Are we conditioned? -- LiveWire Teen Forums

"Davidson makes three more important criticisms of my article that deserve a response. First, he cannot forgive me for refusing to draw what he considers to be the obvious lesssons of the failure of the Soviet Union, to wit that centralized socialist planning cannot work. Let me begin by saying that even if the Soviet Union provided the kind of lessons Davidson claims, the lessons of the market in similar societies are such (at least for the classes with whom I identify) that I would still favor risking the problems associated with central planning instead of those associated with the market, i.e. the path of Cuba over that of China (for reasons given in my article). Fortunately, living in a developed capitalist society, the choices before us are very different, and it is not evident that what was called "socialism" in the Soviet Union has anything whatsoever to teach us about how central planning would work in a socialist America. Davidson reacts to this observation by offering an analogy with the history of the automobile and the airplane: "There was a range of different designs in the beginning: weird dirigibles or devices that flapped their wings, three wheeled cars, steam powered devices. Some, like the Zeppelins or Stanley Steamers, even succeeded for a while. But most of the initial range perished in evolutionary cul de sacs or dead ends. Do we want to say these were not true automobiles or airships because they didn't match Henry Ford's or the Wright Brothers' definitions or models? Socialism has clearly produced some evolutionary dead ends; it's much better to dig deep into the lessons, rather than deny their relevance or existence". It's worth quoting Davidson's analogy at length, because his view of the relevance of the Soviet experience is widely shared, even among socialists.

In replying, I will stick with Davidson's own analogy. All the automobiles and airplanes he mentions had at least engines in common. That's why they could be treated as varieties of the same thing. But how would we characterize a contraption that its inventor called an "automobile" but had only horses to pull it? Is it really "Talmudic reasoning" to insist that certain minimum conditions are necessary to qualify as a real attempt to build "socialism"? Perhaps the most basic lesson of Marx's materialism is that you can't make something out of nothing, and after the destruction of World War I and the civil war, Russia�already a third world country before the war� had next to nothing with which to construct a socialist society. Socialism, according to Marx, could only solve the social and economic problems inherited from capitalism because the enormous achievements of capitalism were available as a foundation on which to build. None of these material, social, organizational, political, educational, and psychological foundation blocks were available to Lenin's government. Socialism was never understood by anyone before the l920's as an alternative to capitalism as a way of industrializing and modernizing underdeveloped societies.

These remarks are not meant to deny that most of the people who led the Soviet Union held socialist ideas and goals, or that the society they constructed contained socialist aspects (socialized medicine, for example), or even that in due time it may have become a precursor of socialism, but it was never socialist. Whatever its achievements, and there were many�rapid industrialization, the victory over fascism, the abolition of poverty, Sputnik, and others� just as the alternative paths that were available on which to advance, and there were a few�Trotsky and Bukharin offered two�must be put down on another register. And if the Soviet Union was never socialist, it cannot offer us any lessons regarding the kind of socialism we can build on the basis of the enormous advantages we possess and they didn't (see my article) here and now. When the Soviet Union still existed, many anti-socialists used it as an example to show that socialism could not work. Now that it is gone, some market socialists use its failure to make the same point. They're both wrong. Irrelevance has never been a good argument."

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/davidson_reply.php

"A brief word on the applicability of my critique to third world countries that have tried to construct their own versions of market socialism. There is no question but that all my criticisms of the market�if only a few of my complimentary remarks (since these were all directed at the more democratic features of market socialism)�apply to these countries, as the recent experiences of China and Vietnam make abundantly clear. But it is also evident that these countries do not possess the material and social preconditions, such as we do in the advanced capitalist world, that would make socialism possible. The intentions, however admirable, of some socialist political leaders cannot substitute for a practise that history has placed beyond their reach. The real choice for these societies, therefore, would seem to be between a dictatorial form of savage capitalism, with socialist trimmings (China), and a progressive, egalitarian, anti-imperialist dictatorship, with different socialist trimmings, that is neither capitalist nor socialist (Cuba). If the political dictatorship is not too severe, I favor the latter option if only because social and material benefits are shared more equally under such regimes, other social problems associated with the market are either missing or minimal, and the anti-imperialist foreign policy that these regimes generally follow creates difficulties for the world-wide rule of capital. Only socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist lands, however, could create the conditions that would enable the underdeveloped countries whose regimes have declared in favor of socialism to make substantial progress in this direction."

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/market_mystification.php

I am currently trying to find information on North Korea.

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