If you want to unseat the elite who have power now and replace them with you, you need a reason why you are preferable to them.
One could pledge to reform and improve sclerotic institutions, but where is the percentage in that? Running fair institutions that give no favor to you and your supporters is pretty weak beer for all the effort.
No, a much better rationale for replacing the current power elite with you is to convince people that the current institutions are irredeemably unfair. Then you get to take over the institutions and run it according to your lights. Universities are not overpriced, over administered, and failing in their missions to educate. No, they are full of rapists, racists and privilege. Only by throwing out the current administrators and professors can they be made fair. You get to keep the overpriced, over administered, and failing features. Once you start running the place you can get some of that swag, reward your supporters with useless administrative positions and keep goofing off in the work (educating) department.
Marx and the Bolsheviks claimed that capitalists were exploiting the workers. Power must be moved from whomever had it now to the Bolsheviks to right the injustice and make life better. Strong medicine had to be applied by the new leaders least society slip back into injustice. I don’t think the condition of the proletariat were improved much by the Russian Revolution. In the USA the working class got richer, more secure and freer with no radical change of leadership or institutions. Soon all revolutionaries seeking power for themselves needed a new grievance to justify the revolution.
Our government is very corrupt but it is not a system that is irredeemably evil. One could change the tax code so it did not blatantly favor one person or business over another. One could stop bailing out banks ran into insolvency by their management. One could prevent the government from taking an ownership stake in a business, like General Motors, and then regulate the safety of the product of General Motors. One could stop politicians from getting millions in ex post facto bribes for favors by having politicians forfeit their pensions and secret service protection if they engage in remunerated work after office (or accept gifts). One could dry up the student loan money that is funneled into rich failing institutions. One could make the Justice Department independent of the Executive Branch. One could end the Federal Reserve.
Those are all possible things – there would be reduction in the discretionary power of our elite if they were instituted. Naturally it would be hard to accomplish such things, since the elite would resist them and the reformers would not get a large amount of personal gain. Not to say it would be impossible for determined people of good will.