> Marvin: But it is still a political opening for further struggle rather than a cause for despair and the embrace of what is, in effect, an enlightened despotism favoured by Carrol and, it would appear, Charles, and you can see how this difference has played itself out over Libya and similar issues.
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> Somebody: Say what you will Marvin, but it is the People's Republic of China, a despotism if there ever was one, which is the fastest industrializing country in the world. It is the Russia of managed democracy which has navigated the way back from national distintegration. The East Asian tigers, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan were all autocracies during their periods of industrial lift-off. For that matter, so was Japan, both prior to 1945, and to an extent thereafter, under a distinctly un-Western democracy of one-and-a-half parties and thoroughly managed press.
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> You don't have to turn to left-nationalist regimes to find evidence for the role of despotism in developing nations outside of the American and European spheres. The explanation is that democracies, while more suceptible to popular opinion, are also more receptive to foreign influence, Western capital, and the disincentive of losing elections to
> parties financially backed by Washington.
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> I wouldn't say you need a dictatorship per se. But you do need a very strong state, such as in Japan or Turkey, which inevitably means something less than a free-wheeling liberal polyarchy of political scientists imaginations.
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> Having said all that, Libya is not a very poor country. As everyone knows, it's probably the best off country in Africa. It may do just fine under bourgeois democracy. I would just question that it would have done so well if it had been bourgeois democratic since independence in 1951.
Somebody raises important issues, although I don't think I would describe Japan as a strong state during the long reign of the LDP. This designation has been reserved, at least on the Marxist left, for states where independent trade unions and opposition political parties are outlawed, voting rights and elections are restricted or non-existent, and dissenters routinely exiled, jailed, tortured, or "disappeared". The other states he/she (?) mentions exhibited one or more of these characteristics during the period of their ascendency, as did the advanced capitalist countries of the West whose democratic institutions and political rights were also very limited as they passed through the stage of primitive accumulation and early industrialization.
In any event, even assuming the argument that developing nations with single party autocracies necessarily produce faster growth than multi-party liberal democracies is correct - and I question whether there is such a causal relationship when, for example, I contrast Zimbabwe with Brazil - this still would not justify the widening social inequality and political repression of the working class which accompanies the strong state. This justification seems to be at least implicit in the comments by Carrol, Somebody, and Charles.
The US and Eurozone states do not belong to the developing world, but you could argue with equal conviction - and some within the elites have taken to doing so - that political gridlock is hampering economic recovery and threatening to deepen the current crisis, and China is much admired as a model of decisive action. Taken to its logical conclusion, this effectively means rule by decree by a single party in the capitalist states, with all this implies for the political rights and economic conditions of the mass of the population. Is this something we would welcome in the name of the GDP? And if we would not exchange faster economic growth for austerity, growing inequality, and repression for ourselves, how can we propose others, including rebellious workers in Libya, China, Iran and elsewhere, accept this tradeoff for themselves?
The socialist left never to my knowledge turned its back on a struggle for democratic rights anywhere, except in the case of those who refused to recognize as legitimate such struggles in the fSU, China and the rest of the "socialist bloc" for fear these could be exploited by imperialism. That anticapitalist bloc has since disappeared, as has a politically conscious working class movement with the power to act in its own interests, and the argument for a strong state in any part of the capitalist world, developing or developed, in the present context can only reinforce the interests of the ruling class in these societies. In the deeper crisis of the 30's, many jobless young workers and students disgusted by the inability of paralyzed bourgeois democracies to resolve it turned to the most extreme variant of the capitalist strong state, fascism, even when the socialist left presented a powerful alternative at the opposite pole. Some of us need to be more careful about what we wish for.