Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> >CB: What about the struggle continues, victory is certain ? The
> >revolution is not over yet. Amandla.
>
> "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
> into the past."
A beautiful cadence & image, but I can't remember the source. It always irritated me when British scholars would not translate a Latin quote or give a citation for some quote they assumed "everyone" (who counted) would recognize. But that's by the way.
I am not the cheerful type and I by no means think victory is certain. It is, however, a rather obvious empirical fact both that the struggle continues and the revolution is not over yet. And it seems a rather fluffy intellectual point to think that it is remotely possible to get back to the past. (E.g., Baghdad was a modern city, and hence it could not retreat to the past and past medical/sanitation practices) when it was bombed -- instead its children died because the 'choice' was between modern medicine and no medicine at all.)
But in any case no one has ever seriously suggested any alternative to Rosa Luxemburg's "barbarianism or socialism," nor has anyone ever seriously proposed any route to socialism other than forceful smashing of the central capitalist states. I remember someone on this list jestingly proposing a gradual legal shift to socialism in the U.S. But no one with any sense of reality could propose that. The result even of any initial success of a parliamentary movement towards socialism in the U.S. (and even that is a pipedream) would be a blood bath that would make WW 2 look like a minor gang clash in South Chicago.
While revolution (through insurrection) is highly unlikely in the U.S., any other scenario is too absurd to even argue against.
Carrol