The question is, though, where is a revolutionary potential? As you said yourself, you don't see any such potential anywhere at least in the near future ("we are not in a time of social revolution," <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070312/005322.html>), and neither does Doug. That being the case, I don't understand the problem you and Doug have with my view that social revolution is unlikely to appear on the political horizon in the North any time soon. It seems to me that we all agree on that.
> Also, I think you are wrong to dismiss the productivity of the workers in
> the north, which obviously shouldn't be taken as a moral judgement, it is
> just the fact that output is greater in the more capitalised economies. That
> said, over time, the northern economies are losing that advantage as eastern
> economies become more industrialised.
The high productivity of the workers in the North means two things: it allows capital to raise living standards of workers and strengthens the power of capital vis-a-vis labor at the same time. Both tendencies make it difficult for wage workers of the North to even contemplate social revolution.
> [Having said that, Doug oversteps the mark- it is Monthly Review's choice
> who edits their website, not his.]
Well, Doug forgets which part of the world to which Monthly Review has always oriented itself. :->
On 3/18/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 18, 2007, at 7:45 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
>
> > [Having said that, Doug oversteps the mark- it is Monthly Review's
> > choice
> > who edits their website, not his.]
>
> Of course it is. But I was asking Yoshie why she's there, at one of
> the leading Marxist brand names in the English-speaking world, given
> her intensifying hostility to Marxism.
Is it me or Marxists who take lands from peasants and shoot them when they resist, for the purpose of plain and simple capitalist development (not even in the name of socialism, national security, etc.), who are hostile to Marxism? It's undeniable that Marxism _which ceases to struggle for, even dream of, transition to socialism_, as well as state socialism that fails to democratize itself, sooner or later becomes a Zombie Marxism, merely a philosophy of progressive capitalist development.
I prefer, for instance, the vision presented by the Bolivarian Revolution, an eclectic politico-religious project that is "bolivariano, humanista, endógeno, indoamericano y cristiano" (Humberto Márquez, "Con el Jesús en la boca," <http://www.ipsnoticias.net/nota.asp?idnews=40199>), a project that cannot fit neatly into any Marxist category and that looks like social democracy to Tariq Ali and is a model of 21st-century socialism in the eye of Michael A. Lebowitz. -- Yoshie