Permanent revolution v stability

[WOM]

Permanent revolution v stability

No, not the fundamentals. But it can provide a framework so that disasters are kept in check.

Imagine hundreds of cars flying down the highway. That's capitalism. What keeps it from being carnage - most of the time - is regulation: speed limits, licensing, generally understood (and enforced) rules of behaviour. If everyone is playing by the same known rules, and there's responsible oversight with some teeth, you've got a reasonably workable system.

Now, if it's car travel that you're against, then this won't make you happy either way. But if it's the movement of people from point A to point B in an expedient fashion, then you're probably okay with it.

And no, I don't think there's any way - or any point, for that matter - to keep booms and busts from happening. I'm not sure that matters, really, as long as you have decent social safety nets in place. What I would like to see the end of is calamitous happenings like we're experiencing right now. Those, I think, could be avoided with strict, enforced regulation of key industries. Um...like banking.

[Bruno]

Permanent revolution v stability

Creative destruction, TonTon.

I think this could have been avoided by not allowing the financial services industry slash Wall Street to take over the economy and the government. Somehow, like. I guess that's regulation, but it looks more like disrupting a symbiotic relationship which has come to seem fundamental to capitalism in recent decades.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Doesn't that just make the crash earlier, though?

[Bruno]

Permanent revolution v stability

Earlier and less severe I suppose. WOM's right, you can't plan an economy, so booms and busts are inevitable, and the key is to try and regulate 'em.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

Demand management mitigates the worst of these crashes/recessions. So crashes are inevitable, but it isn't inevitable that they'll create a will to abolish capitalism.

The strong state is really preserving capitalism, I suppose.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Permanent revolution v stability

Aside from my temperament, which (like Mike Dickon's health) is not the issue, are there not good reasons for preferring stability?

We have no choice. Or so I'm told. Chaos/complexity theory — very fashionable in the management consulting biz these days apparently — says we should give up the idea that the pace of change will ever slow down, it will only increase. All we can do is manage it.

[WOM]

Permanent revolution v stability

I think that's the fundamental problem: believing it's manageable.

I think the best you can do it set up a framework for it to exist within (regulation, again), and rely on organic systems to work around it and fill in the cracks and gaps.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Permanent revolution v stability

I think that's what's meant by managing it. Or at least not much more than that.

[WOM]

Permanent revolution v stability

Maybe you're right. When I read 'manage', I read it as the supposedly rational practice of numbers, projections and 'order'. You know, as if you were managing production in a factory.

It tends to work in small spaces like that. It seems to fall apart as the sphere broadens, if you know what I mean. So many things that are irrational yet significant - consumer optimism/pessimism, etc - aren't taken into consideration. I think there's too much belief that the 'factory' brand of management can work across countries or global economies.

If there's one discipline, besides banking, that's been shown throughout this meltdown to be wearing no clothes, it's economics.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Oh, economics is bunk, that much is true.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Permanent revolution v stability

TonTon wrote:

Lenin was one of those who believed this - although he, quite rightly, rejected the Mensheviks' view that what was required for this bourgeois revolution was an alliance of the working class with the bourgeoisie.

Why "quite rightly"? Presumably a revolution that had united the two forces might not have produced quite so much slaughter.

Lenin envisaged a coalition comprising the workers' party and a peasant party, a 'democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry,' in which the peasant party would have the majority. The 'democratic dictatorship' would establish a republic, expropriate the large landowners and enforce the eight-hour day. Thereafter the peasantry would cease to be revolutionary, would become upholders of property and of the social status quo, and would unite with the bourgeoisie.

Stalin saw this too. This is why he slaughtered millions of kulaks.

The industrial proletariat, in alliance with the proletarian and semi-proletarian village population, would then become the revolutionary opposition, and the temporary phase of 'democratic dictatorship' would give way to a conservative bourgeois government within the framework of a bourgeois republic.

I don't remember this bit at all. When did he say this - In State and Revolution?

[Anton Gramscescu]

Permanent revolution v stability

TonTon wrote:

Trotsky, on the other hand, didn't believe that the peasantry was capable of playing an independent role.

He also argued that in order to achieve a consistent solution of the agrarian and national questions and a break-up of all the social and imperial fetters preventing economic progress, the revolution would have to go beyond the bounds of bourgeois private property. 'The democratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist, and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.'

So, by "permanent", he meant "irrevocable" rather than "continuous"?

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Why "quite rightly"? Presumably a revolution that had united the two forces might not have produced quite so much slaughter.

Because the two forces have opposed interests. I'm not sure which particular slaughter you're talking about, and why you think the Menshevik approach might have led to better outcome.

Stalin saw this too. This is why he slaughtered millions of kulaks.

Calling the millions who died "kulaks" seems to me to be conceding rather a lot to Stalin.

I don't remember this bit at all. When did he say this - In State and Revolution?

Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution 1905

So, by "permanent", he meant "irrevocable" rather than "continuous"?

Yup, that's it really.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Permanent revolution v stability

TonTon wrote:

Why "quite rightly"? Presumably a revolution that had united the two forces might not have produced quite so much slaughter.

Because the two forces have opposed interests. I'm not sure which particular slaughter you're talking about, and why you think the Menshevik approach might have led to better outcome.

Well, start with the civil war, which I think accounts for a million or two dead. Had Kerensky not been toppled by the reds, it's likely that Russia would have ended up with a republican government with a heavy leftish tinge that would have carried out large-scale land reform. That still would have been awfully good. And, you know, peasants would have owned their own land and been able to produce food in abundance, as opposed to losing their land again under a collectivization policy which caused widespread hunger.

To say that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had opposing interests in Russia at the time pre-supposes a social and economic structure in which the former had a controlling interest. I'm not sure that's quite tenable in 1917 Russia what with the hereditary absolutist monarchy and vast landowning estates and all. I mean, the Menshevik position presumably is just another way of saying "hey, we need an 1848 before we can think about anything else". And presumably, one that lasted longer than the eight months of the Provisional Government.

Stalin saw this too. This is why he slaughtered millions of kulaks.

Calling the millions who died "kulaks" seems to me to be conceding rather a lot to Stalin.

Well, not all of the millions who died under Stalin were kulaks, but some were, no?

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Well, start with the civil war, which I think accounts for a million or two dead.

Ok. That slaughter. I'd go higher, meself. I suppose you could blame the bolsheviks for those Russians killed in WWII as well, while you're at it.

Had Kerensky not been toppled by the reds, it's likely that Russia would have ended up with a republican government with a heavy leftish tinge that would have carried out large-scale land reform.

That sounds awfully unlikely to me - Kerensky's government was clearly utterly unable even to defend itself, and the toppling would just have been done by the right rather than the left. I dread to think of the consequences.

I mean, the Menshevik position presumably is just another way of saying "hey, we need an 1848 before we can think about anything else".

Well, that's what it says, yes. The outcome is another matter though, isn't it? You'd have actually to take on board, and argue against, the objections put up to that position.

Well, not all of the millions who died under Stalin were kulaks, but some were, no?

True enough, yes, some were. And millions more weren't. It seems an important point to me.