[lbo-talk] Tea Party: less than meets the eye

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Wed Nov 10 10:18:02 PST 2010


Marv was talking about Lenin, he was not saying that armed insurrection is in any way reasonable or likely at the moment. How could that not be clear?

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> Alan Rudy
> On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 11:32 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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>

-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319



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