Re: Milosevic out?

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
> (1) state ownership of enterprises only shows the _potential_ for
> socialism, not the actuality of socialism. ...

Charles writes:
> CB: Nor was the Paris Commune the actuality of socialism , only a
> potential for socialism, ...

of course. But socialism is _about_ the self-liberation of the working
class. (Marx's dictum is that the only the workers can liberate the working
class.) State-owned property is only a means to this end, not the end itself.

> 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...

I'd say instead that these cases were efforts to replace capitalism in the
effort to develop national economies (since capitalism had failed at this
task). Because of the participation of workers and peasants in the
revolutions, these efforts were relatively egalitarian. As Gershenkron's
analysis suggests, the fact that these countries came last to the
development effort meant that the state played a bigger role in the
process. (He was an orthodox economist, but he based a lot of his ideas on
previous work by Marxists, as Brenner points out.) Whether one calls the
relatively egalitarian statist economic development efforts "socialist" or
not is the kind of sterile academic debate I try to avoid.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine