[lbo-talk] why Prince is right

Somebody Somebody philos_case at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 12 13:41:04 PDT 2010


Carrol: Socialism will answer to the activity of those who find themselves in a non-capitalist environment, not accordint to any recipe we presume to write.

Somebody: And thus you've just erased the historical memory of the Soviet experience, China under Mao, Cuba since the Revolution, Vietnam before the Doi Moi reforms, Albania under Hoxha and after, Hungarian goulash socialism, Yugoslavia's market socialism... not to mention the vast reservoir of Third World experience with quasi-socialist and Marxist influenced national projects, or the record of Scandinavian social democracy, and on and on.

It just won't do to pretend that socialists will *just figure things out* after the revolution. We've seen an entire spectrum of socialist polities, of degrees of central planning, of worker's self-management, of different types of market-oriented socialisms, and of varying levels of integration between socialist states and with the global capitalist economy. We don't have to speculate about the effects of socialism in one country as opposed to socialism in many countries, or what series of events tends to follow after the establishment of a political ruling caste after the revolution. We have the data. There's a century of information on socialist experiments, and oddly enough, some socialists are still mouthing 19th century platitudes about not being able to write revolutionary cookbooks. Sorry, it's no longer true, comrade.



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