socialism

> Socialism is the ownership of and control over production. 
> Andrew Austin
> Knoxville, TN

Are you defining socialism as an intermediate stage to communism, which
would represent the "higher stage" of the abolition of alienated wage
labor, the attainment of a society of "free cooperative individuals"?

If so, perhaps I could agree, but otherwise I disagree with the
definition of socialism.  I am with AGF -- the law of value has still been
in operation in "actually existing socialist" states.  They do not, in
other words, represent the attainment of the utopian (not in a bad way)
goal proposed by Marx.  Therefore they should not be called socialist
except with quotation marks -- "state socialist" societies. What I'm
saying is that state socialism, whatever its virtues, and I agree with
those who point out that there are many, does not correspond, any more
than Western-style social democracy, to what Marx had in mind.  (Bernstein
and Lenin were both revisionists, in other words.)  Giovanni Arrighi has
written an excellent analysis of the positive achievements of both sorts
of workers' movements ("Marxist Century, American Century:  The Making and
Remaking of the World Labor Movement," New Left Review #179, Jan/Feb
1990).

As Jon Langford of the Mekons has said:  "this funeral's for the wrong
corpse," speaking of the common notion that Marxism and socialism died
with the death of the USSR.  Further (now paraphrasing), what is declared
dead hasn't even happened yet!

[See Moishe Postone's "TIME, LABOR AND SOCIAL DOMINATION," CUP, 1993, for
a brilliant exposition of what Marx was really saying.]

And on a slightly different note, no one has offered any evidence of the
alleged horrid atrocities of the Cultural Revolution of 1960s China.

RH