----- Original Message ----- From: "Ismail Lagardien" <ilagardien at yahoo.com>
"When the world’s two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction."
----
Theoretically they might be contradictory, but historically, I don't know how much better Lenin/Trotsky might have done. As for Stalin, that's a different question.
My favorite definition of socialism so far came from Howard Zinn: "I believe in socialism without prisons," he said.
That's as good a working definition as any. Beyond that, there are historical possibilities and impossibilities.
Joanna