Quote of The Day
Sep. 28th, 2014 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebris"The dumbest thing Marx ever did was fall for that "withering away of the state" business. Whether the state is "bourgeois" or "proletarian" or "cooperative" or "corporatist" or what have you, there is not the slightest reason for thinking that the state, as such, will come to an end. There is no reason at all for thinking that complex human societies can forgo politics, governmental organization, planning, the rule of law, coercive enforcement of the rule of law, the paternalistic socialization of children and the ongoing, organized defense of the realm against violent threats from potential predators. There is no reason at all to think that the many interlocking institutions in such a society can make everything work through "self-organization" or "emergent" patterns of pure voluntariness and spontaneous cooperation.
There is no millennial salvation coming at the "end of history". There will be no end of history.
You know why the left goes absolutely nowhere and has been crushed by the forces of private capital power for over a half-century? Because it is largely composed of nitwit fantasists, dreamy melancholics drowning in barbarous and muddy ideological theorization, and thumb-sucking fools who are in deep, deep, deep denial about human history, human nature, and human social life.
People want a more just and equal world? Then they are going to have to fight for such a world, struggle to build it, think hard and in a concrete analytic fashion about how to organize it, put those organizational plans in place though the messy gringing work of politics and the coercive mechanisms of an organized legal system, and then struggle to keep it from falling apart.
And the struggle will be endless, because human beings are an erratic mess, with abundant proclivities toward aggression, violence, irrationality, selfishness, delusion, laziness, fanaticism and hysteria. Decent human society comes from keeping all of these things in check via a well-thought out system of governance, not from attempts to eradicate them.
Society is hard work because human beings are just a species of wild animal with the special ability to domesticate and tame themselves. There is no race of pure and sinless angels waiting to emerge once all of the fascism, statism, or meanyism is scraped away." ~Dan Kervick
There is no millennial salvation coming at the "end of history". There will be no end of history.
You know why the left goes absolutely nowhere and has been crushed by the forces of private capital power for over a half-century? Because it is largely composed of nitwit fantasists, dreamy melancholics drowning in barbarous and muddy ideological theorization, and thumb-sucking fools who are in deep, deep, deep denial about human history, human nature, and human social life.
People want a more just and equal world? Then they are going to have to fight for such a world, struggle to build it, think hard and in a concrete analytic fashion about how to organize it, put those organizational plans in place though the messy gringing work of politics and the coercive mechanisms of an organized legal system, and then struggle to keep it from falling apart.
And the struggle will be endless, because human beings are an erratic mess, with abundant proclivities toward aggression, violence, irrationality, selfishness, delusion, laziness, fanaticism and hysteria. Decent human society comes from keeping all of these things in check via a well-thought out system of governance, not from attempts to eradicate them.
Society is hard work because human beings are just a species of wild animal with the special ability to domesticate and tame themselves. There is no race of pure and sinless angels waiting to emerge once all of the fascism, statism, or meanyism is scraped away." ~Dan Kervick
