“Progressive” ideologies like communism and socialism, which attempted to create a better system, were doomed to fail in my opinion. Capitalism took many centuries to develop. This development was partially cultural, partially economic and partially technological. To imagine a better world and to try to impose a half-cocked design based on the inevitably myopic conjecture of a central committee would be to ignore certain truths about human nature and the scope of what is possible. When Lenin and his cohorts took an essentially feudal empire and tried to create a communist system from above they ended up creating a high-tech version of ancient despotism. Hitler and his fellow travelers can be distinguished from the communists because they intended to create a high-tech despotism. They intentionally reacted against the Enlightenment and all that followed (apart from the gadgets).
The communists did not intend to do so. Certain vicissitudes of liberalism (like free speech) were enshrined in the Soviet constitution but they weren’t worth the price of the ink used. Without the ‘bourgeois’ political framework of free elections, property rights, separate powers and the rule of law any constitutional guarantees of human rights were fatuous. The communists tried to create their future now. They did not realize that the values of the Enlightenment would take time to permeate thru a populace and that it was not possible to create a ‘worker’s paradise’ (assuming it’s possible to create Utopia at all) by legislative proclamation. Note that all communist regimes took hold in culturally backward countries. Totalitarianism in the ‘bourgeois’ states took on the character of wholesale rejection of liberalism in places where this latter set of ideas had a tenuous hold. Fascism was a rejection of the Enlightenment; communism was a corruption of it. The results were near identical*
Most highly recomended for its clear thinking and sound reasoning from a lefty that I actually respect.
*Emphasis added
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Filed under: Blogging, Leftism, Multiculturalism | Tagged: Thinking Blogger Award’
Thanks old bean. I responded to your question re. online opinion in the negative. I’m not really posting enough on my own blog. But maybe…
I was just thinking that you could offer your latest post as it is; because most pieces at OLO have generally been posted some where else before hand.
Anyway glad to promote your stuff and equally happy that some one from the left got the message of Cohen’s book