Scalded Chait

On the one hand, Chait holds himself out as the practitioner of a liberalism devoted to “permeability, [and] openness to evidence and diverse perspectives.” On the other, he wants to make out that the people who are to his left on race and gender are a crowd of neo-authoritarians in the making

:: applause gif ::

If you really carry political correctness to its logical extreme, and the US starts imposing restrictions and defining the views that are appropriate to express in public, we could wind up being like … Canada.

people like Chait are going to be hauled off to the camps for compulsory gender reassignment surgery

Nah, they’ll just refuse to let him speak anywhere, and disrupt him when he tries. That’s totally fine. Because, you know, it’s not like they’re hauling him off for compulsory gender reassignment surgery.

What is striking is how one form of political correctness just replaces another, from McCarthyism, to nationalistic jingoism and standing for the anthem, with only a choice between them.

I teach at a major US university. I see many colleagues up in arms about pc-ness. Whenever I look into a case, I see a comfortable person getting criticized (often unfairly), and crying about it.

But what I don’t see are cases where a comfortable academic has actually been materially harmed by a pc uprising. I know some people have had to change jobs, and that is disruptive, but they are still FINE — well off, in fact.

I haven’t paid close attention, so I am honestly asking for the examples. Who has been unfairly and significantly harmed by an overly aggressive pc crusade?

– the problem for this Chait character is that all ”liberal” people and otherwise have started to reject the illiberal notion propagated by US Conservatives of free HATE speech as a positive good enjoyed by all bad citizens.

And as he makes this crazy political play with it:
”MARXIST”!
SCARE!! SCARE!!! –
somebody perhaps should tell him ON TWITTER – that ”Marx” was a dude who never ever would have joined a club which would have accepted him.
And as I don’t do nonsense like Twitter – perhaps somebody who likes to ”zwitscher” should ”zwitscher” him?

Adam @ 10:

Well, it depends what counts as harm in your book. Loss of a limb? Being violently assaulted? Dismissal without a buyout or generous severance?

Let’s not get semantic about it. What do you call the firing of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying at Evergreen State College? Or Amy Wax being barred from teaching a first year law class at Penn?

I also teach at a major US university. After one student complained anonymously that I made him or her feel “unsafe” and agitation by “more than one or two” other students (out of about 120), I was yanked from teaching two classes.

I am not crying about it. I am shedding tears for the real losers — the other students — who are taught bowdlerized and expurgated classes by faculty who have let themselves be mau-maued into silence.

First they come for the libertarians ….

They are the book burners. In another time and place, they would have been the first students to confront Jewish professors and to hound them out of their classrooms.

There actually have been book burners, and there is literally nothing that would stop these kids if they wanted to burn books. They don’t burn books solely because they don’t want to. No other reason.

There are actually people who speak out against Jewish professors. It is a convention of white people that we don’t call them “PC,” because that term is used as a bludgeon against, well, Jewish professors, among other people.

The threat to free speech on college campuses and elsewhere is coming almost exclusively from the right. As Chait points out, Bouie wrote well about this — but not well enough, apparently, to deserve a substantive response from Chait.

I’ve got to give this one to Chait, though:

Many of the anti-anti-PC-niks, while conceding that it’s wrong to shout down speakers or close down newspapers, use the moral power of some other issue to make their case. Because we have too many anti-PC columns, they insist, we have too few columns on some worthier subject.

If Bret Stephens weren’t constructing a false equivalence between the way leftists and rightists treat free speech, he’d be doing some other ridiculous thing. It’s not like there’s an opportunity cost associated with some particular bit of nonsense from David Brooks — if he weren’t writing about the scourge of political correctness, he’d be writing stupidly about something else.

Chait, on the other hand, really does have useful things to say, and it’s a shame that at a young age, this issue imprinted itself on him.

What Chait fails to grasp is that liberal intolerance on campus is interesting primarily because it is so unusual. Everyone understands that free speech isn’t a conservative value, so nobody but liberals will mind this bit of routine business by a congressman and a school.

@Stephen

In Latin America, there is Allende’s Chile and Cuba and, without either being paragons of virtuous liberalism, I would say that they were both victims of American aggression for geopolitical reasons rather than for any massive human rights violations.

Currently, we have Laos and Vietnam and former socialist states include Mongolia, East Germany and Mozambique. I don’t know how liberal these states are or were, but I don’t think they are much worse that states that the US looks kindly to or to the US itself, what with all those wars, torture, and renditions.

I personally am a socialist and I am not illiberal, it is just that I do not consider liberalism revolutionary anymore, as it was in the 19th century. I see no contradiction between liberalism and socialism, just that socialism has to build upon the gains already made by the liberal revolutions. This notion that you have to choose one or another, and destroy one in order to have the other, I find ridiculous.

First, kulakization. Then, dekulakization. You can’t win!

Also, what Jerry V. said.

And Professor Maitland is nothing if not consistent. Foolishly, hobgoblinishly so. Some variation on the same theme every time he comes out from under his bridge!

Ian Maitland, are you seriously suggesting that “trans people should be listened to about their own gender” and “trans people should be killed”, that “people of colour should be listened to about their experiences of marginalisation, and we should try to counteract that marginalisation” and “people of colour are subhuman and should be killed” are – and I quote – ‘technicalities’? That’s an INTERESTING definition of technicality you have there.

@Stephen:

Nice straw-man. That Chait is right about historically instant cases of the Marxist state is trivially true.

What he is wrong about is that campus “PC” is remotely comparable.

Typo mangled grammar, third sentence. Should be “if he is accurately quoted”.

Should stress, I know almost nothing of Chait. If argument is “this man is an all-round scoundrel”, well, for all I know that may well be so. But did he write the words complained of, and if so was he wrong?

A simple sentence and yet – my propensity for error remains intact ‘our’ thinking. I blame the caps.

I’m of the opinion that a look at actual, concrete facts is the basis of a solid understanding. So, here are your potential Gulag operators, reading slogans from an iphone.

These people are a major PR problem for the left, but not much more. That’s bad enough, though, IMO.

Maitland @ 14: Profs. Weinstein and Heying were not fired from Evergreen. They sued Evergreen and then resigned after being offered a $500,000 settlement from the state. But don’t let that get in the way of a good rant.

To answer 19 – Wikipedia is your friend:

The Communist Party in Kerala is unique because it has functioned under the conditions of a democracy, relying on popular support to remain in power. Unlike many other communist governments, the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Kerala did not crush political dissent. CPI’s 1957 constitution stated it would allow the existence of opposing parties after it had parliamentary majority. Party leaders, like Namboodiripad, did not like the idea of using military force to remain in power because it would reflect poorly on the CPI as a whole on a global stage. This reliance on the people’s opinions created a benevolent communist government, but it also made it more difficult to enact radical reforms. Therefore, the reforms of the CPI in Kerala were mainly moderately socialist.

Communism in Kerala refers to the strong presence of communist ideas in the Indian state of Kerala. In addition to Kerala, the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura have had democratically elected multiple Marxist governments, and change takes place in the government by regular multiparty electoral process. Communism of Kerala has provided Indian communist stalwarts such as E. M. S. Namboodiripad and A. K. Gopalan.

Today the two largest communist parties in Kerala politics are the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (which split from the Communist Party of India in 1964). The Left Democratic Front is a coalition of left-wing political parties in the state of Kerala and is one of the two major political coalitions in Kerala, each of which have been in power alternatively for the last two decades. The coalition consists of the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Revolutionary Socialist Party (India), the Janata Dal (Secular), the Nationalist Congress Party, the Indian National League, the Kerala Congress (Anti-merger Group), and the Indian National Congress (Socialist).

Lived and worked in three communist/Socialist countries (Laos, PRC and Vietnam) and travel to them (and Kerala) regularly. People like Chait demonstrate an inverse relationship between the strength with which they hold their opinions and the extent to which those opinions are informed by actual experience.

Does Marxist ideology in fact prioritise class justice, or in the Marxist-Leninist version the interests of the Party, over individual rights? If not, why not?

What constitutes “Marxist ideology?” What specific text by Marx would lead you to believe the former?

What allowance for legitimate disagreement is in fact made by Marxists? (I do realise that “legitimate” is a very elastic word: it might, perhaps, cover disagreement only by other Marxists. Also, “Marxist” is itself a very slippery term.)

This question is entirely meaningless, as there’s no one true thing that Marxists are “required” to believe on this issue (or most other issues either).

In short, why was Chait wrong?

I find it very difficult to get into the mindset of someone who finds Chait’s argument incomprehensible. Either society, culture, structure or whatever you want to call it, can be oppressive, and should be opposed/exposed by a left, or only the state and/or economic sphere should be opposed. If the culture can only be accepted, then—given that the ancien regime disappeared long ago—it’s up to each individual to cope in whatever individualistic way she can create for herself. And this seems quite a bit closer to Chait than to what Henry would seem be defending as the not-anything-like-a-gulag left. (I refrained from saying this on the other post because it seemed rude in that context, and the whole gulag thing is not going to fit in a comment box). The argument here—it seems to be different elsewhere—is apparently that we ought to allow the kids to act like commissars (a term I think I’m borrowing from Tim Burke), not because it’s right to have commissars and kids do the best job, but because being stupid is what kids do and it’s good for us to be afraid of them. If leftists want to distinguish themselves from liberals, something more than “they’re obliged to agree with me and they won’t” seems called for. (Personal note: I attended a college reputed for lefty activity and lefty faculty a couple of years before “PC” became a thing—the idea that we were generationally expected to do something even our elders on the left considered stupid and pointless , just because we didn’t know better yet, wasn’t unvoiced, even by some of those elders. Now, maybe all that offloading responsibility onto the young is on the brink of bearing fruit, though I’m not holding my breath.) But when our pundit class is reduced to writing about writing about writing about writing, it’s hard to see why no more writing would be a bad thing.

I also, very honestly, find it very difficult to grasp what Henry, and possibly other commenters and/or front-pagers here, mean by “left.” I did come here, though, immediately after reading Chait’s new piece, to see if he had commented.

Chait’s not the only one doing this, by any means, obviously. There’s also the sociological pairing of Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, authors of The Rise of Victimhood Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). They’re fond of the phrase “concept creep,” which in their writing seems to do the same sort of work:

Victimhood culture encourages […] concept creep. Conditions that breed a high sensitivity to slight encourage people to describe things they find offensive in the strongest possible terms – not a mere insult, but a verbal assault; not an awkward statement, but a microaggression; not just irritating, but oppressive. Victimhood culture also involves a tendency to rely on third parties – complaining to authorities or to the public at large – and this too encourages people to use the most severe terms available. Language that emphasizes and exaggerates one’s degree of victimization becomes a tool for convincing others to join one’s side.

So there seems to be a slippery slope assumption operating in this kind of discourse; a sense that, once “liberal” safeguards surrounding decorum and civility are removed, it’s a discursive war of all against all that will (perhaps inevitably) slip into actual, physical conflict.

To be honest, I think there are some valid insights here about the nature of “call out culture,” I’d just prefer if I didn’t have to go to extreme-centrist liberals like Chait or Haidt or libertarians (which is what I assume Campbell and Manning are) to find them.

I do think efforts to shut down speech are dangerous. I’ve seen this process first-hand many times over the course of my life at many scales, from small political groups to large institutions. I agree tactically with Chait, but I think his analysis is utterly wrong.

Illiberalism is not a consequence of left wing thinking, Marxist or otherwise. I do have a beef with Marxism over the concept of objective interests, which I regard as anti-democratic, and which has been marshaled to justify grotesque extremes of repression. This framing of politics does not single out speech, however; it can be used to attack any activity that interferes with governance by the party that deems itself the agent of the “true” interests of the masses. But that’s not what Chait is talking about, is it? (And one could believe in the doctrine of objective interests knowable by those who understand the “correct” theory and still hold off from repression on the grounds that the means shapes the ends, as Rosa Luxemburg and many other democratic Marxists did.)

Most of the repression of speech I’ve seen has been in the context of good ol’ fashioned power grabs, more or less orthogonal to ideology. Any faction might do this.

To the extent that there’s a particularly leftist justification for shutting down speech, it comes from the emergence of radical subjectivism in a strain of left thinking. According to this view, subjective experience is the highest form of knowledge, such that there is no value to the utterances of someone from Group Y about the problems experienced by members of Group X. In this context, the main effect of speech emanating from Y is to cause either positive or negative emotional reactions in the Xers, which makes it a potential form of oppression in itself. To put it differently, in this view some speech is bad not because of the actions it might lead to but because the immediate experience of hearing the speech is personally painful.

Now that take on “painful” speech is not wrong in general: speech can do that. And certainly some speech does that so intensely and with so little countervailing benefit that it is justified to shut it down—that’s what we mean by hate speech. We can debate where we would draw the line, and I’m sure we wouldn’t all agree. The problem with the subjectivist take on speech is that the line is drawn on the basis of the binary “is this speech painful to oppressed people?”, which is a terrible test. (We need people to tell us things that are painful to hear but we need to hear anyway.)

I think people of a progressive or leftist outlook should be aware of the emergence of radically subjectivist ideology and push against it, not only because its anti-liberal aspects are pernicious, but also because it is ultimately anti-political. It is not about achieving collective action to overcome urgently needed political and social change but solely changes in individual belief and behavior. In sloganeering terms, the personal is political, but the political is not just, or even primarily, the personal.

Peter Dorman @ 44:

I’m skeptical of the way that today’s anti-PC slippery-slopers speak of a “logic” to a “strain of thinking” that has historical effects. Just as you implied that the concept of “objective interests” was tangential to the actual repression justified in its name (in the case of Rosa Luxembourg, we see there’s no necessary relation between the concept and it’s inhumane application), “radical subjectivism” is unlikely to put on pants and walk off the page, so to speak. And yet “pernicious” and “anti-political” are predictions about the future in meat-space, are they not?

Of course, there can be valid slippery slope arguments. When the slippery slope is a real thing that has actually played out in our recent history (racism —> racial oppression), for example. But anti-PC fears about the illiberal left resemble the tendency of the “comfortable” to treat a potential harm that would threaten them as more real than an actual harm that damages others.

True advocates of free speech should be radical egalitarians.

+googolplex

Floopmeister236: many thanks. I am very happy to learn that in the Indian state of Kerala there has been long-term Communist participation in government without any silencing or oppression of those who disagree: so, it’s possible.

I note, though, that the Communists in the Kerala government were only one part of a multi-party coalition, did not attempt to enact more than moderately socialist reforms, and participated only in a local State government without control of the national courts, police or army. I suspect that may have had something to do with their moderation.

I forget who cited East Germany and Cuba as non-oppressive Communist states. Full marks for creative imagination.

@Stephen 50

The problem is, there have been various flavours of socialists/communists/marxists, some were revolutionary marxists (e.g. Lenin) and some were not (e.g. Hilferding).

The one who were not revolutionary did not create communist dictatorships, and therefore lived in multiparty regimes; but if you only count the ones who created communist dictatorships as “communists” or “marxists” then you have a circular logic were every “true” communist always creates a dictatorship, because if he or she doesn’t then s/he isn’t a true communist.

I’m using Hilferding as an example because he is generally counted as a social democrat, he was boss of the SPD, he was opposed to Stalin, but he was also clearly a marxists who believed in central planning. Here is a citation from

“State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy” (1940)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1940/statecapitalism.htm
___________
[…]
Of course, from a social democratic viewpoint the Bolshevik economy can hardly be called “socialist,” for to us socialism is indissolubly linked to democracy. According to our concept, socialization of the means of production implies freeing the economy from the rule of one class and vesting it in society as a whole-a society which is democratically self-governed. We never imagined that the political form of that “managed economy” which was to replace capitalist production for a free market could he unrestricted absolutism. The correlation between the economic basis and the political structure seemed to us a very definite one: namely, that the socialist society would inaugurate the highest realization of democracy. Even those among us who believed that the strictest application of centralized power would be necessary or inevitable for the period of transition, considered this period only temporary and bound to end after the suppression of the propertied classes. Together with the disappearance of classes, class rule was also to vanish – that class rule which we considered the only possible form of political rule in general. “The state is withering away …”
[…]
For this reason the controversy as to whether the economic system of the Soviet Union is “capitalist” or “socialist” seems to me rather pointless. It is neither. It represents a totalitarian state economy, i.e. a system to which the economies of Germany and Italy are drawing closer and closer.
________

“If there is oppression going on, you’re either for it or against it. It’s not really possible to be neutral. If Chait is arguing for neutrality, he’s actually supporting the oppressors. ”

That’s a good sound bite, but I doubt it’s true. Just take the example where there’s oppression going on *which I don’t know about*. Then presumably I’m neither for nor against and in fact am neutral. And I doubt in my ignorance I’m actually supporting the oppressors.

If we could go back to the beginning of this discussion: Chait wrote that “every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive”. I wondered if this was true.

Floopmeister interestingly cited Kerala as a state where there had for a long time been a partly-Communist state government, with restricted powers, that had not turned massively repressive. I commented that in the circumstances they had no chance to do so.

Layman, seriously misunderstanding Anthony Flew’s argument, declared this to be an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Rather, the parallel goes like this: All true Scotsmen drink whisky. Hamish MacPherson, currently doing time in HM Prison Barlinnie, and Ian MacTavish, working on contract in Saudi Arabia, do not drink whisky. Does that mean that they are not true Scotsmen, or that they are still true Scotsmen because they would drink whisky if that were possible?

Mister Mr makes, I think, a basic error, as does Chait. They both seem to me to slither between Marxist and Communist. If by Marxist we mean influenced in some way by Marx’s arguments, that covers rather a large range of people, and Chait is wrong (in this, and for all I know in many other things). In as far as social democracy is influenced by Marx – though of course it began as a complete disagreement with one of Marx’s basic ideas – then there have been numerous examples of social democratic governments that have never turned massively repressive. Anyone equating the two should consider that the Communists in 1930s Germany regarded the Social Democrats as their real enemy, in part because they did not intend to turn massively repressive in what the Communists saw as the Marxist interest. That Hilferding, a Social Democrat, did not advocate repression is to his credit. Still, he did want a completely centrally planned economy, and how far that is compatible with the absence of massive repression is uncertain, since the combination has never as far as I know been tried.

I agree with Z that democratic electorates have very rarely chosen Communism, and are not likely to. I’m not convinced by his example of San Marino, a micro-state entirely surrounded by overwhelmingly powerful non-Communist Italy. To quote Wikipedia on San Marino’s history:

“The coalition of 19 Communist and 16 Socialist deputies of parliament fell in April 1957 due to a factional split in the Socialist Party…. New elections were scheduled for September 19 of that same year. Facing defeat at the polls, the Communist-led coalition issued orders on election day to bar members of parliament from gaining access to the parliament building and proclaimed it to be dissolved. This constitutional crisis was resolved by intervention of the Italian government.”

Forgive me for thinking that, without Italian intervention, there would have been yet another example of Communist repression. That Z is right in declaring that non-Communist governments can be repressive, well, who could possibly disagree?

Would I be right in summarising the arguments for and against Chait thus:

Pro. We have in the American left, particularly in some universities, people who are happy to use threats and violence to prevent those they disagree with being heard. They have no power over the courts and the police; but if after (unspecified) political developments they had, it is reasonable they would use that power in accordance with their beliefs.

That does seem to me to be indisputable.

Con. Given the healthy US system of democracy and balance of powers, the chances of the violent repressive Left coming anywhere near power are essentially zero. We’re dealing with students, by definition troublesome and ignorantly rebellious. Semel insanivimus omnes. Leave them to grow up.

Also in my opinion indisputable. But in as far as the intelligent non-repressive Left do not clearly separate themselves from violence, they are handing a valuable gift to their opponents.

Z: sorry to ignore one of your points, I was called away by other work of greater importance and indeterminate duration. You wrote that “a coalition of Communists and explicitly marxist Socialists (the former being dominant) held legislative power after the elections of 1945 in France and had the task of writing the Constitution of the newly liberated country.” 

Well yes, up to a point. The Provisional Government of the French Republic, created in June 1944 and lasting till January 1947, had as successive Chairmen Charles de Gaulle (say no more); Felix Gouin (Socialist but emphatically not Communist); Georges Bidault (eminent non-Communist Resistant, de Gaulle’s and Gouin’s foreign minister, founder of the Christian Democrat MRP, eventually, member of the not-remotely-Communist OAS); Vincent Auriol (eminent Socialist Resistant, President of the Constituent Assemblies that drafted the eventual Constitution of the Fourth Republic); and very briefly Leon Blum (ex-Buchenwald, anti-Communist and anti-Gaullist). Isn’t Wikipedia wonderful?

How you get from that to saying that the Communists were “dominant” and “held legislative power”, I cannot say.

As for a coalition of Communists and Socialists writing the new Constitution of the liberated French Republic, well indeed, what you wrote is strictly true. Nice try, they did. What you did not mention was that this Constitution was submitted to a referendum in May 1946, and decisively rejected. The Constitution eventually approved was very different. You will forgive me for suspecting that had a Marxist coalition held real power, either the referendum would never have been allowed or the votes, counted by the coalition’s observers, would have been over 90% in favour.

I do think efforts to shut down speech are dangerous.

Indeed. We shouldn’t talk about such things.

Stephen @56:

We have in the American left, particularly in some universities, people who are happy to use threats and violence to prevent those they disagree with being heard. They have no power over the courts and the police; but if after (unspecified) political developments they had, it is reasonable they would use that power in accordance with their beliefs.

I don’t think “happy” makes any descriptive sense. Perhaps you are intending to demonize, here? A sociopath is “happy” to use threats and violence, the rest of us (you and I) are “angry”, “scared”, “frustrated”…maybe “passionate” (but that’s a stretch) when we resort to threats and violence. Can you offer an example of such people being “happy” amidst these threats and actions?

More substantively, do not the security guards and criminal codes that protect both privately-held and government-controlled channels of mass communication constitute “threats and use of violence to prevent those they disagree with being heard”? Without denouncing the principle of free speech -or even while simultaneously praising the principle- both Liberals, the Right, and the Left, are tempted to defend a scarce resource for speech (be it a televison studio or a college campus) with the implicit or explicit use of force.

And just as some in the Left might justify their “no platform”-ing as the necessary act of a weak and threatened interest, Liberalism has too supported flagrant violations of free speech internationally where it has considered itself to be weak and threatened. The complex relationship between liberals and free speech continues, even in domestic matters: see Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.

Finally, you more-than-imply that “it is reasonable” to assume that an emergent (American) Leftist order would resemble the spirit of Antifa but not, say, Black Lives Matter or DSA, if only the Left controlled the courts and the police. This seems to be a prediction completely without substance: as if the analysis of politics and history could be reduced to modules in stasis (“the Left”) that cohere and act like chess pieces and move according simple equations (“the most violent faction accrues relative power within as the faction’s power spreads without: it’s a law!”). I’ve made similar types of gross generalizations and tried to turn human affairs into algebra before. You help me see how foolishly I have thought and written.

@Stephen 56
“Mister Mr makes, I think, a basic error, as does Chait.”

No, I think you are making the error, together with Chait.

There are two levels in this discussion, plus I believe a misunderstanding about history.

1st level:
At a purely lexical level, there isn’t really something like a true communism, a true social democracy, a true marxism, or even a true christianity or a true conservatism: these are words that have been used to cover a range of people and ideas, and often used in contradictory ways in different times in different places. Does a red rose smell differently if I call it a social democratic carnation? not really.
So at this first level, we both agree that Stalin->bad, Hilferding->good, we just have a lexical disagreement on the word “communist”, on whether we should have a larger or stricter use of the term.

2nd level:
But in reality, the reason I’m counting Hilferding in and you aren’t is that I see myself as a marxist, a communist, and also a social democrat and a liberal, so counting Hilferding in gives some points to my team, and reflects my political opinions, whereas you are anti-marxist and anti-communist, and you don’t want nice looking guys like Hilferding counted as communists because this would score a point for the other team.
Chait goes beyond this and clearly uses words like “marxists” or “maoists” without any reference to actual beliefs of marxists and maoists. Is he pissed of at the maoists who fought imperialist Japan? or maybe the ones who fought a fascist regime in China? He is only interested in the ones who caused a lot of deaths in China, because he is just using them as a scarecrow to force in his argument against totally non-marxist and non-maoists, but leftish, people.

3rd level:
But historically, I think your distinction between social democrats and communists is also wrong.
Before WW1 there wasn’t really a difference between the two things, although certainly there were more extremist ones and less extremist ones.
But in part because Lenin had a revolution, which scared the shit out of a lot of people in europe, in part because of the extreme condition, and in part because and together with the rise of fascism, those parties split in two groups. In Italy the socialist party split in 1921 between a socialist party, that was what we would now call “social democrats”, and a communist party with strong sympathies for Lenin.
The communists were beaten by the fascists (Hilferding died this way) but also, whereas the socialists either were also beaten or had to collaborate with the fascists.
After WW2, both parties reappeared, but since there was the cold war going on, and the communist parties that reappeared had strong ties with the Soviet Union, the split became more evident, so today we use the word “communist”, or also “marxist” only for the most extremist, pro Stalin or pro Lenin currents; but in reality this distinction is much fuzzier, and also the idea that social democracy “began as a complete disagreement with one of Marx’s basic ideas”, well I think you can find it if you want to look at it from this angle, but you can also see the opposite, personally I think that this is quite bunk.

MisterMr@64 wrote “the idea that social democracy ‘began as a complete disagreement with one of Marx’s basic ideas,’ well I think you can find it if you want to look at it from this angle, but you can also see the opposite, personally I think that this is quite bunk.”

Social democracy/socialism defined in opposition to revolution is a thing. It’s not Marxist. Marx on the Paris Commune defended revolution, and like the Jacobins accepted the teachings of the masses and life in preference to ideal theory. Marx’s critique of the Gotha program is also illustrative of the tendency to put practice first. Social democracy/socialism as covert acceptance of class society under cover of fine phrases about universal rights and democracy (abstract, never qualified by class terms.)

Social democrats/socialists showed up recently in Jacobin on the Austro-Marxists. Hilferding was a leader in that sect, so it may be interesting to consult. I thought it was remarkable that the review managed to omit the July 1927 “uprising” or the mass slaughter of demonstrators. Or for that matter the events that triggered it. As usual with Jacobinrag, one must use great caution.

Whoops – forgot the ref. for that quote – comes from a great Wikipedia summary of the Keralan model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model

The BJP has just made big inroads into Kerala in the most recent elections, BTW at the expense of the Communists. Another example of them ‘not being allowed to be repressive’?

Stephen, I have a hard time figuring what you are getting at, so I’ll just restate my position, in a more abstract and general way.

Communism, as a political movement within countries with robust democratic institutions and traditions, proved to be regularly able to get a sizable minority of voters – albeit only in very specific regions – and proved able to get a plurality of votes – albeit only in rather exceptional circumstances and for very brief periods – at the national level. Where they got in power within the context of robust democratic institutions (typically at the local or regional level), they were (and are) generally perfectly ordinary rulers, both in their positive and in their negative aspects.

However, the success of that specific political movement, as with many others, appears to be highly correlated with specific circumstances temporally (typically the rise and subsequent universalization of primary education) and, perhaps even more importantly, exhibits strikingly permanent geographic features (so that for instance Communism was always vanishingly small in France’s Maine while it was all-powerful in Puy-de-Dôme, a mere 300 miles away, or if you’d rather do international comparisons, compare Thailand and Viet Nam, or Poland, Finland, the Baltic States and Russia) which are more or less completely uncorrelated with the geographical distribution of the working class (so that Marx’s own analysis of Communism, as a historical political movement, seems quite completely wrong). The same is also largely true in non-democratic countries though of course judging the political will of the people is in this case by definition harder.

Putting everything together, it appears that Communism, as an actual political movement, likely has little or no direct relation with Marxist ideology and is much more easily understood as a reflection of the underlying social and cultural properties of the people inhabiting a certain region as expressed in specific historical circumstances of rising literacy. Evidently, one of these social and cultural property is a low priority given to individual liberty, or even a relatively less clear concept for that term, usually easily discernable both before and after the strictly defined Communist period.

If that is correct, and the evidence is in my opinion overwhelming, then Chait’s quotation you asked us to evaluate, namely “[t]he reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement”, rates in my view as “nicht einmal falsch”, in the helpful terminology often attributed to Pauli.

P.s. Clarification: I misstated a bit the relevant argument in Critique of the Gotha Program. What Marx argued was that there *could not be* significant redistribution without a change in mode of production, so it was retrograde etc. to focus on distribution as opposed to changing the m.o.p. I don’t think this contention, insofar as it was meant partly as an empirical proposition, fit all that well w some facts at the time of writing, or later. (But in the interest of not re-trodding well-worn debate paths, I shd have prob. just ended the preceding comment before the last paragraph.)

J-D @73

I think you have missed at least part of my point, but I’m not inclined to try to restate it. So I’ll just leave it at that.

But if it’s the word “meaningful” in the last paragraph that’s bothering you, please just mentally remove it: the point stands just as well without it.