On 7/29/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie wrote:
>The Iranian Revolution managed to make transitions, both in the
>offices of the Supreme Leader* and the President (elected for a
>four-year term, with the limit of two terms), through elections. The
>Supreme Leader is elected (for life) by the Assembly of Experts, which
>is in turn directly elected by public vote (for eight-year terms),
>though the Guardian Council* vets its candidates.
Iran has made lots of transitions, but none of them unfortunately are in
the socio-economic arena. The Islamic Republic rests on bourgeois property
relations.
So do Venezuela and the rest of Latin America today. Changes within
the overall capitalist relations of production matter.
Not having elections doesn't guarantee the survival of revolutions
either. Depoliticization of the masses in formerly existing socialist
countries like the FSU, China, and Vietnam eventually made for the
restoration of capitalist relations of production, when their
respective bureaucratic power elites decided that they could amass
more wealth and power under capitalist rather than socialist
conditions.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
