Re: the Soviet system and the w-s

On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Ed Weick wrote (on the Soviet Union):

>|                       It was too disparate in terms of many different
>|ethnicities with many different quarrels, and carried far too much
>|justifiably paranoid historic baggage about being invaded and sacked from
>|all directions.  As well, there was no extensive working class at the time
>|of the revolution.  The communist regime therefore slipped into the 
>familiar
>|Russian mode of holding the country together by sitting on it,
>

Jozsef Borocz <jborocz@rci.rutgers.edu> replied:

>As opposed to the liberated tendencies of the western capitalist 
>governments?
>In the first two decades of this century?
>

        Why stop there?
        Or through Yugoslavia and East Timor? 
        Has anything structurally changed, except the degree (more) of
disarticulation and cross-linkages of the process of empire?


Regards,


Mark Whitaker
University of Wisconsin-Madison