----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 9:37 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Universal Asceticism and Social Levelling
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-- Now, Marx's (few and unpublished) remarks about crude communism may be regarded as prescient with respect to the kind of "communism" that emerged in poor countries in the 20th century.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.
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And the animal and plant morphologies of the Carboniferous had to presage the bauplans of the Cretaceous.
Teleological fallacies for $100.00 please, Alex.
Ian