Nice post, Rod! And I tend to side with Barkley on the SR Constituent
Assembly, too - which seems to me to have been a more promising midwife for
the sort of transformations you discuss (especially in light of the
resolutions they were passing in their last days) than the dictatorship of
a vanguard -> substitutionalist elite.
Social-Democratically yours,
Rob.
>First, let's start with the word socialism and what it means. To me the
>minimum
>would be some socialisation of the means of production (I distinquish this
>from
>nationalisation). This entails the establishment of democratic institutions
>capable of managing that control. I take this to be what Marx meant by the
>withering away of the state. The state as a institution of a divided society
>would be replaced, as those divisions were resolved, by alternative democratic
>institutions (the division between the public and private sphere being one of
>the most important divisions, would thus be overcome).
>
>The Soviet Union did not attempt to construct these institution, (in fact,
>after
>the initial period of the soviets, they did everything in their power to
>destroy
>alternative centres of power.) Yugoslavia and Cuba did more in this and have a
>greater claim to being socialist.
>
>The Soviet Union was a society in which the division between capital and
>labour
>was still strong. Capital, was for the main part, controlled by the
>bureaucracy,
>but it still existed as an opposition to labour. Little was being done to
>overcome this division. The Soviet Union was one of the world's most developed
>welfare states but it was not socialist, it was most definitely a society in
>which capital still ruled.
>
>Rod
