Canceling Comedians While the World Burns by Ben Burgis

Canceling Comedians While the World Burns by Ben Burgis

Author:Ben Burgis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2021-02-18T00:00:00+00:00


The moral problem with the practices Serge criticizes is too obvious to need to be spelled out. The strategic issue about the probability of various possible consequences of the Bolsheviks’ decisions and their utility or disutility for achieving socialist goals require a bit more unpacking. The problem is that even if you’re willing to sign off on such methods for the sake of achieving your goal of a classless society, the methods are flatly incompatible with the goal. You can’t “temporarily” abandon the most basic civil liberties and extend democracy at the same time. When Soviet citizens started to see that being accused of counterrevolutionary sympathies was a death sentence, most of them learned not to express controversial political opinions of any kind. Mass popular participation in government or the economy—even to the extent that such participation was still allowed—was pretty quickly reduced to the status of a legal fiction. The end result of all this wasn’t the originally desired end to a division of society into a class of workers and a class of owners in favor of some sort of radically democratic alternative but the substitution of a new division of society into a class of workers and a class of party bosses and state officials who essentially filled the role vacated by the old private capitalists. By the time the various opposition movements that arose within the party during the 1920s started to push to restore some measure of democracy, it was far too late. In the 1930s, men and women who’d devoted their lives to the revolution—both former oppositionists and unlucky Stalin loyalists who had randomly come under suspicion—were being executed or sent to prison camps on absurd charges ranging from being Nazi spies to being “wreckers” working to maliciously undermine the fulfillment of the state’s economic goals. Even if later Soviet leaders were far less brutal, Stalin’s reign of terror stands as an indictment of the Soviet system for the same reason that Caligula’s reign of terror stands as an indictment of the Roman Empire. These systems created the possibility of Stalins and Caligulas by concentrating immense power at the top with no democratic accountability or constitutional restraints.

It’s important to note that when right-wing anti-communists say that “every” attempt at replacing capitalism with socialism ends this way (with the implication being that any future attempt at bringing about socialist democracy will have the same authoritarian result), they’re making a sloppy argument. The accurate thing to say is that exactly one attempt at replacing capitalism with a socialist democracy ended with authoritarianism. Subsequent transitions to communism in countries like China, Vietnam, and the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe weren’t attempts to create socialist democracy. They were self-conscious attempts to recreate what existed in the Soviet Union initiated by Communist parties whose leaders were ideologically committed to that model.

We can (and should) both walk and chew bubblegum when it comes to our retrospective evaluation of these societies. Not everything we can learn from these experiments is negative.



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