Carrol wrote: > Doug is right about the incredible difficulties faced, and the great > difficulty we on the outside have in grasping just how great those > difficulties were. I agree with Jim that they industrialized, but they > industrialized under conditions of immense difficulty, while surrounded by > enemies as ruthless as they were. At the very worst, one needs to note that > the PRC & the USSR killed only their own people: they did not ravage three > continents in the process. > > The difficulties included of course incredible intellectual difficulties; > the huge difficulties of even knowing what were the main questions. It is > not as easy as many seem to assume to distinguish the crimes of Stalin from > the errors of Stalin. And among the errors it is not easy to identify which > were 'his' errors and what in tennis they call _forced_ errors. > > It wasn't socialism, but it was in fact not quite so destructive of its own > working class as was British capitalism -- in part because of (a) those > social services and (b) the relatively short hours of work. And but for the > USSR the language of the world today might be German. I can still remember > Gabriel Heater's opening of his news program on the eve of El Alamein: In > that unforgettable preacher's voice of doom: There's bad news tonight folks. > It was close. What did make the Red Army fight? What did make Leningrad hold > out? > > Where would the world be today? Where would our imaginations be? If not for > the Russian & Chinese Revolutions.
This is all well said. I'm reading Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, a fictionalized description of the attempts to plan the socialist economy in the Soviet Union, and here's a telling passage: "They volunteered for things. At first the things were tiny, clapping when a monument was unveiled or handing out towels when students from fraternal Poland came to the university. A period of probation was normal. They expected as much: the Komsomol would need time to sort out solid types from fly-by-nights. But reassuringly quickly, it seemed to be understood by those who made such matters their business that the two of them were indeed electing themselves (which was the only way it happened) into the ranks of the energetic and reliable, and then the activities they were called on for got more important; more interesting, even." The sentence in parenthesis is absolutely key. People who took the initiative were "electing themselves" to positions of leadership and, thereby, authority. And that was the only way it happened. This is the only way it happens. And, of course, this impulse to take the initiative, to undertake, to lead, to oppose inertia is unevenly distributed. That's what inequality reduces itself to. Wealth inequality, inequality in the "distribution of the ownership over the conditions of production" (Marx), the social division of labor, etc. is ultimately inequality in the distribution of the drive to shape up the world purposefully. The sources of Stalinism, bureaucratism, authoritarianism, or whathaveyou do not lie at the top. It's not bad or evil or power-hungry people. The phenomena at the top is just the external manifestation of the real thing. The real source lies at the base, in the conformity and apathy of the masses conditioned by a millennial history of external expropriation that then got internalized. It's a Sisyphean torture to dismantle alienation and take full ownership over our social relations. It is a push against the second law of thermodynamics. As it is all life. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
