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gilmae's review
2.0
I figure there are three possibilities here for what seems so very poorly reasoned and even less adroitly argued:
1) Time and the widespread adoption of what they call Conservative Socialism has done a disservice to the arguments. The world has moved on.
2) People were shockingly naive when they read this, but the bourgeois triumph over the old order was fragile enough that a few forceful personalities could drown it in the bath before it could mature. cf Russia, 1917.
3) There are two Communist Manifestos, and I just read the hoax version created by Tories with the express purpose of making Communists and their Socialist successors look like berks.
Don't misunderstand, I'm entirely empathic to the classes they were trying to free, and contemptuous of the kind of people who read this and, as per an earlier review, "think of Obama". Those people are people who've never questioned their own privilege.
But the notion that we should cast down whole classes of people and oppress them because society has conspired through commission or indifference to keep down the working poor, that's a wilful swipe at the very humanity of the people it was supposed to elevate. Is it any wonder that it created the conditions in which strong willed sociopaths could rise up and discredit the entire progressive movement by preying on the righteous anger of the oppressed and just nudging it gently off the edge into insanity?
I don't rate it low because of political beliefs. I rate it lowly because even as sympathetic as I am to its cause, it rang hollow and tarnished to me; entirely unconvincing.
1) Time and the widespread adoption of what they call Conservative Socialism has done a disservice to the arguments. The world has moved on.
2) People were shockingly naive when they read this, but the bourgeois triumph over the old order was fragile enough that a few forceful personalities could drown it in the bath before it could mature. cf Russia, 1917.
3) There are two Communist Manifestos, and I just read the hoax version created by Tories with the express purpose of making Communists and their Socialist successors look like berks.
Don't misunderstand, I'm entirely empathic to the classes they were trying to free, and contemptuous of the kind of people who read this and, as per an earlier review, "think of Obama". Those people are people who've never questioned their own privilege.
But the notion that we should cast down whole classes of people and oppress them because society has conspired through commission or indifference to keep down the working poor, that's a wilful swipe at the very humanity of the people it was supposed to elevate. Is it any wonder that it created the conditions in which strong willed sociopaths could rise up and discredit the entire progressive movement by preying on the righteous anger of the oppressed and just nudging it gently off the edge into insanity?
I don't rate it low because of political beliefs. I rate it lowly because even as sympathetic as I am to its cause, it rang hollow and tarnished to me; entirely unconvincing.
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