WHAT WERE THE IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SOCIALISM IN THE SOVIET BLOC AND SOCIALISM IN THE THIRD WORLD?
To understand the differences between Socialism in the Soviet Union and in the third world, we first have to explain what Socialism in the Soviet and the third world context really mean. The phrase the 'the third world' is generally taken to include the Americas south of the United States; the whole of Africa; Asia apart from the Soviet Union, China and Japan; and the oceanic islands apart from Australia and New Zealand.1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels theorised in general terms about the transition between Capitalism and Communism. They reasoned that between Capitalist and Communist society there would be 'the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.' They also contended that the social order during this period would be "a communist society, not as it had developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, as it has emerged from capitalist society." They referred to this transitional social order between capitalism and communism as the 'inf!erior stage of communism' and frequently as 'Socialism.' Alec Nove in his book 'Political, Economy and Soviet Socialism' comments that there is "Basic unclarity about the meaning both of 'socialism' and of the 'transition period'." Alan Abouchar says, "T
wo people rarely mean the same thing when they refer to communism and socialism. Yet, apart from Cuba, when it comes to radical social change, none of them has gone beyond a Socialist-sounding rhetoric. This is however, an exceptional and limiting case; most th!ird world states have been able to acquire a degree of control over their economies which, though highly variable, disproves any simplistic notion of the state as merely the product and plaything of external economic forces. Control of the economy is thus intimately linked to external relations, and provides a ready indicator of the government's autonomy vis-a-vis the outside world. "4 Since the most profitable and easily controlled areas of economic activity are those concerned with external trade and especially export production, economic management provides the clearest and most literal example of the role of the third world state as broker between domestic and external interests. The term socialism has been widely abused especially where the notion of socialism had only recently penetrated countries where the demands, or at least the yearnings, for social justice were widespread. In both situations, state power did not pass into the hands of the working class or a coalition of exploited classes, and neither of these cases was there a conjuncture of internal and international contradictions that would have enabled these societies to do without further capitalist development and pass directly to the construction of socialism. "The essential factor that makes a national revolution differ from a neo-colonial regime is the government's determination to control the country's resources, and this determination is revealed in nationalisation of industry. The ideology of these regimes crystallised around anti-colonialism and a usually! rather emotional anti-imperialism, with nationalism as the supreme value. A 'banana republic' is a state whose domestic economic management had been co-opted by external companies to a degree that deprives the state of autonomy even in the conduct of its own affairs. Yes, they did share many things in common, for example; coercion and terror from 'above', a military dictatorship, a planned economy and state intervention. "On the whole, third world governments have a positive interest in encouraging production for the world market in order to increase their revenue base,"5 and this explains why even self-confessedly 'socialist' regimes have often proclaimed extremely liberal investment policies, and maintained close relations with Trans-national corporations, "especially in fields such as mineral production where technological and marketing factors call for vertically integrated structures for extraction, transport and processing. state ownership of the means of production; continuing non-democratic, authoritarian regime; rapid industrialisation based on a very high rate of investment and a nominal commitment to equity and social justice, subject to the constraints imposed by the nation's other goals. It can be said therefore that the important difference between socialism in the soviet and socialism in the third world is that those countries who claimed to be socialist were actually, by strict definition to the soviet model, not socialist.
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