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Originally Posted by Douglas G. Brown
Mr. Baurle, the combination of your focus on socialism paired with your seeming lack understanding of its actual workings and forms making your posts a bit strained.
My Vietnamese ex wife and her extended family of about 35 people had their fill of the "actual workings" of socialism from 1975 to the middle of 1980, when they got on a leaky boat and headed out to sea. They have since had much better lives in Canada, France, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand.
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Your doing the same thing as Bill. Socialism has many permutations. State socialism being one of those. What discussion of Viet Nam in the late seventies can you have without examining the repercussions of the misguided domino theory and the alienation of Ho Chi Minh? Is the supposed predilection to violence of a socialist state in Asia in 1970's able to be calculated without adding the previous decade of napalm to the equation? Doubtful at best.
What Bill has spent the last months raving about are ideas in the present spectrum of US politics that have no trackable commonplace with say the Khmer Rouge or Stalinism. The murderous campaigns in those regimes have much more to do with ideas of power, purity, and the fear of counter revolution that with any desire to check the accumulation of wealth of the few. In the Khmer especially, being a regime based on a very tight cult of personality in Pol Pot and Leader Number 2 and focused on a destruction of all art and cultural experience have almost nothing in common with ideas of the so-called regressive left. Socialist experiments in Chiapas and Rojava would be just as applicable if not more so than any of the war time rampages born out of the violent nationalisms of the last century.
It is not mere lip service to say that a human socialism was betrayed by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in the service of the State. If you wish to make leaps like you are making then capitalism is nothing but Sinclair's Jungle or child labor of the turn of the twentieth century. The question is what is innate to the ideas and what is created by particulars of the time. A politic based in the idea of "to each according to her needs", that recognizes that all wealth in the modern world is based in an access to structures lifted up on the shoulders of others is hardly innately connected to the Killing Fields or the Gulag. Vaclav Havel, a man as aware as any body in any boat of the dangers of State socialism said in 1994:
Planetary democracy does not yet exist but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it. It is the very Earth we inhabit linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us and all of us together.
A disaster looms for human society and the biomes of the world. The promise that a solution to this disaster which has been brought to its peak by unfettered capitalism (among other players) will look more like that same capitalism and less like the as yet unrealized aspirations of socialist dreamers is, to me, a very strained bluster.
All that serious business aside, if you don't find conflating the women on the View, some loner adjunct goofball with a bike lock, and Stalin with the idea that we cannot allow the wealth disparity and the war on the worlds resources to go uncontested, maybe even to the point of blood, strained gobblygook then I don't know what to tell you. There is long history of many permutations of these ideas on the left.
It is no accident that when there is any real danger of a human Socialism coming to be as with Allende, Spain or now Rojava the interests of concentrated power on all sides unite against it. Bill speaks of the true left with obviously no experience wrestling with the presence of say Gramsci, or Luxemborg, or Kropotkin. I think the charge of lack of depth to his argument stands even without noticing how often his phrases and language seem parroted right out internet talking points of the far right despite their being sandwiched in constant claims of the center.
Truth is I am no anything-ist myself. I think these categories are way past obsolete. But I respect their arguments and find nothing remotely resembling the actual Left in the windmills Bill is charging at. Stupid internet-filled fans rooting for the Blue Jersies, maybe. But no one I hear speaking at any meetings where serious tactics are being discussed.