> Date sent: Tue, 07 Apr 1998 12:09:13 -0400
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: Wojtek Sokolowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: re:Soviet objectives
>
WS:
> I do not see any contradiction here. There is a well known distinction
> between manifest and latent functions of a particular social order. All I
> am claiming that building true socialism was NOT the manifest function of
> the x-USSR leaders, but one of the latent functions was that socialists and
> national lib movements in certain countries could benefit from competition
> between the imperial powers.
Come on, the Soviets may have failed but building true socialism was
their manifest -intended - objective. Show me a passage from Lenin or
Stalin were they deny this goal. Of course, the Soviets inherited an
empire and wanted to preserve it.
> I do not see why we should endow the x-USSR with any special moral mission
> -- the messianistic movements (i.e. proclaiming an entire nation as the
> Messiah of all peoples) in that part of the world notwithstanding. It was
> an imperial power just like any other imperial power, except that its
> development was terribly belated, and thus the Russian leaders faced a
> pressures to catch up with the rest of the gang (esp. Germany and Japan).
They were not "just like any other imperial power" since they
had socialist aims. The Cold War was an ideological-power
struggle, Kissinger notwithstanding.
> The fact that Russian leadership championed a socialist cause? That was
> mere PR, a managerial ideology if you will, to get people go along with
> their austerity measures. The "history belongs to us" and "we are building
> a heaven on earth" spiel has incompartably greater popular appeal than the
> liberal market-schmarket drivel or, for that matter, any bourgeois
> mythology that, like the class that created is, lack guts and imagination.
Lack guts and imagination? - they won the Cold War.
> The religion of two abstract lines crossing each other to form an invisible
> hand of providence can have an appeal only to spineless, asexual geeks on
> Prozac - to borrow from Camille Paglia who, in turn, borrowed from
> Nietzsche.
Yeah, I guess the SS had more guts and spine!
The real flesh-and-blood people (like the working class) need a
> more exciting eschatology, and one was provided to them by the Soviet
> leaders.
A managerial eschatology if you will.
> The Soviet state religion was not much different from other managerial
> ideologies, like for example, the human relations school preaching Abraham
> Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs.' Maslow (like Marx) might have been a
> humanist, but nobody would seriously believe that corporate schmucks who
> selectively used elements of his writing to forge a PR crap, genuinely
> wanted to advance humanistic development of their employees.
> The bottom line is that the problems experienced by the Russian empire and
> its change in their state religion in no way undermine the work of Karl
> Marx or the cause of socialism -- other than changing the conditions under
> which that cause is pursued. The competition between two empires migh have
> offered some short-term windfall profits to socialism here and there, but
> that was about it.
I know there is lots more to Marx than the Soviet experience; that's
why me and Louis Proyect are comrades.
ricardo
> Regards,
>
> Wojtek Sokolowski
>
>
