On 2011-08-27, at 4:12 PM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
> Marvin: Why stop there? Congress and Parliaments in the developed countries are similarly "susceptible to being manipulated" by the rich and powerful, which is understating it.
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> Somebody: Developing countries have this effect twice over, as Ravi suggested. They're susceptible to their own rich and powerful and to the rich and powerful of the U.S. and Europe. Say the people vote in a party that stakes a relatively autonomous position towards the West. Washington will then fund the other party so that when it eventually wins elections, as it inevitably will in a democracy, it will reorient the country back towards the West and financial capitalism. This is why Chavez, Morales, and Correa all have instituted semi-autocracies already.
All very interesting, but in the rush by yourself, Charles, and Ravi to defend Carrol from criticism and "misrepresentation", you've all failed to address his latest Big Idea which has been at the heart of this discussion - that Venezuala, Bolivia, and Ecuador can't halt at being mere "semi-autocracies" (your words) but will "have to abolish elections" and become full-blown "authoritarian states" (his words) in order to maintain their independence from the United States.
Do you endorse Carrol's advice to Chavez, Morales, and Correa?
Why do you suppose they haven't already abolished elections and assumed dictatorial powers?
>From a failure to understand that electoral politics has its limitations and can't produce revolutionary change - a notion Carrol seems to believe is uniquely his own?
Or because they full well understand that political change has less to do with good ideas and more to do with the changing balance of social and political forces? That even the appearance of moving in this direction would provoke a civil war with their local bourgeoisies supported by at least part of the military high command? That the US, stretched as it is abroad, would nevertheless not hestitate to forcefully intervene? That they would at a stroke lose their buffer of support from Brazil, Argentina, Spain, and other sympathetic trading nations in Latin America in Europe? That, contrary to the assurances offered them by a retired professor of English literature a million miles removed from their struggles, their own survival and the independence of their countries would not be guaranteed but very much in doubt in these circumstances?
The only contemporary example we have of a throroughgoing social transformation is in Cuba, where the standing army and the state apparatus were smashed in an armed struggle, enabling to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It helped, to put it mildly, that the Soviet Union also provided military support and the protection of a nuclear power and an alternate market for the blockaded Cuban economy. The same conditions which produced the Cuban revolution no longer exist; they started changing soon after the revolutionaries took power. Chavez, Morales, and Correa are all admirers of the Cuban revolution, and don't need reminding by Carrol and other Western leftists of the heroic but failed electoral attempts by Arbenz, Bosch, and, most dramatically, Allende before them. If they've gone down that same path, it's not because they are oblivious to the pitfalls of the electoral road, but because they have effectively had no other choice in the present period.
Perhaps this will give you a clearer idea why Carrol's Olympian and mostly ill-informed political pronouncements tend to set my teeth on edge.