A Real Democracy by direct voting

May 2024 Forums General discussion A Real Democracy by direct voting

Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 53 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #131935
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    kenax wrote:
    oh, and if i may just make one little addition, my name is Karel. kenax is my company name and what i generally use as a username on websites. Karel is a czech name and i grew up with two earfuls from parents who absolutely hate communism and even the russians. in any case, i have my own brain and do not need to be swayed by anyone. i run several online business and believe in the positive, innovative effects of free enterprise, but that a society should properly take care of the weak, but there should be SOME incentive for innovation, otherwise we get line-ups several blocks long just for toilet paper. anyway, thank you for the discussions and wish you success in all your endeavours. 

    Where are peoples making a line to get toilet paper? 

    #131936
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    kenax wrote:
     – one always needs an enemy to control the people). the problem is that the elite also control the media and most people just believe it. 

    That is called the capitalist press, that is the proper name,  and they are doing their job in the proper way, now they used the euphemism of calling them the media. They  propagate the bourgeoise ideologyThe Socialist Party press is different, we are doing our job  which is to inform and educate the world working class

    #131937
    kenax
    Participant
    Marcos wrote:
    kenax wrote:
    oh, and if i may just make one little addition, my name is Karel. kenax is my company name and what i generally use as a username on websites. Karel is a czech name and i grew up with two earfuls from parents who absolutely hate communism and even the russians. in any case, i have my own brain and do not need to be swayed by anyone. i run several online business and believe in the positive, innovative effects of free enterprise, but that a society should properly take care of the weak, but there should be SOME incentive for innovation, otherwise we get line-ups several blocks long just for toilet paper. anyway, thank you for the discussions and wish you success in all your endeavours. 

    Where are peoples making a line to get toilet paper? 

    that's at least the story my parents said or what i heard about under communism in czech. without incentive for the means of production, people just get lazy me thinks and things start to rot from the inside out. i've traveled a lot around the world and i find that envy is predominant among most people. if you create a socialst system, people start to get jealous that someone else is working not as hard as them, and everyone starts competing against each other in terms of who can be the most useless and unproductive. as they used to say in czech to the communists: "you pretend to pay us and we'll pretend to work". the communists eventually had to bend so they started giving catholic land to the czechs for cottages in the country in exchange for a little more work. when i arrived to czech after the fall of communism, pratically everyone had an apartment in prague as well as a cottage in the country, with NO DEBT. they didn't even know what a mortgage was, amazing.

    #131938
    kenax
    Participant
    Marcos wrote:
    kenax wrote:
     – one always needs an enemy to control the people). the problem is that the elite also control the media and most people just believe it. 

    That is called the capitalist press, that is the proper name,  and they are doing their job in the proper way, now they used the euphemism of calling them the media. They  propagate the bourgeoise ideologyThe Socialist Party press is different, we are doing our job  which is to inform and educate the world working class

    that is good, but please don't tell me that the press under communism is any closer to the truth. the main press agency there was called Pravda, which means "The Truth". What a total joke. when noam chompsky invited a bunch of Russian journalists to america, they were amazed that the media basically told the same lies, but that the general population actually believed that bs. in russia they said, if you want to make the people believe that, you have to rip out their finger nails. of course i'm not saying you all do that, but if you actually manage to somehow revolutionise the entire system and you do not have direct democracy, it will alway end up, in my mind, with the elite controlling things, and of course they will seize control of the media to enhance and better themselves. it is the nature of humans to want more. that is why i am for spreading the vote and doing more away with elite represenation.

    #131939
    robbo203
    Participant
    kenax wrote:
     that's at least the story my parents said or what i heard about under communism in czech. without incentive for the means of production, people just get lazy me thinks and things start to rot from the inside out. i've traveled a lot around the world and i find that envy is predominant among most people. if you create a socialst system, people start to get jealous that someone else is working not as hard as them, and everyone starts competing against each other in terms of who can be the most useless and unproductive. as they used to say in czech to the communists: "you pretend to pay us and we'll pretend to work". the communists eventually had to bend so they started giving catholic land to the czechs for cottages in the country in exchange for a little more work. when i arrived to czech after the fall of communism, pratically everyone had an apartment in prague as well as a cottage in the country, with NO DEBT. they didn't even know what a mortgage was, amazing.

    Karel, to be quite honest I do think you need to read up a little more on what the SPGB is saying as I detect quite a few straw arguments in what  you say.   As long as you are under the misapprehension that what socialists are advocating is something akin to the so called "communism" – actually, it was just state administered capitalism – that operated in the old Czechslovakia you will miss the point of much of what is being said to you. Classical socialism in the sense that we are talking about is totally different to the distorted Leninist and Labourite version of "socialism".   What you are effectively doing is considering what we have to say through the lens of this latter definition of socialism which we would in fact define as state capitalism Of course people are envious under capitalism.  Capitalism thrives on envy.  Much of what "consumerism"  is about under capitalism is based on the notion of "keeping up with Joneses".   Meaning it is status driven.  In capitalism that is how you acquire status and the esteem of others – though the accumulation of wealth, not what you contribute to society.     Money is the metric by which individuals are accorded esteem and respect.   Money also converts into the currency of political power and as Oxfam has pointed out  a mere 8 billionaires in the world currently own as much wealth as half the world's population combined!  It does not matter what system of democratic voting you have in place, unless you address and overthrow a system that can generate such grotesque and enormous inequalities you will never have a truly democratc society. And then you wonder why people are supposedly "lazy" today.  What incentive is there to work when your work serves to enrich the few at the expense of the majority and when you have little or no control over your conditions of work under the authoritarian system called "waged employment"  (which socialists seek to eliminate)? Actually even under capitalism most work is not paid , disproving the claim that you need a so called monetary incentive to incentivise people to work.   According to some statistics – see writers like Charles Handy – slightly more in the way of total labour hours  falls completely outside of the money economy than inside it.   Also, there is some evidence to suggest that the very fact of monetary payment  itself has a demotivating effect on volunteer work.  In their article  "Does Pay Motivate Volunteers?"  (Review of Economics and Statistics, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich , Working Paper Series , ISSN 1424-0459 , Working Paper No. 7, May 1999)  Bruno S. Frey and Lorenz Goette  argue that monetary rewards actually serve to undermine the intrinsic motivation of volunteers.

    #131940
    kenax
    Participant

    thank you for the feedback. if you have some articles explaining exactly what your philosophy is, and more interestingly for me, how you envision to implement it and some practical explanations how it should function in practice i'd be happy to read it, thank you

    #131941
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    kenax wrote:
    Marcos wrote:
    kenax wrote:
    oh, and if i may just make one little addition, my name is Karel. kenax is my company name and what i generally use as a username on websites. Karel is a czech name and i grew up with two earfuls from parents who absolutely hate communism and even the russians. in any case, i have my own brain and do not need to be swayed by anyone. i run several online business and believe in the positive, innovative effects of free enterprise, but that a society should properly take care of the weak, but there should be SOME incentive for innovation, otherwise we get line-ups several blocks long just for toilet paper. anyway, thank you for the discussions and wish you success in all your endeavours. 

    Where are peoples making a line to get toilet paper? 

    that's at least the story my parents said or what i heard about under communism in czech. without incentive for the means of production, people just get lazy me thinks and things start to rot from the inside out. i've traveled a lot around the world and i find that envy is predominant among most people. if you create a socialst system, people start to get jealous that someone else is working not as hard as them, and everyone starts competing against each other in terms of who can be the most useless and unproductive. as they used to say in czech to the communists: "you pretend to pay us and we'll pretend to work". the communists eventually had to bend so they started giving catholic land to the czechs for cottages in the country in exchange for a little more work. when i arrived to czech after the fall of communism, pratically everyone had an apartment in prague as well as a cottage in the country, with NO DEBT. they didn't even know what a mortgage was, amazing.

    I agree with what Robbo has said that you need some serious reading about socialism, politic, economic and history in order to understand what we are saying and what is taking place around the world. You cannot be a carpenter without a hammer, or you cannot practice medicine without any medical knowledge, the same case is applied to socialism-communism.A great socialist intellectual like  Engels always said that he was a student of socialism, probably we are just a bunch of amateursYour parents are not anti-communists because they did not live under a communist society, even more, the Soviets leader never claimed that they were building a communist society but a socialist society according to the division and definition made by Leninism. In this article written by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, we explained that semantic situation:  https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2001/no-1165-august-2001/did-communism-collapse  Lenin himself said that state capitalism was a step toward socialism which was beneficial for the majority of the workers like this article explains: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2018/no-1361-january-2018/lenin-and-state-capitalismYour parents were living under a state capitalist society, and the so-called anti-communists are just anti-state capitalists workers, like many workers who have emigrated to Western Europe and the USA.Lately, every economic sector in Eastern Europe has been privatized, and it was not the fall of communism it was the economical re-structurization of capitalism, the same situation that took place in Chile where everything has been privatized including the worker's pensions and social security and the winner of the lottery was the capitalist class, that is reason why they gave a Nobel prize to Freidman and to Henry Kissinger, two good servants of the capitalist classLately, the idea that workers were making lines to get toilet papers have been blamed on the goverment of Venezuela claiming that under their so called communist society there is a large scarcity of commodities, but, first, Venezuela is not a socialist society, neither cuba, or north korea, and second, the USA has imposed a large embargo on Venezuela, in the same manner that they have imposed an embargo on Cuba and they imposed one on Chile, and third, the retailers and wholesaler in Venezuela are holding the commodities to produce scarcity to motivate the workers to overthrow the goverment as they did in Chile. There is an article on "Socialism or your money back"  which has shown that businessmen were producing sabotages and the majority of the means of production in Venezuela are privately owned including petroleum, and Gitco has been sold for a bargaining pricePuerto Rico which is similar to a classical  colony the peoples are making line to get toilet paper and many others commodities, and they are making line to get potable water, foods, gasoline to run the generators, cooking with kerosene,  and many are dying due to lack of electricity, and they are washing their clothing in the rivers, and the water of the rivers are contaminated with animal waste. Probably, that can be called communism under the definition of the US ruling class and the idea spread among the population.The concept of envy reminds me of George Bush who said that most peoples around the world envy the situation of the USA including the liberty, the law and the standard of living, but he did not say that the USA has invaded ( 125 times in Latin America )  and intervened  many countries around the world and has killed thousands of human beings and that has created a large repulsion against their system, and it has also created a large immigration because those countries  have been completely impoverished along with the ruling elite of those nations and most peoples  in the US repeat the same expression without studying history, playing music by earThere was no such thing as Catholic land, the Vatican was the large landlord of Europe and most of that land was stolen from the peasant, ( the Vatican land belonged to the Italian peasants given by decree signed by  Mussolini  ) and when the Anglican church expropriated them, it produced one of the largest original accumulation in England and the same situation. took place in Eastern Europe, it was the thieve stealing from thieves.I have also travelled many parts of the world under a different view,  and I have not seen any envy, I have seen  poverty and economical exploitation, and robbery of the sweat of millions of human beings by a bunch of parasites which are the real lazy peoples because they do not work, it was the same situation produced by the  slaves who worked 16 hours a day and they were considered as lazy peoples, you are repeating the same vocabulary of the ruling elites.Don't you know that there are more 49 million peoples in the USA living in extreme poverty? What envy can they have against the workers of others countries? Workers do not have envy what they see is that small group peoples have everything and they have nothing. Have you followed the situation of the homeless living in the banks of rivers in the state of California? They are living in the same conditions that the peoples of Haiti.  Have you travelled to those places to see their envy?  Don't  you know that the majority of those poor people in the USA they are European descendants or white peoples?  Have you studied the history of the Italian, and Irish workers that emigrated to the USA and they lived in extreme poverty in the Ghettos of New York and Chicago? Do you know that the peoples that emigrated from Eastern Europe were called third world peoples? There is a good book that I would recommend you to read and it is titled: How the Irish became white. During WWII the USA government did not want to admit the European Jews because they had to be placed in the poor Ghettos of New York and Chicago.Have you travelled to the Natives reservations in the USA and see their envy that after 500 years they are living in worst conditions than during the tribe period,( Lewis Morgan Ancient Society is a very good book to be  read )  and they are renting their own land, there is an epidemic of alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, extreme poverty, and most children grew up  without their parents.. There are five books written by a US historian known as Francis Jennings which described their situations since the times of Colonialism. Read them and you will see a different situation to the fairy tales thought by the education system and the Cowboys movies filmed by Hollywood.Is there any incentive for peoples to work under capitalism? Why are peoples always waiting for the weekends to arrive? It is like Marx said that the happiness of man begins where the works end. Their happiness is with their family, relatives, friends and drinking in a bar or eating in a restaurant, and they are places where peoples are completely unemployed and they cannot do that either. First, see the envy of the US workers inside the USA and then, you can see the so-called envy of workers in others parts of the earth

    #131942
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    kenax wrote:
    Marcos wrote:
    kenax wrote:
     – one always needs an enemy to control the people). the problem is that the elite also control the media and most people just believe it. 

    That is called the capitalist press, that is the proper name,  and they are doing their job in the proper way, now they used the euphemism of calling them the media. They  propagate the bourgeoise ideologyThe Socialist Party press is different, we are doing our job  which is to inform and educate the world working class

    that is good, but please don't tell me that the press under communism is any closer to the truth. the main press agency there was called Pravda, which means "The Truth". What a total joke. when noam chompsky invited a bunch of Russian journalists to america, they were amazed that the media basically told the same lies, but that the general population actually believed that bs. in russia they said, if you want to make the people believe that, you have to rip out their finger nails. of course i'm not saying you all do that, but if you actually manage to somehow revolutionise the entire system and you do not have direct democracy, it will alway end up, in my mind, with the elite controlling things, and of course they will seize control of the media to enhance and better themselves. it is the nature of humans to want more. that is why i am for spreading the vote and doing more away with elite represenation.

    You can read the press of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and you will see the difference between Pravda, and others capitalist press. Your problem is that you are calling communist press of what in reality is also a class capitalist press, it is like looking for the ideological difference between the Western capitalists and the Soviet capitalists. PS Pravda existed before the emergence of the Soviet Union and it was privately owned by business people and the Leon Trotsky became its editors, and he provided certain political orientation,  so your history is not completely true either. The USA has also something similar to Pravda which was edited by the CIA and it was known as The voice of the Americas, but which Americas? it was the voice of the US government

    #131943
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    kenax wrote:
    thank you for the feedback. if you have some articles explaining exactly what your philosophy is, and more interestingly for me, how you envision to implement it and some practical explanations how it should function in practice i'd be happy to read it, thank you

    Hello, please watch this very short video and and you will see what socialism really is,  unsullied by politicians and dictators of the left and the right. The Socialist Party has stood for this since 1904  but the ruling class would like you to believe that the only alternative to capitalism is a state-capitalist dictatorship. Well it aint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZonz0YE50A&t=11s  

    #131944
    kenax
    Participant

    okay, will read your two articles, thank you. just one thing i would like to clear up, by envy i was referring to laborours working in a socialist factory. i was not at all referring to workers in the west. for example, for 25 years i translated. never liked the job but i liked being able to work at home and on my own time, not having to spend an hour in rush hour getting to and from work, or working in a regimented schedule with some boss breathing down the back of my neck. i could take naps at home whenever i wanted to and work on my own schedule, as long as i got the job done by the deadline. and more recently it has enabled me to travel around the world, requiring only a laptop and internet connection. it's not a fun job, but i don't understand how such a job would function without monetary remuneration. by envy i was talking about people working in a factory, for example, and watching others (within the same factory) who might appear to work less and start to bicker about it. some have mentioned about doing away with money. i am curious what motivation there would be under socialism to perform crap jobs, like cleaning the garbage off the streets.

    #131945
    kenax
    Participant

    okay, i read the two articles and checked out the video and would like to respond as follows. first of all, i believe we have similar intentions to the degree that people should not have to suffer in poverty while others get filthy rich. in this respect i found jesse ventura's proposal (which he got from someone else) that there be a cap on income, the rest going to taxes. such as 100 million bucks a year. cannot that be enough for anyone? is not a billion bucks a year in income totally obsene when we consider so many starving people around the world, who could all be well fed on just US's military monthly budget in Iraq of some 80 billion dollars (not sure if i remember all the statistics correctly). or apparently in denmark, if you are of certain wealth, taxes might be 105%, meaning you pay out more in taxes than you actually earn. if a person is wealthy he should be happy enough. the problem with the ruling class is based on human nature. these driven, shrewed, highly motivated and often very intelligent and not so honest people become obsessed with a craving for more power, while most of us are happy with some job and loving their families in the evening. those who are obsessed with power can easily despise the poor or common joe. my parents are very driven and i can see how they despise to see lazy people freeloading off the social net in canada while they work hard.so yes, 8 billionaires controlling so much wealth is a crime, i agree, i just cant see the practical implementation of a purely socialist society. without currency? how are we supposed to trade? such as one's labour for a dozen eggs? in your video was surreptiously inserted "people will volunteer their labour". Really? why? what is their motivation? this is why i brought up envy. maybe it's similar to a kibutz, although i have never experienced it myself. i honestly do not want to argue or anger anyone here. i am truly enjoying the discussion.

    #131946
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    kenax wrote:
    okay, will read your two articles, thank you. just one thing i would like to clear up, by envy i was referring to laborours working in a socialist factory. i was not at all referring to workers in the west. for example, for 25 years i translated. never liked the job but i liked being able to work at home and on my own time, not having to spend an hour in rush hour getting to and from work, or working in a regimented schedule with some boss breathing down the back of my neck. i could take naps at home whenever i wanted to and work on my own schedule, as long as i got the job done by the deadline. and more recently it has enabled me to travel around the world, requiring only a laptop and internet connection. it's not a fun job, but i don't understand how such a job would function without monetary remuneration. by envy i was talking about people working in a factory, for example, and watching others (within the same factory) who might appear to work less and start to bicker about it. some have mentioned about doing away with money. i am curious what motivation there would be under socialism to perform crap jobs, like cleaning the garbage off the streets.

    There are voluntary workers in the capitalist society doing the same jobs without any monetary compensation, like the voluntary workers in hospital cleaning and giving a bath to the patients and taking them to the bathroom, and washing their dirty clothes, bodies and blankets. There is also a good book written by Paul Lafargue titled: The right to be lazy, and there is another one written by Franz Fanon known as the Slave mentalityThere are workers in the east and the Caribbean in the so-called socialist countries working in factories doing the same jobs as the wage slaves of the Maquiladoras, the sweatshop and the free zones. There were peoples working in the factories of New York in the textile industry making 1.25 an hour working 7 days a week without any type of benefits or workers unions. Most of them were Caribbean womenThe European workers have higher salaries than the USA workers and they have more social benefits. As Robbo said workers are not making any money at all, most workers are working for free. Capital means unpaid labour in my neighbourhood it is called robbery. Working at home the slave is cheaper than the one working on the premises, there is no such freedom because if you don't work you will not survive, but capitalist can spend their whole life  without moving a finger

    #131947
    robbo203
    Participant
    kenax wrote:
    okay, i read the two articles and checked out the video and would like to respond as follows. first of all, i believe we have similar intentions to the degree that people should not have to suffer in poverty while others get filthy rich. in this respect i found jesse ventura's proposal (which he got from someone else) that there be a cap on income, the rest going to taxes. such as 100 million bucks a year. cannot that be enough for anyone? is not a billion bucks a year in income totally obsene when we consider so many starving people around the world, who could all be well fed on just US's military monthly budget in Iraq of some 80 billion dollars (not sure if i remember all the statistics correctly). or apparently in denmark, if you are of certain wealth, taxes might be 105%, meaning you pay out more in taxes than you actually earn. if a person is wealthy he should be happy enough. the problem with the ruling class is based on human nature. these driven, shrewed, highly motivated and often very intelligent and not so honest people become obsessed with a craving for more power, while most of us are happy with some job and loving their families in the evening. those who are obsessed with power can easily despise the poor or common joe. my parents are very driven and i can see how they despise to see lazy people freeloading off the social net in canada while they work hard.so yes, 8 billionaires controlling so much wealth is a crime, i agree, i just cant see the practical implementation of a purely socialist society. without currency? how are we supposed to trade? such as one's labour for a dozen eggs? in your video was surreptiously inserted "people will volunteer their labour". Really? why? what is their motivation? this is why i brought up envy. maybe it's similar to a kibutz, although i have never experienced it myself. i honestly do not want to argue or anger anyone here. i am truly enjoying the discussion.

     Hi Karel The short answer to your  point  is that there is no need to trade in a socialist society and consequently no need for money either.  Trade or quid pro quo exchange implies private or sectional ownership of the means of producing wealth.   As such it is incompatible with the economic foundations of a socialist society where the means of wealth production are the common property of all, where goods and services are made available on a completely free basis and where labour is perfomed on a purely voluntary basis. Its no fault of your own, Karel, that you seem to have got the wrong end of the stick about socialism given the sheer volume of misinformation/disinformation on the subject.  However, it is comments such as yours and countless others I have come across that convinces me of the urgent need for the SPGB to bring out a comprehensive and well reseached pamphlet on the so called Human Nature argument against socialism.  I am convinced this is the major reason why people such as your good self tend to be somewhat skeptical. I hope we can demonstrate to you in due course that this is not at all the barrier to socialism that you might suppose…

    #131948
    kenax
    Participant

    thank you for the nice words Robbo. i guess socialism got the most bad wrap because of the capitalists who bought into media and helped propagate the red scare, to encourage people to embrace capitalism as some sort of gauntlet of freedom while communism represents repression (which it did).meanwhile, in communist russia, they basically used the same tactics but limited their pictures of the west to the worst slums. i remember when my parents finally brought their grandparents to the west and they were utterly amazed at the massive stockpile of food in your average grocery store. in any case, i'm still curious about practical implementation. for example, at one point it was said it could not exist if any country adopted capitalism. this would require a worldwide revolution, and i doubt it wouldn't be bloody. i would think it would be a good idea to lay out some sort of a "ten point plan" of how this is supposed to come about. perhaps start on a grass roots level, perhaps akin to the Hamish in north Alberta, Canada, who for religious reasons don't want electricity or any of the gadgets and just live together like a community in kibutz style. if enough of such communities were built from the ground up, with grassroots interest, then i could imagine a world transition/revolution could take place. secondly, even if this first stage was successful, i still do not understand how the day to day functionality would work. running several online business, i guess i look at things from a practical perspective. let me explain. first of all, i am a one man show. i taught myself programming, web design, search engine optimisation and many things. i do not have any employees, so i guess i could be considered as one "owning the means to production". because of my webpages customers write to me asking me to organise boat tours for them. i pick someone who is available, and after they confirm their availability and interest, and after the customer pays the deposit (my remuneration if all goes well), i send to the customer the contact detail to the boatman and they take care of the rest. so the boatmen are basically freelancers like myself and are free to turn down any offers. like when i was translating for the past 25 years before i found this "job". what i don't understand is how my service could possibly exist in a moneyless society. why should i bother with all the effort if i could just go fishing and grow my own vegetables on this lovely little remote island i live on in the Philippines? why would the boatman bother hosting the guests if he doesn't feel he'll get a larger lcd movie screen out of it, or possibly larger boat? who's going to pay for the gas? it seems that your system of presuming everyone is going to work voluntarily will inevitably turn into blocks and blocks of people waiting for the next ration of toilet paper. and i cannot imagine a service like mine even existing (except perhaps for the ruling elite, as they always seem to crop up like mushrooms after rain, no matter what system is devised).again, i do not wish to be cynical or negative or provocative, but this discussion truly does interest me. Endnote: actually, speaking of the Philippines, i imagine it quite may have been your socialistic ideal before the Spaniards came, who invaded the 7,107 islands and conglomerated the many tribes under the name of King Philip of Spain at the time so that it could incorporate the region into the system of world colonial rule by the europeans, them fighting against one another and plundering the world's resources for their advantage in competition. Even on the island where i live, most of the people are simple fishermen, living from the ocean and land. all these tribes probably lived in harmony, different tribes populating different beaches or islands, everyone here is so relax its not funny. they might have been happy going on like that a thousand or more years. but if the world was like that, i doubt there would be any smartphones or the technologyy that represents such convenience for us, for better or for worse. In any case, i'm placing my faith in 3d printers and technology to free us from the tyranny of the capitalists. definitely think we live in very interesting times.

    #131949
    robbo203
    Participant
    kenax wrote:
     in any case, i'm still curious about practical implementation. for example, at one point it was said it could not exist if any country adopted capitalism. this would require a worldwide revolution, and i doubt it wouldn't be bloody. i would think it would be a good idea to lay out some sort of a "ten point plan" of how this is supposed to come about. perhaps start on a grass roots level, perhaps akin to the Hamish in north Alberta, Canada, who for religious reasons don't want electricity or any of the gadgets and just live together like a community in kibutz style. if enough of such communities were built from the ground up, with grassroots interest, then i could imagine a world transition/revolution could take place. secondly, even if this first stage was successful, i still do not understand how the day to day functionality would work. running several online business, i guess i look at things from a practical perspective. let me explain.  

     Hi Karel.   The question of practical implementation that you touch upon is a vital one but trust me when I say that all of the points you raise are points that others have raised too en route to becoming socialists themselves.   We have all been through these necessary prelimanry stages of questioing and trying to figure it all out.   In the end I guess it all comes down to one's ideological make  up and motivation as to what one does with the information to hand.Talking of which there is a wealth of information available on this site for you to explore and even if in the end we dont end up in agreement, such information will be very useful to you in your own political development. Can I particularly recommend to you 2 publicationshttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-practical-alternativehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/capitalism-socialism-how-we-live-and-how-we-could-liveApart from that, there is a treasure trove of about 114 yeras worth of articles published in the Socialist Standard.  That will make for a quite a lot of bedtime reading ! 

Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 53 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.