Re: [Marxism] Getting Over State Socialism's Crimes

["Roger Raven" <rogergen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Indeed, my point is that a sense of proportion is sorely needed, but is sorely 
lacking.   Entrenched and dogmatic opinions - the politics of remembering - 
completely dominate discussion of these matters.     The result is a left 
obsessed with the issue, and a right determined to exaggerate it to infinity 
and exploit it forever.   Socialists should acknowledge the crime, attempt to 
minimise the risk of it ever happening again, but recognise that whatever 
betide, socialism is in fact much less violent.

GULAG for instance was Solzhenitsyn's size probably between 1936 and 1954 - 18 
years.   Yet the USSR was around for 70 years.   I will repeat the point I made 
- which you will have read - literally hundred of thousands of people in the 
former USSR have been dying unnecessarily every year since 1991.  My view is 
that for them the issue was and is not academic; you of course have every right 
to disagree with me.

Contrast that with what has been described as the politics of forgetting - the 
Belgian Congo, for instance, just one crime of capitalism.   Leopold II, King 
of the Belgians is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the 
Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King to extract rubber 
and ivory, which relied on slavery and is held responsible for the deaths of 
between 3 to 10 million.   Many historians consider the atrocities to have 
constituted a genocide.   The conditions would certainly have been more brutal 
than anything in the Gulag.   Just remember, too, people were released from the 
Gulag; they weren't released from slavery.

Among many other great crimes of capitalism are the issue of famine in British 
India arising from colonialism, or the consequences of the British East India 
Company's monopoly on the growing of opium and forcible export to China.   
However, the above will suffice.

I trust that in future discussion of these matters you'll recall to mind such 
things as the Congo Free State, and premature death in the Former Soviet Union.


-- Original Message ----- 
  From: Sayan Bhattacharyya 
  To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition 
  Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2007 10:36 AM
  Subject: Re: [Marxism] Getting Over State Socialism's Crimes


  On 2/2/07, Roger Raven <rogergen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

  >
  > Imperial America has its own pseudo-liberal Gulag.   The United States 
leads the world in putting criminals in jail - according to the International 
Centre for Prison Studies at King's College, London, the United States detains 
714 prisoners per 100,000 people. That amounts to two million prisoners, most 
held in appalling and degrading conditions.

  While no doubt degrading, surely it's a wild exaggeration to compare
  conditions in US prisons with those in the Gulag. A sense of
  proportion is sorely needed.

  ________________________________________________
  YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
  Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism