Re: The Soviet "empire" was a drain on Moscow

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 8/2/2004 10:28:39 AM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:   >Russians lived more poorly than people in any other of the republics or in the Eastern Bloc (except maybe Albania?). Moscow may have been a possible exception. It's one of the reasons why Russia junked them. Ironically, those losses of subsidies have resulted in the wealthiest of the republics -- like Georgia and Moldova -- into the poorest. Russians now live better than people anywhere else in the fSU, except maybe the Baltics, which is why you have so much illegal immigration from them into Russia.<   There are lots of Soviet jokes depicting Castro as sucking at Brezhnev's teat.   Comment   This Great Russian Bully . . . seeking the restoration of an historially evolved privledge . . . was unshackled as the results of the era of Nitkia Khrushchev . . . although many may had thought they met the "bully boy."   Being forced to try and recover what you had is a harsh school.   Striving to receive what you think you have coming is the school of chauvinism. This Great Russian Bully . . . who was handcuffed and forced to serve the dictatorship of the proletariat is going to teach some harsh lessons. Lessons an enormous section of our proletariat learnt in a pervious era and during several junctures in the development of our industrial system.   Wealth is measured against master's house and not your neighbors shack.   Khruschev's betrayal of Lumumba and the Congo set the basis for the evolution of Soviet policy up to the collapse of Soviet Power and the overthrow of its property relations in the industrial infrastructure.    The vassal states of the Soviet Union were not colonies or the meaning of colonies in the sense of bourgeois imperialism. The Soviet Union was an imperial power and its responsibility was to uplift the petty bourgeois countries and aid the world proletariat to the best of its ability.   Any modern economy operating on the basis of the exchange of labor is going to manifest economic inequality. What Russia junked was socialism. The people of the Soviet Union understood that Brezhnev was not a Red. I remember their jokes from this period . . . concerning Brezhnev trying to impress his mother with his power and wealth and privileges.   At the end of the story . . . Brezhnev's mother looks at him and says . . . "you have done well son . . . but what you gonna do when the Reds come back?"   The real ideological basis of support of the counter revolution . . . outside the apparatus that intermingles with international capital and the characters able to exact tribute from Ivan Average on the basis of their station in the bureaucratic apparatus (something understood by every industrial worker having labored in a large factor or tenured Professor languishing under the heavy hand of the machine) . . . is the petty bourgeois intellectual that alter the ideological sphere on behalf of its prejudices.   What wrecked the Soviet Union was democracy and I do not mean incarceration or the lack or social engineering . . . but the petty bourgeois concept of workers democracy and political rights.   If you are fighting on an economic terrain that is hostile to you all you have is ideology as the social glue. Under the Stalin regime there could be no talk of the ANC being niggers at the trough of the Soviet Economy or Castro sucking a breast.   None of us get a world like we envision it and workers in America are in the process of showing the world their conception of democracy. It is not going to be pretty and our greatest failing is the inability to understand how people actually think things out.   It means we cannot reach our workers because subjective conception of democracy create the unbridgeable class barrier.   Poland gets what it deserves. Those within the former Soviet Union are going to get what they deserve and they are going to pay more than under Sovietism. The world workers are going to get what they deserve and are paying more than under Sovietism.   Then again . . . the damn bureaucracy flips . . . man. And the bureaucracy is not a class. In the Soviet Union the bureaucracy was an excretion of the state in practical terms due to its peculiar curve of development. In the historical sense it was part of the line of industrial development.   Where in history has any society every overthrown the machine before its economic basis was eroded?   The Bully Boy is back . . . the real bully boy and not that guy you freaking thought was a bully. A democratic slave master is still a slave master however . . . and there were some decent slave masters . . . according to some who never escaped the mental chains of slavery . . . or rather bourgeois democracy.   Melvin P.