Re: marxism & (under)development

[malecki@xxxxxxxxxx (Robert Malecki)]

>>
>> 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
>
Dear Brad,

For some reason i get the feelinf that the above is a ideological
smokescreen for doing nothing. Perhaps we should start a group or list
called commentators of living class struggle.  malecki




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