: Well, for the record, what I am presenting has been the Socialist Party's case since, oh, 1917...What a sorry claim! Before the October Revolution was even a few months old, your opportunist party was disowning it.
Like, you guys did such a better job at managing a socialist transformation...
: Our revolutionary tactics must be based around the presumed continued functioning of the state, we cannot hope for situations of collapse in order to form our revolutionary programme, we have to work on teh basis that the state will be fully functional.
Marx on the 'continued functioning of the state':
If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and that is essential for every real people’s revolution.(1)
Marx on revolution while the current state is functioning well:
With... general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when these two factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois production forms, come in collision with one another... A new revolution is only possible in consequence of a crisis.(2)
Hurry hurry, RD---turn these explicitly revolutionary Marx quotes into equivocal liberal mush.
: Secondly, the capitalist class are tiny in number, teh working class make up ninety percent of the population, that makes for an unstoppable, overwhelming majority. Thirdly, the capitalist class is tied to its ideology, it can be turned against it, and a formally legalistic revolution would cause splits in their ranks, and tie their hands.
Here is opportunism personified.
Yes, the capitalist class are tiny in number; yes, about 10%. However the procapitalist forces within the proletariat exist as well. Although it is UNQUESTIONABLE that the overwhelming majority of workers must agree upon communist aims and possess their own political experience (in the streets) before acting, what RD and his rhetorical party want to do is hold back the struggle until conditions of 'infallibly favorable chances' exist---i.e. until every last Frenchy and Lark is on board. Also, to tie communist aims exclusively to formally legalistic methods is to simply... give up.
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Notes:
1. Marx, Letters to Kugelmann, International 1934, p. 123.
2. Marx, The Class Struggles in France, International n.d., p. 135.
None.
