But also this is why history is so important - I can tell who is familiar with history and who isn’t based on their political beliefs. It boggles my mind that I still regularly encounter people who call themselves socialist and they espouse utopian socialist ideals but they aren’t even aware of political philosophy enough to call it that and I can ask them what happened to the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon and Robert Owen but they’ll just blink and stare like I’m speaking a completely different language. But I’m like “Ah! You’re at an early-19th century level of political development and you haven’t even done the reading on this movement yet.”
Or they’ll talk about reformism and you can ask them whatever happened to the Fabian Society in the UK and what lessons we can learn from Allende, and Arbenz (or Sankara, Machel, Bishop etc.) and they won’t have any answers because they’ve never really looked into the thing they’re touting as the solution to all of our problems.
Or they’ll talk about co-ops, which is a terrible thing to do around me because I will ask them for a good example of a co-op. Of course the answer is Mondragon and—without even getting into matters of self-exploitation or trade union consciousness or how this model (arguably) economically hamstrung socialist Yugoslavia and the Spanish Republic during the Spanish civil war and how the Soviets resolved these problems when they emerged in their own country by the dissolution of the worker’s councils—this is when I talk about how Mondragon was founded under the fascist Franco, how it flourished under Franco, and how Franco held it up as the exemplar for the new fascist economic model for Spain and how this also dovetails perfectly into the Italian fascist economic push towards a self-sufficient and corporatist economy.
Usually the best response I get is some cheap complaint about “guilt by association”, despite the fact that I’m not saying “co-ops are bad because Franco liked them and Franco is bad therefore co-ops are bad”.
Of course, they never know about the autogestión movement in Argentina that kicked off at the turn of this century and look how far that movement has come over the course of a quarter century - they have an ancap president who will unleash his state-sactioned, state-funded thugs on you if you dare to protest in the street. I haven’t kept up with the news on worker co-ops in Argentina but I can only assume that no news is bad news, in this case, and I really can’t imagine that workers occupying businesses owned by other people would be tolerated for a single moment under Milei’s regime. Maybe the movement is still clinging on to life in the margins but if so this just illustrates the ineffectual nature of a political program that amounts to establishing worker co-ops and nothing beyond that.
Che learned the lessons that history taught him and he spread this to others in Cuba and beyond. Castro tried to spread these lessons to Allende, and I’d argue that the gilded AK he gave Allende as a gift (which Allende would eventually use on himself as the presidential palace was being stormed by forces under the command of Pinochet) was at least as much of a symbolic warning as it was a present. Castro urged Allende to take the threat of a coup seriously but Allende didn’t listen and, maybe this is me armchair quarterbacking history here which I should know better than to do but, I feel like if Allende spent more time learning about Guatemala he might have taken a different course of action himself.
This is why history is so damn important; the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles etc. etc. but if we aren’t studying history then we aren’t learning what worked and what didn’t from past attempts and so we won’t be able to be effective in the class struggle that we are facing right now.
Often I feel like these socialists and leftists who have a foot in both worlds are the worst type of people to try to agitate/educate/organise because they are so deeply idealistic and you can tell that they arrived at their current political position because socialism seemed pretty cool and, like, what about if we all just agree to get along y’know?
I can lead that horse to water, I can drown the fucken thing, and yet it will still bob it’s head up and be like “But if we elected a socialist president then that would prove that we don’t need a vanguard!!”
Yeah, it’s pretty wild.
But also this is why history is so important - I can tell who is familiar with history and who isn’t based on their political beliefs. It boggles my mind that I still regularly encounter people who call themselves socialist and they espouse utopian socialist ideals but they aren’t even aware of political philosophy enough to call it that and I can ask them what happened to the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon and Robert Owen but they’ll just blink and stare like I’m speaking a completely different language. But I’m like “Ah! You’re at an early-19th century level of political development and you haven’t even done the reading on this movement yet.”
Or they’ll talk about reformism and you can ask them whatever happened to the Fabian Society in the UK and what lessons we can learn from Allende, and Arbenz (or Sankara, Machel, Bishop etc.) and they won’t have any answers because they’ve never really looked into the thing they’re touting as the solution to all of our problems.
Or they’ll talk about co-ops, which is a terrible thing to do around me because I will ask them for a good example of a co-op. Of course the answer is Mondragon and—without even getting into matters of self-exploitation or trade union consciousness or how this model (arguably) economically hamstrung socialist Yugoslavia and the Spanish Republic during the Spanish civil war and how the Soviets resolved these problems when they emerged in their own country by the dissolution of the worker’s councils—this is when I talk about how Mondragon was founded under the fascist Franco, how it flourished under Franco, and how Franco held it up as the exemplar for the new fascist economic model for Spain and how this also dovetails perfectly into the Italian fascist economic push towards a self-sufficient and corporatist economy.
Usually the best response I get is some cheap complaint about “guilt by association”, despite the fact that I’m not saying “co-ops are bad because Franco liked them and Franco is bad therefore co-ops are bad”.
Of course, they never know about the autogestión movement in Argentina that kicked off at the turn of this century and look how far that movement has come over the course of a quarter century - they have an ancap president who will unleash his state-sactioned, state-funded thugs on you if you dare to protest in the street. I haven’t kept up with the news on worker co-ops in Argentina but I can only assume that no news is bad news, in this case, and I really can’t imagine that workers occupying businesses owned by other people would be tolerated for a single moment under Milei’s regime. Maybe the movement is still clinging on to life in the margins but if so this just illustrates the ineffectual nature of a political program that amounts to establishing worker co-ops and nothing beyond that.
Che learned the lessons that history taught him and he spread this to others in Cuba and beyond. Castro tried to spread these lessons to Allende, and I’d argue that the gilded AK he gave Allende as a gift (which Allende would eventually use on himself as the presidential palace was being stormed by forces under the command of Pinochet) was at least as much of a symbolic warning as it was a present. Castro urged Allende to take the threat of a coup seriously but Allende didn’t listen and, maybe this is me armchair quarterbacking history here which I should know better than to do but, I feel like if Allende spent more time learning about Guatemala he might have taken a different course of action himself.
This is why history is so damn important; the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles etc. etc. but if we aren’t studying history then we aren’t learning what worked and what didn’t from past attempts and so we won’t be able to be effective in the class struggle that we are facing right now.
Often I feel like these socialists and leftists who have a foot in both worlds are the worst type of people to try to agitate/educate/organise because they are so deeply idealistic and you can tell that they arrived at their current political position because socialism seemed pretty cool and, like, what about if we all just agree to get along y’know?
I can lead that horse to water, I can drown the fucken thing, and yet it will still bob it’s head up and be like “But if we elected a socialist president then that would prove that we don’t need a vanguard!!”