war and the state (was milton, etc.)

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Fri Aug 23 07:33:53 PDT 2002


Gordon Fitch wrote:
> > of the Soviet project. Lenin might as well have instituted
> > a liberal capitalist social-democratic state in 1918 and
> > saved himself, his heirs, and his country a lot of trouble.

Dennis Robert Redmond:
> Nonsense. Russia was a peasant country thrown into the ghastly cauldron of
> WW I; no social democracy could exist in the peripheries of the day. The
> choice was, build up your industrial base at a terrible human cost, or be
> liquidated by Fascism. Stalinism was the result of that situation, not
> some bad choice made by a personal leader.

I think you're mixing up two historical periods. In 1917, the external threat was Germany, able to advance into Russia but pretty much exhausted by the war and trying to cut a deal that would enable them to concentrate on the Western Front. It would be many years before aggressive fascist states arrived at the Soviet border. Meanwhile, had Lenin been unusually prescient, he could have proleptically imitated the Korean and Taiwanese models of national capitalism. It would have been tricky, simultaneously buying off both his own side's radicals and foreign interventionist liberals with rhetorical gestures, but he might have gotten lucky.


> > In the middle of the 19th century, one could delude oneself
> > into believing that a little transitional violence, a little
> > temporary authority, would advance us toward a better world.
> > Today, anyone who reads history ought to know better.


> A little temporary violence worked pretty well at ending slavery, toppling
> monarchies, defeating Fascism, and kicking colonialism out of Africa and
> Asia -- all thing which *did* advance us towards a better world. Violence
> is a historical category, not a moral one.

Yes, if you want to conserve liberalism and capitalism, violence, if properly organized, can work. (Although I might quibble as to whether colonialism was really kicked out of Africa.) If you want something different and better, however, different and better techniques will be necessary.

-- Gordon



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