Hi Barry,

Wow, that takes me back :) Yeah, Marx and Engels are still in my mind, not gods but, flawed angels, from a very different time, and with vastly less experiences of Real Socialism than we can have, and which we should learn from.

Thanks for a brilliant and incisive article. Now wait for the Apologists for Fascism to storm your gates.

Best wishes,

Joe

What a confused jumble.

The first leftists were those who sat on the left side of the French National Constituent Assembly at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789.
“They wanted wages, prices, and profits to be determined by competition in a free market, and not by government decree. They were pledged to free their economy from government planning, and to remove the government-guaranteed special privileges of guilds, unions, and associations whose members were banded together to use the law to set the price of their labor or capital or product above what it would be in a free market.”
http://mises.org/daily/3425

However Marx cast the issue clearly in terms of the ownership (meaning control) of the means of production. Capitalism means the private, and socialism means the public [translation: State], control of the means of production.

The problem facing the left has always been this. If they go the whole hog, full socialism, than the result will not be the fairer and more productive society they envisage. It will be a totalitarian dictatorship, even characterised by mass starvation. Then the leftists are left either
a) trying to say that’s not “true socialism” when it is exactly the public ownership of the means of production, or
b) trying to say that the miserable results were some kind of strange coincidence, nothing to do with socialisation of the means of production

However if they resile from full socialism, they start from deserting their principles. (For example, if “democracy” votes for non-left values, they are left contradicting themselves, as the left are now in complaining about the West’s invasions of the middle east.)

And then – since respect for private property is anathema – the government has to dictate the terms of whatever activities it decides to control. The result is a system in which nominally private ownership is permitted, subject to the government’s overriding right to dictate conditions of supply, price, demand, wages, interest, profit, money, credit, banking.

The resulting national socialism is the picture of fascism with its characteristic of government in bed with big business.

(cont.)

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
Adolf Hitler
Speech of May 1, 1927
http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/

Yet in the confusion that Barry York has displayed so well, the leftists keep not understanding that if you’re not going to have full socialism, and you’re not going to have a voluntary private property society – capitalism – then the left will be the main vector of fascism in the world, because the only possibility left will be government getting into bed with big business.

Look at the left wing parties today, in the name of global warming, all urging governments to take trillions of dollars from the ordinary working people, and give it to the big banks and big business in corrupt government-picking-favourites deals. The left! Do you agree with this, Barry, or not?

So the left keeps ending up doing the opposite of what self-identify as doing, keep favouring the powerful against the weak, favouring exploitation, and they keep not identifying with the results they are getting, and keep assuming it’s got nothing to do with the socialisation of the means of production.

So let’s cut to the chase Barry. What exactly do you stand for, if it’s not government control of the means of production?

If it is, why not full socialism?

If it’s not, why doesn’t that mean you’re wrong, contradicting yourself, confused about the nature of the State, ignorant about the economic phenomena you're talking about, and still making exactly the same mistakes that caused the left to give rise to communism and fascism?

I am a moderate "leftist" from way back. I marched in protest against the American war on the people of Vietnam. I never had any time for any of the usual Marxist-Leninist-Maoist crapp.
Meanwhile I have a great deal of sympathy with most of what is featured on this website: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com
And all of the people and outfits that are listed here:
http://www.dabase.org/GCF.htm

Yes JKJ. Sob.
Well argued, what we and the world needs now, is cooperative capitalism comrade!
Sob, Rhrosty

Hi Rhosty,

My grand-dad was a Wobbly, and my parents in the old CPA. So all that was literally in my mother's milk. I went Maoist in 1962-1963, and didn't move away from it until about 1983, after reading about Mao's murder of Lin Piao, and China's support for Pol Pot's fascism.

Since 1917, we've all had an enormous body of experience to go on, we can't ignore it. We now know how quickly 'real socialism' slides into fascism, how quickly scum move into the party and take it over right to the top: a fish rots from the head, an old Russian proverb says. Yes indeed.

All Utopias. all Grand Theories of Good Societies, with their ready-made prescriptive pathways, seem to degenerate into fascism: ghastly societies in which all dissenting individuals, and all putatively-dissenting groups, like Jews and other minorities, are suspect and eventually have to be 'detached'.

So Utopias all seem destined to become uni-ethnic, dominant-ethnic, well as one-belief societies, once the potentially dissenting groups have been stripped out. Hence, the convergence of 'socialism' and fascism.

Hence, their inevitable self-destruction.

I've been toying with the suspicion that even Marx was hankering for a sort of Fairy-land, a return to a mythical Golden Age, pre-democratic, and for all his praise of its role, pre-capitalist as well. Maybe this explains the attraction for the current pseudo-Left of ISIS' fascism, a strong and certain dictatorship, something they could pledge total allegiance to, to surrender to, to avoid all the uncertainties and 'imperfections' of democracy, and its ever-unfinished nature.

So ISIS promises heaven (and 72 virgins) for martyrs, while the pseudo-left craves the promise of heaven on earth, at any cost, even if they have to ally themselves with rabid anti-humans like ISIS. And with their usual arrogance, the pseudo-left thinks it can eventually manipulate groups like ISIS, once they have gained more successes.

Democracy, uncertainty, imperfection, muddling through, no 'historical inevitability' - that's the uneven and cluttered - post-Enlightenment - path towards the future, which we never reach. Utopias will always betray their 'progressive' claims and turn into their opposites.

Joe