re: #74 Destro

Okay, let me help you here.

And you will call Marx a “right-wing reactionary” I guess by your definition that you made up for yourself. My definition of a leftist is someone who hands out ice cream free to kids on a warm sunny day. A commie is by my definition some who adds extra sprinkles.

Write it like this:

Would you call Marx a ‘right-wing reactionary’? My definition of a leftist is someone who hands out ice cream free to kids on a warm sunny day. A commie, by my definition is someone who adds extra sprinkles.

My answer would be:

For me, there is quite a bit of history since Marx began writing. In fact, there was quite a bit of history while Marx was writing that forced him to change what he was doing—a few times. First, he was writing in Victorian England, which by any standard was a hellhole for workers. It was a reasonable assumption for him to believe a revolution was imminent. He was under the mistaken belief that he had discovered the calculus, so to speak, of history. But he found this out while writing The Grundrisse. He then went back to the drawing board the wrote a critique of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which we all know as Das Kapital. It was a good critique. I view him as a guy who worked hard, nothing more than that.

I wouldn’t hesitate to call Lenin or Stalin right-wing reactionaries. Living under their regimes wouldn’t have felt any different than living in Nazi Germany—as evidenced by many Eastern European countries welcoming the Nazis as liberators.

I don’t know how seriously to take your definition of leftist. For many leftists, after WWII, life was about much more than handing out ice cream. It was about studying what happened in Germany and trying to make sure it never happened again. Many of these ‘Marxists’ are extraordinarily insightful—the most famous group is known as the Frankfurt School. There were also some significant psychological experiments done, one of which is the Milgram Experiment, the other is known as the Asch conformity experiments—which were quite shocking, showing that psychologically, we are much much closer to the Nazi abyss than we thought. The question was not how psychopaths emerged in full Nazi regalia, but how did average citizens, nice people, fall under the spell. The average citizens in the victorious West didn’t fare so well—showing very strong tendencies to sacrifice their basic morals and integrity to please an authority figure or to fit in with a group. So for me, this is the leftist path—addressing this problem. This problem don’t solve so easily.

Historically, Communists ended up supporting Stalin, which to me, simply made them irrelevant, not even worth the name. You’ve probably never had an extended conversation with a full blown Stalinist. It’s an experience.

However, there are quite a few leftists, besides the Germans that also provide great insight into what makes us tick. The French philosopher/historian Foucault is once such writer. I could go on, but you, at the moment, seem to be concerned with how society divides the pie.

That process, I have found, is not so easy, and historically, the pie ends up in the hands of the folks with the knife. And the folks with the knife tend to use that knife for purposes other than dividing pie.

This means that I choose sides for about two minutes every two years. Once I’m out of the voting booth, I’m on my own, trying to be kind of person that would be worthy of the society in which I want to live. That is what I derive from the two experiments I cited above—that your own internal sense of morality and strength of spine are the ultimate defenses against falling into the abyss of anomie and alienation that contribute to the willful participation in totalitarian regimes.