Mikhail Gorbachev is touring the United States on a tour of the 20th anniversary of Perestroika, the reform campaign designed to prolong the Communist Party's hold on Russia and its satellite states. Last night, the former General Secretary of the Communist Party told an audience at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law that it's "hard to imagine a calm, safe, and secure world" with current poverty levels. "If people's lives are not becoming better," he held, "people begin to change their minds and say democracy is worthless." His analysis reveals that long after Marxism lost its grip on Eastern Europe, it still holds a tight grip on him. One of the main pillars of Marxism is the materialist interpretation of history. This provides a one-size-fits-all answer to whatever questions come along. Most who reflexively invoke the economic causation argument do so without realizing that it is one of Karl Marx's central ideas.

Like most of Marx's ideas, applying the materialist interpretation to current events displays its ineptitude. Did poverty inspire the multimillionaire Osama bin Laden to wage jihad against the United States? Why are Mulsims the combatants in a majority of current wars? Is it economics, or ethnic and religious hatred, that motivated Iran's president to proclaim that Israel should be "wiped off the map"? To see the world through a Marxist lens is to always see an economic explanation even when one relating to nationalism, ideology, or religion would do.

Don't you think that Gorbachev's view is partly a result of how "democracy" and "capitalism" have worked in Russia? The former Soviet bloc has fared a lot better, but isn't Russia's democracy close to a dictatorship by a KBG killer, and isn't their capitalism close to a corrupt partnership between big business and government (AKA as fascism)?

I don't know how much Russia has changed politically in the last 100 years. They've gone from bad to worst to bad again.

Michael Luttig, come on down!

Gorbachev is an old time party KGB man who climbed the Soviet political heights before the whole mess imploded. They do not make mistakes, remember? He is practically programmed biologically to reject democracy and to embrace materialism. He will never accept the beauty of choice when stacked up against a government plan to control our destiny.