On 10/29/06, Marvin Gandall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Presently, as Yoshie noted in relation to Nepal and Venezuela, the opponents of the present world order "emphasize democracy and participation, appear to favor a mixed economy even more than the Sandinistas, and favor foreign investment provided it is in their nation's interest." She describes them as "today's revolutionaries", which is what Chavez and Prachanda, the Nepalese guerrilla leader, both see as their objective, but yesterday's revolutionaries would have likened them more to their social democratic rivals who perceived they could gradually and peacefully replace capitalism with a planned socialist economy.
Socialist experiences of the past tell us that, without democracy that encourages people to participate in politics, debating various options for the country in public, eventually people get depoliticized, allowing the power elite or dissidents or both to steer the country into a capitalist direction. So, one lesson we can draw from that is that, while democracy takes more time and may even make the country more vulnerable to foreign interventions than a one-party dictatorship, a socialism that results from democracy will be more enduring. Also, for a country like Venezuela, whose pillar of economy depends on investment and technology for oil exploration, which may or may not be easily available inside the country, what's needed is not so much immediate rejections of foreign companies' participation as smart and vigorous bargaining with them to get the best terms possible. As important as democracy is, you can't tell people to eat democracy. Most people are interested in economic development beyond provisions of basics such as health, education, sanitation, and so forth. At least, Venezuela has oil. It is extremely difficult to figure out what would work best for the Nepalese people. On the political side of things, what the Nepalese experience suggests is that, even in such a capitalist hinterland as Nepal, the penetration of capitalism has stratified and segmented working people more than before, diversifying their political interests. Therefore, the great success of the CPN (Maoist) in the countryside didn't lead to its unilateral hegemony over urban Nepalese, so the reformist parliamentary parties endured and the Maoist had to come to terms with them. That's even more so in the case of countries that are far more capitalist, developed, and complex than Nepal. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
