"So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong." -- is a litmus test that fails. It's okay for these kinds of terms to trigger you to double-check something, but it's not the case that, for example, every use of "racist" is indicative of faulty thought or misapplied labels.
> You claim that it's lazy to label ideas as x-ist, and yet you say "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century."
> This is not using a label to suppress ideas. They called themselves socialists. Saying that Sidney Webb was a socialist is like saying that Myron Scholes is an economist. It's just a statement of fact.
> "many otherwise intelligent people were socialists in the middle of the twentieth century."
I'm actually quite shocked PG would say something like this, the rather sneaky implication that it is a failing of intelligence to be a socialist. How is implying that socialism is a failure of intelligence not using a label (socialism) to suppress the ideas contained within that label? (critique of capitalism etc.)
So I'll take PG's discussion on the topic:
>I've thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich.
This immediately jumps to the idea that socialism is a mode of production in which people "aren't allowed to get rich". Not only is socialism being judged by capitalism's terms (getting rich being a good thing[0]) but the rest of the reply conflates all the forms of socialism with the Soviet model (which mainstream political philosophy and Marxist scholars regard as not socialist at all), and further, the idea that a state can be "much more socialist than the US" conflates Marx's idea of socialism being a qualitative break with it being merely quantitative. It would seem to PG that "the more a government does, the more socialist the country is".
I wonder if PG is aware of the critiques of Soviet socialism made in the 40s, 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt School, those who refuse Lenin's and Stalin's ideas, libertarian socialists and socialist anarchists.
On a general note on the reply, it's a little ironic that PG has failed to take into account the established literature on the topic of "what you can't say". Marcuse and Adorno linked "what you can't say" to things that are regarded as irrational, impracticable, utopian and unreasonable, and they investigate its cause and name technological rationality. Unlike PG they provided fruitful examples; the French Socialist parties of the 50s and 60s which refused to collaborate in the democratic process were shunned as being unreasonable. To be called unreasonable is a major demotivator, it seems to imply that your ideas are in conflict with the very rules of logic themselves. But PG didn't address the idea that what is rational can change, he took it for granted and looked on the peripheries, or as far as his vision would take him without hitting those "radical" ideas he so self-assuredly repudiates.
PG says he's spent a lot of time "thinking" about socialism (or at least dismissing it). If only he'd spent as much time reading about its original formulations, the critiques of socialism and the responses to the critiques.
