>The question I'm thinking about is where we have spaces for organizing _and_ subjects capable of organizing. Collective struggle can and does exist everywhere, but conditions in which struggle takes place are not uniform. For instance, Venezuela's armed forces is a condition that does not appear to obtain elsewhere.
It is all very simple. The potential "space for organising", as you put it, is built into the very success of capitalism in revolutionising the productive capacity. Its greatest strength is its greatest weakness, because of the glaring contradiction between capitalism's potential capacity to produce all the goods and services needed by the people and its systematic inability to actually do so.
The profit-motivated free market creates potential abundance by revolutionising the means of production, but at the same time a free market requires shortages of goods and services for it to operate at all, let alone operate efficiently. Once the means of production has developed to the extent that it is possible to produce goods and services in abundance, the only way that capitalism can survive as a system is to maintain artificial shortages of goods and services.
Otherwise, if supply of goods exceeds demand (as is the natural state where the productive capacity of the economy exceeds the needs of that society) then market prices fall below the cost of production and unprofitable production has to be cut back.
To make matters worse, it is necessary artificially keep most of the population economically insecure and deprived in the midst of this abundance, to maintain labour discipline. That is to say maintain an efficient labour market. A balanced labour market would also naturally result in wage levels too high to allow profitability.
Basically, capitalism is naturally efficient until it inevitably revolutionises the productive capacity of society to the point where abundance is possible. After that, it must either be kept on a life support machine, fed by the misery and insecurity of the majority of people, or the productive capacity must be periodically destroyed, to recreate a natural state of shortage. Either way, hunger and want in the midst of potential plenty is inevitable.
It follows from all this that Wojak is spot on in his observation that socialism will only occur in a place like Europe, where the productive forces are fully developed. And where there is advanced democracy, in the sense of a deep popular acceptance of democracy. An unwillingness to even contemplate any other form of society, let alone tolerate an undemocratic society. I agree also that there was no possibility whatsoever of a socialist revolution in feudal Russia or China. I would go further, I would say that these particular so-called "communist" revolutions were actually counter-revolutions against the capitalist revolutions that were in the process of taking place. In effect, all that was achieved was to install a backward semi-feudal dictatorship in Russia and China, hampering rather than advancing technological development.
As for strategy, Wojak is also correct to point to the strength of numbers of the working class as its major asset. Democratic means is obviously the sensible strategy. I don't think it necessarily follows that electing people to parliament should be the sole tactic though, it hasn't worked very well so far. What has to be done is to democratise the economy and this will require several different streams of activity.
Electing socialist parliamentarians is all well and good, quite necessary, but parliaments don't actually control the economy. Parliaments control the police and army, so parliaments can interfere with other organising. But direct democratic control of the means of production is the only form of socialism that means anything, so people need to organise at that level too.
Its just a question of working out the order of things. But this isn't rocket science. Clearly you cannot achieve any direct democratic control of the means of production without majority support for such an end. So the first objective is to publicise the innate weaknesses of capitalism which make change necessary in the first place. The strategy is to achieve a consensus for socialism. We are some way from achieving that at present, but there are quite a few signs that people are turning in that direction everywhere in the advanced capitalist world.
Even the somewhat reactionary demands for protectionism are rooted in a deep conviction that the economy should be at the command of and be designed to serve the needs of, the majority of people. People become quite agitated when they realise that it is the other way around.
The protests against globalisation, are really demands for economic democracy. Economic democracy is socialism.
So that is the space that has opened up right now, the popular notion that the economic system should serve the needs of the people. The fact that the means of production is capable of meeting peoples' needs isn't even questioned. People want the economy to be subject to democratic control, in fact most people mistakenly believe it already is subject to democratic control. They are annoyed that those at the helm seem, on the results, to be incredibly incompetent.
So at a very deep level, most people are already socialists. they just don't know it. They think economic democracy is "capitalism". They think all this nonsense about free markets and privatisation is a terrible perversion of the democratic free market. Of course it isn't, it is the original version, the true version.
So we aren't faced with a minor opening, but a space for organising that you could drive a fleet of supertankers through. The fact that us left wingers are unable to exploit it, is a sign that we totally out of touch with the real world. I can sort of imagine, a few years from now after the revolution, many of us left-wingers will probably be completely unaware that "we" have won and will still be meeting in dark closets trying to figure out why no-one shares our determination to go on fighting the good fight.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas