[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by Nodrog

It would be historical in that it takes into account the horrendous failures that previous attempts to create communist regimes without proper planning have been.

I think the main useful thing Marxists (or indeed anyone advocating a new social order) can do is outline general principles. Specifics (e.g. how often people should vote for their local representative, how many people each ward will contain) is speculation at best and would seem to be a waste of time as discussion topics go (especially as you then get bogged down in side issues, or defending irrelevant details).

A problem which has affected some revolutions* in the past is the perception that they (i.e. the revolutionaries) would replace a social order over night. This leads to it's logical (utterly absurd/grotesque) end point with the Khmer Rogue. An attempt is made to completely remake society in one gigantic act of sheer will (with obvious accompanying slaughter). One of the things that encourages such an approach is dwelling excessively on utopian fantasies (almost inevitably top-down, by their very nature). If you inherit system x and then want to completely change it to system y then you start seeing centralisation as the obvious path. It's the sort of Civilisation (or Populus/Sim City) approach to politics; "You have total control over the world, how do you want it to be?"

The question "How should society be?" isn't really one we should ask any more than "How should a human being be?". There isn't some end point / ideal type as such we're aiming at, but more an approach that an awesome human being (/society) would take, given certain conditions. Having said that, I would "blame" Marx for not being explicit in some of his works - if he had spent a few chapters saying "ffs, in a new society there will be no imprisonment without trial, there will be no suppressing of free speech or free assembly...etc" then I don't dare to think how many lives could have been saved.

I would say that these sorts of questions are probably best handled in novels, and if I wasn't a useless gobshite, I'd try to do such a thing. Given we are in a situation where revolutionary left parties struggle to maintain memberships in double figures it's difficult to embark on such a project seriously though. Where there are developments in this area I suspect they will at least partially come out of struggles or experience. Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' is more interesting than 90% of academic left utopias combined because although tragic it is a real product of history.

I realise that Marxists tend to be intrinsically hostile to theorising as detached from action, but I think there is a point where it makes sense to acknowlege the terrible mistakes that have been made in the past and at least make an honest attempt to learn from them.

Despite my comments in the above, I agree with this and would concede one that it represents one of the main weaknesses in Marxist (or whatever) theory today. There are people who have written things on this subject, but they're not well publicised and they generally fall into masturbatory utopian fantasising before too long. For those interested, there used to be a journal called 'Democracy & Nature' (now not published) which tackled these sorts of questions. The late Murray Bookchin I think did a couple of articles on his proposed utopia : libertarian municipalism.

This is disingenous to the extent that it implies any particular communist state was content to be communist in isolation. The driving force behind communist ideology in the 20th century, and the soviet Party in particular, was generally that communism should be actively spread over the world to the greatest extent possible.

This is true, but doesn't change anything. Let's imagine that, at some point in the future, a global Islamic movement manages to defeat liberal democracy globally and replace existing governments with Islamic theocracies. A few years after this, one country tries to have a liberal revolution, and this is violently put down after intervention from it's neighbours. The Islamic apologist could easily say "Well, liberal democracy is a totalitarian ideology. They are not content until every single person in the world has their precious 'freedoms'". And they'd be correct (upto a point).

But then any analysis of the nascent liberal state would have to take into account they were almost immediately attacked by the dominant world power(s). You couldn't look at the experiences of this hypothetical state and try to generalise from its experiences. Even if the first intervention failed, and they survived then the economy and politics of the country would (most probably) be warped. Even a relatively small risk (e.g. like the United States faces now, in comparative terms) can lead to a sort of national paranoia, curtailing of individual freedoms and abuses of power. What would the United States look like if more than a dozen countries had recently landed troops to attack them and an industrially strong Mexico was talking about needing more living space in the North. It's possible to imagine that we might get things siginificantly worse than the Patriot Act.

But this is kind of what we find if we look at post-revolutionary Russia. Between 1918 and 1920, when Soviet Russia was in such a mess to not be a direct threat to the Imperial powers, over 100,000 foriegn troops intervened (not including the German/Austro-Hungarians who were already fighting the Russians), often directly against Bolshevik forces. I am not complaining about such an action, it makes sense from a power perspective, I am merely saying that we should take it into account in any analysis of the resulting politics.

I would say that one general principle of any socialist state would be a total rejection of conscription (and perhaps even a rejection of having a military at all). However, if on Day #1 of the new order the nation was attacked by someone then what? Chomsky raises this question and seems to suggest that it would be better to not resist at all, thereby being a heroic example to future struggles. I'm not sure if I was the elected representative for the Campberwell Worker's Council I could seriously suggest people martyr themselves on the guns of the oncoming troops. However, I do get his point that any sort of military struggle will result in the usual war-like-conditions. In a similar vein, did the American revolutionaries always respect due process when dealing with British sympathisers in the colonies during the fight for independence? Again, this is not to defend the horrors that resulted from the Russian revolution and it's long and bloody aftermath.

But I'd say that it's a general rule that in wars for national survival that even nations with checks on executive power can run into problems. One of the reasons Britain has not fallen into dictatorship is not the checks and balances which exist in Britain but a general culture which does not favour totalitarianism or arbritrary violation of the rule of law. It's also probably the reason which Britain has lower levels of corruption than even economically comparable parts of Europe. The point is, what we'd need in any crisis situation is a population which appreciated freedom and held the right kind of cultural values. (Based on current trends, we're screwed. )

Anyway, all we can do is prepare ideologically and practically - both domestically and internationally. If there was a sufficiently strong anti-military movement in Britain then that would probably be able to constrain the British state from intervening in a hypothetical French revolution in the first place. One of the (many) problems with the Russian revolution was it took place in such isolation that not only did Europeans workers not join them but the left was unable to stop attacks against the new regime. Even today while America does not necessarily invade Cuba (at least partially due to international opinion I would say), there is still a blockade in place which unnecessarily immiserates the Cuban people mainly, or so it seems, out of spite.

Perhaps in the future, given technological and economic developments (and mass migration) we could expect a more trans-national outlook to arise. Not necessarily totally internationalist (because these links between nations are not evenly spread) - but a strong cultural affinity between citizens across national boundaries (due to the 'net and such). If such a thing happened then we'd be less likely to see massive military interventions as has happened in the past (maybe).

Previously people relied on a global media (controlled/influenced to a greater or lesser extent by state power or capital) for global news, but now there is much more scope for hearing directly from the people involed. As I've said before, 9/11 was interesting to me because it was the first global event where I learnt just as much from people I knew on the ground (e.g. New Yorkers on mailing lists I was on) than I did the TV news. If we develop to a state where everyones phone is basically a super powerful camcodrder and there are methods of sharing such video in an uncensored fashion then I suspect the scope for "Bolsheviks Eat Babies" type propaganda will be greatly reduced. As such, it might get to the stage where if political consciousness was high enough then it wouldn't matter if it was only socialism (or whatever) in one country since the power to blockade, attack and destabalise such a country would be constrained by internal forces. This already happens of course, and certainly in Europe the ability for states to participate in the Iraq war has been reduced dramatically (especially given the response of large, restless Muslim populations throughout most of Western Europe).

* = "Revolution" is a word which also carries with a lot of baggage which implies baracades, slaughtering aristocrats and replacing society overnight. It has now got to the point where some believe that an action can only be revolutionary if it involves murder. This is obviously not the case and to an extent, revolution is a word which needs reclaiming.