File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-19.123, message 52


Date: Sat, 18 Jan 1997 11:18:00 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: What went wrong in the former Soviet Union


        

Louis (P) writes:

>I don't think socialism has been feasible in the Soviet Union or in any of
>the semi-colonial states that attempted this model in the 20th century.
>Let me repeat this and make sure that there are no mistakes. THESE
>EXPERIMENTS WERE BOUND TO FAIL. This includes Slovenia, Cuba, the USSR,
>China, etc. The reason for this is the same as it was in Marx's age.
>Socialism can not be built on a substructure of a backward agrarian
>society. 

I'm afraid this will simply not do,  Louis.    Marx did not explicitly
foresee the role that peasant nationalism (he neglected both nationalism and
the peasantry in his writings,  beginning with the *Manifesto*) would play
in dismantling capitalism and creating a new system of planned production
and distribution.    But the vagaries of national politics,  coupled with
the successive crises of imperialism led to the socialist denouement in ways
compIelely foreign to classical Marxian dogma.    If socialism has not been
realized in these countries,  some of the conditions for its realization
have,  however imperfectly,  been created.    The proletariat has enormously
increased in numbers; its standard of living,  its health,   its education
have improved remarkably.    It may well be that this new proletariat will
one day take up the burden which its weak forebears could not carry,  and
move forward to socialism.    Thanks to the revolution and the often flawed
and ambiguous attempts to build socialism which it precipitated,  this is
now at least a tenable prospect.     

Louis,  my friend,  it is simply wrong to dismiss this inaugural effort on
the part of one third of the world's humanity to fashion a life without
capitalism as somehow  "bound to fail." 

Louis Godena

        



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