Re: Forwarded from Anthony (rise of US capitalism--part 6)

["dmschanoes" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

How does one conduct a revolutionary war without carrying forth in the
battle the determining component of social revolution, the overthrow of a
pre-existing property form by a different form?

You can't.  And the fact that Reconstruction was defeated, that the
revolutionary war, or the social revolution, was thrown back is indicative
of the failureof capitalism when confronted by the reactionary form at its
core, private property.  And this, even when, especially when that private
property is fundamental to securing its continued expropriation of labor.

Marx did not analyze revolution as the overthrow of the oppressors by the
oppressed-- revolution is precipitated by the conflict between the means and
relations of production, and examined as such.  With capitalism that
conflict is embodied in the struggle between the exploited and exploiter
class that reproduce each other in the fundamental "defining" form of the
bourgeois economy, exchange between capital and wage-labor.

As for the notion that every nation must have a bourgeois revolution-- Marx
and Engels were more inclined to that than Lenin, and certainly Trotsky.
Indeed, all of Trotsky's work points to the impossibility of the national
bourgeois revolution in the world of capitalism.

The defeat of Reconstruction is the precursor of this emerging
impossibility-- cemented in the 1890s by 1.the stepping forward of the US in
the Spanish-American War as the guarantor of anti-revolution globally and 2.
Plessy vs. Ferguson.

dms



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