I haven’t written anything political on this blog for a while, so why not throw a big haymaker out there this morning?<\/p>\n
Via Norm<\/a>, I see some chap called Robert Paul Wolff has written an essay called The Future of Socialism<\/a><\/em> which contains the following sentence:<\/p>\n If socialism is the achievement, at long last, of justice and equality, it is a dream that has been aborted in the womb of the old order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Erm, no.\u00a0 Socialism wasn’t some poor, helpless unborn infant cruelly aborted by evil capitalists, it was a fucking huge great alpha male abomination which during the prime of its life ran rampage with a bottle of vodka mixed with amphetamines in one hand and a heavy machine gun in the other.<\/p>\n So how come Mr Wolff hasn’t noticed the scale of death and destruction wrought by this beast?\u00a0 Here’s how:<\/p>\n The economic systems established in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, in the People\u2019s Republic of China, and in a number of other nations self-described as \u201csocialist,\u201d were not in any usable sense examples of socialism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ah, that old chestnut! Of course they weren’t.\u00a0 Because to admit they were (and let’s point out that they weren’t just “self-described” as socialist, they were also thus described by an awful lot of third parties) would mean that an essay called The Future of Socialism<\/em> would be about three sentences long.<\/p>\n I liken this mentality to a nutty professor spending his life trying to make a time machine, and each time he produces a device which inevitably doesn’t work he turns to his exasperated assistant and says:<\/p>\n “Ah!\u00a0 But that wasn’t a time machine we were making, was it?\u00a0 If it was, we would have been able to travel through time, wouldn’t we?\u00a0 Now what we’re going to build next will be a real time machine!”<\/em><\/p>\n No wonder these clowns never see their political dreams realised. Thankfully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I haven’t written anything political on this blog for a while, so why not throw a big haymaker out there this morning? Via Norm, I see some chap called Robert Paul Wolff has written an essay called The Future of … Continue reading