State and Democracy (was Re: Who Killed Vincent Chin?)

[Carrol Cox]

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