Charles Brown wrote: > > > > CB: Why was there a need to develop the agrarian country ? People had been > surviving in agrarian societies for millenia.
For one thing, the USSR existed in a capitalist sea, & as Stalin said in 1930, they had 10 years to catch up with the west industrially, culturally, etc or they would be overrun. (This speech by Stalin was quoted by Carl Oglesby in a book the title of which I now forget, and I have never been able to run down the text in any of Stalin's works that I possess.) Secondly, the primary Marxist point about capitalism was that, destructive of human life as capitalism had been from its very beginning (the advances for the few from the beginning disguising the greater horror for the many), it _had_ opened up the possibility of _real_ improvement of human life, a possibility that did not exist within agrarian society (as superior as such societies had been for the the vast majority in comparison with capitalism). Carrol
