[lbo-talk] Re: Consumer goods (Back to the USSR)

[Michael Dawson -PSU]

> Lenin's (and later Stalin's) government was revolutionary in nature,
> its historic mission was the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
> So my point remains, I agree that Stalin's rule was a (long)
> transition to capitalism, but your assertion that it was a transition
> "from one stage of capitalism to another" appears to be at odds with
> the fact that Russia wasn't capitalist to begin with. (If you
> continue to assert it was already capitalist, when did the transition
> to capitalist rule take place?)
>
> It is also at odds with logic in that it is essentially asserting
> that the transition was from capitalism to capitalism. Which wouldn't
> be a transition at all of course, yet most surely some form of
> transition took place.
>
> I don't understand why people refuse to face the facts on this issue.
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas

I don't understand why we Marxists continue to talk like this.  This
grandiose, otiose, "world-historic" stage-theory stuff is precisely the
branch of Marxism that deserves to be lopped off and buried.

The USSR was an attempt to create socialism out of a weird late feudal
society.  It was not an absolutist monarchy.  It was not capitalism.  It was
an undemocratic socialist state.  To deny this through fancy circumlocution
is to offend potential allies and advocates of future attempts to make
democratic socialism.

The USSR wound up preceding the delivery of the former USSR into third-world
capitalism, but that was a result of particular choices made by the
Stalinists and their heirs, not an automatic result of some "stage."

Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands all failed at making big-time capitalism
out of feudalism.  Why should anybody be shocked that big-time socialism
hasn't happened yet?  People have only been trying for 100 years.