Archive for February 22nd, 2010
There’s probably a peanut in there somewhere…
I’m trying to work up interest for my current book It Didn’t Happen Here, an analysis of the failures of American Socialism. It’s got all the hallmarks of “doctoral thesis turned to book”, and you may have guessed that that doesn’t translate to “gripping prose style”. Thing is, I have a very hard time just scanning: usually once I crack the cover on a book I tend to go all the way through.
But I think I know the answer to this already: Marxism, while providing a compelling analysis of societies where capital is aligned with fixed class structures, it has not proved to be a useful predictive tool in any meaningful sense. It combines the rationalism of the enlightenment with the mechanistic world view of the nineteenth, and as such has a hard time imagining situations where groups of people act in irrational ways. For example: the church in Europe has been for the most part an agent of class conservatism, even after the reformation. In the US, religious vitality has more often than not been the result of class resentment and anti-authoritarianism. Thus it was much easier to organize a proletariat in Europe by attacking organized religion.
So perhaps the question shouldn’t be why didn’t Socialism succeed in America, but rather why should we expect it to? In any event, unless something unexpected interrupts the assertion-proof-citation-conclusion cycle, I may have to make an exception and just move along to another volume.
Tags: books, daily photo, politics