>That's a pretty weird exercise. This thread seems to me about that
>ancient controversy, whether bourgeois democracy is a sham or not.
>For all its flaws, I'm on the non-sham side, and our resident
>Leninists seem to be on the sham side. Your counterfactuals are pure
>but empty mental exercises about which one could never say anything
>conclusive.
Yes, and it is odd that would-be Leninists should show such disdain for democratic rights. Lenin himself, of course, put Leninism on the map by a defence of that most bourgeois of rights, the right of nations to self-determination.
Eight-something years ago Lenin rubbished the vulgar economism that held the question of democratic rights cheaply, as a 'caricature of Marxism'.
-- Jim heartfield