File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-07.045, message 39


Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 09:29:58 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: planned socialism.end


On Mon, 6 Jan 1997 dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz wrote:

> 
>  The resort to the market was a necessary step back to ensure the
>  survival of the new regime. So was reliance upon small peasant
>  cooperation under Workers and Peasants Inspection. But neither the
>  market nor peasant cooperation were panaceas for Russia's desperate
>  plight. On the contrary Lenin and the Left Opposition always made the
>  planned development of heavy industry the backbone of the transition
>  to socialism and vitally necessary until such time as the world
>  revolution corrected Russia's backwardness. Lenin last article

Louis: This is a simplistic view of Bolshevik economics. Part of the
problem is that there are contradictory aspects of Lenin's ideas on the
feasibilty of socialism in the USSR. Sometimes he uses formulations that
are more akin to Trotsky (and Marx's, I might add) that say in categorical
terms that *unless* revolutions triumph in short order in Western Europe,
then the socialist experiment in the USSR is doomed to fail.

Other times he seems to recognize that such revolutions are not
immediately on the agenda and devotes himself to the task of building
socialism in an isolated, backward country.

There is textual evidence in Lenin's writings to support both Trotsky and
Stalin's ideas. The reason for this should be obvious. The USSR was a
contradictory phenomenon and various aspects of it would present
themselves more strongly at one time or another.

The problem with Trotskyist thought is that it tends to make a fetish over
those writings in the Bolshevik tradition that point in a unilinear
direction from Lenin the industrializer to the Left Opposition. Bukharin
becomes anathema. Actually, there is plenty in Lenin to support the notion
that Bukharin was true to some aspects of Lenin's theory on socialism in
the USSR.

Finally, I did a word count on how many times David Richard Bedggood used
the term "menshevik" in his paper. Guess what! I got a protection
exception in Windows because I ran out of memory.



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