>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 -
No argument from me on that. But we - you & I & most of the people on this list, though not all - live in rich countries with long histories of bourgeois democracy. It's kind of pointless to talk about Russia in 1917 as a model for the U.S. in 1999, just as the U.S. in 1999 is a pretty poor model for Russia in 1917.
>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).
That's absolutely not my intention, to set up some forced choice binary
like that. I'm arguing that a serious evaluation of the Soviet or Chinese
experience isn't served by caricatures from either side, either the Cold
Warriors one or the CPUSA's.
>
>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
Not in 1917 they didn't.
>- 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).
Of course. The nomenklatura was a ruling class that appropriated social resources for their own comfort and power. But I think people should really think seriously about how a revolutionary or even seriously reformist regime could ever sustain itself with the CIA gunning for it, and international capital shunning it.
>Either you have a libertarian (in the classic sense) democracy or you
>don't.
Talk about false binaries....
Doug