Tom Kruse: >... is terribly ignorant of other sources of political practice, debate, >innovation, ideas. The point here is we need to separate the wheat from >the chaff. In the mid to late 1970s thre emerged in Bolivia an amazing >amalgamation of human rights, left parties, peasant and labor >organiztaions, all figthing under the banner of a return to democracy; to >get Banzer out. And they did! Want to call that "civil society"? OK. >They did, to some degree. I think the problem is when "civil society" is used as a club against socialist revolution. That, of course, is exactly what Jorge Castenada intended when he wrote his book on Latin American politics. It was an effort to discredit Castro and every armed group that followed in the Cuban tradition. Since Sandinista leaders such as Victor Tirado were saying the same sort of thing after Chamorro won the election, there was enormous pressure to go with the new orientation. This orientation is basically social democracy, but the problem with social democracy is that it doesn't work. When the masses win the right to have elections, freedom of the press, trade union rights, etc. in Bolivia or any other country suffering under dictatorship, this is a cause for celebration. However, what is getting swept under the rug in all these discussions about the importance of democracy and civil society are the substantive economic issues which were the cause of class tensions to begin with, namely land ownership and a living wage. The rightwing ARENA presidential candidate just won in El Salvador, where the ex-FMLN candidates won only 29% of the vote. The bourgeois press describes the voters as "cynical" and "apathetic" which is another way of saying that the left parties simply can not address the underlying economic injustices. These, by definition, are not subject to votes. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
