At 05:09 PM 3/26/01 -0800, you wrote:
>Hi Stan...welcome to L-I.
>
>onto the following...
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: bon moun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>
>> Is it the militarization of socialist society that has ultimately led to
>> problems, or the continuation of commodity production under the same
>> pressures that forced socialists to militarize?
>>
>
>Can you clarify this question? I'm not sure I follow, unless you are
stating that one
>cannot produce the necessary commodities, armaments and heavy industry all
at the
>same time, in SOIC. Am I way off here?
I guess my question is: Even though encirclement created the necessity to
prepare for war, including the imposition of elements of martial law, was
the lack of "democracy" what undercut socialist-led societies, or was the
real problem the continual reproduction of capitalist categories by
commodity production the back-breaker? I understand that these are in some
sense inextricable given the historical contexts. But it seems like the
two issues can be disaggregated to some extent for the purpose of analyzing
the concrete events that constituted the larger historical progression. An
awful lot of preceding societies seemed to have enjoyed fairly long periods
of political equilibrium even with a high degree of authoritarianism. I
suppose I am appealing to materialist argument. It should be obvious that
I am ambivalent, even though I consider it an important question. I simply
don't have enough historical facts at my command to venture a well-informed
guess.
>
>> And is there a distinction to be drawn between militarization of society
>> and military action in a liberation struggle?
>>
>One would certainly hope. The militarisation of society, as opposed to
military
>action, can be a result of encirclement. This is much of my point: How can
one posit
>another way to create the conditions for the abolition of capitalism?
You certainly don't put the easy questions out there, do you? Can "we" or
"anyone" "create" those conditions? And given that those conditions we
shall indeed encounter are largely unpredicatable in their specificity, can
a satisfactory answer be arrived at? My intuitive guess, and that's all it
is, is that the bastion(s) of capital, particuarly the US, must be brought
low by struggles in the periphery that precipitate a revolutionary crisis
here. I'm not at all optimistic about how that will turn out here, since
we are ripe right now for fascism. For all the centralism it implies, and
all the hazards that attend that, I still yearn for a revolutionary
international. As a former military person myself, I welcome an element of
chaos, but I strongly mistrust spontaneity and decentralization to act
within that chaos. Without some form of civil war in the US, I don't quite
see how--given the prevailing balance of power--socialist projects can
advance. Not a very pretty picture, I'm afraid. But, heck, I've been
wrong lots of times.
Stan
>
>Macdonald
>
>
>
>
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"...all truly great scientific abstractions are both universal and simple.
They are simple not because they explain so little but because they explain
so much. Generality does not arise because an abstraction represents
everything that could possibly happen, but because it remains valid no
matter what happens."
Alan Freeman
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