<< Supposes it's a bit antiquarian of me to suggest in swamp that is lbo
that battery of individual liberties/rights of which liberal societies
are so proud amount to 'repressive tolerance.' By giving impression
of choice and freedom without offering prospect of fulfillment,
'bourgeois democracy' creates seductive and compelling form of
oppression.
>>
So it is better not to give any impression of freedom and choice? There is something completely insane about the proposition that bourgeeois democracy is such a total fraud that even a cruel and repressive dictatorship like NK, or Cuba (a far freer society than NK), with its scary block warden thought police, is more free. There is no hint of dialectics here, no sense of how the precious freedoms of bourgeois democracy represent literally centuries of struggle from below against arbitrary power. The attitude seems to be a simple mirror image reversal of the flatheaded right wing reflex that this society is perfect because of freedoms the right disapproves of. If we do not make these freedoms our own, if we go about talking about how free the last remnants of Stalinism are and how it would be better if we were like them, we will have deservedly forfeited any possibility or right to make a political difference.
--jks