wojtek
>Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 23:27:29 -0400 (EDT)
>From: JKSCHW at aol.com
>Subject: Re: North Korea
>To: sokol at jhu.edu
>X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 86
>Original-recipient: rfc822;sokol at jhu.edu
>
>With some qualifications I agree with most of what you say here. I do not
>think that De Long attributes the lack of democracy in Russia to
"socialism";
>I would be surprised if he disagreed either. We could ask him.
>
>Some qualifications: things might have been different if the Russians had
>established a liberal capitalist regime in the interwar period--it would not
>have led to a democratic paradise in the circumstances, but it would have
>been _different_. It might have been better, but Trotsky was probably right
>that the forces to sustain such a development were lacking. Things would
have
>been different and better had the NEP developed deeper roots, creating an
>indigenous capitalist class, as Lenin hoped; whether thatw ould have
>developed into socialsim, who can say. But the demolition of the NEP was not
>inevitable: The forces supporting it had to be crushed by savage repression.
>So there were alternative paths. Granted the NEP was not very democratic
>either, but it was not the Stalin terror.
>
>I agree that the character of the Stalin terror, or even Leninist
>aithoritarianism, cannot be attributed mainly to the evil intentions of the
>leaders. Whatever their intentions, evil or good, they would not have been
>effective without social forces that coukd make their intentiond effective.
>Lenin, I believe, was actually a man of pretty good will making as good a
>deal he could of a bad situation. His understanding and appreciation of
>democracy was weak, but even had it beens tronger it would not have had a
lot
>of scope for exercise in the circumstances. Stalin seems to me to have
been a
>cruel tyrant, a genuinely evil man. His rule marked the character of his
>system, making it worse than it had to be. Stalinism was possible without
the
>terror,a s we say in the post-Stalinist USSR.
>
>I agree that there is the tendency not to see societies as coming out of
>their won trajectories. I do not think myself that the USSR and the state
>socialist countries were socialist in the classical sense; certainly they
>were not working class democracies. Nor do I think that the formerly
>state-socialsit countries are, for the most part, meaningfuly capitalist.
>There may be exceptions: The Czech Republic, Hungary, maybe
Poland--countries
>that had some real experience of capitalism before 1945. Russia is a
gangster
>kleptocracy, a real anomolay, a county without a mode of production. It
>would be better off if it had capitalsim--any kind of capitalism. China, who
>knows, not me.
>
>You can post this to the list if you think it is worth it.
>
>--jks
>
>In a message dated 00-04-25 18:07:45 EDT, you write:
>
><< That was I arguing - backward countries like Russia could not sustain a
> democracy - no matter what's the name of the regime. But that means that
> we cannot attribute the lack of democracy in those countries to the
> epolitical label of the regime (e.g. socialism) as DeLong & Co. seem to
> argue - which implies that things would have been diffrent if teh Russians
> established western-style political institutions (the market and
> parliamentary democracy).
>
> By the same logic, we cannot say that such lack of democracy can be
> attributed to the evil character of political leaders - which would imply
> that if someone else took Stalin's place, things would have been different.
>
> As far as idealism is concerned - I see a tendency among many US-esers,
> left, right and the center - to perceive other countries not through the
> lenses of their onw institutional development and histories, but as
> embodiments of US ideologies e.g. NK, Cuba etc as embodiments of
> "socialism" Eastern Eurpeans as converts to "capitalism" etc.
> >>
>