> At 6:32 PM -0500 9/20/03, joand315 wrote:
>
>> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>
>>> At 8:43 PM -0500 9/19/03, joand315 wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Workers' cooperatives don't take away incentives to save ones' own
>>>>> lives and families from a civil war or to emigrate to richer
>>>>> nations, though.
>>>> Civil wars are more likely when much of the population is out of work.
>>> We are thinking of a hypothetical but realistic transition from a
>>> capitalist society to a post-capitalist one (whether you call it
>>> socialist or anarchist or cooperativist or whatever). Most likely,
>>> any such transition will involve much economic upheavals: capital
>>> flight, emigration of skilled labor, economic embargoes and/or
>>> military interventions by other capitalist powers (that are more
>>> powerful than the nation in the throes of transition, unless the
>>> transition in question happens in the USA), indigenous power elite of
>>> the ancient regime employing saboteurs, soldiers of fortune, etc. to
>>> overthrow those who overthrew them, etc., all tending to a civil war.
>>> How do LBO-talk technophiles handle desertion (from the military or
>>> factories or whatever that the new socialist government needs) in
>>> this context?
>> In this context, Yoshie, don't you think desertions, mass emigration,
>> will benefit those who are left?
> Desertion from the military of a new socialist government fighting
> against soldiers of the ancient regime in a civil war -- if the
> desertion is on a large scale -- causes defeat. Defeat of the new
> socialist government leads to the return of the old ruling class and
> power elite, ready to round up and execute the defeated revolutionaries.
>
> At 6:32 PM -0500 9/20/03, joand315 wrote:
>
>> a newly formulated society won't be able to handle the entire
>> population that it has at the moment of disruption.
> Especially if it loses much of skilled labor and unable to train workers
> in new skills quickly. . . .
Well, then aren't we talking at cross purposes. A radical upheaval can never work. -joan