I think Marx would think this typically British idealist gradualism (didn't he say some such thing about the Brits' take on evolution?). To think back to the short gaps between Princips' shooting of Ferdie and sheer catastrophe, between the 1929 tank and sheer catastrophe, glaznost and bourgeois revolution, Mandela's release and revolution - well, it all looks a little more like Marx's tectonic-plate model of change than Orwell's lawn-growing model. Didn't Lenin tell his Swiss audience in 1916 that he'd never live to see the inevitable Russian revolution - six months before he was General Secretary of a new nation state? Certainly, the timing is beyond calculation, but I maintain we shouldn't be too surprised occasionally to be very surprised. There are tipping points at which stuff tips quickly, that's all. This is probably one reason 'missing link' fossils are so hard to find - they're only there for the geological blink of an eye ere a bunch of relatively stable enviro-compatible organisms arise ... ere they suddenly disappear ...
Cheers,
Rob.
>
> Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost
> unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever
> is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the
> Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for
> ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly
> capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long
> before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to
> the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and
> catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of
> empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to
> happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely
> started are talked about as though they were already at an end.
> Burnham's writings are full of apocalyptic visions. Nations,
> governments, classes and social systems are constantly described as
> expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving, toppling, crashing,
> crumbling, crystallizing, and, in general, behaving in an unstable and
> melodramatic way. The slowness of historical change, the fact that any
> epoch always contains a great deal of the last epoch, is never
> sufficiently allowed for. Such a manner of thinking is bound to lead
> to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction of
> events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo. Within the space of
> five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of
> Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the
> instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the
> existing trend as irreversible. With this in mind one can criticize
> his theory in a broader way.
>
> <http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essays/burnham.html>
>
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