Remember all the excitement among Sanders supporters when Rogan endorsed Bernie?

[The Magistrate]

65. Indeed, Sir

There are libertarian anarchists of several stripes, but the libertarian socialist is a rare bird indeed.

The fact is most who identify with 'Bernie' are at bottom nihilists, attracted by the hope of 'burning it all down'. This is a feeling people on the leftmost tail of the political bell-curve share with people on the rightmost tail of the political bell-curve.

Socialism really is not compatible with nihilism, and it is very hard for a nihilist to be a socialist.

At bottom, Socialism is simply the view that what a society produces ought to belong to the society, and not to private parties who superintend facets of its production, and appropriate to themselves a disproportionate quantity of the society's produce. It does not, and never has, meant either autocratic state control or diveying up everything into equal shares. Nor does it require destruction of anything. In fact it seeks to take over what already exists, and direct in a different manner.

Capital, the surplus of what is produced over what its production costs, is the engine that drives new economic activity, and would do so whether it was administered by public or private means. Humans being involved, one can expect log-rolling and sharp practice in any case, but with public administration, however contrived within a democratic polity, it ought to be more difficult for a few individuals to extract value in greatly disproportionate share from society's capital.

Marxism is something different. Marxism is a particular theory of how socialism will emerge from capitalism. Marx saw this as something which would inevitably occur as industrialization reached its peaks, producing of necessity a trained and regimented work-force, who would be subjected to extreme penury owing the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands, and who would come to understand they actually controlled the mines and factories, etc., on which capitalism's profits depended. This he supposed would occur first in countries like England and Germany, France and Belgium. Nothing of the sort happened, and a variety of people enchanted by the theory, and its promise success was inevitable, set about trying to figure out ways to redeem the promise. Lenin's view was that imperial expansion was what was delaying the inevitable emergence of socialism, and he conceived further the idea that establishment of socialism by revolution might be achieved through forcing accelerated development of a backward, largely feudal society such fin de siecle Russia. At this point it should be obvious that Lenin's program had little to do with the original ground of Marxism, and as Orwell observed, 'one does not establish a dictatorship to preserve a revolution, one makes a revolution to establish a dictatorship'.

People once steeped deeply in Marxism have a hard time letting it go, and it is Sanders Marxist background inclines me firmly against him. He continued in Marxist belief well into middle age, and that to my mind indicates questionable judgement, to put it mildly. He seems to have still at that time accepted the equation of socialism with Marxism, and so have taken states established on the bastardized pseudo Marxism of Lenin and Mao as genuinely socialist states, which again calls his judgement into serious question.



"It is nonsense to suppose what benefits the greater portion of society would be injurious to its whole." (Adam Smith)