Quantifying history and historical progression, all ways get me in trouble, yet this stops no one from quantifying history. I believe that the American state, as we know it is going to change at lightening speed, after a change in the property relations.
What happens in America is very important to world history. The state can fall relatively peaceful without the outbreak of Civil War as was the case after the Lenin group seized power. However, the Bolshevik seizure of power was relatively peaceful. The fight came afterwards as the result of invasion. Invasion will not be one of our worry's. What happened with the fall of Soviet Power - 1989, outlines our future more or less. Marx wrote that the proletariat would have to fight for 50, 100, 200 years of wars and international wars not just to achieve power, but to make itself fit for the exercise of power. I am not sure if it is understood that it will take perhaps another 100 - 200 years, just to completely leave the old ritualized agrarian/feudal culture of Russia. One hundred years is nothing. Very much of China today is still feudal in its real actual and ritual behavior. Hundreds of millions of peasants, with an unbroken historical and written culture is mind boggling. Hence the stability of the system no matter what direction it lurches in. I am laughing because Mao had to tell everyone Marxism meant "it is right to rebel." This of course does no excuse or justify state policy one way or another. There is a tendency to forget that the October Revolution was bound up with the transition from agrarian social and economic relations to industrial social and economic relations. Defining the October Revolution of 1917 as a revolution - transition, from capitalism to socialism is in my estimate extremely inaccurate and run against all the statistical data on the Russian - Soviet population from the early 1900's to 1950. One cannot build socialism in a country of peasants, or rather the socialism one builds, cannot overcome the law of value as commodity exchange. One can restrict the law of value in everything fundamental to the industrial infrastructure. What made the Soviet Union socialist rather than capitalism was its industrial infrastructure. The fact of the matter is that no one owned any aspect of heavy industry or light industry before the spread of the second economy unleashed by Nikita. When "the state" owns all the capital and establishes institutions that deploys labor based on a plan and not anarchy of production that is socialism. There of course are zero peasants in America. In Russia, so-called socialist accumulation, a hideous term that tells no one anything, was carved out of the backs of the peasants. What actually took place was the thousand year old battle of the towns - city-states, demand for cheap food stuff running into the culture and ritualized social life of the small producers. I have a bias for Polany on this issue. At any rate, is not the average Russian living on about 3 bucks a day today? I do agree that the process of the withering away of certain features of the state began with the class rule of the proletariat in the Soviet Union. And that Russia was no basket case in the 1960's, 1970's or 1980's. Don't quote me on it but I believe the 1980's rate of growth hovered around 3% of GDP with a lack of statistics in the second economy. WL. I agree that these are the classical Marxist-Leninist theory, definitions, schema and order of the process, but I'm thinking that actuality, actual history, the concrete truth of this may not "go down" in as linear a fashion, as the a,b,c,1,2,3 of the theory. This would be applying Marx and Engels other warning against "cookbooks" and predictions about socialism and communism to their own sketch of how the state whithers away. So, the process of whithering away may in actuality be a zig-zag , one step whither, one step unwhither of the straightline of the abstract classical formulations For example, the Soviet state was a multinational state. The Russian state does not encompass all of the former Soviet territory. This might be seen as an early aspect of the total whithering away of the state there. Also, notice that there was relatively little bloodshed. The Soviet state did not go down fighting, not with a bang but a whimper ( as that Commie T.S. Eliot put it) Also, Soviet society was substantially without class antagonisms. This is one of the most important theoretical and praise of the Soviet Union points. The peaceful end of the multi-national state is an indicator of the lack of class antagonisms existing in the Soviet Union. Also, notice that the implication of my use of "whithering away of the state " is that some of what is left in Russia is _communism_ not socialism. The whithering away of the state ushers in communism. Obviously, since capitalist imperialist states still exist in the world and the Russian _state_ has nuclear weapons, the state has not totally whithered away. So, it would be a partial and harbinger whithering away that we see. 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