That's one way of dealing with the nasty problem that the real world socialist have ranged from bloody tyrants and world-historical mass murderers to psychopathic torturers and thugs: stipulate by definition that it ain't us. Not what we mean by socialist. Make the bad things go away by definitional fiat. It doesn't persuade anyone outside the charmed circle of believers, but it makes you feel better.
If you can do that, I can do the same thing with liberalism. That's my point. Robert McNamara and Jimmy Carter ain't us. Billary certainly ain't us and don't claim to be, in fact deny that they are us.
You can't have it both ways. If you say, liberalism brought us the first cold war, loyalty oaths, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, etc., I'll say, gulag, collectivization, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution.
I wish for once that people would read. I have short, two or three line definitions of my concepts of political and philosophical liberalism. They are not very complex or hard to understand. They do not commit me to capitalism, imperialism, or the baggage of liberalism as the left as understood it. Or the as the right understands it either, for that matter. They are also real world, not ideal constructs. They are old notions with length pedigrees. They actually exist to a greater or lesser degree in the real world -- more than some people's ideals (mine too) of socialism!
And, here's further point and a challenge: no one here or elsewhere has come up with a credible alternative to liberalism as I define it. Rakesh moans that liberalism qua promotion of individual autonomy promotes anomie. But when I say, what do you suggest, repression? He says, no, that's not what I suggest either. Ted gives us a lot of highfalutin stuff about Kant and Aristotle, none of which seems to connect with practical realization of a policy in an institutional context. Mike starts to babble about seatbelt laws like some sort of right wingnut libertarian, as if that had to do with anything. (Actually, bitching that the state has no right to make us wear seatbelts is very much a certain kind of autonomy first liberal reaction.)
I have said it before: practically all of you are liberals. Maybe not Charles, insofar as he thinks the Soviets had it pretty much right, maybe not Yoshie, insofar as she thinks the Iranians do. But the rest if you are liberals whether you like it or not. They is no real alternative. Or if there is, it hasn't been expressed. That isn't a local list problem. No one on the left has a credible alternative.
--- dredmond at efn.org wrote:
> On Mon, September 24, 2007 11:35 pm, andie
> nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > It is no more peculiar to insist on this way of
> > talking that to say, for example, that socialism
> means not what
> > actual real world socialists have mainly done when
> they have gotten
> > into power (massacred real and imagined
> opposition, imposed
> > one-party dictatorships and idiotic censorship,
> choked the economy
> > with a command style central planning, etc)
>
> Nice try, but no cigar. There have never been "real
> world socialists" in
> the periphery. The USSR, China, Vietnam - all
> autarkic
> peasant-developmental states, where the
> one-party-state was (or still is)
> accumulator-in-chief. Capitalisms without capital,
> as Heiner Mueller put
> it pithily.
>
> I seem to recall a little thing called 300 years of
> liberal-era
> colonialism as having something to do with that lack
> of capital.
>
> -- DRR
>
> ___________________________________
>
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