Great Post from John Quiggin

Wow!  John Quiggin (Social Democrat) takes on the big picture of revolution and reform in an incredible post:

http://johnquiggin.com/2011/06/19/marxism-without-revolution-class/#more-9916

Please read to the bottom before dismissing his dismissal of Marxist revolution.  What he is actually proposing is extremely important...and imaginable.*

Basically the idea is that we were on the right track until around 1970 (I agree).  Step One is unwinding the "market liberalism" (his term for neoliberalism) which has taken hold of our society since then.  If we could just bring back those great old reforms from the New Deal and Great Society, we would be well out of the hole we have fallen into since then.  It should be clearer and clearer to many people that those ideas, like the Glass Stegal Act and the Fairness Doctrine, were very good ideas, and that what they were replaced with isn't working at all, except for the top 1%.

It was done before.  It produced the best societies the world has yet seen.  It can be done again.

BTW, I am continuing to review Quiggin's most excellent book "Zombie Economics" about how the ideas of market liberalism are disproven again and again, but never seem to quit dominating our world.

*From where we are right now, I think it pretty unlikely that a Bolshevik style revolution would go the right way, if it were even possible.  For the actual Bolsheviks, it required passive acceptance by the military, for the Maoists and Cubans, it required a weak state military that a popular force could overpower.  But Quiggin gives other reasons why it wouldn't go well, quoting leading socialist/marxist thinkers.

And linked within the above post, there is Quiggin's further discussion on the futility of violent revolution to achieve lasting change:

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/17/the-winter-palace-and-after/