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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: What is socialism?
Message-ID: <190@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-Feb-85 20:30:17 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.190
Posted: Mon Feb 11 20:30:17 1985
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<mike wants Rich Carnes to come up with a non-Utopian
criteria for a socialist state.  The implication is that Carnes
doesn't think any of the states now calling themselves socialist
are socialist.  I don't think Carnes ever said that; I hope he didn't.

My own criteria (which I think would have been Marx's) come from
the best book on Marx of the last ten years or so -- G.H. Cohen's
"Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense" (Princeton University
Press, 1978).  [Frankly, I must agree with comments about Carnes'
quotes on Pachter that we've heard that all before].

Cohen's book (and subsequent microeconomic elaborations of it, such
as John Roemer's "A General Theory of Exploitation and Class" [Harvard
University Press, 1983] -- a book which even neoclassical welfare
economists like Amartya Sen recommend -- but it's SO TOUGH...])
says that Marx held to a "stages of historical development" theory
that says that economic systems are overthrown when alternative
economic systems can provide as good or better outcomes with less
structural exploitation.

In the context of capitalism vs socialism, this means overthrowing
a system (capitalism) where exploitation is based on property and status
differentials in order to establish a system where exploitation is based
only on status differentials (socialism).

Lots of socialist countries, that is those which underwent a capitalist
phase, meet this criterion of overcoming systems based on more axes of
exploitation and then establishing systems based on fewer axes of
exploitation.  I would place the USSR and Eastern Europe from Hungary
northwards in this category, at the least.  Cuba would also apply,
some other countries too, perhaps.  Any country which was substantially
penetrated by capitalist market enterprise before its shift to socialist
systems should be called, by my criterion, socialist.  So I would
define it by history as well as by current conditions (apartness from
capitalism and state management of the economy).

Tony Wuersch