On 2011-12-24, at 6:29 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
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> "There has never been a socialist revolution in capitalist countries with parliamentary systems, the universal franchise, and other democratic rights. That's been the elephant in the room for Marxists and others on the revolutionary left; it's an awkward reality which has been mostly ignored."
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> What about Germany before WWII? Viet Nam? Chile? Argentina? Spain?
There were no socialist revolutions in Germany, Argentina, Chile, or Spain, despite the presence of large left-wing parties in these countries. Nor were there socialist revolutions in the wealthier and more developed bourgeois democracies in the US, Britain, and Western Europe - the subject of my post.
There was a socialist-led revolution in Vietnam which expropriated the large landowners and capitalists and reorganized the economy under public ownership. It was preceded by similar anticapitalist revolutions in the USSR, China, and Cuba. These revolutions occurred in the less developed regions of the global economy, and the autocratic political systems which they displaced bore little if any resemblance to the liberal democratic systems of the core capitalist countries.