Re: [OPE] Venezuela is the most democratic country in LatinAmerica[MESSAGE NOT SCANNED]

DZ,

I suppose you accept the point I made about German elections and Hitler.

With respect to your list of leaders. This is simply abstracting from
entirely different epochs and makes little sense.

Paul B.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Cockshott" <wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
To: "Outline on Political Economy mailing list" <ope@lists.csuchico.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 12:17 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Venezuela is the most democratic country in
LatinAmerica[MESSAGE NOT SCANNED]

> paul bullock wrote:
>> Dave Z says 'allowing officials'... etc
>> Gerry has already shown that curtailing the rights of voters to reelect
>> a President, is rare, and relatively recent in the USA. ie used to
>> prevent another FDR by the Republicans/establishment in 1952 once
>> re-established. Secondly no one is 'allowing' anyone to do anything,
>> rather, the voters are requiring actions from the elected. The abolition
>> of the two term limit is presented by the enemies of democracy as the
>> removal of some sensible constraint upon individual megalomania, rather
>> than the extension of rights to the electorate. Indeed it treats the
>> electorate as an unreliable passive amorphous manipulated mass without
>> any hope or political capacity.
>
> There is a more general issue here Paul.
> Popular movements have historically often relied upon strong leaders :
> Ceasar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, Castro etc.
> The death of the strong leader has often posed major problems for the
> survival of the revolutionary project, and even where the state survived
> that, as in the USSR and China, the concentration of great power in one
> leader means that subsequent leaders were in a position to
> radically change direction.
> Leaders like Solon or Washington who were willing to step back, left more
> lasting revolutionary legacies.
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Received on Thu Feb 26 18:00:27 2009