[lbo-talk] Limits on the Duration of Liberated Zones

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 7 11:18:23 PDT 2013


Au contraire - they are accelerated capitalist development zones in which state planners tried to do the work of the bourgeoisie. They were borrowing left and right from their more advanced neighbors - both organizational designs and money. If anything, the USSR demonstrated that tools created by capitalist development can be put to many different uses.

Wojtek

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> The late Mark Jones (prior to his brain tumor) noted that the USSR should
> be
> regarded not as some specifiable form of society but as a liberated zone --
> one that lasted some seven decades. I think _all_ the revolutionary regimes
> of the 20th-c should be so regarded, making nugatory the endless attempts
> to
> define them as crippled workers' states, bureaucratic capitalist, etc etc
> etc. This applies to Cuba as well -- and two or three posters on the SfTP
> list are blathering away on what kind of a state Cuba is.
>
> A Liberated Zone necessarily offers some protection to its people against
> the ravages of world capitalism, and socialist rhetoric (though not
> socialist principle) offers the best political language for organizing such
> zones. And since they are under constant battering by the forces of world
> capital they must _also_ be organized on semi-military principles. Hence
> socialist democracy, if instituted . . . .But it is silly even to talk
> about
> that topic. As silly as it would be to worry about food pavilions on the
> beach in the midst of winter.
>
> Such Zones cannot be maintained indefinitely. Both Cuba and the USSR had
> pretty good runs of it, and their example encouraged resistance to capital
> around the world. But it is the most naïve (retroactive) Voluntarism to
> harp
> on their non-socialist features or to whine that their leadership were/are
> "sell-outs" etc.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
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> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."



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