Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 10:52:57 -0500
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: "Challenger Civilizations" & the Decline of the West


At 6:31 PM 12/30/96, Louis R Godena wrote:

>But Doug,  those same  "forces" who,  in your view,  are destitute of the
>"education or skills necessary to challenge capital's power" are precisely
>those who have successfully authored revolutions in China,  Russia,  Cuba,
>Indochina,  and Africa,  while it is your  "proletariat" -- the "true
>creators of value and possessors of industrial skill"-- who have been most
>decisively and ignominiously "crushed by the juggernaut of capital".

The point isn't only to make a revolution, it's to sustain one. Let's look
at the record of the examples you cite. China made great social progress
under Mao, but economic development was disappointing, and the revolution
essentially ended 15 years ago and the country is well on its way to
capitalism. It's doing capitalism in an Asian manner, with a highly
interventionist state, but it's basically capitalism. Cuba couldn't have
sustained its revolution without Soviet support. Vietnam defeated the U.S.,
sure, but it spent the next 20 years with a poisoned landscape and in
profound poverty. Africa...well Africa is the most ravaged neighborhood on
earth. The exception that (partly) proves the rule is Russia, which began
its revolution with incomes about 40% of Western European levels (by
Maddison's stats), compared with 10-20% for the other examples. It also
sustained its revolution at a tremendous cost - I don't want to sound like
a Stalinophobic Trot here, but the USSR in the 1930s was a pretty nasty
place, and even in the 1970s it was far from my idea of utopia - and it too
finally collapsed.

One reason these revolutions had so much difficulty, aside from their own
domestic contradictions, was the implacable hostility of the United States
and the other imperialist powers. That power is probably greater than ever
now, now that the USSR is gone. So how can any poor country make a
successful revolution today? For the Third World to have a revolution, the
imperialist powers have to be defanged, and that is impossible without the
masses in those countries doing the job. I don't dispute that they don't
seem up to the task, but they have to rise to it, or barbarism will be the
victor.

>Doug,  please don't become -- even by default -- a babbler of Received
>Doctrine,  especially when the overwhelming preponderance of evidence
>suggests a reality far removed from the type of political gerrymandering we
>witness daily in this forum.

I'm not making this argument for scriptural reasons; I'm doing it from an
analysis of the world I see around me. If I were a true catechist, I'd be
talking about death agonies and imminent revolution; I'm not. What I'm
saying is, if the first world proles don't become revolutionary, or
radically reformist even, socialism anywhere is pretty much out of the
question. In case you haven't noticed, I'm of the opinion that socialism is
pretty much out of the question for the forseeable future.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
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