The historic popularity of socialism has been brought up as an argument for epistemic modesty. It’s important to take into account the historic broadness of the term “socialism.” This wasn’t the entire intellectual class collectively jumping for centrally planned economies created by a vanguard party. Socialism has included a wide variety of schemes that weren’t capitalism inc. mutualism (market economy but with worker’s coops), guild socialism (high medieval city economy except modern tech), anarchocommunism (everyone lives in a decentralized network of kibbutzim, basically) and “libertarian communism” (planned economy but decentralized). Heck, Benjamin Tucker, ideological ancestor of modern anarcho-capitalists, considered himself a socialist because he believed the best economy for workers would be a laissez faire market economy. Like this was a bunch of different ideas on how to change society, most (if not all) of which wouldn’t have worked, but many of which would have likely failed far more gracefully. For example, socialisms that were voluntaryist, nonviolent and/or gradualist. Mutualism isn’t that improbable of a model, like, modern worker’s coops exist in our economy and they function and have high worker’s satisfaction rates. I don’t think it’s that far-fetched that the world would be a better place if they were the primary or exclusive form of corporation. A world where Proudhon won the argument at the first international and all the historic energy that went towards Marxist-Leninism went to founding worker’s coops and credit unions would have been quite a bit better and such a history branch wasn’t that improbable. And many socialists at the time of Lenin decried Leninism (Rosa Luxemburg), correctly predicted that it was going to go to shit(Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman), and even lead rebellions (Kronstadt Rebellion). This isn’t me saying socialism is good, this is me saying historic intellectual support for “socialism” is complicated and not as homogeneous as it may look initially.
The historic popularity of socialism has been brought up as an argument for epistemic modesty. It’s important to take into account the historic broadness of the term “socialism.” This wasn’t the entire intellectual class collectively jumping for centrally planned economies created by a vanguard party. Socialism has included a wide variety of schemes that weren’t capitalism inc. mutualism (market economy but with worker’s coops), guild socialism (high medieval city economy except modern tech), anarchocommunism (everyone lives in a decentralized network of kibbutzim, basically) and “libertarian communism” (planned economy but decentralized). Heck, Benjamin Tucker, ideological ancestor of modern anarcho-capitalists, considered himself a socialist because he believed the best economy for workers would be a laissez faire market economy. Like this was a bunch of different ideas on how to change society, most (if not all) of which wouldn’t have worked, but many of which would have likely failed far more gracefully. For example, socialisms that were voluntaryist, nonviolent and/or gradualist. Mutualism isn’t that improbable of a model, like, modern worker’s coops exist in our economy and they function and have high worker’s satisfaction rates. I don’t think it’s that far-fetched that the world would be a better place if they were the primary or exclusive form of corporation. A world where Proudhon won the argument at the first international and all the historic energy that went towards Marxist-Leninism went to founding worker’s coops and credit unions would have been quite a bit better and such a history branch wasn’t that improbable. And many socialists at the time of Lenin decried Leninism (Rosa Luxemburg), correctly predicted that it was going to go to shit(Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman), and even lead rebellions (Kronstadt Rebellion). This isn’t me saying socialism is good, this is me saying historic intellectual support for “socialism” is complicated and not as homogeneous as it may look initially.