Speaking seriously, the internal critique of socialism most often came from the left. Like any religious reform movement, the most dangerous enemies of socialism were not its ideological opponents, but young people who took the sacred texts seriously and tried to live by them
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The opponents of socialism point to the empirical evidence that socializing the means of production quickly leads to the end of political pluralism, and from there to tyranny. This lesson was demonstrated as early as 1921, four years after the Revolutionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion …
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The problem with having arguments about this with the American left is that 'socialism' now covers everything to the left of the status quo of monopoly capitalism with a crumbling public sector. It is tempting to just wave the red flag and say "sure, whatever," to the comrades
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But if you're really intellectually interested in workers' rights and why we can't have collectives and public ownership at the national level, just know that there's a pretty intellectually rigorous critique of socialism from the left, that argues this point about pluralism
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If you are interested in transforming the relationship between the individual and the state in the direction of justice, and other people tried this but no one in history ever got it right, then study why they never got it right! It probably wasn't because you weren't around then
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We so often talk past each other because one side argues about socialism as a means of organizing the economy, while the other side sees it as a system of power, in the name of the greater good. So we get: "Socialism in X devolved into tyranny" "Because it wasn't real socialism"
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Anyway sorry about Bernie
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If anyone wants to seriously engage with this stuff, beyond six tweets from a jerkass bookmarking site, I highly recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leszek_Ko%C5%82akowski …, or more approachably, whatever is available in English by Adam Michnik
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Debating socialism on Twitter is like playing a chess game where the opponent eats your pieces, and then boasts that they are undefeated
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Replying to @Pinboard
I don’t feel like either of us were fighting about anything
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I was not subtweeting you
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