On 2010-09-05, at 10:50 AM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
> Marvin: Even the most corrupt and isolated Romanov, Kuomintang, and Batista regimes did not abdicate without a prior lengthy struggle to repress the revolutionary forces arrayed against them. They fell when the revolutionary tremours in the society fractured their armies.
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> Somebody: Of course, none of these countries had a robust bourgeoisie in command. It's not a new observation, but socialist revolutions only seem to happen in countries in transition to capitalism. To some extent, I feel like neo-liberalization and democratization in the former Third World has been about the installation of fully bourgeois regimes. It's difficult to see how any of them will be dislodged. Notice how the abortive Maoist revolution in Nepal was combating an anachronistic monarchy. There are very few of those left.
I think this is largely true. Up until the collapse of the USSR and the process initiated by Deng in China, the Soviet and Chinese revolutions could be plausibly seen as "socialist" in that private ownership of the major means of production was abolished. We could get into a hair-splitting discussion about whether these new systems were truly "socialist" or "state capitalist", "bureaucratic collectivist", or "workers' states", but I don't think there is any dispute they abolished capitalism as it is understood and has been practiced worldwide. But these revolutions did so only for a brief period in historical time, so that, in retrospect, they now appear as failed or premature attempts to establish a planned economy under public ownership before being forced to reintroduce private ownership and to reintegrate into the capitalist world economy.
Nevertheless, these revolutions were about more than simply installing purely bourgeois "neoliberal" regimes, and had some very positive, if contradictory, historical effects. Notably, they accomplished what Marxists described as the "bourgeois democratic tasks" in these societies - the destruction of feudal vestiges, land reform, industrialization, the raising of the health, education, welfare, and cultural standards of the masses, national independence, etc. - which the Chinese and Russian bourgeoisies, unlike their Western counterparts earlier, had been too weak and unwilling to carry out. I doubt a liberal or social democratic regime susceptible to the pressure of Western states and economic interests could have carved out a similar space for independent development in the 20th century. Current Chinese growth, in particular, can't be separated, IMO, from the foundations laid by the 1949 revolution. Of course, the widespread restoration of private ownership and capitalist social relations has produced all of the growing inequity and injustice associated with that system, which is why the outcome of these revolutions is best described as contradictory.
Trotsky thought the Russian Revolution would progress quickly, in the context of a world revolution, from the completion of its bourgeois-democratic reforms into socialism, and the Bolsheviks took power on that assumption. The Mensheviks thought such a perspective was utopian in the context of Russian backwardness, but their dogmatic belief that the Russian bourgeoisie could and would preside over this stage of development seems to be to have been equally utopian. Probably Lenin, before his April theses in 1917 suggested he had been won over to Trotsky's line, was the most prescient in anticipating that it would be a "dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry", rather than the national bourgeoisie, which would implement the necessary historic reforms allowing these societies to progress to a higher stage of development, but one which still fell short of socialism. This seems to me to closest to what happened.
> I agree with Wojtek that "Only under capitalism -which revolutionized the old economic order - the idea of radical systemic change "trickled down" to the masses." But, if that's the case, and if capitalism is now so venerable a system to no longer appear revolutionary, then what is there left to trickle down except the lack of faith in any alternatives? If most past class struggles consisted of peasant rebellions that led at best led to new dynastic regimes, then we can say that the revolutionary moment from roughly 1790-1990 was an exceptional period, and that we've returned to the historical norm.
I was once convinced that neither the USSR nor China would revert to capitalism, or as Trotsky put it, that "the reel of history could run backwards", certainly not without widespread resistance against such a counter-revolution by the Soviet and Chinese workers and in such an abrupt and compressed fashion by historical standards. So I now shy away from making definitive pronouncements about the course of history one way or other, and am open to all possibilities, even those which appear most unlikely to us today.