Not to be a wet blanket, but it's 39 years since 1968, and if most of the people on this list can even remember that, that shows the graying of the left more than anything else. Moreover, '68 wasn't exactly a even failed worker's revolutionary movement, unlike, say, Spain '30-39, Germany 1918, Russia 1917, and going _back_. There was radical workers' activism in the 60's and even afterward -- maybe the last of it seen lately on a mass scale was the early days of Solidarnosc in 1980-81 -- but even that is a very long time ago and not exactly in the capitalist core. And see what came of it. Probably irrationally I do not despair, but from where I stand it would not be irrational _to_ despair, and while I concede that things might change very fast in an unforeseeable way, and I'd be glad if they did, it's ipso facto not foreseeable that things will so change. From here it looks like a long shot against high odds over a very long period. If you can show me I'm wrong, I will be gratified.
B., or whoever it was was asking: to find instances of Marx's own general optimism about the immanence of revolution in the advanced capitalist countries you can open almost any volume of the Collected Works or, since that is a bit daunting, whatever decent anthology you might have, such as Tucker's Marx-Engels Reader, almost at random. Whether he thought communism was inevitable is arguable; he's inconsistent on the subject. That he mostly thought it was on the immediate horizon is not. Nor, as Yoshie (I think) was saying, was that crazy in his time -- a time when the workers' movement when from near zero to '48, the (First) International, and Paris Commune, in less than 25 years.
And such a belief continued to be rational through, probably, at least World War II, when workers' movements and revolutionary aspirations were fairly vibrant and capitalism seemed not only to have collapsed into self-destructive barbarism at least twice, but also to have spectacularly failed in the Depression at a time when (or so it them seemed) the Soviet Union, even though it was a ghastly parody of what socialism hoped to be, showed the world that There Is An Alternative. It is only looking back, like Owl of Minerva that flies only at twilight, that it seems that those hopes were delusive, at least for the 20th century -- well, _were_ delusive for the 20th century. You can draw your own line about when became manifest. That it's manifest _now_ is hard for s sensible person to deny, I think.
--- wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> This polemic seems to be willing to sweep some
> inconvenient facts
> under the carpet to makes its point. There were
> moments of
> continental upheaval after the Russian Revolution
> from 1917-1919, and
> the upheaval of 1968 is hardly limited to France,
> but one can see
> similar struggles going on through the entirety of
> Europe (and in
> fact globally) in 1968. In both those cases, the
> upheaval is the
> effect of the struggles of the periphery or the
> semi-periphery, but
> it doesn't mean that they didn't occur. Or is the
> problem that they
> didn't succeed? If this is the case, then 1848
> didn't happen either.
>
> robert wood
>
> > Marx and Engels lived the last time when a
> continental revolutionary
> > wave swept through Europe. Since then, with a few
> exceptions (e.g.,
> > the Spanish Civil War, France of 1968), the
> Europeans have ceased to
> > be revolutionary.
> >
> > Not only that, Europe doesn't exist.
>
>
>
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