Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 17:04:31 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-I: Albania


At 11:50 PM 3/17/97 -0500, you wrote:
>I have been really struck by the Albanian events.  i must say sadly so.  It
>is a kind of post-modernist revolution.  That is you have the almost complete
>collapse of a state, the masses are armed to the teeth and yet it is
>difficult to avoid a sinking feeling it is going no place.  There is no
>vision, no hope for a better society, and I believe therefore no communes,
>"soviets" etc.    One thinks of Somalia and Afghanistan not Russia 1917.
>
>Am I wrong?
>
>

Impossible to say at this stage Tim.  But I have been very struck by the
resemblance not so much to Post modernism as to Engels' account of the
'Peasant Wars in Germany'.  Local idiocy does seem to hold sway.  Obviously
the towns needed to link up and march on the capital.  The people had to
stop that stupid shooting of the guns in the air and learn something about
the horizontal imperatives of a revolution.

Still it all does seem to be an example of Marx's metaphor of the Revolution
as Mole grubbing away and popping up in the most unexpected of places. And
of course there is no solution to the problems of the Albanians available
within the present system.  They may still have illusions but these will be
stripped away most cruelly I fear.

regards

Gary



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