> --- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
>
>
>> As should the Chinese revolution. But in fairness to
>> those who led these
>> revolutions, they didn't separate the two but, like
>> Marx, saw the
>> development of a modern industrial economy - in
>> these cases, under public
>> ownership - as laying the material foundations for a
>> future communist
>> society.
>>
>
> I think they were pretty much synonymous in the minds
> of the Bolsheviks. Industrializing and building
> skyscrapers were conceptualized as "achievements of
> socialism." This is so clear in Kaganovich's
> fascinating memoirs. I really have got to translate
> some of them.
=======================
Yes, but they also distinguished between the "socialist" and "communist"
phases. The latter implied the disappearance of state coercion, wage labour,
and class antagonisms in human affairs. The Communist parties never
pretended to have arrived at this stage. Of course, some Marxists, notably
the Trotskyists, didn't accept that Russia and China were "socialist"
either, because of the absence of socialist democracy and workers control
over the means of production, preferring instead to describe them as either
"degenerated workers' states". "bureaucratic collectivist" or "state
capitalist" - but in all cases, still representing an historical advance
over private ownership.
This all sounds so dry and pedantic now, it's hard to recall there was a time when these discussions were real and vital to those living through and observing these social experiments, when people gave their lives willingly on behalf of them, and involuntarily lost their lives when they found themselves on the wrong side of the debate.