Socialism and Class

I may have mentioned I am listening to David Copperfield.  It is impossible not to notice that in that world everyone more or less has their place and their station.  Respectable people are respectable.  Working men and women are common.  The educated are educated, and all in all your life and prospects in large measure depend upon your birth, and how you use the English language.  A commoner will never be a barrister, or so it seems.

And it occurs to me that the nations where Socialism has gotten a strong hold all had strongly held ideas about hierarchy, place, and a relatively fixed system of privileges and duties.  This is certainly true of England, Russia, France, and even China.

And it occurs to me that the core idea of Socialism is ALSO that everyone has a place, a station, to which all people must be assigned by, it is assumed, their NEW betters, rather than their old betters.  The intellectuals, rather than the hereditary elites.

I have said this before, but it is hard to suppress the sense that the salient objection most intellectuals felt to ancient systems of privilege was not that privilege is inherently wrong, but that the wrong sorts of people were in charge.  They wanted, and want, to out-aristocrat the aristocrats, not undo the fundamental tenets and habits of the system. They just want new management, not a more just order.  They consider the aristocrats dull, and the bourgeoisie their enablers and minions.  The Artist and the Intellectual, we are told, are to be their successors.  This is, we are told, only just, although the why is quite obscured by the highly disingenuous and misleading verbiage surrounding the project.

If you observe this, then add some magical thinking about how things should be free–Mugabe was going to deliver free shit, as was Chavez, and as will Sanders–you have the Left over the past 2 centuries or so.