andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> We disagree about the value of theoretical modeling of
> economic alternatives,
Leave aside that disagreemen; any "economic alternative" would be introduced by a political not economic process. It's that political process for which we can have no model. We can't even have the faintext idea of what sort of context for that political process will exist. The context would obviously have been different in Germany 1921 than Russia 1918. It's different in Venezuela than it was in Cuba or China. And so on. The struggle during the last 5-10 years before a socialist movement achieves some sort of political power determines that context -- for example it determines how many of those who made the revolution are/were revolutiobnaries (only a minority probably), how many of the revolutionaries were socialists (also probably a minority of a minority) and how many of those socialists are marxists (a minority of a minority of a minority). Most followers of Trotsky never realized that socialist revolutions have to be made by men and women who are neither socialist nor marxist nor revolutionaries. But there is no way of knowing the proportions until after the fact. Hence the absurdity of speaking of models for this process.
Carrol