Re: [Marxism] Re: State capitalism -- addition

[Octob1917@xxxxxxx]

You write:

Few people who actually lived there had any such illusions.


Reply:

How do you know? did you happen to conduct a census? This is like the sweeping 
statements made by bourgeois politicians and their media stooges all throughout 
the Cold War.

I mentioned in my last post that I have a Polish friend, now living in the US, 
who tells me that he and many of his Polish friends consider the Brezhenev era 
to be the 'Golden Years'. Is he a liar?

He also vehemently attacks the Solidarity Movement which helped bring down the 
Polish government as reactionary. I'm also in contact with many Russian emigres 
and they, without exception, speak highly of the Soviet Union and the lives 
they once enjoyed there.

Like many, myself included (originally from Scotland but who moved to the US in 
search of the American Dream) they were all led to beleive that the US, the 
West in genral, was some Utopia where the streets dripped with gold, where a 
life of excitement and glamour beckoned. As I, and they, have found, it was a 
lie.

What about the Cuban dissidents?  Are their existence and activities against 
socialism in Cuba to be taken as proof of the evils of Cuba? Then there's 
Venezuela, where millions have marched against Chavez and the Bolivarian 
Revolution. Are we to now assume that this is also a Stalinist regime?

The simple fact is that socialist states, including the Eastern Bloc, developed 
largely according to the external pressures placed on them by the West. Our 
mission, at least I believe it is our mision, as Marxists living in the West, 
is not to attack those trying to build socialism, but instead to attack the 
system of imperialism trying to undermine their efforts.

Succeed in doing that then we are in a position to begin criticising and 
dissecting the nature of such states.

JoeD

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