> 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.
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> 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.
Marx gives revolution two roles only one of which is that "the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way."
The second is that assigned to "revolutionary practice" in the third thesis on Feuerbach, the development "on a mass scale" of the degree of rational self-consciousness, i.e. "communist consciousness," required for successfully imagining and then building "the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man."
"Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm>
This development of rational self-consciousness includes development of the intellectual and other powers required to "appropriate" the degree of rational self-consciousness objectified in "the productive powers of social labour" developed within capitalism. "Appropriation" isn't "ownership" (as in the meaning usually given "public ownership"), a point made emphatically in "Private Property and Communism" where the mis-identification of "appropriating" with "having" is characterized as an expression of capitalist self-estrangement.
"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.
"In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
According to Marx, revolutionary practice must and the required kind must and does develop the intellectual and other powers required for "appropriating" the degree of "universality" - i.e. the degree of developed mind - objectified in capitalist productive forces.
"Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.
"The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm>
"private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03o.htm>
It's by itself developing "reason" as embodied in "the productive powers of social labour" and "the integral development of every individual producer" that capitalism works to create the pre-conditions for "socialism" including those required for the initiation of this kind of revolutionary practice. This "prediction" of the developmental consequences of capitalism - "it itself begets its own negation with inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature" - is found in the following 1877 summary statement of the conclusion of the "scientific" analysis of capitalism found in Capital.
"the historic tendency of production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property."
The Russian revolution was not a revolution of the required kind.
Ted