Yoshie F.:
Yes, the rearguard is as important as the vanguard in the final analysis.
But it is not quite true to say that "[i]mperialism defeated socialism militarily in the 'Cold' War," though a number of governments and movements certainly were done in by the empire's secret agents and their local collaborators. Neither Russia nor China nor Vietnam was militarily defeated by imperialism, nor the CPI(M)-led Left Front government in West Bengal, the longest-standing elected Communist government in the world. They changed from inside.
^^^^ CB: Yes, I have to explain, but I would stick to my new conclusion that the most accurate way to describe what happened was a military defeat. The political, cultural and economic factors followed the military factor in this case. War is politics by other means, other violent means. Afterall, it was termed a "war", "Cold" war, but a war. And it wasn't really cold.
They changed "inside" because of the horrendous military, onslaught, actual and threatened, from the outside. It was not internal processes or processes with internal initiation that caused the change, but external processes. This is a situation in which holistic analysis is important. The socialist countries must be understood in the global context of 70 years for this analysis.
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Political struggle within a nation, within a party or between parties or both, is usually far more important than military battles between the empire and nations in the South. The empire never has enough soldiers to invade or intervene in all countries.
^^^^ CB: The empire had enough soldiers to invade and superweapons to threaten most of the main socialist territories. The empire had enough soldiers to invade the SU in 1918. The empire had enough soldiers in the Nazi army to invade the main country, the SU. Then it invaded Korea and Vietnam. Then, very importantly, it pointed tens, then hundreds, then thousands of nuclear warheads at the SU, China, Eastern Europe. This is just as much a military matter as an actual attack. Then imperialism threatened to extend the arms race to Star Wars. The main cause of the fall of socialism was military attack and threat of attack, not internally originating failures.
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Michael A. Lebowitz writes that "Until workers break with the idea that capital is necessary, a state in which workers have political supremacy will act to facilitate conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital. . . . The state, accordingly, remains entirely within the bounds of the capitalist relation and is its guarantor so long as workers look upon capital's requirements as 'self-evident natural laws'" (Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 191). The hitherto existing Communist Parties, in or out of state power, inside or outside the West, have more or less been parties led by intellectuals whom workers and peasants followed, so once intellectuals lose their (more or less idealistic) commitment to socialism, or once right-wing intellectuals defeat left-wing ones, the parties can easily be transformed, from above, into essentially social democratic parties, even neoliberal capitalist parties, that "act to facilitate conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital," even by bullets if that's what it takes. And they have been, some sooner than others.
^^^^^ CB: The necessary premise for all this is imperialist military onslaught which required the socialist countries to militarize and discipline their whole societies in defense. This destroyed the democracy that socialism needs more than capitalism to be spiritually viable. By forcing the socialist countries to militarize, imperialism succesfully undermined the self-determining spirit of the working class regulars that is necessary for revolutionary elan.
Without the forced militarization of the whole society, there would not likely have been loss of idealistic spirit among the socialist cadre, intellectual and otherwise.
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Whether Maoists in Nepal, Bolivarians in Venezuela, and a few others who have not given up on socialism can break with the social democratic horizon of what can and needs to be done, when the global economy loses steam created by a credit boom, remains to be seen. Will they give in or move in, to use Lebowitz's terms? If the latter, how? -- Yoshie
^^^^^^^ CB: Yes, Also, Cuba is a leading socialist country, right now. It persists as a direct link to the first socialist revolutions in history. Of course, it is playing a leading role in helping to create the next generation of socialist countries. Cuba was not militarly defeated nor did it lose its democracy.