[lbo-talk] "A Labor Party Based on the Trade Unions"

[Chris Doss]

I don't care about debates on the gains of bureaucratic collectivism (which strike me as a political variant of nerd discussions about who would win in a fight, Batman or Wolverine), but living standards certainly did rise in the USSR and satellite countries and the economies were modernized, with the exceptions of East Germany and the Czech part of the Czech Republic, which already had modernized economies so it was probably kind of pointless. The USSR became a superpower after all. Really they were modernization projects and should be viewed as such, IMO.

 
Christopher E. Doss
Moscow, Russian Federation 

 
----- Original Message ----
From: Bhaskar Sunkara <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Tue, April 13, 2010 7:44:38 AM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] "A Labor Party Based on the Trade Unions"

A lot of assumptions there.  1) That "former communist" countries
represented any sort of progress over capitalism in the historical sense
(it's late and I'm choosing my words carelessly and I'm sure I'll rue them
if this spawns a discussion on the gains of bureaucratic collectivism). 2)
that any move to collectivize the means of production will mean a re-thread
of the Soviet "model."  It's a matter of differing perspectives.  I too
respect some of the gains of social democracy, but if socialism is an old
left dogma to you, why bother with the radical circles at all?  The
left-wing of the Democratic Party has operative social democratic politics.
For a rough sketch of post-capitalist economics *The Activist's* theory
section has a few articles of note ("On Economic Democracy" and Schulman's
rejoinder) : http://theactivist.org/blog/category/theory .