Doug Henwood wrote:
> So are those the only two options, vigorous repression or utter
> chaos? And why did China follow the first path and Russia the second?
One keeps hoping that they are not -- that some day some nation will industrialize by some other route. During the early '70s I was still telling people that China would be the first nation to industrialize without huge bloodshed -- obviously I was wrong. (I count as bloodshed of course the conditions Marx describes in the chapters on the working day and on machinery, and the havoc wreaked on India -- and China through the opium trade -- by British industrialization.) So at least on the empirical record, one would have to say that the choices are either industrialization with huge repression or non-industrialization with huge repression.
Is there any theoretical basis for thinking it may yet be otherwise? It is abstractly true, I think, that a rigorous democracy as envisaged by Marx in his comments on the Paris Commune, as envisaged by Lenin in *State and Revolution*, and as exhibited concretely to a point in Longbow could probably bring off the trick. But that is abstract in the sense that it presupposes an arrival at power which leaves the leadership with the courage to follow that route or a sector of the working class strong enough to force it. And it also presupposes, not necessarily a world revolution but working classes strong enough in the chief remaining capitalist powers to protect the state in question against the sort of seige which all socialist states to date have had to confront.
Carrol