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It seems as though you’ve fixed the issue.
Just a comment on your comment on my blog about the demise of the capitalist mode of production(CMP). You seem to think that I think that the CMP will meet its demise by democratic, peaceful means. If I gave that impression, it was not the one I intended to give.
In fact, it’s obvious that the internal dynamics of the CMP are by definition aggressive, confrontational and violent. Capital accumulation will not go quietly into the night. There will be more and more violence as the CMP exhausts itself by eliminating the working class (or degrading the value of labour to make it impossible for the working class to reproduce itself). That said, we cannot apply the model of 19th or even 20th century violence and confrontation on the present. Let’s face it, the age of thermonuclear war is behind us unless some rogue state tries it on. It’s so because the CMP is now so spread all over the globe with its tentacles everywhere that, for example, any nuclear attack on Russia would be very bad for many ‘American’ corporations, directly in terms of consumer sales if for no other reason. China, Mexico, etc., are now the CMP’s sites of manufacture along with the pollution that goes along with that kind of activity. Violence can come in many ways, definitely not always accompanied by tanks and ground troops. I wrote a blog post some time ago about whether Canada was a capitalist country or not and I concluded that the question had to be reconsidered given the pre-eminence of capital over nations and national sovereignty. Capitalism created Canada and not the other way around. Capital will not want its assets compromised by destructive large-scale war and violence. Best keep things local and wrest control of production from workers more and more completely in every corner of the globe.
I see violence escalating in the coming decades as the CMP struggles to stave off defeat by a working class for itself and not just in itself. I don’t see a modern day uprising of the working class just yet and it’s not likely to look like a military movement in any case. More like guerilla warfare. Sabotage. That kind of thing. The US is headed for a massive implosion in the foreseeable future although I’m not sure what will trigger it in the end. I won’t live long enough to see it, but the signs of cracking infrastructure are everywhere.
So, I think that violence will escalate, confrontations will multiply and the state will do what it can to protect capital from the working class making it look like civil war or disagreement with governments when in fact the fundamental issue will be the increasingly rapid erosion of the working class. When people have nothing left to lose the shit will hit the fan. We’re a ways away from that yet.
I am sorry it took a while to respond to your comment. I have been giving it due consideration and formulating my response. I appreciate that the CMP appears to be under duress at the moment. Several articles were written in the Guardian in late December 2015 focussing on the end of capitalism and postulating a new way forward. Many other articles are out daily talking about the condition of global capitalism and the threats to its continued existence in its present form. I am working on a blog post to highlight these perspectives.
I too think that violence will continue to escalate and that not untypically there will be the usual mystification of the true underlying clash of class warfare into some other misleading portrayal. The financial world is awash in debt and the provision of credit seems endless. This recipe is disastrous in the mid-to-long term. Commodity prices have plummeted, especially oil – that lubricant that makes the current system function, and the rise of automation hangs like the sword of Damocles over millions of workers in the Western world. Demonizing the trade union movement has reached epic proportions in the US, still the world’s largest economy, all the while advocating the merits of ‘right to work’ environments. Present peaceful forms of resistance to these phenomena at best slow down the unrelenting grind of modern capitalism, and at worst give participants an elevated sense of their successes in altering and changing the real conditions of global capitalism.
While there are many voices of opposition to these capitalistic conditions, they strike me as more Sisyphean than Promethean. Change of the kind that Marx described in the foundational mode of production would require that the necessary conditions for its transformation are fulfilled in the present system of economic activity. Things will actually have to get a whole lot worse before the transition begins in earnest.