>If something didn't work the first two hundred times,
something which required the risking of everything,
why think it might work the 201st time, Grok ? But if
I was a CIA agent, it's what I would be advocating,
in order to draw out the naive and pure of heart to
try to do the same thing all over again, and in that
way gut the progressive movement.

With all due respect, LM: You really don't understand either marxism or the history of the past hundred years, however much you have tried, apparently. You're essentially giving in to the bourgeois version of events and reality here. Bottom line: no matter how many times they defeat us, we come back at them -- because we are THE essential cog in the machine; they, OTOH, only have to be defeated ONCE -- and then they are GONE. Forever. Guess which side the odds favor?

>It didn't really work 160 years ago, 100 years ago,
60 years ago - why should it do so when the 'objective'
conditions for supposed success are fading away year by
year, GFC notwithstanding ?

Here is where you are exactly wrong, LM: the objective conditions have never been *more* ripe for socialism than today. In fact, they were putridly OVER-ripe decades ago, as others have stated elsewhere: and only matters like world war and the slaughter of over 100.000.000 people and the "creative destruction" of much infrastructure, etc. and the penetration of "Third World" markets (and MUCHO outright fraud) has allowed capitalism to maintain itself a while longer. No; in fact, LM, where marxists have failed miserably for the most part, is in the *subjective* sphere of class-consciousness and organization.

>there has to be a better way,
in vastly more complex conditions than 1847, an
incredibly fragmented working class (relatively
speaking) co-opted into the system, immensely more
powerful productive forces and intricate work processes.
Do we have another 160 years ?

Socialism isn't inevitable in any teleological sense. Nuclear war could indeed snuff out this capitalist order -- and everything else.

More on your above questions, later.

> Lenin's butchery was much like other butcheries

There was no "butchery" under Lenin and the bolsheviks. There was revolution and civil war. You might as well be a know-nothing middle-class pacifist to continue to use logic like this, LM. And if you're continuing to confuse Lenin with the stalinists -- then you're fixating on ir-reality as much as the Reichwingers here.

And if you think today's mafioso financial oligarchy are not intending and planning *right now* to slaughter us uppity workers by the MILLIONS very soon -- and the working-class' plans MUST take this approaching capitalist class violence fully into account: and act accordingly -- then you have, uh, learned very little about life and our recent historical past, Herr LM.

Thank you, grok, but there WAS the Red Terror, then the famine, which between them killed off around twenty million. Not to mention the crushing of the Workers' Opposition, the Narodniki, and Kronstadt.

I'm not saying that Lenin alone was to blame for all of this: Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, and yes Stalin, all played their revolutionary roles in overthrowing a semi-capitalist regime and installing a new feudalism. Then the back-flip from "Land to the Tillers!" policy to one of forced collectivisation, and another few million died in yet another famine.

My question is: was it worth it ? Should we take your advice, Herr Grok, and do it all again, in our different contexts and circumstances ?

Joe

>Thank you, grok, but there WAS the Red Terror, then
the famine, which between them killed off around
twenty million. Not to mention the crushing of the
Workers' Opposition, the Narodniki, and Kronstadt.

Why do you accept bourgeois lying figures as good currency? These propagandists pull those figures out of their rear ends, really -- whatever the truth of the matter. The REAL numbers are always generally at least an order of magnitude lower, in my experience. But besides the fact that you continue to fixate on the ugliness of a revolution -- rather than the real context of a far greater ugliness surrounding it -- makes me think you really don't understand the true nature of why any of this occurs in the first place. As if people really have a choice about killing -- or being killed. Seems to me, LM, you are not yourself faced with looming or imminent life and death choices like the rest of us, frankly.

>My question is: was it worth it ? Should we take your
advice, Herr Grok, and do it all again, in our different
contexts and circumstances ?

If capitalism could actually solve the problems of the world as they loudly proclaim every freaking moment of the day, it would be FOOLISH to call for anything BUT *supporting* them. However, you discount the endless suffering of the billions of the world *caused* by these capitalist liars and murderers -- to fixate instead on the sound and fury of the passing moment: like a child fixating on bright, shiny objects -- while adult life unfolds overhead and around them...

Sorry I have to put it that way -- but you ask for it, frankly.

We are appalled by the prospect of revolutionary violence not merely as we ponder the viciousness of our prospective death, but by the prospective death of ideals. Similarly, the death of an innocent (the macho-hyperbolic “women and children”) in itself is not the appalling factor; it’s the death of the “idea” of innocence. Death is banal; it is the utilitarian inverse-notion of the spectacle of death, on a grand scale, that offends. A single innocent death is merely shocking, an offence against the ideal, whereas death en masse is appalling to contemplate. Yet death en masse is merely a single death multiplied. The equation threatens the ideal, and that is what binds us together. That is the rationale behind hegemony. To support revolution is to renounce all ideology, to be naked and vulnerable in the world “in preference” to continuing on, humiliated, in an exploitative system of comforting illusions (damn lies!); a system which fosters far more misery, and death of innocents, than the revolution itself that is perennially forestalled. Moreover, beyond the death of ideology, the actual violence we dread is the violence we feel immanent within us, enlivened by our system. According to Alain Badiou the violence of alienated individualism and our animality are, “one and the same thing”; which is to say that the evil “nature” of man is “the nature of man under capitalism!” Revolutions are desperate attempts at freedom, not gratuitous violence! If you want to see gratuitous violence on a truly grand scale, look at the continuing history of capitalism!
For revolutionaries it is better to die, better to risk violence, than to live demeaned.
Histories of revolutions are or course written by the victors.

Grok and Squeers,

I see. So there is only (a) capitalism, and (b) violent revolution ?

There is no c, d, e, ..... ? Nothing else is possible ?

No alternatives to constantly self-renewing capitalism but endless reprises, one way or another, of Red Terrors and the shining Khmer Rouge example, policy-induced famines, the sacrifice of millions, the gulags, laogais, re-education/starvation camps ?

I'll keep looking, thanks :)

Joe