Young Master Smeet
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SocialistPunk wrote:And if friends won't sign, get some better friends.
That's a pretty scummy opinion.
"widest dissemination of information",No subscription costs for learned journals, well stocked libraries with no membership costs, open access to datasets where practicable (subject to reasonable privacy of participanmts in experiments)"open debate"No pre-censorship, peer reviewed journals, free association and adequate resources made for groups to promulgate opinion."maximum number of people"the debate never ends.
Dave B,Of course, we can apply Condorecet's Jury theorem(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet%27s_jury_theorem) The more people involved in arriving at a decision, the more likely they are to be right. The big question is what effects the probability of a voter being right, simple guess work between two options is 50/50, so any reliable information should raise the chance of a voter being right above 50%, so long as the voter processes it correctly. Obviously, diminishing returns apply as you add aditional voters (as you say about polling smple size, once you get enough it doesn't make much odds to add a few more).What that would seem to suggest is that the widest dissemination of information is necessary, along with open debate that includes the maximum number of people.
SP,it's better, IMNSHO, to go knocking on doors, as it's a way of raising awareness that there is a campaign going on,. In London it's difficult to get the right number of people in the same constituency. And, to be frank, I'd rather not put friends on the spot and ask them (and risk perfectly reaonable refusal).
SP,we need ten electors to sign nomination papers before we can contest the seat.Steve,Yeah, he'll check them when I hand it in, and I've got the cmplete list to check myself, so we should be good.
Just a quick note: four of us went knocking on doors in North Islington to collect signatures. Most people were polite (although many pointed out how inconcvenient our calls were). Quite a few politely declined our request, because they were Labour; but we did it in the end. Including one party member as a signatory, which is relatively unusual.Next step is to submit the paperwork, that's next week, after nominations formally open I'll have to double check our signatures before then to make sure all were eligible electors, I missed a column off the print-out).
Quote:In fact, humans 'react to the same circumstances and material conditions' in totally different ways, because those 'humans' live in different societies and thus have different 'social beings'.And if humans were not at root basically the same, then those people brought up in a given society would react differently to their experienced social being, rather than reacting in relatively predictable ways. There wouldn't be stable social sets such as nations and classes.
Quote:'Humans' are actually 'social products', and so different societies will produce different 'individuals'. Unhappily for your bourgeois liberalism, which insists to you that 'you are an individual', Marx's ideas insist that if you had been born in a different society, you would be a different person. And you wouldn't regard yourself as 'an individual'.There seems to be an echo in here, since that was exactly what I was saying, that humans are basically identical, and the offspring of one "nation" transplanted into another would grow up exactly the same as their fellows. All humans have basically the same bodies and the same brains, and will react to the same circumstances and material conditions in roughly the same ways, so that social being will determine social consciousness, or something like that.
If humans are not basically the same the world over, how can they be expected to have any equality of say in running society? Let's not forget, that nationalism doesn't "just happen" it is the product of a vast process of material production, from mass media, to civic performance. The material culture of sports helps produce, reproduce and reify nationalist ideas. It's not a coincidence that a lot of effrot went into nationalism as a direct counter to the workers mvoement and its internationalism.
This is very revealing, nationalism seeks to make humans into rocks. Of course, Marx flirted with Tremaux, until (it seems from correspondence) saved by Engels, on the very connexion between rocks and people.
But they don't emphasise your humanity, nationalism denies humanity, and instead interposes nation, and denies humanity to other nations. It also emphaises the idea that the world cannot change, since the nation is an organic whole as it is and is unchangeable. The fact is, it is science that punctures the lies of nationalism, and demonstrates that us talking rocks are all basically the same the world over.
LBird wrote:Given the choice between a 'nationalism', which gives room to human input, or a 'materialism' which tells us that the rocks speak to us, I know which any thinking human will go for.But Nationalism doesn't give room to human input: its very point is it essentialises and reifies "national characteristics" and removes them from debate. It is 'inevitable' that different nationalities will compete and struggle for dominance "good fences make good neighbours" and all that.
I think it's fine as far as it goes, but I don't think either 'regulated stock control' or saying 'Zim-zala-bim ABUNDANCE' quite does the job (90% of the time, I think both do cover the case, they merely , to my mind, fight the ECA to a draw, rather than knock it out). I used a different tack in my talk about incas, demonstrating that a complex (largely) moneyless society existed, and the main basis was self sustaining communities backed up by very detail labour accounting centrally, plus stores of reserves. So, we aren't far off, but i am still seeking the magic bullet, possibly in Adjusted winner and stable matching systems.
I've read Cockshott, and in particular his stuff on kantorvich (which I found interesting), thouh his instance on labour vouchers seems redundant to me (among the simplest criticism is, if everyone works roughly the same number of hours, why bother handing out the vouchers that way)? At least he is looking to find a way to set up a systematic money free society, but ultimately i think he is too wedded to a centralised planning mechanism.
Stuart, I think Mises is right and wrong at the same time. He's absolutely right that economic actors need scope to negotiate, act and react independently, and to evaluate their activities. The simple failure in his argument is the assumption that this can only be done through exchange.Red Plenty is a splendid book, and it brings through the utopian thought in a lot of what some people in the soviet union tried to do, and it demonstrates neatly the failure of a centralised command control system without the active involvement of the population at large.Kantorovich's system has a lot of benefits, and could be used to create indicative system values, there's no need for end user exchange (and, importantly, the maths could be done at the firm level, not necessarily by a central bureaucracy). Other solutions such as adjust winner auctions and rank choice voting (along the lines of Shapley's stable matching algorithms) could be used fairly comprehensively.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjusted_winner_procedurehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
