On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, s_sanderson wrote:
> If the Soviet Union and other Soviet-style systems had made such great
> accomplishments, then why did they collapse and give way to something
> different? I suppose their defenders will claim that this was the result of
> Western constraints. That may provide some of the answer, but not most. Their
> internal deficiencies were glaring also. I sort of recall massive popular
> reaction against the state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989. That
> tells us what most members of these societies thought about their
> accomplishments.
>
> Stephen Sanderson
>
>
It is also worth noting, based on this logic, that a large proportion of
those in the former Soviet bloc now see the Brezhnev days as a Golden Era,
and would happily return to it immediately now that they know there is not
a Capitalist Cornucopia awaiting them with the fall of the old system.
Your arguments are totally one-sided, and sound just like those of a
U.S. Republican or English Tory. If that's what you think we should
become, you should be frank and say so.
The problem with much of the recent discussion is that several people seem
to be inferring that the people who made revolutions in the periphery
wanted nothing other than to oppress people, which is the assumption that
the right wing makes. Those of us who are arguing the other side are
maintaining that
1) the capitalist world-system is in need of revolution
and
2) many people with good intentions have tried, with outcomes all over
the map, but including some positive ones.
It's hard to see in the apparent system-defenders' arguments any sign that
they too see the need for structural change.
To shift to a different but related point, that of alternatives, it
strikes me that Wagar's proposal for a world party is a classic case of
the perfect being the enemy of the good. In reality, positive change is
likely to occur at the local, national and global levels (the last through
networks), but the dream of a global state is likely to be realized only
by the capitalist elites.
Back to the discussion of "actually existing socialism," then, it is the
luxury of the core intellectual to dismiss all real-life attempts at
revolutionary re-structuring as reactionary, calling on those in the
periphery to wait for global capitalism to modernize them.
Any genuine attempts at constructing a unified, global anti-systemic
movement will be killed at birth by this attitude.
Richard Hutchinson