Victorious small-country revolutions lacked resources to correct their own distortions
Evidence
Thus it was that Vietnam, the great victor of anti-imperialist war, became the showcase not of socialism but of the impossibility of building socialism. This sense of failure was to be repeated, then, in the rest of Indochina, in Southern Africa, in Nicaragua, and (so far to a lesser extent, but already visibly) in Cuba. None of the small places where great revolutions had occurred had the space, the time, the material resources, the assistance, the conditions of peace to make possible the correction of the distortions which inevitably arise in the course of collective human projects of such magnitude, undertaken in conditions so very punishing. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 51
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The structural argument that revolutionary failure is not a moral matter but a material one — a small place undertaking a great project cannot pause, resource, and correct itself. Resists one-sentence summary.
- XREF: Speaks to the addendum article on sacrifice: what a revolution must forfeit in material terms just to survive.