Maintaining anarchism

Writing to an MP;

- MP makes a call for the bad apples to be punished
- at best contacts Italian pm and gets some media coverage

- Under growing pressure Italian government sends the cops to jail, proves that there is 'justice' and that they have dealt with the problem.
- civil society types are satisfied and their belief in social-justice within capitalism is reinforced

Of course none of this would happen, but if it did it wouldnt leave anyone in a better position except the state. The reality is there is more or less nothing we can do about what happened in genoa, except publicise it if you are so inclined to show workers what happens when people challenge the hegemony.

The only way is to create a communist society on a global scale. Hence world revolution.

Yep. A country that goes through a socialist revolution is going to have to try and appeal to the working class of countries such as America. even if not to bring a revolution to those countries, just for people such as dockworkers to strike and refuse to load weapons.

it does depend on the country, too. look how much global opposition there was to the Iraq war. i imagine there'd be a lot more Americans who'd have a problem with invading a country such as Britain than there were opposed to the Iraq war. not that I'm calling Americans racist (not too much anyway), but I think the people would see a lot more in common with the British and not be so easily convinced that invasion was right. like what Katt Williams was saying about the language the news uses. "i do not readily know one single insurgant, you can kill all of them". http://youtube.com/watch?v=u5jQgImBzLA

Clearly, a completely simultaneous revolution would be highly unlikely. There will undoubtedly be periods when there are proletarian bastions existing next to bourgeois states - and those bastion will need to be ready to defend themselves militarily against invasion, sabotage, incursion, etc.

However, the thrust of the revolution must be international and the question raised by box shows why. The longer the revolution fails to encompass the whole world, the more dependent the proletarait will become on organs of violence. Although these will be initially created and maintained for defence, it is only a matter of time before they become transformed into oppressive state structures. Only quick victory in the world-wide civil war will make these organs superfluous and enable them to be dismantled.

The global integration of capitalism combined with its fragmentation into nation states is one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. The global, socialised reality of production is in conflict with the nationalist, propertied relations of production embodied in the bourgeoisie.

It's the global nature of capitalism - and therefore the working class - that provides the material basis for internationalism. By destroying private property and all its manifestations (of which the nation state is the highest synthesis), the proletariat liberates itself, the forces of production and, ultimately, all of humanity.

The fact that some states dominate others or enter into alliances doesn't change the fundamental rule of capitalist competition. The Latin American bourgeoisies would love to wriggle out of America's grasp if they could - hence the growth of anti-american, leftist governments like Chavez in Venezuela which is orientated around a seizure of national assets by the state (i.e. by the Venezuelan bourgeoisie) and an explicit anti-American imperialist orientation.

Except, of course, that nature has always existed and humanity has been around for about 100,000 years. Does this mean that a global human community, built on abundance rather than scarcity, has been possible throughout history? Given that famine was a regular occurance throughout human history since the advent of capitalism, one would have to say no. (That's not to say famines don't occur in capitalism, but they are largely the result of capitalism itself rather than technical development capitalism has engendered which has the potential to eliminate famine completely.)

Except that the whole point about the condition of the proletariat is that it has its humanity stripped from it. It has no humanity to recognise. It is able to reclaim its humanity solely through the means of its struggle and revolution which has its fundamental basis in the economic structure of capitalism itself not in any noble ideals. That's not to say there are no noble ideals, but that these are a product of the struggle, not the other way round.

The problem with your position is that it doesn't seem to explain why the bourgeoisie itself can't recognise "brotherhood of all human beings as a part of nature".

Why are they alienated by their own system? Is it not because of their economic position? Similarly, the proletariat is also alienated - it represents the extreme limit of alienation. The difference, to paraphrase Marx, is that the bourgeoisie recognise their strength is in alienation while the proletariat is forced to revolt against it. And also, because the proletariat represents the historical limits of alienation in that it is the last alienated class and will abolish alienation for all humanity as this is the only way it can free itself from it.

Your average bourgeois probably has as many friends as your average worker. Alienation is not a measure of how many people you talk to. In capitalism, all relationships and activities bear the scars of alienation. It cannot be escaped from, it can only be masked.