Re: Rorty on socialism

["Alan G. Isaac" <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:

>      I don't know that I want to get into this one too
> much, but I think that Rorty is a) out of date and
> b) way overdoing it.  The first has to do with the
> fact that shock therapy Thatcherite Kinkel in the
> Czech Republic botched and corrupted the privatization
> and really made a mess of things.  The Communist
> government in CR was very oppressive, so few want
> to return to it.  But free market capitalism is not looking
> nearly as wonderful as it did in 1992.

I do not grant that Rorty argued that free market
capitalism is wonderful.


>
>        Also, many of these countries have experienced
> extreme economic shocks.  Communists have been
> reelected, although most now label themselves as something
> else, like "Social Democrats" or "Democratic Socialists."
> The "socialist" label is hardly as dead there as he claims.

That is not what he claimed. Indeed, he expects such labels to
remain in use:
>>It is going to take a long period of readjustment for us Western leftist
intellectuals to comprehend that the word "socialism" has been drained of
force--as have been all the other words that drew their force from the idea
that an alternative to capitalism was available.  Not only are we going to
have to stop using the term "capitalist economy" as if we knew what a
functioning non-capitalist economy looked like but we are going to have to
stop using the term "bourgeois cultures" as if we knew what a viable
non-bourgeois culture in an industrialized society would look like.''<<

Note that his language is generally quite literal.
E.g., available means available (concretely).



> It remains a fact that the majority of the population was
> better off economically in 1989 than it is today throughout
> the region.  Much of the opposition to the ancien regime was
> nationalist opposition to Russian domination.

This also seems orthogonal to Rorty's points.
(Furthermore, I am not sure what the region you are
referring to is, whether you are relying on self-assessed
welfare status, and what the supposed counterfactual
is.) Anyway, Rorty does not argue that there aren't bad
ways to take apart totalitarian regimes. Nor does he
argue in favor of existing capitalist relations.

Alan