[lbo-talk] Wolff again

[Somebody Somebody]

I should study that history, but I never have. Marx must have seen something like it again in 1848. Accounts of the early phase of the Russian Revolution before the civil war broke out also read a little like what I saw in miniture or toy form. There must have been something like it when the Berlin Wall came down. I remember thinking about it while I was watching a group break into the main East German police HQ and dump their police files out in the street.

Wolff has his memoirs on line, but so far I haven't found the most important part, the events inside Columbia in 1968...

Somebody: The problem is we don't know if a society can actually be productively run this way. We do know that social democracy is somewhat sustainable and that centrally managed socialism works for a few decades. Even in the best scenarios, like in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, we're talking about brief historical interludes. 

Revolutionary fervor inevitably dies down. Unless the system put into place can function well during times of political apathy and lack of popular engagement, it's just not going to replace capitalism.