Re: a violent revolution?

You would think from recent posts that the list has been transformed into
a revolutionary organization debating strategy.  As if a loose circle of
core academics is going to to launch a revolution, violent or otherwise...

The real issue for this list to discuss is what is likely to happen, given
the structural conditions we have identified.  We are not going to make
the revolution, it is going to happen, and then the question is how do we
relate to it.

Unless we truly have entered a New Age, there will be violent revolution,
mainly in the periphery and semi-periphery, whether we like it or not.  In
the core, there is not likely to be, unless and until the next core war.
At that point, a pledge of pacifism may just insure your irrelevance.  But
for now, the sort of movements coalescing in Seattle are the name of the
game in the core, not some sort of storming of the winter palace.  The
action is in the periphery (Amin's terminology), or semi-periphery
(Chase-Dunn's terminology).  The lofty moral pronouncements of a few core 
academics are not going to affect that one way or another.  What can we do
to facilitate the countermovement from below?  It seems to me our time
would be much better spent building networks of awareness and support for
the movements on the ground than this far-fetched notion that we are going
to be the world vanguard.

Richard Hutchinson