Revolution and 'Built up Capital'

[MrDoom]

A good friend of mine and I were arguing the other day about how powerful a proletarian revolution would be, and how the bourgeosis would resist.

According to my friend, the bourgeosis would be unstoppable due to the "built up capital" that the proletariat had been creating and building up for so long. Tanks, missiles, and superior resources would be in the capitalists' hands. The proletariat would have to start from literally nothing, and would not be able to overcome the massive built up resources they had produced for the counter-revolutionaries.

I have tried explaining that not only would the capitalists not dare kill of their only means of sustainince, the workers in revolt (ruling out the use of missiles or other weapons of mass destruction), but that the proletariat outnumbers the bourgeosis many times over, and during a revolution would be producing for themselves as opposed to capitalist 'war' material, and would be siezing the capitalist means of production as well.

I know somewhere he's tripping over his own argument, and that it is a rather defeatist stance to take hold of ("Well, things are bad under capitalism but there's nothing we can do about it..."), but I don't know how to word a counter argument to this. Any ideas?

[Forward Union]

Originally posted by [email protected] 4 2006, 02:30 PM
A good friend of mine and I were arguing the other day about how powerful a proletarian revolution would be, and how the bourgeosis would resist.

According to my friend, the bourgeosis would be unstoppable due to the "built up capital" that the proletariat had been creating and building up for so long. Tanks, missiles, and superior resources would be in the capitalists' hands. The proletariat would have to start from literally nothing, and would not be able to overcome the massive built up resources they had produced for the counter-revolutionaries.

I have tried explaining that not only would the capitalists not dare kill of their only means of sustainince, the workers in revolt (ruling out the use of missiles or other weapons of mass destruction), but that the proletariat outnumbers the bourgeosis many times over, and during a revolution would be producing for themselves as opposed to capitalist 'war' material, and would be siezing the capitalist means of production as well.

I know somewhere he's tripping over his own argument, and that it is a rather defeatist stance to take hold of ("Well, things are bad under capitalism but there's nothing we can do about it..."), but I don't know how to word a counter argument to this. Any ideas?
You also should point out that the people who produce the tanks, bombs, bullets, warheads and any other means of murder the ruling class have are produced by the working class.

And who uses them, soldiers right? Don't they have the ability to think?

I'll move this to theory for now, as this is more a discussion of such.