Kevin -- Cool, I'm glad someone's out there.
 
Revolution seems to be a hot topic in Marxism these days, probably because
it's getting harder and harder to theorize it.  My own position follows
Marx's, Althusser's, and Jameson's (and maybe Antonio Negri's if I
understood him better).  Along these lines, I've had some disheartening
discussions with the director of my dis., Richard Dienst (a disciple of
Jameson and Brian Massumi).  He claims that truly subversive activism died
when the economy went global (1973 by some claims, when Kissinger and
Nixon abandoned the Gold Standard and money became a signifier floating
in space without even a supposed referent).
 
My feeling is that Jameson is right -- when the economy goes global,
there's no real "outside" (no critical distance possible) from which to
launch an attack.  Additionally, with late capitalism's commodity
reification in place, and Taylorization in place in the workforce (our own
as well as the working class's) the possibility of class consciousness
disappears and with it the possibility of that sort of revolution.
 
To make things worse, for revolution to succeed, it would now have to
occur on the global level or be forced into the compromise positions of
China and Cuba who find that in global capitalism and its abolishment of
conventional modes of "nationality" a nation can be forced through
economic pressures to bow to more capitalist modes of production.  Russia
strikes me as the most prominent example, actually, although the Chinese
privatization surge recently is pretty scary.
 
Anyway, drawing on Althusser, if we can barely begin to imagine (and can
never really "know" existentially) the ways in which we are
interpellated into the global economy, then how can we ever mobilize a
whole class?  To paraphrase Jameson, you just can't imagine the whole
world at once -- it's too damn big.
 
So, we're left with local action or we turn to Deleuze and Guattari and
start looking for lines of flight.
 
What I try to do at a personal level is teach in a somewhat collective
manner -- less authority for me, more for the students, less lecturing,
more discussing, etc..  I try to give them some control over their
means of producing their education. But what is to be done besides that?
That's what stumps me.
 
I'm obviously starved for talk.  I should probably join some more
listservs to avoid pouring too much into this one.
 
Anyway, thanks for getting in touch.  Now I need to write to a zine
columnist who calls himself Lefty Hooligan.  I think he's a Trotskyite,
but he's all over the map.  Still, I seem to need pen pals.
 
Stacy