[was: Re: [PEN-L:7564] Re: Re: Re: Korean news]
Brad wrote:
>I see an equivalence here up until the 1980s. Khrushchev and his people
>were absolutely certain that they were the wave of the future, and the
>road to utopia.
but this was quite different from the attitude of the early 1920s or the
late 1910s. By the time K had taken over, the emphasis was on fighting and
winning the battle of competition with the "West" ("we will bury you") just
like Microsoft wanted to bury Netscape, rather than promoting socialism of
the original, democratic, version. The "utopian" emphasis on central
planning -- the big heresy from the orthodox economist's point of view --
was falling apart in the background as the products and processes became
more complicated and hard to produce and as labor reserves and raw material
reserves ran out.
>For the first half of the Brezhnev era I think that the same was true, at
>least as far as Soviet foreign policy was concerned. The Soviet Union may
>have become a status-quo power as far as Europe was concerned, but its
>foreign ministry was definitely interested in promoting world revolution
>throughout the 1970s.
I don't know where this "world revolution" stuff comes from, except perhaps
from the Cold War's bipolar ideology that all bad things in the US sphere
of influence arise due to the outside agitation of the "Reds" (after all,
capitalism is an inherently harmonious and wonderful system, so it couldn't
be anything that the system did). The USSR had attained the conservative
big power "we need to do everything we can to defend what we've got" mode
in the 1940s, if not earlier, which combined with Stalin's paranoia to form
a bureaucratic defensiveness (which meshed well with the domestic
authoritarian welfare state). (It's important to remember that Stalin
abandoned the last revolutionary and socialist principles by signing the
non-aggression pact with Hitler, though it does make sense in terms of
nationalism.) To the extent that there was "world revolution," it came
_independent of_ or even despite Soviet foreign policy. The revolutions in
China, Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, etc. did NOT occur because the Soviets
wanted them, though the USSR's foreign ministry supported them with
revolutionary-sounding rhetoric and efforts to use a little bit of foreign
aid to make them fit with the USSR's defensive foreign policy goals and
bureaucratic values. The official line for decades was _not_ the need for
socialism but for the "non-capitalist" road to development, what many
Marxists call "state capitalism" (i.e., state-owned capitalist enterprises
with some welfare-state stuff, as in Algeria for a decade or so after their
revolution).
>The Soviet Union went into Afghanistan, after all, for relatively pure
>motives: to defend socialism against barbarism. (And from today's
>perspective it is hard to argue that they were wrong.)
I see this a defense of civilization, not socialism, unless one accepts the
USSR's own vision of statism-as-socialism. (Of course, one can use the word
"socialism" any way one wants, as Hitler proved.)
>I don't know when the loss of faith in their system on the part of the
>nomenklatura took place...
they lost faith in socialism in the 1920s (if not earlier), whereas they
lost faith in their bureaucratic system in the early 1980s as the war in
Afghanistan turned into a quagmire and, as Ian pointed out, when Chernobyl
went "phht" (1986).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
