Date: Tue, 23 Aug 94 23:36:58 CST  
From: "Cynthia Hoffman" <choff@violet.berkeley.edu>
To: badsubjects@uclink.berkeley.edu
Subject: Socialism, Cold War, Chomsky

Since these three things have recently appeared on this list, I thought some
people might be interested in this post from the Chomsky newsgroup on
Usenet:


From rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Tue Aug 23 15:59:15 EDT 1994
Subject: Today's Quote...
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 08:35:14 GMT

One major issue now which has devastated a good bit of the left and
has caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere is the alleged fact that
there's been this great battle betwen socialism and capitalism and
capitalism won and socialism lost.  And the reason it lost is because
the Soviet Union turned out to be a failure, and that shows that
socialism has lost ...  [W]hy don't they say that democracy failed?
And the proof that democracy failed is, look what happened to Eastern
Europe.  I mean after all, those countries called themselves democratic,
in fact they called themselves "people's democracies," real advanced
forms of democracy.  So why don't we conclude that democracy failed?
Well, I haven't seen any article anywhere saying "look, democracy failed,
let's forget about democracy," and it's obvious why.  The fact that they
_call_ themselves democratic doesn't say that they _were_ democratic -
that's pretty obvious.  Well, in what sense did socialism fail?  Certainly
it's true that they called themselves socialist, but they also called
themselves democratic.  Were they socialist?  You can argue about what
socialism is, but there are some ideas that are at the core of it, like
workers control over production and elimination of wage labor and things
like that.  Did they have that?  There wasn't even a thought.  In the
pre-Bolshevik period, there were in fact socialist initiatives.  They
were crushed instantly, within months they were crushed.  In fact, just
as whatever moves there were towards democracy were instantly destroyed,
whatever moves there were towards socialism were equally instantly
destroyed.  The Bolshevik takeoever was sort of a coup, which was sort
of a counterrevolution.  We certainly understand this easily enough with
regard to the claim to democracy, how come we don't understand it with regard
to the claim to socialism?

                 Noam Chomsky speech 6/16/94 at Woods Hole, MA

Comments anyone?

Cynthia