29 Jan 2024 7:39 am
(PART III)
I wrote: "...socialism's character is, at its core, international and necessarily anti-nationalistic."
Cannonpointer: "Really? Isn't socialism an ECONOMIC system that can work in an isolated environment?"
Not at all. As the Bolsheviks learned in the wake of the failure of the German Revolution in 1918, understandably hostile capitalist powers quickly descended upon newly revolutionized nations. As I see it, Stalin's clinging to the illusion that the Soviet Union could "go it alone" had more to do with foolish pride than a misunderstanding of geopolitics concerning socialist states. Stalin knew better but refused to acknowledge Dr. Marx's admonishment: "An island of socialism cannot survive in a sea of capitalism."
Cannonpointer: "Why does it take more than one tribe to make a country socialist?"
I apologize, for I don't understand what that means.
Cannonpointer: "My understanding - admittedly pedestrian, but believed nonetheless - was that the Kulaks were put upon because they did not wish to cede their properties to state-run agribusiness."
That's correct.
Cannonpointer: "It seems that you want to tear down the hierarchies that naturally and inevitably and incontrovertibly self-constitute, and give every human being an equal voice - meaning equal AUTHORITY."
First, I disagree that hierarchies are natural, inevitable, and incontrovertible. Evidence demonstrates that hierarchies are a very recent development vis-a-vis humankind's roughly 200,000 years of existence. Indeed, there have only been hierarchies within human relations since the agricultural revolution a mere 12,000 years ago. Evidence shows that human beings lived cooperatively with one another before that, with no hierarchies. Indeed, human being's once well-demonstrated ability to cooperate enabled us to survive as a species.
So, yes, I want to destroy the artificial hierarchies that enable the tiny sliver of humanity known as capitalists to hold billions of human beings in bondage while subjecting them to lifetimes filled with material uncertainty and precarity. I want to see the elimination of the hierarchical-induced artificial competition that keeps workers at one another's throats, battling for the few economic crumbs left to them by capitalists.
For their wholly self-centered reasons, the world's capitalist class' media and other organs of social control have convinced us that hierarchies are natural, inevitable, and incontrovertibly self-constituted, but it isn't so. Humans once lived cooperatively, and we're capable of doing so again.
And since we, the working class, already operate and manage the means of production, why shouldn't we have an equal say in dispensing the economic wealth our labor produces? Why shouldn't we reject the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all other contrived social pathologies that render us powerless against our capitalist masters?
(END OF PART III)
Be well
Good Day
"Harvey Mushman"