Mark, this is no time to take it easy on theoretical mediocrity on any question. It seems that we are well on our way to ENJOYING a crisis which will enable a revolutionary transformation of social relations--a truly world historic opportunity which every ounce of our energy must be devoted to exploiting.
At any rate, whatever fame I have acheived on the internet as a result of my continual escape from the systematic reasoning required by my dissertation--thinking is truly painful especially if you are not a genius and you are always in the process of discovering brilliant intellectual traditions suppressed by our ludicruous university system (see Upton Sinclair's wonderful Goosestep on this) and especially if you are sickened by the topic you are writing about (RACE; do you think it is fun reading Arthur Jensen on the upcoming disappearance of the Negro in a putatively skill intensive and complex world?)--I cannot lend my imprimatur, whatever it is worth as a highly visible member of this virtual community, to the belief that these besieged garrison states, from the USSR to China to Yugoslavia to Cuba, were or are socialist.
I have a lot of work to do, so will be hanging low here.
The kind of post capitalist future we may well be able to achieve is not anticipated in any of these experiments. If humanity has any hope, it is in the development of anti bolshevik communism (see Richard Gombin, The Radical Tradition; Michel Beaud's Socialism in the Crucible of History; Maximillen Rubel Non Market Socialism), a world without wage labor, the state and money.
My feeling is that Marxism confronts a formidable intellectual challenge in neo Ricardian theory as developed by Pasinetti (more important than Sraffa, it seems) and in the post Keynesian reformist agenda which follows from it in the writings of the brilliant duo of James Galbraith and William Darity, Jr or Thomas Palley (these left-liberal thinkers give substance to what nine out of ten *Nation* readers think needs to be done).
Our Doug is a very complex thinker, one foot in and one foot out of this tradition. To his great credit, he seems to be despised by some of the more respectable post keynesians for harping on class struggle and all that shit.
At any rate, that's one of many battles Marxists and more so anti bolshevik communists have to fight but so far no one's collosal intellect has risen to meet the challenge (from what I know) , and at this point I don't even feel comfortable with the matrix algebra or Pasinetti's idea of vertical integration which by the way could be truly useful in any kind of labor accounting in a post capitalist society.
Rakesh