From: Alexander Sheppard (alexandersheppard@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Nov 20 2002 - 10:44:54 MST
I think mabye the biggest problem that I can see, with regard to the
discussions of socialism and communism on this list, is that everyone
refuses to make any sort of definition of these terms. People wildly call
virtually any bad thing that comes to find an example of "socialism"--Nazi
Germany was "socialism", for example, presumably because its proponents
called it that, and it suited a propaganda purpose in America to call it
that, so as to show people how evil "socialism" was. Well, some people have
proposed theories of "authoritarian socialism", saying that socialism needs
to be imposed from above. But I find this to be impossible, since if you
have socialism imposed from above, those who impose it will turn into a new
exploiting class, as Bakunin did in fact predict, and then what you will
have is merely a ruling elite exploiting the new (actually mostly old)
working class. Now what is this? Do we call it socialism? Well, I don't
know--socialism was supposed to be a classless society, no? And this is most
certainly not a classless society--in fact it's an example of some of the
most class-ed out societies around. So I think first of all we should
recognize that, regardless of whether we call this an example of
"authoritarian socialism" or "state capitalism", it is a society with a lot
of class stratification. And capitalism is also an example of a society with
a lot of class stratification--mabye there is not as much as in these
extremely class stratified societies like in the USSR, but still, a lot. So
what about a classless society? Any comments on this possibility?
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