To reiterate, my argument is that the Soviet system was a product of specific historical conditions, none of which favored democracy - which is pretty much in line with what Barrington Moore argued - plus a mixture of modern innovation some of which were more socialist than other, some of them brilliant other less so - which is in line with Alexander Gerschenkron. That system - whether we call it "real" socialism, "fake" socialism or shit on a stick - was then transferred to countries that fell under the Soviet hegemony after WW2, a process which had different socio-historical dynamics in each country.
So what really interests me here is not ideology but history and sociology. I am not sure what "proper" and "improper" ways of implementation are - those normative categories may be useful from an ideological point of view, but are pretty meaningless for a sociologist or a historian. From the latter's point of view, every way is "proper" when it is actually implemented ("all walls are great if the roof doesn't fall" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62pLY5zFTtc ).
To put it differently, I am not interested in defending or condemning the Soviet system, but rather to understand the interaction between a rational social engineering project and the actually existing social historical conditions. A corollary to this is that if a socialist social engineering project was implemented in a different socio-cultural setting, the outcome would be very different (case in point: Tanzania under Julius Nyerere.) The Tanzanian version of socialism was not more or less proper than the Soviet version from this point of view (albeit party ideologues would disagree.) So your charge of ex post facto rationalization misses the mark altogether.
One advantage of this approach is analytical separation effects due to specific social historical conditions and limitation from effects of the socialist project (as conceptualized by its implementers) itself. That seems to me like a more intellectually useful exercise than simple vilification or admiration of the whole package without fully knowing what is in it.
Wojtek
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 1:00 PM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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