RE: [OPE] Venezuela is the most democratic country inLatinAmerica[MESSAGE NOT SCANNED]

Well said.

>That last message was from me not from Dave Z.
>
>Why do the range of historical examples I raise invalidate the point?
>One needs to be willfully blind not to notice the tendancy towards
>monarchy in 20th century revolutionary constitutions, and this is
>something that has existed in past revolutionary processes as well.
>There is a long historical trail associating popular movements with
>monarchic outcomes. When faced with an observable fact like that the
>appropriate
>thing to do is not to ignore it, but to seek to understand its underlying
>causes.
>
>Paul Cockshott
>Dept of Computing Science
>University of Glasgow
>+44 141 330 1629
>www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ope-bounces@lists.csuchico.edu on behalf of paul bullock
>Sent: Thu 2/26/2009 10:58 PM
>To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
>Subject: Re: [OPE] Venezuela is the most democratic country
>inLatinAmerica[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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-- 
Associate Professor Ian Hunt,
Dept  of Philosophy, School of Humanities,
Flinders University of SA,
Humanities Building,
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