> > CB: But why not admit that this is a Ghandian/ML King
>revolutionary theory; and that this is not Marx's position ? I
>know Marx is real attractive and hard to break with, but isn't
>it clear that there will almost always be violent
>counterrevolutionaries who will prevail if fire is not met with
>fire ?
> >
>===================
>
>And your plan for defeating the US military and it's Nato
>minions etc. is....?
>
>Ian
>
>^^^^^^^
>
>CB: There can't be a socialist revolution until the overwhelming majority
>of the working class support it. The vast majority of the military are
>working class. You do know that the Bolsheviks were based on workers',
>_sailors' and soldiers'_ soviets ?
I notice without having followed the full thread, that some of these exchanges have been personalised. That, in my opinion is often when the differences and issues have not been spelled out clearly enough. I take Charles's formulation here, and I do not have a problem about accepting as fact of history that violent confrontations sometimes occur. However I think that as an immediate confrontation for socialism is not likely, we must look for less perfect combinations of allies and forces on a world scale. Including inter-imperialist rivalry with the astonishing military and economic predominance of the USA.
In a formal theoretical sense this means looking for a world revolutionary process spreading over say at least a couple of decades in which the form of the struggles are about more radical applications of bourgeois democratic right but increasingly from a socially consicous perspective. The class struggle within each country is hard now to separate from the struggle internationally.
In formal terms this is like a new democratic world revolutionary movement, rather than an explicit struggle for socialism in each country. Is this a step back? Only if an immediate struggle for socialism in each country could achieve the goal faster.
Chris Burford