January 26, 2005
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Topic: utopia?
The socialism/liberalism vs. capitalism/conservatism debate, is at the heart of politics, the media, and education. It is the root of wars past and present, and the cause of so much confusion and anger between people. The depth and breadth of the debate is just now shining light on me, as well as the underlying content, which I am beginning to embrace.
Here’s a quote from Frontpagemag.com
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Daniel J. Flynn, the author of Why the Left Hates America and of the new book Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas.
FP: I hope you are right. But overall, as long as humans remain who they are — fallen and flawed — I think the socialist impulse will never go away, and will remain the easiest thing for people to cling to. Indeed, as long as inequality exists, so will the impulse toward equality, and so millions more humans will be tortured, starved and exterminated.
We can’t make things “right” and “perfect” in this world, because only God is perfect. And because of original sin and free will, imperfection and tragedy must be constant realities of human life. For many humans, however, the easiest thing intellectually is to believe that this can be fixed and that heaven can be built on earth – an experiment that always leads to hell on earth. And so the Left will remain powerful and continue to build more human hells in its utopian experiments, which now involves the glorification of the suicide bomber.
What do you think?
Flynn: The idea that man can be perfected is the most dangerous delusion. Whether it’s an Islamic terrorist attempting to establish Allah’s earthly kingdom, a Nazi believing that a perfect race of men can be created, or a Communist looking to make Heaven on Earth, the motivation of these fanatics is the same. They are all utopians.
The road to heaven on earth always seems to detour to hell on earth. If you really believe that your ideology will bring salvation to humanity, what would you be willing to do to impose this world-saving idea? Would you be willing to lie? To kill? Looking back on the last hundred years, the answer too often is yes. When you’re building utopia, all is permitted. No end is greater, so no means can be too base to get there.”
Dan’s thoughts: I’ve just picked up some pretty thick irony here. First of all, by criticizing the left in its attempts to bring about utopia on earth, the right must be arguing:
capitalism is not going to bring about utopia, but it’s more desirable than thinking about utopia, since that always ends bad. But, it’s hard to argue against utopia w/ non-utopia. All idologies are based on a belief of what would create the BEST world. The right supports capitalism not because the utopia of socialism has led to bad things, but because they believe capitalism is the only utopia available. For the right, just like the left, “no end is greater, so no means can be too base to get there.”
But…the irony is that the right is blind to the injustices committed in the name of capitalism. They can point to Russia, to China, to North Korea, and say, “here’s Communism for ya,” but, they deflect the wrong-doings of capitalist democracies, as explained here…
This is from an interview in the Washington Witness, my own universities conservative newspaper:
WITNESS: You finish your book with: “Americans love their country not only because America is their country. Our country is loved because she is lovely.” You give many reasons throughout your book about why America is lovely, but is their one thing that sticks out in your mind that is exemplary of America’s beauty?
Flynn: I think the thing that sticks out most is that this really is a land of freedom. If you look at the world today, most people living outside of western civilization have no say in who their rulers are. Even today our government is the exception, not the rule. When you go back 225 years or so, it was certainly unique at that point. But when you discuss these matters with Leftists the stock response that you encounter is that free blacks were excluded from voting, women were excluded in most places, if you didn’t have a certain amount of land you were excluded. It’s true, that was the case at that time. What bothers me about that argument, though, is it implies it was somehow unique to America, that we were the only country that had such specifications for voting. What was unique about America in 1776 and 1787 was that we allowed anyone the ability to vote….The extent of democracy that we had at that time was more expansive than any other country at that time in the world, and yet the Left still finds a way to make us look bad. It’s grasping at straws. That’s the part of America that I like the best – the idea that we stand as a beacon of freedom in an un-free world.”
This is the testimony of one of what is a large number of people who would call Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn idiots as quickly as I would put that lable on Bush. So…what makes these guys tick???
First of all, there’s the view that morality is relative. If slavery was the norm, than slavery was moral. They say: “Do poor Americans have it better than poor Africans? Of course they do. So, why is there all this complaining about American poverty?” I go back to my simplified model for understanding the left/right divide. The left is concerned with a glass that is only half full, and is focussed on addressing the empty half, while the right is content that our glass is half full, in fact, it’s more full than any other country.
There’s no question that socialism is a form of idealism. It wants a full glass, so none are left behind. It’s a belief that people should not grow up in poverty, w/out food, a decent home, or education. That people should get paid a decent wage. That some sense of community should exist. I’ve hardly given a solid account of socialism, but it’s the general ideas that attract myself and many others. The idea that there is misery in the world now, and we should work to end that misery.
One common theme I’ve noticed from the right, is that failure of utopian movements in the past, proves utopian movements are inherant failures. Islamic terrorists, Hitler, Stalin, are examples of how pursuit of utopia can be distorted, but they are not proofs that we cannot, and that we should not, create a better world.
I have taken for granted that Zinn and Chomsky have been honest in their writings, and their efforts to improve the lives of many. It is my duty to examine them w/ the same skepticism I should have of any source…and to truly be open-minded and a critical thinking student (we’re all students, even after school), requires reading those on the right, and their criticisms of the left.
However, I cannot hold back, nor should I, skepticism of conservatives…especially as they’re leading campaigns to document the liberal nature of higher education, which I will not dispute. But it shows further how the idea of looking at both sides can hardly exist in this country. Conservatives are no more interested in creating a balance of ideas on campus as creating conservative colleges. Daniel Flynn is just one of a 100% conservative cast behind “accuracy in academia.” Too fishy for my taste, but won’t stop me from hearing what they have to say.
Comments (7)
To briefly answer your question left on my site:
1.) There’s an important distinction between liberal or liberalized socialism and communist socialism. State-run education here is liberal socialism. Communist socialism implies a transitional alteration in the relations of production that is not present in the capitalist mode of production. Both examples you give, by Marxist standards, function within and according to the logic of the capitalist mode of production.
2.) That doesn’t state my views correctly at all. I’m for a Communist Republic. You should read the second chapter of Lenin’s Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky for more on this question of democracy.
3.) Both the Soviet Union and the PRC prior to their revisionist periods (the reinstatement of bureaucrat capitalism under Krushchev in the mid ’50s and Deng in the late ’70s, respectively) have demonstrated that a planned economy can advance faster and more rationally (though certainly not without incident – this is the real world, and not an economic model, after all) than the anarchy of the market guided by what Adam Smith calls the “blind hand” of Capital, while taking far better care of the needs of the majority of the people. The PRC did this more effectively than the Soviet Union, correcting a number of Stalin’s errors (cf. Raymond Lotta, Ed., Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai Textbook, and also Mao Tse-tung, Critique of Soviet Economics). History shows us that the crises of the Capitalist business cycle cannot be overcome by either Keynesianism or Monetarism, but can only be put-off by imperialism. The fall of communism in the Soviet Union and the PRC, however, is rooted not in economics, but in the distinct superstructural contradiction between the particularities of the personality cult (which I oppose, due to the historical lessons of this contradiction) and the necessity of the two-line struggle during socialism.
4.) I am quite critical of both Chomsky and Zinn, and I have explored the arguements of the Right (a category in which I place both Democrats and Republicans, by the way). I come from a Republican family, so I am very familiar with conservative arguments. The question of ideology is an interesting one. I will make the distiction (with Althusser) between ideology and science (cf. Althusser, ”On the Materialist Dialectic” and “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses“) which seperates Marxism (the critical discipline combining the philosophy of dialectical materialism with the science of historical materialism) from ideology (the largely unconscious network of imaginary relationships which functions as a symptom of the current mode of production and serves, reciprocally, to recreate the necessary means of production, i.e. both the forces and relations of production). The words I will use to address the right (from Sean Hannity to G. W. Bush) are “nieve” and “short-sighted,” perhaps with a bit of “dangerously delusional” thrown in to cover the darker recesses of Christian Fascism and Zionism. I think those terms apply just as well to the vast majority of liberals (such as Kerry and Dean). I will reserve terms such “ill-intentioned” for libertarian and neoliberal ideologues like Milton Friedman, Bill Clinton, Margret Thatcher, and F. A. Hayak.
I don’t think the right is necessarily blind to the injustices of capitalism. I, for example, fully appreciate the point of people who bemoan the plight of the poor while some of the rich have more money than they know what to do with. I think that these people do not realize that by interfering, they are making matters worse for everybody, rich and poor.
Secondly, I think all governments are afflicted by problems of overreaching and overpowerful leaders. Corruption is intrinsic to power. In our own country, look at the billions spent in discretionary spending by Congress, look at the power interest groups have in Washington to affect favorable regulation. However, capitalism by nature tends to minimize these problems, while communism by nature must embrace them wholeheartedly since the essence of communism is in a powerful central authority. I think this is one of the main reasons the injustices in communism quickly lead to tens of million dead, while the injustices inherent in capitalism have much more palatable consequences.
This is why I am a libertarian, why I believe in the primacy of the individual. Inherent in libertarianism is an element of despair. We know that people aren’t good. Some of us believe in the doctrine of original sin. The rest of us watch Maury Povich. People are sneaky, greedy, mean. And yet we, as libertarians, propose to turn these people loose to do whatever they want.
We do so because we know that no matter what bad things individuals do, they are better than the things that get done to them by the collective will. And I don’t just mean the really gross manifestations of collective will, such as totalitarianism or public television. I mean, imagine a rich farmer going door-to-door trying to get huge subsidies from you and your neighbors. Imagine a steel tycoon down at the docks in Long Beach trying to impose a one-man tariff on cheap foreign steel. Imagine someone trying to inflate his own currency with a Xerox machine at Kinko’s.
Libertarians don’t expect miracles from individuals. We just expect them to be individuals, with the limited scope for evil that individuals enjoy. Real evil is coercive. And an individual does not have the power to coerce that a government has — even if dope and machine guns are legalized.
It boggles my mind that there are people out there who still call themselves Leninists and show their faces without shame. How seriously would you take someone telling you to take tips on good government from Mein Kampf? Why do the communists get a pass on the atrocities their ideologies have led to again and again. It’s not just that these experiments ended in failure, the way you might say Prohibition was a failure. These experiments ended in a catestrophic failure on a scale never before seen in human history. Tens of millions dead, hundreds of millions of refugees, people living like packrats digging in the forest for roots, while their leaders orchestrated famines and purges, pointed at the inequalities overseas, and gained sympathy from our “intellectuals.”
I’m not going to defend either myself or Marxism-Leninism from such an ignorant, slanderous, and politically charged attack. I’ll just say that I have actually read all those books, from Smith, Ricardo and Keynes (respectable political economy from those three) to Hayak’s (less respectable – won the nobel prize and supported pinochet) “road to serfdom” and Ayn Rand’s (ridiculous pseudo-intellectual drivel) “capitalism: the unkown ideal”. The fact is, they are wrong.
I won’t get drawn into to a debate here. I got tired of all of that pointless academic to-and-frow quite a while ago.
The funniest thing about the American Poverty vs African Poverty thing for the right (and thatliberalmedia has hustled this nonsense shamelessly, is that what has made the difference is the very “socialist” government programs the right detests. Until Theodore Roosevelt urban poverty in the US was excruciating, until FDR rural poverty in America was flat out disastrous, but the biggest progress came from the what the right always lists as a “colossal failure,” the Great Society programs of the 1960s. That’s why the poor have health care and housing and a shot (if a remote one) at education.
Whenever you listen to the right listen for that split argument. “Social Programs don’t accomplish anything” and “our poor are better off than their poor.” Of course, our poor are far worse off than European poor, because they are truly socialist and we are only peripherally socialist. So, by the right’s own argument: Socialism works in ways capitalism can’t hope to.
The rest of what thatliberalmedia says here is just a continuation of his “humanity is inherently terrible” nonsense. What a weird, depressed kid he must be.
regarding the link about the New Deal, while news of the extreme tax rates is shocking, it still seems that having the government create jobs, even if done less efficiently than the private sector, (such as building roads), still gave 5 million people jobs, when 9 million were unemployed. If the tax money that went to those programs stayed in the hands of the wealthy, there is no guarantee that they would have used the money in a way that would have aided those who required aid. Some of that money could have been invested in businesses that required creating new jobs, but it is unlikely that the private sector would have been able to meet the immediate needs of so many unemployed.
I don’t quite follow some of the logic in the article. He says there’s no net gain when tax money which would have been used to buy CD’s, TV’s, etc., is then given to the gov’t, and used to create jobs. His argument is that there is no net gain, just like in the broken window. He is correct, that there is no net economic gain. However, there is a societal gain. In the face of large unemployment, what is more important, people buying excess luxuries, or ensuring that some of those unemployed have a job?
Even if gov’t programs aimed to help the poor are inefficient, such as the building of roads in a slow manner or needing to be re-built, or, even if gov’t programs slow down the overall GDP of the country, how do we measure the needs of society? The economy grows when there’s oil spills, because someone has to clean them up. The economy grows when someone breaks a window, because someone has to buy a new one.
The negative externalities of our strong economy are why we need some restrictions on un-regulated capitalism. Things that need to be protected are the poor, the environment, and our mental health (which is being exploited right now through rampant commercialism and the overwhelming reliance on prescription drugs to keep people from spiraling into depression).
You’ve found the mystery behind right-wing economics. They simply believe that money paid to and spent by the government disappears. One wonders if this isn’t the “David Copperfield School of Economics.” Money that moves through the government remains absolutely in the economy. To the right, if cash goes to, say, the artists of the New Deal, or those who worked in the CCC or the WPA, it is somehow lost. But if a Rockefeller got it, it would be a “net gain.” This would be like me claiming that because the Rockefeller’s “only” built Rockefeller Center during the depression (obviously Roosevelt tax policies didn’t stop private investment) and the WPA built over 15,000 schools, post offices, hospitals, and bridges, that “private industry contributed nothing to the economy.”
All taxes are either (a) spent by the government (good), or used to redeem government bonds (returning money to the lending system). Even if it is “wasted” it is wasted on millions of middle class jobs and university research that funds the education of millions. When capitalists waste money, they’re far more likely to waste it outside the country.