> Under what condtions would a mass anti-capitalist
> movement overthrow the
> state and seize total power?
Under what conditions would that be a good thing?
Granted, the capitalist system has inherent problems, and any existing government has failures. They also do some things well; there's some risk of throwing a baby or two out with that bathwater. In the US, for example, you might lose the Constitution and the civil liberties it protects (arguably, you've lost many already, but ...) while in China you might lose some of the prosperity the last few decades have brought (arguably mostly to corrupt Party hacks & their cronies, but ...).
There's also a fair bit of history indicating that mass movements sometimes go off the rails. The French Terror, Stalin, ...
What must such a movement do to be credible? How do you convince large numbers of people that overthrowing the system is a good idea?
Why should they risk it, rather than stick with the devil they know?
And if the system must change, why does that require a mass insurrection, rather than just a landslide election result? Of course, that's obvious for someplace like Burma where the gov't simply ignores inconvenient elections, but why should it be necessary in a nation that claims to be a democracy?
> ... What would have had to happen inside the military to bring
> about the one certain preconditions of a general insurrrection
> succeeding, ile. the refusal of the troops to fire on the marchrs? (For
> endless marches in the streets of many many cities would be what in
> general a insurrection in a modern state would look like. How many days
> would the troops fire on marchers before they stopped firing? What would
> be the temper of the masses in the movement and their f riends and
> relatives when after weeks or months of heavy repression and heavy
> casualties the troops finally refused to fire?
In some cases, the troops aid the insurrection. For example, in Herat, the revolt against the "socialist" Kabul government that led to the Soviet invasion really got going when Ismail Khan's troops opened their armory to protesters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Khan
I was in Iran during their revolution. Troops did fire on marchers, but they never used their full power. I've never been able to figure out if this was incompetence, the Shah or various officers exercising some restraint, or officers afraid to give orders their troops would not be likely to obey.
For example, in Isphahan, they used a Cobra helicopter gunship to break up one demonstration. Cobras were developed by the US for use in Vietnam and are very well armed. The target was an open square with thousands of closely packed demonstrators. They only used one chopper's machine guns and killed a few dozen. If they'd use all they had in the air and the very efficient anti-personnel rockets, they could certainly have killed hundreds or maybe even thousands.
In another example, they used tanks to break up a demonstration in Mashad. Again, many closely-packed people in an open square. If they had chosen to open up with all they had, it would have been carnage. In that situation, even a squad with rifles can cause utter havoc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
Instead, they just drove some tanks into the crowd and crushed a few people.
So another question is what induces troops, or their officers, to exercise some restraint. Also, what would provoke them to drop the restraint.