socialism then and now...

[lazs2]

ol arlo with his gushy and breathless endorsment of his hero arlo guthrie got me going on this and didn't want to spoil borodas ode to all things commie thread.

Took the girlfriend to jack london state park.. he was an author (call of the wild).  who lived in glenn ellen and had a farm/ranch/toy there..  a world traveler and builder and dabbler in farming and land conservation.  arrogant to a fault.   everyone was doing it wrong but his experiments always failed.. good thing he was fabulously wealthy.

He was an avowed socialist..  he was world renown author.. authors in those days were like movie stars are now... he was rich and used his money to travel and buy yatchs that would cost 4 million these days and play at farmer.

He was very much like our socialists today.. he worked his men hard and payed em a little better than most but... no way could they achieve parity with him on those wages.    he never got it.. like woodie guthrie.. he grew up poor and that is probly what formed his ideas but.. when he got older.. his contribution was to spend as much as he could and live as well as he could while chiding the rest of us....  like todays socialists.

arlo guthrie is just a poor clone of woody and pretty much a joke tho...

Why is it that most famous socialists all think that it is for everyone else but not for them?

lazs

[Boroda]

Just curious, what books by Jack London did you read? Try finding "People of the Abyss" (I am not sure about the title, have to translate it back to Eng).

It will explain a lot. I am sure you'll like it, it's an anthem to America compared to Old World. He studied the life of East-End London in 1903. What he wrote is absolutely stunning. Returning to my previous post I can say that what was going on in Russian Empire at the same time was much, much worse.

[storch]

jack london was an imbecile

[Excel1]

Originally posted by lazs2
Why is it that most famous socialists all think that it is for everyone else but not for them?lazs

because they are just plain old hypocrites and phoney as a $3 dollar note to boot. but they are a minority compared to the much more numerous variant of the species who share the same traits...chardonnay socialists:

link

Chardonnay socialist is the middle-class equivalent of a champagne socialist or limousine liberal. The distinction is significant - they are comfortable rather than rich, more likely to watch TV than be on it, and are much, much more numerous.
Chardonnay socialists are characterised by having wonderfully admirable left-wing ideals...which they never act on. It's about feeling good, not doing good. Causes are often comfortably remote - it's easier to sit around with a glass of Church Road talking about how awful the oppression is in East Timor than it is to help your own underprivileged ten minutes down the road.
Despite being about as useful as tits on a bull, at first look they seem basically harmless. But like anyone who chooses a credo for their own self-interest and entertainment, a chardonnay socialist's true value system may well be anything but what it appears. They are quite likely to have a case of the not-in-my-backyards: "Oh, isn't it wonderful we've accepted all those poor refugees into the country! (Just as long as they don't move into our neighbourhood)". If you're the sort of person who cares about actually getting something useful done, the idea of these people starts to look quite sinister.
An accusation of Chardonnay socialism is often a cheap shot fired by right-wingers at anyone they disagree with whose views are remotely to the left of their own. This can be moronic knee-jerk-reactionism or a more calculated move designed to play on the belief of a surprisingly large proportion of the population that anyone with an apparent concern for other people's well-being must have something in it for themselves somewhere. Either way such accusations often have no substance, although if there weren't so many Chardonnay socialists about, the people genuinely interested in doing something good would be far less likely to be tarred with the same brush of hypocrisy.
The term is widespread in New Zealand as well as Australia, but a quick Google search for chardonnay socialism seems to indicate the term is restricted to these two countries. The British would probably say trendy leftie.
There is a particularly high concentration of Chardonnay socialists in the suburb of Grey Lynn in Auckland, New Zealand.

heh.. i might move to grey lynn and give them something to really whine about

[rpm]

Why lazs, I would have thought your shoes would burst into flames setting foot on "liberal sacred ground".

[lazs2]

rpm.. nope.. I like the place a lot.   I like the lifestyle of the guy..  his lifestyle was one I would want.. his politics were far from his life style tho.

point being.. like almost all socialists who are above the age of 20... he was a total hypocrite.

boroda.. have not read that one.  I find him tedious to read.   I like the other authors of the day better... the drunks.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald and dos pasos and such.

lazs

[Boroda]

Originally posted by lazs2
boroda.. have not read that one.  I find him tedious to read.   I like the other authors of the day better... the drunks.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald and dos pasos and such.

Didn't read Dos Pasos, will dig for it - I think I have a book or two on a shelf.

Jack London is very diverse author IMHO. His Klondike stories are probably the most famous, as well as "Iron Foot" (that I failed to read) and other "socialistic" novels. OTOH his stories about Southern Seas are sometimes almost racist, I can see that even reading his works "filtered" by Soviet publishers. I have an 8-volume collected works printed in 1950s, later there was a 16-volume edition with original complete story collections.

Tedious?! Try this one: http://www.online-literature.com/london/99/ It's quite short, I think you'll like it.

What part of his lifestyle do you like? When he was begging and riding trains? Or when he was a sailor on a whaler? I bet you'd like to travel like he did on Snark

[lazs2]

boroda..  "the call of the wild" was pure plagarism.   I didn't like it much in any case..  "the iron boot" was tedious.

I have lived as a laborer and worked as hard as he did... I have also lived in relative luxury..  I prefer the latter.

I would love to have lived as he did in later life... travel all over on the snark yacht and gentleman farm without a worry in the world.. build a 15,000 square foot mansion with cheap labor and sit on one of my many sun porches in the valley of the moon writing..  

live in one of the nicest places on earth with lots of money where money meant you could do pretty much as you pleased..  in a country where it was stylish to talk about socialism but where you payed no taxes and government was small and unobtrusive.

I think if he seen what the country had become he would say that socialism was simply one more idea that he had that was not thought out very well... as failed as most of his farming methods like... planting eucalyptse trees for furniture or cactus for feed or any of a number of other grand ideas that don't work.

lazs

[Boroda]

Well I think his "socialistic" approach was a result of what he saw in England... He compared his life of a beggar in the US to British working-class, and said that any bum in the US lives better then a hard-working Londoner.

The details of his life in a "farm" are absolutely new to me, you know, here he was an icon - describing the people in the North (though in conditions not nearly as harsh as Siberia), and a "socialist" at the same time, a "working class hero". Publishing his late "bourgeous" novels like "Hearts of the three" or "Little mistress of a big house" (sorry - have to translate back to Eng again) were a small sensation here back in mid-50s.

If we come back to discussing an October Revolution - we didn't have "socialists" like London here because the problems were much worse, we didn't even have Unions here before 1917. Something had to be done. If you support all the things described in "People of the Abyss" because it was "pure capitalism" - then it's beyond my understanding. Social Darvinism is like fascism IMHO.

October Revolution brought the first State of Working Class, if you like it or not. It was one of the reasons for the changes in "capitalist countries" that happened in 1920-30s. People understood that there is an alternative to mass-murdering "capitalism".

Look, USSR never saw anything like Lena shootings, Bloody Sunday or American police "pacifying" strikes with machine-guns. Voting against Socialism now is like voting for starvation for many for the sake of bigger diamonds for the few. Western civilization moves towards socialism simply to release class tension, and even then we see riots in France 2005. It's much more complicated now, it's a knot of national and ethnic tensions added, mostly because Western regimes are "democratic"/irresponsible (as well as current regime in Russia), so some new ways should be found, and found quickly. You guys move towards the Soviet system, and you take the worst parts of it so far, while we move towards monopolistic capitalism, abandoning all good things from Soviet heritage and acquireing the worst things from the West.

I have many things to say, hope I'll not get as drunk as on Nov 7th...

[lazs2]

boroda.. someday I would love to discuss all this with you at length.  I may not express myself as well in print.

london did indeed live a life of idylic luxury.. he lived as I would have.. away from all government and as an individulist... he preached socialism but lived like he was in love with Ayn Rand.

I can think of no situation where socialism would be preferable to individualism and free will.

when we speak of alaska.. it is indeed harsh... know lots of people from there but.. they are individualists and not socialists.

lazs

[Boroda]

Originally posted by lazs2
boroda.. someday I would love to discuss all this with you at length.  I may not express myself as well in print.

Same thing here Plus I have to type in a foreign language (well i started English when i was 5 years old, but still it's too different from Russian).

Again I have to say You are an opportunist. I hoped I'll meet you when I spent 2 weeks in Bay Area a year ago, when Wolfala invited me to his wedding. Believe me, in RL I don't wave hammer and a sickle

Originally posted by lazs2
london did indeed live a life of idylic luxury.. he lived as I would have.. away from all government and as an individulist... he preached socialism but lived like he was in love with Ayn Rand.

This was completely erased from his biography in Soviet times.

Ayn Rand is a symbol of inhuman capitalism for me. Absolutely alien.

Originally posted by lazs2
I can think of no situation where socialism would be preferable to individualism and free will.

when we speak of alaska.. it is indeed harsh... know lots of people from there but.. they are individualists and not socialists.

Free will and Socialism don't contradict. Even in USSR you could place yourself in purely capitalistic relations.

Individualists have smaller chances to survive in certain conditions. Russians have a "community" as a basic social unit, it's hard to fight it. It's genetic. For us giving, not taking is a natural behavior. "Existential communism". That's why this ideas were adopted in the worst possible country

[DYNAMITE]

It amazes me how many people on these boards mistake socialism and communism.  

[Shuckins]

Socialism is Communism Lite...without the massacres.


There was nothing "almost racist" about Jack London.  He was a complete racist in every sense of the word.  Some of his less well known stories reveal attitudes about the Indians of the far north that would shock Republicans and leave Democrats catatonic.

He was a firm believer in the superiority of the white race.

[Boroda]

Originally posted by DYNAMITE
It amazes me how many people on these boards mistake socialism and communism.  

Define both terms please.

I am armed with Marxism-Leninism. They taught me that. You guys only know that "communism is bad", that's all. We were taught to understand American "democracy", as the most democratic regime available.

There was no Communism here at this planet. We are working on it (tm).

[soda72]

Originally posted by Boroda
There was no Communism here at this planet. We are working on it (tm).