. . . there were many idealistic Communists, especially in the 19th century, who turned their ideological commitment toward the ends of social justice. . . . one has to reckon with the fact that Communism had "a tendency to churn out murderous despots", and thus, you add, "deserves our scorn." Frankly, it's hard to scorn a tendency. Do we scorn Christianity because it had a tendency to launch crusades and pogroms? Islam because of its terrorists? In the case of such complex phenomena, I prefer to hold invididuals accountable for their own actions and beliefs, thus preserving a sense of the ways in which controversial ideas can produce different outcomes in different situations.For 150 years Marxists envisioned an ideal of peace, prosperity, and equality. However, it was based on economic and historical premises which have proved to create the opposite type of society from what most of its adherents intended. Fascism was never a social-justice movement at all - in fact, it was deeply reactionary, drawing its power from nostalgia for an imagined era of ethnic vigor.
Yes, I know the official title of the Nazi party was the National Socialist Party, and that they intended to reach their goal of "Aryan" hegemony via state socialism. I have believed for many years that entrepreneurial capitalism within a democratic republic (with equal safeguards for all individuals against state power and mob rule) is a much better petri dish for the equality and prosperity the Marxists dreamed of than the governments they eventually produced once they gained power. But along with David, I want to place the majority of social activists in a context that respects their genuine achievements and doesn't expect them to have perfect hindsight.
Although the abuses of Stalin were known by the beginning of WWII (thanks to Orwell and a few others), the evidence of totalitarian abuses and questioning of the sytem that perpetrated them (in spite of its ideals of prosperity and freedom) accumulated slowly through the 50s and 60s, and was met with the same resistance as any challenge to an existing orthodoxy. I remember being a teenage libertarian in the late 60s. Nobody was a libertarian but a few science-fiction fans, Objectivists, and campus refugees from YAF (who didn't like their positions on drugs and sex) and SDS (who didn't like their positions on economic freedom). There was no Libertarian political party trying to participate as a mature organization in electoral politics. Keynesian economics still reigned in Washington. Milton Friedman was just beginning to be taken seriously by popular culture. Solzhenitsyn had recently been published in English.
In the absence of political and economic analyses that would enable them to think about social problems in a different way, and then later the reluctance to throw over their entire world-view for a radically different one, activists could only imagine the achievement of their goals of freedom and equality in Marxist terms, so they needed to explain away Stalinism (and Maoism, and Pol Pot-ism, and others) in a way that wouldn't undermine Marxism. The numerous biographies of prominent activists, writers, musicians, etc. of the last 50 years which contain statements like "dabbled in Communism before moving on to. . . " or "was a member of the Communist Party in his youth before breaking with the movement over . . . " or "was a life-long socialist, but disavowed Communism after such-and-such traumatic experience," not to mention the rise of the New Left, testifies to the lameness of those explanations.
Even in the absence of an alternative vision, totalitarianism struck a wrong note with too many people. Eventually too much had to be explained away, and the free market critique of socialism permeated popular culture sufficiently that those holding those views were no longer considered kooks. The growing unease with A.N.S.W.E.R. (which has reached such liberal mainstays as NPR's Fresh Air, Salon, and the NYTimes) reflects the fact that in the US at least, Marxism isn't cool anymore. The feminist and civil rights movements in America were enormously successful because - although the media likes to make a big deal out of colorful exceptions - the mainstream leadership of these movements explicitly rejected a Marxist infrastructure or analysis.
But I've been talking about America. David points out that the critique of Marxism hasn't penetrated inside the Continent to the same extent it has here:
there are many on the Continent who "no longer wear the badge of Communism" but are still suspicious of those who refuse to recognize the distinction between Stalinism and Western European communism.(I guess most Americans would wonder what the difference is, or argue that any supposedly "liberal" communism is going to lead invariably to totalitarian abuses.)
"No Blood For Oil" reflects the transition of Marxist analytical thought from intellectual paradigm to common sense throughout much of Europe. . . . one will not find oneself alone on either the left, the right or the center if one identifies the search for wealth as the foundation of foreign policy, especially American foreign policy. In contrast, Americans think of foreign policy in terms of security and ideology. It is this divide, no less than the one between multilateralists and unilateralists, that has prevented the Western democracies from coming together to bring justice to Saddam Hussein.This suggests to me that many Europeans still imagine there is some essential difference between the Communisms which have failed so far, and the shining ideal Communism that we haven't tried yet, and this may indeed be a significant factor in the current divide over forcing regime change in Iraq.
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