Originally posted by Compań
[email protected] 13, 2007 12:02 am
just because they made great econmic advances doesnt mean they were necessarily socialist. fascist and capitalist contries do the same things.
No they don't. The socialist countries made huge strides while providing housing, employment, food, clothing, education, healthcare and the like.
Still not a valid point.
The capitalists use the very same point to argue capitalism is great. The standards of living are improving under capitalism, therefore it's a good system (compare the average worker today to the average worker of 1750 in England).
The plain fact of the matter is that judging a system by that it improves the standards of living is a bad criteria...as it can be then used to justify Nazism. The average German of 1939 was living significantly better than the average German in 1919...so therefore Nazism is a "good system".
You could even use this with slavery. The average American slave in 1850 was far better off than the average American slave in 1650...therefore slavery, by such a criteria, is a "good system".
This is also use-able with Stalinism...compare the average Russian of even 1935 to 1905, the standards of living improved. So therefore, along with slavery, nazism, and capitalism, stalinism is a "good system" by such criteria.
i personally dont consider either one of them socialist because they did not have the workers controlling the means of production.
So, who did control the means of production? The people who coordinated the production and distribution of commodities...although superficially "no one" "owned" the means of production.
In, e.g., the USSR, the party members (the nomenklatura) got their own markets which they could get better quality and foreign goods (even goods made in capitalist states!) just for being party members.
Compare this to, e.g., a non-party member who had to face shortages at the common market of sub-par goods.
It goes without saying that a party member has a different relation to the means of production and labor compared to a non-party member.
Different groups of people with different relations to the means of production and labor results in different classes.
And yes, this position was inherited. See Michael Voslensky's Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, 1st edition (1984).
today pretty much everyone in the world labels them both as capitalist countries and its not because of "democracy" that "socialism" fell out of power.
Source?
No, the reality is that the capitalists (and all their mouth pieces in the media, school systems, etc.) still describe the socialist states as evil communist dictatorships.
The specter still haunts them... See capitalism.org for the description of "socialism" as "evil statist, altruistic dictatorships".
I would agree that some aspects of those countries was socialist, but that doesn't mean that they were socialist. If we label them as socialist, we will confirm the black and white lies of the ruling class that that was how socialism was. Just like we often hear on the news about this or that "communist country".
Capitalism takes on various different forms, so why can't socialism? Capitalism has a class directing the production and distribution of commodities, why can't socialism?
The imperialist-oppressed, cramped, distorted economies of the "third world" countries are still capitalist.. just a different form..
Likewise, the encircled, strangled, bureaucratically deranged socialist countries were still socialist.. Why ever so?
They didn't really have the suitable material conditions before-hand for a socialist revolution, so it seems unlikely that the result from a revolution would be socialism.
Considering that industrialization is one of the key features of early stages of capitalism, and that's exactly what happened in the "socialist" states, that it would take only a master of deduction to say "Ah, it was capitalist after all."
What happened in the USSR wasn't something that went "horribly awry" because some bureaucrat (or bureaucrats) messed up. What happened occurred because of the material circumstances they were faced with, largely being the biggest backwater nation that still hadn't industrialized.
Cuba, obviously, is not the same as the DPRK.. but they both have a centrally planned economy, free education and healthcare, near full employment, etc., and capitalist property relations have been overturned in both .. still, one relies on mass democracy, a "war of the people" strategy of self-defense and internationalism, while the other relies on heavy weapons and massive military spending and has a cult of personality, bureaucratic excess, etc. ... one is a very seriously bureaucratically degenerated sort of socialism, and the other is genuine socialism under very harsh conditions.. but neither are capitalist. Wait until Castro dies, then we'll see things unravel in Cuba. Raul is already trying to reconnect with the U$.
As for the DPRK, it seems to be in a similar predicament where everything will remain as it is until Kim Jung-Il dies.
I'm not sure if the DPRK could legitimately be considered socialist and not feudal, or even some mode of production prior to feudalism (see Dae Sook-suh on the Juche idea)!
Andrei Lankov actually has an interesting position that the Juche idea is little more than a neo-capitalist idea, I haven't read anything directly by him (only analysis of his ideas)...I'm certain that the DPRK-ers will reject both Dae Sook-suh and Andrei Lankov as "bourgeois reactionary pseudo-intellectuals" or something like that.
But there is still not really convincing evidence that the DPRK is or ever was socialist as far as I'm concerned.
As for Cuba's socialism, that has gone the way of the honest politician. They had socialism for a few decades, and now it appears to be dissolving under the moves of Raul.