The heart of a leftist/Last time

[Brad De Long]

>Attacks on those who have been called Stalinists (which in America 
>have been the same as attacks on not only the CPers but also anyone 
>who doesn't denounce the Soviet Union & the Communist Party 
>ritualistically) have narrowed the limits of acceptable political 
>discourse considerably (this is the point that Ellen Schrecker, 
>among others, has made), to the extent that your view (despite 
>enthusiasm for the ACLU and all that), too, is not acceptable in an 
>American philosophy department, for you have never dismissed Marx 
>and Marxism altogether as the *discursive origin* of the show 
>trials, etc., which is the ultimate litmus test of the official 
>anti-Stalinism in America.

I would have said that the essence of Stalinism is the claim that the 
absence of freedom of speech, freedom to move, freedom to organize 
political parties, freedom to organize unions, and so forth *didn't* 
*matter* *much* because Stalin's regime had the *only* thing 
necessary for Utopia: state ownership of the means of production.

And I think it is fair to say that this mode of thought is deeply 
rooted in the writings of Karl Marx, who spent so much time 
denouncing private ownership of the means of production as a blocker 
of human liberty and so little time detailing just how and in just 
what dimensions Communism was supposed to make people more free.

Brad DeLong