Socialism vs Individualism? (RE: LibertarianSocialistRants)

This is an excellent video by The Finnish Bolshevik discussing perhaps one of the most contentious topics separating people who supposedly share the same political objectives. Ahh, they say, the devil is in the details, and they are right. In this case, the "details" refer to the fact that anarchists and libertarian socialist critics of Marxist-Leninist socialist construction conveniently underestimate or dismiss the urgent and often horribly penurious historical context in which actual revolutions are made. For lack of a better term, I call this "contextual degradation" of any historico-political discussion. At times, this is deliberate, in which case we deal with a dishonest interlocutor, and there's not much we can do about that, except walk away.  But far more frequently, the critics take this tack due to intellectual laziness, a tendency to superficiality in argumentation, voluntarism, or simply a woeful deficit in revolutionary imagination. Egoist tendencies, which normally fuel bourgeois individualism, also explain such behaviour. (Let it be understood that the latter is a personality trait that clearly transcends bourgeois class boundaries and does exist sometimes in disturbing dimension among workers, peasants and other types of social strata). As well, when I say "lazy intellectualism" I don't mean to convey the impression the chief ideologues of anarchism or council communism only produced pamphlets. Some of the anarchist "fathers" were no lightweights and delivered hefty tomes. But their intellectual output rarely rose above elaborate but still superficial examinations of the revolutionary praxis, in some cases indistinguishable from classical utopians. Since I already filed a critique of council communism in an annotation I did for a recent essay on Sylvia Pankhurst, I will not repeat its main points here. If you are interested, just examine that article. Lastly, I strongly recommend readers interested in these issues to examine a truly thought-provoking essay we ran about four years ago dissecting with great skill the trap of left anti-communism and the weaknesses in Noam Chomsky's anarchist positions in relation to the problems of social change and revolution: The Mainstream and the Margins: Noam Chomsky vs. Michael Parenti. I can almost guarantee that many people will learn a great deal from that investment.—PG