>The reverse is true today. If it ain't socialist, then it ain't
>democratic. >That's a Marxist approach to democracy.
The reverse was always true, Charles. They aren't mutually incompatible notions, are they? The thing is to bear both sides in mind at all times.
And I think Trotsky's suspicion, that the Russian revolution (which he saw as necessary once the opportunity arose to go that distance) was probably doomed by the contemporarily underdeveloped system of soviets, and the consequent improbability that a dangerously established elite could be avoided. That's not to say the majority of people did not go on to do a lot better than they otherwise would have, or even that they would not have done a lot better than their proletarian counterparts in other contemporarily comparable political economies. But it couldn't last. *And it didn't*. And now they're dying like flies in Russia (where the aparat's transition to bourgeoisie was a suspiciously seamless event, for mine) as they are in North Korea.
Nope, what you need is a mechanism, a culture, a commitment, a structure, wherein and whereby the people have the agency regularly to make wholesale changes to the political economic lever-fondlers. The notion of the soviet seems to me to work just so. That's the only way to avoid your heroes becoming your tyrants, anyway. If that comes as a surprise to you, I'm - well - surprised.
Never mind Commodus! The Romans had already learned this unhappy lesson by then! From old Tiberius!
And, by the way, I'll thank you not to throw tags at me unless you make damned clear what you mean by them. If I am a liberal because I believe 'the sovereignty of the people' must be seen to be done, rather than just invoked by fat theory-peddling commissars by way of self-legitimation, then, yeah, I am a liberal. But that's a very personal definition, Charles!
And, I submit, one that tells us more about the definer than the defined.
Yours mildly indignant, Rob.