>Brad De Long wrote: > >>Do the "deaths in Indonesia need to be attributed to liberal U.S. >>capitalism"? To the U.S. national security state, perhaps. But even >>there you have to construct a counterfactual picture of what the >>succession to Sukarno would have been like: rule by the PKI is >>scary to think about. > >But it's in no small part relentless U.S. opposition to even the >mildest reformism in the "Third World" that has helped make >revolutionary movements more brutal than you or I would like. Who >knows how the Cuban revolution would have turned out had the U.S. >not tried to smother it in its crib? Who knows what would have >happened elsewhere in Latin America & the Caribbean if the Cubans >had been allowed to go their way? What would have happened in >Nicaragua if Reagan hadn't unleashed the contras? What would have >happened in the USSR had the "West" not been hostile for 75 years? >What would have.....? > >Doug I have never bought the argument that Stalin was the result of "Western" hostility toward the Soviet Union. Dzerzhinsky, Vyshinsky, Molotov, and Djugashvili himself were who they were. Someone like Trotsky seems likely to have started the collectivization of agriculture earlier, and to have had a more disciplined and permanently militarized view of society than did Djugashvili. The people like Bukharin who might have actually made good--and democratizing--heads of government seem to me to have been like large-mouthed bass thrown into the piranha tank when I think about Russia in the 1920s. So I think your case is extremely weak there. Primacy of internal politics and all that. Your case is, I think, a little stronger as applied to Cuba. But I don't think that it is much stronger: Castro has had enormous running room to create the kind of society and polity that he wants; and what he wants is for a whole bunch of people to jump instantly and instantaneously when he says "frog." On the other hand, your case is pretty strong as applied to Nicaragua. However, the Leninist current seems to have been very hard to swim against. And, as Rosa put it, the process begins by ruling in the name of the people, then by substituting the judgment of the Party for the wishes of the people, then by substituting the decisions of the Central Committee for the judgment of the Party, and then by substituting the whim of the Dictator for the decisions of the Central Committee. I see nothing in early-1980s Nicaragua to disrupt this chain of politico-bureaucratic evolution even in the absence of the contras... And your case is overwhelmingly correct as applied to Allende, Arbenz, Mossadegh, et cetera... Brad DeLong
