Are you a dangerous idealogue?
Conservatives or centrists often criticise anarchists or communists etc as being a ‘dangerous idealogue’. It’s a common taunt. And actually it may be true! It’s not an impossibility. However, it is also an aspect that they do not escape themselves. If an idealogue is: ‘an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology’, then advocates of capitalism are also sometimes that. In holding that capitalism is ‘the best system in history (or the least bad)’, they are following or being influenced by an ideology, that is ‘the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program’ or more widely ‘a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture’. So, they are certainly idealogues, by supporting capitalism.
As to the dangerous bit - if we think that capitalism is doing untold damage to many aspects of human life and the natural world then it’s a dangerous or certainly a very costly ideology to support. So, yes, I think we can say those who support capitalism are also ‘dangerous ideologues’.
They may say ‘No, I’m a realist’. On what grounds? Firstly they term it ‘realistic’ because it sounds more positive than to say ‘pessimist’. They take a very negative, and even ‘wimpy’ stance by refusing to accept that humans are capable of coming up with anything better than capitalism. But no one likes to label themselves negatively, so they call it ‘realistic’, which sounds admirable, even a bit macho. What makes something realistic? Certainly not that it currently just ‘exists’ - lots of things exist but have little realistic use value. Or that it is common - it’s common to smoke, but is it realistic to do so? Nor that it is what most people do or think - most people in the west eat too much, but is that a realistic thing to do? What makes something realistic is that it works in practice. Or that we can reasonably estimate that it will work.
Here the supporters of capitalism think they win: ‘Ok, so capitalism has been proven to work. Your communism has not worked out in practice. We win.’ But, of course, this is by no means clear. If it was clear there would be no problem with all this stuff, we would have decided all this ‘how to organise society’ stuff long ago. Firstly, people who criticise capitalism say that is does not work well in practice in many ways, rather it works very poorly. It’s often very impractical, and does not fit well with ‘reality’, physical or social. And even the things it does well have such negative consequences that you start to doubt if they are worth it. These are all reasonable, ‘realistic’ criticisms of capitalism. Dismiss them offhand and you start to look like a, emm... dangerous ideologue.
Secondly, the point that communism was tried and failed is no where near as strong as most people think. People like myself point out that even in 1917 and 1918 there were many who were already saying of the Bolsheviks things along the lines of ‘This is not communism as i see it. This is going to be a mess’. Now, even if you insist that Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China were still broadly communist, despite these many early dissenting voices (many of whom had ‘the dissent killed out of them’), surely you can’t say with a straight face that the horrible dictatorships were a full implementation of genuine communism? How could you claim that when they did not fit the definition or theories or values of communism in several ways? If it does not look like a duck, or walk like a duck, or quack like a duck… why are you still insisting it’s a duck? I wonder if it’s because you are behaving like a ‘blindly partisan advocate of a particular ideology’ who does not want to realistically access history or sociology?
Conservatives or centrists often criticise anarchists or communists etc as being a ‘dangerous idealogue’. It’s a common taunt. And actually it may be true! It’s not an impossibility. However, it is also an aspect that they do not escape themselves. If an idealogue is: ‘an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology’, then advocates of capitalism are also sometimes that. In holding that capitalism is ‘the best system in history (or the least bad)’, they are following or being influenced by an ideology, that is ‘the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program’ or more widely ‘a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture’. So, they are certainly idealogues, by supporting capitalism.
As to the dangerous bit - if we think that capitalism is doing untold damage to many aspects of human life and the natural world then it’s a dangerous or certainly a very costly ideology to support. So, yes, I think we can say those who support capitalism are also ‘dangerous ideologues’.
They may say ‘No, I’m a realist’. On what grounds? Firstly they term it ‘realistic’ because it sounds more positive than to say ‘pessimist’. They take a very negative, and even ‘wimpy’ stance by refusing to accept that humans are capable of coming up with anything better than capitalism. But no one likes to label themselves negatively, so they call it ‘realistic’, which sounds admirable, even a bit macho. What makes something realistic? Certainly not that it currently just ‘exists’ - lots of things exist but have little realistic use value. Or that it is common - it’s common to smoke, but is it realistic to do so? Nor that it is what most people do or think - most people in the west eat too much, but is that a realistic thing to do? What makes something realistic is that it works in practice. Or that we can reasonably estimate that it will work.
Here the supporters of capitalism think they win: ‘Ok, so capitalism has been proven to work. Your communism has not worked out in practice. We win.’ But, of course, this is by no means clear. If it was clear there would be no problem with all this stuff, we would have decided all this ‘how to organise society’ stuff long ago. Firstly, people who criticise capitalism say that is does not work well in practice in many ways, rather it works very poorly. It’s often very impractical, and does not fit well with ‘reality’, physical or social. And even the things it does well have such negative consequences that you start to doubt if they are worth it. These are all reasonable, ‘realistic’ criticisms of capitalism. Dismiss them offhand and you start to look like a, emm... dangerous ideologue.
Secondly, the point that communism was tried and failed is no where near as strong as most people think. People like myself point out that even in 1917 and 1918 there were many who were already saying of the Bolsheviks things along the lines of ‘This is not communism as i see it. This is going to be a mess’. Now, even if you insist that Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China were still broadly communist, despite these many early dissenting voices (many of whom had ‘the dissent killed out of them’), surely you can’t say with a straight face that the horrible dictatorships were a full implementation of genuine communism? How could you claim that when they did not fit the definition or theories or values of communism in several ways? If it does not look like a duck, or walk like a duck, or quack like a duck… why are you still insisting it’s a duck? I wonder if it’s because you are behaving like a ‘blindly partisan advocate of a particular ideology’ who does not want to realistically access history or sociology?