<ITT: discuss various forms of localist politics, e.g. communalism, municipalism, other forms of localist socialist governance, distributism, etcthere are some who still complain that russia was "socialism in one country". i contend that they are right, not because the concept is absurd, but because they do not go far enough. we have not yet taken stalin's gnosis to its logical conclusion and brought it to the hyper-financialized modern era
the current dichotomy in modern discourse has largely been between reformism and revolutionism. ultimately both forms make the mistake of operating as though contradictions are uniformly distributed. it is either you immediately go against the whole system in order to take it down, or you work with the whole system in order gradually reform it into socialism. why are these ultimately the only two notions entertained? the first approach underestimates the adaptability of monopoly capital or they fail to see the difficulty in coordinating an immediate revolution across large spans of the country. i think we all can see the failure of the second approach with its disregard for the blatant capture of bourgeois institutions by capital. maybe instead of still operating at such a high level of social change, we should focus more on what we can achieve on lower levels
this was part of the wisdom in "socialism in one country", it was the recognition that the contradictions were ripe in certain regions over others thanks to imperialism, and the specificity of these contradictions to particular regions only supports rather than detracts from the cultivation of determinate national character (contrary to industrial capital, which constantly strives towards maximal hyperconnectivity and the erosion of all national determinateness). ultimately, if you can not even achieve socialism in one country, there is much less hope in achieving socialism globally. now, we must of course acknowledge that "socialism in one country" was a logical response to imperialism, with the latter's tendency to unite the various classes within a society against a common imperialist bourgeois enemy. it is easy to see this and conclude that various forms of third-worldism are the answer. my issue with such a position is that it simply gives us an excuse to sit on our asses all day. if we actually carefully analyze things, we would notice that developed western nations have a tendency to, after the
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