RE: [Marxism] Fatal Flaw of Socialism

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is regularly and crudely argued by the lazy and unimaginative that
"socialism might be a good idea but it's impossible because it runs
against human nature."  It seems a more sophisticated version of that to
say taht "this cycle of progressive socialism and then imperialism is
neverending" or positing "the endless cycle of capitaist greed and war."


None of these things can be understood well outside of their historical
context.  Leninism sought solutions to specific problems that came up in
the extremely repressive circumstances of the old Russian Empire.  The
militarized repressiveness of European civilization in World War I
framed the broader, international applications of Bolshevism.

The years 1918-19 were years of revolutionary upheaval across the globe.
The great armies of the World War were torn by mass mutinies.  In the
case of Germany, these detonated revolution at home.  People tend to
forget that World War I ended very unlike World War II.  It wasn't
military invasion and occupation that destroyed the Central Powers but
genuine revolutions.

Socialists were totally involved in these risings and their leadership.
There were mass rebellions in the colonies.  The largest strike wave in
US history closed the steel industry and the IWW-inspired general strike
at Seattle took control of the city.  In places--Munich, Hungary--"red
republics" formed and functioned until put down in bloody
counterrevolution.

So, the idea of the Russian Revolution as a detonator of world
revolution was more than just a Bolshevik idea.  It reflected a certain
reality of the day.  The attempt to codify this and extend it through
the establishment of the new Communist International--the Comintern--was
too little too late to have been a factor in all this.  And the bloody
repressions that met these revolutionary risings in war-brutalized
Europe also doomed the Russian Revolution to isolation and degeneration.

In the end, Communism got a lot of things right.  But it erred in its
gross overgeneralizations and oversimplifications--that the
revolutionary conditions of 1918-19 would become a permanent crisis,
that the Russian solutions to party-building was universally applicable,
that conditions required the postponement of socialist democracy to some
point in the increasingly indefinite future, etc.

However, these errors reflect the tendency of people in an increasingly
more complex capitalist world to generalize and simplify what they
encounter in order to comfort themselves with the illusion that the
world and people are ultimately predictable.  Thus, the ultimate
illusion that "history repeats itself"--which encourages us to look at a
situation only long enough to see something familiar before
overgeneralizing and oversimplifying.

Is there really an immutable, universally applicable feature of human
nature that determines our social and political order?  There have been
many kinds of social and political orders that belie that assertion.

Are there really inescapable cycles?  Not if we actually get down to
cases.

Is there really a fatal flaw of socialism?  Not really.

Solidarity!
Mark L.




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