Chavista Club World • Page 23

That's a pretty big reason I would say. Both were "backward" politically, only having (mostly failed) democratic revolutions in the early 20th century. So in this sense they did not have democracy as a political tradition like the US and some European countries.

They were also relatively undeveloped in terms of economics: they had many peasants and relatively few urban dwellers, fewer still in the merchant classes, or as business owners, i.e. the bourgeoisie. Capitalism had not developed yet. Marx always envisioned socialism coming after capitalism, the idea of "skipping" capitalism as a stage of development is a Leninist innovation.

In the course of history, democracy and capitalism have been developed together in countries in ways that are directly effected by the economic distribution of its people, which some call the material conditions*. In Great Britain and Holland/the Low Countries, the development of capitalism and burgeoning democracy occurred because, as the old Lord-Serf relationships of feudalism were breaking down in favor of the centralization that dominated the 17th and 18th centuries, former serfs relied on certain freedoms in order to find work and survive. These included freedom of movement (you probably have to move to a rapidly developing city) and fair taxes and less government meddling in the economy** (business owners have to pay their workers and sell what they produce).

Such rights benefited all of the former serfs, the business owners, and the landlords, so they were united in their orientation against the state in support of these rights. United in this historical moment, this bloc of classes in GB and Holland was able to exert great political power and get the concessions they needed from the government, which amounted to essentially the creation of capitalism.

As the Enlightenment started to become so popular and influential, ideas of democracy came with it. The American and French Revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas which guaranteed these freedoms as self-justifying, the correct organization of society. In Britain, they did not have as much violence, but people were fighting for the opening of their democracy contemporaneously with those revolutions, and by 1832 Great Britain passed its first Reform Act which began a series of such Acts that gradually expanded suffrage until it became just about universal, around the same time China and Russia were having their first shots at democracy at all. (The old autocratic regimes of central Europe - Prussia cum Germany and the Hapsburg Empire - crushed revolutions in 1848 and prevented any kind of democratizing until after WW1, when it was forced on them.)

So basically...China and Russia never went through any of that. Neither successful democratic revolution nor the GB/Holland style development over time through less discrete political struggle. Russia was the last European country to abolish serfdom at the same time as the US was having its civil war. China, being outside of Europe, is a much different situation, but saying that the same was more or less true for that country wouldn't be incorrect. The material conditions were different, so nothing played out exactly the same, but they were largely agrarian and the old feudal relations (which Mao identified as only one thing which needed breaking down, along with foreign imperialism and bourgeois capitalism) were not broken down when democracy or communism was ascendant.

So they didn't have a tradition of democracy in those countries and, by trying to 'skip' the capitalist phase, they were also skipping the conditions from which latent desire for democracy emerged in Europe, so it didn't develop over the course of their revolutions, either. Many of the deaths attributed to communism are partially the result of efforts to skip this phase: the Great Leap Forward, Stalin's Five Year Plans, forced collectivization. Ironically, this very quick and very deadly industrialization in these countries was only possible because of their backwardness - they could look to countries which had already done so and work towards their results instead of allowing the market and the material and political conditions to work themselves toward the results. But that natural process is also what developed democratic traditions in many countries - that, or successful liberal capitalist/democratic revolutions. Neither of which China or Russia had.


*(Also defined as "the union of production capacity and the social relations of production" which can be understood to mean the resulting conditions from how much a society can produce and how it produces in terms of how the people who produce relate to what they produce. Are they an independent farmer, selling their excess crops at the local market and eating what they need? Are they a wage laborer, getting paid for their labor based on how much time they spend working? Are they a serf farmer, who works for a lord who distributes the products of their labor as he sees fit? These are different social relations of production.)

**Note that mercantalist, pre-keynesian 'government meddling' was less about regulation per se than it was about levying taxes at every opportunity and controlling the flow of goods and labor for the benefit of the state alone. It was of a very different character than what is called 'government meddling in the economy' nowadays.

 

Wow thank you! That was extremely helpful

 

I'm glad you understood it haha let me know if there was any of it you didn't get

 

Here's a short excerpt from Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution that discusses the historical peculiarities of Russia's development.

Leon Trotsky: The History of the Russian Revolution (1.1 Peculiarities of Russia's Development)

Interesting how he talks about the "privilege of historic backwardness" - the privilege of being able to go through advances like industrialization without all the fits and starts that its original innovators have to endure. The tragic irony of this in the USSR and China is that because of things like Lysenkoism, and Mao's more insane ideas like the Four Pests Campaign and the Backyard Furnace Campaign, those two countries essentially negated that privilege. Which is part of the reason I said in the politics thread last night that Lysenko is one of the dumbest and most malignant people in history

"Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. The European colonists in America did not begin history all over again from the beginning. The fact that Germany and the United States have now economically outstripped England was made possible by the very backwardness of their capitalist development. On the other hand, the conservative anarchy in the British coal industry – as also in the heads of MacDonald and his friends – is a paying-up for the past when England played too long the role of capitalist pathfinder. The development of historically backward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process. Their development as a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character."

 

That sent me down the rabbit hole of Lysenko and I came across this description on Wikipedia:

That is some serious alchemy shit right there

 

He was a ridiculous figure. So many starved because of the adoption of his psuedoscientific policies he pushed. I would argue he also contributed to a general denial of scientific reality in China and Russia that made it easier for Mao to push for things like killing all the fucking sparrows or forcing peasants to make useless pig iron in their backyards instead of doing anything useful. It also made it harder to back away from those policies when their failure became evident because they had to come up with a theoretical reason that it was actually the fault of Trotskyists or Capitalist Roaders instead of denial of basic agricultural developments and metallurgy.

 

Anyone read "The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore Allen?

 

+1000 with what Wharf Rat said. I've spent a couple years in Russia, and this is one main difference with the European and North American countries : Russia (and China) never had a class of workers that were literate and went to bars and cabarets, of peaceful merchants having their classy little homes built, all of what forms the "bourgeois" culture.

In the Marxist view of history, there are six stages of politics :

1) Primitive communism, where the prehistoric tribesmen bringing the mammoth meat share it with the berrypickers' harvest and with the work of the ones staying in the cave.

2) Antique society, with slaves and slave owners. See Rome, ancient Greece.

3) Feudal society, with nobles and serfs, where serfs have a tiny pack of rights as opposed to the slaves who were, well, slaves, and in which nobles have to share some of the power with the church and, in some cases, a wealthy class of citizens, the beginning of the bourgeoisie (mostly merchants). See the Middle Ages.

4) Bourgeois society, with the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Technically, the proletariat are free citizens with the same rights as the bourgeoisie, but they're held in economical chains, having to earn a wage to live until the next while the bourgeois takes the biggest part of the wealth produced by labor and live a beautiful, comfortable and luxurious life. It's described by Marx as slavery by the hour, in which the technically free proletary sells his time and labour force to the bourgeois in order to survive. See, the 18th century until now.

5) Socialism, or the dictature of the proletariat, in which the proletariat rose up, smashed the bourgeoisie, seized the means of production and have formed a powerful state fed by the wealth created in the means of production in order to get rid of the class system to reach part

6) Communism, a stateless, class society in which all people work because it's good for everyone, according to the principle "from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their needs". At this point, money doesn't exist anymore, and worker A, a bricklayer, works on houses that aren't his and for which he isn't paid because he know he'll have some of the farmer's meat and vegetables, will be healed if needed by the doctor, and will ride on the driver's tramway made by the steel workers. All of that without money.


The big problem is that Russia and China have jumped from step 3 to step 5, and had thus to change the Marxist theory (mainly by including the uneducated, illiterate, and most importantly religious, farmers to the prolateriat, that was supposed to be composed of the school-educated, agnostic/atheist, somewhat cultured factory workers) and never had a real cultural base to begin with, since all of the culture was held by the nobles, while in a bourgeois society, the proletariat would include some artists, writers, teachers etc.

 

The idea of trying to turn farmers and peasants into proletarians through labor and strife was probably the dumbest of Lenin's ideas

 

@Contender @dylan @Zac Djamoos @Wharf Rat @Dominick @sophos34

 

(and eventually getting their dick stuck in the disposal)

 

Instructions not clear: dick caught in capitalist rhetoric.

 

This post should be stickied

 

You guys should post in this lay language more often, this was an excellent explanation and something I'm tempted to copy/paste and show people who are idiots about this topic lol

 

Kinda confused about this -- if their "backwardness" allowed for rapid industrialization and economic growth, why were democratic conditions not also developed just as well? I don't get how this idea of the "latest desire for democracy" wouldn't come about. If they were able to mimic the goals of other countries economically, why not politically?

 

So what I'm saying is - and, people could disagree with me of course - is that democratic traditions in the west emerged from either enlightenment inspired liberal democratic revolutions or a long, slow process of reform that coincided with the long, slow development of capitalism. Russia and China had no (successful) liberal democratic revolutions and purposely skipped the long, slow development of capitalism. So, neither of the conditions in which democratic traditions organically arose in the west were present in either of those countries.

This is not to say that, had the political will been there, democracy could not have been created, because it could have imo, but it is to say that Russia and China lacked what made it an established political tradition in the west. And without that there was less of a necessity for democracy to be an integral part of the communists' political program (even if it was a nominal part).

Of course, there is always the question of what happens when socialists implement democracy when they are opposed by capitalist superpowers, which historically tends to be: democratic institutions are manipulated by those capitalists and used to destroy the socialist movement, replacing it with, at best, a liberal democratic government, and more likely, an undemocratic puppet state. But, I don't say this to justify the lack of democracy, I just think it is something critics tend not to give its due weight.

 

posting here cuz relevant

thread v

 

200 years of Marx today. HBD Poppa Karl

 

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