At 07:46 PM 5/18/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Perhaps Marx was utopian. But we will have to wait until we have a socialists
>society, in order to find out. The Soviet Union called itself socialist but it
>wasn't.
I think that quibbling about whether or not the USSR was "socialist" is
useless. Names are not that important, while "socialism" typically refers
more to a movement than an end-result.
I used to think that the USSR should be called "collectivist" rather than
"socialist" (for reasons similar to Rod's) but I noticed that in the
Manifesto and elsewhere, Marx and Engels never made the assumption that
"socialism" was a good thing. They are quite critical of socialists (and
call themselves communists).
The key question is not whether or not the USSR was "socialist," but rather
_what kind_ of socialism it was. I think of as an example of bureaucratic
socialism (BS). With the receding of the grass-roots working-class
movement, with the imperialist invasions and the civil war, with the
conflict between the peasants and the workers, the party-state ended up as
the only force holding things together, providing order, organizing and
developing the economy, defending the country against its foreign enemies,
etc. Under these conditions, a small minority of the population could grab
and keep state power for themselves "in the name of the proletariat."
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
