Second American Revolution, Anyone? (was Re: Faux on Cockburn)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Russell:
>I think this analysis emphasises too much the role of mass struggle in the
>demise of Stalinism and under-estimates the role played by the bureaucracy
>in the process.  The transition process in the Soviet Union/Eastern Europe
>was initiated from the top downwards.  It was ironically the bureaucracy -
>not the masses - which concluded that it could no longer carry on in the old
>way.

I don't disagree with you.  There's a pretty good book titled _Revolution
from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System_ by David Kotz and Fred Weir,
which seems to accurately explains the top-down nature of the transition
process itself (except that Kotz and Weir seem to give too much credit to
Gorbachev for trying, at least rhetorically, to reform the USSR within a
socialist framework).  The post-1975 stagnation of economic growth in the
USSR, however, was in part attributed to the problem of "labor discipline,"
to which Perestroika was a response.

Yoshie