Wez
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‘And how is that going to happen if there are no leaders? How is the capitalist class going to be overthrown? If your revolutionary moment is successful, how are you going to protect yourselves from the inevitable capitalist counter-reaction? You’ll need a military for that. Who’s going to lead it? No one? Serious questions. What are your answers.’
How old Marx and Engels would have laughed at that. Sorry to keep emphasizing the point but this guy is the very paradigm of Leftist bourgeois thinking and exposes the fact that the Left are no closer to socialist consciousness than are the Right.
‘Of course most aristocrats are now capitalists, even though some of them are still great landowners a part of whose income is ground-rent.’
‘Most aristocrats’? Again confusing since we know there are only two classes – working and capitalist. Are you saying that some live entirely off of ground rent and that this makes them a separate economic class called aristocrats?
‘We only have two choices’
MS- I think there’s a 3rd choice which is to try and understand the psychological motivation behind such perverse ideologies. As you say we have encountered similar Left/Right reactionary delusions on countless occasions. Belief in any ideology is primarily emotional and irrational and our logical approach has no impact on it. You may be correct that very occasionally a casual reader might be impressed by our coherent case but this, in my experience, is very rare. We, of course, like to believe that our socialism is entirely logical and coherent but there is much more to it than that. Comrades like Alan and yourself believe socialism to be a matter of ‘common sense’ that people can access through rational debate but I see little evidence for this. A good insight into why we believe what we believe, in terms of psychology and emotion, may help us understand why our opponents believe what they do.
‘I find debate with reactionaries pretty dreary going too, so it works both ways. I mean, Alan calls the CIA “friend”, a sentiment you no doubt all share. At any rate, no one’s forcing you to read along. on your bike then, rack off.’
This is the kind of ludicrous statement that stopped my attempting to communicate with this guy in the first place – what interests me is why comrades continue to debate with him.
Clearly TS cannot be influenced by rational debate and anything we say will not change his mind. We have to ask why he has to believe what he does. I think there are three elements symptomatic of the Leftist mindset and ideology: a) the need to identify with authoritarian structures and the power and leadership they personify, or seem to personify. b)paradoxically, a hatred of US power. c) the inability to imagine an alternative to capitalism (because it does not exist yet) alongside a desperate need to believe those who proclaim that socialism does exist somewhere. As comrades know I’ve never believed that the Left are necessarily more likely to achieve socialist consciousness than the rest of the population and TS is a great example of why.
‘delusional adherence to Stalinism’
Alan – that question is relevant and entirely within the realms of psychology – something that Reich (who you’ve already quoted) and the Frankfurt School dedicated their lives to try and understand.
‘I have no idea who you are talking about and nor do I care. You are a cowardly reactionary who snipes from the sidelines rather than engage in debate like a grown up. Sad little budgie.’
Sadly the usual mixture of ignorance and arrogance that characterizes the Left. Can you not get it in your head that no socialist is interested in your defense of a militaristic, fascistic one party state that masquerades as some kind of ‘socialism’.
‘I mere saying that I can sympathise with left-wingers when Stalinists slander Trotsky.’
Just out of curiosity Alan, why are you interested in an internecine struggle between Bolsheviks? Is it born of esoteric historical inquiry? Like the internal struggles within the Nazi Party, which were similar, they represent a kind of morbid curiosity but they have no relevance or importance for socialists.
‘Wez, I wouldn’t say TS is representative of any substantial number of leftists. He is a contrarian outlier and outright liar.’
Alan – don’t many Leftists still cling to the illusion that Russia was once ‘socialist’ and that China and Cuba still are?One good thing about the ‘TrueScotsman’ is that he reminds us just how reactionary many on the Left are and that socialists have no political common ground with them at any level.
‘Instead of being a pedantic bore, how about addressing the actual meat of my argument?’
So what is the ‘actual meat’ of your argument? That the ruling class of China is superior in some way to that of the US or European nations? I’m afraid that socialists find that kind of meaningless debate futile and boring.TS wrote: “It was the Europeans, principally the UK, France and Poland that were trying to encourage Germany and the USSR to fight it out against one another. The Soviets were aware of this and signed the non-aggression pact so that those powers would have to join the fight the Soviets knew was coming.”
This is all very ‘bourgeois’ in identifying a whole nation with it’s ruling class and it’s economic/imperialist interests. The ideologies of nationalism and religion were used to disguise the real motives for war of which, as usual, the vast majority were unaware. The idea that all ‘Europeans’ were trying to encourage Germany and the USSR to fight it out is just nonsense. Also the idea that the ‘Soviets’ still existed in Russia at that time is likewise nonsense.
TS – why should any socialist give a flying f**k about the Machiavellian tactics of Stalin or any of the other parasitic warlords of the time? The only important element is the reasons why the working class was willing and able to murder each other for no other reason than these power hungry degenerates desired it. The second world war was just a sequel to the unfinished business of the first world war which was enabled by the leftist betrayal of the second international.
