On 10/13/2010 12:16 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> in both countries
> socialism was imposed by an imperial power rather than developed on
> its own, so it did take the characteristics dictated by the imperial
> power that imposed it.
Can you be more specific? Can you point to some of the characteristics of E. German socialism that marked it as a type of "backward" socialism? You seem to be saying that nationalized industries and central planning are proper socialism but the way they were implemented was improper because it was colored by the backward Russian experience. How exactly?
As far as I can tell, nobody seemed to notice this at the time. You didn't hear socialists in, say, the 60's claim that East German socialism was not a "modern" type of socialism because it had been imposed by backward Russia. In the late 50's, Aneurin Bevan, the British Labour socialist leader (father of the NHS) used to say that Britain should learn from Soviet planning in order to modernize its economy. I have to say, this has the smell of an ex-post-facto rationalization to me.
SA