True enough that no two nations are identical, and there may be problems in India -- e.g., sex-selective abortion -- that no social revolution can easily solve, but many of the worst problems for the poor of India -- illiteracy, chronic malnutrition, high infant mortality, etc. -- are the sort that a socialist or even populist social revolution would have been able to greatly alleviate by removing obstacles to change.
> The Chinese revolution was pretty much a
> fluke of history that is alsmost impossible to
> replicate - it was a coincidence of certain element
> scoming together: the tradition of centralized yet
> weak national governance, the uprooting of peasantry
> by the Japanese occupation, the Soviet influence, and
> th eleadership capable of taking advantage of this
> situation. The Soviet revolution was also a fluke of
> history difficult to replicate - again, centralized
> government seriously weakened by war, th epush toard
> industrialization held back by feudal structures, the
> weak middle class. In both cases, the revolutinary
> leadership was able to harness th euprooted peasantry
> as a tool of its revolutionary project and destroy the
> eeudal vestiges and at the same time push for
> industrialization.
>
> But those conditions are almost impossible to
> replicate elsewhere, and as a result no other country
> had a successful revolution (Cuba is a different case,
> it would not have a revolution without Soviet
> support). Gramsci already made that observation
> before WW2 and try to steer away Marxism from the
> infatuation with revolutionary struggle and
> lumpenproletarial as it stool, toward more gradual
> change mediated by civil society.
The Russian and Chinese Revolutions are surely the most impressive revolutions among all modern revolutions, for the simple reason that it really has to be damn difficult to have revolution over such enormous territories with multinational, multiethnic, multifaith, and multilingual populations and hold them together for decades while radically changing social relations.
But there have been many political, social, and socialist revolutions in modern history, from the American Revolution in the 18th century to the revolutions in Nepal and Venezuela today. The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, explicitly billed as "process," may be the first Gramscian social revolution, which may eventually become fully socialist, in the world, with those whom you'd label "lumpenproletarial" among the most loyal Chavistas. -- Yoshie