A constant feature of this discussion seems to be the relegation of all "socialism" to that of its exponents in underdeveloped, isolated countries. This, we are told, is the "reality" of socialism. But, like the Stalins they decry, these new Epigones turn the history of socialism on its head, and declare that state-capitalism-qua-Stalinism is the "true" historical representation of socialism. The new Epigones take Stalin at his word that the Soviet Union represented "actual" socialism, and thus the two are made reluctant bedfellows.
But, Marx understood that world revolution could only succeed by first occurring in the most powerful capitalist countries. Thus in 1848, he wrote in the CM with Engels:
"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than what existed in England in the 17th and in France in the 18th century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."
Seemingly prophesying on what was to latter happen in Russia, they wrote in the same book:
"At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover still able to do so for a time. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obstained is a victory for the bourgeoisie."
This was somewhat true for the Asian and Latin American revolutions as well. Of the better-developed countries, however, M&E continue....
"But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor and nearly everywhere reduced wages to the same low level. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois takes more and more the character of colliisions between two classes...." etc., etc. The proletarian movement becomes a truly mass movement.
. Socialism fails and becomes degraded in the less advanced countries because the material conditions for socialism, along with a larger international revolutionary movement, do not exist. Socialist revolution can only become successful when it reaches the economically most advanced countries, where capital is concentrated. Until then, all the cries against the "actually existing socialisms" are crocodile tears, subjective moral characterizations in place of objective economic analysis.
-- David