> CB: Why don't you think Marxist ideology will ever be the sort of force it was once ?
andie:I've explained. Kells, is my paper still on your website? Whats' the link? It's not long, about 20 pp in typescript.
CB: Until I get the website, are there three or four main reasons ?
* * *
Do you really want to get into this? (1) It's long term historical fact that self-identified Marxist movements, parties (and of course states) have been losing their appeal to workers worldwide for over 50 years. (2) Marxism as an ideology has been heavily discredited by the oppressiveness and economic failures of Communism. Things might change, but you have to make bets on the future; that's not a horse I'd put my money on. This is independent of whether historical materialism is substantially true, which I think it is.
> andie: Hmm. the world wars (I & II) were started by autocracies or dictatorships
(Germany, Austro-Huna=gary in WWI,
> CB: Germany had universal (?)suffrage, competitive elections, and civil and political rights before WWI, no ?
No. Actually the first state to have universal suffrage was the Soviet Union. "Competitive" elections inb Germany wereinhibited by the anti-Socialist Laws, and political rights were accordingly limited. Wilhemine Germany wasn't a dictatorship or an autocracy like Russia, but it was nor a liberal democracy. it was probably more like modern Iran.
> On the other hand, the US. had non-universal suffrage, competitive elections or extensive political and civil rights for Black people or Native Americans or Mexican or Chinese Americans, no vote for women, so less than half suffrage ; no first amendment rights for opponents of war (i.e. when first amendment rights really count they didn't exist), , no exclusionary clause to enforce the Fourth Amendment, no appointed lawyers for the poor, etc. Point being was WWI really started by a less liberal democratic nation or a more liberal democratic nation ?
Look, I was just saying that it wasn't the liberal democratic aspect of LD capitalism that causes wars and other bad effects; if (as you say) the US was less of a LD than one might have unreflectively supposed in 1917, that doesn't go to my point.
> CB: What is your theory of the causal connection between the lack of liberal democracy in Germany, Japan & Italy and the war ? I would still say it was the capitalism of these nations that "had" motives for war.
Well, I don't have an elaborated theory of the relationship, but I'd suggest as a hypothesis for investigation that it's easier to get a fascist dictatorship or any non-LD on the warpath. However, I agree with you that the engine of imperialist aggression in those case (and in ours) is capitalism, which is the point I've been hammering on -- it's not LD.
> See all the wars before and since WWI and WWII. Liberal democracies have no particular aversion to war.
At least against each other they do. I can't think of a case in the last 150 years where an LD made war on another. Can you?
> CB: I don't think universal suffrage, competitive elections and extensive political and civil rights are the cause of the things we both abhor. I think capitalism is, and that really you can't have truly effective universal suffrage, truly competitive elections or extensive political and civil rights with capitalism.
OK, so far we agree.
> Look at the trend of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions which is going backward in regard to rights, after 200 plus years of liberal democracy.
Well, as you point out above, reall more like 70 or 60 years of it. Though beforehand we had the world's nearest appriximation to it.
> Democacy is degenerating here. Almost everyday in court I see some way in which we don't really have the rights declared on paper.
Yeah, things are scary. And that is in court. Out on the streets, as the cop told me, Counsellor, this aint a court a law.
jks
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