Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 18:37:30 -0500 (EST) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: Is China socialist? On Thu, 2 Jan 1997, Kevin Cabral wrote: > your reply at all satisfying? What seperates South Korea of old from China > of late by your definition, why is one socialist and the other not? > Equally important practically is it useful practically for socialists, who > claim to be for democracy and worker-management, to prosthletize on behalf > of China's 'socialism?' Doesn't it just put another shell in a falling duck > to do that? > Louis: I guess Jorn Anderson got bored with all of this M-I subtlety and Adam Rose's new employer won't let him write email on the job. (I sometimes got the feeling that Adam regarded this as just another way to kill time at work, like playing computer Solitaire.) Otherwise, we'd be hearing the standard spiel on state-capitalism. These questions are really tough and I took a shot at them by writing about Algeria and Cuba in *detail*. If you want to answer them in a few hundreds or less, you are just kidding yourself. I think a good analogy is to look at the emergence of the working-class in the late middle-ages. At one point did the weavers become workers? When they were provided a building with all the raw material that they needed, but brought their own tools? When the burgher supplied them with the raw material *and* the tools? The point is that it takes an extended analysis rich in a mastery of dialectics to provide an answer to these sorts of questions. Even Leo Huberman's "Man's Worldly Goods" spends a hundred pages on trying to nail down the inception of the working-class as a class. And this is supposed to be for beginners! The American Trotskyist movement after WWII tried to answer the question whether the Eastern European states were capitalist or not. This was at a time when thinking wasn't the exclusive monopoly of the national chairman who has an IQ of 750 and the blessings of Farrell Dobbs. This was a very rich discussion and it took years to come to a conclusion. People on this list like "neil" don't want to waste all that time thinking. They gave this question all the time it deserved--a month or two--and now have devoted their lives to spreading the WORD!! China is capitalist! Cuba is capitalist! --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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