Bloggerei und Sozialismus

Pipes, Tubes, Strings and Cans: The Internets

Will just make this a new main entry because the thread we've been commenting on is getting very long. Just to respond to one thing Rocky mentioned about the difficulty of assessing whether blogging does much good, I don't know what good all these thousands of blogs passing through the "Tubes and Pipes" do either—it's a good question. It may be that more than we know depends on some core of people who are capable of making an intelligent case for their convictions rather than shouting as loud as they can and then resorting to chicanery when that doesn't work. I used to enjoy listening—believe it or not—to William F. Buckley's Firing Line interviews. I disagreed with him most of the time, but the fellow had a certain semi-aristocratic, bemused way of intoning, "Now what would Kant say about that as an ethical proposition?" to people who claimed to know the way but hadn't consulted the moral or intellectual atlas necessary to sustain their claim.

As for post-election gloating, yes, it should be avoided and is invariably in poor taste. If John McCain loses as all the major pollsters and the politicos now expect, he will still have been granted the nomination of his party. That is a tremendous honor granted to very few politicians, and he should be proud of it, as he is of his military service.

That Old-Time Socialism

Also wanted to address what I recall being Robert's use of the term "socialist" or "socialism." I think such a term always needs calibration. Socialism of the grand old European sort is by no means something Obama or other Democrats would want anything to do with. Nobody in Glorious Nation of US & A really wants to do away with the market in favor of system-wide state control of the means and processes of production, and that is what socialism is. I don't know any Democrats who want to do away with private property. (We do have one self-declared Socialist in Congress. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He's a cool cat, but nobody listens to him.) America has a very strong capitalist, market-oriented tradition that has, for practical reasons, been somewhat modified over many decades, especially since the Great Depression. We now have what could be called a mixed socio-economic system, with hefty government involvement in some areas, and very little in others. Why this involvement is sometimes necessary should be painfully evident from the recent (and potentially ongoing) near-collapse of our financial sector thanks to an ideologically based proscription of even the most necessary oversight of market practices. Unfortunately, as I'm sure you know, capitalist movers and shakers do not always do what's in the best interests of keeping the system viable. (The Brits figured this out long ago, and it is why there wasn't a communist revolution in Great Britain, as Marx himself thought would be the case.) There is no such thing as pure capitalism in practice anymore, and with good reason. All western liberal societies are "mixed." A socialist government wants to nationalize/centralize production and rationalize distribution rather than leaving things up to market forces that it finds exploitative. And it wants to do this as a means of eventually or rapidly doing away with the capitalist order in its entirety: full communism. Even something like Canadian-style single-payer health insurance (which Obama doesn't support) wouldn't come near such a thoroughgoing agenda, and is unlikely to lead to one. A socialist wants to transform the entire socio-economic complex of institutions and practices radically, and there just aren't any serious, highly influential leftists of that kind in American political power today. Obama is arguably fairly "liberal" in his views, but American liberalism doesn't equate to socialism: it is just a modulation of bourgeois capitalist ideology, not a fundamental challenge to it. Indeed, the European left has always found the American left half-hearted and undisciplined.

When Comrade Obama starts talking like this, I'll diagnose him as a downright socialist:

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. (The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Part II -- from my little International Publishers volume, replete with red-and-white cover pics of Karl and Fred.)

"Allerdings, das wollen wir." Can't fault Uncle Karl for sarcasm, that's for sure.