----- Original Message ----- From: <dredmond at efn.org> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, October 03, 2009 2:44 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] more noxious crap
> On Sat, October 3, 2009 11:19 am, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>> But I think he made it extremely clear that the ruling class will never
>> allow themselves to be summarily expropriated without fighting back
>> militarily.
>
> Marx didn't quite say that -- the point of the Brumaire was that the
> French ruling classes of the day would rather destroy the formal trappings
> of democracy (limited as they were) than share even a smidgeon of power
> with workers. But he also pointed to the Factory reform acts in Britain as
> harbingers of a future socialism.
>
> In today's transnational capitalism, there's a huge state sector which
> regularly taxes, regulates and otherwise expropriates giant chunks of the
> social surplus. There are also powerful media and information commons,
> which are no longer under the control of one-party states, the US Empire,
> or giant corporations.
===========================================
But it remains "transnational capitalism", nonetheless. Social democrats
used to cite the growth of the state sector as vindication of their belief
that socialism could be won by peaceful, gradual, parliamentary, means. But
that was a long time ago, before they excised references to socialism, state
planning, and public ownership of the "commanding heights" from their
programmes and Sunday speeches.
Marx and Engels both mulled over the possibility of a peaceful transition in the US and Britain, but you don't get the sense they did so with much conviction.
The Bolshevik Red Guards seized power relatively peacefully in the ten days that shook the world, but that was a prelude to the vicious civil war which followed the reorganization of the white forces outside Petrograd and Moscow and foreign military intervention.
There's nothing in the behaviour of the the US capitalist class which suggests it would peacefully defer to a radical left wing party genuinely bent on stripping it of it's wealth and power rather than engage it by mobilizing the reactionary sectors of the population for civil war. At present, there's every indication that it would find enough willing foot soldiers from a Republican base which would be breaking further to the right than the left in a deeper crisis.