>In fact all revolutions led by "Leninists" have been
>marked by their distinctness. Tito's Yugoslavia had
>nothing in common with Castro's Cuba, and Mao's China
>virtually threw the classic literature about
>proletarian revolution out the window. Sandinista
>Nicaragua celebrated Daniel Ortega's electoral victory
>by playing Michael Jackson at his windup rally.
What they did have in common was not so much the use of Marxist rhetoric as the eventual political judgment that national liberation from colonialism on the periphery in any meaningful sense cannot be very well carried out without going for socialism at the same time (as opposed to simply aiming for the constitution of a bourgeois republic). Another commonality is that all socialist revolutions happened in nations where peasants, rather than proletarians, predominated.
>Mostly, these revolutions seem to owe more to
>pragmatism than Marx--as indeed they would have to.
>When revolutionaries come to power, they tend to be
>constrained by material conditions rather than shape
>them. That's the unfortunate reality of socialist
>revolutions in the post-1917 epoch.
Being constrained by existing material and ideological conditions is the reality of human existence in general, not of the post-1917 epoch in particular. The difference that matters is the exact character of given material and ideological conditions, which may be more or less conducive to socialism, modernization, and liberation from direct control of imperial powers, depending on the balance of social forces. -- Yoshie
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