Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > One thing that formerly and actually existing socialist societies > > never overcame is attachment to iconic leaders
On 7/29/06, Carrol Cox wrote: > I think that is a reflection of the fact that every socialist regime so > far has been a regime under seige.
On 7/29/06, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
OK, but does it have to be the same darn leader _for decades_? Does it have to become a _family business_? From Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il, from Fidel Castro to Raúl Castro? I don't think so. 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.
I'm sorry, Yoshie, but this is fallacious, putting too much emphasis on the name & face of the individual leader. It's like the result of the Mexican revolution of 1911: in response to the repeated "re-election" of the corrupt Porfirio Diaz, it abolished re-election (and some streets in Mexico were thus titled "No Reeleccion"). But it created a system in which the PRI was repeated re-elected. In Iran, they made sure that the Shi'ite imams and their political parties were re-elected. (Similarly, in the old USSR, it was the CPSU that was "re-elected" over and over again. They did escape the attachment to "iconic" leaders, leaving only Lenin, who had no power to use his iconic status for good or evil, since he was dead.) -- Jim Devine / "A different world can be created or re-created—but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide." -- Gloria Steinem
