| Shaunodon said: 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. ... |
What are you attempting to achieve with this post? The scope is pretty wide and all over the place.
The original topic was about the connection between Socialism and Fascism.
G.D.H Cole's sympathies to Guild Socialism are irrelevant, because in his five volumes he covers many other ideas of socialism, some directly opposed to what he believed in. Besides Guild Socialism was probably one of the more popular currents in the Anglosphere in the 1900's-1920's.
The point of bringing up the fact that G.D.H Cole had to write five volumes, each hundreds of pages on the topic, was that -- that was necessary to cover the whole ideological breadth that fell under the "socialism" umbrella. That's why you are seeing many socialists disagree on what is "truly socialist."
But one of the main themes of the book (and others that attempt to summarize the socialist movement as well) is that what connects them all is that all socialists aim to solve the social question and answer it with the transformation toward a classless society where wage-labor is not the principle relationship of production. The Nazis (and other fascist movements) rejected the social question, instead choosing to naturalize class and promote so-called "class collaboration." It is that which makes them non-socialists as the word was mutually understood between say 1840 and today.
People who might have known me on here ten years ago, would know I was a hardcore heavily ideological anarcho-capitalist for about five years. Before then I was more aligned with mainstream Republicanism. I voted for Ron Paul in 2012, as an example. I've read plenty of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Karl Hess, etc and use to profess their views.
For example, even today I still think Rothbard said a lot right in his Confiscation and the Homestead Principle.
And of course Karl Hess' essay he was responding to is even more on-point -- Where are the Specifics of [Libertarianism]?
|
Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations. Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual. That is the property most brutally and constantly abused by state systems whether they are of the right or left. Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and as importantly secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one’s own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion. Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliché. This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom. This is proto-heroic nonsense. |
So no, I am not in some ideological bubble here. I can appreciate right-wing thinkers who at least put in the work to educate themselves, and who have excelled much beyond that. I think they're wrong and disagree with them, but their arguments are a lot better than garbage YouTube Auth-Right propaganda.
