Somebody Somebody wrote:
>
> , what subjugated class . . .r) would ever consider risking their lives to overthrow the existing order, when moreover, the last attempts at that failed so miserably that the socialist elites themselves dissolved their own systems?
You make the common intellectulist error of assuming that everyone in a revolution has stood outside history, calculated the odds, and made an abstract choice to joing the revolution.
But at the beginning the revolution is not a revoltion. It is a mass struggle for some dramatic change in the present system. On rare occasins (which will continue to be rare) those struggles develop a 'logic' of their own, behind the backs of their participants, a logic drawing in others AND transforming all involved. (Ted doesn't agree with this interpretationo of Marx's "revolutionizing practice.") Very few (perhaps none) choose to be revolutionaries; rather, they suddenly discover that what they have been already involved in for months or a year or two makes no sense unless they posit revolution as its 'final goal.' No one certainly sits down, inspects alternatives, 'chooses' socialism (a pig in the poke), and rationally decides to overthrow the state and install socialism off the shelf. That's how you decide which brand of string beans to buy.
Carrol