sc94597 said:
Yes, because "rebuttals" is not how science, even social science, primarily works. I am not watching 5 hours of propaganda because you can't intelligently make your own arguments. I counter your 5 hours of propaganda with you reading G.D.H Cole's fifth volume where he explains the influence of socialism on fascism, and how they differ. |
You weren't even comfortable watching an easily accessible YouTube video, but you want to recommend a book that's practically harder to find than first prints of the bible.
G.D.H Cole was the leading voice on 'Guild Socialism'--
Such a fringe off-shoot that I can't find anyone who even reviewed the particular book you mentioned.
What is seemed to boil down to is barely any different from the original concept of the soviet collective shared economy that the Soviet Union was meant to be, which was very easily co-opted by the Bulshevik's under Lenin's authoritarian cult-of-personality and quickly became a death cult.
Of course not only can socialists never actually agree on what their real socialism is, even the few voices from this fringe branch couldn't agree just how much state intervention would be necessary to actually force their goals. G.D.H Cole in particular seemed to lean towards Anarchism, problem being in a state-less economy with no one to actually tell people they all have to equally share their rights and income, why would anyone who creates the source of production want to share their profits with people who perform more basic tasks.
Of course a militia of 'workers' would then have to form and forcibly coerce production and/or land owners to bend to their idealogical goals, but for them to be co-ordinated they would naturally need a strong and charismatic leader who could actually plan and direct them, and what do you know, you've created a new authoritarian government/state with a new social heirarchy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._D._H._Cole
Although Cole admired the Soviet Union for creating a socialist economy, he rejected its dictatorial government as a model for socialist societies elsewhere. In a 1939 lecture, Cole stated:
If I do not accept Stalin's answer, it is because I am not prepared to write off Democratic Socialism, despite all its failures and vacillations of recent years, as a total loss.... Democratic Socialism offers the only means of building the new order on what is valuable and worth preserving in the civilisation of to-day.[16]
In his book Europe, Russia and the Future published in 1941, Cole claimed that however immoral the new Nazi-dominated Europe was in some ways it was better than the "impracticable" system of sovereign states that had preceded it. In economic terms, it could be said that "it would be better to let Hitler conquer all Europe short of the Soviet Union, and thereafter exploit it ruthlessly in the Nazi interest, than to go back to the pre-war order of independent Nation States with frontiers drawn so as to cut right across the natural units of production and exchange".[17] Cole also stated:
I would much sooner see the Soviet Union, even with its policy unchanged, dominant over all Europe, including Great Britain, than see an attempt to restore the pre-war States to their futile and uncreative independence and their petty economic nationalism under capitalist domination. Much better be ruled by Stalin than by the destructive and monopolistic cliques which dominate Western capitalism.[18]
Good heavens. Yet another Communist sympathiser, who themselves don't have too many ideological differences from the Nazis outside of who believed they should lead the real socialist new world order.
There's a reason those ideas were rejected by everyone with common sense when the world needed to rebuild quickly after WWII. It's because the sheer horror and loss of life under all these socialist regimes was so severe, no one who witnessed it or studied first-hand accounts would ever think it was even worth considering making that mistake again.
But these ideas were all resoundly rejected by the Free World and only embraced by the nations which would become so poor, they would eventually become known for bread lines and mass starvation/famine.
If they're so fringe that most people aren't willing to seek them out on their own, how did they somehow reach someone in the modern world...
"In 1941, Cole was appointed sub-warden of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was central to the establishment of the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey which collected a large amount of demographic, economic and social data. This information was used to advocate for an extensive programme of social reform.[2]
To no one's surprise, another cliche example of our 'higher-education' institutes paving the way for brainwashing future comrades.
Must be nice for people to put themselves into crippling debt just to pay for their own indoctrination. But at least you can feel validated enough to look down on anyone else you believe is only informed by 'propagandised YouTube videos'.
Your standard of 'rigorous process of validation' is in line with the response video I was told to watch, which again only attracts a fringe audience. But rather than actually critiquing any of Tik's points just waffles for an hour about needing more 'academically approved' or 'up-to-date scholarly sources'. He literally just repeats those same qualifiers in every single segment as if that's the only measure of intellect that has value.
I guess the only way academics can feel confident in their values is by collective re-affirmation between their close-knit delusions.
What makes you so worried to simply listen to a video and process the ideas yourself. It's not like they can hurt you.
What really takes the cake though is the idea that we can only achieve a true cultural 'freedom' through a complete libertarian socialism. Even though they also clearly have no problem with supporting state lead athoritariansim if they believe it can bring down capitalism first.
But then several socialist scholars also have to admit they need to first utilise a capitalist economy to actually build wealth, before they can suddenly reform that into an equally shared utopia where the government will just magically relenquish their grip on power without any incentive but the concept of goodwill, which somehow exists in their world without any actual moral basis. Just like how China after building it's wealth, looks more than ready to suddenly give full autonomy to it's populace and equally share rights and means of production with the people...
'Seizing the means of production' has never been about sharing it equally among the working class.
The only time in the history of mankind someone wielded that much power and actually ceded it for the goodwill of the people, was when George Washington resigned as commander-and-chief when he could've easily established a monarchy, because the Founding Fathers and early settlers were strongly aligned in their faith and vision for creating a land of freedom and opportunity.
Meanwhile the liberal and social left have systematically been pushing Western society away from those values which they forget are largely responsible for the properous world they inherited.
It's not difficult at all to see why people who align with the liberal or socialist left, can so easily fracture and radicalise as Orwell detailed. Since they only think of the revolution for selfish ideals and not the following real world consequences.
Rather than theories and concepts, I only attribute beliefs to what has actually been proven to lead people to prosperity. The freest country in the history of mankind is also the most capitalist country in the history of mankind.
Abandoning what has verifiably been the most effective model for leading poor undeveloped countries to prosperity, for a social and econcomic concept that has proven to be disasterous every time, is textbook insanity.
Of course if you don't want to bury your head in fantasy novels writtten by self-indulgent scholars who died in denial of reality:
https://mises.org/profile/erik-von-kuehnelt-leddihn
https://mises.org/mises-wire/portrait-evil-man-karl-marx
https://mises.org/mises-wire/roots-anticapitalism
https://mises.org/library/book/liberty-or-equality-challenge-our-time
― Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
