This is the same old purist (to put the most favorably construction on it)
problem.  Socialism is so refined that no country can actually have it
and thus we capitalists need never fear it.
wcm
>
> Chomsky subscribers:
>
>
> Comments?
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
> From: Jamal Hannah <[log in to unmask]>
>
> One can debate the meaning of the term "socialism," but if it means
> anything, it means control of production by the workers themselves, not
> owners and managers who rule them and control all decisions, whether in
> capitalist enterprises or an absolutist state.
>
> To refer to the Soviet Union as socialist is an interesting case of
> doctrinal doublespeak. The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 placed state
> power in the hands of Lenin and Trotsky, who moved quickly to dismantle
> the incipient socialist institutions that had grown up during the popular
> revolution of the preceding months -- the factory councils, the Soviets,
> in fact any organ of popular control -- and to convert the workforce into
> what they called a "labor army" under the command of the leader. In any
> meaningful sense of the term "socialism," the Bolsheviks moved at once to
> destroy its existing elements. No socialist deviation has been permitted
> since.
>
> These developments came as no surprise to leading Marxist intellectuals,
> who had criticized Lenin's doctrines for years (as had Trotsky) because
> they would centralize authority in the hands of the vanguard Party and its
> leaders. In fact, decades earlier, the anarchist thinker Bakunin had
> predicted that the emerging intellectual class would follow one of two
> paths: either they would try to exploit popular struggles to take state
> power themselves, becoming a brutal and oppressive Red bureaucracy; or
> they would become the managers and ideologists of the state capitalist
> societies, if popular revolution failed. It was a perceptive insight, on
> both counts.
>
> The world's two major propaganda systems did not agree on much, but they
> did agree on using the term socialism to refer to the immediate
> destruction of every element of socialism by the Bolsheviks. That's not
> too surprising. The Bolsheviks called their system socialist so as to
> exploit the moral prestige of socialism.
>
> The West adopted the same usage for the opposite reason: to defame the
> feared libertarian ideals by associating them with the Bolshevik dungeon,
> to undermine the popular belief that there really might be progress
> towards a more just society with democratic control over its basic
> institutions and concern for human needs and rights.
>
> If socialism is the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin, then sane people will
> say: not for me. And if that's the only alternative to corporate state
> capitalism, then many will submit to its authoritarian structures as the
> only reasonable choice.
>
> With the collapse of the Soviet system, there's an opportunity to revive
> the lively and vigorous libertarian socialist thought that was not able to
> withstand the doctrinal and repressive assaults of the major systems of
> power. How large a hope that is, we cannot know. But at least one
> roadblock has been removed. In that sense, the disappearance of the Soviet
> Union is a small victory for socialism, much as the defeat of the fascist
> powers was.
>
> Noam Chomsky
> "Socialism, Real and Fake"
> 1993
>
> http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-3-4.html
>
> [Moderator: "Socialism, Real and Fake" is an excerpt from the book "What
> Uncle Sam Really Wants", Odian Press, 1993, ISBN: 1-878825-01-1 ]
>
> [Moderator: Another version of the comments in the above excerpt can be
> found at http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/86-soviet-socialism.html ]
>