Confirmed. Just got through it. It’s a good article, valuable for synthesizing in one place a lot of recent scholarship and arguments (no one else has done that to such a scale lately, making this a good update now to the classic study of Paget 2001).

Its novel contributions are more hypertechnical though so maybe not of much interest to lay readers. For example, he builds a more comprehensive case against the obscure “Pseudo-Hegesippus preserves the original of Josephus” argument that relies a lot already on Hansen’s able takedown of that; so the additions are incremental. Also Viklund has a more thorough demonstration of the “context” argument that is the best I’ve seen, though again the improvements are hypertechnical. And he revisits an obscure point made before that I myself overlooked, that we have some indirect evidence of manuscripts without the TF, but that’s speculative and again hypertechnical. Likewise, Viklund finds a discussion way back in Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome (1979), where, solving a completely unrelated problem, Cohen lists many examples of how Josephus diverges a lot in how he refers to people in a text, such that (we can then argue) adding the appellation “son of Damnaios” a few lines later would be congruent with Josephan practice, winning another hypertechnical debate (that I got into with, separately, O’Neill and Hansen here on my blog, where I’d have loved to have known about the Cohen reference).

Etc.

Maybe a downside is that it doesn’t address Bermejo-Rubio directly (not even to cite Hansen’s takedown), though it does throw enough shade on his kind of argument to be sufficient IMO. But again, that’s a hypertechnical matter most lay readers won’t care about.

And of course a downside is that this article will languish in Swedish libraries and not get read or seen (or cited) as widely as it should. Since it’s not even in a journal but a festschrift, which are the most forgotten and neglected source materials in any history field (sadly).

Didn’t know about it. Thanks for alerting me. (It’s possible he even emailed me but it got lost in the thousands of emails I get every month.)

I am not facile with Swedish so it will take me time to read it through a translator. But the English abstract appears to just affirm all the positions I have published (see my Josephus category in reverse chronological order). Whether it does so with anything new I won’t know until I have gotten through it.

So in the meantime I will plan its inclusion in future errata.

I guess you’re emphasising overall that what these regimes had in common was that they indoctrinated people with ideologies that could not be questioned and these ideologies functioned as their state religion, as well as the state being above all.

I agree with that, I think that’s clearly true and you’re right there’s plenty of comparative work in history about the differences and similarities between Stalinism and fascism (mainly between Stalinism and Nazism), i.e Richard Overy and Ian Kershaw have done a lot of work on this and there are definitely big similarities, though I would argue that there are significant differences.

I’d say that the right wing regimes that emerged during the 20s and 30s on the whole all kept traditional religion (albeit in a warped version, i.e positive Christianity, Imperial Shintoism) as well as having a new cult of the leader and of the state and the churches tended to keep a lot of their privileges as institutions.

The Stalinist regimes tended to do away with the institutional privileges of the traditional religions (like they did with the original class system) and often tried to do away with them themselves although of course they didn’t replace them with terribly healthy mentalities, i.e still a culture of non-thinking and not all of them had bad relations with the church (Ceaucescu being one case). As you say, in effect Marxism-Leninism became the state religion.

I’d happily apply the lable “totalitarian” too to both, I think it’s mostly a 20th century phenomenon (Sparta might be a counter-example), that you get when you have new ideologies, the idea of mass participation in politics, the percieved failure of liberal democracy to deliver for the masses, the left/right divide. They’re both quite different to absolute monarchies in that regard.

I agree with you that it’s impossible to get it to work in a large scale society at any rate, and I agree with you, I think at the end of the day any sophisticated form of organisation is a kind of government and I do think any functioning kind of government does need enforcement mechanisms of some kind otherwise you’ll never get anything done.

I think what early socialists aimed for, like Robert Owen, like Marx, like Proudhomme, without some kind of central government you would essentially go back to having lots of small little tribes and the difficulties that brings (i.e tribal warfare can be nastier than wars between big nations, Jared Diamond´s book has some really illustrative examples).

I liked your article “How far left is too left”, I found myself agreeing with it. I think it’s important for the European left and the US left to learn from each other’s successes and failures. I think many people on the left in Europe think that the best way to stop fascism is to ban fascist ideas and it’s been a dismal failure. For starters, the fascist parties can always just say “we’re not actually fascists” and it’s kind of hard for courts to get involved in debates like that. There’s the whole issue of undermining your own values and often things like anti-semitism laws have been turned on the left. They also don’t seem to work very well at denting fascist movements, i.e the RN in France have a good chance of winning the presidency.

R.e presentation it’s definitely a big issue, I think one thing David Pakman said which is true is that in a sense right wing ideas are easier for people to understand, they appeal to people´s gut instincts more. It’s one reason why in most liberal democracies, right wing parties have won most of the elections.It means we have to be especially careful about how we present things and take people along with us.

Mottos like “socialism without a state” I think are a joke. It is literally impossible to have any functioning system without a government. And a government is a state.

Government was invented precisely to solve the problem of lawless chaos, and organize collective action successfully. Whether you call a government a “state” or not is semantics. You can’t change what a thing is by changing what you call it.

But yes. Hybrid economies are equilibrium-seeking economies and thus obey the same laws as ecosystems—and are thus the only actually stable form of collective organization, i.e. “government.” See How Far Left Is Too Left?

That all seems like irrelevant semantics and trivia to me.

Maybe go back up thread and reconnect with what we were talking about.

Yeah, I agree with that. When I said “libertarian socialist”, I meant basically how someone like Noam Chomsky would use the term, i.e to mean socialism but without a state.

I guess “communism” is just a synonym, in effect.

One problem on the left is that we have a very unclear vocabulary at times. To some (probably most people these days) “communism” means Stalinism, to others it basically means what Marx meant, i.e a society with no state per se, where people basically self organise and everything is shared and I think “anarchism” in left circles basically means the same thing, but that you don’t believe in Marx’s theory of history.

It’s definitely a huge issue when trying to explain our ideas. I happily use “social-democrat” and “socialism” interchangeably, because I think social democracy is a variant of socialism and most socialist thinkers haven’t been for out and out abolition of markets (Marx is just the most famous).

The issue is that if I say I’m a socialist, lots of people believe that I want to nationalise literally everything, whereas I think that something like a Scandinavia +, where Tony Benn (left wing Labour MP in the UK) wanted to go is what I actually believe in.

I realise I said something that was misleading (not intentionally) :

“There is also the fact that Stalinist regimes tended to have planned economies, whereas fascist regimes did not (indeed, Hitler actually privatised some companies when he came to power and the Nazis were quite reluctant to nationalise things until the war) and Mussolini when he came to power initially was pro-privatisation too. I think that´s to do with Stalinist regimes on the whole wanting to disrupt the class system heavily, whereas fascist regimes on the whole don´t want that.”

What I meant by this is that fascist regimes maintained private property and private ownership of capital, not that they didn´t use central planning at all, they certainly did, I think pretty much all modern capitalist economies use it to some degree. It’s true that they thought that everyone should be subordinate to the state, absolutely no disagreements there, I expressed myself badly.

It´s worth noting too that privatisation isn’t the opposite of increasing the power of the state, the Nazis sold the early industries they privatised to supporters and it´s not opposite to central planning either, as I mentioned in the response to another post below central planning is used in agriculture in the present day EU and very much used in the weapons industry. There as a central planning board, which was created during the war (1942). The Nazis of course had four-year plans too.

As for Stalinist states, they certainly did create a nomenclature and what you say about the top level of the party being in a ripe position to become capitalist oligarchs, that’s definitely true, a lot of post-Soviet/Warsaw pact politicians are literally the same people.

I don’t think the differences between the regimes are just semantics however. I think the way regimes portray themselves ideologically can create real differences in the mentalities of the population.

I think too that although the Soviet Union ended up creating its own class system in effect, I think the socialist origins of the regime did shape its policy (and that of the other Warsaw pact states). For example, Nazi Germany was the only fascist state to actually have a universal healthcare system and they basically just kept the Bismarckian one, whereas all the Warsaw pact states did create one (granted, it was often quite corrupt and you could pay to have queue jumps). Neither Franco, nor Mussolini bothered creating one at all.



All true, except one point that only furthers your point when corrected:

Hunter-gatherer societies are not libertarian; they are fundamentally communist. Everyone works for the group, and everyone partakes of its products (food, tools, labor, parenting). In fact they could not survive in the wild otherwise. Libertarians usually dismiss them, therefore, as lifeboat scenarios that civilization ended the need of. Which simply isn’t true. Civilization sustained the need of it, but did create room (and necessity) for greater freedoms as a lever of progress and productivity. Libertarians just forget about the former and obsess over the latter (with armchair fantasies that never connect to any well-tested reality or its indispensable context).