Another advantage is the ability to allocate resources to the development oriented uses without being constrained by market limitations, especially skyrocketing food prices as labor is transfered from agriculture to industry.
So the way I see it is a trade-off between the destruction of productive potential and opening of new potential for development that would be difficult to obtain under the old regime. Of course, in backward countries that destruction is less of a factor than in more advanced ones, which perhaps may help explaining why socialist revolutions succeeded only in backward countries but never in more advanced ones.
As far as the investment vs consumption issue is concerned, the problem is really in political control, and specifically in the ability of political leadership to curb consumption (austerity measures.) That control is not limited to socialist countries (the Japanese did it without socialism) but it requires a functioning central government. That is perhaps why socialist revolution succeeded in Russia or China - which had traditionally strong central government but experienced temporary weakening of elite control - but not India, which lacked a "central nervous system" (as Barrington Moore noted.) So the trick here is to take over a central authority system from the hand of the old elites without damaging it too much. I am less familiar with Venezuela, but afaik it ever had a strong central government, which may explain Chavez's problem. He needs strong government to pursue investment policies, but in the absence of one he must build it, and in doing so - rely on populist appeals, which in turns undermines the very raison d'etre of a strong government i.e. its capacity to curb demand (impose austerity.)
So to sum it up, it appears that despite popular perceptions of radical use of force in face of obstacles, a successful socialist revolution is a complex balancing act - if one gets the balance right, one will succeed, otherwise one will fall.
Wojtek
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:
> Wojtek: It is unlikely that a mere economic downturn will dissolve social
> order
> and
> social control by the elite - far more than that is needed.
>
>
> Somebody: But this is the old catch 22 of socialist revolutions, isn't it?
> On the one hand, you need war, a breakdown of the social order, and schism
> or major weakness in the ruling class to make a plausible attempt at
> overturning the existing class system. On the other hand, the wholesale
> destruction of productive forces and attendant demographic disasters this
> brings about means that any new socialist state has to start not at zero,
> but at minus 100, and is poorly placed to survive, let alone thrive, in a
> world of capitalist powers. To survive, mind you, I'm not even addressing
> the possibility of actually posing a superior alternative to the market
> economies.
>
> Incidentally, this is why I always find ecosocialist mutterings about
> zero-growth or low-growth sustainable socialism so amusing. By necessity,
> any new socialist society will need to grow at least as rapidly as did
> Stalin's Soviet Union, simply to exercise the right to exist. In fact, every
> socialist and left-nationalist regime has known this, which is why they all
> have prioritized economic growth as much, if not more (being often willing
> to sacrifice consumer consumption), than the capitalist nations.
>
> Hugo Chavez has tried to have his cake and eat it too, by offering a
> subsidized consumer spending spree and high-growth petroleum driven economy
> - but this too has run into serious problems as of late, even before the
> global crisis hit them. Something has to give - in Venezeula's case the
> result has been that the money going to support cheap gasoline and consumer
> goods hasn't been available to support an national industrial expansion, for
> all the talk of endogenous development.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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