The paramount one is that they saw no NECESSITY to overthrow a system which they credited for their rising living standards - my eloquent arguments notwithstanding. They weren't so enamoured of the system, however, that they would not acknowledge its harsh and unjust character, which was a daily lived experience, and the consequent need for reform. I expect more than a few would be sympathetic to the Occupy movement today. Probably most would not join it because they feared the formal and informal repressive apparatus of the state and the employers, something which was also part of their lived experience. They would have had to have been far more desperate and have exhausted all peaceful possibilities for reform before they would have contemplated engaging in illegal activities, particularly going underground and taking up arms, which is what revolutions entail. Finally, these were workers whose view of revolution and socialism was coloured by Stalinism and the bloody abortive attempts at revolution which you allude to below. Perhaps the latest generation, exposed to declining living standards, will of necessity become more political and, if the system is no longer able to adjust, even revolutionary. We'll see.
I'm as aware as anyone of Allende, the Spanish Civil War, the street battles led by the German KPD, the counter revolutions, the repression, etc. I think this is the source of your confusion. You keep conflating the many heroic but failed attempts at revolution with the few (historically short-lived) examples we have of successful ones. You seem to attribute the failure of revolutionary politics to take hold to the repressive power of the state without taking into account that all successful revolutions have had to confront and overcome fierce repression. Others such as Lou Proyect and many others on these lists attribute the failure of the Western working class to move in a revolutionary direction to the ideological errors and betrayals of successive generations of Marxist and social democratic politicians. These are factors, but as I've tried to explain above and in previous posts, the explanation, IMO, lies primarily in the consciousness of a working class shaped by decades of relative prosperity which has not over these many decades felt it necessary - that word, again - to overthrow the system. Recall that the classical Marxists emphasized that the working class would be driven by necessity borne of immiseration, rather than by utopian socialist propaganda, to resort to force of arms to overthrow capitalism.
On 2011-12-24, at 11:12 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> But Allende was the start of a socialist revo. That's why they had to get rid of him. And the Spanish Civil War was a socialist revolution to begin with. And Germany stood on the cusp in the twenties. I mean, your thesis is basically that the lack of socialist revos are the result of the working class selling itself for a mess of pottage. You're leaving out the counter revolutions, the repression, the world wars. It just doesn' jibe with the actual historical record.
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> Joanna
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> ----- Original Message -----
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> On 2011-12-24, at 6:29 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
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>> "There has never been a socialist revolution in capitalist countries with parliamentary systems, the universal franchise, and other democratic rights. That's been the elephant in the room for Marxists and others on the revolutionary left; it's an awkward reality which has been mostly ignored."
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>> What about Germany before WWII? Viet Nam? Chile? Argentina? Spain?
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> There were no socialist revolutions in Germany, Argentina, Chile, or Spain, despite the presence of large left-wing parties in these countries. Nor were there socialist revolutions in the wealthier and more developed bourgeois democracies in the US, Britain, and Western Europe - the subject of my post.
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> There was a socialist-led revolution in Vietnam which expropriated the large landowners and capitalists and reorganized the economy under public ownership. It was preceded by similar anticapitalist revolutions in the USSR, China, and Cuba. These revolutions occurred in the less developed regions of the global economy, and the autocratic political systems which they displaced bore little if any resemblance to the liberal democratic systems of the core capitalist countries.
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