At 03:33 PM 4/7/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Come on, the Soviets may have failed but building true socialism was
>their manifest -intended - objective. Show me a passage from Lenin or
>Stalin were they deny this goal. Of course, the Soviets inherited an
>empire and wanted to preserve it.
Well, who knows what really was on their minds -- we can forever speculate
on that. As I recall (I think from Braverman), Lenin was also mesmerized
by the works of Frederic Winslow Taylor - the quintessential capitalist.
So who knows which work had a greater influence on his thinking?
As I see it, the architects of the Soviet revolution were like foreign
exchange students today - coming from a backward country to learn the
modern Western ways. They might become attracted to various intellectual
trends, managerial ideologies, systems of organizations - especially ones
that they see as successful. They perhaps even genuinely think of
implementing some of them.
But then they go back to their backward countries and what they face is the
material reality of local backward social institutions and organization of
production. Even if the manage to gain a position of power there, it is
that material reality and not the ideas they learned in the West that
primarily dtermine their decisions and actions. Thinking otherwise would
be putting Marx on his head.
They can make ideological procalmations to please their local
constituencies or foreign investors, and those proclamations might sound
like the Western ideals. But their real course of action is bound and
determine by the existing material conditions in their country. Nkrumah of
Ghana is a good case in point. On th eone hand, he made ideolgical
proclamations to please his Soviet or Chinese supporters, on th eother
hand he had local constituencies whose consent was crucial to his rule. So
as a result, Ghana's development was a mixture of various Western ideals
(some of them implemented by powerful missions) and indigenous institutions.
Perhaps Lenin thought of Marx's ideals, or even selectively used them to
his own ends, but to maintain that the social structure and organization of
production was ready for th eimplementation of production is putting Marx
on his head. It is like saying that those who invented the myth of Ikarus
were pioneers of modern avaiation. Daydreaming of something and being in a
position to implement is are two different things.
Regards
WS
PS. As to the bourgeois victory in the cold war - well, the christians are
also supposed to win the battle between good and evil. Usually the
narrator wins the mythical battle he has manufactured.
