The thrust of Jabob's post was not to say that Kerensky would have brought utopia to Russia, but that the communist regimes in Russia and China should not be viewed as examples of the type of society we are trying to achieve - that they should be criticized just as much for their use of coersion and exploitation and anti-democratic institutions as capitalist societies. Having your choices limited to Soviet-style communism or US-style capitalism is just as bad as being limited to a choice between Bush and Clinton (or Bush and Gore, as the case may be in 2000).
As for the argument that (to paraphrase) the KGB was necessary to counterbalance subversion by the West, I'm not buying it. The Soviet Union had nukes and a big army - the US couldn't have its way there like it could in Central and South America. The Soviet population was treated that way so the Soviet elite would stay in power, not because it was necessary to meet the "capitalist threat" (although I'm sure that was the official reasoning in the USSR, just like the Soviet threat served as the official rationale for spending large sums on defense in the US during the cold war).
Either you have a libertarian (in the classic sense) democracy or you don't. The Soviet Union was not, and China is not. Achieving this goal in a poor country (like Cuba or El Salvador) is next to impossible due to the inevitable hostility of the West, but this is not necessarily the case for a more powerful country like China or Russia.
Brett
>I entirely agree that secret police have no place in my utopia, and that
>the brutal idiocies of Stalinism are a betrayal of Marxism. But Kerensky or
>any other democrat you want to name would have faced the implacable
>hosility of the domestic foreign bourgeoisie. For a more recent example,
>look what happened to Allende. How do you keep the CIA at bay without jails
>and firing squads? I really don't know the answer to that, but it's not
>just a matter of making good or bad choices.
>
>Insane seems an odd word to apply to Lenin.