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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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