> On Oct 13, 2024, at 10:23 AM, Charlie via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> "It took years of struggle to overthrow capitalism in social revolutions that
> included Civil War, terror, and reaction." Neither tsarist Russia nor China
> were capitalist.
They were both part of the international capitalist system, and that's a
reality of any anti-capitalist revolution anyplace in the world. The
capitalist world rallied to, funded, and sent troops to aid the
counter-revolution in both cases. This hostile posture undermines democratic
functioning in countries that exit the capitalist world order by putting
post-capitalist countries on a permanent war footing.
>
> Mark wants "independent working class and civic organizations that were free
> of the authoritarian party and state."
>
> • How does one distinguish this conception from the liberal democracy and
> rules-based order that the U.S. trumpets (hypocritically today but largely
> real not so long ago)?
Workers don't run factories, workplaces and neighborhoods in liberal
democracies. They didn't in the USSR, either, and those factories, workplaces
and industries were privatized by crooks and cronies with no effective
opposition.
> • A feature of pluralist political systems like what Mark wants is that
> they encourage divisions in society based on secondary interests, to be
> managed within limits. You can't construct socialism heading to communism
> that way.
The phrase "encourage divisions in society" is characteristic of an autocratic
regime because divisions and diversity are characteristic of human beings under
a variety of productive modes. There is diversity in human social organization,
sexual orientation, gender, language, and cultural practices. Allowing that to
flourish produces a people that are harder to command.
Unlike liberal democracy, socialist democracy should feature economic democracy
and thus real political democracy rather than a system controlled by capital.
But we won't see that in our lifetimes so long as international capital keeps a
post-capitalist society on a war permanent war footing. Hostile and powerful
capital undermines democratic functioning in favor of elites needed to command
the ongoing fight and whose families become a permanent, privileged social
strata. That's why there can be no "socialist countries" that coexist with the
international capital order because it is a state of permanent war.
Mark
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