Robert Gassler writes:
Apparently there is no way to look ahead and prevent another disaster like
the Soviet Union – totalitarian state capitalism in a developing country
disguised as a socialist revolution. The freedom that is socialism can exist
only under a dictatorship. That makes no sense.
The question is precisely about the system, since any system can be spoiled
by a lunatic. If it is impossible to prevent the rise of such a leader – as
Jim Devine’s argument seems to suggest – then socialism is not a liberated
zone, though it may be an egalitarian one.
If there is no royal road to the future, if both capitalism and socialism
involve suffering for most people, then there is not much point in choosing
between them.
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I don't think much "choice" would be involved.
If capitalism continues to produce growth, tolerable living standards in the
mature economies, and increasing job opportunities and rising living
standards in emerging markets, it will continue to endure, despite it's
propensity to crises, inequality, and protest, and widespread popular
hostility towards politicians, bureaucrats, and the rich.
If the system of private ownership were unable to recover from one of it's
periodic crises, there would necessarily be efforts to revive production
through public ownership. There would be public support across the political
spectrum for such initiatives, even from reluctant libertarians, because
their conditions will have deteriorated along with those of everyone else by
the catastrophic decline in production.
Two questions, it seems to me, cannot possibly be answered in advance: 1)
would there be more popular control over the state than under capitalism?
and 2) would there gradually be a reversion to private ownership following
the revival of production and the restoration of stabilty?
Marxists expected an affirmative answer to the first and a negative one to
the second, but were disappointed on both counts by the revolutions in
Russia and China which did not result in workers' control of production and
the state, and which turned back to capitalism after abolishing it.
Arguably, this occured because the revolutions took place in underdeveloped
countries surrounded by richer capitalist states, and the outcome would have
been different had the anticapitalist revolutions taken place in the West
with it's more advanced economies and cuture. But, paraphrasing Goethe,
theory is grey and the great tree of life is green.
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