Re: marxism & (under)development

[Bradley Mayer <concrete@xxxxxxxxx>]

>
> At 10:40 AM 4/10/96, Rahul Mahajan wrote:
>
> >Why? All you first world intellectuals going to tell the huddled masses
> >what to do?
>
> Of course not. This isn't exactly a new controversy in the Marxist
> tradition - can you have a socialist transformation of a partly
> industrialized society? Or putting it into a global context, can a
> socialist revolution survive in the Third World without any transformation
> of the First; as Lou said, quoting Lenin, the Russian revolution would
> perish without revolutions to the West. It took a while, but Lenin seems to
> have been proved right?
>
> Teleology is unfashionable these days, but Marx's point about socialism
> emerging from developed capitalism is worth reconsidering after the
> collapse of the USSR and the transformation of China into a giant export
> processing zone.
>
> >What would you suggest people living in places full of injustice and misery
> >do, if it gets shown conclusively that attempts at building socialism are
> >doomed from the start?
>
> I don't know the answer to this, which is why I brought it up. Kerala is an
> inspiring example, but hasn't it run into limits imposed by India's
> poverty?
>
> Doug
>

Time only for semi-casual commentary on this important question.

As in many other instances, there is a tendency to over-dichotomize on
this question.  Lenin has not only been proven correct insofar as the
less developed world is concerned, but all of the critics of
social-democratic reformism have been shown to be correct in regards to
the possibility of an evolutionary, sui-generis development of socialism
"out of" the most developed capitalist (i.e., imperialist) countries, as
well.

Clearly, it is a question of putting two and two together.  Revolutionary
movements towards socialism must be developed in parallel,
(realistically) in accordance with the level of capitalist development in
a country. What connects the two is the common struggle against
imperialism.  Just as the case of the Soviet Union has demonstrated the
impossibility of the development of a socialist society in isolation from
the most advanced capitalist countries - this true only on condition that
those advanced capitalist countries possess a qualitatively superior
development of the productive forces, don't forget - it is just as true
that a socialist movement  in an imperialist country can never deserve
the name revolutionary that does not seriously challange the imperialism
of its own country, much less achieve socialism.  By raising a challange
to the inherently imperialist political regimes of the advanced
countries, the linchpin of the capitalist state of these countries, which
linchpin in turn rests upon the domination of the less developed world,
is exposed to attack. Of course, as everybody knows, the failure to press
that attack was the great historic failure of social-democratic socialism
and its "state" variants (and in the final analysis they remain only
variants on a grand historic scale), stalinism and maoism.

Hence the continued relative importance of Lenin on these questions.

                        -Brad Mayer

"It is not that things have changed so much, but that they haven't
changed enough!"

                -Famous Last Quotes



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