Re: Re: Michael's Question

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Gar Lipow wrote:
>
>  I tend to think that government (socialist or otherwise) will be  at
> least as repressive as it's population will tolerate,

This personifies government, ripping it out of the concrete context of
activity in which an actual "government" exists. General remarks about
government so conceived are pretty empty. Revolutionary governments
don't drop from heaven, they emerge from an extraordinarily messy
process, the details or even many of the main outlines of which are
utterly unpredictable.

General statements about the need for revolutions to create an open
society or to represent power from below would be more persuasive if one
could point to any state anywhere anytime that was actually an open
society for more than a large minority of its inhabitants. One
characterization of an open society ought to be the absence of death
squads. The only state in the western hemisphere without death squads
(also known as metropolitan police) is Cuba.

Carrol

Carrol