Re: the "unified socialist camp"

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
> > On the other hand, the Chinese and Vietnamese communists were home-grown
> > nationalist victories -- not part of some sort of unified "world
> > socialist camp."

Brad writes:
> Baran and Sweezy would disagree. So would Mao (before 1960), and Ho Chi
> Minh (all his life). And one interpretation of the failure of Kissinger's
> foreign policy is that Kissinger had no grasp of the fact that Brezhnev
> and company really did still believe in the (long run) world revolution,
> and in the ultimate victory of their brand of socialism.

So what if B&S disagreed? I wasn't making a brief for their viewpoint.
Maybe orthodox economists like to quote Adam Smith as if He were a Fount of
Truth, but Marxists don't do that kind of stuff these days.

Similarly, I was talking about (my perceptions of) objective reality, not
about the subjective feelings of "Great Men" in the historical process.
Marx & Engels make it pretty clear in the GERMAN IDEOLOGY that it's a
mistake to judge anyone by their own self-description or self-perception alone.

Mao and Ho Chi Minh did share a lot, e.g., a statist model of economic
development, and did form a temporary alliance. The two revolutions were
both powered by nationalism and by peasant rebellions. The peasant
revolutions encouraged the similarities, while the nationalism encouraged
the conflict (as when China joined the US and the Khmer Rouge in a
coalition against Vietnam).

Brad wrote:
> >Baran and Sweezy lie?

Louis writes:
> No, they were correct. The world revolution was advancing in the period
> from the end of WWII to the Carter presidency. That is the reason the US
> launched counter-revolutionary wars all across the planet and put enormous
> pressure on the Soviet Union to sell out colonial revolutions...

The problem with this, Louis, is that the "world revolution" was more
unified in its opposition to the US and world capitalism than it was
unified by conditions in individual countries (at least in the long run).
The peasant and anti-colonial rebellions unified the various of the
rebellions after World War II. But as the peasantry's power declined and
the state bureaucracy's rose, the emphasis was more and more on nationalism
and national economic development, so that the basis for the unity of the
"world revolution" declined. This didn't mean that the decline of the
"socialist bloc" was "inevitable" but it suggests that frictions would get
more intense, so that keeping the bloc together would be harder and harder.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine