one can take a "history make all" position and absolve Stalin sort of a al Louis althusser. if there are real objective heavily weighing historical conditions that leave not much room for soviet policy maneuver than that is correct. Stalin or anyone else in power in the cccp would act in very much the same way. if the cccp had much room to play than stalin is to blame. in hind sight socialism in one country was a sort of desperate measure at wait and see politics. they waited it out and we saw.
the only time the cccp was in a position to be really effective on an international scale was when nuclear parity was achieved and even then when they played strong the Americans played crazy and for real too (Gus hall seems to have said that Marcuse was on the payroll of the american intelligence). sort of the americans said if our class rule sinks, we take the planet with us. i think one has to gauge developments in light of a global balance of forces.
one thing may be certain now and that is with no big entity pushing a social agenda, social progress in the west is going regress and or come to a halt. no one to compete with.
Part 1 of 3
The very concept of "socialism in one country" is an ideological category and misunderstands why the Soviet Union was in fact a union - collection of countries/nations, federated into a political union. An old map of the Soviet Union will reveal that it was not one country.
"Socialism in one country" is an ideological category that masks an eclectic economic doctrine that exists outside of the Marxist economic doctrine and Marxist theory. After the Second Imperial World War an actual socialist community took shape on earth, with revolutionary China moving one quarter of the world peoples from being economic, political and military reserves of imperialism to the front line struggle against it. No matter what the outcome of the continuing revolution in China - in the short run, the concept of "socialism in one country" and the "national elite" dominating the area in which socialism existed in one country is - how does one say this?. . . . shallow and ahistorical.
I engage the Stalin debate without reservations because he was a great proletarian leader and to advance a Marxist theoretical conception of Soviet socialism and at what phase of history we are currently living.
Perhaps for the past 10 months I have referenced my discussion concerning property relations and the economic content of the Soviet UNION, in the tradition and economic writings of Karl Marx, specifically a section of his Critique of the Gotha Program, which is why I claim a Marxist presentation of the question.
It is not possible for any society to jump to communism on the basis of politics or on the basis of the industrial production of social implements of production and articles. What describes the various countries that constituted the Soviet UNION and the former Socialist community is not their political orientation but their economic underpinning - mode of production. All of these countries without exception were undergoing the revolutionary transformation from agriculture to industry - not the ideological category called "transition from capitalism to socialism."
This simple and obvious conclusion concerning the industrial epoch is difficult to explain to anyone not familiar with what Marx specifically wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program," or for that matter the programmatic portion of the Communist Manifesto pinned by him and Engels. The transition - according to Marx, is from capitalism to communism, - not capitalism to socialism, and he described the general political shell as a historical abstraction called "the dictatorship of the proletariat."
Then of course Engels wrote in detail about the general stages of evolution of the material power of the productive forces and hammered out a doctrine - policy of action, in his Anti-Duhring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Even the phrase "permanent revolution" has been muddied by the ideologues and really means continued revolution in the mode of production and not the political (shell) revolution. Marx and Engels must be read again, for the first time.
Socialism is generally referred to as the first phase of communism - at least in the writings of Engels. Marx defined the first stage of communism is no uncertain terms. The problem in the realm of theory is that communism has in the past been identified as an industrial system of production with changed "social relations." This concept is incorrect.
If all of earth had a Soviet form of government no industrial society can lead to communism no matter how the mode of accumulation is organized. Engels put forth a conception of socialism as the first stage of communism wherein the law of value still operated and the society had to build the economic foundation for communism.
At the other extreme communism has been defined as a specific social relations of production, which confuses matters because social relations of production is not fused with the fundamentality of the technology of the infrastructure - it tools and implements, that are the basis on which people organize themselves to use such tools and implements. This breach that disconnects the physical properties of the material power of the productive forces from social relations has been the basis for endless debate over applying a contemporary concept of class and classes. Perhaps later, we can deal with class and classes in American society and how they are formed in the concrete.
Now, the first stage of communism is only possible after - not before, the evolutionary leap in the mode of production is underway. This evolutionary leap does not mean the evolutionary leap from agriculture to industry, but rather the leap - transition, from industrial society to a society whose infrastructure is riveted to advanced robotics, computers and digitalized production process.
Within this theoretical conception - the historical abstraction, is a conception of the dialectic of transformation. This basically means that a process undergoes transition - (the "leap" means transition from one qualitative state of being to another by/buy definition), as the result of the injection into the process of a new qualitative ingredient. This new qualitative ingredient contains its distinct law of emergence and halts expansion and further development on the same basis - makes advance impossible. The impossibility of further advance on the same basis is why the transition process is called a "leap" in the first place. Soviet socialism was an industrial system in transition to the first stage of communism. The leap to the first stage of communism is not possible before the mode of production characterized as the industrial production of the social products begins its transition.
Soviet socialism was a political form of society led by Marxist whose stated goal and practical policy was to industrialize the union of countries as the basis for the advance - evolutionary leap, to communism. "American efficiency and Russian revolutionary sweep," was coined by Comrade Stalin as a doctrine or policy of action. Another one of his slogans was to "master technique."
Comrade Stalin of course stated over and over "the American workers can better tells us how far our advance in industrialization is." Let us forget the fact of 20 wars in 21 years and ponder why Stalin would point to the American workers as having an intuitive grasp of the industrial advance.
I do not seek to belittle anyone but have trouble saying this the right way, without offending anyone.
How can anyone, starting from one point know how far he or she have advanced based on where they are at? It is impossible to know. "Two points" is not enough and a "third point" is required. In real life the problem is more complex because the "third point" is not really a "point" but the emergence of a new qualitative definition that delineates the social process. How can one know they are in the first stage of communism before transition emerges as a material force? In this sense I have maintained that the errors of the Soviet Marxist where of a historical character.
The reason that the issue of Stalin and Soviet socialism continues to emerge on the level of theory is because in the advanced imperial centers we are at a new qualitative juncture and that, which was unclear 50 years ago is pretty obvious today. The question is not "socialism in one country" but the evolutionary development of the productive forces or more accurately what Marx called development of "the material power of the productive forces" and the dialectic of the evolutionary leap.
Just using the concept "the material power of the productive forces," as opposed to simply "the productive forces" deepens ones grasp of Marx meaning of the "mode of production in material life."
Now, this matter of defining the industrial infrastructure is the fundamentality missing from the theoretical conception of the previous generation of Marxist. Not because they were "stupid" or wrong, but because we are historically limited and incapable of proceeding based on a material assumption that has not yet emerged. Engels always maintained that knowledge proceeds along a trajectory from the absurd to the less absurd - his exact words.
I more than less laugh at the statements about what Stalin or this and that leader should have done, and do not take such utterances seriously. A more serious question is the evolution of the value form, which Engels discovered in its historical trajectory and whose law of operation Marx unfolded, which is why Marx was a genius. What was the state of the value form under Soviet socialism?
The value form is torn from itself or rather social products only at a certain stage in the development of the material power of the productive forces. We have reached that stage or the beginning phase of the first stage of the destruction of value.
Melvin P.
