[no subject]

[Rubyg580@xxxxxxx]

uestions about revolution

In a message dated 96-04-11 Boddhisatva wrote:

>       The questions I have had and asked all the time I have been on the
>list reflects your own frustration with the possible mechanisms for third
>world revolution.  I see three principle problems:
>
>First - Lack of capital resources and markets seem to doom socialist
>revolutions in under-developed countries before they begin (One of Louis
>Proyect's points).
>Second  - Tyrannical and corrupt state structures (Olaechea's problem).
>Third - Feudal social relations that permeate the culture of these nations
>from top to bottom.  (your point).
>
>       I believe that feudal social relations are relatively easy to
>overcome. The attendant culture may require modern productive relations
>before it can be overcome.  Revolutions have always come out of a change
>in relations and culture and then targeted state structures with some
>success.  The problem that has not been dealt with in third world
>revolution or the rest of socialism is capital.
>
>       The proletariat can enforce its will on the state, but not on
>consumers and lenders.  When proletarian revolutions try to push
>development, they risk upsetting fragile economies and making enemies (as
>with the Nicaraguan farmers Proyect described) or taking the Stalinist
>route of compulsion.  Socialists have got to find a way, through
>government credit, or co-op syndication, or whatever to provide the
>capital necessary for economies to change gears and evolve.
>
>       Obviously Perotistas and such would argue that capitalism can do
>this but it clearly has not.  The cost of the tremendous amount of
>capital needed is far too high under capitalism.

The problem with your thinking is that you're not understanding that
CAPITAL is a social relation.  What is needed for development is
primarily human labor, not the social relations of exploiter and exploited,
which is what capital is.

Look at revolutionary China.  They accomplished in less than 30 years
of proletarian rule a tremendous amount of development; development
in an all-round way, not the lopsided sort that imperialism introduces
to the countries it exploits.

They built roads, schools and housing; made major breakthroughs
in medicine using a combination of traditional Chinese herbal remedies
and procedures such as accupuncture along with Western medical
practices.  They went from a huge importer of food with massive starvation,
malnutrition and disease, to a net exporter of food where malnutrition
was long-gone and many diseases had been essentially wiped out,
along with opium addiction which had been epidemic before the revolution.

They did all this, not with massive inputs of capital, but by mobilizing
the population to take on the work for their own benefit.  There were
huge agricultural projects, like the Red Flag Canal, built almost entirely
by hand tools and dynamite, to bring water for irrigation to an arrid
part of the country.  Terraces were built on hillsides everywhere in order
to grow crops in previously unproductive places.

 Many square miles of desert were reclaimed.  The hillsides that had been
stripped bare in pre-revolutionary times by the people's need for firewood
were replanted, and birds returned to vast areas of the country that had
not heard the sound of birdsongs for decades.

It was not the lack of capital that led to the destruction of socialism
in China, but rather the reintroduction of capital into China by the
enemies of the revolution who siezed power back after Mao died.

Comradely,
Gina/ Detroit









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