"For real socialism, look at Germany, plus the Scandinavian nations. Free elections, trade unions are respected, health care for life for all citizens, & free enterprise to make the money that makes all the above possible. China is headed in this direction, I think. Do you really want to go back to the USSR, with no money & a five-year wait for an apartment or a Trabant (car)?"and"... there are better, successful models of socialism than the old Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist one. I wish the workers of Bangladesh success in preserving trade unions!"
I responded:
AM, you can forget Scandinavia as a model of Socialism. The idiots running the crippled remains of ex-Warsaw Pact countries like Czecho/Slovakia after the so-called Velvet Revolutions had all kinds of crazy ideas about Third Way socialism based on eg Sweden. Fat lot of good it did them. Not much left of the Welfare State these days. Both Conservative and Social Democrat governments have been rolling and racheting back all the postwar gains of the workers. Education, health, pensions, workers rights, public services of all kinds all going down the drain while the "country" ie the rich just gets richer and richer.
And there's nothing odd or remarkable about it - workers get better conditions when they threaten to boot out capitalists for ever. As soon as the capitalists feel less threatened they force worse conditions on us as soon as they can.
And as Mike said, Mao and Stalin and their bureaucratic regimes have as little to do with Marx and Lenin as Hitler and Mussolini - with the exception that Mao and Stalin used Marx and Lenin as masks to fool the workers. They had to do that cos their privileges were sucked from the blood of a non-capitalist state, a workers state. Bureaucratic regimes always try to turn themselves into real hereditary bourgeois, though, rather than let the workers take power democratically. In the USSR they went the whole hog and handed over the state to capitalism. The Chinese haven't got there yet (what's the point? They're doing fine as it is,and what on earth has imperialism got to offer them that they can't fix better themselves?)
If the imperialists don't destroy the world, real socialism will come, don't worry about that. What we don't know is where or when. What we do know is that the start will be a bloody mess following the battle to oust the capitalists - they'll go far less quietly than Gaddafi - and that when things settle down they won't look ANYTHING AT ALL like the Stalinist USSR or Red China.
Almost immediately AM responded with this friendly post:
Nope. But more on that another time.
Think modern bourgeois democracy before the English Revolution of 1640-60. There were no countries then anyone could point to that came close to that ideal. Yet after two centuries all the advanced countries were bourgeois democracies.
The thing is that socialism will be a worldwide system improving on the highest levels of production and quality reached by capitalism, and it will be run on the basis of workers democracy and universal cooperation and planning. We'll get there, but there's a lot of spade work to be done before we do.
And there's nothing odd or remarkable about it - workers get better conditions when they threaten to boot out capitalists for ever. As soon as the capitalists feel less threatened they force worse conditions on us as soon as they can.
And as Mike said, Mao and Stalin and their bureaucratic regimes have as little to do with Marx and Lenin as Hitler and Mussolini - with the exception that Mao and Stalin used Marx and Lenin as masks to fool the workers. They had to do that cos their privileges were sucked from the blood of a non-capitalist state, a workers state. Bureaucratic regimes always try to turn themselves into real hereditary bourgeois, though, rather than let the workers take power democratically. In the USSR they went the whole hog and handed over the state to capitalism. The Chinese haven't got there yet (what's the point? They're doing fine as it is,and what on earth has imperialism got to offer them that they can't fix better themselves?)
If the imperialists don't destroy the world, real socialism will come, don't worry about that. What we don't know is where or when. What we do know is that the start will be a bloody mess following the battle to oust the capitalists - they'll go far less quietly than Gaddafi - and that when things settle down they won't look ANYTHING AT ALL like the Stalinist USSR or Red China.
Almost immediately AM responded with this friendly post:
" @ Choppa: best explanation I've heard yet! Thanks. Is there any country today that comes close to your ideal? Just curious."and I replied:
Nope. But more on that another time.
Think modern bourgeois democracy before the English Revolution of 1640-60. There were no countries then anyone could point to that came close to that ideal. Yet after two centuries all the advanced countries were bourgeois democracies.
The thing is that socialism will be a worldwide system improving on the highest levels of production and quality reached by capitalism, and it will be run on the basis of workers democracy and universal cooperation and planning. We'll get there, but there's a lot of spade work to be done before we do.
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