What societies were socialist?

[1949]

The incredible emphasis modern communists put on studying the history of the Soviet Union and China makes me wonder if there were, in the Maoist view, any other socialist societies than those two. I understand that most supposedly socialist societies in history were really revisionist, but there are a few I am not sure about, namely:

-Mongolia, from its revolution (which I believe was in 1920) to its falling in line with Soviet revisionism;

-north Korea, before Kim Il Sung's adoption of the revisionist Juche idea (a society I have seen our comrade Andrei X refer to as socialist); and

-Albania, before Hoxha's betrayal (sp?) of Mao Tse-Tung Thought.

Were any of these societies socialist? And were there others?

[JC]

It would be idealism to say there Socialist base ends when Incorrect ideas take root. So I would say that all socialist societys remain socialist till the bitter end .

[celticfire]

I think this is a good discussion - what about Cuba before Castro officially fell in line with the revisionists - or did that occur at the same time they declared the Cuban revolution to be a "Marxist-Leninist" one?

[flyby]

JC said "It would be idealism to say there Socialist base ends when Incorrect ideas take root. So I would say that all socialist societys remain socialist till the bitter end ."

This is a very important question.

Here are my views:

Matter (including class relations) forms the material basis for ideas, but ideas grasped by humans can transform matter. (The influence goes both ways).

It is not idealist to say ideas influence human events, or the nature of societies.

The society is determined by the economic base (essentially the relations of production, including class relations) -- but the relations of production are transformed by changes in the superstructure (by revolution that overthrows the bourgeois state).

In particular:

When revisionist forces come to power in the leadership of the socialist society -- that is a turning point, and the decisive moment in the restoration of capitalism.

it is not magical, in the sense that the next day, everything in the society had changed, and everything has gone from sugar to shit.

But once overall political power in a socialist society falls into revisionist (capitalist roader) hands, the revolution has been reversed, and the rest of society (more or less rapidly) undergoes capitalist restoration.

This has to do with the nature of socialism -- which is already a complex and shifting checkerboard of old capitalist and new socialist relations.

Mao said "If people of the Lin Biao type come to power, it will be relatively easy for them to rig up the capitalist system."

This is a deep, important and controversial summatin.

i won't write more on this right now. but we can and should dig in.

****************************

As for the earlier questions:

I don't think forces like Castro or Kim Il Sung were ever on the socialist road.

Castro was a bourgeois nationalist, who claimed to be a "communist" when he hitched his wagon to the Soviet imperialists. He is no more socialist than Nasser, or Gaddafi.

Kim Il Sung was a revisionist. There was nothing in his politics or movement that had any glint of a communist society. It was (at best) what we call "the second choice" in the Chair's DOP talk -- a welfare state, with some promise of security and food. What Mao called "goulash communism."

In the case of Kim, it was connected with some real feudal, neo-confucian, dynasty, monarchical, religious crap. That isn't a vision of liberation, and it isn't a road to communism. That shit is raw reaction.

And I feel (like BA did in his memoirs) that there was nothing revolutionary about that korean road.

There was a national liberation aspect to the Korean struggle against the U.S. invasion and occupation. (and against Japan before that.) And Kim lead that national struggle. But I don't think he was a communist.

BA also said he didn't think eastern europe was really that socialist after WW2.

I think the world had two great socialist revolutions -- Russia and China. And those were some profound experiences worth summing up correctly -- upholding what was pathbreaking, understanding what needs to be done differently.