I somehow missed this, and I usually try to read all Marv's posts:
> Marv: "to lead the workers to state power through forms of political class
> struggle ranging from demonstrations to armed insurrection, its highest
> form."
Marv, in the modern state, "armed insurrection" is a pipedream. This does not mean that capitalism can be "peacefullyd" overcome, but it has been demonstrated that modern states (and whether capitalist or something else is irrelevant) can be overthrown by massive and continued 'illegal' demonstrations (perhaps / probably) accompanited by various other less 'formal' activities, but if and only if the military refused to fire at some pont. In 1958 DeGaulle was uncertain enough on this point that he made a trip to NATO headquarters to interrogate his generals on the probability of the army reaming "loyal," before he began his actions to suppress the continuing uproar.
Moreover, "armed insurrection" seems to imply a more centralized (and probably sole) command (e.g. the fantasy of "democratic centralism," sometime sdmisnamed "Leninism"). But in the core capitalist nations, there will never again be a "unified" movement in the old sense of a hegemonic party determining strategy. That was always something of a pipedream anyhow
I am deliberately vague. Political thought as well as military thought is always attempting to plan the "next" war in the image of the "last" war, and it never works. But at least I have the _last_ war (the '60s) not the war before the war before the last war in mind. My image will prove false, but however it works out, one aspect of the '60s is almost certain to characterize future mass uprisings -- the absence of a central hegemonic party or any centralized command to carry out sdystematic "armed insurrection." The term is an an anachronism. And of course, "peaceful, democratic roads to socialism" are just as absurd. Marxists, as Mao mentioned, have no crystal ball, but we can see some of the things that simply cannot be.
Carrol