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Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy
jmc@Steam.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) wrote:
>I suspect Mason Clark is old enough so that it is reasonable to
>ask him whether he denounced the Soviet Empire as non-socialist before
>it collapsed.
John,
I think you are being disinguenuous here: I think you know that
socialists have always referred to the Stalinist countries as "state
capitalist." A vaiant on this has been the abundant use we always
made of Churchill's quip that t"The USSR is the only country with four
lies in its name."
Only during WWII did Western countries flatter the Soviets with the
title "socialist," and we did that through gritted teeth.
>So far as I know, the Social-Democratic parties of Europe did not
>denounce the Soviet Empire as non-socialist, although they did
>criticize it from time to time.
That is ridiculous. Western Social Democratic parties have been
entirely oen-eyed about the nature of the Soviets ever since Stalin,
as Minister of Nationalities, drowned the Georgian SSR, his own
country's democratic Menshevik government, in blood in 1922.
>To call it not socialist at all excuses Mason Clark and other
>pro-socialists from learning anything from the disaster of "existing
>socialism". "Oh, that has nothing to do with us, even though many of
>the slogans are the same."
Again this is not true. Socialists have been aware of the necessity
for signalling systems in the economy since the twenties -- and have
invented all the equivalents which are used in such socialist
economies as Sears Robuck, the US armed forces, US Steel, GM and so
on.
The Soviet Union was not a disaster of existing socialism, Ronald
Reagan's vain claim. It was the disaster of centralism, tyranny,
price fixing, censorship, and the warfare state: anti-socialism five
ways.
-dlj.
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