> 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.)
[...]
> 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.
------------------------------
I think your main points - that there are no "perfect" societies, and that
the efforts of humanity to create better ones, even if they fail, should be
respected rather than condemned - needed saying. I'm not so sure, though,
about your point that we can't learn from the "mistakes" of the SU or the
PRC. I certainly have. I always thought that, whatever their political
failings, their system of public ownership and planning represented a more
advanced mode of production than capitalism, and that for that reason alone
these new postcapitalist societies would necessarily endure. Any political
change that occured would be being entirely progressive, the introduction of
workers democracy. I was confident capitalism wouldn't be restored because
the "reel of history doesn't run backwards".
But these developments called into question for me the validity of the Marxist categorization of the present epoch as one of socialist revolution, the basis on which the Bolsheviks and the People's Army took power. I now lean to the view that these revolutions in the name of socialism were, if anything, "historically premature"; that they proved instead to be a state-sponsored means of carrying through the "bourgeois democratic" tasks (land reform, industrialization, mass education, etc.) in primarily peasant societies where the domestic bourgeoisies were too dependent on foreign imperialism to emulate their 19th century Western forebears. Andie has touched on this viewpoint in another post, citing Hobsbawm and Anderson, whose analyses I also find persuasive.
So I was "mistaken" about how these revolutions would turn out, and think I learned something from them, even if you think what I may have learned was wrong.
Haven't most of us, in fact, spent the better part of the last 15 years thinking about and discussing why these revolutions fell short? That means we've all been trying to learn something from the experience. In your case, it's that these revolutions took place in the wrong "context". Or that they fell because of leadership mistakes that are natural and inevitable, which "have to be battled against on their own merits (or demerits) each time they occur." So you've also clearly drawn some conclusions. Otherwise, how would you now know what contexts and mistakes to avoid if you hadn't learned, after your own fashion, from the historical experience of the USSR and the PRC? Others have drawn different conclusions. Some on this list seem to believe that the problem is rooted in mass psychology - that China and the USSR "prove" it's utopian foolishness to expect the degree of selflessness and cooperation implied by socialism.
Is this discussion of anything more than academic interest? Maybe not so directly for me, living in a Western capitalist society in 2005 and now politically inactive, but millions of people fought and suffered and died because of the promise of a socialist future. If that promise hadn't been there, it is unlikely the masses would have struggled for what resulted in modern China and the fSU. Certainly, millions more today won't fight and suffer and die for socialism - religious millenarianism has taken its place - largely because of what finally happened in these societies. Even in our tiny corner of the world, as we've seen in this discussion, what China and the USSR represented, whether socialism is still on the agenda, and how we relate to current reform movements and reform parties are all related questions.
Anyway, we had some extensive discussion on these issues not long ago, so I don't want to repeat myself. I only raise these points again to underline that we can - and do - learn from history in our own imperfect way. For many of us, the history that has counted most unfolded in the Soviet Union and China, the great social experiments of our time. There is no escaping their history, although some on the left sometimes try to do so to retain their faith in the possibilities of a socialist present.
MG