[lbo-talk] What is socialism?

123hop at comcast.net 123hop at comcast.net
Wed Oct 13 20:15:58 PDT 2010


Your post begs a lot of questions.

Why is it bad to have 20% of the population involved in food production?

Why is it bad to be a peasant? Why is it so much better to be an assembly line worker?

What I remember about life in Romania in the sixties is:

--it was peaceful --the food was great --education was free all the way through college --medical care was free --rents were almost nothing --child care was free --women had equal opportunity at work and in school

...and the bad stuff: travel was restricted, consumer goods were scarce, there was a secret police and a bunch of stalinist hacks.

There are now thousands of children living in the sewers of Bucharest. The ruling class continues to suck the country dry and to use its citizens as slave labor. People have to choose between food and heat... Not exactly progress.

Romania was NOT a country that built communism from the ground up as happened to some extent in Russia. Romania had a fascist govt during the war and fell to Stalinism as a result of Yalta. Hardly what you'd call ideal conditions for building socialism.

The socialism that was built was in a patriarchal, backward class society where the division between physical and mental labor was still a huge social marker, and the division between country and city even more so. It's hard to think of more difficult conditions under which to build a socialist society. To say that it illustrates the failure or impossibility of socialism is kind of weird.

Joanna

----- Original Message ----- From: "Wojtek S" <wsoko52 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 6:54:14 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] What is socialism?

Somebody: "Even when countries changed under socialism, like in Hungary under János Kádár's Goulash Communism, or less positively with Ceausescu overtures to the West, they never seemed to escape from their impoverished origins, they never made the leap to an industrialized democratic polity. They never, for example, developed agricultural productivity beyond the point where still 20% of the population were peasants. I don't know how socialism as practiced could have been an alternate model of development when it seemed to be most an alternate *phase* of development on the road to capitalist modernity."

[WS:] But then task yourself whether these countries would have done any better under a different label. I doubt.

Another point is that there were numerous attempts at democratization and reform - some of them more successful than other. So the question is why these attempts failed, for a large part. The power struggle between reformers and old guards was almost legendary - suffice it to quote the cultural revolution in China or the 1968 student revolt in Poland or the Prague Spring - but they were eventually sabotaged if not defeated. But the same political paralysis exists today in the US. So the question is whether this has something to do with generalized features of "socialism" or "capitalism" or rather with particulars of power structure in a given country.

As I said before, I am not trying to exonerate the Soviet system in any way - it was not so great - I know that from personal experience. But as a social scientist, I am trying to perform an analytical task of separating different effects instead of wholesale vilification (or exoneration.)

Wojtek

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Joanna: Still, life under "communism" didn't take a dive until Ceausescu decided to borrow big and build an export economy. That was the kiss of death for Romania. Hard to see what that had to do with socialism.
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> Somebody: It has everything to do with socialism. Somehow, every Soviet-style socialist elite attempts to make like Ceausescu and plunder their own state. In fact, it's so universal we might as well consider it the natural evolution of any socialist revolution.
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> See, I agree to an extent with you and Wojtek that socialist experiments should be looked at individually, with an eye to the state of development on the eve of their revolutions. But, frankly, why are socialist countries so marked at birth to begin with? South Korea in the 1950's was a feudal, militarist, agrarian country with no industry to speak of, and living standards on a par with countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's moved on since then, become an industrialized nation, and has instituted a universal health care system, freedom of speech and democracy. Meanwhile, North Korea is still a garrison state, living in fear, with it's military first and Juche self reliance policies ever since the Korean War unofficially ended. Saying that capitalist enforced isolation and military threats explain it all is insufficient, because the DPRK is only the most extreme instance of what you see in the other socialist countries in history as well - a brittleness
>  and rigidity that only worsened over time.
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> Even when countries changed under socialism, like in Hungary under János Kádár's Goulash Communism, or less positively with Ceausescu overtures to the West, they never seemed to escape from their impoverished origins, they never made the leap to an industrialized democratic polity. They never, for example, developed agricultural productivity beyond the point where still 20% of the population were peasants. I don't know how socialism as practiced could have been an alternate model of development when it seemed to be most an alternate *phase* of development on the road to capitalist modernity.
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> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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