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

Michael Dawson -PSU mdawson at pdx.edu
Tue Feb 10 09:56:44 PST 2004



> 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.



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