Re: [OPE-L] Do Red Butterflies Flap Their Wings in Advanced Capitalist Nations?

From: dlaibman@JJAY.CUNY.EDU
Date: Sat Jan 21 2006 - 15:26:48 EST


Not at all.  The USSR and ANESR are certainly North.  Western Europe is
not far behind.  And the capitalist ruling class in the US is being
driven into greater territorial and political alliances with
precapitalist classes and strata in the South -- the "Second World" --
as the working-class movement here presses toward a "point of
qualitative transformation."

This is all fantasy, of course, but it is not immaterial.  Showing that
butterfly wing effects are conceivable *within a historical materialist
framework* is, I think, a useful and important response to the old
canard that Marxists are rigid determinists; that grasping a direction
principle within history amounts to a fatalistic assumption taht only
one path is (was) possible.

David


----- Original Message -----
From: Jerry Levy <Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM>
Date: Saturday, January 21, 2006 11:28 am
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Do Red Butterflies Flap Their Wings in Advanced
Capitalist Nations?
> (I also left  out Japan, as someone else pointed out.)
>
> Hi David,
>
> And Australia and New Zealand.
>
> Is it _my_ imagination or was there a built-in
> presumption on your part that socialist revolutions
> -- even with alternative scenarios for the 20th Century
> -- would most likely only be successful in the 'South'?
>
> In solidarity, Jerry
>


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