Thread by @BrankoMilan

(Long thread)
I am rereading vol. 2-3 of Kolakowski's magisterial "Main currents of Marxism" (read it in 1982-3; written in late 1970s). Will write a post on it later.
The erudition is awe-inspiring. Writing excellent. Clear, very logical sentences. The use of irony is sparing.

Pent-up anger is never allowed to escape and eclipse the thinking.
But some parts are dogmatic and ultra-deterministic; plus, the current Chinese experience throws a very different light on USSR in the 1920s. That experience was, of course, still in future when Kolakowski wrote.

Kolakowski has the straight line: Marx=Lenin=Trotsky=Stalin=Lukacz etc.
In econ, it leads him to treat War Communism, NEP and collectivization as the same thing, or as everything inevitably leading to collectivization & mass murder. No "degrees of freedom".

But if Bukharin's policies had won (as seemed in 1926-8), USSR might have developed as China post-78. Large increase in agro output, export of the surplus, use of money for industrialization, alliance btw small & medium peasantry and workers.

(There are of course other things, like the rise of Nazism that cannot be easily put in this counterfactual).
But the Chinese success sheds an entirely new light on the likelihood and possible success of that variant.
Not everything was, as K. believes, predetermined.