As I explained a few months ago:
Alexis de Tocqueville in his book, *The Ancien Régime and the Revolution*, emphasized the role that increasing prosperity played in generating resistance by increasing people's expectations of future improvements. It's when these expectations turn out not to be met that people will then rebel. So misery by itself tends not to generate rebellion. In fact it usually breeds passivity.
And yes, I would agree that east European state socialism died from its own successes. Those regimes over time created modern industrial societies, with well educated populations, whose expectations rose beyond what their countries's economic systems were capable of delivering.
Jim F.
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Marxism 2009 Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:28:08 -0400
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Itamar Shtull-Trauring <itamar at itamarst.org
> wrote:
>
> Wasn't this Tocqueville's theory about the French Revolution? IIRC, he
> thought it was caused (among other things) by improving economic
> conditions that then got worse, i.e. by disappointed relative
> expectations, not by absolute misery.
>
To my likely intellectual impoverishment I haven't read de Tocqueville. But my understanding is that this was a big factor in the collapse of state socialism. Ben Friedman wrote a - dry and whiggish, but I think well argued - book not too long ago arguing that sustained economic growth is the basic condition for center-left success in developed countries. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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