Don, Roger, Platt, Horse,drose and Y'all:
Socialism has taken many shapes in history, but I'd say the essential
and over-riding feature is its' recognition that unfettered capitalism
can be a very ugly thing. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson both warned
against "moneyed incorporations", like the Dutch East India company,
which was a corporation that ran India. They held that any kind of
highly concentrated power, public or private, was a grave danger to
liberty. And all the traded goods, moved by all the ships in Europe,
thoughout all the middle ages can fit into one of today's cargo ships.
Capital has more power today than Smith or Jefferson ever imagined in
their wildest nightmares.
Child labor laws are an example of socialism. Minimum wage laws are
another. Anything that restrains capitalism in the interest of
individual citizens can rightly be called socialistic. State ownership
of all industries is communism. Marx described state ownership
specifically in his communist manifesto. Socialism is a corrective,
whereas communism is totally void of capitalism. Where is the line that
seperates socialism from communism? Socialism has been known to get out
of hand and become communistic and authoritarian. This is why I insist
on the qualifier, LIBERTARIAN socialism. Any laws or policies that
violate individual liberty are opposed as a matter of principle. Its a
socialism that fits within the U.S. constitution and presupposes that
the means is the ends. It doesn't subscribe to a pre-determined goal for
which liberty can be sacrificed, it says that any real progress
depends primarily of the liberties of individuals. It says a fair
process is always better than grand utopian ideals.
The history of socialism as it exists in the real world is filled with
nightmares, but one could say the same about Christianity, Capitalism or
technology. But everybody knows you can't condemn the whole church
because of a few hypocrites.
Take the Soviet Union, for example. The Russian revolution was preceeded
by nearly a thousand years of serfdom and Orthodox Christianity. The
Czar owned nearly all of the land and the people who lived on it. Talk
about being the owner of the means of production! Russia was an
agricultural society in which there was one plantation owner and the
millions were all slaves. You could say the Russians tried to have a
revolution in 1917, but it failed. All they did was fast-forward their
nation through an industrial revolution that was false, cheap and
deadly. Their fake industrial revolution was an attempt to forced Marx's
historical stages of development into a span of about 20 minutes. They
never even had capitalism to overcome! They changed the names of the
players, but Joseph Stalin really was just Russia's most powerful Czar.
Marxism was imported into China, also a farm-based, authoritarian
culture. Confusianism is a relatively gentle social guide, but is
elaborate and almost totalitarian in its' reach. Their history is much
longer and their authoritarianism is less brutal ( Who can beat uncle
Joe for political murder?), but you can still see that Marxism hardly
changed things there either.
Both of these cases demonstrate the persistence of social level values
in spite of the intellect's wishes. One can't remake society overnight.
There were early enlightenment thinkers who thought so and advocated
reform over revolution. They were the romantics who saw humanity in
naturalistic terms instead of mechanistic terms. They held that social
institutions were like the organs of a body. An institution like the
church represented a real human need and ought not be abolished any more
than one should remove a lung from one's chest. You can see a little of
Pirsig's social level patterns of value in this notion. His description
of NY city as a living thing reminds me of the romantic's organic
vision.
You can see the social level values shift and evolve in Western history
by looking at the public buildings. As the Roman empire became the Holy
Roman empire, garrisons and forts turned into churches and monasteries.
As Christiandom dissolved under the weight of protestantism and secular
industrial society the monasteries became universities and churches
became particle accellerators and stock markerts. The more things
change, the more they stay the same.
Ceaser, Kaiser and Czar are all the same words and represent an
underlying social pattern of value that seems very persistent. And
aren't the Pope and Ceaser both representatives of the same value
pattern in two different contexts? I've made the case that Hitler
represents this same set of patterns gone wild. And where does Martha
Stewart fit into all this?
Pirsig makes a great case for the absorbtion of native cultural patterns
into the American national character. The cowboy is really a native
plains warrior in his value system. But he never mentions the Africans.
Obviously their contribution is enormous, and America must have
inherited as many social values from them as from the natives. Not only
the social patterns they brought with them, but the patterns that must
have emerged in the face of such intense and intimate contact with their
captors. The influence on language and music is most striking, but there
must be other areas to explore. Any thoughts?
David
MOQ Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:53 BST