Carrol Cox wrote: > I don't think the USSR or China should be seen (at least after the fact) as > ever having a chance to build socialism. What they did was to bring their > nations into the 20th-c.
Both Stalin and Mao referred to what they were doing as "socialism" (or worse, as "communism") -- and a lot of people on the left believed them. I used the word socialism in their way. "True" socialism wouldn't be barbaric. Not that there's unanimity about what the word means. To my mind, the USSR and the PRC were doing nothing but promoting a nationalist form of industrialization (which might be said to "bring a country into the 20th century," including a lot of the bad aspects of the 20th century). The collectivist nature of their states (state ownership of the means of production) is nothing like the kind of socialism that Marx and Engels advocated, since the workers had no control over those states. At best, those countries provided authoritarian and paternalistic welfare states; at worst, we get forced collectivization and crazy purges (in the USSR) or the Cultural Revolution (in China). -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac. Social science is in the middle.... and usually in a muddle. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
