that the left in the 20th century, apparently in the pursuit of justice or equality, descended into horrendous totalitarianism, resulting in the suffering-unto-death of millions of persons, is not, i assert, a forgivable or an understandable mistake. endorsement of marxist communism or state socialism was just an obvious endorsement of tyranny, oppression, exploitation, and mindless propaganda. advocacy of twentieth-century communism constituted advocacy precisely of inequality and injustice of the most extreme and explicit imaginable variety. it's no more forgivable than endorsing, let's say, the annihilation of the jews or chattel slavery. and i will say this: the left is still utterly dominated by statism, and it's no more decent or plausible or egalitarian than it ever was.
dude, you did not have to wait for stalin's show trials - though if you persisted after that you were explicitly endorsing a monstrous politics in a way that you couldn't possibly hide from yourself or anyone else. the point was incredibly obvious to common sense, but also all sorts of people were warning you about it, including a whole nother strand of the left. they warned about it 1840, 1900, 1919 (emma goldman on the soviet union, e.g.), and at all points between. marxists kicked the ass of anarchists, but definitely not because the marxists were making even vague sense, and certainly not because their inspiring vision of the future wasn't a nightmare of stupid pain.
anyway, i'm prompted to return to these points by rereading kropotkin's modern science and anarchism as i gear up to teach it. this is 1901, but anarchists had already been saying this for sixty years. proudhon attacked the state communism of weitling and others in 1840 on precisely these grounds. kropotkin:
The opinions of the anarchists concerning the form which the remuneration of labor may take in a society freed from the yoke of capital and the State still remain divided. To begin with, all are agreed in repudiating the new form of the wage system which would be established if the State becamne the owner of all the land, the mines, the factories, the railways, and so on, and the great manager of agriculture and all industries. If these powers were added to those which the State already possesses (taxes, defence of the territory, subsidized religions, etc.), we should create a new tyranny even more terrible than the old one.
marx endorsed placing all these powers in the hands of the state, and added, for example, banking, education, and communications (see the end of the commie manifesto). it's just the most obviously disastrous formula in human moral history, and people even of the left with some shred of decency knew that when it was being articulated. you hardly even have to state the refutation: the thing just sits there, being palpably ridiculous and straight-up evil. and honestly, anyone who ever endorsed it was or is a dolt or a slave or a very bad person or some combination. i am going to include in that assessment benjamin and adorno, for example, or zizek, say, or hardt and negri. no the grotesque basic failure of heart and intellect is not mitigated by burying the whole thing under various new layers of mumbo-jumbo. the shit has just got to be over.
dilute versions of that thing are all the left has, even now. they could have gone another way, but they weren't good enough as human beings or not independent enough as thinkers to draw the most obvious conclusions; in some cases they expressed their devotion even as they were dying at the hands of the totalitarianism they wanted. the mistake is so obvious, the position so implausible, that embracing it - i would have said if i didn't know differently - is just not possible. there is no explanation, excuse, reationalization that makes this forgivable.
so people of vague leftist leanings just think that that whole side of the spectrum means well, has a basic commitment to justice or equality or progress that makes it all understandable or something. racial suprematists, or terrorist jihadis, or for that matter laissez-faire capitalists, have exactly the same excuse: well, they mean well, if you listen to themselves. if you forgive some of these people on the grounds of their stated intentions - even while their actual procedures lead to utter disaster precisely for the values they themselves purport to hold, and even though that is the only thing that could possibly be rationally expected - you should forgive them all.
now, when i say the position is 'unforgivable', i do not mean that we should execute zizek or negri, or lob them into a new gulag, or place them at the forced-labor farm, or censor their works, or have the secret police blackmail their families to expose their misdeeds, desperately as they're begging for it. but we should definitely take it as a reflection on their intellect, sincerity, or decency. disqualify anything they say that has any political bearing on anything.
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