rodshaw
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Hi Johan,
I doubt very much the Netherlands would go bankrupt but unfortunately governments always put costs ahead of human health and wellbeing because they support the capitalist system which is based on profit-making and cost-saving.
But in the properly socialist or communist world that we advocate (for us the words are interchangeable) there would be no governments to tell us what to do. Instead, decisions would be made democratically by the whole community, based on the best evidence available.
In socialism there would be no money because all resources would be commonly owned. Health and wellbeing would be given priority and those who needed extra care would get it. There would be no monetary cost, and healthcare like everything else would be determined by people’s self-defined needs.
I have a suspicion that by far most people who profess a religion in the statistics are not very devout. They mostly do their worship for social/family or ‘just in case’ reasons.
Before world revolution can come about people’s ideas need to change on a huge scale. Otherwise it’s minority action imposed on the majority. There’s no way it will take people by surprise. That doesn’t mean we all have to be experts in political theory but people will certainy have to be aware of their position under capitalism and have the desire to change it.
The campaign for socialism might in the meantime take people by surprise if it ‘goes viral’ (when it might still be only supported by a minority). The change from a small minority into a substantial majority might happen very fast and leave some of us reeling – the capitalist class most of all, let’s hope.
”Now, when socialists are so very few, a higher degree of understanding of the workings of capitalism and the course of history are required of socialists (at least of organised socialists). This need not be the case when the socialist movement takes off and begins to become a mass movement.”
Maybe this would become true as the practice of socialism became more relevant than the theory. If you’re establishing more democratic workplaces, helping to get food to those who need it, building a more eco-friendly environment, etc., it doesn’t really matter what your religious views are.
But I don’t think membership would grow significantly, if at all, if we dropped the religion question. It would probably fall as some people would be bound to leave.
The Great Britain figure for no religion also went up significantly in that time. Same for the UK, if you lump no religion and not stated together.
But the figures beg the question – is the abandonment of religion by the majority a prerequisite for establishing socialism?
Interesting. One tends to think of London as being more ‘progressive’ than the rest of the country. This suggests that it’s more conservative.
Does it say whether the numbers of religious people are increasing or decreasing?
Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, has written a short book The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again, apparently containing scathing comments on how world governments have approached the pandemic. Too little too late, ignoring medical advice, scientists in thrall to the government, putting capitalism before needs, etc. etc. All things we would have predicted when it started.
How to stop it happening again? Pity people like him can’t just go that bit further and campaign for an end to the system itself.
Meanwhile, sport is making a comeback, driven of course by the money machine. The richer the clubs, the quicker they are coming back while the poorer ones will struggle. Football League 1 is at loggerheads over whether to continue or call it a day. The social distancing measures clubs have to obey are almost laughable. Footballers can celebrate goals by touching elbows. And on televised matches there will be the option of synthetic crowd noise.
Would it happen in a sane society?
This is brilliant. The guy voiced most of the concerns people have about socialism and gave Paddy plenty time to explain the case patiently and with hardly any interruption.
When we get two hours of airtime like this on the BBC, we’ll know we’re going places…
I would be well and truly amused to see the Tory party ripped apart over all this hoo-ha.
According to an article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (though I don’t know how people get information like this), Johnson is well and truly pissed off with Cummings but is feeling the strain of the last few months and can’t do without him. They have in common that neither ever apologises.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but playing with people’s lives.
There is also no point in trying to decide now what attitude a socialist society will take towards meat eating and the slaughtering of animals, especially when different parts of the world may take different attitudes towards it.
As a matter of interest this is the email the party sent them in 2013. Their website had a totally different look then, no paywall, and a far more ‘open’ aspect to it, including a contact email and lots of info about future events. Obviously enough to make us interested at the time in a debate.
But no wonder we didn’t get an answer!
“Dear World Future Society,
Hi there,
I am a member of the Campaigns Committee of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.We are interested in organising some sort of event with the World Future Society. Are you based in London, UK where we are? Would you be interested in this?
Were you to agree to a debate, off the top of my head we could debate a Materialist Conception of the Future, or as Marx put it;
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
Kind regards,
Darrell Whitehead
Campaigns Committee
The Socialist Party of Great Britain
