The Glade 4.0

One kid asked me about Che Guevara because his uncle has a poster of him. (Sorry Elmo you are probably cringing at this, but i feel the same way) I told him first he was a doctor and a writer, but then of course I told him about his support and being a key figure in the Cuban Revolutionaries movement and being a guerilla. I also told him on his views about capitalism and his hatred of it. Very basic stuff about him. Then that got me thinking, so i started to look up more about Marxism and more about socialism. I know most of you can scold me later anyway, can someone send me a "socialism for dummies" guide or link because when I went to wikipedia and found 16 different types of it I was like Woah! I mean there is every type you can possible think of. I was schocked to see a "Libertarian Socialism." Now to me, I must be missing something, but those words do not go together for me. I don't have a lot of time to read about them because of the school day, but I am genuinely curious about them. I get the Marxist Socialism and communism, I focus on those in class, but what is green socialism and guild socialism?

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"None is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people safe as they are the
ultimate guardians of their own liberty."- Thomas Jefferson

"Yeah, I'm rehearsing my poker face. I don't handle stupid well. *sigh*" - Farsky

Subsets that elevate some particular "group" or "activity" to a higher importance, or the sole importance in the notion of collectivism.

For example, a large portion of the traditional, nuclear and extended families in the US practice what could be framed as a form of socialism... I'm sure there is a name for it, but I don't know.

<WoW Joke>
Guild Socialism is when everyone deposits their tradeskill mats in the guild bank, and whenever someone needs something crafted, he can just pull the mats out of the guild bank to make it.
</WoW Joke>

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The green party is a good view of green socialism. Everyone should unite in society and put mother earth first in their considerations. Its called the watermelon party because they are green on the outside and red (as in commies) on the inside.

Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron - I've talked extensively with people who claim to be this but their views are anything but libertarian (when it comes to recognizing rights they don't like of course). I think they put the word on there because at their core they understand socialism itself is simply unworkable and for some reason putting a word in front of it that is at odds with the core ideas somehow redeems socialism.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I've run into one or two "libertarian socialists" too, and Elmo is correct. It's a wildly incoherent viewpoint in which the government should heavily regulate everything except personal freedoms. It essentially comes down to wanting to have it both ways, and contains a heavy undertone of "you can have all the rights you want as long as you don't use them to your own advantage."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What it is, is Fabian Socialists who have come to understand, in part atleast, that Socialism is unworkable economically because it incentivizes the wrong things. It then bastardizes both ideas by instituting "libertarian" reforms of socialist programs. It is, by and large, the group of ideas espoused by the Libertarian Party.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

The meaning of socialisim has been changed over time. The book "Liberal Fascists" might be helpful. So would the "Road to Serfdom." Having a quick and dirty description won't be sufficent. A few paragraphs will only be confusing I think.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I think of it like Christianity, while the fundamental belief is in the same god, the rest is somewhat lost in translation.

If you read that, I highly recommend you read some critiques of it too. The author, Jonah Goldberg, is a polemicist with an agenda, not a scholarly historian or political scientist who at least aspires to honest analysis. There's a fad in conservative circles these days to pretend that "the Left" and "collectivism" are synonymous, so that collectivist ideologies traditionally associated with the Right (e.g. Fascism, Nazism, etc.) can be disowned by conservatives/rightists and blamed on liberals/leftists. Goldberg was just capitalizing on that to sell some books.

You mean "collectivist ideologies [falsely] associated" with the right. You seriously need to stop being dishonest with your history, because it's doing you a great disservice and destroying your credibility.

Socialism is not on the "right".

Fascism is not on the "right".

And if you want to argue that either are, then I fully expect a dissertation length explanation of the Maoist Regime and Stalinist Russia as "conservative" governments.

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Nationalism, particularly when married to authoritarianism and militarism, is a creature of the right, and militant/authoritarian nationalism was the dominant feature of both Fascism and Nazism. State management of the economy (esp. in the Communist sense of doing it for the people) was not the raison d'etre for those systems; nationalistic pride and territorial expansion were.

Again, you either need bone up on your history or silence yourself, because you basically just called post World War II Europe the most conservative place on the planet. Your ignorance of nationalism, politics, and hegemony is astounding, mostly because you had a better understanding of historical reality before Law School.

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And your reading skills seem to have suffered, Khross. I did not say Fascism and Nazism were conservative. I said they were on the Right. Big difference. So your references to conservative governments is a red herring.

Except, they aren't on the right. Or, your implication in your first post is disingenous?I mean, it's your conflation I'm working with here ... try not to be so careless when trying to out "logic" me.

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Oh, let's play a game. Arms and legs are features of a human, therefore anything with arms and legs must be a human. Even if you believe nationalism, authoritianism, or militarism are products of the right - which I don't necessarily buy - it doesn't mean that it can't also be a product of the left. Nazi is actually a combination of the German words for National Socialism. Are you trying to tell me that the Nazi's didn't understand they were really right-wingers when they used the term socialist about themselves?

They weren't right-wingers. They were for expansive government. They were for massive social and societal change, to the point of exacting both by force. And they certainly weren't for preserving established traditions or social orders. Nor, for that matter, were the Fascists. And this taxonomic difficulty arises from a need in the 1960s to divorce words of lasting meaning. For the most part, we can trace this particular problem back to the academic bastardization of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi Strauss that's been going on for the better part of a century. The misprision of structuralism and hegemonic materialism is astounding.

The Classical Liberal is conservative in the contemporary world. Small government, expansive personal liberty, and high levels of freedom are anathema to actual political acts of the contemporary liberal. And that's almost entirely an issue born of linguistic revisionism.

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I think you're misinterpreting that statement Khross. It was meant for RangerDave. I was being sarcastic about the fact they described themselves as socialist yet we need to slap a right-wing label on them.

I kind of figured that, so I was clarifying for the general readership at large.

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Fair enough Khross.

Again, I suggest you read more carefully, Khross. My point seems quite clear, but if you're honestly missing it, I'll clarify. Conservatism, Fascism, and Nazism are all traditionally viewed as being on the Right of the political spectrum. That association makes contemporary conservatives uncomfortable, so they want to convince people that Fascism and Nazism are actually on the Left, thus transferring the guilt-by-association to liberals. To do this, they are trying to argue that collectivism, and collectivism alone, is the key factor in categorizing an ideology as Left or Right. In their formulation, any ideology that embraces collectivism is automatically on the Left, regardless of the reasons for the collectivism, the form it takes, or whatever other features the ideology in question may have. That is a ridiculous (and revisionist) oversimplification. With regards to Nazism and Fascism in particular, it completely ignores the fact that militant nationalism was the actual core organizing principle of both, which is vastly different than, and indeed totally contrary to, the internationalist, economic "justice" principles underlying Leftist ideologies.

That's exactly the game that Goldberg is playing, Ienan. He's arguing (as other conservatives have been) that collectivism is a feature of Leftist ideologies like Communism and Socialism, therefore any ideology that involves collectivism must be Leftist.



By that logic, North Korea is a democratic republic.

Anyway, you know what, I don't want to do this. We've had this argument before, and it's derailing Oonagh's thread, so I'm going to bow out.

Actually, this would seem to be spot on for Oonagh. She professed to genuine curiosity on the subject.

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I've argued for a long time that all collectivism is leftist in nature, and for a long time leftists agreed.

That is until both communism and fascism became very very unpopular political ideals in Europe and the creation of the political spectrum as RD and many others are likely familiar with came about explicitly to associate fascism with the right so as to not bunch socialism up with majorly disliked ideologies.

Of course this was easy for the leftists to sell because the ideas of progressives to split the ideals of rights into two formats social and economic had already been swallowed and digested by this time.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Really? So, you're post is a glorified appeal to tradition that ignores the actual facts of the situation? Are you familiar with the Nazi platform? Have you read the Political Manifesto of the Italian Fascist Party? Did you research what Franco's government did with regard to policy and social engineering in Spain?No, we don't transfer the guilt by association to anyone. We simply refuse to accept revisionist history as either traditional or fact. Again, your argument, per your own words, is that militant nationalism makes these things Right Wing. If that is the case, then Europe is a Right Wing Continent by your own definition. The era of militant European nationalism never ended. National identity, xenophobia, and all sorts of things anathema to your politics play out every day on the Old Continent. People still get lynched at Soccer Games.Except, I very briefly disproved this statement. Have you ever read Goldberg's book? Did you bother to even look at this bibliography, which includes more academic sources and peer reviewed literature than your average academic political science treatise these days? He did his homework. You may not like his conclusions or his political leanings, but you're speaking of ignorance on his text and from an already debunked version of history.

Again, what part of expansive government is even traditionally conservative?
What part of government control of both the means and manner of production is traditionally conservative?
What part of enacting social change (no matter how abhorrent it actually was) by government force is traditionally conservative?
What part of universal suffrage is traditionally conservative?
What part of social security and social pensions are traditionally conservative?
Except, all of the governments in questions actually tried to implement economic justice principles. And they campaigned and acted on platforms that mirror the very "internationalist, economic justice principles" you continually espouse as "core" Leftist ideologies. You simply haven't been taught or bothered to read enough history to see what happened behind the "atrocities". And even then, you seem to be forgetting that Europe spent the better part of the 18th and 19th centuries fighting wars of nationalistic identity; and that trend still isn't over on the individual and social front.

So, no, my position is neither reductivist nor revisionist. Quite the contrary: you're repeating the socially convenient pablum that legitimates your political position and demonizes your enemies without actually bothering to learn what you're discussing.

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