Is There a Noncapitalist Road?; Crisis Within the Crisis

Abstract

My remarks will be blunt because of time limits. Perhaps that is just as well, if they thereby also help sharpen some of the issues. In Marxist circles, and prominently advanced at this conference, there is a widespread theory that a third line of social development exists, one that is neither capitalist nor socialist but which nevertheless leads inexorably to socialism. This "non-capitalist development" is supposed to be achieved by those Third World countries which introduce democratic reforms of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-feudal nature. Nations that undertake such reforms are thought to be ipso facto in a clear-cut transition stage between national liberation and socialist revolution.

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