One of the readings in the colloquium on socialism last weekend was an excerpt from Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto.
In preparing my questions for discussion, I highlighted two sentences from his book.
Here they are, along with the question I asked about each.
On page 234, Sunkara writes, “The socialist record on oppression is uneven but still better than that of any other political tradition.” Is there any evidence from the 20th century we could look at to evaluate his claim?
And:
On page 236, Sunkara writes, “The socialist premise is clear: at their core people want dignity, respect, and a fair shot at a good life.” Do any other ideologies share this premise?
READER COMMENTS
Frank
May 9 2021 at 7:44pm
Oppression uneven? Please add the killings of Stalin, Hitler [a socialist], and Mao, adjust however the hell one likes, and get a damned big number, and share of the population. Killing is a pretty extreme form of oppression.
Everybody wants a shot at the good life. In free societies there are the greatest chances for that.
Matthias
May 9 2021 at 9:33pm
It’s fun to lump Hitler with the other socialist.
However, it weakens your argument: not everyone agrees with that assessment, and it’s not necessary to get that scary big number you are after.
Just like in math, the weaker you can make your premises, and still get the same conclusion, the stronger your argument.
Lawrence
May 10 2021 at 9:36am
Matthias, I disagree that the inclusion of Hitler as a socialist weakens the case. Both Mussolini and Hitler are rife with socialism in their respective pasts and in their programs. Nearly every biography of Hitler and Nazism — and even the writings of general historians such as Paul Johnson, which includes accounts of the desperate efforts by Moscow to distance COMINTERN from its kissin’ cousins in Germany — demonstrates otherwise. Just because most govt-school-educated people are ignorant of these pertinent facts does not mean we should dumb-down the conversation to that level. Even today, I just noticed that Lawrence Samuels published a very fine and detailed essay on the roots of Nazism. I provide here both a link to his original article and a paragraph of relevant text:
“So why is there a general belief that German National Socialism and Italian Fascism rest on the right? After all, according to the French Revolution’s sitting arrangement in 1789, authoritarians sat on the right while the classical liberals, like Thomas Paine, sat on the left. It was because of Soviet propaganda during and after World War II. The Russian Soviets, embarrassed by their cozy corroboration with Hitler and Mussolini, decided to conceal their striking Fascist-Marxist similarities. They prohibited communists and their sympathizers from using the term “National Socialist”in public or in media outlets. They organized massive disinformation media campaigns to convince the world that Fascism and Communism were polar opposites, devoid of any common traits. Of course, it was all a big propaganda lie worthy of the myth-making Pravda.
When the worldwide disinformation effort by Soviet Russia started to gain traction in the 1940s, Winston Churchill was flabbergasted at the news. Churchill, a historian in his own right, clearly saw the glaring parallels between Nazism and Communism, commenting that, “As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.” When Churchill was confronted by Soviet propaganda to falsely depict the world’s two major totalitarian ideologies as polar opposites, he remarked to his son, “Fascism and Communism… Polar opposites—no, polar the same!” ”
Lawrence
May 10 2021 at 9:37am
Here’s the link (it didn’t appear in my post above).
https://libertarianhub.com/2021/05/10/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
Mark Z
May 9 2021 at 11:54pm
I’d be curious to see him list what countries he considers socialist in order to reach that conclusion. I have to assume he would need to exclude almost every self-identified socialist country, then count Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Canada as socialist or something. Or perhaps he’s counting all fascist, nationalist, maybe even religious fundamentalist countries as ‘capitalist.’ Some socialists like to do this to rig the metric (or counting brutal imperialist monarchies like 19th/early 20th century Belgium in the capitalist category). This class of argument is of course specious. We should emulate Nicaragua rather than Switzerland because we rather arbitrarily group Switzerland in the same category as Nazi Germany, and thus on average Switzerland’s ‘political system’ is worse? Even if one accepts whatever bizarre categorization leaves socialism as anything other than one of the worst ideas conceived by man, it can be easily overcome by just being more specific in what kind of system we want (e.g., liberal democratic capitalism).
Tracy W
May 10 2021 at 3:26am
Ah yes! Colonialism!
The problem was the lack of wanting to extend dignity, respect and a fair shot to “outsiders”. A problem with both systems.
Weir
May 11 2021 at 4:14am
Goebbels must have imagined himself among the forces of anti-colonialism in 1927: “Germany is an exploitation colony of international Jewish finance capital.”
And again in 1939: “England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state. And it is not the case that we think England is the richest land on earth. There are lords and City men in England who are in fact the richest men on earth. The broad masses, however, see little of this wealth. We see in England an army of millions of impoverished, socially enslaved, and oppressed people.”
“The lords and City people can remain the richest people on earth only because they constantly maintain their wealth by exploiting their colonies and preserving unbelievable poverty in their own country.” Goebbels wrote this at the same moment that the Nazis were colonizing Poland and plundering Germany’s Jews.
Kyle Walter
May 25 2021 at 10:54pm
A little background on what Sunkara includes in his definition of “oppression”.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/child-killing-romanovs-jacobin-bhaskar-sunkara-berlin-wall/
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