promethean75 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 4:41 pm
The people do not wish to have socialism imposed on them cuz that's when it backfires.
It's the only way it's ever happened.
Some group of people, fancying themselves as the "elite," in the sense of behing more sincere, more moral and more compassionate than everybody else, overthrows the existing order in the name of the common man. They take it on themselves to speak on behalf of everybody else, and force their Socialism on the majority in the name of compassion and the common person. You see this in every case: the Socialists declare themselves the ones who have the common man's interests at heart, and all the objectors are not real citizens...they're "deplorables." They're "fascists." They're "racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, transphobes, fat phobes," etc., etc. They're yokels from "flyover country." They're nobody, in the Socialist scheme.
So then the Socialists proceed to kill the common man. After all, he's either a "counterrevolutionary," if he doesn't agree with Socialism, or he's a traitor for being "secretly insufficiently committed to the revolution," even if he does.
The common man is immensely useful to Socialism, even after the revolution. You see, Socialism requires the permanent presence of an adversary, an "oppressor" or a "counterrevolutionary force" of some kind. That's because it's utterly lousy in any positive role. It can't make money, it has no particular concept of justice, it can't justify its own program, it has no fixed moral orientation, it has no achievable goals, and only a perpetually-deferred utopia to offer in the place of any real meaning or purpose. Like so many bad ideas, it only seems to work when it is operating purely in the negative, as an oppositional force to something somebody's already achieved or arranged. It's criticism without constructive power. It has some good things to say about what's wrong with everybody else; but in itself, it's really awful at getting anything done. So it never really wants to win
completely...at least not in such a way that there are no enemies left from which its bitterness, anger, envy and resentment can draw their power and keep Socialism itself relevant.
It always fails to deliver. This requires it always to have a story about how
somebody else is cheating us all out of our heaven-on-earth...the bourgeoisie, the nationalists, big business, the capitalists, conservatives, the colonialists, the patriarchy, the whites, the sexually normal, the healthy and beautiful, the able-bodied, the traditionalists, the Christians, the educated, the right-wingers, the American imperialists, and so on and so on -- and if nothing else is left, the "fifth column" of Socialism's own allies and supporters, who can always be turned to the useful purpose of being declared unstated enemies, and can be sent off to the gulags when everybody else is gone.