You Have Only To Carry It Out - A Really Egalitarian-Democratic Economic System Won't Require Erudite Experts And Theoreticians They'll Just Muck It Up

Oh, dear.  I doubt that the announced resurgence of socialism among the very young, the Bernie Sanders fan club, is going to end well for the promotion of real socialism.  I say that as a socialist. It's promoted in a sort of Manichean book review by Richard Seymour in In These Times.   He contrasts the, no doubt, evil Regnery effluent, The Problem with Socialism by one Thomas DiLorenzo with the opportunistically timed Verso book, The ABCs of Socialism Edited by Bhaskar Sunkara of that most absurdly named Jacobin Magazine.   I haven't looked at either of the books, I think I've outgrown an absurd primer style treatment of would-be socialism - I have every faith that they, no less than DiLorenzo, don't mean at all what I do when I call myself a socialist.  Considering that In These Times apparently thinks Seymour's socialism has a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the Sanders fad the whole thing turns immediately into a ridiculous attempt to do things like downplay the reality of Stalinism

Still, the best arguments that DiLorenzo can muster are some warmed-over scare tactics about Stalinism and a bizarre retelling of the story of Pocahontas.

Considering the fact that Stalin is in the running for most accomplished mass murderer in history, can one over emphasize the importance of avoiding repeating it?   Though I don't know what Seymour is referring to, I'm sure that anything Regnery publishes is likely to include a bizarre retelling of history, I don't have any more faith that what Seymour says is any less bizarre.  And it's a rather odd thing to allude to an absurd story about Pocahontas, considering how Seymour promotes the Jacobin's book.

For a volume that aims to cover all bases, the collection succeeds to an impressive extent. There is a spritely tone to a lot of the argument, and a precise calibration of piss and vinegar that works particularly well when puncturing pieties. The ABCs offers answers to a range of questions, from “Isn’t America already kind of socialist?” to “Will socialists take my Kenny Loggins records?” (The answer to both is “no.”)

I certainly hope that any young person who is bright enough to read the book would find that insultingly condescending and clueless.  "Kenny Loggins records"?   I can imagine after lots of them ask "Who's that", they might be miffed.  The equivalent would have pissed me off when I was in my 20s.

And, if the goal is to instruct today's young this seems to be rather anachronistic.

The kind of “freedom” offered by capitalism, explains sociologist Erik Olin Wright, preserves the “tyranny” of the nine-to-five workday, hoards control over the major investment decisions that affect our lives and compromises even the limited political institutions that we are left with. 

I think most 20 somethings facing an Uber economy, a future as "contractors" and "subcontractors" and part-time wage slaves would love to experience a secure full-time job with the "limited political institutions" such as guaranteed benefits that even the wage slaves of my generation once knew.

No, the kind of "socialism" that these guys are talking about has nothing much to do with direct worker ownership of the means of production within an egalitarian democracy.   My socialism is so shunted aside and disregarded and talked over that I don't think calling it "socialism" is useful anymore.  Some new name for it needs to be found.   I'd like someone to supply one, I don't have any gift for inventing neologisms that catch on.

Most ironic of all, to me, is that I look at what Seymour and the neo-Jacobins advocate and I don't see it as really different from what they're pushing at Regnery.  I think the attempt of the Marxists and the fascists to distingish between themselves has produced a false and phony dichotomy when they're just variations on the same, oppressive, materialist, ultimately enslaving and murderous system of thought.

The Bernie or Busters I know tend to be rather affluent, many with something I don't and wouldn't have, investments in stocks and money markets and the such.  If Richard Seymour's style of socialism came in, they'd be among those who would resist it and be fighting against it, tooth and nail.  I can well imagine a lot of them taking that well known road from the alleged far left into neo-conservatism which, in reality, is a baby step.

Those 20 somethings, they'd hate living under Marxism, especially as it has existed in any of the places it has been imposed.  Though I think they'd really like to own the means of production they rely on to make a living.

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One of the biggest lies that came out of that section of the neo-atheists who were also peddlers of the pseudo-science of evolutionary psychology was the accusation that the universal declarations of love found in the Gospels was meant only for Jews, that Jesus would have turned over in the ossuary or pit or wherever they claimed his unresurected body lay if he knew that Paul and others were preaching the Gospel to gentiles.   Such was, of course, contradicted directly in the text.   That's most notable in the famous passage from Luke 25 in today's lectionary of many churches,  the parable of the Good Samaritan. The passage starts when a "scholar of the law stood up to test" Jesus.  He asked what he had to do to gain eternal life, what we'd probably call "going to heaven".   Jesus asks him what The Law says.  The Scholar gives him the formula from the book of Daniel, the Shema, with references from Deuteronomy and Numbers, said as a daily prayer by strict Jews appended with reference to the passage from Leviticus popularized by Christians as "The Golden Rule".

"You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your being,
with all your strength,
and with all your mind,
and your neighbor as yourself."

He replied to him, "You have answered correctly;
do this and you will live."

The Scholar wants clarification as to just who it is he has to love like himself so he asks who his neighbor is and Jesus teaches him with a parable.

In the parable a traveler is assaulted and robbed and left lying in terrible condition on the side of the road.   Though Jesus didn't specify the ethnic identity of the man, I think it's generally assumed he was intended to be understood as being a Jew.  Though perhaps Jesus was indicating that wasn't important so he didn't assign him ethnic identity.

Two highly placed Jews - no doubt to be considered strictly law abiding - see him lying injured on the side of the road, a priest and a Levite - the Levites were the assistants to the temple priesthood - and they ignore him, passing on the other side of the road.  But a Samaritan, who might well have been considered a heretic, certainly not followers of THE authentic, Jerusalem Temple based, tradition, gives the injured man first aid, puts him on his own animal and brings him to an Inn where he takes care of him and leaves money so the inn keeper will let him stay there till he recovers, promising to come back to pay the balance when he passes through again.   Jesus asks which of these were the injured man's neighbor and the Scholar has to admit it wasn't the two members of the high religious establishment, it was the heretic who - by his actions - was a neighbor to the injured man.

Which of these three, in your opinion,
was neighbor to the robbers' victim?"
He answered, "The one who treated him with mercy."
Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

Clearly the Scholar of the Jewish Law knew, when it was pointed out to him,  that genetic and ethnic and clan relatedness had nothing to do with who we are to consider our neighbor, treating them like we'd want to be treated.  Jesus certainly taught that ethnic groupings and class didn't matter.  So the accusation made against both The Law and the Gospel is a bald-faced lie.

The accusation that few of those who professed that passage, who read it or heard it in church who didn't "Go and do likewise" were hypocrites would have been entirely justified but there's no news in that.

What is especially ridiculous for someone like Richard Dawkins or John Hartung or Kevin MacDonald or anyone trying to squeeze morality out of natural selection in using that as a criticism of Judaism and Christianity is that the Priest and Levite were practicing what they preached was the way of nature, part of the mechanism of evolutionary advancement, something that so many of their fellow Darwinists such as Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, have advocated be turned into social policy and law. turning passing on the other side of the road into a requirement of law and a societal good.

Darwinist social science and biology always has tends to drift to the end result of propping up capitalism, unsurprising in that it originated in the worst, most cruel and least Christian of capitalism as elucidated by Malthus and succeeding generations of enlightened, priests and Levites of  English language and European materialism.   Trying to paint a happy face on it will, sooner than later, fade and wear away like an old political campaign sign.

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Now, the Golden Rule, that's something I think just about everyone can get, it doesn't require an insulting primer-style book for the ignorant masses, it is as the passage, also in today's lectionary from Deuteronomy says:

"... this command that I enjoin on you today
is not too mysterious and remote for you.
It is not up in the sky, that you should say,
'Who will go up in the sky to get it for us
and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?'
Nor is it across the sea, that you should say,
'Who will cross the sea to get it for us
and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?'
No, it is something very near to you,
already in your mouths and in your hearts;
you have only to carry it out."

I don't think anything more complex than that has any chance of working as a real political or economic strategy of defeating the horrors of capitalism.   I am absolutely certain that someone like Richard Seymour or the writers at Jacobin are not going to come up with anything except what will only make that less likely.