RE: Non-DOGMATIC capitalists (fwd)

elson, i agree with the main part of your critique. however, there are
a lot of  issues in your post that i disagree. i won't go into details of
this because we cannot solve this problem at the moment. my impression is
that, despite your intentions, your critique of the state socialist model
implictly carries the vulgar orthodoxy's central claim that the productive
forces were not suffuciently developed in Russia to make socialism
possible. On the contrary, as we know, Lenin's study of imperialism
discerned the beginings of socialist revolution all over the world, as a
global system, not only in one county. thus, there is no point in
attiributing a purely national charecter to Russian revolution, although
it empirically took place in Russia. revolutions should take root
"somewhere", X, Y,Z location, empirically speaking, if they can not exist 
from all eternity. we are dealing with the causes and consequences of
the Russian revolution here; it had far reaching "systemic" and "national"
consequences. it has also systemic prerequsities that made it possible to
happen, ie., the explotation of landowners and capitalists, mass
strikes (1896, 1905),  first world war etc... to argue that the Russian
revolution was simply a "national" is to deny the systemic forces
conditioning Russian revolution or to reduce it to simple bourgeois
nationalism. if societies do not have their indepedent logic of
development,as you argue, then why do you insist on the nation-state
charecter of the October revolution so much?  I do not remember
anywhere Lenin made such a claim, strictly speaking.. he said they would
be a role mother to world-wide revolution. on the contrary, he was
criticizing the bourgeois conception of nation-state.

Lenin deeply analyzed these conditions before the revolution and
criticized vulgar orthodoxy's mystical and deterministic interpreation of
theory of stages:


"where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the
customary historical order of events are impermissible or impossible? it
hard needly be said that a text books written by kautskian lines was a
very useful in its day. but it is time, for all that, to abonden the idea
that it foresaw all the forms of development of subsequent world history.
it would be timely to say that those think so are simply fools"..


second,i really do not understand, with all due respect, your complete
rejection of the theory of stages. i criticized the kauskian version
above, but this does not mean that marx's historical materialim is
completely out of fashion. kautskian version is just a BAD and
non-dilactical version, that is all. vulgar meterialism does not bind all
marxists nor all marxists should be seen as adulterated by
vulgarism. why not, for example, apply Marx's historical materialism to
world systemic level? in fact, even the world system theory, despite your
charecterizations, implictly carries the notion of transformation from one
system to another--hence consequental logic,. let's say, from feudal world
system, to capitalist world system, and then to socialist world system
(even though nobody has clarified me yet how this transformation takes
place to be honest. evolution? revolution?).without these stages, marxist
theory turns out to be ahistroical structuralist theory, which neither
marxists nor world system theorists have in mind. thus, i do not think
that the differences between marxist (non-vulgar versions) and world
system theorists should be over-stated, or "all" conventional marxists be
put in the same camp with capitalists.


thanks,

Mine Doyran



>This argument is quite different from conventional Marxist arguments,
>including
>Leninism, which presumed that socialism -- as a social system -- could be
>created
>within a nation-state, and thus that states do or can develop