Milosevic out?

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 10/06/00 02:29PM >>>
I wrote:
> >Please don't equate Milosevic, a total opportunist and rabid nationalist
> >(though he and his wife mouth socialist rhetoric when it's convenient),
> >with Allende, a socialist leader. It dirties the latter's memory.

Louis responds:

>Milosevic presided over state-owned enterprises. By all accounts, he was
>determined to preserve these property relationships against the wishes of
>Nato. ...

(1) state ownership of enterprises only shows the _potential_ for
socialism, not the actuality of socialism. (It's necessary, but not
sufficient.) It's not just a matter of the state owning the means of
production. We must also ask: who owns the state? After all, the Egyptian
Pharaoh owned the land and other major means of production. Do you think
that the workers and peasants of Serbia had significant democratic control
over the Serbian state? (Louis, do you think that Algerian state-owned oil
wells are "socialist"? How about the Tennessee Valley Authority?)

((((((((((((((((((((

CB: Nor was the Paris Commune the actuality of socialism , only a potential for socialism, and one that Marx said was doomed to fail from the beginning. Yet,... as Lenin points out:

  " It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavourable auguries. Marx did not assume the rigidly pedantic attitude of condemning an "untimely" movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from Marxism, Plekhanov, who, in November 1905, wrote encouragingly about the workers' and peasants' struggle, but, after December 1905, cried, liberal fashion: "They should not have taken to arms."

Socialism is coming into the world in imperfect forms, as most things in the real world do. The imperfections , crimes even, of Yugoslavia, the SU, China, Cuba, Korea, Viet Nam, Ethiopia etc. do not mean that those countries' revolutions are not the real advent of socialism for humanity. To paraphrase Engels on another point, the actuality of socialism will come about through a series of potentialities of socialism.

Allende's effort was not the only real glimpse of the communist future, whose name is sullied by association with the others.