Mytheos Holt: Your column “Tear Down this Wallerstein!” (witty, I’ll give you that) is just as ideologically driven, and therefore flawed, as the “radical leftist” theorists you criticize.
Let me try to squeeze your argument down: socialism and communism are bad because they are systems of social repression that enslave (see Stalin, Mao, Che and Chavez), whereas capitalism is unbelievably great because it looks past social repression in the name of higher profits.
First, capitalism also enslaves people. I’m not sure if you’ve read your history books, but slavery has been a part of the world for pretty much all of human history. It is not unique to “leftist social theories.” Rather, perhaps the harshest form of slavery, blacks in the Americas, was a product of capitalism.
In Brazil, for instance, despite massive importation of black slaves, the black population never grew because the death rate was so high. But you don’t need me to lecture you on the state of nonwhites in the Americas or the United States; you’ve clearly read all of your social theorists on Wikipedia since you have an overwhelming propensity to name-drop them in your articles.
Second, I’m not convinced that Stalin, Mao, Che or Chavez are “full-scale” socialists, whatever that means, or that their governments’ actions are at all unique to socialist/communist ideologies. Believe it or not, your intellectual heirs (I assume Hayek, von Mises, Buckley, Jr.) are trying to achieve the same goal as the leftists you mention: maximized human freedom. If you have stopped to read these leftists, I’m not convinced that you have given them more than a cursory glance; or perhaps you had them synthesized by a fellow ideologue. You should realize that at least Mao, Che and Chavez are trying to achieve this as well. I’m not going to defend Stalin’s Gulags, but I think you need to get beyond them if you want to have a legitimate discussion about the merits of socialism or communism.
It is certainly reasonable for you to have an informed debate about how to maximize human freedom and create democracy, but you haven’t gotten there yet.
For instance, you might think about the ways in which the vanguard is supposed to interact with the masses and how Che’s ideas differ from Mao’s and Wallerstein’s in this respect. I might add that I think many of the left-leaning students on this campus do not do this either because they simply decry other opinions as ignorant. (Aviva Tevah’s recent Wespeak about Ed Klein’s use of gendered language is an excellent example).
Finally, you take this free market idea way to far. For starters, capitalism is a system in which full employment mandates unemployment. That is, when we say the economy is running at full employment we mean that the unemployment rate is hovering at around 3 percent. Given that capitalism is an inherently exclusive system, I find it hard to believe that it can “crush every last trace of prejudice.” Not even Hayek went this far; he just said it was the best approach to maximize freedom in society, not that all prejudice would magically disappear.
The point of all of this is simply to tell you that I think you should think about how your ideology (I’ll call it neo-liberal) interacts with the reality of the world. The truth is that the world we live in, at least in the United States, is much closer to free-market than socialist, and we have a lot of problems. If you need an example, read about New Orleans post-Katrina, urban and rural poverty, massive food shortages in food banks across the country or health care costs. The truth of the matter is that some countries that are “socialist” have better tactics to fight these problems than we do, and we have some better tactics than they do. Don’t let your ideology blind you from finding creative and innovative solutions to real social problems.
I’d welcome a response from you about these issues as long as it is considerably more informed and thoughtful than your current article.
Leave a Reply