Ah, what a thing is an Australian spring! Garish blooms, chattering
parrots, chortling magpies, snogging roos, migrating turtles and a soft sun
that can caress even the jaded likes of me into flights of sensuous fancy.
Do a September in Ozzie before you die, comrades - the footy's still on and
the nasty wrigglies are still in bed.
'k'n' perfect ...
Anyway ... I think Dave is quite right. My speculative take on history is
that socialist revolutionaries are loudest and most numerous when either
life is unbearable (eg 1905-19 in Russia - mebbe the US in 1930-33) or when
the institutional setting is such as to encourage attempts to revolutionise
society from within (eg. the post-war welfare state of 1945-68). In the
former, desperation alone was enough to make up for the post-bellum
question-mark - in the latter, there was, I suspect, a belief that society
could be held together by extant institutions while the theory/praxis
dialectic produced a workable socialist society - certainly there were no
serious questions being asked about the central planning of resource
allocation yet (no-one was listening to the likes of Hayek and Mises yet,
anyway). Both are rare moments in the great scheme of things (and just
possibly parallel-computing is approaching the capacity to take care of the
technical side of planning).
We'd be silly to discount the possibility of life becoming very hard for the
western majority (it's already very hard elsewhere) in the near future (the
dangers inherent in a credit crunch in the world of today are pretty
spectacular I think), but I can't see the people I talk to throwing off
their yoke until they feel some of the dangers they associate with 'actually
existing socialisms' have receded. We do have some bad press to undo.
But still ... there have been some surprisingly big self-consciously leftish
rallies about of late ... and most 3rd Way socdems do seem to have a
legitimation crisis on their hands. That's gotta be two dynamics with which
a clever left should be able to do something, I reckon. Slow and steady
wins the race, eh?
'Nite all,
Rob.
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