> At 10:59 PM -0500 9/20/03, joand315 wrote:
>
>> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>
>>> 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
> And yet there would be no transition to socialism or any post-capitalist
> society without radical upheavals. And as a matter of fact, the
> continuation of capitalism in itself creates radical upheavals constantly.
I don't believe radical upheavals can have a predictable outcome. It seems that radical upheavals almost always end in fascism or some form of totalitarianism. -joan