D
droid
Guest
heh.
I might be going off on a tangent here but I don't see how any "debunking" of the Labour Theory of Value is supposed to affect the validity or otherwise of being for or against Capitalism, by which I mean the dominant social system that exists today however you'd like to call it.
Capitalism is a flawed system. Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that one of the concerns of Marxism: exposing its flaws and internal contradictions etc? As dHarry quotes above, it thrives as it lurches from one self-generated crisis to the next.
There is no point in "promoting" the prevailing order. It's like doing an advertising campaign for gravity.
Reaching for the dictionary is something my old man used to do around the family dinner table. Constant appeals to a higher authority. It happens here a lot too.
I assume you're fucking around, but i'm not sure what the joke is.
Are you saying that Vietnam and Cambodia were invaded by the Soviet union?
If so, that's a demented cold war fantasy. Even hardline pro Western historians have acknowledged that the Soviet role in Vietnam was extremely limited.
And as for Cambodia? I cant think of any serious commentator who has even suggested soviet interference there.
Consider the state departments' opinion:
Western acts are always defensive and benign...
The threat was not primarily the USSR and China, which were not aggressively expansionist.
The threat (as seen by US planners) was from national independent movements and social revolutionaries in 3rd world countries potentially preventing access to the exploitation of 3rd world resources
China believed it might be invaded by the Soviet Union (the fear of this invasion might even be the real reason for the US involvement in Viet Nam -- the though of combining soviet arms and resources with chinese man power must have sent chills down the spine of the US defense establishment ... but that's just speculation on my side).
Can you explaiin what you mean more clearly? One minute you say China feared USSR invasion, the next that America invaded (maybe) Vietnam to keep them apart.
The SU invasion of China was feared by the US and by China. China didn't want to be invaded, naturally. The US feared what a combination of the SU and China could do after a successful invasion.
I don't know how real this danger was, it might have been speculative.
Anyway, Marxism is explicitly and openly an imperialist ideology with the goal of establishing a world-wide socialist state.
In the USSR, Trotsky was the figure who advocated 'permanent revolution' - the same Trotsky that was politically isolated , exiled and then eventually assassinated by Stalin, whose main desire was to consolidate his power (which was what the purges were all about), not to project it around the globe - curbing workers movements in his policy of 'peaceful coexistence' with capitalism, and this approach continued to dominate Soviet policy throughout the cold war.
[...] Stalin, whose main desire was to consolidate his power (which was what the purges were all about), not to project it around the globe - curbing workers movements in his policy of 'peaceful coexistence' with capitalism, and this approach continued to dominate Soviet policy throughout the cold war.
This much is true, 'socialism in one country' was the other phrase used at the time. Reading Tony Judt's Postwar recently, it was striking just how cautious Stalin was in projecting Soviet power beyond the buffer.
This is true, but I would argue that this is not indicative of JS's ultimative intentions, but because the rest of the world has made it very clear in various ways that it was not willing to tolerate Soviet expansion without serious fighting.
Reading Tony Judt's Postwar recently, it was striking just how cautious Stalin was in projecting Soviet power beyond the buffer.
The proposition that the West acted aggressively only in response to 'reds under the bed' is a self-justifying paranoid fantasy, and if you look at internal documentation from the US and UK its clear that this was not how elites viewed the situation. Its also the case that any independent move to the left in the third world was automatically portrayed as 'intervention from Moscow', regardless of the facts.
We also now know that the USSR from the mid 60s onwards was in no position economically to project its power in the way you are asserting it did.
Its interventions were primarily limited to arms shipments and espionage.
Which I guess supports droid's point about direct Soviet intervention being limited to the Eastern Bloc countries (and Afghanistan) - and Chinese intervention in/invasion of Tibet and other E/SE Asian states.
So what about, for example, 'Maoist' guerrillas like these Shine Path guys in Peru? Did/do they act totally independently from China (and the USSR)?
I think that trying to figure out which one out of the USSR or the USA were more aggressively expansionist/imperialist during the cold war is a finally unsolvable question that doesn't really ultimately touch on the issues of communism and capitalism, or the communist critique of capitalism, today. But I could be wrong.
So it was a pragmatic adjustment to the situation, a bit of realpolitik. In this respect, are the post-Trotsky leaders of communist countries (for the most part) any different from those of capitalist countries? I take your point about the nature of the ideology outlined in the links below, but the gulf between the classical Marxism of the academic world and the application of the theory in the real world is enormous.
Marxist purists imagine both a withering of the state and the eventual abolition of national boundaries (iirc, tho i could be wrong on the 2nd part).
I think that trying to figure out which one out of the USSR or the USA were more aggressively expansionist/imperialist during the cold war is a finally unsolvable question that doesn't really ultimately touch on the issues of communism and capitalism, or the communist critique of capitalism, today. But I could be wrong.
So what about, for example, 'Maoist' guerrillas like these Shine Path guys in Peru? Did/do they act totally independently from China (and the USSR)?