Socialism Series Episode 8: Moses Hess
Added 2022-02-20 20:18:06 +0000 UTCMoses Hess published Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat one year before the publication of the Communist Manifesto.
Comments
A problem that's been on my mind lately is what a bad policy debater might call the "inherency" problems with any kind of transition to a socialist order. I thought of it again when listening to Hess' policy program. The basic problem is familiar: obviously, a capitalist order will tend to resist any political program that is designed to eliminate that order. And so you can expect that eg liberal democracy and all the subsystems that go into it—not just the formal electoral mechanisms but also the various media and the educational system and so on—will tend to be designed to impede such a program. We seem to observe this in reality. In other words, absent what debate kids would call "fiat," socialist political programs could only come about "internally" if there are mistakes in system design. But what you might call "revolutionary" mechanisms—as in, hey, fuck elections, take the streets, do strikes, whatever, all that kind of talk—are equally vulnerable to this problem, aren't they? Insofar as the state also controls all the levers by which you could get revolutionary/outside-the-system action organized, you're right back to the same issue. For example, many forms of labor strikes are just illegal in the US. Which seems pretty crazy—it's illegal to NOT WORK?—but true. OK, so far this all seems pretty obvious and I'm sure there are a billion things written about it that baby brains like me haven't read. So my actual question, at tediously long last, is actually not theoretical. How, in actual practice, have the Nordic states (which for my purposes score as more socialized, bc more state ownership yada yada) come to be that way? Why have the forces that theoretically impede those changes in America or wherever not ended up doing so in those places? And the Hess discussion gave me a germ of an answer, maybe: because despite the tendency for the present order to impede changes, its inherent inefficiency as compared to the emerging alternative eventually becomes overwhelming. In the end, capitalism is just a more productive economic order than feudalism, and so eventually emotional attachment to dukes and shit will give way. And so, perhaps that's what happened in the Nordics: for contingent reasons, the forces that eventually produce a socialist order were stronger in those places earlier. Does that sound plausible? And by the way, if it's true, to what extent does that reduce the difference in difficulty for various strategies for political change? Thanks. I'll take my answer off the air. Adios, mofos.
Ian Samuel
2022-06-18 17:20:17 +0000 UTCRichard Wolff or gtfo
Ian H
2022-02-21 23:38:55 +0000 UTCGreat episode! What about inviting Freddie on for the Marx episodes?
Warbs
2022-02-21 17:30:37 +0000 UTC
