MARXISMS, SOCIALISMS AND COMMUNISMS: AN ANALYSIS AND REFORMULATION OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND COMPARATIVE SYSTEMS THEORIES

• Main Author: SILVER, GEOFFREY ALAN
• Language: ENG
• Published: ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst 1987
• Subjects: Economic theory
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8727108

Attempting to square the concrete realities of post-revolutionary Soviet Union and China with their various notions of communism, participants in the Marxist theoretical tradition have found themselves engaged in polemics contending the definitions of socialism and communism, as well as the basis for their development. The absence of consensus within the Marxian tradition has resolved into a confusing disarray of dogmatic confrontations wherein the proponents of the various schools of thought claim that their respective theories, in comparison to others, have captured (epistemological essentialism) the true essence of social development (ontological essentialism). Rejecting the empiricist and rationalist epistemological bases of these confrontations, this dissertation posits an 'Althussarian' notion of overdetermination as an alternative basis with which to critically evaluate the constitutive logic of the contending discourses utilized in attempting to analyze social formations which have experienced 'socialist' revolutions. We define three broad traditional theoretical approaches to these issues: economism, humanism, and overdetermination. Rejecting an apodictic posture toward these contending approaches, this dissertation presents a thorough reading of the works of Marx and Engels in demonstration of the exegetical basis of contending discourses. A discussion of J. V. Stalin's writings is presented as an example of one of the predominant forms of essentialist logic. Charles Bettelheim's works are analyzed and compared to Stalin's. Both Stalin's and Bettelheim's approaches to questions of socialism and communism are found to reduce social development to ahistorical essential characteristics. Their respective strategies for communist development are thereby reduced to propounding those characteristics proclaimed as essences. Rejecting such reductionist analyses, this dissertation concludes in presentation of the type of analytical fruits that might obtain when approaching these issues within the framework of the tradition demarcated by the notion of a conjuncturally overdetermined communist fundamental class process and its conditions of existence.