[lbo-talk] Waht Would Have to Happen First

[Marv Gandall]

On 2010-02-14, at 9:33 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> On Feb 14, 2010, at 12:42 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> 
>> Under what condtions would a mass anti-capitalist movement overthrow the
>> state and seize total power?
> 
> That's the only way socialism could happen? Through a violent revolution?
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Logic and history suggests there'd be some violence. I can't imagine the US ruling class faced with the loss of it's power and privileges not resorting to repression. But I suppose if the repressive apparatus quickly melted away and sided with the people, the violence could be kept to a miminum. That's what happened in the Bolshevik Revolution, where there was very little loss of life until the white counter-revolutionary armies, reorganized and supported by foreign expeditionary forces, launched the ensuing civil war. Presumably there would be no equivalent foreign powers to intervene against a mass anti-capitalist uprising in the US backed by police and troops refusing to follow the orders of their commanders. 

I suppose further that a collapsed economy could become so incapable of recovering under private ownership and the country so completely disorganized and ungovernable that no solution other than wholesale public ownership of the system of credit, production, distribution, etc. would present itself, and the bourgeoisie, which also has to eat, would peacefully consent to surrender to or share power with a new party(s) from below. Something like that happened in the former USSR, where the transition to/restoration of capitalism was virtually uncontested by the working class and the party bureaucracy either of which, depending on your POV, owned the Soviet economy.