[lbo-talk] Some Comforting Words from Rosa L.

[Carrol Cox]

It's not a question of conferring or not conferring "socialist credit" on
the USSR. The Russian people from 1917 through 1939 built a 20th-century
nation and army which in 1939 defeated the Japanese in the first major
battle of WW2, and were able (through tehnology built in only some 20 years,
to return that army to the west to meet the German assault. To measure that
against some merely hypothetical conception of what a "Socialist Revolution"
should be (with the concealed and clearly false premise that socialism was
in any sense a material possibility in that period) is to replace history
with sectarian fantasy.

That titanic achievement has yet to be theorized in any satisfactory way,
nor will it be until we escape the sectarian fantasies and quarrels referred
to here.

Carrol