In response to
this post by Jeremy Brown, I offer a humble alternative:
In Defense of Abusing Socialist Revolution
Three critical developments since the death of Marx show the utter futility of pursuing Socialist revolution in the current era;
John Nash's work on cooperation in complex economies, the expansion of economic roles available to individuals in diverse economies, and the historical consequences associated with the overwhelming number of socialist revolution that have already occurred.
John Nash's work on cooperative games as models for complex economic systems destroys the requirement for revolution by showing that cooperation can be beneficial to all parties, especially the worker. Mathematical proof that choices can be made, agreed upon, and improved over time by multiple parties with disparate goals to the benefit of all is a stake through the heart of socialist revolution. You can do what is best for yourself and the group for optimal results, John Nash proved this. The Nobel winning "Nash equilibrium" means that individual choices about personal contribution to group benefit have value. This is a concept that socialist revolutionaries throw away the instant they start to seek power; I am not sure that they have to, but I am sure that they have never reached power without abandoning individual needs.
Hairdressers and
massage therapists are the death of socialist revolution. The existence of these non-essential occupations are not valuable (in the sense that they are not assigned a significant value) to socialist revolutionaries. Regrettably, in large and prosperous economies, occupations like these are available as independent businesses to individuals in unplanned ways. More to the point, the millions of hairdressers, massage therapists,
web page designers, and
such have vital reasons to oppose socialist revolutions that would disenfranchise their independent economic activities. It is impossible to believe that socialist revolution will come from a "Supercuts"; however it is easy to believe that the revolution will die there. Hairdressers talk about winning the Lottery, not sacrificing everything for socialism. While there are not as many hairdressers as traditional laborers; diversity of economic roles means that individual economic choices blur the differences between labor and capital to the point where critical mass is unobtainable by revolutionaries.
While socialist revolutionaries have become inured to recanting the horrific results of past revolutions, their cognitive dissonance is not shared by the masses. The tens of millions of dead, the ecological disasters of global proportions, and the brutal suppression of culture happened and are known by the "proletariat". There is no explanation available to socialist revolutionaries for why this time they won't put millions more up against the wall, especially when so many of their fellows and supporters are screaming for this to happen. There is a suspicious lack of discussion about the impact draining the Aral Sea and turning it's tens of thousands of square miles of arable land into a salt desert has had on global warming, or any of the other massive ecological disasters performed by socialist revolutionaries. Probably this is because scientists can do enough math to realize that there is no point in shaking down bankrupted governments with a pronounced tendency to kill inconvenient persons. The destruction of indigenous cultures practiced by socialist revolutionaries to suppress dissent is a documented historical fact that is being played out on a smaller, so far less lethal, scale, on
university campuses here in the United States. We do not have to imagine the consequences of cultural suppression; we can go to any local campus and witness it.
All of this is why socialist revolutionaries are fair game for denouncing, ridiculing, and abusing at every turn. I am not entirely convinced that efforts to date to do so have been the most effective. It should be noted that the simpler and more wildly fraudulent your claims are, the more sensational they can be. People committed to telling the truth have more restrictions on their speech than those who abandoned honesty as the price of admission. I am interested in working towards improving this situation, and so I am going to work with the local chapter of
Protest Warrior towards developing responses to the endless wave of protest here in Portland. I am not interested in violently confronting the socialist revolutionaries here, because I do not respect them that much. Ridicule, however, is a tool I plan on using a lot!
