by hilzoy
"The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).
Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of "social justice," and their economic programs. (…) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — "equal rights" and "social justice" are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies."
"As between freedom and dictatorship, in principle Obama is fine with dictatorship — we are seeing less and less freedom in our own country, and I believe Obama (who is dirigiste by nature) values stability over the rambunctiousness of a free society. He has certain values, and while he'd be delighted to have a free society arrive at them, he'd rather see them imposed if the alternative was a free society likely to shun them."
Leave aside the fact that this is completely insane. And leave aside as well the fact that this was written by Andy "
detaining US citizens without charges is fine"
"waterboarding someone once or twice is not torture" McCarthy. What puzzles me is this: I have spent a lot of time in places where one might suppose the Hard Left might be found. I mean, I grew up in
the Kremlin on the Charles, for heaven's sake. Moreover, I know some people who are fairly far to the left. And yet I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in this country who even remotely resembles McCarthy's "Hard Left".
My guitar teacher might have — he didn't talk politics enough for me to be sure — but that was in the early '70s. I might have found one had I ever ventured into Revolution Books in Harvard Square, but I can't recall that I did. There's one other person I knew back in the mid '80s who might have fit the bill, though I'm not sure how much of what makes me think this wasn't just general obnoxiousness, rather than a substantive political view.
But with these possible exceptions, none of the people I have known, in a long life of knowing leftists, has been "fine with dictatorship". None of them has the slightest interest in the "suppression of freedom", or "intrusiveness in all aspects of life". Like most people, they would prefer that the policies they think are best get adopted, but none of them would want to impose those policies by force if they lost the political argument.
So here's my question: have I just been hanging out in the wrong places? Are there, in fact, any substantial numbers of "Hard Leftists", as Andy McCarthy uses that term — not just the handful of surviving Stalinists that I'm sure exist somewhere in the US, but an appreciable number of people who are "fine with dictatorship"? And if so, how did I miss them?
Two words: “psychological projection.”
“But with these possible exceptions, none of the people I have known, in a long life of knowing leftists, has been ‘fine with dictatorship.'”
I’ve known two, though they wouldn’t agree with that description of themselves. One was a Maoist, and the other a Trotskyite of or another of the tiny American sects. But that was back in the Seventies and early Eighties.
But I’ve known thousands and thousands of people, with a very high proportion of them being from outlying areas of the political spectrum, particularly in science fiction fandom, which tends to attract a lot of… unusual… thinkers.
And I’ve encountered a handful of other such people, who worked in, respectively, two hardcore leftist bookstores in Seattle in the Seventies (Red And Black Books, and Left Bank Books, if my memory isn’t too confused; one on 15th Avenue E on Capitol Hill, and the other in the Pike Place Market). Plus that small bookstore the CPUSA used to run in Manhattan, which disappeared many years ago.
But offhand, there weren’t more than a couple of thousand such Americans back then, I’d estimate, and I’m quite sure their numbers haven’t grown in recent decades. They’re fairly rare beasts.
I really should write up again my brief encounter with the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade in my extremely brief college days. I haven’t done that since Usenet days, and I’m not sure I wrote a very full account even then. Mind, we’re talking about a group of six-to-eight people. They never were able to recruit a larger group, and that was in 1975.
Even paranoids are right once in a while. Just not today.
Getting overheated about the US President is a widely-observed tradition. Just run down the various foolish remarks usually described as Bush Derangement Syndrome.
At least one John Bircher said Eisenhower was a conscious dedicated agent of the International Communist Conspiracy.
Best to let it drift on by. Bill Ayers is of a much harder left, so some of it rubs off on his co-worker, Obama. And so on.
“Like most people, they would prefer that the policies they think are best get adopted, but none of them would want to impose those policies by force if they lost the political argument. ”
What does losing the political argument mean? Does it mean being outvoted? Does it mean losing the vote but suing to declare the vote illegal (for example same sex marriage referendum in California being taken to court)?
If ‘you should help your neighbor’ is the debate topic.
Do argue your side and let each person decide on his own how to act? Or do you legislate a program and force the few to pay for the many against their will?
Gotta watch out for the Trotskyite wing of the Democratic Party.
Krawk!
Re Gary’s reminiscences
I didn’t spend much time in the much-missed Red & Black Books (gone for at least five years now, along with the (unrelated) co-operative Mercantile store across the street), but it’s worth noting that the name of the store came from the Red flag of Communism and the Black flag of Anarchism. Now, I happen to think that Anarchism isn’t practical, but without getting into that debate I’m not at all familiar with the argument that Anarchism is compatible with dictatorship.
I will concede that anyone in tune with full-on Stalinism would probably have hung out at Red & Black, but that’s because it was a place for extreme fringe politics, especially of the left, not because it was managed by Stalinists. Crunchier lefties would probably have spent more time at Horizon books, across the street and now also sadly gone, or at Bailey-Coy, up the hill a bit.
hilzoy, I can only speak from a European perspective and it depends on how you want to interpret “in principle fine with dictatorship”. Of course few hard leftists would want a full-blown dictatorship in the country they live in, though paternalistic and undemocratic tendencies are common enough among the left here (which annoys the hell out of me, so much so that my rather feeble inner libertarian sometimes wins out over the much stronger social democrat in me).
But when it comes to judging other countries and their political systems, it is really not very uncommon for hard leftists to be fine in principle with (party-) dictatorship as the many apologists for e.g. Castro or the GDR prove, and you only have to look as far as Crooked Timber to find some of those. There is and has always been a rift on the left between human/civil rights absolutists like myself and those that are willing to compromise on these issues because it suits their political agenda. But then this attitude is not exclusive to the left and can also be found among free marketeers and right wingers.
I didn’t know there was a Revolution Books in Harvard Square! I occasionally went into the Berkeley branch back in the late 80s and early 90s, though, and yes, I think they did qualify as “hard left”. And the posters of Stalin and Mao suggested to me that they didn’t mind dictatorship.
Not that I’m claiming Obama has anything to do with the Avakianist left, of course, or anything stupid like that. Just a data point that the “hard left” isn’t completely a figment of the right-wingers’ imaginations. It’s tiny, insignificant, and ludicrous, but it does exist.
“Getting overheated about the US President is a widely-observed tradition.”
And getting all crazy like McCarthy is a lesser known cousin to that tradition… namely the ‘I’m all crazy’ tradition.
“Best to let it drift on by. Bill Ayers is of a much harder left, so some of it rubs off on his co-worker, Obama. And so on.”
Yeah. And what’s really up with ACORN anyway?
novakant: there were several reasons why I limited what I said to the US, and that’s one. (More important reasons: I have been to East Germany and Yugoslavia, back when they were East Germany and Yugoslavia; and to Hungary during the same period.) (Also, there’s my uncle who was, last I heard, a Maoist of some sort, but the only time I’ve actually met him that I can remember was over 15 years ago. I suspect I might have met him when I was little, though I don’t recall it. In any case, he’s in Sweden.)
My favorite poster on the sandwichboard outside Revolution Books in Berkeley, after communism collapsed in the Soviet Union: “Down with phony communism! Up with real communism! Mao more than ever!”
Seriously, even in Berkeley, you have to look pretty hard to find more than a handful of real hard-core commies anymore, and they’re not about revolution anymore, they’re about complaining.
“Horizon books, across the street and now also sadly gone”
I’m sad to hear it, though hardly surprised. Horizon seemed a bit of an anachronism even in the Seventies. It was for a time a meeting place of the completely unorganized longtime science fiction social group, “the Nameless,” from whence, for a while, the Hugo winning fanzine Cry of the Nameless (later just “Cry”) came.
Les Sample managed Horizon for decades, and employed a series of hard-up Seattlites, many sf fans, as employees, of whom Gene Perkins was the one I knew best and was friendliest with.
Sample issue of Cry mostly available on the web.
This short piece by my old friend (now long sadly deceased) Terry Carr really gives a sense of 1962. Check it out. Jessica Salmonson’s piece on Les Sample and Horizon Books that I link above is quite accurately atmospheric, as well.
The Nameless still had a vague meeting every month at Horizon when I arrived in Seattle at the beginning of 1978, but this pretty much consisted of 6-8 people wandering around the extremely narrow and twisty passages between the bookshelves, occasionally engaging in some conversation, and often just pulling out books and reading to one’s self. It was this close-to-moribund quality that led me to take the initiative to, along with Denys Howard (one of the aforementioned communists), to found the completely non-competing, and hardly more organized, but far more active and larger, monthly sf party we called The Vanguard Party (ho); last I looked, as of a few months ago, it was still meeting.
My first dwelling in Seattle was a block down the street from Horizon, in a large house rented by Loren MacGregor, at 606 15th Avenue E.; when a few months later, the rent on the house was raised by $500 a month (over the I think then $250/month), we all had to move, and my then-sweetie, Anna Vargo, and I, moved a couple of blocks down to 602 12th Avenue E., to the top floor very small attic apartment of a three apartment house. After a while we moved to a vastly larger house in the U. District at 4227 Eighth Avenue NE.
I mention all this so as to aid those in future who wish to make pilgrimages. And cuz I’m nostalgic.
Horizon was never a political bookstore, though; it was just a mess of used books of all sorts, according to whatever struck Les’ interest, although it always had a good collection of sf and mysteries. The other political bookstore I’m thinking of was across the street, down the street, for a while downstairs, but after a while upstairs over what became an ice cream parlor with a deck. There was a very nice bakery two or so stores down from it, and a couple of more blocks down 15th was the lovely B&O Expresso, with fantastic chocolate truffles and other hand-made chocolate items. This was all before the invention of Starbucks and Seattle being known for coffee.
I should probably add that Horizon was just an old house, stuffed with bookshelves. Thus wandering around it was one of the more unusual book store experiences I’ve ever engaged in; I’ve never seen another book store like it.
hilzoy, your point is supported by the fact that the US is generally to the right of Europe and that leftists run a much higher risk of being ostracized. However, I bet at least half of the commentators praising Castro’s and Suharto’s accomplishments at CT are from the US, so support for dictatorships and disregard for human/civil rights cannot be all that uncommon there either.
“Or do you legislate a program”
Yes, democracy is certainly a terrible system.
There were always a few Spartacist Youth types floating around Cambridge selling newspapers when I was there. Occasionally one or two would show up at “soft left” meetings and express surprise that we weren’t envisioning the liquidation of the bourgeoisie after the revolution.
I never thought of them as the “hard left.” Just the loony left…
mccarthy’s favorite president was fine with dictatorship, “…just so long as i’m the dictator.”
more projection.
Heck, this doesn’t seem to have posted:
“Horizon books, across the street and now also sadly gone”
I’m sad to hear it, though hardly surprised. Horizon seemed a bit of an anachronism even in the Seventies. It was for a time a meeting place of the completely unorganized longtime science fiction social group, “the Nameless,” from whence, for a while, the Hugo winning fanzine Cry of the Nameless (later just “Cry”) came.
Les Sample managed Horizon for decades, and employed a series of hard-up Seattlites, many sf fans, as employees, of whom Gene Perkins was the one I knew best and was friendliest with.
Sample issue of Cry mostly available on the web.
This short piece by my old friend (now long sadly deceased) Terry Carr really gives a sense of 1962. Check it out. Jessica Salmonson’s piece on Les Sample and Horizon Books that I link above is quite accurately atmospheric, as well.
The Nameless still had a vague meeting every month at Horizon when I arrived in Seattle at the beginning of 1978, but this pretty much consisted of 6-8 people wandering around the extremely narrow and twisty passages between the bookshelves, occasionally engaging in some conversation, and often just pulling out books and reading to one’s self. It was this close-to-moribund quality that led me to take the initiative to, along with Denys Howard (one of the aforementioned communists), to found the completely non-competing, and hardly more organized, but far more active and larger, monthly sf party we called The Vanguard Party (ho); last I looked, as of a few months ago, it was still meeting.
My first dwelling in Seattle was a block down the street from Horizon, in a large house rented by Loren MacGregor, at 606 15th Avenue E.; when a few months later, the rent on the house was raised by $500 a month (over the I think then $250/month), we all had to move, and my then-sweetie, Anna Vargo, and I, moved a couple of blocks down to 602 12th Avenue E., to the top floor very small attic apartment of a three apartment house. After a while we moved to a vastly larger house in the U. District at 4227 Eighth Avenue NE.
I mention all this so as to aid those in future who wish to make pilgrimages. And cuz I’m nostalgic.
Horizon was never a political bookstore, though; it was just a mess of used books of all sorts, according to whatever struck Les’ interest, although it always had a good collection of sf and mysteries. The other political bookstore I’m thinking of was across the street, down the street, for a while downstairs, but after a while upstairs over what became an ice cream parlor with a deck. There was a very nice bakery two or so stores down from it, and a couple of more blocks down 15th was the lovely B&O Expresso, with fantastic chocolate truffles and other hand-made chocolate items. This was all before the invention of Starbucks and Seattle being known for coffee.
Frack! Four fricking tries to publish this, and Typepad still keeps claiming it’s posted, and won’t!
Okay, now Typepad, after five different variant attempts, just won’t post *anything* by me.
And now some of them show up.
So how’s that move to another platform than Typepad coming?
Too many links, Gary? Then perhaps compounding that by reposting too fast? Anti-spam measures often miss their targets.
BTW, I checked out the first of novakant’s links over to Crooked Timber. Just a bunch of lefties saying that Castro actually did some good for his people besides being a repressive dictator and the usual righties saying that the lefties don’t put enough weight on the fact that Castro is a repressive dictator and thus discard any good which came out of his regime as tainted. In other words, the usual arguments past one another, bouncing between freewheeling and good-natured discourse on toward willful misinterpretation and distortion of opponents’ points of view.
Such intellectual mixing-it-up is par for the course over there, of course, making it easy to quote-mine for whatever material you’re looking for. But nowhere did I see anyone claiming that they thought it was a good thing that Castro was a dictator, just that Cuba under Castro somehow eked out more progress than its Caribbean neighbors (aside from the US, of course). So I don’t think novakant’s point is supported, but it’s not hard to see how someone else might think it is.
The hard left certainly exists, but if Obama is part of it, he’s doing a fair job of hiding it. OTOH, like most politicians, I expect he’s got more than a little dictator envy, and no particular patience for anybody who doesn’t want to do as he says. But that just makes him a common type in politics.
But, yeah, the hard left exists, I’ve encountered them. And the bit softer left, who admire tyrants abroad, but disclaim any desire for one here, are a lot more common.
Wish I could actually believe they’d continue to oppose a tyrant here if they had the chance for one.
An actual Maoist, or a follower of the popular cult of (largely mythical) Mao?
I’m guessing that most Maoists were largely ignorant of who Mao actually was, and what Mao actually did, thought, and stood for.
And the bit softer left, who admire tyrants abroad, but disclaim any desire for one here, are a lot more common.
got any examples?
and let’s not hear anything about Saudi Arabia. or China. and we all know how to find the picture of Rumsfeld glad-handing Saddam. and let’s not forget Reagan’s arms sales to Iran.
Hello, I did say that dictator envy was a common trait among politicians. And there are precious few politicians I actually admire.
“‘m guessing that most Maoists were largely ignorant of who Mao actually was, and what Mao actually did, thought, and stood for.”
And, as with Stalin, maintaining that degree of ignorance of what Mao actually did requires a fair degree of effort. Effort you wouldn’t expect out of somebody who didn’t on at least some level know what they were avoiding learning. So it’s not much of a defense for the soft Maoists.
“And, as with Stalin, maintaining that degree of ignorance of what Mao actually did requires a fair degree of effort.”
Not really all that much effort. It’s not as if China has been an open book since the turn of the 20th century, or anything.
But, yes, Mao was bad enough before you get into the fine detail. He was able to effectively ascribe some of the Great Leap’s millions of deaths to crop failures, though, even though there was nothing of the kind going on.
Right off the bat, Matt Osborne has said it: projection, pure and simple. No matter how wildly wrong these whack-jobs are, it’s hard to call them liars with conviction, due to *their* conviction: they aren’t really lying if they really believe it.
Which reduces things to the questions: how can intelligent adult believe such patent nonsense? And, how long must we as a nation pretend they are not raving mad?
I’ve had people trying to sell me this mess of pottage since I was a kid and was forced to attend John Birch Society meetings. Despite continual effort, I’ve never been able to find any signal in this noise. I too have known plenty of committed doctrinaire leftists & I’ve found their humorless, stringent monomania to be so very much like the outpourings from the right (as we have received them these last 20 years or so).
It seems to me incontrovertible that extremists *ARE* extremists because very few people are able to discount the bulk of their experience. These people can only draw from those as close to the fringe as they are themselves. This is why the ‘Left’ never made much headway in the US politically: extremists relegate themselves to the extreme…which perfectly explains the current implosion of the so-called ‘Right’.
So I don’t think novakant’s point is supported, but it’s not hard to see how someone else might think it is.
Well, I have no interest in refighting old battles from another blog, but unsurprisingly
I disagree with your summary – people can judge for themselves.
nowhere did I see anyone claiming that they thought it was a good thing that Castro was a dictator
This is not how it works, most modern dictatorships don’t call themselves dictatorships, but rather “democratic republic” or something along those lines. The leaders of such countries don’t think of themselves as tyrants, but honestly believe or pretend to believe that they are restricting civil and human rights in order to achieve a greater good. Similarly, quite a few commentators on these threads have highlighted the greater good and merely paid lip service to civil and human rights.
got any examples?
A whole lot of people on the left admire and/or defend Castro for various reasons. Conversely A whole lot of people on the right have admired and/or defended Pinochet. There’s no way out of this mess unless one takes a principled stance on human and civil rights.
The picture of Nixon shaking hands with Mao is nothing, cleek. Politicians shake hands with other politicians, no matter how vile.
Now, what Nixon and Kissinger did behind the scenes with Mao and China, those are another thing altogether, and worthy of attention. Basically, they were going to conspire to give China a number of things, including advanced jet engines, in exchange for…nothing, as far as I could see. And pretty much without anyone knowing about it, was the sense. Possibly Nixon thought he could use China as a check on Russia, but China had other plans, mostly of the power-grubbing variety.
Mao was really upset when Nixon was forced out. He completely didn’t understand why that had to happen, and it prevented any of Nixon’s promises of covert aid from being kept.
The picture of Nixon shaking hands with Mao is nothing, cleek. Politicians shake hands with other politicians, no matter how vile.
of course. i was obviously trying to preemptively fend off any weak-tea examples of tyrant-loving lefties that Brett might come back with. well, i thought it was obvious, anyway.
A whole lot of people on the left admire and/or defend Castro for various reasons
with all due respect, two posts at CR doesn’t really equal “a whole lot”. i personally don’t know anyone who thinks fondly of Castro or Mao or Stalin, etc.. it seems like “a whole lot” should be sufficiently large that i might meet one, someday.
“Dirigiste”? Whoa, now there’s a blast from the past. Apparently what McCarthy means is that Obama is actually on the right like de Gaulle and Pompidou.
I’m with cleek; I’d like a list of “softer left” types who admire tyrants abroad. And no, simply repeating “plenty of people think Castro is terrific” by taking CT comments out of context still doesn’t count.
A lot of this is because I don’t see where the hard vs. soft line is being drawn. Does Bernie Sanders admire tyrants abroad? Chomsky is pretty far left, but is a Wobblie and an anarchist. So I’m just not seeing how those who aren’t hard-left by any reasonable definition “admire tyrants abroad.”
I personally don’t know anyone who thinks fondly of Castro or Mao or Stalin, etc..
Well, I personally don’t know Olli Stone, Sean Penn, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Nelson Mandela – but they sure display a certain reverence for Castro. I’ll give you Stalin, but Mao posters and the Red Book were also quite popular in left-wing flat-shares back in the day.
The President’s given several speeches which demonstrate he’s on the side of democracy and human rights. In his inaugural address, his remarks to the Iranian people to mark the national anniversary, and in the Cairo speech, he stood for these things.
Moreover, he’s reached out to the societies in the Middle East in a respectful way that makes clear he understands that change in these areas should be organic and home grown. Just like our civil rights movement.
On this point, over the weekend, the President cited Martin Luther King’s quote about the arc of history bending to justice in addressing the Green movement.
Consider this–in response to a citizens movement for voting and human rights whose participants are being beaten, tear gassed, and shot in the streets by police as they non-violently protest, a black American president says that this reminds him of what Martin Luther King said about justice.
No one with any intellectual honesty about the moral history of our country, and the President’s place in it, can doubt who and what he supports.
“Not really all that much effort.”
If you’re at all public about being a Maoist, people will be throwing what he did in your face, so, yes, it does require a fair degree of effort.
I’ll grant you that there was a period there, when enough communists in the media, (Walter Duranty, for instance.) were covering up, that innocent ignorance was feasible. That period is long since past. Of more concern is that ignorance we see in the generation since the cold war ended. I could see a resurgence of communist thinking among people who just weren’t around when everybody knew how nasty communism really was.
“i personally don’t know anyone who thinks fondly of Castro or Mao or Stalin, etc”
Somebody’s buying all those Che shirts. I assume they’re not people who think he was a monster.
Brett,
[Dillinger’s] body was then taken to the Cook County morgue where the body was repeatedly photographed and death masks were made by local morticians in training, who inadvertently damaged the facial skin. Throughout that night and most of the next day, a huge throng of curiosity seekers paraded through the morgue to catch a glimpse of Dillinger. The chief coroner finally complained that this mob was interfering with work, and Cook County sheriff’s deputies were posted to keep the crowds at bay. There were also reports of people dipping their handkerchiefs and skirts into the pools of blood that had formed as Dillinger lay in the alley in order to secure keepsakes of the entire affair.
Dillinger was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery (Section: 44 Lot: 94 )[12] in Indianapolis. His gravestone is often vandalized by people removing pieces as souvenirs.
Fans continue to observe “John Dillinger Day” (July 22) as a way to remember the fabled bank robber. Members of the “John Dillinger Died for You Society” traditionally gather at the Biograph Theater on the anniversary of Dillinger’s death and retrace his last walk to the alley where he died, following a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace”.
There are hundreds of people who were morally odious, but whose death at the hands of authorities allows them to take on a quality that has people hang on their identity. Taking che posters as true indicators of political beliefs rather than items of fashion reveals a true sense of cluelessness.
“No one with any intellectual honesty about the moral history of our country, and the President’s place in it, can doubt who and what he supports.”
Actually, we can doubt who he supports. It would be foolish to continue to take Obama’s speeches at face value. His praise for justice in Middle East is elections is obviously a sham–Hamas is still being marginalized and he still supports the repressive Egyptian and Saudi regimes. While still bombing Iraq and Afghanistan, his calls for non-violence as the way to peace is even sillier.
Of course, these things exist because Obama is a centrist US president.
Of course it’s easy to exaggerate the significance of the Leninist left in America, but it wasn’t quite as tiny as Hilzoy’s saying, and it had influence beyond its hardcore membership. In the 1930s, the Nation, New Republic and New York Times all supported the Moscow Trials. When SDS split up, there were rival chants of “Mao Tse Tung” and “Ho Chi Minh”.
Trotskyists and Shachtmanites have had a substantial, if underground, impact on American intellectual life, left and right.
Andy McCarthy is still a nut, with an apt last name. But Hilzoy’s exaggerating.
Somebody’s buying all those Che shirts.
true. i still don’t know any of them, though.
i know more wiccans than i know fans of Che.
Brett: Che was a symbol of rebellion and change – little was actually known about him at that time (which I’m sure you don’t personally remember), and the shirt/poster was a very effective way of being edgy & pissing off the straights.
Looks like it’s *still* working, to judge by the import you place on it….
That’s your evidence? There are people buying Che T-shirts primarily marketed to them by for-profit entities; ergo, the “softer” Left admire tyrants? Sheesh, if you’re going to include Che Guevara on your list of tyrants, based on when he ruled Cuba or something, you could at least use Nelson Mandela as a legitimate example of a “softer leftist” who admired him. Or Murray Rothbard… Whoops, you probably don’t want to go there.
Hey, guys, if anyone here still lives in Cambridge, never take Mr. Bellmore to People’s Republik for drinks, okay?
i know more wiccans than i know fans of Che.
Oh come on, didn’t we just see an epic, two-part biopic called “Che” by Steven Soderbergh. And what about “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Walter Salles a couple of years ago? The legend is alive and well. And no, I’m not saying he was the devil incarnate, but denying that there’s still quite widespread adoration for him is simply wrong.
No, my evidence is that I’ve met such people. Regrettably, I don’t keep a list.
But, yeah, don’t invite me out to enjoy communist or nazi chic, I’ll be a real killjoy. I just don’t find anything entertaining about mass murder.
An actual Maoist, or a follower of the popular cult of (largely mythical) Mao?
See, if you know Hilzoy’s real identity, you can look up the Wikipedia article on him. “Maoist” isn’t completely unfair, although his views are a bit more complciated than that.
I’m just not seeing how those who aren’t hard-left by any reasonable definition “admire tyrants abroad.”
That’s because they don’t exist (in the US) in any appreciable quantity. People like McCarthy just can’t let go of the late 60s, or the 1930s-40.
Somebody’s buying all those Che shirts. I assume they’re not people who think he was a monster.
You were on to something, Brett, when you mentioned ignorance. They have no idea who Che really was; they just think it ‘looks cool’. If you look next to the Che T-Shirt, there is a shirt with a Playboy Bunny on it, and next to that there is some other essentially meaningless logo. Welcome to the postmodern, flat, overwhelmingly capitalist world. There has also been a vogue recently for 30s style soviet design – does that mean the people who buy that stuff long for a return of the USSR? How could they long for something they know little or nothing about? I also notice that 60s style Peace Signs are stylish again, this time in a *strictly* ‘stylish’ way.
Some people admire Che for his initial good intentions. Others admire W Bush for *his* good intentions (such as they were). So what?
Note to people who think they’re conservative: capitalism won, and may even be a ‘catastrophic success’ at the moment. There has never been a strong Left in this country, and there certainly isn’t one now. McCarthy is indefensible because he’s irrelevant. Defending him puts you in danger of being irrelevant, too. I would prefer you to be in the game, frankly.
Oh, please. Black Sabbath was dubbed ‘Satanic’ in the early 70’s, ditto for anyone who played the original D&D. There were also media reports of Satan-worshiping teens; among the evidence cited against them was displaying the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath poster.
Sometimes a poster is . . . just a poster.
Truth to tell, even genuine liberals are hard to find on the ground, or rather, either they’re hard to find or about three out of every five adults in the U.S. are ‘liberal’.
Novakant, I remember (and participated in) the CT thread you linked (though I didn’t actually check). I hope you aren’t claiming that people who say that dictator X might have done some good in the area of economics or public health (I have therefore covered Suharto, Pinochet, and Castro) are therefore apologists for that dictator. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. I’m willing to grant that some murderer might have done some good in some areas without thinking this cancels out the murders they are responsible for.
For that matter, the same is true of a few American Presidents I can think of. Even Dubya did one or two things that were good–hilzoy posted on them, iirc.
You’re right, though, that there are a fair number of lefties who go beyond saying that Castro is good on public health (a claim which I’m not in a position to evaluate) and seem to admire him. The same is obviously true on the right with respect to Pinochet and many others.
Say that there were 100,000 members of the ‘Leninist Left’, an implausibly high count. Out of 100 million people, that’s one tenth of one percent, i.e., a tiny number. You can’t say anything about the size of a political faction without noting what percentage of the electorate they constitute.
You’ve also got to do something to nail down what ‘influence’ means in this context, but that’s another kettle of fish.
Interesting how McCarthy has managed to provoke something of a spirited discussion here about the existence of a “hard left” in the US (now or in the past)–while his main point, that Barack Freaking Obama is a card-carrying member thereof, is too ridiculous to even merit consideration.
I’ve got no beef with 100+ comment threads about college kids with Che posters in their dorm rooms, but I would have thought the fact that the flagship journal of American conservatism is regularly publishing the meanderings of certifiable lunatics would be worth a bit of discussion as well. Nobody’s going to invite the college kid on to CNN to ask him what we should be doing about Iran, after all.
Of course, there *is* such a thing as a ‘hard right’ in the US, and it’s been quite influential many times over the years, particularly the last 25.
There was a Revolution Books in Berkeley? Like the one in Cambridge? (I think there’s a creperie there now, or a DIY pottery place – even more subversive!)
Does anyone else find it odd that Revolution Books seems to have been a franchise operation? Probably owned by McDonald’s.
cleek, thanks for that link. [to others, I suggest you click for wry amusement.]
Oh, holy crap. I just read that guy’s name as a cite in another book on Mao. Not good, I think. But Mao had a lot of people fooled, I think. He showed the outside world just what he wanted them to see, and not much more.
I’m going to have to go look up that passage. If I recall correctly, the book he wrote was given as an example of how Mao used people to propagandize the rest of the world.
Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t.
True. It depends on context, tone, intention and weighting, all of which can be hard to determine. If a historian soberly acknowledges that Stalin and Hitler have initiated some progress in sanitation, infrastructure or whatever, I have no problem with that. But in the cases in question it was blatantly obvious that this was not the case.
Pithlord, most Western observers thought the Moscow trials were above board. Ironically, (with your cite of Trotskyists and Shachtmanites), it was the Dewey commission, which was initiated out of a desire to show that Trotsky was innocent, that showed that they were show trials.
And what about “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Walter Salles a couple of years ago? The legend is alive and well.
Not to mention Lord Lloyd Webber’s musical, Evita, in which young Che is the male lead character . . .
Well, Trotskyists hate Stalin too. And the International Committee of the Fourth International were never all that keen on Castro, either.
Meanwhile, could you sketch out a little more clearly the effect the Leninist Left had on America? I guess I’m missing the substantial impact Trotskyites and Schachtmanites had on American intellectual life, unless we’re including the original neoconservatives. Though I’ll admit that the SDS, anti-communist until 1966, and quickly well rid of Bernadine and her gang, became a titanic influence on every politician to the left of Ben Nelson.
Anyway, I do appreciate that none of the resident right-wing experts on the beliefs of the American Left has brought up Jane Fonda.
Oh, I’ll bet you’re a real wet blanket on the Fourth of July.
Here’s a hint about People’s Republik: the West won. Reducing the once-feared symbols of the “Evil Empire” to kitsch in order to make a buck is not actually an endorsement of Stalinism. It’s triumphalist dancing on its grave. Oh, wait, that’s right, it’s not dead yet, because those of us on the left “admire tyrants.”
Well, according to Brett Bellmore, that’s who he has in mind when he accuses the “softer left” in this country of admiring tyrants. But he doesn’t keep a list, since he’s talking about complete nobodies. He can’t come up with an example of that sort of leftist who has a platform comparable to McCarthy’s, because there’s no such animal. Which was part of hilzoy’s original point.
As usual, there’s also a determined will not to nail down what, precisely, it means to be a member of the ‘hard left’, or indeed, what it means to be ‘hard left’ period. Being a facts and figures sort of guy, I’ve got to wonder what sort of specific events, issues, and legislation a member of the ‘hard left’ would supposedly plump for, as opposed to someone who is merely ‘of the left’ or a ‘liberal’.
The trick is an obvious one, of course – cue the ominous music and the black-and-white PSA-style advert with the voice-over that solemnly informs us that the ‘hard left’ supports a public health plan. Well, yes, yes they do. So does >70% of the American people. But that fact never seems to get mentioned, does it? In fact, I think Digby had a post to that effect a few days back.
Slarti: yeah. He’s one of the reasons I never, ever hold people’s peculiar relatives against them. Besides being a Maoist (though my sense is that his views have to some extent evolved with the actual China, so that he now has pretty seriously conservative bits along with the general anti-colonialism), he also supported Pol Pot.
Supporting Pol Pot: that takes some doing.
About knowing what Mao did: I think it’s very important to specify when you’re talking about. The PRC was very, very closed until after Mao’s death. Even if you could get in, you tended to be led around by minders, and not able to judge things for yourself. Growing up, I knew some people who worked on China, and a lot of other people who were interested in, and relatively well-informed about, other countries, and none of them had much of a clue what was actually going on. This is especially true of ‘big picture’ things: some anecdotes were around, but it was (iirc) almost impossible to get any sense of whether they were isolated, part of a larger trend, or what.
The people I knew were not, best I could tell, apologists for the PRC, since they had the sense not to pronounce about stuff they were ignorant of. But there really was very little information out there. And what there was was unreliable: breathless accounts of barefoot doctors on the one hand, utter demonization on the other, in both cases by people who seemed to have serious agendas. (About the right: bear in mind not just that some of them, e.g. Luce, plainly had specific axes to grind on China, but also that analyses of Vietnam by these very same people had just turned out to be spectacularly wrong in a particularly awful way.) Pretty much everyone I knew just felt ignorant.
That completely changed after Mao’s death, of course. And after that, I think Brett is right. But before, it was very very hard to know these things, from the outside.
Also: I didn’t mean to deny that there was a Hard Left, in McCarthy’s sense, in (say) the 1930s. Just not for the last few decades.
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about, and why I tend to give folks who supported Mao based on some portrayed fiction of what China was like a bit of leeway.
That brought me up short, though, that this fellow that I just saw cited in a book that I just finished is your uncle. It truly is a small world.
I can talk only about Europe as far as Che is concerned. My estimate is that the iconic image is the only thing that more than 90% of the people over here (Germany) know about him. The image is so iconic that there exist numerous spin-offs (e.g. google [images] “Libertad para los patos”).
If I had to make a choice to live under either Castro or Pinochet, I’d choose the former without much hesitation. And I think that he is significantly less bad than the typical (often US backed) Caribbean junta heads. That does not mean that I support him.
As for shaking the hands of scum that happens to be Head of State somewhere, I think it play a role, whether it is done out of necessity (the Soviets could not be shunned), out of opportunism or out of genuine ‘affection’. Btw, the Nixon-Mao handshake is now considered toxic enough by some on the right that FOX News actually tried to claim that the Chinese guy in the picture was not actually Mao.
There’s these guys:
But you can find examples of anything on the web. Like Pol Pot fansites. But I don’t think they have much more significance than Time Cube.
The McCarthy/Lowry vaudeville act reminds me of a particular Beavis and Butthead scene. Beavis goes off on some rant about not being able to get laid, Butthead responds with his typical “Settle down, Beavis,” and Beavis uncharacteristically says “NO! I WON’T SETTLE DOWN!”
Leave aside the fact that this is completely insane.
Sorry, I can’t do it. Every time I try to analyze this further, my mind stops at the word “bastsh*t”.
“If I had to make a choice to live under either Castro or Pinochet” I’d chose Pinochet in an instant.
He’d let me leave, which is what I’d be doing. That’s not a minor difference.
he now has pretty seriously conservative bits along with the general anti-colonialism
Yeah, it’s surprising to find out that he thinks it necessary to save the institution of marriage from gays.
Time to bring up that classic quote
Still fits the loudmouths a la Andy McCarthy.
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‘plays’ not ‘play’ in my last post above
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Rummy and Saddam was imo a meeting between businessbeings without a conscience
Brett, ‘live under’ was a deliberate choice of words with leaving not an option. Btw, Pinochet had that nasty habit to send killers after people he really disliked. I don’t know about Castrist assassination squads deployed in the US
McCarthy’s “hard left” smear is obviously an attempt to de-legitimize Obama by implying he’s radically outside the mainstream. the fact that nobody with half a brain could take it seriously makes it clear (to me anyway) that McCarthy is either astoundingly ignorant himself or he thinks he’s talking to astoundingly ignorant people. either way, he’s selling dumb to dumbers.
“But when it comes to judging other countries and their political systems, it is really not very uncommon for hard leftists to be fine in principle with (party-) dictatorship as the many apologists for e.g. Castro or the GDR prove, and you only have to look as far as Crooked Timber to find some of those.”
I agree with this and pretty much everything else that novakant has written on this thread. Including the part where he correctly notes that it isn’t an exclusive feature of people on the left.
That said, Obama is pretty clearly not a hard leftist, or a Che admirer, or a Castro lover.
In fact he seems to be a person with liberal-influenced politics and a conservative temperament. I’d prefer someone with right-influenced politics and a liberal temperament, but since I can’t get that Obama looks pretty good over all.
Yeah, I know, “live under” was deliberately chosen to exclude a major difference between the two. And I’m not having any of it. They were both tyrants, one of them usually let people leave, the other didn’t.
Brett, ‘live under’ was a deliberate choice of words with leaving not an option.
Still, not letting people leave is a good indication that the regime in question is total cr@p.
Of more concern is that ignorance we see in the generation since the cold war ended. I could see a resurgence of communist thinking among people who just weren’t around when everybody knew how nasty communism really was.
Right. Substitute the first instance of “communism” for “even slightly left-of-center,” and this is definitely already happening, and we’re all lucky for it.
I would have thought the fact that the flagship journal of American conservatism is regularly publishing the meanderings of certifiable lunatics would be worth a bit of discussion as well.
Not really. It’s well understood that the leadership of modern American conservatives are insane, or at least, highly committed and specialized demogogues. (No offense intended to self-identified conservatives who are not among the leadership of modern American conservatives.)
So norbiz, I take it you’re not The Hard Left then?
OK, so: Stalinists from the 30’s, SDS members from the 60’s and 70’s, folks that buy Che T-shirts (including executives at AIG), and hilzoy’s uncle, except he’s not in the US.
Oops, sorry, I forgot Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky, a pair of true authoritarians if ever there was one.
And maybe that famously annoying life-long grad student who used to hector everyone at the bus stop when I was at Stony Brook, unless he’s sold out in the intervening 30 or so years and is short-selling condos in Manhattan now.
That’s the American hard left.
“In fact he seems to be a person with liberal-influenced politics and a conservative temperament.”
I think that about nails it.
Yes, and hilzoy’s point was that such “hard leftists,” especially in the US, are a vanishingly small group. Hence phrases like “substantial number” and “appreciable numbers.” And your repeated apparent attempts to refute this by the example of a couple of commenters on Crooked Timber doesn’t actually disprove hilzoy’s hypothesis, any more than Mr. Bellmore’s anecdotal encounters with hordes of pro-tyranny soft leftists does.
Why substitute? “Even slightly left-of-center” still admires tyrants, so is practically indistinguishable from communism.
Russell, you forgot Sacco and Vanzetti.
I have to admit the accusation against Obama is so stupid it doesn’t interest me even as something to ridicule. So I’m going back to novakant’s issue. Consider this apologetics for threadjacking.
The problem I have is that anyone who says dictator X actually did do something good is automatically accused of apologetics and often the claim is denied out-of-hand. Now in some cases it is a question of apologetics, but even if it is, I still want to know if it is true that the Castro regime has a good record on public health and even whether life expectancy under Mao (one of the great mass murderers of all time) actually went up by a factor of two (a claim I have read). Public health is not a minor thing and no, it doesn’t cancel out the crimes.
The same is true on the right–Pinochet is always being credited with saving the Chilean economy, though I’ve read some lefties who say this is false. It’d be nice to know what’s true and sometimes the cries of “apologetics for tyranny” just get in the way. Though I also think that in America, apologetics for Pinochet as a savior of the free market system get much more sympathetic coverage than the claims of Castro as the hero of lower infant mortality rates.
Andy McCarthy has gone off his meds again:
Is it just me or is the rhetorical phrase “gone off his meds” a bit off-putting? Some folks legitimately need medication for various reasons. I dont think they should be implicitly mocked.
For that matter, suppose McCarthy actually does take meds. He shouldnt be villified for that.
Surely we can use a better turn of phrase to describe when someone is writing nutty stuff.
and even whether life expectancy under Mao (one of the great mass murderers of all time) actually went up by a factor of two (a claim I have read).
No idea about the factor of two factoid. Anything as precise as that sounds like it belongs in the family of Dubious Statistics.
A lot of what I’d heard was true about post-Revolutionary China (mostly via Europeans who had visited China or Chinese who did not live there) turned out to be not true, or true only in a very limited sense (true for educated people/for town or city dwellers: not true for peasants).
But given that India and China started at about the same level in 1948 (which I think is true) it may be significant that in China after sixty years of Communism life expectancy is 73.47 (105th in the world), while in India after sixty years of capitalism life expectancy is 69.89 (145th in the world).
In addition, even the pro-dictatorial “hard left” (in the times and places where there was one), like the pro-dictatorial hard right, drew distinctions among dictatorships.
And Iran’s current regime doesn’t exactly fit the model of the kind of dictatorship that even the (now tiny to the point of irrelevance) pro-dictatorial “hard left” would have cottoned to.
Michel Foucault did support the very earliest days of the Iranian revolution, but even he said it had taken a wrong turn by 1979.
Are there any leftists, anywhere, who are vigorous supporters of Ahmadinejad?
“Though I also think that in America, apologetics for Pinochet as a savior of the free market system get much more sympathetic coverage than the claims of Castro as the hero of lower infant mortality rates. “
Word up.
I haven’t read the Crooked Timber thread, but I’m happy to see novakant’s CT and raise him a RedState.
I never thought I’d read a serious, not-meant-to-be-a-bad-joke defense of, literally and specifically, throwing people out of airplanes, but there you go.
Because, you know, Castro gave Allende a rifle.
Live and learn.
“Surely we can use a better turn of phrase to describe when someone is writing nutty stuff.”
How about “believes his own lies”?
Is it just me or is the rhetorical phrase “gone off his meds” a bit off-putting?
I dunno–I will freely admit to being a med-taker myself (and I’m not talking about blood pressure medication here, but one of those SSRI ‘happy pills’), and it really doesn’t bother me. But I can see where it might rub some people the wrong way.
And with that in mind, I hereby apologize for my use of “certifiable lunatics” upthread to describe Andy McCarthy and those of his ilk. It was grossly unfair and defamatory to actual certifiable lunatics.
“Somebody’s buying all those Che shirts. I assume they’re not people who think he was a monster.”
I never actually had a Che T-shirt, but I do recall that back in the day I thought Che was the zigzag cigarette paper guy and that his T-shirts and posters were about pot, not politics.
On a more serious note I think that an awful lot of people are hardwired to invest faith in leaders and that projecting qualities on those leaders that make them seem worthy of faith is part of the psychology.
Having once invested faith, it is painful to withdraw it, but lots of people do go through that disappointment. The more blatant the feet of clay, the harder to retain faith.
I think that twenty eight percenters who still believe that Bush was a good President are a better example of Americans being unable to face up to the deficiencies of a leader than hypothetical people who still admire Mao or Che.
Besides the little I know about Che is sort of romantic–he was a freedom fighter who died before his side won and before his cause was made manifest as Castro’s dictatorship. In other words, he wasn’t around when things went sour, so I suppose one could absolve him of responsiblity.
Not thah I absolve him–I don’t know enough to have an opnion one way or another.
Jes, the wikepedia on Mao contains some of the life expectancy claims. link
Life expectancy in 1949 was allegedly around 35 and at the end of his life it was in the mid 60’s or maybe 70.
I suspect it went up dramatically in many countries without the accompanying prison camps, the Cultural Revolution and at one point an economic policy so stupid it caused tens of millions of famine deaths.
Che was around when things were going sour during his revolution.
“Surely we can use a better turn of phrase to describe when someone is writing nutty stuff.”
My mom used to use “intellectual self-deception”.
“intellectual self-deception”.
aka: Bullshit
And your repeated apparent attempts to refute this by the example of a couple of commenters on Crooked Timber doesn’t actually disprove hilzoy’s hypothesis
I have also mentioned a very popular Nobel prize winning politician, a very popular Nobel prize winning writer, and some very popular actors and directors – just from the top of my head, I’m sure we could come up with more people who admire Castro to varying extents.
It’d be nice to know what’s true and sometimes the cries of “apologetics for tyranny” just get in the way.
Donald, why not read a book on the history of Cuba or Chile, I don’t know of any, but I’m sure there must be something substantial and objective out there on these topics. Maybe you should ask Randy Paul.
Given a long history of famine being used as a deliberate tool in China, and the established fact that Mao wasn’t averse to mass murder, I’d be a bit antsy about assuming those famines were inadvertant.
“About knowing what Mao did: I think it’s very important to specify when you’re talking about. The PRC was very, very closed until after Mao’s death. Even if you could get in, you tended to be led around by minders, and not able to judge things for yourself.”
Second that, and the rest of what Hilzoy said there, most emphatically. China before Mao died was endlessly more opague to the world than North Korea is today, and that doesn’t convey it, because it’s perfectly clear how evil and totalitarian North Korea is, due to the huge number of defectors, and the details of concentration camps, starvation, and totalitarianism in general.
China under Mao was like the far side of the moon to the West: a land of fable and rumor, and, yes, a small number of credulous outsiders were let in and led around and let out to report of wondrous sucesses, but there were very few countervailing facts available, or even accounts. Just more rumors. Yes, there were very much, in those days, a significant number among the small numbers of the left who romanticized Mao: absolutely. But that was in the light of almost no actual knowledge, and simply because of wishful and credulous believing in propaganda (The Little Red Book!), rather than an unwillingness to face a flood of contrary fact.
OK, so: Stalinists from the 30’s, SDS members from the 60’s and 70’s….”
No, no, no: first of all, there were a huge variety of factions of Communists in the U.S. from the 1890s through the 1930s. Have you never seen Reds, my good man? The factional fights went on and on. It was hardly just Stalinists.
And SDS, which came into existence in 1960 with the Port Huron Statement, wasn’t at all communist as an organizaiton until the splits at the 9th national convention in 1969, with the communist Progressive Labor Party faction, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and a variety of other factions of Maoists, Trots, and so on, rose in power. At that convention RYM split off, and expelled PL, and SDS now consisted of two different organizations. RYM then promptly split into two more organizations. The rest of SDS petered out after that.
Mind, we’re talking about the massive numbers of all of 500 people in RYM, both RYM I, which was entirely opposed to violence, and RYM II, which led to the Weather Underground, which supported violence, and consisted of a few dozen people: and that was the peak of communism in the American left in my lifetime. We’re not exactly talking about a mass movement.
(There were also a few hundred Old Left Moscow-supporting communists in the CPUSA, but all they did by the Sixties was sit around and have coffee and complain and have ideological arguments. They were as threatening as a bowling league.)
Donald: I suspect it went up dramatically in many countries without the accompanying prison camps, the Cultural Revolution and at one point an economic policy so stupid it caused tens of millions of famine deaths.
I’m sure it did. That’s why I was citing present-day differences between life expectancy in India and life expectancy in China as indicators that public health is better in China than in India.
Brett: Given a long history of famine being used as a deliberate tool in China, and the established fact that Mao wasn’t averse to mass murder, I’d be a bit antsy about assuming those famines were inadvertant.
Capitalists tend not to care very much about predictable and preventable famines caused by world capitalism.
hunger stats:
– About 25,000 people die every day from hunger and related causes:
– 10.9 million children under five die in developing countries each year: malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths;
Famines in China did not begin with Communism, and millions of people die each year because of famine who don’t live in Communist countries – who are dying, often, because their country’s most-fertile land is not being used to grow food to feed the people who live there, but used in the service of capitalism to give people who live in wealthier countries profitable out-of-season fruit and vegetables.
Someone noted that while you can have a little black book that lists number of deaths due to Communism, it would take a big black library to list the number of deaths due to capitalism.
And yes, this makes me a hard leftist – certainly by US standards, though in the UK I am merely a moderate socialist: yet, funnily enough, I’m really not a supporter of dictatorships nor of militant Islam.
“Some folks legitimately need medication for various reasons. I dont think they should be implicitly mocked.”
I take psychiatric meds, for depression, and I don’t think it’s inherently mocking to all people who take psychiatric meds to say of someone that they’ve “gone off their meds.” The phrase arose because a lot of people who take such drugs do some times choose to go off their meds, and often fall back into some form of craziness. My father, who was extremely manic-depressive (we say “bipolar” nowadays) did this regularly, and was really nuts when he did it. Using the phrase as a metaphor doesn’t strike me as inherently insulting to med-users in general. (Any metaphor can be used in an inappropriately insulting way, to be sure.)
I’m not sure that I would characterize the forcible deprivation of food as famine; famine has more of an accidental, act-of-nature flavor. Technically, though, famine may be correct.
What was Mao doing with the food? Selling it back to the Soviet Union, or even giving it away.
Well, actually, the explicit “anti-communist” provision was stripped out at the 1965 convention, allowing the PL to gain a foothold in 1966.
And come to think of it, I’m surprised Tom Hayden’s name hasn’t shown up yet, given the vast influence he wields via the tyrant-admiring Progessive Democrats of America.
I’m somewhat suprised that no-one has mentioned the Frankfurt School and its influence in intellectual and university circles, both in the US and in Europe, in the postwar period up to the middle 60’s.
The “new left” and organizations like the SDS come out of that, certainly, but I think their influence wasn’t limited to those groups.
I don’t really have the chops to comment on them further than just making note of their presence, but if you’re looking for a real, influential left in recent US history I think you’d need to include them.
There were always a few Spartacist Youth types floating around Cambridge selling newspapers when I was there. Occasionally one or two would show up at “soft left” meetings and express surprise that we weren’t envisioning the liquidation of the bourgeoisie after the revolution.
I never thought of them as the “hard left.” Just the loony left…
I went to Oberlin, reputedly one of the leftiest colleges in the universe. Even there, the Sparts were generally regarded as loopy, and rumored to actually be agents provocateurs seeking to discredit other liberal political groups by associating with them.
I wonder if Andy is sitting in his mom’s basement (or wherever he does his writing and posting) chortling and cackling Got ’em again! Got ’em again?
I love this blog, the posters and [most of] the commenters, but a lot of you Very Serious People rise to the bait with predictable regularity. The more wacko the wingut declaration, the quicker and harder you rise. Over 100 posts! Wow!
I mean, the whackjob and his fellow-travelers offend me, too. Viscerally. But remember: the primary raison d’etre of certain provocative conservatives is to piss off the liberals.
Did a helluva’ job, didn’t he?
“Besides the little I know about Che is sort of romantic–he was a freedom fighter who died before his side won and before his cause was made manifest as Castro’s dictatorship.”
Well, that isn’t remotely true. Che died October 9, 1967. Castro had created a “revolutionary militia” and “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution” by late 1960.
To quote Wikipedia:
In 1959 you could easily have illusions of Castro; after 1960, only if you weren’t paying attention. By 1967 you’d have had to have been extremely tunnel-visioned (as ideological people tend to be, of course).
Trivial personal note: Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls was one of the various books in Avon’s Latin American line I was the assistant to the editor on in the mid-Eighties. It was a fantastic line of books, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a bunch of Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, José María Arguedas, Manuel Puig, Jorge Amado, Márcio Souza, Óscar Acosta, Omar Cabezas, and a variety of others. I really really wish I hadn’t lost all my copies (along with all the other Avon Books I worked on, and tons of other stuff), in the fire of 1991.
Well, there’s a movement of the left that did have an intellectual impact. I don’t think it was exactly teeming with people who were “fine with dictatorship,” though, not even (or especially) Marcuse, who was probably its furthest-left adherent. Then again, perhaps Horkheimer actually meant “The Authoritarian State” to be a how-to manual.
Regardless, none of the Frankfurt School can hold a candle to the intellectual and political influence of Sean Penn.
“Then again, perhaps Horkheimer actually meant “The Authoritarian State” to be a how-to manual.”
Or maybe Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” was intended to be a self-help book.
“I don’t think it was exactly teeming with people who were “fine with dictatorship,”
My impression as well.
novakant: There is and has always been a rift on the left between human/civil rights absolutists like myself and those that are willing to compromise on these issues because it suits their political agenda. But then this attitude is not exclusive to the left and can also be found among free marketeers and right wingers.
Indeed, it’s common today among plain old liberals — those who don’t want any loud objections to Obama’s Bush-like positions on secrecy, detention, and spying on U.S. citizens.
“I’d be a bit antsy about assuming those famines were inadvertant.”
Not so much advertant as products of insane top-down ideology, and indifference to the actual facts, combined with a certain amount of people being told all up the line what they wanted to hear, because you’d be punished otherwise for failing.
The Great Leap Forward pulled tens of millions of peasants out of agriculture into futile and crazy attempts at bootstrapping industrialization with, literally backyard furnaces. Plus a policy of collectivizing every productive endeavor.
To quote Wikipedia:
This led directly to the Great Chinese Famine:
All this stuff is incredibly well-documented now by Chinese scholars. It’s not at all dismissable as anti-communist propaganda. Anyone who is unfamiliar with the facts hasn’t been paying attention.
If anyone can point to these kind of figures for famine taking place in the 20th century due to capitalism, I’d be interested.
[Pinochet would] let me leave, which is what I’d be doing. That’s not a minor difference.
I would agree with Brett that that isn’t a minor difference as compared to Fidel, but I also think it isn’t as major a difference as he and novakant imply it is. Yes, it’s a sure sign that you have a crap government if it won’t let you leave the country. But the fact is, most people *don’t* leave even if they are allowed to. For most people, when your country gets a crap government, you don’t leave the country, either because you don’t want to or because you can’t.
Michel Foucault did support the very earliest days of the Iranian revolution, but even he said it had taken a wrong turn by 1979.
Well, of course Foucault is a well known genius, so he perceptively withdrew his support for that Rev. when the non-theocratic Iranian supporters of it were betrayed (e.g. the communists). Man, he’s deep.
Glad someone brought up Foucault though. There was an Authoritarian Left (or Right, depending on your mood that day) school of thought going on in the 40s-60s (roughly), and its influence in N. America was made manifest by…(wait for it) the Neoconservatives! (I think it’s a mistake to assume all neocons have a trotsky background, to paint with that broad a brush. They hate Liberalism alright, but that doesn’t mean they are all trotskyites (like Hitchens)). I await Jonah Goldberg’s expose on this.
It seem to me that what McCarthy, Brett, et al. call the “hard left” are the left-wing authoritarians, corresponding to the right-wing authoritarians of the “hard right”. Bob Altemeyer has looked for left-wing authoritarians in his studies, but he hasn’t found statistically significant numbers of them over the past 20 years or so. Which is pretty much what people are saying in this thread.
There are *plenty* of people to the left of Obama, but they aren’t the “hard left” because their style is anti-authoriarian and thus “soft”, even when they’re *way* left.
I don’t know of any good history or study of why the LWAs withered away, but wither they did.
Um, what are you talking about, Slart? Not long into the Great Leap Forward, China was net importing food; it wasn’t exporting food to the Soviet Union.
Prior to the Great Leap Forward, during the first Five Year Plan, China was exporting food to the Soviet Union, but that was before the GLF, and the resulting vast agricultural deficits. Trading food to the Soviets during the 1953-57 period didn’t deprive Chinese people of food.
Nor were people intentionally forcibly deprived of food (in large numbers) at any time.
So I’m wondering what you’re talking about here.
Public health in Cuba:
Best hurricane response system. In the past decade, a total of 22 hurricane-related deaths — and Cuba gets a *lot* of hurricanes.
Cuban health markers are essentially the same as those in the United States and other parts of the industrialized world.
IMHO these are two of the reasons Castro is still in power: the government actually takes care of the people on the most basic level.
Some of the under- and over-medicated pontificators on the right have spent years railing against people who don’t actually exist. It makes them feel good about themselves. Set up a straw man, fill him with all of the worst characteristics you can think of, then shout to the world, “Look! I’m not him!”
@Brett:
Ah, so you’d prefer the one who would afford you the opportunity to emigrate? Given the context of the thread, I suppose the only appropriate response is “How very bourgeois of you!”
No, really. Your blithe assertion that Pinochet would be better because he’d let you pack your bags and remake your life elsewhere, and your homeland could rot, is entirely beside the point. That sort of out would not be an option for large swaths of the populace; uprooting to become a penniless refuge in a foreign land is a very, very drastic measure compared to emigrating with some or most of your wealth to rebuild your life overseas. And if you wish to assert that it would be an option for everyone, and the risk they’d be putting themselves and their families at be damned, I defy you to claim with a straight face that Pinochet would have sat back idly and let, say, a quarter or more of the population chose to vote with their feet.
To say nothing of your assertion that Pinochet freely let whoever might want to go, go. There was the small matter of those folk who had the minor misfortune of being a touch too dead or imprisoned to take advantage of that glorious gift.
If Harmut is excluding major differences, you’re disingenuously handwaving them out of existence. “Oh, but how onerous Pinochet would be to live under wouldn’t matter, because under no circumstances would I have to” neatly ignores the fact that many, many people did in fact have to do just that. Which, I dare say, was the entire thrust of Harmut’s cited preference.
Or more succinctly, what jonnybutter said.
“I don’t know of any good history or study of why the LWAs withered away, but wither they did.”
I imagine the examples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Mao’s China, had something to do with this.
There’s still a certain amount of romanticism and fantasizing and tunnel vision remaing about these governments, amongst some of the more extreme, or “harder,” leftists, but even they don’t tend to, as a rule, go very far into supporting authoritarianism in the here and now. It tends to show up more as “so’s your mother” kind of reactions to criticism of the communist countries, and a tendency to rhetorically minimize their badness in quick asides.
It’s fair to suggest, I think, that the same people tend to react badly when extreme rightists do the same thing in reverse (yes, Pinochet/Franco/Somoza was a dictator, but at least he…).
“If anyone can point to these kind of figures for famine taking place in the 20th century due to capitalism, I’d be interested”
Without intending any defense of Mao or Communism, I’d say if you widened your filters a bit you could find significant damage that could reasonably be ascribed to capitalism.
US military adventures in South America in support of US Fruit, and the subsequent political violence throughout that continent.
The US (and global) effects of the Great Depression.
I’d include the US domestic slave trade of the late 18th and the 19th centuries. In much of the US, black human beings were, straight up, considered to be and were treated as capital, pure and simple. A most excellent form, in fact, because it was self-perpetuating and -increasing.
I’m not saying this is specifically where you were going with your comment, but it strikes me that a criticism of totalitarian communism doesn’t automatically translate into an endorsement of capitalism.
Also not saying this is where you were headed, but it always puzzles me when and how the ideas of constitutional republican government and hands-off free market capitalism became conflated.
Slavery existed long before anything that you would recognize as capitalism. In the US the North would be more clearly capitalist by our corrent definitions anyway at the time of the civil war, which also problematizes things. And military adventures (even over resources) aren’t a feature correlated especially to capitalism as opposed to anything else either.
Not saying either slavery or war are unique to capitalism.
Likewise, I wouldn’t say that insane agricultural or industrial policy are unique to communism.
The US north in the 19th C was industrial, as opposed to agrarian. Not the same as capitalist vs not capitalist.
Ask a farmer if investing in a new combine to increase his or her productivity is capitalism, or not.
If you want to say you only endorse nice capitalism, that respects human rights and dignity, I’m your pal. Really and sincerely, straight up, no snark.
If you want to say that capitalism is only ever found where there is a respect for human rights and dignity, or that no other form of economic organization can do so, we disagree.
Nombrilisme Vide, the fact that Pinochet permitted people to leave, and Castro did not, tells us two things.
1. That the people who found life under Pinochet most offensive did have a choice. Ok, most people didn’t chose it, but maybe that’s because most people didn’t find life under him all that offensive.
2. That Pinochet himself didn’t view himself as creating a society so hellish people would want to flee it in significant numbers.
Castro DID understand that he was creating a society people would want to escape. And was willing to keep them trapped there anyway.
That’s not just a difference between the situation the people found themselves in, but also a difference in how the two tyrants viewed their own actions. Pinochet might have been laboring under the delusion that he was the people’s savior. Castro knew better, but went ahead anyway.
“I’d say if you widened your filters a bit you could find significant damage that could reasonably be ascribed to capitalism.”
That wasn’t remotely my question.
And I meant specifically in one country, not diffuse generalizations about Capitalism In The Third World As A Whole, nor Capitalism In General, and specifically as a result of specific policy decisions. I’m hardly claiming that capitalism is all wonderful and great about taking care of poor folk. Really, would I do anything like that?
I wasn’t making any claims at all about capitalism, in fact. I was simply asking if anyone could point to any deliberate capitalist decisions in some country that led to any scale of famine remotely like that of China’s Great Famine.
“I was simply asking if anyone could point to any deliberate capitalist decisions in some country that led to any scale of famine remotely like that of China’s Great Famine.”
The policy of British land owners in Ireland exporting food during the Potato Famine? There wasn’t any point in the famine during which Ireland wasn’t producing enough food to feed everyone, it was a famine because they were shipping the food out of Ireland anyway.
I’m kind of surprised that no-one has commented on “suppression of freedom”, and “intrusiveness in all aspects of life” being much more right-wing attributes than left-wing (along with being “fine with dictatorship” — it wasn’t the left that founded and ran the School for the Americas). Especially the Christian Right.
So few revolutions get it right (the US got lucky, I think). Batista was corrupt and cruel, and overthrowing him was the right thing to do. Turning your back on your principles as soon as you win just isn’t. I’m glad the Cuban Revolution happened; I just wish Simon Bolivar, Vaslec Havel or Lech Welensa had been the one to win it.
I was simply asking if anyone could point to any deliberate capitalist decisions in some country that led to any scale of famine remotely like that of China’s Great Famine.
There’s Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, which I haven’t read, but which blames British imperial policy in India for the deaths of tens of millions in famines there. Not quite twentieth century, but from a time when capitalism was at its least unregulated.
“The policy of British land owners in Ireland exporting food during the Potato Famine?”
Ireland lost 20-25% of its population, about half to starvation and half to emigration.
Not as big as China in absolute numbers, but perhaps more as a proportion of the overall population.
“That the people who found life under Pinochet most offensive did have a choice. Ok, most people didn’t chose it, but maybe that’s because most people didn’t find life under him all that offensive.”
I don’t think the 40,000 prisoners put in the National Stadium when it was used as a concentration camp had a choice about leaving it.
I don’t think the 3,000 killed by the regime had a choice about leaving the country:
I don’t think the 28,000 who were jailed for opposing Pinochet had much choice about leaving the jails.
It’s true that the innumerable people who were exiled got to leave the country.
And there were those who got in some cases to stay, and in other cases to go, but first some jolly torture!:
“…maybe that’s because most people didn’t find life under him all that offensive.”
Yeah, what could possibly be offensive about any of this?
Incidentally:
I don’t know if any of this rings a bell, though.
I did read Mike Davis’s “Late Victorian Holocausts”, as well as the mostly favorable reviews it got from Amartya Sen in the NYT and Simon Schama (I think) in the New Yorker. I don’t know if one would call what the British did in India “capitalism”–there’s probably a “no true capitalist” would do that sort of argument floating around, but according to Davis the British did refuse to help the starving on laissez faire grounds. And their policies helped cause the famine. It’s similar overall to what Mao did, in the sense that the famines weren’t deliberately engineered (what I’ve read about the Great Leap Forward was like Gary’s version rather than Slarti’s), but rather they came about because of a ruler’s insane adherence to some fanatic ideology. Mao in one case and Lord Lytton in the other.
There was also a famine with around 3 million deaths in British ruled India during WWII–again, because the poor couldn’t afford to buy food.
Amartya Sen is well known for saying that democracies avoid famines–famines in the modern era don’t come about because there isn’t enough food to feed everyone if it was distributed evenly, but because something happens (drought or whatever) which causes a shortage and then there’s a system in place which keeps food out of the mouths of the least powerful. In capitalist famines people starve because of lack of purchasing power and if you have some laissez faire fanatic in charge the government won’t step in to help, but lets market forces direct food away from the poor people who can’t buy it. Democracies allegedly avoid this and that’s why there hasn’t been a huge famine in India since 1945, or so the theory goes.
Jes’s numbers are not from famine, but malnutrition. India (among other places) has had plenty of deaths from that cause, as Sen pointed out in one of his books. To me it seems a little misleading to make a big distinction between famine and malnutrition-caused deaths. Famines are where the mortality figures spike, I suppose.
Wikipedia on the famine in British India in 1943–
link
“If you want to say you only endorse nice capitalism, that respects human rights and dignity, I’m your pal. Really and sincerely, straight up, no snark.
If you want to say that capitalism is only ever found where there is a respect for human rights and dignity, or that no other form of economic organization can do so, we disagree.”
I wouldn’t really say either. I would say that capitalism cures some ills and makes others easier to deal with, but doesn’t avoid all possible common human failings. War for example is a common state between human factions. Capitalism doesn’t entirely avoid it. I think there is SOME evidence that it might tend to make wars less likely on average, but you don’t really have to accept that. It could very well just be that capitalism doesn’t have much to do with wars one way or another.
Anyone who says that capitalism fixes everything is a fool. But it might be fair to say that in the things where it has most dramatic impact, it rarely makes things much worse, and often makes them much better.
Communism on the balance can’t really say that.
“The policy of British land owners in Ireland exporting food during the Potato Famine? There wasn’t any point in the famine during which Ireland wasn’t producing enough food to feed everyone, it was a famine because they were shipping the food out of Ireland anyway.”
That seems perfectly fair to throw into the conversation.
“I’m kind of surprised that no-one has commented on ‘suppression of freedom’, and ‘intrusiveness in all aspects of life’ being much more right-wing attributes than left-wing”
Do you have some metric to measure this by? I don’t know that the assertion is even arguable either way without the context of some agreed-upon measure.
“There’s Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, which I haven’t read, but which blames British imperial policy in India for the deaths of tens of millions in famines there.”
That sounds quite interesting.
“Ireland lost 20-25% of its population, about half to starvation and half to emigration.”
Well, yes, but that half was free to leave, so really, what did they have to complain about? [/sarcasm directed at Brett]
But it might be fair to say that in the things where it has most dramatic impact, it rarely makes things much worse, and often makes them much better.
Like the slave trade – I mean, specifically, the famous triangular profit of selling English manufactured goods in Africa and buying slaves, selling slaves in the Carribean and buying sugar and rum, selling sugar and rum in England and buying manufactured goods, with lovely profit at each leg of the trade? I think that qualifies as an example of capitalism with most dramatic impact – so where, in your view, does capitalism make this so much better?
It’s self-evident that capitalism is amoral at best–the whole idea is to harness greed. That can work out relatively well in some ways, but it’s not surprising if you find people trying to sell tobacco, slaves, sex, guns to criminals (on the individual level or on a governmental scale), addictive drugs, massive gas-guzzling climate-wrecking vehicles, etc… And then there’s also this incentive people have to exploit workers if they can get away with it.
Communism was a horrible failure, but that doesn’t mean the problem it was supposed to solve doesn’t exist.
American conservatives are sorta funny on this–their moral values are often in direct conflict with market forces, but they often seem to have trouble admitting this. I don’t know how a conservative Bible-believing Christian can avoid a certain sense of uneasiness where capitalism is concerned, but in America people manage to avoid it.
“Well, yes, but that half was free to leave, so really, what did they have to complain about? “
That bit of snark might make sense, if I were in any way suggesting that nobody had a basis to complain about Pinochet. The fact that I refer to him as a tyrant might lead you to notice that I hadn’t suggested anything of the sort.
Even among tyrants there are degrees, but they’re still degrees among tyrants. None the less, I put tyrants who turn their entire nation into a prison camp in a special category, a bit worse than those who only imprison a fraction of their victims. Pinochet put a lot of people in prison. EVERYBODY in Cuba is in prison.
It’s self-evident that capitalism is amoral at best–the whole idea is to harness greed.
I’m not sure what you mean by “capitalism”, but I’m pretty sure you are misusing “self-evident.”
The basic moral insight of capitalism is that voluntary positive-sum trade is morally preferable to coercive zero-sum taking.
A capitalist transaction, in this usage, is one that is consented to by all involved. It’s hard to deny that consent is morally significant.
Of course, not all market exchange fits within this moral framework. The slave trade doesn’t, since the subjects of the trade are not voluntary participants.
The basic moral insight of capitalism is that voluntary positive-sum trade is morally preferable to coercive zero-sum taking.
A capitalist transaction, in this usage, is one that is consented to by all involved. It’s hard to deny that consent is morally significant.
It’s certainly a convenient way of defining capitalism that excludes enclosure, the slave trade, indentured labor, company stores, company towns, or any other exploitative arrangement that certainly looks like capitalism but does not involve consent on the part of the person providing the labor.
More broadly, capitalism is the social system in which trade/industry/other activities are privately controlled for individual profit: socialism is the social system in which trade/industry/other activities are publicly controlled by the state.
There is no particular morality to capitalism – it’s simply the pursuit of profit. Socialism need not be a system with any morality – the definition is “controlled by the state” not “for the public welfare”. But socialism in a democracy does imply “for the public welfare” – intended so, at least.
Where it is more likely that a service or an industry will be more effectively run by individuals seeking profit, capitalism is more effective. But the intention of capitalism is private profit, not public benefit.
Do you have some metric to measure this by?
Yes, I do, but you have to write to the Bureau of Weights and Measures to obtain it.
=============
The basic moral insight of capitalism is that voluntary positive-sum trade is morally preferable to coercive zero-sum taking.
More correctly, the basic moral insight of capitalism is that coercive positive-sum trade (for the business) is morally preferable to voluntary zero-sum taking. See “Sweat shops” in wikipedia for an example.
“Yes, I do, but you have to write to the Bureau of Weights and Measures to obtain it.”
I’m out of luck, then, since such an organization hasn’t existed for a very long time. The National Bureau of Standards (NBS), existed between 1901 and 1988; since then it’s been NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose existence you can’t miss if you live in, or read about, Boulder, Colorado, or read about their science.
There’s an International Bureau of Weights and Measures; maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.
@Brett:
No, you didn’t say he was good… just that he couldn’t have been that bad.
And here you once more elide the issue. That many (but pointedly not all) individuals under Pinochet were de jure free to leave the country (though I again question if this would have remained the case had there been the sort of exodus you upthread imply would have been necessary to conclude his regime was “that offensive”) says nothing to the fact that most were de facto incapable of doing so. You’ve been dancing around this issue ever since Harmut made his statement: if for whatever reason leaving the country was off the table (as it was for many, even without getting into those incarcerated, etc.), was Harmut’s declaration so risible as you made it out to be? You’ve crowned the ability to leave a country as the defining measure of its freedom, trumping all other concerns (I say this because you fail to even mention anything beyond this to conclude that Pinochet must not have been as “offensive” as Castro). So what does it say that in most “free” countries a great many people have only the ability to leave a country on paper, when their economic status prevents them from ever realizing this crowning freedom?
Your argument is specious. If you want to make the argument that Pinochet was a less “offensive” dictator than Castro, at least have the decency to do so by examining the oppression he inflicted on his people as a whole, rather than considering only the plight of those citizens which he deemed were not an immediate threat to his power who were well-heeled and/or rootless enough to abandon the nation if they chose to do so.
What I’m talking about is this:
From Mao, The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, page 430.
The book is confusingly endnoted, so it’s difficult to say exactly what source the author used. But I wasn’t referring to the Great Leap specifically; there were a number of famines.
Notably:
(p 292)
I don’t know to what degree this book can be regarded as scholarly, so it’s possible that she has it wrong. If so, it’s 600 pages of text and 90 pages of footnotes completely wasted.
Anyway, that’s what I was talking about.
“I would say that capitalism cures some ills and makes others easier to deal with, but doesn’t avoid all possible common human failings. “
Fair enough.
“It’s self-evident that capitalism is amoral at best–the whole idea is to harness greed.”
I think a formulation that would be truer to Adam Smith’s ideal would be that the idea is to harness self-interest, which is not quite the same thing.
In practice, however, greed is a quite common expression of self-interest, and will do the job.
“The basic moral insight of capitalism is that voluntary positive-sum trade is morally preferable to coercive zero-sum taking.”
I think that’s correct, however in the absence of something approaching perfect market conditions the morality part goes south pretty quickly.
And perfect market conditions virtually never exist outside of something like a village market economy. Or a textbook.
“But the intention of capitalism is private profit, not public benefit.”
Quite so. The ingredient missing from pithlord’s formuation here is the “capital” part of capitalism.
In capitalism capital is held privately, all decisions about the use of capital are made by its private owners, and the increase of privately held capital is the point and purpose — the sine qua non.
A capitalist economy in which there are gross differences in the quality and availability of information, in the barriers of entry to the market, etc etc etc, are all still capitalist economies. They’re just bad ones.
They’re bad because the conditions for fair, just, and moral free market transactions between mutually consenting free agents don’t exist. But, they’re still capitalist, because their purpose is the employment and increase of privately held capital.
“Of course, not all market exchange fits within this moral framework. The slave trade doesn’t, since the subjects of the trade are not voluntary participants.”
No, the buying and selling of human beings as property fit perfectly in the “consenting participants to the transaction” model.
The consenting parties required are the buyer and seller. Slaves are neither.
You may object to slavery on other moral grounds, but the fairness of the transaction per se doesn’t really come into it.
“There’s Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, which I haven’t read, but which blames British imperial policy in India for the deaths of tens of millions in famines there.”
This would probably be off topic if the topic hadn’t drifted, but it has, so I’ll fire away. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Were the colonial adventures of the UK, via chartered corporations like the East India Company and the various companies that were involved in the colonial development of the Americas “capitalist”?
Certainly they were about increasing wealth through the investment and deployment of capital, especially through the vehicle of corporations.
It’s hard to describe them as truly market-based, however, because they were largely pursued through monopolies chartered by the government.
Remember that the famous Tea Party was as much a rebellion against a monopoly on the tea trade as it was about taxes.
There’s the “capital” part of capitalism and the “free market” part of capitalism.
Are they separable?
I’m curious to know what the relatively more pro-capitalist folks here think.
Can we agree, at some level, that neither capitalism nor socialism are intrinsically built on any sort of morality at all, as most other than Ayn Rand would define the word?
Oh, I located the part where hilzoy’s uncle is mentioned. It’s just a brief conversation with Mao that’s given; Chang doesn’t even mention the book he wrote.
Who can say they’ve chatted with Mao? Not many, I’d imagine.
You can stipulate any definition of “capitalism” you want. No one is going to defend indentured servitude, but it is possible to make a profit at it.
The only useful stipulated definition is one that gets at the issue in genuine dispute.
“Can we agree, at some level, that neither capitalism nor socialism are intrinsically built on any sort of morality at all”
I’d go along with that.
“The basic moral insight of capitalism is that voluntary positive-sum trade is morally preferable to coercive zero-sum taking.”
When I see some bananas at the store, I have some money and the store has the bananas and we voluntarily exchange and both of us are better off, as opposed to me just stealing the bananas or the store robbing me as I walk in. I get it. But it’s not always that simple. So if someone is drowning and you throw him a rope on the condition that he becomes your indentured servant, it’s a voluntary positive sum trade. The drowning person lives and you acquire a cheap servant. (We won’t call him a slave, because it was voluntary.) In that case I think I’d prefer the zero sum coercive scenario, where the drowning man somehow manages to grab the rope and save himself without the consent of the rope-owner, possibly even breaking the rope or accidentally leaving it in the river to be swept away. That’s extreme, but I think Anatole France was on to something when he talked about rich and poor people both having the right to sleep under bridges. It’s not always so easy to distinguish between voluntary and coercive transactions when some people have much more money and power than others and it’s silly to talk as though everyone was on equal footing, each making purely voluntary decisions like everyone else.
I think that particular defense of capitalism is silly–you’re better off making the empirical claim that capitalism works better than centrally planned economies, but then those pesky liberals and social democrats will come along and say that mixed economies work best of all.
I limited my claim. I only said that consent is morally relevant, not that it is the only morally relevant thing.
But that’s enough to address the statement that capitalism is “self-evidently” amoral. Laissez-faire is rooted in some moral values (possibly taken too far or to the exclusion of other, competing values).
I know where you are going with “works better”, but that does presuppose some standard of value.
I knew a few people you could legitimately describe that way – members of the British, Trotskyite SWP, which is quite big by the standards of Trotskyite parties (ie. tiny). But they’d never describe themselves that way – they’d say that violent revolution and transformative dictatorship are prerequisities for a real democracy, and that its better than the ongoing violent oppression of capitalism. Its crap of course, but its sort-of valid if you believe in their shiny socialist future and have nothing to lose in the present (as most of them do). Oddly I’ve never heard Obama say anything like that …
And its really wierd that right-wingers who are so suspicious of democracy when it opposes their idea of “freedom” (to own stuff and ignore poor people’s needs) are suddenly so much in favour of it in other countries where they don’t have to tolerate the consequences. Until an oil field is threatened with public ownership, of course, then all those democrats mysteriously turn into socialists again (cough, Mossagdegh, cough).
Slarti: Can we agree, at some level, that neither capitalism nor socialism are intrinsically built on any sort of morality at all, as most other than Ayn Rand would define the word?
No. Because socialism derives ultimately from the moral values expressed in the New Testament: whereas capitalism derives ultimately from the amoral values of profitability and exploitation.
All you can say is that socialism is a moral system and capitalism is an amoral system. Christianity and Islam and Buddhism are all moral systems – yet socialist, Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist governments have done hideous things using the moral system as a justification. To say that socialism is intrinsically built on a moral system is not to justify or approve what socialist governemnts have done, any more than to say that Christianity is intrinsically built on a moral system is to justify or approve what Christian governments have done.
Donald: When I see some bananas at the store, I have some money and the store has the bananas and we voluntarily exchange and both of us are better off, as opposed to me just stealing the bananas or the store robbing me as I walk in. I get it. But it’s not always that simple.
It’s not even simple on the bananas level. If you see bananas at store 1 and they’re cheaper than bananas at store 2, but the reason they’re cheaper is that store 1 buys bananas from a plantation in South America where the workers have no choice but to labor all their lives being paid just too little to get out of debt to the company store, while store 2 buys slightly more expensive bananas from a plantation run more collectively with profit-sharing, capitalism says you buy the cheaper bananas, even though they were produced under economic coercion.
“socialism derives ultimately from the moral values expressed in the New Testament”
The difference is that socialism is coercive and moral values expressed in the new testament are not coercive. In other words, the new testament called for the moral actions to spring from an individuals heart and be performed by the individual’s free will. Socialism coerces the action by law and the threat of punishment.
When you coerce someone to do something it breeds in them an inclination to do the opposite. Socialism is a false promise and a false hope.
If the world is ever safe, it won’t be because of the coercive power of the global police force. It will because the citizens of the world act peaceable towards each other of their own free will.
The difference is that socialism is coercive
And taxation is theft, yeah, yeah, we got it.
and moral values expressed in the new testament are not coercive.
Acts 4:32-5:11 Right there in the New Testament: give up your wealth to the collective or die.
Jesurgislac
I said NOT all taxation is theft.
and the Acts quote is “Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God.”
In other words, “It was yours. You didn’t need to pledge it. It was not required of you. The problem was that you reneged on the pledge and then lied about it.” The lie was fingered as the problem.
So much for your bending of the truth to fit your own purposes.
“Can we agree, at some level, that neither capitalism nor socialism are intrinsically built on any sort of morality at all”
I’m not sure the advocates of either system would agree with your formulation, but IMO it’s very, very helpful to simply consider them as alternate ways of organizing economic life and use whatever works better.
In other words, I doubt everyone agrees with what you’ve said, but life would be simpler if we would just pretend that what you’ve said is so, even if just for the sake of argument. Much less finger-pointing that way.
“I only said that consent is morally relevant, not that it is the only morally relevant thing.”
Fair enough, and well said.
“The difference is that socialism is coercive”
Socialism is only coercive under certain assumptions about the privileges and scope of private ownership of property.
And given that textbook socialism is about as rare as textbook capitalism, what we’re actually talking about in any realistic case is balancing the interests of private capital against those of the public sphere.
Is it coercive to say that you have to make all of your possessions available for sharing by the public? I’d say yes.
Is it coercive to say that, frex, mineral rights in a geographic area are the common possession of the folks who live there, and that they should be developed for the common benefit of all of those people? I’d say no.
You don’t *have* to approach their development that way, but there’s nothing coercive about doing so. Just ask the folks in Alaska.
russell: but IMO it’s very, very helpful to simply consider them as alternate ways of organizing economic life and use whatever works better.
Yes, exactly.
Speaking as a member of the Hard Left. 😉
The real existing socialism was coercive. Of course one is free to imagine some non-coercive utopian socialism or to water down the definition of socialism, so that it applies to countries like the UK or Sweden. But the former was always a cynical promise to keep critics of coercion at bay, while the latter is a risible exercise in semantics that ignores the capitalist base structure of such countries, which are much better described as “social democracy” with a “mixed economy”.
capitalism says you buy the cheaper bananas, even though they were produced under economic coercion.
Well, no, capitalism says you can choose whichever bananas you want, depending on which of the underlying factors are important to you. I buy fair trade bananas at Whole Foods rather than cheaper bananas at Dave’s, but that hardly makes me a socialist.
Well, no, capitalism says you can choose whichever bananas you want, depending on which of the underlying factors are important to you.
True – badly phrased. What you said is closer to what I meant.
Of course one is free to imagine some non-coercive utopian socialism or to water down the definition of socialism, so that it applies to countries like the UK or Sweden.
So “no true socialist” would describe the NHS as a socialist health care system, just because the state is the health care provider, funded by taxation, and no one working in the UK has any real choice but to pay for it? Good to know.
“Socialism is only coercive under certain assumptions about the privileges and scope of private ownership of property.”
LOL! The same could be said of mugging somebody in an alleyway.
You know what? That’s why socialists scare me: You take your average guy who conceives of himself as acting for his own benefit, he might be restrained by his conscience, because he’s aware that he might be harming you. But once he convinces himself he’s acting for YOUR benefit, his heart is hardened against your pleas, and he can do ANYTHING with a clean conscience. That’s why “This is for your own good!” is one of the most frightening phrases in the English language.
The NHS is part of a mixed economy within a social democracy, which by definition consists of both privately and state owned elements. Picking out a state owned, tax funded element and calling it socialist is simply daft, because it ignores the larger system. If institutions funded by taxation are socialist, then you have a definition of socialism that is so broad as to be incomprehensible. Also, everybody who can afford it is free to go private.
Nominally we have lived under a “socialist” government for the past twelve years and London had a “socialist” mayor for 8 years. That doesn’t change the fact that the UK is not a socialist country and London one of the most capitalist cities in the world. I have no idea why people both on the right and the left cling to this word as if their life or the future of mankind depended on it.
Well, I have some idea: the right clings to it because “socialism” makes for a good boogyman, the reasons for the left to cling to it are more diffuse.
The question of morality in economic systems is interesting. When someone says that something is moral, I have the strong feeling that ‘moral’ means ‘protect the weak’ in some sense. I suppose that it is possible to have a moral code that demands that you cheat, lie and steal every opportunity you get, and the only sin is getting caught. So is anyone willing to stipulate that some sense of moral is where the weaker are protected by/from the stronger?
Ok, here’s a problem with that formulation: It basically says that you can screw over anybody you think isn’t “weak”. (And definitions of weak and strong tend to get accordingly warped.)
Proper morality will protect the weaker from the stronger only because it’s protecting everybody from everybody.
Picking out a state owned, tax funded element and calling it socialist is simply daft
But it’s not daft to pick out capitalist elements and identify them as capitalist: it’s only daft to pick out socialist elements and identify them as socialist?
I have no idea why people both on the right and the left cling to this word as if their life or the future of mankind depended on it.
I have no idea why people reject the idea of socialism with such intensity that they cannot bear to see the word used accurately. Can you answer that question?
Brett, how does defining moral as protecting everyone from everyone make the concept applicable to economics?
” So is anyone willing to stipulate that some sense of moral is where the weaker are protected by/from the stronger?”
I will so stipulate (taking note that ‘some’ is not ‘the’ and that ‘weak’ migrates among different individuals and institutions as circumstances vary.
I have no idea why people reject the idea of socialism with such intensity that they cannot bear to see the word used accurately. Can you answer that question?
I’m not afraid of anything, but anyone claiming that the UK is simply socialist is not being accurate. If the NHS is socialist, then so is the US road, mail and school system – are they socialist as well? The government controlling certain subsectors of society is not equivalent to socialism. All you’re doing is making it easier for right-wingers and rags like the Daily Mail to scream “socialism” and scare the common people into accepting capitalist overreaches. Where’s the point in that?
“the latter is a risible exercise in semantics that ignores the capitalist base structure of such countries”
That’s a reasonable point.
What I’d add is that the folks most commonly engaging in that risible exercise in semantics in this country (the USA) are conservatives.
In other words, take a look and see who is calling the UK and Sweden “socialist”.
“LOL! The same could be said of mugging somebody in an alleyway.”
Too true. And your argument about “protecting everybody from everybody” could be said of a fistfight between Mike Tyson and my grandmother.
Look, there have been societies and cultures, and no small number of them, in which the persistent private ownership of land, capable of being passed down to your children, was seen as wrong if not unimaginable. Many more societies grant the right to own real property subject to strong constraints.
In many societies, giving some portion of your wealth to support the poor, either directly as in things like gleaning, or indirectly through money, is a positive obligation. Not charity, not voluntary. It’s their due, by virtue of them being fellow human beings and fellow members of your society.
In Alaska, the mineral rights are held collectively by the population and the income from the development of those resources goes directly back into everyone’s pocket.
What a society considers to be the scope and privilege of private property varies widely.
Whether practices that any American conservative would readily call “socialism” are considered to be coercive or not in a given society depends on its understanding of what property is private, what property is not, and what privileges attach to private property.
In other words, take a look and see who is calling the UK and Sweden “socialist”.
russel, I have already mentioned that I find it counterproductive for the left to make liberal use of the word “socialism” since it provides fodder for right-wingers and conservatives.
“Brett, how does defining moral as protecting everyone from everyone make the concept applicable to economics?”
Certainly doesn’t make it any less applicable.
Free market capitalism is based on the notion that, if all transactions are voluntary, transactions will only take place if they’re net positive, and the aggreation of net positive transactions is net positive. It’s HIGHLY dependent on that “if all transactions are voluntary” bit, and fails to the extent that people are enabled to compell involuntary transactions. It also fails to the extent that transactions have third party costs.
The market, by itself, has no way of policing third party costs. Government can contribute there. The problem being that government, being in the business of making coerced transactions, can very easily compromise the esential basis of free market economics by renting out to the private sector it’s ability to coerce transactions. And then you don’t really have a free market anymore.
But when it works, it’s a fantastic engine for economic growth, and thus public welfare.
Near as I can tell, socialism is based on the notion that, if you provide really smart, well meaning people with the ability to coerce transactions, you can maximize third party benefits, and minimize third party costs. It fails to the extent that those people aren’t smart, aren’t well meaning, or lack crucial information.
Hayek, of course, argued that they’ll ALWAYS lack crucial information. Public choice theory says you shouldn’t assume they’re well meaning, either.
But if it works, it does better by the poor than the free market, which has no use for people who have nothing other people want.
I think you could probably get an ideal result by a combination of these two, if you can keep them separate. Because they’re each better in their own area, but harmful in the other’s.
Novakant: If the NHS is socialist, then so is the US road, mail and school system – are they socialist as well?
Yes.
All you’re doing is making it easier for right-wingers and rags like the Daily Mail to scream “socialism” and scare the common people into accepting capitalist overreaches.
No, all I’m doing is pointing out that when mad right-wingers scream “Socialism!” as if it were an intrinsic evil, they’re talking about valuable institutions that it would be stupid to run as for-profit businesses. As we have talked to death, the US for-profit health care system is vastly inferior and inefficient by any standards to the socialist NHS: the scary, scary right-wing nutcases who try to pretend that socialism is always bad are enabled by people acting as if it’s bad to mention socialism in a good context.
Well, if it’s your aim to rile people up, that might be a good strategy. Not so much if want to improve the acceptance of state funded institutions, as it’s not only mad right-wingers who cringe at the mentioning of the word “socialism”.
Brett:
Proper morality will protect the weaker from the stronger only because it’s protecting everybody from everybody.
Only one truly socialist country is being invoked in this discussion: Cuba. As the public health cites I found show, Cuba has a remarkable and even admirable success at protecting its people from the most pervasive dangers humans face: disease and forces of nature. In what way is this not “doing better” than capitalist countries? I’m not saying life and health are the *only* good things, but without them the other stuff becomes secondary.
No-one in Cuba is wealthy; no-one in Cuba is starving. The Cubans are quite aware that this makes their median lifestyle much better than that in other Caribbean countries, and in many ways better than in the US.
To forestall an objection I suspect Brett will make: but Cubans are in prison! they can’t leave!
IMHO to most Cubans, they aren’t in prison, they’re in this together. It’s not that some people can’t leave, it’s that no-one gets to run away from their mutual responsibilities.
Not “the collective”; “the believers”.
You’re thinking that we have similar beliefs, you and I?
I don’t know how a conservative Bible-believing Christian can avoid a certain sense of uneasiness where capitalism is concerned, but in America people manage to avoid it.
Donald, I think that most people manage to resolve this cognitive dissidence by OMG LOOK OVER THERE HOMOS GETTING MARRIED!!!1!!1!!
“IMHO to most Cubans, they aren’t in prison, they’re in this together.”
Ah, right. And that’s why Cuba forbids people to leave, because they don’t want to.
Cuba has now survived 2 generations of Castro’s form of socialism, and since we have witnessed over these 5 decades numerous escapes from his ‘prison’, perhaps most all of those who actually had an awareness of and a strong personal drive for individual liberty, freedom of choice, or however one might describe life outside Cuba, are now elsewhere and that leaves mainly those who are indeed content to remain inside the prison of mediocrity.
I subscribe to the theory that there is a genetic component (without proof) to individual personality traits that cause some people to stand up for their right to make choices on important matters in their lives rather than defer to the collective judgement of their peers. Perhaps Cuba does not have enough of these people left to make a difference. May also be true in Great Britain since that country has had large numbers of emigrants to the US, Canada, Australia and other places where individual initiative has been perceived to be more favored and that provided more opportunity because the land was less populated.
More recently, US immigration has been more influence by those fleeing hard-right and hard-left authoritarian regimes or where economies offered little opportunity for improvement and this has helped dilute the overall US inhabitants’ views on the importance of individual initiative and choice in some aspects of life (not all) and made some soft-left concepts of governing more acceptable.
President Obama, IMHO, is not hard-left or sympathetic to such authoritarian regimes but, clearly, he is not opposed to government having much greater power over the choices individuals can make in their lives. And since he is doing this in the American tradition, through the ballot box, he might be deemed soft-left.
There was a claim far up the thread that RW systems are more intrusive than LW ones. I’d say that there is no general rule here. The GDR was in many ways far more intrusive into the live of their citizens than the Third Reich and demanded far more lip service from the population. Hitler allowed ‘inner immigration’ because he thought that the non-nazis would die out naturally and that there were more pressing needs than wiping out the neutrals (that might have changed after a won WW2 though). ‘lack of enthusiasm’ on the other hand brought trouble to many a person in communist systems. That does not mean that the GDR was worse than Nazi Germany, of course (I’d compare the former to permanent pruritus and the latter a disease that kills 10% in a very painful way and leaves the others almost symptomless).
—
As for ‘Castro does not let people leave while Pinochet did’: Other RW systems also block(ed) people from leaving or let them leave only after extorting most of their posessions from them. Some communist states allow(ed) retired people to leave or sell their political prisoners to the West for a fixed price (Romania and the GDR were very active in the latter area).
And, as I said above, Pinochet (in connection with other RW juntas in South America) sent assassins after leaving opponents (Iran and Iraq were btw also notorious for that*).
*Yes, the Kremlin too but I am unaware that Castro ran an assassination network outside his borders.
Just wanted to say that IMO Brett’s discussion of capitalism in his 8:55 is thoughtful, well said, and on the money.
My understanding of socialism, feeble as it is, is that it is based on the principle that some or all resources necessary to production are, or ought to be considered to be, commonly owned, and there is a legitimate common claim on the yield thereof.
I’m not sure the idea of a coercive transaction is essential.
I agree that each model is most appropriate to different sectors of the overall economy, and also agree that the agent most likely to do a reasonable job of policing third party costs under capitalism is the government.
Novakant: Not so much if want to improve the acceptance of state funded institutions, as it’s not only mad right-wingers who cringe at the mentioning of the word “socialism”.
But it should be.
*shrug*
Anyone who thinks that the NHS would be better run as a capitalist institution rather than a socialist one is welcome to go live in the US… if they can get past the anti-immigration walls.
Well, if it’s your aim to rile people up, that might be a good strategy.
Why not get people riled up over the mad right wing Daily Mail poison that makes you and others embarrassed to identify successful socialist institutions as, well… socialist?
GoodOleBoy,
Are you suggesting that people of British descent have some genetic infirmity that renders them incapable of standing up for individual liberty, and which causes them to flee to the genetically superior nations of the U.S., Canada, and Austalia?
“But once he convinces himself he’s acting for YOUR benefit, his heart is hardened against your pleas, and he can do ANYTHING with a clean conscience.”
You say this, but it doesn’t measure against reality as I observe it. It may be true of some folks, but it’s hardly true of anyone and everyone who believes in some liberal prescriptions. It just isn’t.
One might claim with equal accuracy of libertarians that “But once he convinces himself he’s acting for his benefit, his heart is hardened against your pleas, and he can do ANYTHING with a clean conscience.”
But wouldn’t you consider that rather an excessively unfair generalization and absolutist claim, at best?
No, Brett, as I was saying: it forbids people to leave, because those who do would be running away from their responsibilities.
*Most* Cubans are better off in really basic ways than if Cuba were a strictly capitalist country. *Some* Cubans think that they personally would be better off under capitalism, even if everybody else would be worse off.
It’s like a traditional extended family: it works because everyone’s in it together, and that means some people have to stay in the family even when they want to be the prodigal son. And from the perspective of that tradition, the son who wants to run away to find his fortune in the big city (and not share it with the family) is a self-centered, irresponsible jerk.
I’m not actually saying Cuba’s socialism is perfect. But I’m saying that it is not an obviously unreasonable system: it *really* works in crucial ways, and for the vast majority of Cubans it probably seems like a pretty good deal.
Look at it this way: Hurricane Ivan came roaring straight off the ocean, bounced all the way along the spine of Cuba — and only 4 people died. And the Cubans were *shocked* that the death toll was so high. Why would they want to move to the land of Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina?
Since I kick Brett a lot, I feel a need to give him a cookie in saying that I think is June 24, 2009 at 08:55 AM is quite well-balanced, fair, and sensible.
On the flip side, both Brett and Dr. Science’s statements on Cuba make me want to tear some hair out and rant about how wrong each is. Brett over-states the horrors of Cuba and Dr. Science grossly under-rates them. Brett discounts that there are some benefits for some of the people of Cuba by their government, and Dr. Science significantly over-rates them and romanticizes them in contrast to what, so far as I can tell, most Cubans think.
In short, I think both could benefit from a much closer look at Cuba and Cubans.
I just want to say to whomever was spoofing Jesurgislac in the post defending socialism with an appeal to the New Testament that spoofing commenters isn’t allowed.
Even though it seems to come from the same IP address as all of the real Jesurgislac comments. Hmmm.
Leaving the country you were born in is “running away from your responsibilities” and the state is like a “traditional extended family” and if you think New York is better than Idaho you’re an “self-centered, irresponsible jerk”? Wow!
Doktor Science may serve as my exhibit A for left-wing authoritarianism.
“Hurricane Ivan came roaring straight off the ocean, bounced all the way along the spine of Cuba — and only 4 people died. And the Cubans were *shocked* that the death toll was so high. Why would they want to move to the land of Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina?”
I think this is more a story of US hubris than anything else. Build a major port below sea level in a key hurricane zone with the one of the largest rivers diverted for 100 years so that the city is below the level of sea on one side and further below the level of the river on the other side. When the city gets smashed by a hurricane, be sure not to even consider letting the river go to the natural place and think about an above sea level port there.
Can we pull it off? Probably. But failures are likely to be ugly.
My impression (certainly subject to correction) of Cuba is that they aren’t so stupid as to build places the water regularly rushes in. They also don’t have the ability to use denial the way that New Orleans did, hurricanes hit or near miss lots of areas in Cuba every single year. New Orleans got to pretend it was immune for 50.
As I think Russell noted before, this thread has veered somewhat into a discussion of capitalism versus socialism.
Free market is a term I prefer over capitalism and I have a personal view of how behavior in a free market should occur when viewed in the context of what many consider greed or abuse within free market systems. When an individual enters into a competitive free market venture, there are several aspects that should get attention. Obviously, there is the self-interest profit motive. The effort should result in a service rather than a disservice to people and community. The individuals self-interest is driven by needs to provide for the individual and family or others and likely will include a move into higher living standards and even luxury. But there is likely a point where profit meets all these requirements and any acquisitions of wealth beyond that level might be for the sole purpose of increasing power and influence, though not necessarily. We have many entrepreneurs in the US who have reached these levels and many of those have chosen humanitarian actions as their wealth has increased beyond levels that any individual could conceive as necessary purely for their self-interest. When this does not happen, I suppose one might conclude that the wealthy person’s self-interest requires further accumulation in order to increase power and influence over others. This is where I start to have doubts that this person’s subsequent behavior results in a net positive service to people and community. I suppose this is also where the greed factor enters. This is also where the behavior has a true potential to do harm to society and, obviously generate negative views and opinions regarding capitalism.
Gotta go now, more later.
I think Cuba’s government does provide some benefits to the people there, it’s not all cost. (You have to reach North Korea levels of awfulness, or maybe Zimbabwe, before that’s the case.) But prohibiting people from leaving shows that the Cuban government itself thinks that the Cuban people would try to get out from under it’s thumb, if they were allowed to.
And, yes, I understand the rationale that socialist countries with closed borders invest a lot in the people, and can’t let them walk off with that investment. Kind of like you don’t invest in a stamping press, and then let somebody walk off with it… I just think that undervalues human liberty. Drastically. It offends the Kantian in me, treating people as means like that.
“My understanding of socialism, feeble as it is, is that it is based on the principle that some or all resources necessary to production are, or ought to be considered to be, commonly owned, and there is a legitimate common claim on the yield thereof.
I’m not sure the idea of a coercive transaction is essential.”
It is, because without the coercion, you can’t get any group larger than a family to treat resources that way. As somebody once said of comunism, “Great theory, wrong species.”
Thanks for the cookie, Gary. Truth be told, I usually let my excessive love of a good argument overcome any nuance in my actual position. I’m trying to fight that.
Russell: “My understanding of socialism, feeble as it is, is that it is based on the principle that some or all resources necessary to production are, or ought to be considered to be, commonly owned, and there is a legitimate common claim on the yield thereof.
I’m not sure the idea of a coercive transaction is essential.”
Brett: It is, because without the coercion, you can’t get any group larger than a family to treat resources that way.
This is simply erroneous, Brett. As others have pointed out before, many of the “resources” humans use are regarded in many human societies as being common, for communal use (sometimes with individual usufruct). That includes not just air – which remains a residual “common” good in our society – but water, forests, land in general, and, in some cases, actual tools. Any basic anthropology course would teach you that.
What tends to happen over time is that the modern concept of individually owned, alienable “property” in these things is introduced, and winds up taking over these societies, often backed by the power of the modern state. In Southeast Asia, the region with which I have most familiarity, this transition was still going among many groups in the 19th century, and even in the 20th century.
Prior to that, people were not coerced to treat such resources in common. If anything, the coercion was on the opposite side – the power of the state was used to impose *private* ownership on what had previously been *public* goods. (Cf. the enclosure movement in England, somewhat earlier.)
Now these societies were not fully socialist, in any modern sense of the word, and you can argue, if you must, that given our contemporary acceptance of “property” rights as natural, it would be difficult, and might be impossible, to persuade people to give up these rights without coercion.
But intellectual honesty ought to compel you to acknowledge that these rights are contingent, and historical – they are not intrinsic to our “species.”
Please: Hurricane Ivan never made landfall on Cuba. It never got any closer than 15 miles from Cabo de San Antonio on the far Western tip of Cuba. It never did anything like “bounced all the way along the spine of Cuba”, as this storm track shows. The closest Ivan got to any decently populated city in Cuba (Santiago de Cuba, population just under half a million) was about 150 nautical miles. Roughly 170 statute miles, or 275 km, for those who don’t do nautical miles.
I just want to say to whoever was spoofing Mr. Bellmore in the post acknowledging possible complementary roles for socialism and capitalism that spoofing commenters isn’t allowed.
Morality had already been invoked as relevant to a defense of capitalism. To paraphrase Ender Wiggin, perhaps she was attempting to speak to people in the language they understand. That isn’t being slick, it’s being clear.
Anyway, the 8:55 excerpt was… amazing. Granted, the emphasized bit about “separate” brings to mind The Cassini Division and its anarcho-capitalist enclave surrounded by a socialist world, where they have to stay almost entirely separate. And fortunately, given that deciding the extent of each sphere is what the debates are actually about, the argument can continue.
It is still funny, though, that “socialism” is a pejorative term that gets applied as all-or-nothing, when “free market” and “capitalism” need no cautionary qualifiers or (usually) absolutism. Perhaps defining them axiomatically as virtuous allows them to be more aspirational than socialism. At my Reformed Christian high school in the American Midwest, one of our teachers explained to us that free markets and socialism are opposing poles, and virtually every country (including the US) is a mixed economy. Yet we often seem to miss that there is a continuum, and that there are socialist and capitalist elements in most economies. Hence the dismissal of the charged term “socialist” as not meaningful, even when it is. Is the government getting into the health insurance business, but at least initially competing with private insurance companies, socialist? Definitely yes and no. Is the NHS socialist? Absolutely. Does the existence of the NHS mean that the UK is a socialist nation? No. But it’s closer to the socialist pole than the US. And so it goes, as we move the slider back and forth.
And good grief, beware of the molecular modeling program Avogadro, because it seems to have an enormous system-hanging memory leak in it. Serves me right for using pre-version 1.0 software.
But intellectual honesty ought to compel you to acknowledge that these rights are contingent, and historical – they are not intrinsic to our “species.”
Yeah, sure, but sharing with a large community is also contingent and non-intrinsic – some people did, others didn’t. It’s similar with animals.
@Novakant: I may be misreading your reading of DoctorScience, but he clearly was speaking from “the perspective of that tradition” not, “I, Doctor Science, crazy authoritarian leftist, insist that…” Also here’s a thought experiment to make the point that maybe the right to immigration isn’t as unproblematic as you take it to be. A country with a dominant/colonial/imperial minority finally is forced to cede power to all the inhabitants of the country. This formerly privileged minority finds the country ain’t like it used to be, so they start withdrawing, going either to other countries or maybe insulated private estates. This in turn deprives the new country of most of its financial capital and expertise. To make the agricultural and infrastructural transition, the new country has three main choices: 1) either compel the minority, against their will, to provide the requisite wealth and assistance, i.e. basically a type of servitude, 2) spend time and money, which they have very little of due to their underdeveloped status and the removal of large concentrations of assets by the aforementioned minority, on either hiring foreigners or their former oppressors to train them gradually, or 3) somehow accept the loss of these resources. Given most people, especially from a privileged or wealthy background, derive their wealth or status from a set of background societal conditions, doesn’t choice 1, although maybe repugnant, seem like the justest choice. You’re forcing them to pay back something they never really had claim to in the first place. Thus, they really cannot leave the country or reallocate their private capital; in this sense, it would be sort of like embezzling. Societal debt can be waivable for everyone (or perhaps argued not to exist), thereby resulting in massive brain drain and creating development issues for an afflicted group that never had much a fighting chance. Or societal debt can be waivable for some people, resulting in arbitrary privileging. Or waivable for no one, resulting in restricted right of immigration. Now, most of the nominally communist governments that have been mentioned in this thread arose in preindustrial, agricultural, post-colonial countries with these sorts of imbalances and with wealthy/racial elites that were too duplicitous to even be characterized as “unhelpful”. To go Kant on you, maybe in these situations the right to immigration is not consistent with the external freedom of all other citizens when taken as a universal law.
This has turned into a capitalism/socialism debate (nothing wrong with that), but I think we could be a bit more clear on the whole “authoritarianism” thing. I feel like a lot of leftist (and rightist) communitarian beliefs are being torn down as strawmen, because OF COURSE the liberal values are indisputably paramount. While I’d say I’m a liberal and not very comfortable with the belief that the state is an entity whose value trumps the aggregate of its individuals or that the state can mandate sacrifices, I think people are being a bit too glib about this here (and in the US in general). I don’t see why we aren’t looking at the child poverty rate or incidence of homelessness in countries as key indicators of its “goodness”, rather than the rights of immigration or protest, although I think all four are important. It doesn’t seem immediately clear to me why a country with a right to immigration is more just or less tyrannical than a country with a curtailed or nonexistent such right but a much lower child poverty rate. I don’t even care to bring the US and Cuba into this, I just don’t think we’re considering all the relevant details.
Morality had already been invoked as relevant to a defense of capitalism. To paraphrase Ender Wiggin, perhaps she was attempting to speak to people in the language they understand. That isn’t being slick, it’s being clear.
Also, I’ve read the Bible beginning to end, some books more than once, and I’m familiar with the historical development of socialism and its links with Christianity and roots in the New Testament. That conservative Christians do not care to be reminded of where the socialist concepts originated is unsurprising: but any well-read atheist could tell you better. Indeed, I believe I just did.
Conservative Christianity is basically oxymoronic, emphasis on the third and fourth syllable: as Uncle Kvetch noted, so much of it works by “As it says in the Bible… OMG OVER THERE HOMOSEXUALS GETTING MARRIED! STONE THEM!” Really, it’s the gospel according to Monty Python, and not in a good way.
“I may be misreading your reading of DoctorScience, but he clearly was speaking from….”
Perhaps not.
I think this is more a story of US hubris than anything else.
Or French colonial hubris. Or an accident of history that’s not easily reversed.
Can we pull it off? Probably. But failures are likely to be ugly.
Some of the failures seemed to me to be avoidable, like failing to repair the levees and failing prepare for and respond to a predicted weather event. And, no, I don’t solely blame the Bush administration for that. (But I largely do.)
My impression (certainly subject to correction) of Cuba is that they aren’t so stupid as to build places the water regularly rushes in. They also don’t have the ability to use denial the way that New Orleans did, hurricanes hit or near miss lots of areas in Cuba every single year. New Orleans got to pretend it was immune for 50.
I wouldn’t cast an absolute denial of stupidity in any and all decisions made in the building of any and all parts of New Orleans, but much of what happened could have been avoided, and many of the people who lived in the worst-hit areas had little power or choice in the matter. And, if I might borrow from Gary Farber, New Orleans is not conscious being with a mind, and therefore doesn’t get to pretend anything.
And good grief, beware of the molecular modeling program Avogadro…
My stupid joke from high school chemistry class: Avogadro. No thanks, I just ate.
dr ngo: But intellectual honesty ought to compel you to acknowledge that these rights are contingent, and historical – they are not intrinsic to our “species.”
novakant: Yeah, sure, but sharing with a large community is also contingent and non-intrinsic – some people did, others didn’t. It’s similar with animals.
????
I never suggested otherwise, at least not intentionally. I don’t believe people are “intrinsically” proto-socialists. In fact, I tend to distrust any implication that humans are intrinsically just about anything. I’ve spent my entire adult life studying non-Western societies, and thus am more aware than most of the enormous variety of social arrangements people have made.
So what’s your beef?
*MY* beef was with Brett, who tends to assume – or (to be fair) writes as if he assumes – that “property” is in fact intrinsic, written in the blood (or DNA?), and that therefore attitudes toward property can be used as a baseline for the acceptability of any other social or political institution. I was just reminding him that his unquestioned axiom is others’ unproven hypothesis.
Cynthia Marx,
Here’s what I’m saying. In the days before our current global orientation, mobility, and particularly inter-continental mobility, was a challenge. Spunkier individuals, when faced with daunting obstacles to their improving their life conditions in their existing environment, were more likely than their risk averse siblings to pursue emigration to unknown but promising lands. So, the places I named earlier got a lot of adventurers seeking new challenges and many of their contented brethren stayed home. This applies as well to many other origins of immigrants but especially to Great Britain.
So perhaps Cuba, over 2 generations, has pretty much rid itself of people with initiative so, if not a prison, it becomes a place where there is little interest in seeking something better.
I’m speculating here, but my guess is that Cubans living in Florida will produce many more new ideas in science, industry, and the arts than will originate from those left behind in Cuba.
Sounds as if Avogadro’s got your number.
Sounds as if Avogadro’s got your number.
One thing I was delighted to find out today via Wikipedia was that the use of “Avogadro’s Number” (to which I am accustomed, as opposed to the more modern “Avogadro’s Constant”) is now considered to be anachronistic. It’s fun getting old. Now I can look forward to being archaic.
“In fact, I tend to distrust any implication that humans are intrinsically just about anything.
I tend to distrust any implication that we’re not; If we weren’t intrinsically something, we’d be the only species that was born a total blank slate on the planet.
I think essentialism is inaccurate and harmful, especially as a justification for societies. That said, man is not a tabula rasa that can be molded in infinite ways – there are certain basic and not so basic human desires that cannot be ignored by any society, at least not for very long or without massive coercion. Society should be designed to satisfy these, but otherwise leave people alone as much as possible, because they generally know best what they want out of life. Socialism (as in full-on GDR socialism, not the bloody NHS) failed in both these regards.
Hence “just about.” It’s a long way from saying human infants have a rooting reflex to watching primates build little rough fences around their individual patches of land. Homo Faber? Sure. Homo Economicus? Not quite as convincing.
I tend to distrust any implication that we’re not; If we weren’t intrinsically something, we’d be the only species that was born a total blank slate on the planet.
What we are isn’t a blank slate, but intrinsically far more plastic than other animals. Compare the range of things that any two dogs or chimps, for example, can do. Then compare the range of things that you or I can do and that an Australian aborigine can do (or an Inuit or a decathlete etc).
@nothingforducks: yes, you understand me correctly. I was trying to explain how things might appear to people in Cuba, and that a belief that Leaving the country you were born in is “running away from your responsibilities” and the state is like a “traditional extended family” are quite conservative and traditional approaches, in the broad scheme of things.
I am not talking about my own political philosophy, but about how it is reasonable for most people in Cuba to feel.
I disagree, Gary, that I am “romanticizing” — I’m pointing out that there is hard actuarial evidence that Cuba isn’t “a failure” compared to capitalist countries in its region. To assume that Cubans should care more about their principles than about their health and well-being, *that* it romanticizing.
Slarti:
I got my I-hurricanes mixed up — I was thinking of Ike, not Ivan.
Sebastian:
US hubris certainly had a lot to do with the disaster of Katrina, but not everything — and you’re disregarding Andrew, Ike, and the rest. As the wiki link says, Cuba evacuated about 10% of its population for Ike (more than a million out of 11 million) — Cuban disaster planning is widely acknowledged as the best in the world.
My point is that what GoodOleBoy calls “the prison of mediocrity” is measurably — rationally — a better place to live for most of the population.
“Spunkier individuals, when faced with daunting obstacles to their improving their life conditions in their existing environment, were more likely than their risk averse siblings to pursue emigration to unknown but promising lands.”
This is a flattering characterization of the folks that immigrated to, frex, the US, but it doesn’t really do justice to the actual history.
Lots of folks came here because they owed somebody money and the debtors’ prison was full.
Lots came because older brother got the land and they got nothing when dad died.
Lots came as an alternative to being hung.
Lots came absolutely against their own will, and I’m not just talking about black people. Although you’d certainly have to include them.
For many, many folks who settled the US, it was basically one of several possible flavors of jail.
For lots of others, especially in the early days of plantation culture, it was a way to make a quick killing so they could go back home and marry up. Some of those folks just never made it back.
It’s a pretty varied lot, and nowhere close to the picture I think you want to paint.
Also, one significant difference folks have failed to draw between, frex, Castro’s Cuba and Pinochet’s Chile is that Cuba is an island. Can’t say for sure, but it’s likely that that fact of geography had some effect on the difference between the two as regards emigration.
I am not talking about my own political philosophy, but about how it is reasonable for most people in Cuba to feel.
Oh, so you’re a mindreader. This is one of the most condescending things I’ve ever read.
Yeah, it meant that Castro didn’t need to build a wall, like East Germany, because he already had a moat.
DS, if it’s so great, they should permit free elections, they’d be a shoe in to retain power. And allow people to leave, why not? They’d stay.
I tend to assume that rulers who won’t risk elections unless they can rig them do so because they know they’re not really popular, and rulers who close their borders do so because they know that otherwise people would leave.
“To assume that Cubans should care more about their principles than about their health and well-being”
That’s doubtless true, but I’m not assuming a thing about anything anyone “should” be doing.
Russell, I cannot refute your points on what motivated some to emigrate to America and other not because I have no idea how the numbers would actually breakdown. But even in the categories you raise there were some who emigrated and some who did not. In the remnants of the second estate, primogeniture certainly affected most males not first born, but only some of them became Virginia gentlemen. And in the non-landholding class, Ulster-Scots frex, some chose to emigrate when conditions turned unbearable but others chose to stay put. I guess what I’m trying to express is ‘What made these individuals in similar circumstances take these significantly different paths?’.
I love emigration stories because they really undercut this notion of grand motivations for emigration that often get kicked around. Russell gets at some of the mundane reasons for emigration and the reasons why people emigrate are often so far removed from what we ‘see’ looking back on things as to make us wonder if those idealistic reasons exist. (Immigration stories, on the other hand, often reflect seem to reflect a desire to validate a particular country’s value in the world, so aren’t as interesting)
“I guess what I’m trying to express is ‘What made these individuals in similar circumstances take these significantly different paths?’.”
I hear you, but I guess what I’m trying to express is that there isn’t one answer. Certainly not enough so that the point you are trying to make — that all the folks with the gumption gene fled the UK, Cuba, or wherever, and are now disproportionately represented in the US, Canada, and Australia — is either remotely likely or proveable. IMO, at least.
A large number of people came to the US in the colonial period because they were sent here. They were broke, or criminals, or slaves, or some variety or other of huge PITA, and they were sent here. Conditions here being what they were at the time, it may be that only those with the real “root hog or die” genome lived to pass that DNA along. But many, many of the folks who came here did not come here to grab the brass ring.
Even in the later waves of immigration, in the late 19th and early 20th C, many of the folks who came here came primarily because we would take them. They were fleeing starvation, pogroms, dire poverty, and extermination. A lot of them would have preferred to stay home, they just would have died if they had done so. Whole extended families, towns and villages came here en bloc, it wasn’t a matter of the few bold adventurers striking out on an independent path.
People don’t leave Cuba in large numbers because it’s an island, there are a lot of sharks in the water around it, and you get sent to prison if you try to leave and fail. And prison in Cuba sucks.
The folks who came from there post-Revolution didn’t come because they yearned to breathe that free American air, they came because they didn’t want to get shot, and they wanted to hang on to whatever of their money they could stuff into a suitcase or an offshore bank account.
The biggest chunk of folks who have come from there since then were the Marielitos, who basically comprised the population of the Cuban prisons at the time. Carter said he’d take Cubans, Castro said “Great, have these”.
No spunky DNA involved.
“No spunky DNA involved.”
I thought we were done with the onanism references.
Ah. I suspected a mixup, but didn’t want to suggest that.
I didn’t think of Ike, though, or I would have known what you were talking about.
“Well, if it’s your aim to rile people up, that might be a good strategy. Not so much if want to improve the acceptance of state funded institutions, as it’s not only mad right-wingers who cringe at the mentioning of the word “socialism”.”
This is good advice for politicians, at least in America. But it’s a concession to American irrationality on the subject and since nobody here is a politician (as far as we know), there’s no reason to take this attitude. The idea behind the phrase “mixed economy” is that an economy has both capitalist elements and socialist elements.
An economy where everything was run along capitalist lines would be a nightmare to live in, I suspect, just as countries where everything is run by the state have turned out to be. So why not run away from both words?
“But it’s a concession to American irrationality on the subject “
Overton window, y’all.
Put the ideas in play and over time they become normal.
The USPS is a socialist enterprise. It operates under the aegis of the US government, in the public interest, rather than for the benefit of private owners or investors.
That’s socialism. Look, I said it and lived to tell the tale.
Think people want their mail delivered by a private, for-profit company?
The concept of a legitimate public sector needs to be restored.
Not all property is or ought to be private, not all useful endeavors need to be carried out for private profit. Many people are perfectly happy to do interesting, useful, helpful things because they are interesting, useful, and helpful, not because a desire to enrich themselves drives them to it.
Quite a number of the most remarkable achievements of our lifetimes, in this country and elsewhere, have been accomplished on that basis.
And all of is so without eliminating the private sphere, or the free market, or anyone’s personal liberty.
novakant:
Oh, so you’re a mindreader. This is one of the most condescending things I’ve ever read.
Good heavens, do you even believe what you’re saying? It’s not “mind-reading” to talk about what reasonable and prudent (or frightened, or angry, or happy) people are likely to do in particular circumstances — except in the way that all human interactions involve trying to read other people’s minds, and thus give philosophers a job.*g*
And I hardly see it as “condescending” to assume that Cubans are just as interested in health and life as my ancestors, who left Germany, Sweden, and Ireland for the US not out of some generalized ambition, but because staying at home involved things like “desperate poverty” and “being shot at”.
“And I hardly see it as ‘condescending’ to assume that Cubans are….”
Um, right over here you were pointing out that “To assume that Cubans should care more about their principles than about their health and well-being, *that* it romanticizing.”
Now, you may easily suggest that one kind of assumption is fine and the other (which, as I said, I wasn’t in the least making) isn’t, but my own suggestion, again, is reading more journalism with reporting from Cuba, interviewing actual Cubans, from journalists with no particular bias either for or against the Cuban government, and considering what you read, rather than, as you suggested was a bad idea, assuming.
My own suggestion would be that there are certainly aspects of Cuba’s system that many Cubans would like to keep, but if you generalize that into a belief that most Cubans are happy with their governmental system overall, and wouldn’t like to see the dictorial aspects, the internal repressive apparatus, gotten rid of, that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The same statement, as it happens, could have been made about the late Soviet system, and for very similar reasons. Being “interested in health and life” doesn’t preclude strongly disliking the fact that if you criticize the regime, you’ll lose privileges or be arrested. (And gay folks in Cuba are also interested in health and like; are you familiar with gay life in Cuba?)
You might also check out Human Rights Watch on Cuba.
Incidentally, about that health care system:
Full Human Rights Watch report on Cuba. I suggest reading all the stuff there. In particular, things haven’t changed significantly since this report.
Cubans care about these things, too. This isn’t an assumption.
The U.S. has had stupid, self-defeating, pointless, policies towards Cuba. That doesn’t make Cuba a nice place, overall, and neither does the fact that nobody starves, or that there’s better access to some health care for the poor than in many other countries.
Generally speaking, it’s unwise to summarize things like this in a sentence or two, or even several paragraphs, or indeed, in anything less than at least a short essay. But while we’re in ultra-short form: thus.
That sort of thing is why I say that Cuba doesn’t have good medical care, they have good veterinary care: The state views the citizenry as domesticated animals that can talk. They try to keep them in good health, but not for their own sake, just because a healthy population can do more work for the state.
“The U.S. has had stupid, self-defeating, pointless, policies towards Cuba. That doesn’t make Cuba a nice place, overall”
True dat.
Two economies, one for Cuban money and one for dollars (or other foreign currency). You can live good if you have dollars, otherwise not so much.
Folks have food and a place to live, which is great, and the government offers pretty good support for their arts and culture, which is fantastic because it’s one of the richest and deepest cultures in the Western hemisphere.
But I think the average Cuban’s experience is basically one of putting up with a lot of crap and making do with kind of the bare minimum. And if you try to do anything about it, you’re likely to not end up being a happy camper.
I’d really like to see the embargo ended, it will do nothing but good for the folks who live there, IMVHO.
Russell says: The concept of a legitimate public sector needs to be restored.
I find this somewhat baffling. How many anarcho-capitalists are there? Aren’t they about as numerous and important as the Spartacist League?
All real-world economies are “mixed”. Cuba has a private sector. Dubai has a public sector. Saying you favour a mixed economy is like favouring a language that uses phonemes or an arithmetic that uses numbers.
“All real-world economies are “mixed”.”
Yes, I agree.
The legitimacy of the public sector has been under more or less continuous attack in this country for the last 30 years.
What were the nine most frightening words in the English language again?
I think folks should not be shy about challenging that.
Hope that clears up the bafflement.
We live in different political cultures. In Canada, the intelligentsia will just say the words “privatization” or “neoliberalism” with a sneer as if they made an argument.