Joe: Which only proves that Authoritarian Socialism - especially of the Bolshevik variety - leads to state-capitalism.
David: Certainly despotic statehood was a common feature of all the states listed above. So was a lack of economic development and the lack of a proletarian society.
David:
> Conversely, I see little proof that socialism at all possible in the
> underdeveloped countries. Proletarian revolutions, maybe-- but not
> socialist society.
Joe: As I pointed out before - there have been many classless pre-industrial societies, which flatly disproves the idea that you must have "development" to have socialism.
David: Socialism is not simply a "classless society." It is a modern, international society where production is humanized and wealth is divided equally. A population of 6 billion cannot be supported by a global-- let along national or regional-- configuration of "classless pre-industrial societies."
Joe: You don't need white people to have socialism.
David: Now Joe attributes economic development to "white people"! You tell me who is
the racist!
David:
> As I wrote earlier, this seems to be one of the keys to the
> ideological overlap between many anarchists and Stalinists: i.e., the
> notion that socialism can exist in once country alone, removed from
> the global sphere. One group affirms the notion in the idealist
> sense, the other in the pragmatic.
Joe: Since anarchists believe in the abolition of the nation-state, and thus of countries, this is a flagrant straw man. You have a lot more in common with stalinists with your advocacy of conquering state power.
David: The question, then, is whether or not anarchism, socialism, capitalism, etc. can be dogmatically categorized by one simple characteristic: "authoritarian"
or "non-". Certainly, if the answer was yes, than anarchism and stalinism would be fundamentally opposed-- at least in the abstract, given the lack of any real-world comparison, since anarchism has never succeeded in the modern world on the level of Stalinism. But there is also a common regional and economic character to both these systems. Both take it for granted that these
systems can function within isolated, national boundaries. Both take it for granted that economically less-developed countries, in the year 2002, can produce ideal societies without scarcity or despotism.
One thing to do here would be to look at the growth of these movements as they actually existed historically. Anarchism was most successful in the European countries that lagged behind developmentally in the 19th century-- i.e., Spain, Italy, and parts of France. In these areas, petty producers were
the most threatened by the rise of industrialism, where industrialism had elsewhere taken hold to a much greater degree. Of course the other country that fits into this milieu in Russia. Russia had many anarchists but much fewer than Spain, Italy, and France due to the increasing popularity of Marxism. But, of course, Russia produced some of the most prominent anarchist
thinkers-- Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc. Later, Russia produced Stalinism, followed even later by countries in Asia and Latin America (Stalinist and Maoist) which, seeking to develop, encountered the some problems of the petty
producers vs. the bourgeoisie.
David:
> But anyway, I think it's quite clear that socialism, regardless of
> the relative level of development within, was a failure in Russia.
> The next step is to determine why.
Joe: In Russia what happened is exactly what I stated attempts to establish "workers states" always do - it leads to the formation of a new group of exploiters to replace the old ones.
David: If we are to properly examine the illness, we have to look at *all* of the symptoms that the sufferers have in common. Another one of these symptoms, shared by all the nations which attempted "socialism", was that they lacked the economic development of the West. Another was that these countries isolated themselves from the notion of a larger, international revolution.
Joe: Immediately after the October insurrection the Bolsheviks proceeded to consolidate their power and establish a monopoly of legitimate violence. They formed the Cheka, began centralizing the economy under their supreme economic council and suppressing the worker's committes & village assemblies. This resulted in transforming the bolsheviks into a caste of self-seeking intellectuals, a new ruling class of exploiters over the workers & peasants, for the reasons noted above.
David: And, why do you suppose these things occurred? Because they were "authoritarian," answers Joe, power-mongers. The russian state was "authoritarian" because it "formed the Cheka." The russian state "formed the Cheka" because it was "authoritarian." No-- there must be other reasons.
Joe: I have yet to see a coherent explanation for how the ad hoc hypotheses that the degeneration of the russian revolution somehow was a result of being "underdeveloped" or "the civil war" or whatnot.
David: Couldn't agree with you more.
-- David