Anarchism / Marxism debates

[Mr P.A. Van Heusden]

On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, Charles Brown wrote:
> 
> Charles: "Currently" in the historical sense is a lot longer period of
> time than in the common sense. Currently historically we are in an epoch
> in which real humans have moved very much towards socialism. At the
> height of the first thrust toward socialism, one-third of the world's
> population and a larger portion of the land mass made the first giant
> strides toward socialism. There has been a recent setback ,but a huge
> country , China, still considers itself to be building socialism.

<Sigh> I'm sorry Charles, but if you seriously consider what Mao did in
China as part of building socialism, then the distance between the two of
us is too wide to talk across. In China Mao did what Stalin did in Russia
in the 1930's - build a new kind of class society, with the seeds of the
capitalist class emerging from layers within the (already degenerate)
Chinese Communist Party.

What exists in China today is a hideous form of State Capitalism.

I'm with Dunayevskaya on this one - Marxism means freedom, or it means
nothing. (For a more detailed explanation, see (not entirely flawless,
but still pretty good) her Marxism and Freedom)

Peter
--
Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available
'The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the 
demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.' - Karl Marx