I'm happy to say that socialist democracy is liberal. Not all self-styled socialist democrats would agree.
Politics before philosophy, no disagreement there. (That from Rorty.) In that spirit I don't think at present it's real productive to think about whom we'd shoot if we thought we'd had to and we had power. We're kind of busy trying to preserve 800 year old liberties from people with power who'd happily have us disappeared, tortured, and shot if they could, and sometimes they can.
Limitation of rights in Russia, in retrospect, didn't turn out so well. In prospect some foresaw this. Rosa Luxemburg was right. So I'm not real hasty to say, oh yeah, one party state, censored press, death to enemies of the people -- just until we get the situation under control of course. Probably I'd end up with the left oppositionists who got shot by people like you. On the other hand you might look up in the archives what I've said about Cuba. Still, overall, I have a principled _political_ commitment to liberalism. On balance nothing has ever worked better than liberalism, including so called proletarian dictatorship.
--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Andie writes:
>
> >I am a liberal and I think
> > you should be too and many of you probably are. As
> is
> > Doug, anyway, whether he likes the term or not: we
> > both believe in competitive elections, universal
> > suffrage, and extensive political and civil
> liberties
> > -- the basic institutions of political liberalism.
> ===================================
> These ideas aren't exclusive to what you call
> "liberalism". They were also
> incorporated in the concept of socialist democracy.
> Today, at least in
> advanced capitalist societies, they're widely
> accepted even among the
> elites, with only the most extreme right-wing
> ideologues rejecting them on
> principle.
>
> These institutions are dependent on historical
> context. They require a high
> degree of national security and social wealth. They
> have legitimacy only
> insofar as they don't conflict with social order.
> They're suspended or
> limited when social order is threatened.
>
> For all your fealty to these principles, you would
> do the same. For example,
> I expect you would have supported, albeit with
> genuine "reluctance" and
> "reservations", the limiting or suspension of these
> rights in France,
> Russia, and Cuba, in the prevailing conditions of
> revolution and civil war
> and even beyond - until you were satisfied that the
> social changes
> introduced by these upheavals were no longer in
> danger of being reversed by
> an equally or even more repressive ancien regime.
>
> Any disagreements we might then have had would have
> have turned not on
> whether free elections, speech, assembly, etc. were
> desirable objectives in
> themselves - no issue there - but whether political
> conditions now permitted
> their exercise. In other words, the governing
> consideration would have been
> historical rather than philosophical. It always is.
>
>
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>
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