The expected social revolution in the core capitalist countries did not occur because there has never been a complete breakdown of civil authority, never a failure of the state to deliver food, shelter, public safety and other essential goods and services. Where such has occurred - Russia 1917 being the prototype - workers’ councils in the cities and/or liberated zones in the countryside necessarily emerged under revolutionary leadership to assume these functions. Following a period of dual power, they then proceeded to overthrow weak, narrow, and decaying autocracies through armed insurrection - again necessarily so, in the absence of democratic rights or democratic institutions where festering grievances could be absorbed and accommodated by a viable state with sufficient resources before they became revolutionary.
When the capitalist states are no longer able to provide such essential services, when they have exhausted their capacity for recovery and reform, when they consequently shut down the democratic channels which presently serve to contain serious unrest, only then will I be persuaded by Shane that “the system is right now collapsing before our very ideas” or even, as Carrol suggests, that it is again “self destructing” as a prelude to “rising from the ashes”.
These are feverish exaggerations of the scale of the current crisis. There are as yet no indications that the system is either collapsing of its own weight or through the revolutionizing practice of collective activity. Apocalyptic visions aren’t a substitute for more sober analysis of the present reality.
> On Feb 16, 2016, at 4:33 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> And you really ought somehow to have noticed that "the system" is right now
> collapsing before your very eyes. The problem is not to topple it from below
> (that meme is indeed so 19th century) but to get out from under the wreckage
> and start rebuilding.
>
> ======
>
> Those who have not gone through the "revolutionizing practice" of
> overthrowing the system through their own collective activity will be
> totally unfit to build a system a whit better than the system which has
> toppled.
>
> But no worry. Shane often has important things to say, but here he is
> babbling nonsense. Capitalism renews itself by continually self-destructing
> and rising from its own ashes.
>
> Carrol
>
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