> Talk about socialism will occur, willy-nilly. No one either could or
> wants to "forbid" it. We are talking abut it now. I just won't talk
> aboaut it myself except as a process that emerged 210 years ago with
> theexecution of Baboeuf (sp?) and will go on for quite a while.
This is all well said. I think we've uncovered that this dispute comes down to different views of history. To me it's clear that you can't pose an opposition between "history" and "people's choices." History is made up of people's choices. I don't see how that can be disputed. Of course, it's true that history is a *complex system* of people's choices, so that it's impossible to draw a straight line between some number of individual choices and some great historical outcome. But that's just because the line isn't straight. It is a line, though.
I think the view of history you espouse is an attempt to deny a stubborn fact: that history is entirely mediated through people's subjective states of mind: Things happen. Then people react *subjectively*. Then people react in action (on the basis of those subjective mental processes.) Repeat. There is no other form of history.
I also think Marx and Hegel, in formulating this view of history - and here I'm relying on Leszek Kolokowski - were addressing themselves to an ancient philosophical problem, which is the contingency, hence imperfection, of Man faced with the necessity, hence perfection, of God. (Kolakowski begins Main Currents of Marxism with a long chapter tracing the history of the dialectic from Plotinus through Eckhart to Hegel.) By removing the imperfect and fallible subjective element from history, Marx thought he could (in a manner of speaking) deify man.
That's why Kolakowski closed Vol. 3 with this bitter humor, only a few years after he ceased to be one of the most renowned living Marxist philosophers: "The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage." Much later he called himself simultaneously a liberal, a conservative, and a socialist, though I think he ended up well to the right of me.
SA