Your intellectual life online seems to revolve around me. Should I be flattered? :->
> So I was catching up on my Workers Vanguards last night - always a
> salutary experience - and came across this in the course of an
> excellent article on China. WV criticizes Paul Burkett & Marty Hart-
> Landsberg's work on China, which is hostile to China's rapid economic
> growth, preferring instead a more localist/green model. The Sparts,
> by contrast, take a more traditionally orthodox Marxist position,
> which holds that you can't have socialism without the (centralizing)
> development of the productive forces, and which sees capitalism as a
> brake on such development. WV comments that "it is, as they say, no
> accident that" Burkett & Hart-Landsberg's work was first published in
> Monthly Review, which "has long been the main journal of American
> intellectuals of the Maoist persuasion." They quote Paul Sweezy as
> saying back in 1974 that "a low level of development of the
> productive forces is not an insuperable obstacle" to socialism. WV
> comments that this thinking is based on a binary model of the world
> as a false set of forced choices between "integration into the
> capitalist world market or one form or another of pseudo-egalitarian
> national economic self-sufficiency."
If you were interested in actually debating China and socialism, the best place for that debate would be PEN-l, to which Martin Hart-Landsberg is probably still subscribed.
What I say below has nothing to do with Monthly Review or Maoism. It's my personal opinion.
1. There is no evidence that capitalism is a brake on the development of productive forces, except in the poorest countries of the world, such as Afghanistan, Congo, and Haiti. The problem is the opposite: capitalism develops productive forces by severely limiting people's ability to define the purposes -- and to control the consequences (the most important example being climate change) -- of their development.
2. There is no evidence that socialist states necessarily develop productive forces qualitatively or quantitatively better than capitalist states. I doubt that Japan would be more productive than it is -- or come up with fancier toilets than it does -- if it were run by the Japanese Communist Party.
3. Socialist states do have decent records on health, education, etc. (once they get over the initial stage of socialist primitive accumulation which sometimes resulted in large-scale famines, etc.), and that's still a good enough selling point in large parts of the world where a majority are living on less than a couple of dollars a day, but that's not a good enough selling point to the Iranians and others who are in the middle-income category of the nations of the world and whose levels of health and education have been improving under the existing governments and can improve further (e.g., <http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/cty/cty_f_IRN.html>, <http://devdata.worldbank.org/genderstats/genderRpt.asp?rpt=profile&cty=IRN,Iran,%20Islamic%20Rep.&hm=home>, <http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/iran_statistics.html>), _much less to people in the West_. Islamists, nationalists, social democrats, even the plain old _right-wing_ capitalist power elite like the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, etc. can do paternalistic social welfare states as well as socialists.
4. Therefore, the questions of economic development and social welfare can't be the reasons why people want socialism _where socialism is most necessary if there is to be an end to war and imperialism_, like the United States of America, the European Union, and Japan.
5. The main selling point of socialism has to be this: democracy in which people are protagonists, history-makers, as Marx and Engels originally envisioned. IMHO, Venezuela is an intimation of that (though what's happening in Venezuela, too, has a large element of paternalism, with Chavez, its charismatic leader, as a generous patriarch to whom many people look). We can't expect people to buy the vision of socialism = democracy, though, by pretending that people don't know anything about the sorry socialist historical records on democracy. Hell, politics in Iran today is a lot livelier than politics in any of the former socialist nations, North Korea, and even Cuba*! And the Iranian dissidents who are not satisfied witth the existing government generally do not dream of living like Cubans, North Koreans, Chinese under Mao, or Soviets under the Politburo.
6. The way socialist states have organized civil society institutions can be called corporatist, much like the way the Islamic state of Iran has. Under formerly and actually existing socialist societies, trade unions, women's organizations, ethnic organizations, etc. have never been autonomous of the ruling party. While corporatism may be unavoidable under certain circumstances, its perpetuation stifles political conflicts, depoliticizes the populace, and allows the power elite and/or dissident intellectuals to restore capitalism at the first opportunity.
Machiavelli says in Discourses on Livy:
"To me those who condemn the tumults between the Nobles and the Plebs seem to be caviling at the very thing that was the primary cause of Rome's retention of liberty. . . . And they do not realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the people and that of the great men, and that all legislation favoring liberty is brought about by their dissension" (Chapter IV).
Replace the "Nobles" by leaders and the "Plebs" by masses, and what he says suggests what we must aim for: to create as much space as possible for conflicts between leaders and masses in socialist society, for such conflicts are essential to retention and expansion of liberty. The difficulty is to figure out how to do so without allowing a foreign power to take advantage of such conflicts to overthrow the socialist state and impose capitalism.
7. While democracy has to be the main selling point, few are interested in living under equality of poverty, so socialist states have to deliver. Under the present circumstances of global capitalism, as well as given the balance of forces in almost all nations, that means that "one can only do today . . . what Lenin did in the New Economic Policy" (Carsten Schiefer, "Weighty Alternatives for Latin America: Discussion with Heinz Dieterich, <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/schiefer070206.html>). At the next economic turning point, what can and should be done will probably change, and conditions differ from one country to another, too, but, for the time being, the NEP + capacity-building projects, i.e., projects that build people's capacity for self-government, are probably the most advisable course of action in many cases.
* Saul Landau writes of Cuba: "By 'giving' people what they needed without demanding mature responsibility and by maintaining control of virtually all projects, the Communist Party and government helped depoliticize the very people they had educated" (July 26. History absolved him. Now what?" Progreso Weekly, 27 July-2 August 2006, <http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Landau&otherweek=1153976400>).
And that's the most democratic of all socialist countries that have existed so far. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>