> > To put it extremely bluntly: certifications are socialist. > perhaps your understanding of political history could be more developed.
Hmm, that's harsh. I would not have chosen "socialist" as the pejorative adjective. I suspect he was referring to the na�ve utopianist socialists, not the committed guerillas. Perhaps he should have said certification is a na�f utopian dream, and thus avoided dragging OT politics into this. I could argue that certifications are the opposite of the socialist creed, "from each according to his ability", but there are others who see "all workers are equal" as the ultimate in either socialism (garbage men and professors of equal value) or capitalism (laborers disposable). Not all socialists are utopian, not all utopians are socialist, but that's the way to bet. Milquetoast socialists -- as found in comfortable upper-middle-class homes -- who don't expect to have to suffer the reality of their theories are the na�ve ones he refers to. Utopianists of all political stripes are na�f, in that they think if we could all just agree, or if we were all nice people, then we'd all be nice people and we'd all agree. (Except the most-hard-line of the randites, who think if we are all self-interested it also works out nice enough. That's closer to reality, except most people aren't smart enough to think far enough ahead.) Trotsky may have understood /real politik/, and thus as you suggest not have been na�ve, but Stalin did moreso. As a result the state they founded was not a Trotskyite socialist worker's paradise; it was a Stalinist "communist" totalitarian crypto-oligarchic/facist state, socialist only in that the oligarchs had no personal title to the state owned means of production they controlled for their own benefit. Trotsky ended up dead. Does that make Trotsky na�ve? No. But his predictions of a socialist workers' paradise *sound* so in retrospect. We in the larger world typically call the ineffective utopian parlor socialists "socialists" and the effective revolutionary socialists "revolutionaries". In between, you have working politicians. This is particularly appropriate as the effective ones are of necessity less na�ve and thus less pure in their politics. If the use of "socialist" offends you, please read the prior poster's statement as "Certificates are utopian." Bill _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
