1/26/98, DR. PHUA KAI LIT wrote:
>It was compulsory for everyone to vote and,
>of course, all the candidates were also selected and
>approved by the Communist Party.
>Good example of the sham "democracy"
>of Leninist regimes.
One could with equal relevance (to whatever point) relate horror stories
from Guatamala or El Salvador and call them good examples of the sham
"democracy" of capitalist regimes.
At a miniumum we need to look at individual countries if the discussion is
going to be more than "yes it is", "no it isn't". "Leninist regimes"
covers a broad space, from Stalin to Tito to the Sandinistas.
The democratic rationale of a one-party system is that the party is to
embody popular will, and that the government is to administrate party
policy. That system is corrupted when the party becomes a top-down tyranny
instead of a bottom-up system of representation.
Similarly, the competitive electoral system is corrupted when a clique of
parties achieve hegemony, and those parties are each controlled by the same
elite interests. In both cases democracy is undermined by the formation of
de facto hierarchical power structures.
In fact one-party systems and electoral systems are political systems, not
economic systems. Capitalism can exist in a one-party state and socialism
can exist in a multi-party state (examples plentiful). It is wrong to
equate socialist economics with one-party politics (corrupt or otherwise),
or capitalism with competitive parties (representative or otherwise).
I suggest that Vietnam's democratic failings are less relevant to a
critique of socialism than, say, Indonesia's dictatorship is to a critique
of capitalism. The Jakarta regime is charaterisic of capitalist
perphery-management tactics. Ho Chi Minh arose from the ranks as a leader
of national liberation, and his regime is, if anything, characteristic of
that unique national experience. Socialism seems largely irrelevant to
Vietnam's political structure.
rkm