If this pandemic should have done one thing to the socialist left, it should be to force them to see that the Marxist-communist expropriation that goes by the name "socialist" is as legitimate a discrediting of the word as the Nazis expropriating the same word. As I said, any "socialism" which isn't thoroughly egalitarian and democratic* is going to be just another species of gangsterism and Marxism is an anti-democratic ideology. I am entirely skeptical of any and all leftists who have an unrepudiated association with Marxism in their past, that's what the Bernie Sanders cult has done form me since 2008.
Any government which can lie about something will lie about it if they want to, whether the Trump gang in the US. the Boris Johnson government in Britain, state governments, the various other governments, from China and the Putin regime to those nominally democratic and "social democratic". I have every confidence there will be loads of lying in Sweden as the choices that government made come home to roost in a way that even the contented, compliant Swedes face the disaster it was.
I have come to be entirely skeptical about the chances of decency being the result of government ownership and control, I have as much skepticism of that as I do the control of capitalists to produce that result. Capitalism inevitably does the same thing that state ownership does, only it does so through the corruption of governments and elections, why American conservatives who are concerned about the evils of government ownership are not equally troubled by the government being the servant of capitalists is, in its most charitable interpretation, a delusional oversight. A regime of strict regulation may ameliorate that to an extent, temporarily, but it relies on the enduring ability of governments to avoid the corruptions such as our regulations have fallen victim to through lies spread by the corporate media.
There is all the difference in the world between having the state own everything, the central and incredibly stupid core of Marxism, and having the workers own the means of production - what socialism should always have meant but so seldom does.
Does anyone think that the companies that have been the worst at treating their mostly blue-collar workers like disposable supplies would be risking their lives if the workers, themselves owned them? Does anyone think they would be putting out lies like the Trump regime,like the Republican-fascist governors have, like Republican fascist minor state officials and legislators and Republican-fascist members of Congress, the right-wing and supposedly centrist media, the PR departments of companies and corporations have?
I don't think when the state owns the means of production you are going to have a situation that is any better than the one that prevails in officially capitalist countries, countries with state-capitalist and state-"socialist" systems or those who are governed by a Communist gang of gangsters who have retained the Communist crime gangs in power as they become billionaires practicing Victorian era capitalism on the kind of steroidal power that comes with such a parody of "socialism".
Years ago when I wrote about the kind of socialist I was, Echidne of the Snakes related that with some of the economic activity that is, I think, misnamed "anarchist". I am not an anarchist, knowing what happens when there is no civil authority, gangsters will provide one to fill that vacuum. But my kind of socialism isn't what,effectively, everyone means when they use the word so I am reluctant to use it.
What my socialism is is merely the economic utilitarian outcome of those two things I am before I am any kind of socialist, an egalitarian and a democrat. I would say the same thing that Franklin Roosevelt said when a reporter asked him if he was a communist, "I am a Christian and a Democrat, that's all." It would mean the same thing I mean, Christianity being the common source of egalitarian democracy based in the moral teachings of Jesus. I think that is due to Christianity being the most pervasive elucidation of such things as the Golden Rule, doing to the least among us as we would do to God, and the other sayings of Jesus. I think it's possible to hold to equality and democracy even if you find their source elsewhere, though I don't know where that has really been done. I don't think you can do that with materialism or atheism. Over the past two decades of thinking very hard about the failure of egalitarian democracy since the 1960s I have come to have absolutely no faith in any alleged secular source of it. I am thoroughly unimpressed with the moral character of Sweden, right now, and that's after a lifetime of absorbing the image of it as some kind of social-democratic paradise.
* By "democratic" I don't mean one free election and then a dictatorship, not even one allegedly of the majority, I mean one in which real equality is the governing and central law, something which the American system thwarts from its founding.
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