topic: Socialism in one country?

post by Kasama from witbd

I would like to raise some points of method.

Turnoviseous uses a method that I consider "idealist" (which means he draws his plans and proposal from fantasies, not from a materialist analysis of reality.)

He posits certain principles, and then complains that the real world socialist process didn't adhere to those "principles."

Well, get used to it.

Our revolution is a complex, real world process -- where we are inevitably surprised, where things we expect don't show up, where things we propose don't always work. There are not big, perfect "principles" that are invented by leading marxists -- like some kind of revealed truth.

Turnoviseous "posits" things at big laws that are, in fact, only dogmatic inventions. For example he says "\Socialism firstly presupposes more developed means of production than the most advanced capitalism can put together."

Who decided that? God?

then Turnoviseous describes Lenin's proposals in "State and Revolution." But Turnoviseous describes these things as "principles" that set how the "how political structure of the dictatorship of proletariat should be organized." And I guess, Turnoviseous thinks that if real world revolution departs from Lenin's proposals, then it can't be considered socialist. But isn't that a little dogmatic?

In fact, many of Lenin's expectations proved to be mistaken. And Lenin, all his life, realized that predictions of earlier marxists often had to be rewritten in light of new developments and experience.

The experience of the Soviet (and then Chinese) revolution showed that it is not possible for the victorious proletariat to abolish a standing army or rely on the much weaker military force of part-time militias.

The reason is that the Soviet Union (and then China) faced threats from major imperialist professional armies.
And real life forced the development of more nuanced policies at different times.

In the soviet union, it proved impossible to literally reduce all specialists and officials to the same wages as workers. Under Stalin, the wage differentials increased in ways that went much to far in the wrong direction -- and this was later criticized sharply in Maoist China. During the Cultural Revolution, major efforts were made in narrowing the distance in wages: they developed an "eight grade wage system" which was far more egalitarian than any society in history.

It is true, as Turnoviseous writes, that Lenin suggested that, "Any cook should be able to be prime minister."

This proved, in fact, not to be possible.

It did not prove possible to just turn over whole industries to the administration by "ordinary workers with a basic knowledge of accounting" -- socialist planning and management has proven quite a bit more complicated.

Turnoviseous suggests that the state could be run by the masses on a rotating basis.

But in fact, in the world of the last century, you couldn't literally take people at random and give them the life and death responsibility of heading the army, or the party, or the educational system, or the foreign policy.

And anyone who seriously thinks about it for a second can see how that is true. (Think of your cousin Barney -- he is a great guy, but should the fate of the socialist revolution be put in his hands, as he is handed "on a rotating basis" the job of head of socialist military training or the historic decisions of new mass transport railroad industry?)

I think you can see from this that Turnoviseous' so-called "principles" are really apriori fantasies -- snatched from his own reading of earlier revolutionary texts -- but turned from real revolutionary worked (by Marx and Lenin) into rigid prescriptions torn from time and context -- that he wants to impose on us all, by ignoring our real world experience.

This will not work. And anyone using this dogmatic, idealist, fantasy method will simply fail to transform the world or liberate the people.

So we will use the living, critical method of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism -- not the scholastic, brittle, dogmatic method promoted by a Trotsky.