Thank you for correcting my sloppiness on dates. The October Revolution was in 1917.
Yours is obvious not the kind of mind I should be calling on. Socialism died on 1917? Yet if you will keep an open mind, you are welcome.
Rosa Luxemburg and her German Social Democrats, turned Spartacus, turned Communist partner Liebnecht allowed themselves to be butchered by the German military Right in 1919 because of their misplaced faith in "democracy". She participated in the revolution of 1905 in Russia and advocated the general strike as a revolutionary weapon, as tactic that only brought senseless bloodshed but little revolutionary gain. Emma Goldman was an American anarchist groupie who thought revolution was a tea party in some exotic garden. By the way, she did not "join" the October Revolution. She was deported by the US government to Russia (her birth place) in 1919 and left in 1921. She was allowed to return to America in 1924 under a deal to give anti-Soviet lectures. Lenin did not harm any of these well intentioned though misguided types except to keep them from distracting the revolution at a very critical time. Your understanding of China is obviously not as deep as your preconception. At any rate, my whole point was that we should not condemn socialism because we do not agree with what some socialists allegedly did in the past. I can a cite list of horrible things a hundred times longer on what some people did in the name of capitalism for the last 4 centuries. That itself is not a sufficient reason to reject capitalism intellectually. I call for a creative intellectual effort toward a new socialism. I suspect your aversion to socialism is more deep seated than your selective view of history.
Lenin suppressed populist radicalism to preserve institutional revolution, and assigned the state the sole legitimate expediter of revolutionary ideology. Early Protestantism, like Leninism later, also became more oppressive and intolerant than the ecclesiastical system it sought to replace. Ironically, puritanical Protestant ethics celebrating the virtues of thrift, industry, sobriety and responsibility, would be identified by many sociologists as the driving force centuries later behind the success of modern capitalism and industrialized economy. Particularly, ethics as espoused by Calvinism which in its extreme would advocate subordination of the state to the Church, diverging from Luther's view of the state to which the Church is subordinate, would be ironically credited as the spirit behind the emergence of the modern Western industrial state under capitalism. The metabolism of all revolutions is remarkably similar. That should not be the basis for evaluating the ideology a revolution promotes. In that spirit, I call for a new world order based on cooperation rather than competition, sharing rather than greed, serving people rather than capital, and perservating the environment rather than abusing it. Do you have any objection to that? Adopt a longer view of history. It will add meaning to your life.
Henry C.K. Liu
DamonMac at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 12/30/98 6:12:18 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> hliu at mindspring.com writes:
>
> > political force with the October Revolution in 1920
>
> Uh, it was in 1917, and Lenin did his best to wipe out a lot of what socialism
> stood for at the time. There were many anti-Bolshevik Marxists then. Read
> some Rosa Luxemburg and you'll understand. Not to mention the Anarchists
> (like Emma Goldman) who went to Russia in support of the October coup were
> quickly under the threat of being labeled counterrevolutionaries and rounded
> up. If you think the Chinese system is anything but social fascism, you're
> just blind.The problem is this lament for "socialism". Right now we should be
> celebrating the collapse of the tyrannies that called themselves
> euphemistically "socialist" and move on to better forms of REAL leftism or
> what was called socialism in the 19th century. Lenin realized that the
> proletariat was too stupid to understand what he wanted in life, and therefore
> unable to fulfill his "historical role" so he took it upon himself to speak on
> their behalf and establish a bureacratic terrorist organization that finally
> collapsed in 1991. So, the death of socialism was in 1917 when the autonomy
> of the local soviets was taken away and worker's control wiped out. Wage
> labor never disappeared, which 19th century socialism always stressed. So how
> can you call it socialism? The only way you can is if you've bought into
> Western and Soviet propaganda. Oh well, its not the only one of life's sad
> stories.....
>
> Damon Mac Fodge