Peter (F),
As I read your message I wondered about your statement,
"In other words, these countries had never experienced a workers revolution. Human history rarely follows a set script, there's lots of synthesis around familiar patterns and within historically determined constraints. Who could have predicted stalinism in the 19th century (or even during the Russian Revolution)? But in retrospect it makes sense that it happened. But please don't call it "socialist"!!! We haven't seen socialism yet."
I guess I question somewhat the utopian way in which socialism is defined in the above quote. I mean there are romantic notions of capitalism also and we could say - oh we have not experienced capitalism yet. Capitalism too never achieved its "ideal" form and my take is Marx approached the topic materiatically.
I guess what I am asking and maybe this gets close to Eugene's comments is that when discussing socialism should not we approach it materiastically. Like capitalism, socialism has a material basis that should not be left unexamined. Stalin is a distortion, one could even argue a capitalist in certain regards, but it seems there is a material basis to this thing we call socialism that can take one farther than "we have not experienced it yet".
Nate
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Farruggio
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2000 7:43 PM
Subject: Fwd: socialist societies
Paul suggested I post this private message to the list. I don';t know how popular communist politics is to the list membership, but here goes...
Elisa, Paul,
I suggest you read Trotsky for an analysis of the social and material nature of the stalinist societies, which have recently rejoined the ranks of market capitalism. His most explicit writing on this was The Revolution Betrayed in 1937 (?) in which he described the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state," which was not socialist. In the early 1950s some trotskyists continued this analysis to characterize the newly formed "socialist" satellite states in Eastern Europe as "deformed workers' states" because capitalism had been abolished (by Stalin's use of the Red Army), but replaced by a non-democratic state bureaucracy. In other words, these countries had never experienced a workers revolution. Human history rarely follows a set script, there's lots of synthesis around familiar patterns and within historically determined constraints. Who could have predicted stalinism in the 19th century (or even during the Russian Revolution)? But in retrospect it makes sense that it happened. But please don't call it "socialist"!!! We haven't seen socialism yet.
Pete
I don't think that the continued subjugation of women in 20th century socialist societies demonstrates that male exploitation of women is a more fundamental relation of exploitation in capitalist society but it very well demonstrates that the kind of socialism that was practiced in these countries didn't really transform the family relation either, as far as I know: the nuclear family certainly didn't go out of existence and Marx and Engels saw that as the primary locus of the exploitation of women in capitalist society. These socialist states however were marred in a number of ways. I see the 20th century socialist experience in terms of the international struggle between capitalist and socialist states. Perhaps the time wasn't ripe yet as Rosa Luxemburg thought, and the formation of the Leninist Party that morphed into the socialist totalitarian state, led to its final demise. More speculation.
I don't know if this clarifies my position about the position concerning the subjugation of women in capitalist society. There is certainly a lot of room for thought.
Paul H. Dillon
But it seems that historical marxist societies persisted in discriminating women. And that non-capitalist societies still discriminate or subjugate women (and have done so). It seems that the subjugation of women is prior to class division, it is more archaic, primitive, atavistic. And even more universal than class opression.
Elisa Sayeg
cyborg@uol.com.br
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