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From: dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer)
Newsgroups: news.misc,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Re: Beyond Perestroika
Message-ID: <1658@orion.cf.uci.edu>
Date: 2 Apr 89 23:59:21 GMT
References: <3982@kremvax.mosc.cccp>
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Reply-To: dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu.UUCP (David Lawyer)
Organization: University of California at Irvine.  Electrical Engineering
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In article <3982@kremvax.mosc.cccp> gorby@kremvax.mosc.cccp (Mikhail Gorbachev)
writes:  (Not really.  This was an April fools message that I didn't
find humorous)
>
>    For some time it has been apparent that Socialism is a dismal
>failure.  I am convinced that the fundamental internal contradiction of
>Socialism lies in Marx's famous dictum "From each according to his
>abilities, to each according to his need."  So simple.  So humane
>sounding.
>    And so fundamentally evil.
>
This is a dictum of communism not socialism.  Communism does not exist
in the USSR (and the USSR emphatically denies its existence both today
and in the past).  This dictum has not been followed in the USSR
(except perhaps under conditions of War-Communism during the Civil
War).  Almost the entire remainder of the "gorby" posting was based on
this false premise (that the Soviet system has been based on "From each
according to he abilities ...).

This statement by Marx is an abberation since Marx generally restricted
his efforts to criticizing capitalism rather than proposing a communist
system.