Kalkin (11-09-2017)
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
It wasn't communism per se that failed, but the immense scale at which it was tried.
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
--John Adams
I think it's inherent in communism that it just doesn't scale. Even Marinaleda is run by one person, the mayor. Common ownership of the means of production by a small group can be managed democratically, and if you disagree you can pull up stakes and walk away. But as it scales up the need for central planning becomes stronger.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
And you can attach that to most isms and ideology. Excuses excuses.
"What seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological.'" Louis Althusser
Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire
Really? Which ones? Capitalism is still going strong and it largely dominates the contemporary imagination. Nationalism? Still with us. Fascism? Bombed out of existence. The only abject failure that comes to mind is communism. There is certainly a difference between between theory and its historical manifestations but it's quite another to suggest that communism has never been tried. It's tantamount to saying that communism cannot be tried because it is pure theory.
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
And capitalism as the free market of Adam Smith and Hayek and Mises is a descriptive theory of how things work. It's not till you get to the neoliberals that it becomes a prescriptive theiry like Marxism.
Communism had originally two strands, one authoritarian and statist, founded by Henri de Saint-Simon, and the other libertarian and communal, founded by the likes of Robert Owen. It was the former that won out under Marx, Lenin, Stalin on to Castro.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
Was reading the other day, in George Hawley's Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, how the European New Right considers socialism just another emanation of Enlightened individualism.
To me though socialism arose in opposition to individualism and its private ownership of property and free markets. Both promote reason over faith, but individualism is Aristotelian in its adherence to the logical law of non-contradiction, while socialism accepts contradiction in it's reliance on the Hegelian dialectic.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler