Yoshie, your outlined thesis below gets me to thinking. Comments interspersed.
Yoshie F.:
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.
^^^^ CB: Also, in terms of uncontrollable consequences, there is no way to prevent capitalism's evil side from using advances in science and technology to develop W'sMD. There is no such thing as capitalism without militarism, so far in history. All of capitalism's positive, productive development is trumped or historically "neutralized" by this unity with its opposite , destructive 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.
^^^^ CB: There is evidence that socialist states do not initiate wars as inevitably as capitalist states. One main revision of history which we might want to popularize is to erase the big lie that the SU and other socialist states were aggressively and imperialistically militarist. Socialist states were genuinely _defensive_ in their military development.
In other words, part of our New Socialist Idealism might be that socialism offers the world peace in comparison with capitalism: For Democracy and Peace.
^^^^^
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.
^^^^ CB: Socialist states also have an excellent record in not starting wars.
(I don't see where Islamists have _initiated_ a lot of wars, or colonialist aggression in modern times. In the main, they seem to respond to foreign invasion or attack. Until recently, most of the modern Islamist fighting has been against European invaders and occupiers of their lands, hasn't it. No direct connection to the rest of the discussion, as Islamists don't seem pro-socialist, in general).
^^^^
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.
^^^^^^ CB: Agree ! And here's the rub , of course. How to get the people of the U.S. to see that capitalist U.S.A. was the aggressor in the Cold War ! ? That the U.S. is the aggressor in the current wars in the Middle East.
And also, that the _economic and democratic_ failures of the formerly socialist countries were largely due to capitalist military aggression against them, both because of forced excess military spending, direct economic destruction by capitalist wars and attacks and militarist structuring of civilian society as part of the defensive posture, that is FAILURE TO DEVELOP SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY ( your main point) because of need to structure society in defense against capitalist war and threat of war.
Oh, yea, Americans are really going to be able to believe all that ! What a daunting task we have.
^^^^^
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.
^^^^ CB; Truly. Somehow , since we are being tellers of hard truths, we have to admit that socialism failed in making socialist democracy , but show that this failure was forced on them by imperialist military threat, particularly U.S. military threat post WWII. In other words, reverse the whole brainwashing of the Cold War. One main advantage in this is that the U.S. lie machine is no longer mainly producing Cold War lies.
^^^^
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.
^^^^^ CB: We have to elucidate on this point , though, that within-nation lack of democracy in these cases , was dictated from without and determined by U.S. imperialism ( and Nazi imperialism in the case of the SU)
A major lesson of the first socialist nations is that they do not develop in isolation from still existing imperialism. In fact, imperialism managed to _dominate_ or ultimately determine that those socialist countries would develop undemocratically as a means of defense against that stronger and aggressive capitalist imperialism.
^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^ CB; Exactly. The "difficulty" in the last sentence is central dilemma coming out of the first historic struggle for socialism. Robust "liberal" democracy has not yet produced liberals who will ultimately put unity of the socialist nation against imperialist and capitalist restoration above their liberal right to robust debate and opposition. On the other hand, socialism without a higher level of democracy than exists in capitalism is not socialism. This is _the_ dilemma "we" must solve.
^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^ CB; And of course, the imperialists have learned quite well that they can undermine socialist economic prosperity building by forcing the socialist countries ( all of which were economically weak relative to the imperialist countries) to waste resources on defense through imperialist war and threat of war.
Democracy and Peace.
^^^^
* 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=115397640 0>).
And that's the most democratic of all socialist countries that have existed so far. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org <http://mrzine.org/> > <http://monthlyreview.org/>