Philosophy discussion

Three stars is the lowest rating I generally try to give to books I read. Behind every text there are the ideas of people who put themselves on the line and tried to contribute to a debate. We may not agree with everyone's ideas, but we can still recognize their depth even when we disagree with them.

This is not one of those cases. At least not for me.

Kropotkin wrote a book full of technological optimism. He was convinced that production could be decentralized and that local communities could achieve high levels of economic self-sufficiency. Many of his observations about excessive specialization and the social costs of industrial concentration are interesting. The problem is that he vastly underestimates economies of scale, organizational complexity, and the incentives required to coordinate advanced productive systems.

I first read this book years ago, when I was a young man involved in social centers. Back then, Marxism was taken seriously."Capital" was studied, not merely read. The "Communist Manifesto" was something you were expected to know almost by heart. Lenin's speeches were the reference point for every theoretical dispute, and Mao's "Little Red Book" served as a handbook for reinforcing the faith.

This book, which belongs to the anarcho-socialist tradition, was regarded in communist circles as a naïve vision of an ideal society: useful for propaganda, perhaps, but ultimately an exercise in fantasy, much like many medieval utopias or the search for the kingdom of Prester John.

In the Italy of my youth, Marxist indoctrination ran deep among young people, and if you wanted to take part in discussions, you had to know exactly what you were talking about. I was fortunate enough to visit and work in the lands that Italian socialists once held up as models after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I witnessed the horror created by people convinced they possessed the formula for paradise on earth. That experience was enough for me to understand how fortunate my country had been and to free myself from the socialist religion.

The Western country with the strongest communist party in Europe had, by a miracle, escaped communism itself: escaped the madness of those who sought to build paradise even at the cost of killing everyone.

Today, Marxism seems to have returned, but in a far more ridiculous form than it once had. Modern Marxists throw together a stew of slogans borrowed from traditions that have very little in common with one another. They are zombies without ideas or knowledge, especially when compared to the Marxists of yesterday, to whom I at least grant a deep understanding of revolutionary movements.

This book appears in my Goodreads feed far more often than I would have thought possible, even in my worst nightmares.

It deserves one star.

Davide wrote: "I first read this book years ago ..."

You read it years ago but you just happened to add it to your bookshelf yesterday June 05? Coincidentally within 24 hours of my mentioning this author's name?

I see ...

Feliks wrote: "Davide wrote: "I first read this book years ago ..."

You read it years ago but you just happened to add it to your bookshelf yesterday June 05? Coincidentally within 24 hours of my mentioning this..."

You know, as books appear in my feed, I add them. I'm in no hurry to show how much I've studied rather than merely read. Studying and reading are not the same thing.

To seriously study the history of communism, you need at least French and German, and some knowledge of Russian is useful as well. I have the impression that you don't really know who Kropotkin was. He was an anarcho-socialist thinker, not a Marxist, and today he is often embraced by parts of the international left precisely because he provides a way to distance themselves from the failures of the centrally planned economies of the twentieth century.

When you mentioned Kropotkin, I realized that you probably are not really a Marxist. A Marxist who uses Felix Dzerzhinsky as an avatar while simultaneously invoking Kropotkin is combining two traditions that were historically in sharp conflict.

Kropotkin and Lenin knew each other personally. Lenin admired his intellectual abilities, but rejected most of his political ideas. In Nadezhda Krupskaya's "Reminiscences of Lenin 1917–24", this attitude is quite clear: respect for the man and the writer, but severe criticism of anarchism and of the cooperative movement as an answer to the problems posed by the revolution.

The irony is that the cooperative movement, which Kropotkin regarded as essential, later became one of the victims of Soviet repression, helped in no small part by the security apparatus created by Dzerzhinsky and his successors.

That is why I find it curious that you can cite both Dzerzhinsky and Kropotkin as if they belonged to the same political tradition. It is a bit like claiming allegiance to both sides of a civil war.

Anyway, if you pay me, I would be happy to organize a serious course on the history of communism for you, complete with a proper reading list. But first, you will need to learn at least French and a little German.

P.S. The book is available on Amazon. It was originally written in German, but it has been translated into English.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reminiscence...