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Anonymous
2016-03-27 05:04:05 Post No. 893686
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Anonymous
2016-03-27 05:04:05
Post No. 893686
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How does /his/ feel about Socialist Humanism? It was a fantastic intellectual revolt against the parasite of Stalinism that had infected the international political left in the 1950s.
> Socialist humanism asserts that human needs (bearing in mind all the difficulties of this term) are the only valid criterion by which to assess institutions and economic and social arrangements: these must be made to measure people, rather than people being chopped about or stretched on a Procrustean bed in order to measure “circumstances” or “historical necessity.” In line with this assertion, a long derided trend within the socialist movement appears to be reviving Utopian (or “socratic”) socialism, that is, the vindication of the right of the moral imagination to project an ideal to which it is legitimate to aspire; and the right of the reason to enquire into the aims and ends of social arrangements, irrespective of questions of immediate feasibility: in brief, to ask questions of the order of “Why?” and not only of “How?” It must be stressed that this is a trend not in the abstract, but within the socialist and communist movements; that is, accepting that the transition to socialism in one of its many forms is a necessary precondition for building a desirable and rational society, nevertheless it asserts that choices can and must be made along the way – indeed, unless such choices are consciously made the road to socialism may end in confusion or disaster, and, at the least, we will fail to enlist to the full the creative faculties of those who build it.
