====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
The late Mark Jones, commenting on the fall of the USSR, labelled that society a "liberated zone" -- one that had lasted for 70 years. I believe the same label is illuminating for _all_ the nations that have struggled to delink themselves from international capital. It is therefore misleading to judge them as "socialist states" or "failed socialist states." I think Lenin knew this: that Russia could not achieve socialism without a sociialist revolution in several of the core capitalist states. But what what made Lenin great was simply the model he provides of a revolutionary who knws that one must make the effort regardless of abstract theoriy. One cannot know the future, and hence it is always wrong to refrain from struggle on the basis of the ripeness of conditions. Rosa Luxemburg made this point specifically in regard to the Paris Commune in her Stuttgart Congress speeches. Most "criticisms" of these liberated zones are grounded in an essentially voluntarist view of revolutionary history -- the concealed premise is always "if they had had the right theory they would have succeeded" -- success being measured against a false conception of what, up to now, has been achievable. Socialism simply was not on the agenda. The whole world was not yet capitalist. These revolutions moved their nations into the 20th-c. They correctly aimed at more, but we are wrongif we don't see now that more was not possible. Carrol ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
