Today, there is a change from the usual stream of random witterings I offer you in the form of a guest post from Liam, who kindly offered to save you from yet another meme.
Errol Flynn is reported to have once said: “Any man who is not a Communist by the age of 18 is mad, and any man who is still a Communist by the age of 30 is also mad.”
Despite its patriarchal tone (to which I’m sure the owner of this blog will object!) I’ve always been quite fond of this quote. I was an ardent Communist as a young man but by my 30s a gradual loss of faith in human nature led to a growing cynicism towards such utopian ideals. While Flynn’s amusing line might seem to hold some water, more recent developments may well be proving him more wrong than right.
On one level it is easy to agree with Flynn, but has there ever been a Socialist society? Regimes like the USSR and China have much more in common with Fascism than Socialism or perhaps even with Orwell’s 1984. Wherever social revolutions have had a Socialist intention, predatory elements within communities always subverted them to their own power hungry desires. The plot is usually similar to Animal Farm; the pigs end up with their snouts in the trough and the hell with everyone else. Telling Socialists to ‘go back to Russia’ never really made sense; it never was a Socialist regime by any stretch of the imagination.
So am I drawing an incredibly long bow in trying to find any Socialist currents in the online community? Many people have commented on how much people use online communication to share things; free information, images, software etc. etc. with no thought to personal gain at all. These resources are provided by individuals who invest many hours of their time in their distribution with little reward other than sharing as an end in itself. Of course the internet will always be a bastion of capitalism, but is buying and selling necessarily at odds with a Socialist ideal?
People may not be ready to throw away their modern conveniences, march behind a red flag and live on agrarian collectives, but that part never sounded like much fun anyway. As far as egalitarianism and altruism go, the internet may well develop into the new Socialist El Dorado.
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Diddums
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