>The Russian and Chinese revolutions were "good things?" Compared to what?
>Were the Bolsheviks better then the Czarist reign or better than a
>socialist democracy under Kerensky? I fail to see how any revolution that
>leads to Stalin and the collectivization of the peasant or Mao and the GLF
>and the Cultural Revolution can be deemed positive events, unless you make
>some argument about the alternative. The crimes of neo-liberalism hardly
>constitute a defense of communist crimes.
The counterfactuals on these things are always a little blurry, probably because they're dream images in the head rather than anything real or possible in history.
I'm not talking about "neoliberalism" alone as the standard of comparison, I'm talking about the grand sweep of capitalist history, which has to include the founding crimes of the U.S., slavery and genocide, as well as the barbarities of European imperialism, and the successor barbarities of U.S. imperialism. I suppose you could say one difference between the debauched Russian & Chinese revolutions (and I did say there were plenty of stupidities & crimes) and the Euro-American imperial combo is that the most of the people killed by the former were Russians and Chinese, and most of the people killed by the latter have been Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans. There's a lot of blood behind bourgeois democracy.
Doug