An introduction. Where I'm coming from.
With a brief description of what I mean by capitalism and socialism. With a tip of the hat to Richard Wolff.
Before I make any commentaries, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from. I’m a descendant of French, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and English settlers who came to Quebec, Virginia, and North Carolina in the 1600s. One of my French-Canadian ancestors served in George Washington’s Continental Army. Eventually, they ended up in Texas, where some of them fought Comanches.
I’m descended from French Canadians who were among the first European-descended settlers in Arkansas. My ancestral families have been traders, farmers, Confederate draftees, Missouri Redlegs, gunrunners, Communists, doctors, and liberators of Nazi concentration camps.
I refuse to be ashamed of any of them. I think it’s foolish to judge people of the past by anything but the standards of their own time because of one does that, one can never understand history and then one will not learn from it. My ancestors were neither heroes nor villains, just people doing what they did to survive and sometimes thrive in their own times.
As a historian and a student of how and why societies change, I am an unabashed Marxist. All of history is in fact driven by the relationships between the different socioeconomic classes of any human society. I love history. As one of my history professors long ago and far away once said, “History is so rich, who needs fiction?”
There is more to history than class analysis, and a lot of it is downright entertaining, but when it comes to analysis of change I find the Marxist approach the most thorough.
Politically, I’m a socialist. By socialism, I mean the same thing the greatest living American economist, IMHO, Richard Wolff, means. He wrote a short book called Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. It’s a short book. If you really want to learn more, read it.
You’ll see me talk about capitalism a lot. Very basically, capitalism is the economic system where the only driving motive is more profits soonest. Capitalist organizations are run by very small groups of people, who determine what will be produced or what service provided or whether or not the business should even continue to exist, but its profits are in fact produced by employees, who have absolutely no say in any of the decisions that are made in a purely capitalist business.
In a socialist system, it would be the employees collectively making the decisions, and determining who the supervisors and managers, when any are needed, will be. It is literally democracy in the workplace.
Lenin and Trotsky both wanted this to happen in Russia, but it never did. Lenin himself once said that the Revolution had made a great accomplishment in transferring ownership of the means of production from private capitalists to the State, but the journey was only halfway there.
Stalin made sure the Soviet Union never got there. They never moved past state capitalism, and ultimately only a very few people were making all the decisions for hundreds of millions.
In short, socialism as I mean it has never been implemented on a national scale. The closest Americans have seen to it are worker-owned co-ops, which are most likely the first thing a newly socialist government would encourage and assist.
On social issues, I’m pretty much a social libertarian. Religiously, I am something of a Zen agnostic Norse pagan. This means I won’t talk about what I cannot demonstrate to anyone else.
On a personal note, I live with my wife and two of my stepchildren in a house in Euclid, Ohio. I love the Cleveland area and Ohio in general. I work from home now, and hopefully will be able to retire in a couple of years.
Meanwhile, from time to time I will comment on political and social happenings here. First up will be a post on the Covid pandemic and a critique on using panic to advance authoritarianism.
Thanks for reading. Good day, and good luck.
Thanks OB. Nice write up. I know squat about my family history other than that my great grandfather on my mom's side was John Philip Kohler (that 'o' needs an umlaut) who I'm named after. When the Lutheran church split into the Missouri & Wisconsin synod's, he was head of the Wisconsin and a man named Anthony Peeler headed up the Missouri. Great grand parents came to this country in the late 1800's. I'm full blooded German. Don't know much about my dad's side of the family as my parents got divorced when I was around 5 years old. My father & grandfather were both Lutheran pastors. Grandfather in Tucson for over 50 years in that role. I agree with you on socialism and Richard Wolff. Will get his book. You sound like a good friend of mine who's a major history buff. I'll share that quote about history with him. Good idea on writing a 'get to know you' post as your first. I'll do the same. Take care.
Fine writing, no less than I'd expect from you. Not that you need my approval, of course.
I truly regret dropping the F-bomb on you earlier today. That was disgusting and wrong, and I screamed at myself promptly. We could discuss possible provocation for it on another occasion, perhaps, but this wouldn't be the time for that. In any case, despite the foregoing, I would like to remain your friend... since we go back almost 40 years.
You may not believe this, but we agree on far more than that with which we disagree.
As i'm sure you know as well as I do, the terms "liberal," "progressive," and even "conservative" are constantly mutable. The term that concerns me most right now, however, is one that's considerably more recent in provenance: "illiberal." As in Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Belarus, the Philippines, and ascendant parties in Germany, France, Italy, etc. Many of which regimes are praised on Fox "News." Hel, sounded like Carlson wanted to move to Budapest. WTF???
Though we probably won't personally be around to see it, that illiberal cancer has a real chance to prosper more in the mid-21st... yes, likely encouraged by continuing corruption and outright rot in purportedly liberal governments, in which every failure amounts to an argument for illiberal authoritarianism.
But authoritarianism is just that, and nobody can pretty it up like lipstick on a pig. Say what you will about the naivete of Western liberalism... and I know there's a lot to say about that... but I'll still take it over the rhythmic jackboot marching of the opposite tendency, which against all my hopes is finding fruitful territory in our poor, confused 21st century.