Thomas Seay wrote:
>
> However, my question is ... even if we take into account
> that there is never going to be a utopia, did the SU
> measure up to even modest expectations as to what a
> socialist state should be?
And that is a utopian question if I ever saw one. Of course _no_ society measures up to _anyone's_ expectation of what a state (of any kind) should be.
If Thomas & his friends succeeded in their goals, leading to the establishment of a new socialist state under ideal conditions, that state would have not just defects but horrible defects if measured against anyone's "expectation of what a socialist state should be." The SU, PRC, North Korea, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Albania ... all of them, beginning with Babeuf's pitiful insurrection were just what they should have been, that is, they represented the struggle of whole peoples to transform their worlds. The vicious niggling of TS and MP has only one purpose, whether either of them is willing to admit this even to himself, and that is to cripple the struggles of the present by involving them in endless stupid wrangles about whether the ideal leader and the ideal working class should or could have created the ideal socialist state in some never-never land of the past.
I would be willing to accept Justin's and The Sandwichman's perspectives without quibble. That is, whether wrong or right on this or that detail, their perspectives look towards the future rather than to the vicious political puritanism of the likes of MP & TS. (I know nothing about them personally -- but this is the most accurate description I can give to the content of their lbo posts.)
I do have a quarrel with Charles on this thread. It seems to me that his point-by-point defense of the SU and the CPUSA in effect accepts the premise while attempting to deny the conclusions of MP & TS. But horrible things did happen in the socialist movement from Babeuf to the present, within parties out of power as well as in the socialist states. But those horrible things were part of an overall struggle of peoples, a struggle which we must honor. (Besides their puritanism, MP and TS are also victims of the Cult of Personality: that is, they assume the defeats of the socialist movement are due to personalities, bad people like Stalin, etc. It is an attack on humanity, the humanity of the peoples of the SU in particular, to reduce their struggles to the errors or crimes of one or a few leaders.)
Marvin's arguments are more complex, and I won't attempt to handle them in their complexisty here. But he is wrong in saying that we can learn from the "mistakes" of the SU or the PRC. Those lessons always boil down to one of two categories: (a) mistakes specific to their original context and from which we can learn nothing in other contexts, or (b) mistakes like those of the Weathermen: they endlessly recur, and they have to be battled against on their own merits (or demerits) each time they occur. It is banal to say that the Weathermen shouldn't have waved NLF flags or that Stalin shouldn't have shot good communists. The next 'errors' of that sort won't look at all like Stalin or Mark Rudd, and focusing on Stalin or Rudd won't help us now.
It is pure fantasy to try to guess what a U.S. Stalin would look like, as it is fantasy to imagine what a u.s. Mussolini would look like. Were I to fantasize, I would say the Stalin would look more like Michael Pugliese, the Mussolini would look more like Jerry Brown. Michael is convinced that certain opinions are a threat to humanity -- and as such he would be ready to shoot those who held those opinions in order to preserve democracy.
Carrol