> > Tell me, how do we get from the actually existing world in 2000 to a
> > world in which HistMat is no longer necessary?
> > Doug
>
> In 25 words of less?
>
> [SNIP] an interesting question
> to some folks but so is question about origin of the family for some
> people. As Kathleen Gough wrote some years ago about the latter:
> trouble is no one really knows.
>
> > I guess I have a hard time imagining some clean break between
> > capitalism and post-capitalism, in which all issues of power and
> > exploitation disappear and humanity becomes one big happy family.
> > Doug
>
> Apparently so did Marx, recall that transitory 'socialist' period
> that would last as long as class antagonisms persisted. But at the
> risk of being disparaged as a utopian, without a vision of what
> could be, theory is overwhelmed by what is and loses its critical edge.
Doug seriously obscures the question with his gratuitous "clean break." In any decent historical terms a "clean break" would mean (say) less than a millenium of transitional struggle. But it is one thing (recognizing
the necessary lengthiness of any transition) to deny that the goal of revolution should be the hope to live in a classless society, and quite another thing to hold that that necessary messiness is (in itself) an objection to seeing the possibility (and in a sense) necessity of such a future, no matter how long the road to it may be.
The task we immediately face is, most immediately, the defense of humanity against the ravages of capitalism, less immediately the destruction of capitalism. For that we need to understand (or, more accurately, hold on to the understanding we have already achieved) the dynamics of capitalism, and understanding which requires us to see the present as history. But that presupposes that we can, in some sense, look back on the present from the future -- i.e., from the perspective of that which the present necessarily portends. The usual metaphor for this is that of pregnancy -- and it is a useful metaphor because pregnancy does *not* guarantee the birth and survival of a child, but is meaningful only in respect to the potential of such birth and survival.
Capitalism is meaningless unless viewed from the perspective of the classless society of the future -- though that future may never come.
Doug's "How to" question is simply silly. We make a revolution of course. It's scheduled for 07:51:23 GMT March 17, 2011.
Carrol