> Question: I sympathise with your comment overall. But - I guess we
> might mean objective in different ways. What "objective" conditons are
> you in want of? To my simplistic view, it is the subjective question
> that is more predominant. Thanks, Hari
I may be using "objective conditions" in an idiosyncratic way, but anyway I just mean that the system is not going to be overthrown until large numbers of folks are ready to do so, and certain conditions (I don't claim to be able to specify them with any precision) will have to obtain before this happens. Those conditions didn't hold in the 60s, or even in the 30s, so even large anti-system movements, much larger than anything we can cook up today, didn't get the job done then.
OTOH, you can't just sit around waiting for them to happen. What I object to in the "classic" Marxist view (and of course a lot of other people object to this also) is the idea that the mechanical grinding of the gears of the capitalist system will one day bring about the right conditions. (Naturally, no Marxist will cop to actually thinking this, but a lot of them certainly come awfully close.) I think the anti-system movements have to keep pushing and probing in all sorts of ways to help generate them, and also to detect how close we are to getting them. So it's really both subjective and objective -- a dialectical relationship between them, of course!
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt