What’s in a name?

It’s a pity that the comments on your blog largely devolved into a discussion about whether adopting the dreaded “S” word is politically unwise, since your diagnosis is dead on: nominal social democrats by and large either accepted or actively adopted neoliberal economic framing, to the detriment of both their electoral fortunes and most industrialized Western economies. Even in America, I’d bet that ” socialists” are more popular than “neoliberal” and perhaps “evangelical conservatives.”

I always learn a lot when I read your stuff and comments–thanks.

Beyond that let me say that with respect to whatever Trump and followers are, my position is Marxist–as in Groucho singing, “I’m against it”.

I wonder at the defensiveness of the “and democrat” add-on. If you’re willing to embrace “socialist”, I take that as meaning you’re past worrying about the decades of propagandizing to the effect that Stalin or Pol Pot were the exact fulfillment of the socialist ideal of governance, while the excesses of any dictatorial regime that called itself free market were entirely an idiosyncratic aberration that doesn’t even begin to call in question the soundness of capitalism itself. “Capitalism cannot fail, it can only be failed.” Etc.

Sure, we have the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” that I understand is canonic, but does that, at all, mean that Marx and Engels favored what we think of today as dictatorship, so you have to add on “democrat” to advertise that you are a splitter from the original ideology? In the mid 1800s, were there particular instances of dictators more recent than Cincinnatus or Sulla that the phrase would be automatically understood as referring to? Were Marx and Engels ever specific about the mechanics of governance they envisioned for after the owners were booted from political power?

@4 single payer isn’t socialist? Really?

Like I said you get these far leftists who are “prolier than thou.” They aren’t really interested in making real change, just in posing on social media.

The point is that socialist is a distinction with “liberals” who aren’t for those things. Those things points towards a socialist economy and society. After all of those goals are reached socialist can go after new goals or pursue other socialist goals simultaneously.

Single payer means that you’ve accepted for-profit corporations are efficient at delivering health care to their customers. You just want the government to write them some cheques, so that everyone can be a customer. Actual socialists would want a National Health Service, with every health-care worker employed by the government.

Socialism is not about means-testing or meritocracy. It’s about the eradication of poverty and the right to a job, health care and a home.

If socialism means anything definite it has to be public ownership or democratic control of the means of production. All of those rights are consistent with non-socialist economic organisation, ie health care, homes and jobs can all be provided by private capital with the government acting as funder, procurer or provider of last resort. It seems to me you’re describing a form of social democracy.

Any real ‘democratic’ politics has to start from the fact that oligarchies like US and UK are not and never have been ‘democracies’.

Democracy is under threat from the right? Ok. I suppose what one’s definition of the right is. Based on the evidence the ‘right’ now includes the DNC which is stepping in to push locally popular candidates from running in their, um, own districts.

“The Democrats’ message to Mai Khanh Tran was polite but unsparing. With half a dozen Democrats running for Congress in her Orange County district, they showed her a discouraging poll and argued that she could not win — and risked fracturing the party in the June primary election.

Ms. Tran pointedly replied that she was “the only qualified woman, the only immigrant and the only physician in the race.”

“I said to them, frankly, let the voters decide,” recalled Ms. Tran, a pediatrician.

The national Democratic Party was not chastened: On Wednesday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took sides in that House race and backed Gil Cisneros, a Navy veteran and former Republican.”

As in the Asian, female physician, must step aside for the ex-GOP military man because, wait for it – Democrats stand for something different.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/us/politics/democrats-house-midterms-california.html

I wonder what “socialism” describes. Is it a right-left axis? I’m not sure. George Orwell as as socially conservative as could be, but called himself a socialist. A lot of this thread has sounded like Bentham, whom most self-styled socialists would rather disengage with.
I see three axes:
1. Economics/government. Maximize social welfare, or liberty?
2. The Enlightenment. Bastion of human dignity, or corrosive solvent of society?
3. The French Revolution. Hope for the future, tragic failure, or completely evil?
I’d say that the standard Timberite is 1: welfare; 2: dignity; 3: mostly tragic failure, with some hope for the future.

Democracy and freedom of speech are the most important things.

I’m not a believer in the reliance upon “-isms” and “socialism” is an example, since it must deal with a long history of being traduced, and also it is still defined as “government ownership of the means of production”, which is NOT required, and would soon be harmful.

Some of the people who get to the top of government are identical to some of the people who get to the top of private business: mentally limited, megalomaniacal, narcissistic.

If you need a name for what we need, call it “social-capitalism”, and don’t worry much about the older definitions of that. Redefine it anew:

1. Capitalism is so successful technologically that almost all necessary goods and services have moved into the potential of satiety. Necessities (of food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare) need no longer be “scarce”.

2. Technological advance is possible, while: keeping the biosphere healthy, avoiding species extinction, and maintaining an agricultural climate.

3. Let’s create a government monopsony for necessities ONLY. This can buy the necessities for all people from the private producers. Preserve the private ownership of the PRODUCTION of those necessities, in order to foster further innovation and to allow any individual to choose self-advancement beyond those necessities by increasing private income. This is a half-government, half-private market.

4. For other goods and services which are not deemed by voters to be necessities, the production and distribution should be entirely in the private market economy, which allows for the private financial system to continue with private investments, etc.

5. The government monopsony can be funded by taxation, or by money-printing, or by both in combination. Before the invention of central banking, money had two separate originations into the economy: printing by the sovereign, and printing by the private banks. These were historically united under the idea of central banking, which curbed the sovereign’s profligacy in the era of scarcity and ALSO served the logic of markets in the era of scarcity. But now the era of scarcity of necessities is gone, due to the very success of industry. That goal is met. And now, inflation can be controlled by a host of mechanisms which have been developed in central banking.

6. The new system will put a renewed, clearer focus on the local and regional politics and ecology of the one necessity which continues to work upon the logic of scarcity: real estate. There will be a government monopsony buying baseline residential maintenance and repairs.

“Social-capitalism” (or whatever you want to call it, let’s give it a name without an “ism”) as redefined here would return us to the “Trente Glorieuses”-style of the era prior to neoliberalism/neoconservatism — while also taking the NEXT step, into the permanent, partial demotion of the total market economy. It makes “votes” as important as “prices” in our society. It can be done without increasing the cognitive load of individuals: “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings” (Oscar Wilde).

It is important that people can advance in a private economy if they want to, and to aggregate their status baubles if they want to. We don’t know where technological change will take us, next. Democracy and freedom of speech are the most important things.

Engels@13 writes “Any real ‘democratic’ politics has to start from the fact that oligarchies like US and UK are not and never have been ‘democracies’.” This is to surreptitiously redefine “democracy” as socialism. The true statement is that the US and the UK have never been socialist. It does no good to pretend democracy is socialism, unless you wish to disallow the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Playing hangman in historical judgments allows many moralizing speeches, to be sure.

ph@15 plays at being a Scott Lemieux-type swindler who simultaneously condemns and endorses serious politics. (That’s called being savvy and principled, when laughter is otherwise irrepressible.) Politics is policies and personnel, and in the US, presidents. So far as policies are concerned, this is a one-party system where there is more or less universal agreement on the strategic goals.Tactical disagreements are the only acceptable issues. This is most obvious in foreign policy. But foreign policy doesn’t stop at the coast: The fundamental unity continues inland. So far as personnel is concerned, the coalitions of Ins and Outs fight out their rivalries. But being coalitions they are primarily symbolically policy disputes. Only accidentally do Lastly, in the US, the system is rigged so that presidential elections are pretty much guaranteed to avoid a president with a majority. A plurality is not a majority. ph’s insinuations that a woman pediatrician is a left, instead of merely an out, is an unsupported assertion that may be dismissed. That there are any policy differences or how it plays into presidential symbolism isn’t even addressed. Snark, even political snark, is not a real thought.

ph@16 resorts to time-honored bigotry. I don’t quite understand how mold makes things better. The discovery that unbelieving people couldn’t feel common human sympathy until religious words branded their soul is merely malice. The pretense that any religion will do suffices until it comes time to pass the collection plate. The fact remains that if any religion will, allegedly, inspire good acts, then it is not the religion, but the inspiration. And you can’t make this case even if you lie by omission, forgetting all the other acts inspired by religion, from shaming a child for discovering masturbation to the glorious crusades. (Crusade=jihad, lest you forget.) I think ph’s real politics forbid solidarity with the oppressed. Conventional manners may be sociable, but that’s not socialism, no matter what CT thinks.

Ebenezer Scrooge@17 is thought provoking. Prodded, I would say the axes are:
1.Economics/government. Reject the false dichotomy between welfare and liberty. The distinction between positive and negative liberty is reactionary continental philosophy.
2. Accept there is a science of man, that the old Enlightenment (which was never Christendom/the West anyhow) has fractured, first in 1848. But the split has been confirmed time dissolve all the old things, and the bourgeois revolution can no longer achieve its tasks. The last bourgeois revolutions, in Mexico, China and Turkey have proven this.
3.Acknowledge that the Dutch Revolution, the Puritan Revolution, the Great French Revolution and the US Civil War were the revolutions that laid the foundations for the creation of a better world. Acknowledge that the Russian and Chinese socialist revolutions laid the foundations for a better world of a different kind, different because the future is always different from the past.

“Like I said you get these far leftists who are “prolier than thou.”

Ironically, they’re also often rabid linguistic anti-prescriptivists.

If you give a fuck about an Oxford comma you’re a cop, but god forbid you expand the referent of a 200 year old political category with a wildly variant and contingent history.

Anyone who whines “that’s not socialism” should be required to be a strict Saint-Simonian. “What’s that, Marx? According to need rather than merit? That’s not socialism!” “State ownership of means of production? What would the immortal Smith say? That’s not socialism!” “An officially atheist state rather than a New Christianity…?!”

@10, I don’t know. It still sounds pretty defensive to add “democrat”. Everyone claims to be a democrat these days. It’s expected. Anything else would be quite peculiar. “Socialist and anti-fascist”, would be actually offensive. But I doubt you want to define yourself by the nasty qualities of the other side, and, at least in Australia, that might not even be a fair characterization of the other side.

In Marx’s day, it was not at all accepted that everyone was of course a democrat, believed that of course the people should rule. Even in a country like the UK, while there was a parliamentary democracy, and even if we can see today looking back that real political power resided in the Commons, at the time people still told themselves the old fable of the Three Estates. If the govt had to raise money, sure, it should consult the Third Estate, go to the Commons to ask for funds, because the merchant class, for all its tawdry attention to mere material wealth, were the people who understood and possessed money. But the higher functions, deciding what the govt should be doing, as opposed to how to fund it, relied on the guidance of the First and Third Estates, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal. Of course it was all quite nuanced by the mid-1800s, with the British nobility extending in all sorts of gradations down from actual peerage to embrace and co-opt ambitious and talented commoners into a system that at least guided even the Commons and the City. The ruling class flattered themselves that they had the sort of mixed constitution that the Romans enjoyed in the best days of their republic, only Britain had a monarchy as well to serve as a sort of placeholder to prevent the Caesarism that eventually destroyed the Roman Republic.

No room for actual democracy in this picture, one-man-one-vote and everyone gets to vote, because even the Third Estate did not include most of us mere money-grubbers and belly-fillers. Only property owners need apply for the franchise. Rule by actual greasy mechanics, letting such people have any say in govt, would be mob rule, ochlocracy and anarchy.

Marx’s great contribution was the insistence that this was a fable, something the ruling class told itself in self-flattery, and had hitherto gotten even its victims to buy into. Religion had a big part in that buy-in, thus the militant atheism. The false consciousness that allowed people to continue in this fantasy would be dispelled as capitalism progressively made the reality of power clear. The owners, not some fantasy mixed constitution nobility that was above mere money-grubbing, would increasingly become the obvious actual decision-makers in a govt that ever more nakedly acted in their interests alone. The Third Estate would split into the tiny fraction of the owners, with everyone else reduced to prole status, people whose only role in society was to do all the work and drop enough babies to supply the next generation of labor. Untrammeled control of society and govt by the owners would eventually leave the proles with nothing to lose but their chains, true consciousness of these two classes would emerge, and capitalism would be ended because the owners would be hopelessly outnumbered.

This all sort of happened. It didn’t always happen under the banner of socialism, but eventually every place that had achieved a certain level of industrialization chucked the old fable of certain fantasy classes deserving a special say in govt, in favor of at least the democratic principle, everyone should have equal say. Even if this would have happened without Marx and Engels and socialism, that ideology was the only one that called for throwing out the fable of the Three Estates. The liberal tradition played catch up. Until the old fantasies were already hopelessly lost, it was perfectly content to coddle the fantasy of some or other hallucinated class of people more enlightened than the greasy mechanics running govts.

That we have had backsliding over the last few generations is owing to the fact that the proletariat doesn’t run a dictatorship as a very tight ship at all. It got rid of the forms and institutions of aristocratic and theocratic controls on govt, but has not, really cannot, destroy the ideals, which remain out there. This is the essence of democracy, as Plato tells us in the Republic, that in clearing the field of rule by any of the sources of order represented by the Estates, it leaves the field open to the claims that each holds in memory and fantasy on the minds and hearts of the people as they vote. The people swing, sometimes wildly, into nostalgic endorsement of military valor, or great wealth, or divine inspiration, as sources of order behind the latest fad politician or political movement that is going to set everything right, so needs to be put in power.

Lately, at least in the US, great wealth can do no wrong, though it does seek a fusion ticket with martial prowess and the will of God, just to secure its flanks. It needs an actual dementia sufferer as its standard bearer to maintain the pretense that it is also populist, but luckily it found Trump.

But whatever fad politician or movement is in power at the moment, or seeks power, they all agree that they are democrats, however much they also and inconsistently claim that God should really be in charge, or the technocrats and owners who understand how things really work, or the military that defends our freedoms.

That could be your claim, that you believe in no other ordering principle but democracy, that you deny all these dangerous and dark fantasy alternate sources of order. But I don’t see the class consciousness out there to make that a claim that people would understand. Call yourself a socialist, and I think that’s a stronger claim that people should wake up and stop pretending that we live in the classless society that we were perhaps close to a few generations back, but then let slip through our fingers. I can’t see adding “democrat” as anything but an invitation to go back to sleep. We’re all “democrats”, Trump even more ferociously than you or I.

In your blog article you write: On the other side of the ledger, nominally social democratic parties nearly all failed the test of the crisis, accepting to a greater or lesser degree to the politics of austerity. Some, like PASOK in Greece, have paid the price in full.

And yest PASOK stands for “Panhellenic Socialist Movement”. So why shouldn’t we consider the failure of PASOK to be a failure of Socialism? Or is this a No True Scotsman situation?

@28 re: The French Revolution. This is uncharacteristically poor, I’m afraid.

Macron would be very happy to lead a ‘thoroughly modern and secular state in every sense.’ Regarding the period in question: you omit all mention of regional strife and the legitimate objections of a peasant class very much enamored with local church leaders and religious life that offered stability, tradition, and continuity. The struggle between Girondists and others, as I’m certain you’re aware, was very much based on responses to the English revolution in America and the devolution of authority to individual communities/states violently opposed by authoritarians such as Robespierre based in Paris. Setting up a central bank took England nearly a century and given the corruption of the Directorate it’s a small miracle the economy functioned even as it did. There were, of course, net positives. But let’s play counter-factual, would Britain, Holland, and France voluntarily divested themselves of Empire? France today is no less innocent of exploitation, corruption, and hegemony (where they can), and at least as bellicose as any nation on earth. Re: the OP, France is a textbook case of socialist corruption with the the party faithful in near-despair with their ‘leaders.’

The violence of the Terror was not a ‘response’ to anything but paranoia and, in many cases, drunken mobs being egged on by cynics. A great many reforms had been enacted by 1792, and the case for regicide was very weak alienated a great many supporters of revolutionary reforms both in France and abroad. The revolution unclogged the mechanisms of capitalism and elevated enterprising middle-class folks. Many of the very rich retained their wealth and together with the revolutionaries set about enslaving as many people in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere as they could. France remains riven by ethnic and linguistic divisions, and practically nobody would call the current relations between various religious groups anything close to ideal.

@Lee A. Arnold 19

“3. Let’s create a government monopsony for necessities ONLY. This can buy the necessities for all people from the private producers. Preserve the private ownership of the PRODUCTION of those necessities, in order to foster further innovation and to allow any individual to choose self-advancement beyond those necessities by increasing private income. This is a half-government, half-private market.”

If the government has the monopsony (i.e. it’s the only buyer) of necessities, it either can squeeze producers of necessities, so that in reality they are the same of a government employee, or the producers (or some of them) can squeeze the government (see the problems of various public-private partnerships).
Furthermore, as the government would likely buy commodities on the basis of some bureaucratic process, there would be no point on innovation for producers.

I think it would make more sense to have the government own many, but not all, the means of production, so that those who want to change can buy from privates: the same way people can co to government funded schools or, if they prefer, pay for private ones, or in countries with an NHS people can choose wether to rely on the NHS or go to private doctors.

This would be basically a social democratic solution, I suppose, but would still imply the ownership by the government of a large part of the means of productio, so in the current political climate it could be probably considered a socialist solution.

Any real ‘democratic’ politics has to start from the fact that oligarchies like US and UK are not and never have been ‘democracies’.” This is to surreptitiously redefine “democracy” as socialism.

No it’s to define ‘democracy’ as δημοκρατία, political power held by the people as a whole rather than an elite. I don’t think the USSR was a democracy either fwiw.

ph@15:

You needed to read further into that article. The Democrats, who by the very nature of democracy are entitled to have an opinion about things, believe with considerable justification that a non-democratic outcome (similar to the one in the presidential race) could take place in California and other places:

They are moving most aggressively in California, where the state’s nonpartisan primaries present a unique hazard: State law requires all candidates to compete in the same preliminary election, with the top two finishers advancing to November. In a crowded field, if Democrats spread their votes across too many candidates, two Republicans could come out on top and advance together to the general election.

A lot of people have the problem that you have: A basic misunderstanding of what the term “democracy” means. I blame the primary schools. To put it simply, at root, democracy is about rule by the majority. There are lots of arguments about how to best ensure democratic outcomes — and, indeed, whether democratic outcomes are best. But in pretty much all democracies, political parties have a role in organizing around candidates and issues.

@29,
“The violence of the Terror was not a ‘response’ to anything but paranoia and, in many cases, drunken mobs being egged on by cynics.”

You’ve never heard of the Brunswick Manifesto? Even before that open avowal of the war aims and purpose of the states opposed to France in the War of the First Coalition, it was paranoia to imagine that they intended to round up and execute at least the leaders of the govt of France who had in any way been in favor of diminishing the power of the monarchy? And making an example of some representative group of the common rabble who dared oppose the monarchy would presumably have been part of the deal as well. It does not seem to me that, in that situation, “La patrie en danger” was anything but a sober statement of clear fact.

It is true that in history we see many examples of some illusory, or at least highly exaggerated, foreign threat, leading to an unjustified security scare, and then a witch hunt. McCarthyism in the US is a good example. France in 1792 is not among such examples. The coalition had raised an army to invade France to change its government, to take away from its people the right to make their own government. That army was already on French soil, headed to the capitol, and it was far from clear that it could be stopped by French forces. Part of the concern that the coalition army could not be stopped were completely justified concerns that the leadership and highest command of the French army, the king, wanted the enemy to reach Paris and execute any member of the Assembly it cared to.

” …the case for regicide was very weak alienated a great many supporters of revolutionary reforms both in France and abroad.”

So, head of state is caught trying to desert to the enemy that has an army on the soil of his country, marching towards its capitol, in order to lend that enemy moral authority and sanction to make war on his own country — and that’s a weak case?

It is certainly true that “treason” has often been used in history as an illegitimate criminalization of politics, often motivated by paranoia. But treason actually is a crime, and a legitimate case for it can be made in some cases without resort to political enmity or paranoia. If Louis XVI was not guilty of treason, then nobody in the history of the planet has ever been guilty of treason.

Yes, it was traumatic to France to face the reality that its head of state, sanctioned as such by the one true and universal Church (literally had holy oil poured over him by some bishop), was a traitor, that all the painstaking arrangements and compromises the Constituent Assembly had made over many years to include a completely unnecessary monarch in the constitution were just a foolish nod to sentiment and tradition that the king himself responded to with treason. Here in the US we couldn’t even bring ourselves to the spectacle of Nixon be indicted, because it would have been too traumatic. And the US was not in any danger once Nixon had resigned, so it really would have served no obvious and immediate public policy need for him to go to jail, however much in the long run it was a bad example to malefactors of great power to let him off. France in 1792 had no such luxury. Louis XVI could not abdicate, not really, he had had that oil poured over him, and too many people in France and abroad believed that the oil meant he was king until he died. The monarchy was not an office the govt could depose him from and solve the problem, because he’s a nothing once removed from office. Allowed to live, he would always have been a magnet calling foreign armies and domestic insurgents to restore him to his imagined dignity.

This is all perhaps the long way around the barn back to the original point of this thread. Nobody, in 1792, would have added “and democrat” to a self-description of his political beliefs. Robespierre himself was not against the idea of monarchy n the constitution, or, before Varennes, against leaving the Bourbons as monarchs of France. Nobody anywhere near power in France or anywhere in Europe believed that peasants and urban proletariat should vote, much less hold office in a republic. Some wanted to extend the franchise to many (men only, of course), but none of the members of the Assembly envisioned these lower class voters filling any role beyond deferring to the superior wisdom of people such as themselves in actually holding elected office. Almost no one in the spectrum of this opinion was categorically anti-monarchy, or anti-Catholic, until events forced them to go there, because monarchy and Church declared categorical war on any dilution of divine right absolutism.

The middle way, in which you just let the ex-king and the ex-state religion live and let live after dethroning them, only became possible after we all became democrats.

ph @ 29

Sorry to disappoint.

I did skip over considering the bloody bits.

I think the violence is not just morally problematic: in the lurid extremities it reached, it is simply unfathomable. No one can attempt to “explain” it without running the hazards of either excusing it as somehow “necessary” in some functional sense or “justified” (I don’t know how) or — and this seems as bad to me which may surprise you — deeming it entirely superfluous to the process of political change, as you seem to do.

So, I skipped past the bloody bits about which I have little to say, to point out that — with a major assist from Napoleon — the Revolution did manage to institute the politically modern.

Instead, I loaded a lot onto the bloodless phrase, “a functional politics”, with the implication that there was a long period of failing to manage that. A functional politics in the modern sense requires tolerance for myriad differences of opinion combined with the institutional ability to arrive at rational policy for the state by means of deliberation and compromise, backed by power and loyalty. That’s not so easy to do. There was a long period of failing to do it during the 17th century in Britain. There was a long period of failing to do it in Weimar Germany. And, during those periods of failure, things fall apart and can get mighty ugly. Or, power falls into the hands of a Napoleon (or a Stalin!) It may be that at least some of the experience of trying and failing is as necessary to the learning and development of nations as it is for individuals, though my politics thinks we could and should try harder with less stupid and vicious.

I understand looking back on the French Revolution and wondering why they could not just move smoothly to a constitutional monarchy, fiscal and legal reform more or less on their understanding of the British model. Enlightened Opinion was anglophile and key figures like Mirabeau and Sieyès clearly had such a course for a bourgeois revolution in mind. People could not agree and trust that there was an agreement and things spun out of control with no good result. Paranoia, as you say, struck deep — and not without reason. The countryside was not exempt from the mentality of the mob. The Revolution at its start got its last key impetus, remember, from the Great Fear.

You say the English took a hundred years to create a central bank and there’s some truth in that. Revolutionary things do take time to stick. Enlightened Opinion was agreed that the corvée had to go. Louis XVI obligingly abolished it, and the French would keep on abolishing it for another fifty years, because it kept coming back. The Ferme générale was building its wall around Paris even as the Revolution got underway and the Revolution abolished its tax just as construction was finished, but the tax kept coming back; the wall and its tax, the octroi, would wait for Baron Haussmann to pave its final grave. Constitutional monarchists had a solid majority in their favor as late as the inauguration of the Third Republic, but the last Bourbon was as immune to sense as any in his line. Laïcité was finally enacted in 1905.

I have no idea why people want to hark back to ancient Greece (rarely, the Roman Republic,) when they don’t actually seem to know much about it.

Well we can’t all be as knowledgable as you are…

engels@33 seems to forgot the the Greek “democracy” was a synonym for ochlocracy. And when it didn’t mean mob rule, the people as a whole were never actually the people as a whole, just the ones who counted as people

Actually I haven’t forgotten either of those things; just pointing out that whether you like or loathe democracy, the US ain’t it.

…Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with the the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying organisations: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”…

Sorry, ‘the attack on Versailles” was the act that determined the final outcome months later. Incarcerating the royal family in Paris allowed Mirabeau and Danton to bleed the captured royal family dry. There are credible accounts of Danton promising through intermediaries to prevent the attack of August 9th, if the royal family coughed up more – to which Marie Antoinette reportedly remarked – ‘they already taken everything.’ And so.

To elaborate on the issue of the Internet monopolies, I’d suggest that the time is ripe to call for the nationalisation of Facebook and Youtube.* It seems clear that there is no way to make them behave decently and refrain from privacy violations and censorship while they remain private entities dedicated to profit and controllable only via the supposed ‘competition’ or the impracticable ‘voting with one’s feet’. The rest of Google is next, and then Microsoft. And there definitely must be a ‘public option’ for email providers – you know, one that doesn’t read the emails, at the very least. Smaller private competitors may be left as a safety valve, but these arrogant and unaccountable giants have made themselves too powerful and important for modern life to be allowed to exist as private entities; they should be treated as public services. If Gates, Zuckerberg & Co. are indeed such bloody geniuses and weren’t just lucky, then I’m sure they should be able to start all over again and build something else from scratch for the common good; they should enjoy the challenge, the alleviation of boredom and feeling young again.

* Given their international status, the new owner should probably be the UN.

I think Mike Harrington’s take on this is germane. Communism and Marxism (and as a result, socialism too, perhaps to a lesser degree) are highly debased terms being affected by unsavory agendas both on the left and right.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat: first of all, this does not mean “dictatorship”, in the original context in german, it is really a synonym for “regime”. Marx actually spent most of his mature adult life with and around institutions and movements that became the basis of European democratic politics (trade unions, social democratic parties, the fight for universal suffrage).

By the same token Marx was not particularly “revolutionist”. Sure he participated in the aborted liberal(!) revolutionary surge of 1848 but Marx’s thought can clearly be seen as understanding “revolution” as a sociological, structural phenomenon rather than a voluntarist one. And more to the point, Marx was pretty clear that revolution in the context of economic backwards (e.g., barely post-serfdom Russia) would distribute poverty not wealth and inevitably lead to dictatorship, an idea which comes straight out of classical political economy (it is likely Lenin believed the same thing as an actually fairly orthodox Marxist, though leaning to the voluntarist interpretation of things – his big mistake was thinking the “just around the corner” European revolution was going to save Russia from its backwardness).

Since the rise of Stalin, most pronouncements on the nature of the Soviet Union and its achievements (and subsequent Communist revolutions) have been a con on multiple levels and the idea that Marx would have endorsed the terror or the vulgarization of his thought (actually too weak a word) is laughable.

As for the s-word, it has its origins in the rise of modern liberal democracy and defining it as democracy extended to economic and social life is a perfectly consistent (if not proven or actualized) formulation.

I have posted a response to John’s post on my blog, Public Intelligence, for any one who might be interested. https://wordpress.com/post/jzmcgowan.com/1087

44: There’s a good case that Rosa was right: either socialism or barbarism.

engels is defending democracy as No True Scotsman

Not sure what part of real political power held by the people (however [ill-]defined), not elites, is hard to understand…

LFC joins engels in counterposing actually existing socialism to democracy as it should be, dismissing democracy as it is as No True Scotsman

I’ve implied I think classical Athens was a democracy (despite being far from ideal in many respects, principly the identity of the demos), so I’m not referring to some unattainable ideal (nb. that wouldn’t be a No True Scotsman fallacy). I consider myself pretty sympathetic to Previously Existing Socialism in a lot of ways but wasn’t aware anyone in their right mind in 2018 thought Stalinist Russia was a democracy…

engels@53 thinks “classical Athens” was a democracy albeit one far from ideal. It is hard to be absolutely certain absent a scientific survey, but it is likely most people think of Periclean Athens as classical Athens. The Thirty and the Four Hundred were unfortunate aberrations, exceptions that proved the rule or some such. The thing is, Periclean Athens was rather oligarchical, with Pericles’ set running the show, despite elections. That’s why Thucydides approved Pericles so much. Technically one could argue that less oligarchical leaders like Cleon and (horribile dictu!) Hyperbolus were also “classical Athens.” But voting that doesn’t leave the polis under the guidance of the right people (the boni or optimates, as they liked to call themselves in the Roman Republic,) is not the true democracy.

As to the conclusion that the grave defect in the Athenian democracy was the identity of the demos? That was the same problem in Sparta, which is nigh universally denied to al so be a democracy. The real difference is the persistent attempts to enforce the equality of the Spartiates, who proudly called themselves Equals (or Peers if you insist on a misleading translation.) Institutions like the syssitia, the agoge and the ban on money are deemed incipient totalitarianism precisely because they were obstacles against oligarchy. (There were workarounds.) From the other side, the word “tyranny” is largely a pejorative aimed at those rulers who use popular majority support to suppress the oligarchy. As witness the universal disdain for Venezuela, this usage still prevails.

The point is not that engels deals in crude stereotypes about classical Athens. The point is that majority rule is not acknowledged to be a key principle of democracy. It does not single out CT to note that CT approves the principle of minority rule. That’s why they accept the legitimacy of the Trump presidency. Their only issue is whether to blame the filthy rabble or the evil Clinton for him. It is in fact deemed to be essential to democracy that the majority do not rule, that there is no tyranny of the majority. Again, compare the usage re Venezuela.

As for any alleged sympathy for the previously existing socialism? I think the commitment to democracy, where the state defends the property of the minority bourgeoisie and serves their interest, on the grounds that the majority has formal political rights and does elections, makes that null and void. I think that if you are so bold as to revise “democracy” to mean majority rule, you mean a democratic state is one that serves the majority interest. And it seems to me that you have to be out of your right mind to be so sure the US and the UK and France and the BRD and Japan and South Korea and the rest did and do. When you support the restored democracy at the expense of the majority, you are committing to the usual democratic principle, which expressly class supremacy with formal political and civil equality for the citizens, i.e., not majority rule.

@35 I did read the article, actually.

Yeah, I’m not surprised. As I said, I think we really have to blame the primary schools for this sort of thing. People shouldn’t be allowed out of 8th grade without some kind of ability to read and apply critical thinking skills to a text.

@ steven t johnson 04.25.18 at 5:27 pm

>F. Foundling is re-affirming a commitment to democracy as it should be in opposition to actually existing socialism as it was

Oh, I see, so I have to accept actually existing socialism precisely as it was, and not try to, you know, improve on it in any way whatsoever. Many thanks for that most kind suggestion, dear sir, but I’m afraid that I will have to ignore it. You see, you might be surprised, but many people don’t actually appreciate it very much when they fight, risk their lives, and see others sacrifice theirs, all in order to establish a new and better system and government, and then have to witness ‘their’ government do, partly immediately and partly at later points, almost every single sort of despicable and idiotic thing that they have always opposed with all their being – when it doesn’t just kill them personally, that is – and finally transform the system back into the previous one, rolling back most of the real positive achievements that it had previously brought. That is not a trivial experience, and many real people lived it. I’m very sorry to disappoint you, but we do, in fact, need some modification next time around.

>The final victory of counter-revolution in China and Korea will demand a horrific toll

Here is another prediction: the final victory of the counter-revolution will be the work of the non-democratic ‘communists’, just as its initial victories were.

otpup@60 professes confusion at what is refuted. otpup’s contention that Marx wasn’t a revolutionist is refuted. otpup is spiritually as one with the democrats who slaughtered the Communards. But Marx, so far from applauding the bloodshed, criticized the Communards for failing to press the struggle. So much for otpup.

F. Foundling pretends that there was no variety across nations in previously existing socialism. The implication is even that there was just one previously existing socialism throughout the socialist era. The nightmare of an immutable regime is of course simply copied from the the nightmare bogies of the totalitarianism propagandists. The haughty pretense changes were forbidden would be contemptible folly were it not so clearly a product of malice. Democracy is a different kind of state, not a socialist reform. The reform of democracies was a centuries long process (women didn’t get the vote til the twentieth century!) But at no moment was democracy reformed by counter-revolution. No one in their right mind ever thought socialism would be reformed by counter-revolution. The goal was to destroy it.

F. Foundling need not fret of course, for F. Foundling’s side won. No one need take seriously the profession that of course real democracy (in honest language, fictional/fantasy democracy) was what was meant. The successors states show every day exactly what F. Foundling’s ilk stood for then, and stands for today. F. Foundling got what F. Foundling wanted. Pretending embarrassment is pointless.

F. Foundling’s last sentence is incoherent gibberish. Democratic governments defend private property, not just a child’s toothbrush, but properties that give owners vast powers over economy, polity and society. Final restoration of capitalism in China will demand a government that restricts production to what is profitable….which will inevitably mean fantastic human suffering. That this will likely require vast bloodshed too merely mean that the F. Foundlings will blame the victims for resisting freedom. I gather mutters about genetic distortions from the attempt to make socialist man often explain such irrational behavior. As for suffering in Korea, F. Foundling’s endorsement of decades of economic warfare speaks for itself.

steven t johnson exhibits a Dumptian mastery of words, pointing out how others arguments are flawed while also defining the One True Component of Democracy.

@steven t johnson 04.27.18 at 2:49 am
>As for suffering in Korea, F. Foundling’s endorsement of decades of economic warfare speaks for itself.

Don’t forget to mention my unabashed support for the blood diamond smuggling of the notorious Jonas Savimbi, as well as my well-known financing of the Müsavatists.

Re ‘just one previously existing socialism’, there has been some regional and temporal variation, but in general the same power centre(s) stood behind it, the same model was followed and similar patterns were produced, so what I said applies to all of it, albeit in somewhat different ways and to somewhat different degrees. I do not speak with the experience of just one country in mind; my own heritage and background is rather international.

In general, capitalist ideologues and Stalinists are in perfect agreement on one thing: democracy and private property of the means of production entail each other, and socialism entails dictatorship. Whoever rejects capitalism, demands dictatorship, says the capitalist. Whoever rejects dictatorship, demands capitalism, says the Stalinist. Well, no. The reason to reject capitalism and the reason to reject dictatorship are one and the same: the rejection of power disparity, inequality, abuse of power and systems gone out of the control of the humans that they affect. Speaking of which – freedom, like rational thought, is defined primarily and essentially by its process and only secondarily and conjecturally by its outcome.

Yes, the communist systems did much of what they were supposed to do, too. The lives of many people were enormously improved, millions were lifted out of poverty and provided with free and decent services. I am not saying that the struggle for socialism was fruitless. I certainly would not agree with roger garthmann at 04.28.18 at 5:58 am that the form of exploitation under communism was, on balance, worse than it was and is under capitalism. However, that does not make the many unconscionable and moronic things that the regimes did good or acceptable.

You are accusing ‘me and my ilk’ of having overthrown socialism. In fact, ‘me and my ilk’ fought and died to establish socialism, and then you and your ilk hijacked it and turned it into a system of enormous disparity of power and privilege, which was bound to be abused in the various outrageous ways that have been observed and eventually to revert to capitalism under the leadership of a generation of privileged and cynical elite that you created.