On 2010-09-03, at 8:34 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> But at the beginning the revolution is not a revoultion. It is a mass
> struggle for some dramatic change in the present system. On rare
> occasions (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...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.
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All true. But we sometimes forget revolutions have only so far occurred in societies lacking democratic rights - the USSR and China being the most conspicuous historical examples. The revolutionary process Carrol describes above as though it were a contemporary tactical issue for us has never been brought to fruition in a society where the working class has won the right to organize unions and to vote.
When Marx wrote in anticipation of socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, these rights didn't exist. There was univeral male suffrage in the US and Switzerland and intermittently in France but nowhere else, and the right of workers to combine and strike was effectively outlawed everywhere. When these rights were enshrined in law after decades of often violent class struggle which threatened to turn revolutionary, they had a greatly moderating effect on workplace and political strife which persists to this day.
But democratic rights rest on the capacity of the capitalist system to afford them. Where traditional parties governing through bourgeois democratic institutions have failed to revive production following a collapse, widespread social unrest threatening capitalist property followed, prompting the withdrawal of democratic rights and the repression of independent working class unions, parties, and other organizations. This notably underlay the triumph of fascism in Germany in the 30s. Capitalism was shaken also in the US, Britain, and France during the depression, but regained its equilibrium short of suppressing bourgeois political institutions and workers' organizations. For the past three quarters of a century of capitalist expansion, revolutionary political organizations have disappeared from working class political life in the developed capitalist economies. Small revolutionary groups and their sympathizers are still to be found in and around university campuses, with very little influence on national affairs, though you would not know it from Carrol's inflated sense of the importance of his own "revolutionary" theory and practice and his irritation with those who are not impressed by it.
In reply to Somebody's suggestion that we're unlikely to see social revolutions again if they are so contingent on economic circumstances, I don't see how another global crisis on the scale of or beyond the 30s depression, and the consequent reappearance of working class revolutionary politics, can be ruled out even if neither appears to be presently on the horizon. If enough people experience a catastrophic reduction of living standards and if the system in the developed capitalist countries proves to have finally exhausted its capacity to recover, then I think it's a reasonable speculation that we'd see the kind of process Carrol describes above on a mass scale.