Carrol Cox wrote: > I understand that Soviet social services, even in the 30s, were excellent....
So were those of the late "Democratic Republic" of Germany (a.k.a. "East Germany"). In fact, according to some observers, East Germany's social services were as good as they could get, i.e., efficient, given the resources available. But East Germany also had a secret police that was as good as it could get, i.e., efficient, given the resources available (where "good" and "efficient" refers to its ability to protect order and the political-economic monopoly of the Socialist Unity Party, a.k.a., the Communist Party). More importantly, saying that Soviet or East Germany had excellent social services misses my point, i.e., that even these high points of these now-defunct collectivist states were "authoritarian and paternalistic." That is, the working classes of these countries didn't have control over their supposed benefactors (just as people under US capitalism don't have control over HMOs and insurance companies). It is not for us pen-pals to decide how "excellent" the social services were; rather it was the people of the USSR and East Germany to decide. Of course, having a "good" and "efficient" secret police helped prevent such decisions from being made. Carrol Cox also 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. This again misses the point, which is that nationalist industrialization isn't "socialism" of the sort that Marx or Engels favored. It's true that it could be argued the collectivist -- or "Bureaucratic Socialist" (BS) -- states might have created the social and/or economic basis for socialism (though their collapse made it impossible to know if this is true or not). But then again, the same can be said about capitalism (as Marx and Engels did). So the argument says that self-styled socialist states were like capitalism. Great. It's likely true that economic underdevelopment and imperialist encirclement of the BS countries made the development of socialism quite unlikely. Clearly, the original Bolsheviks thought that socialism in one (underdeveloped and dominated) country was impossible. If so, we shouldn't blame Stalin or Mao for not developing socialism. But that doesn't mean that we should apologize for the class societies they ran. > 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. If I understand correctly, the USSR's armies looted much of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II (moving industrial equipment to Russia, etc.) I don't know about mass murders there (and I hope that pen-pals will chime in to fill this gap). In any event, stipulating that the Stalin & Mao regimes only killed their own people doesn't say that they ran socialist societies. > ... Where would the world be today? Where would our imaginations be? If not > for > the Russian & Chinese Revolutions. Those revolutions made a lot of lefties more cheerful, based on their idealizations of the regimes that ruled there. The fact that there was an alternative to capitalism -- even if it was just another species of class society -- gave many people hope. (Similarly, according to a friend who lived in Leningrad in the 1970s, the fact that there was an alternative to the CP's dictatorial rule gave many people there hope.) But then these brittle regimes collapsed, mostly due to their own internal contradictions, and morphed into capitalism, all the idealization and hope they encouraged also collapsed. That's one of the reasons why so many on the left have been in a blue funk since 1989 or so. (Even many "democratic socialists" -- who never apologized for the BS countries -- lost hope!!) So we went from hope based on illusions to dashed hope based on similar illusions (i.e., that it was some sort of worthwhile regime that existed there before 1989 or so). -- 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
