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> I sure didn't. I said that many people historically have found, and still do find, an authoritarian state (of whatever sort) appealing, which is obviously true. It's not like the Chinese population is jumping up and down demanding a multiparty system.
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> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>
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> Where did anyone say anything about inherent tendencies?
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I've drawn that inference that from comments like that above that "many people historically have found, and still do find, an authoritarian state (of whatever sort) appealing, which is obviously true."
Chris and Matthias can feel free to infer from my previous reply that I don't think this to be so. The goal of those who made the French and Russian revolutions - including their leaders, let it be added - was not to replace the Bourbons and Romanovs with another unaccountable tyranny of the party or of the bureaucracy or of the supreme leader. Why and how these revolutions evolved in this direction is another question, whose answer lies in the social and economic and international context in which they were situated rather than in mass political psychology - ie. that people somehow experience the absence of any opportunity to exercise democratic control over their governments as "appealing". I noted previously that if they accepted the democratic failure of these revolutions with more or less equinimity, it was because these continued to meet their overriding needs for economic growth, stability, and the elimination of the graver social inequalities which characterized the old order.
In Britain, the US, and other advanced capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie grabbed power for itself and established narrow parliamentary systems based on property, the masses struggled for a widening of the franchise not for a return to the divine rule of monarchs or more contemporary forms of autocratic rule, as Chris' thesis would have it.
But I'll concede that it does apply to those who led or actively supported fascist movements which defiantly proclaimed their authoritarian aims and their contempt for both liberal and socialist notions of democracy. In the long sweep of history, however, they have represented the few rather than the "many" who have engaged in great social struggles. These have been overwhelmingly democratic in content.
Chris is also wrong about China where he underestimates the growing pressure for democratic rights, including an end to the political monopoly of the ruling CCP, which has forced some accommodation from the party. These demands for political reform would surely intensify if China were to experience a great economic contraction comparable to it's current expansion. Political power is the primary means of improving social and economic conditions, and is especially well understood to be the case in times of crisis.