They didn't consider themselves communist, maybe the KR did. But the Soviet Union was officially "socialist," and Khrushchev used to talk about about building communism by some or other date, until they gave up that sort of talk, the Chinese too. As to whether Marx would consider them anything like what he imagined a post-revolutionary society would look like, I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I('m quite willing to give you the word "communist" to label those societies, but then I think we need another word to refer to what Marx was talking about, which we probably do anyway.
--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> andie
>
> -- Now, Marx's (few and unpublished) remarks about
> crude communism may be regarded as prescient with
> respect to the kind of "communism" that emerged in
> poor countries in the 20th century. I put
> "communism"
> in scare quotes because Marx would have regarded
> Stalinism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge not as communist
> at
> all.
>
> ^^^
>
> CB: Well sure he would consider the Soviet Union and
> the People's Republic
> of China as communist. Those were expressions of
> "crude" communism, just
> like he predicted. And they were the revolutionary
> dictatorship of the
> proletariat, as he predicted. That's you who doesn't
> consider them communist
> at all. They make Marx look, as you put it,
> prescient.
>
> ^^^^^
>
>
>
> However the failure of crude communist regimes
> and their collapse, or collapse into capitalism, may
> be argued to offer support for Marx's idea --
> treated
> as stagist or not, it doesn't have to be -- that
> capitalism is sociologically prior to communism;
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Exactly. The step backward to capitalism in
> Russia and China mean that
> actual history supports a more stagist conception of
> historical materialism.
> China tried to by pass capitalism to socialism, skip
> a stage, and now they
> had to fall back. Even in Russia there were debates
> in the early 20th
> Century as to whether Russia had enough capitalist
> development to have a
> socialist revolution. The current step back to
> capitalism might be
> interpreted in part as a result of the Russian
> Revolution being premature.
> However, it is not the "internal" conditions but the
> worldwide context of
> these "premature" socialist revolutions battered and
> beaten by imperialism,
> and unable to compete militarily and industrially
> with advanced capialist
> nations, external conditions, the global whole of
> capitalism that caused the
> steps back.
>
> ^^^^^^
>
>
> hic
> Rhodus, hic salta (here is Rhodes, jump here)
> (Capital
> I.v) [should be saltus, no?], but not that far, or
> you
> have to ask where the hic is.
>
> --- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org
>
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk>
> > wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >
> > andie nachgeborenen
> >
> > Marx has an attack on "crude communism in the
> Paris
> > Manuscripts, "the consummation of this envy
> [shades
> > of
> > Nietzsche] and of this leveling down proceeding
> from
> > the preconceived minimum." EPR, ME Reader at 83
> > (Tucker, 2d ed.). This leads to the Cultural
> > Revolution and at its worse to the Khmer Rouge.
> > Surely
> > you don't advocate this!
> >
> > ^^^^^
> >
> > CB: I always read this as , not an "attack", but a
> > statement of a sort of
> > objective stage that will be gone through, like
> the
> > revolutionary
> > dictatorship of the proletariat, or "to each
> > according to work" not yet to
> > each according to need. Not pretty ,but
> > unavoidable. Marx doesn't see the
> > revolutionary process, especially the first phases
> > of socialism, as all
> > sweetness and light.
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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