Anyway, I think the anarchist viewpoint on this, that moral denounciations are sufficient, is empirically demonstrated wrong. People like Kropotkin have been denouncing the immorality of it all for ages, and here we are. Of course it’s easy to say that we Marxists aren’t in a much better place, given how there isn’t a workers’ state worth the name today–no, the PRC doesn’t count as one. However at least our attempts at a workers’ state managed to last for a bit longer than a few months, and while clearly not ultimately successful, they did get somewhere.

I’m not sure what you mean about technological change, to be honest. It sounds a bit too abstract for me to make sense of it. Are you referring to some sort of inevitable progressiveness of technical advance? Because i would be very very dubious of taking such a position.

A few days ago i watched on YouTube some films by Ken Loach, who I hadn’t heard of before, about the Irish and Spanish civil wars. In both of them there was brought up the conflict between the practical men who saw that the only way to win the revolution was to put off the revolution until it was won, because the only way to win was by using the instruments/practices of the owners/rulers against them and the other practical men, who were determined that the revolution could only be lost if it was compromised by using the instruments/practices of the owners/rulers because their use must be against revolution.

To me the other practical men are right; and like the anarchists, i think that there is nothing wrong with people, speaking historically; super-structure is the problem. Real change, then, is technological change that people then mediate and humanize or naturalize.

may or may not be of interest!