My own view is that the historical experience of the USSR and the other states where social revolutions occurred and the old ruling classes were expropriated has been more contradictory than suggested here.
These societies industrialized at a much faster pace than they would have under capitalism and did so, crucially, with more support from the working class and peasantry despite the hardships and injustices which accompanied both processes. This certainly seemed true of the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao. Unlike capitalist industrialization, the masses felt the state was their own. Among other things, they could point to their access, despite shortages, to the basic necessities of food, shelter, and health care, to the educational opportunities opened up by the widespread literacy campaigns, to the formal equality granted to women and national minorities, and to their enjoyment of free cultural and athletic events and state-subsidized vacations. These represented real gains for the masses, particularly insofar as they were realized under siege conditions imposed by the capitalist states which required the diversion of needed resources from consumption to defence production. Ironically, it was in the aftermath of forced industrialization and agrarian collectivization, when state control was relaxed, that the greater exposure of the masses to the higher living standards of the West weakened their attachment to the existing system and led them to support the integration of their autarchic planned economies into the global capitalist system. For critical-minded intellectuals, however, the freedom to express their ideas mattered more than their material conditions of existence which were often higher than the mass of the population at any rate. Under Stalin, most of us on the list would have either had to willingly suspend disbelief that Trotsky, Bukharin, and the other Old Bolsheviks were in league with the Nazis or would have been shot or exiled together with the multitude of others found guilty by the state security services of sabotaging and undermining socialist construction. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#32864): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/32864 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/108969231/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
