>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 05/31/00 04:43PM >>>
"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> So, is this the way to go? (At least in Will's case there
> was more than one candidate to vote for.)
I don't believe anyone wishes to use the USSR as a template for socialism.
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CB: Soviet Marxists and all Marxists would agree with Carrol, that the Soviet Union was not a template for socialism. I just wanted to say that because there is a sort straw person or shadow-boxed-with here as if the Soviets or somebody on this list went around declaring that they had a template for socialism.
That does not at all mean that the next efforts to build socialism will not learn from the experience of the Soviet Union or even that the Soviet Union did not have socialism at all. The Marxist attitude toward the SU, as with all issues, is that it was a trial and error toward socialism (without the error being bigger than the trial as some smart ass will try to say).
When there is more successful socialism, that success will be in large part because of what is learned from the history of the Soviet Union.
Again the Marxist model for the attitude toward the SU, is Marx and Lenin's attitude toward the Paris Commune, which of course the bourgeoisie would emphasize was a "failure", in an effort to get the working class to cast off and ignore its most important empirical premises for its successful final conflict with the bourgeoisie.
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In fact my own argument has consistently been that there is not and never will be a template for socialism. And being the dour type I am I rather suspect that the next 5 or 10 or 15 efforts won't produce any template to brag about. The case for socialism does not, in fact, depend on the argument that socialism is either good or possible, but only on the argument that capitalism is impossible and the only exit (if there is an exit) is socialism. Only our descendants will be able to discuss rationally the goodness or possibility of socialism.
And the argument about elections does not really turn on whether they are good or bad. The argument is against fetishism -- the foolish belief that this or that gimick (technical arrangement) is either a necessary or sufficient cause of rule by the people.
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CB: Excellent. The U.S. is certainly not a template for democracy, though it has a lot of trial and error at it that we can learn from.
U.S. elections are beyond a harmless fetish. They are a democratic form that originally was an effort at democracy, which form has been perverted into its opposite by $$$$$$ control of them on behalf of an elite minority and thwarting majority rule.