My take on what looms is the same, save a delay as a result of some
lubricating/fuel scientific breakthrough . But how do the "we" get ready to
survive the fascist assault? Weapons caches and garden plots? Membership or
alliance with unions in key sectors that can threaten the rich with unpicked up
garvbage and nonworking computer networks? Emigration to a socialist-oriented
state in a favorable food-growing clime?
What chance does any socialistic smaller state, e.g. Cuba, or group of states
(those with oil, say) have to withstand the eruption UNLESS they have the ability
to make a thermonuclear response in the right places?
bon moun wrote:
> The auditorium fills up when people either have nowhere else to run, or
> they are herded in there to be massacred. I spent 24 years as a military
> instrument of US imperialism, and got a first had look at the reality of
> power beneath all this number-crunching and theorizing. Perhaps we need to
> prepare for what we can do once those things for which we have passed the
> point of no return happen.
>
> We're not going to talk people into the auditorium. No one can hear.
> We're being drowned out by CNN, The Enquirer, NYT, the latest crop of
> sitcoms. The place where people can hear are where they don't have TVs.
> This propaganda doesn't take in Haiti, where I spend a substantial amount
> of time, because they aren't plugged in. No electricity, you see.
>
> I suppose I can be called a Marxist. If belief in the necessity to
> recognize historical conjunctures, economic, political, military... makes
> me a Leninist as well, so be it.
>
> Marxists have to begin by acknowledging three things: Marx and Engels and
> Lenin and Stalin and Mao, and all the other great scientific socialists,
> were human. They made mistakes. And as humans, they could only
> concentrate their attention on a finite number of the aspects of their
> reality, which they so greatly influenced. Finally, consistent with the
> historical materialist dialectic, things have changed... quantitatively to
> qualitatively.
>
> I say this to preface what I think is an extremely critical error we may be
> making as Marxists now. It's been alluded to by Mark again and again. We
> are failing to integrate real science into our thinking now, and we have,
> as a consequence, ignored the biggest crisis of capitalism imaginable,
> which is just on the horizon. Global collapse.
>
> For a number of interpenetrating reasons, socialist projects have come to
> ruin. Trying to divide the reasons into internal and external has not only
> posited a false dichotomy-and axle we now continually get wrapped around-it
> has diverted our attention from the real, practical discoveries and
> developments since then. The siege mentality created by incessant
> hostility, which we are all familiar with, has also served as a set of
> blinders. It has kept us in a defensive frame of mind and contributed to
> our narrow-mindedness and our sectarianism. These characteristics,
> magnified in the caricature our enemies use to trivialize us, are
> nonetheless based on some real shortcomings, and so we bear a bit of the
> blame.
>
> No one doubts our dedication, but many credible, critical thinkers are
> stricken with our predisposition to try and conform realities to our
> theoretical models before we have examined all the facts-something I myself
> have been guilty of on more than one occasion-instead of constantly
> updating our understanding of practical reality, testing our assumptions
> against that reality, and conforming our theory to our discoveries. This
> leads many who would be interested in our methodology to dismiss us for a
> lack of intellectual rigor and a consequent intellectual mediocrity.
>
> Myles Horton once said, "Marx gave us a tool box, not a blueprint." There
> is no system called Marxism. It is a methodology. Anti-Marxists call it a
> system to discredit it, and Marxists have treated it as a religion, and
> discredited themselves.
>
> I want to propose the hypothesis that there is one major problem that
> contributed to the failure/destruction of socialist projects, for which we
> did not have the knowledge in Marx's time, but which we can ill afford to
> ignore now. And this hypothesis is immanently materialist, that is, it
> looks for the SOURCE of the problem in material conditions. It also has
> profound implications for the direction and character of impending
> capitalist crisis, and therefore how we should prepare to respond to those
> crises.
>
> Capitalism is a system whose motive force is economic competition and
> capital accumulation-expansion. This is precisely the characteristic of
> capitalism that inevitably leads to crises of overproduction and periodic
> economic collapse. COMPETITIVE MOMENTUM always makes it overshoot. In the
> past we have seen the market overshoots-recessions and depressions. But
> the next crisis of capitalism will be profound and permanent.
>
> We have overshot our energy base with our aggregate population.
> Overshooting one's energy base with one's population is similar to the
> overproduction phenomenon, but it differs in one critical respect. Energy
> is more than a mere commodity. It is the lifeblood of all productive
> activity. Our aggregate population has grown in direct proportion to the
> available, readily exploitable energy-mainly primary oil. Now that oil is
> running out. Fast. That's basic to the discussion on this list.
>
> Socialist societies overshot, too. Partly out of failure to understand the
> implications of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Partly out of their faith
> that socialism could be built on the material basis laid down by
> capitalism, and a somewhat uncritical fidelity to that teleology. And
> significantly, because of the competitive pressure of capitalist
> encirclement. That competitive pressure (read: competitive momentum... the
> same inherent characteristic of capitalism that leads it inevitably to
> crisis) led to adoption of capitalist industrial division of labor, which
> also-consistent with Marx's materialism-led to the constant regeneration of
> capitalist epiphenomenal categories within the socialist project. It also
> led socialist countries to environmental devastation.
>
> Historical materialism rejects the notion that we can revert to an earlier
> epoch from a maturely developed current epoch. Capitalist restoration can
> not happen from re-acquiring the IDEAS of the past out of a socialist
> society. It can only have happened, with the suddenness that it did,
> because our instruments and relations of production remained rooted in the
> capitalist paradigm. That paradigm is characterized by competitive
> momentum... which always overshoots. That the imperative to maintain this
> competitive momentum came from encirclement is important to understand, but
> does not change the fact that its net effect is very much the same.
>
> For this reason, the fall of the Eastern Bloc was inevitable, and the fall
> of China is equally inevitable, if civilization survives long enough, and
> if a more enlightened left wing doesn't take over the CCP. The nodal point
> of loss of state power by the Communist Party just hasn't arrived quite
> yet. But it will.
>
> The scarcer oil gets, the faster this conjuncture approaches. It is
> strategic, and therefore the quest to begin controlling remaining reserves
> will be more and more militarized (as we are already seeing in
> interventions at Iraq, Kosovo, and Colombia).
>
> Well before it hits $50 a barrel, the stock markets crash. Before 2008,
> over 50% of all available oil will be under the control of five Middle
> Eastern nations. The competition to gain permanent access to these
> reserves, as well as Caspian and Venezuelan-Colombian reserves, is already
> on. Ultimately, this is a military venture.
>
> Mechanized agriculture, without which there would now be mass starvation,
> is totally based on petroleum products, from pesticides to herbicides to
> fertilizer to transportation to power for irrigation and machinery. The
> implications of this alone are as inevitable as they are unthinkable. And,
> given the current political-economic structure of society, we all know
> where the burdens of this crisis will be shifted. That's also where the
> military foi will be shifted, until our military capacity overreaches itself.
>
> The combination of external militarization (which has already happened, and
> is proceeding apace) and internal crisis in the US (where the crisis will
> hit especially hard, because we have developed such an abject dependence on
> personal, gas-powered vehicles), will lead to increased social
> polarization, sharpened class struggle, more overt state-repression, and
> will likely lead to mass conscription into military and non-military
> service. This is not a far-off science fiction scenario. AND THIS IS WHAT
> WILL FILL THE AUDITORUIM. The question is whether there will be any
> leadership in the auditorium, and the survival of civilization, it seems to
> me, depends on the answer to that question.
>
> These processes are already in motion. Society is attributing what we see
> to a set of presumptions that have not taken this energy crisis into
> account. This is not just the classic replay of class struggle as Marx and
> even Lenin saw it. It has a whole new variable that has never in human
> history been faced before. Lenin taught us to keep our eyes out for
> conjunctures. This is the big one.
>
> These crises have already hit some regions, and we can get a glimpse of
> what's coming. Look at Russia. In the US, we can count on a resurgence of
> state-sanctioned fascism, and on scapegoating that will open all the old
> divisions among the working class. Look for direct and brutal attacks on
> trade unions, left political formations, and oppressed nationalities. This
> will be accelerated by external wars to maintain control of oil reserves,
> and by growing resistance from the southern nations. It is only a matter
> of time until ruling classes begin to openly regard the southern nations
> and oppressed nationalities here, no longer as part of the reserve army of
> labor, but as surplus population. Our current willingness to incarcerate
> millions presages this.
>
> Self-defense will become a prerogative, FOR US, and the open fight to
> overturn capitalism will become a matter of survival-first of us, then of
> our species. The radical changes necessary to prepare for the overwhelming
> global crisis simply can NOT be made in a capitalist structure. Socialism
> may not guarantee a way out, but it is certainly a prerequisite. But
> socialism presupposes survival!!!
>
> Inevitably, there will be a collapse of industrial society. This is the
> grimmest and surest prognostication. We will not be building socialism as
> a shiny city left behind by capitalism, but as survivors of a hellish
> descent into a world of toxins and trash heaps and scraps. That's really
> icky, but so is individual mortality, and it's just something we have to
> deal with.
>
> There is no chance of stopping it, because we have passed many of the
> points of no return. But our only chance of attenuating the shock and
> ameliorating the damage is to prepare now, FIRST TO SURVIVE THE COMING
> FASCIST ASSAULT, then to rebuild on a whole new footing, with 3-4 billion
> fewer people in the world. Because there will surely be a die-off. Russia
> has lost 11 million since 1991.
>
> The future-if we have one at all-is not in the highly industrialized
> classless society envisioned by Marx and Lenin. If we want to see the
> shape of our only thinkable future, we need to look at Cuba, now using a
> socialist state to adapt to a situation where massive petroleum-based
> inputs into the economy were abruptly lost, and where more socially and
> environmentally sustainable practices are being explored.
>
> Rosa Luxemborg was right. Our choice is socialism or barbarism.
>
> I apologize for both repeating what people have said before, and for any
> element of redundancy. I am sorting out my own thinking on this, partly in
> the writing of it.
>
> Stan Goff
>
> "If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
> struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."
>
> -Vo Nguyen Giap
>
> "Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
> all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
> must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
> processes that are generally hidden from easy view."
>
> -Eleanor Burke Leacock
>
> "Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
> transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
> motivation."
>
> -Ernesto "Che" Guevara
>
> "Mask no difficulties."
>
> -Amilcar Cabral
>
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