Rod Hay wrote:
> True, Charles, but surely the important thing for a Marxist is a revolution that
>leads to socialism.
NO! This is to pretend that we access to a crystal ball. The important
thing for a Marxist is revolution aimed at socialism. Whether it succeeds
in maintaing itself to fit some blueprint is entirely irrelevant. There have
been many socialist revolutions: nothing that happened in the Soviet
Untion after 1917 or in Vietnam after 1946 or in China after 1949 or
in Paris after 1871 can change the fact that these were socialist revoluttions
-- and only our distant descendants (at a time when it is only of
antiquarian interest) can say whether any of these revolutions failed.
I was just reading in Eagleton's *Ideology of the Aesthetic," in which
he mentions that Trotsky once claimed, "We Marxists have always
lived in tradition" -- We *are* those "failed" revolutions (even those
that "failed" before anyone ever heard of them -- and if/when a
socialist revolution in one or more of the advanced capitalist countries
it will have much to owe to those various "failed" struggles.
Carrol
> And there Marx's contention that it
> could only occur in an advance capitalist country still holds.
>
> Rod
>
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> > >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 04/14/00 05:59PM >>>
> >
> > very true. plus Luxemburg..
> >
> > >Lenin and Trotsky were both champions of arguments against the Second
> > >Interntional-Menshevic claim that socialism couldn't take root in
> > >'backward' places.
> >
> > ________
> >
> > CB: Also, Lenin predicted the revolution in the "East" would be bigger than the
>revolution in Russia. Today this prediction is valid.
> >
> > CB
>
> --
> Rod Hay
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> The History of Economic Thought Archive
> http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html
> Batoche Books
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