1) There is no moral virtue in demanding the world work some way other than the way it works. The job of the reformer is not to play a game of make believe, coupled with force–“you will be generous with your money or we will take it and kill you.” Rather, the job is to understand the rules of the system and reform them from within.
What most Socialists REALLY want is a more generous, more compassionate world. This can ONLY come about with mass individual moral improvement. That has to come gradually, evolutionarily and voluntarily. It has to come about by means of better ideas, both philosophically and psychologically. In many respects, it has to come about through better means of dealing with trauma and dissociation, which are the roots of most anti-social behaviors.
When you attempt to FORCE “moral improvements” by conflating “morality”, so called, with social organization–and not the collective output of countless individual moral dispositions–what you actually do is make society WORSE. All of the people existing in a world where some asshole is always pointing a gun at them and telling them what to do become MORE traumatized, MORE selfish. The OPPOSITE of the desired effect is not only reliably achieved, but necessarily achieved. Even for those personally inclined to agree with the aims of the efforts, no true growth will be possible in such a context, where the means are anger and repression.
2) there is no moral virtue in being generous with other peoples money, particularly stolen money. More generally, the motives most Leftists operate out of are, on the one hand, resentment towards people who are successful (they are generally personally failures, like Marx and Lenin), and on the other a desire to seek “success” themselves through the medium of bad ideas.
Think about it: most “revolutionaries” never really have jobs. They are people who think, but don’t do. They speak continually and yet do very little, concretely. The “revolution”, psychologically, becomes a means of personal empowerment, and a means of relevance. All opposition, then, comes to feel like personal attacks on them.
Hmmm. There is something about right there.
Take Bernie: he’s an asshole who’s never really had a real job. He was a fuckup at his Commune, then he went into politics, where his schtick was handing out other peoples money as fast and in as large a quantities as he could.
So much of modern history can really be seen as the large scale effects which come from individual psychopathology.
Self evidently, in important ways Adolph Hitler was psychologically not that different from Bernie. Bernie’s followers wanted concentration camps. The whole thing runs on resentment.