Paul Street: 'We Are all Socialists Now'?

[denem]

During the deabate on Mr Street's "Flim-Flam Obama Man" article, the question came up more than once, what do you mean by far left, or socialist. Let Mr Street, talk for himself (March 05, 2009):

Any remotely accurate understanding of socialism as it is grasped and advanced by its modern-day adherents: democratic workers' and peoples' control of economic and political life in the interests of social use, equality, and the common good instead of private gain and social hierarchy. As Lance Selfa, a left-Marxist American author, notes at the end of his recent critical history of the Democratic Party, a "socialist society" is one in which "human needs are not sacrificed to the profits of the rich. In a socialist society, workers would take control of the factories and offices. The repressive apparatuses of the state - from prisons to the military would be brought under democratic control and then abolished." At the same time, daily life and social experience would significantly liberated from hierarchical dress, speech, and other cultural codes of class inequality, as was the case in revolutionary Barcelona in 1936, so wonderfully depicted in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History , pp. 197-198).

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20779

This is no more, nor less, than orthodox Marxism, complete with the 'withering away of the state', a phenomenon yet to be observed in any you/dys/topia. The reference to Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' is intellectual dishonesty at it's worst. Orwell documented how Communists, taking their orders from Stalin's Central Committee worked to cripple the Spanish Republic, paving the way for Franco.

[denem]

1. No takers?

[corruptmewithpower]

2. We're all moderates now. I hope!

The twentieth century gives plenty of examples of what one reaps through extremism:

"Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy. "

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM

[provis99]

3. Paul Street's an idiot who has no idea what he's talking about.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. There's nothing wrong with the withering away of the state

Also yet to be observed: a capitalist economy without dire poverty and exploitation of labor, or a democracy that hasn't been taken over by oligarchies in one form or another. That something has yet to be noted doesn't disqualify it as an ideal to strive for. Another world is possible.