George, you are trying to have it both ways when you slam historical Communsim (Stalinism) with _political_ repression and murders drawn from the Black Book and other more reliable sources, but try to get capitalims off the hook as a merely economic system, never mind its politics. Let's compare apples with apples.
If we stick to Stalinist _economics_, it looked pretty good as a development strategy for poor nations. Leaving aside the lack of democracy, the intermittent police state terror, the cult of personality, Stalinism pulled Russia and China into the 20th century, made Russia a great industrial power, and put an end of mass poverty, disease, and famine in China. I'm not defending Stalinism, but only pointing out the facts here. Stalinist development was less successful in more industrialized nations, like those of Eastern Europe, but then capitalist development has been a flop throughout most of the Third World, at least as far as improvements in material conditions go.
If, however, we factor in politics, Stalinism was repressive, though less so than you suggest. The high Stalin terror lasted for about ten years: 1936-39, 1947-53. Soviet life under Khrushchev and after was not one of terror but enforvced conformity. The Chinese experience is similarly spotty, never approaching democracy, but only being intermittently really awful.
Meanwhile, politics in capitalist states, which after all is not disconnected from the needs of the dominant capitalsit class, if not wholly dictated by that class, is not a perfect paradise of democracy. Throught the third world, death squad dictatotships and brutal repression have been common. Pinochet is hardly the worst of the lot. In this country, there was no democracy for Blacks until the mid-late 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act started to make it possible for African Americans to be represented, and even today, poor Blacks, and they are disproportionately poor, live under police state conditions. Don't tell me that has nothing to do with capitalism: segregation and white supremacy have everything to do with keeping a pool of cheap terrorized labor.
Anyway, I insist again that the issue is not: was Stalinism worse than capitalism?--it's worth getting straight on how bad they are or were and why, but we are not being asked to choose between them. Stalinism is off the table, and it would not be attractive anyway. However , we have to start from the premise that what we have here is unacceptable. And we have to talk both about where we want to go and how to get there.
--Justin _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com