EDITOR—The fall of Fascism, subsequent nationalizations, the entrance of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) into government, the rise of workers’ commissions, the mobilization of urban and rural protest, and land occupations held the world in thrall, if only for a short time. In the end, the corporatist bureaucratic state apparatus and its economic partners emerged renewed, chastened, and not unscathed. Chilcote singles out the durability and continuity of the state apparatus as a major factor in the prevailing hegemonic bloc and blames the fractiousness of the Left for failing to replace it. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, the attempts to create a counter-hegemonic bloc paved the way for democratic, pluralistic politics in Portugal.
-
-
BRUCE LERRO—In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.
-
CHARLES MCKELVEY—But the future is not dark. Expansion in photovoltaic energy, already in process, combined with the increased national production of crude oil, will enable the system to attain energy sovereignty and stability without depending on the importation of fuel oil, the availability of which is shaped by imperialist sanctions and international conditions.
The threat posed by the blackout has been contained, as a result of the dedicated day-and-night work of the electrical workers, accompanied by the Cuban people, who supported each other in difficult conditions, living without electrical service and water, and who passed on the opportunity to participate in politically immature protest.
-
M. KIMBERLEY—Coercive measures are a means of making war without soldiers, bullets, or bombs. They are deadly and secure the primacy that the U.S. seeks. Countries are declared adversaries and punished not because of any wrong doing on their part, but because they somehow run afoul of U.S. foreign policy dictates. In the case of Cuba, its commitment to its socialist revolution presents the threat of a good example. The existence of free education and free health care and a foreign policy that seeks peaceful coexistence so close to the U.S. presents a possibility that the U.S. will not permit, and so the punishing sanctions regime goes on.
-
P. GREANVILLE—We publish the whole uber-ballyhooed debate between the duopoly’s actors, Trump and Harris, whose disgraceful lack of substance is matched by their lack of independent agency and morality, each one trying to outgun the other in imperialist machismo and bloodlust, not to mention complete absence of actual solutions to the problems afflicting the US and the world. These enormous flaws, personal and systemic of the duopoly’s figureheads, are underscored by Jill Stein’s intelligent analysis of the political situation and the sensible requisite policies that will heal a nation tearing itself apart.
