Young Master Smeet
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fz849The above will be available for one week: it's quite a good programme, back when Stl was still in the SWP…
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:All the nonsence about abuse, spam etc is a whitewash. This has been a premeditated and planned attack on the free speech of *certain* membersI will not remain in a party with such 'moderation'. It is nothing but censorship.What views do you think you have (or have tried to express) that the premeditated plan attackers want to suppress? Why are you worth censoring?
http://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/807483.sozialdemokraten-gruenden-neue-internationale.htmlThis seems to shed some light. Acording to Google translate, it says, among other things:
Machine Translation wrote:The formation of the new alliance preceded disengagement from the traditional Socialist International (SI), which was coming under increasing criticism. Gabriel had announced earlier this year that the SPD would suspend payments to the International – the German Social Democrats were around 100,000 British pounds largest contributor. From an SPD member of the board was at the time reported that Gabriel had the ground that he could not allow "that the SPD with gangsters at a table" seats. This was aimed, inter alia, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional of Nicaragua.It seems it has been replaced by a "Progressive Alliance":http://www.progressiveallianceconference.org/progressive-network.html
Warm Words wrote:The progressive, democratic, social democratic, socialist and labour movement is founded on the belief in human rights and the pursuit of freedom, justice, social equality and international solidarity. Our time is defined by rapid changes and historic economic and political shifts. Looking around us, many countries are striving with grave economic challenges, while in other geographical areas people have a more optimistic view for the future than ever before. In every circumstance, the demand for progressive policies which provides answers to the needs of ordinary men, women and children is strong.Seems to be their founding object. Apparently there will be apple pie too.
Bugger, just lost my reply. Try again.Short version: socialism isn't a thing. Socialism is us applying the capacity and co-operation we use in our daily lives now. If workers don't think they can run their own lives, they won't create socialism. We run capitalism from top to bottom in a co-operative fashion, and socialism is just about extending that workplace co-operation. There is no chart, no method, no algorithm, just free co-operation. The evidence is in your own life, before your very eyes every day.
Right, I think we're on the same page with scalability.So, the thing to crack is the autonomous agency, and then relations between autonomous agencies. Now, in any large scale firm, departments (or teams, in the usual modern terminology) operate independently, within their structural remit: the director of a firm does not micromanage teams a long way from the management level. So, we do have the modern means of marrying the relations between a close knit team and a larger organisation.My larger point is that socialism lies in what we do now: we run capitalism from top to bottom through collaborative means'; and it won't be some thoroughly worked out model of socialism that will convince people its possible, but folk's capacity to run their own teams and lives now.In firms, we don't charge each otehr for our time, we don't haggle with our managers for the cost of every instruction and we don't pay for stationery or the use of resources during the day.
Alaric wrote:By my definition if you have 6 billlion people having 12 billion 1:1 market based interactions then the market system is operating at a different scale to 600 people having 1200 1:1 market based interactions. My concern about examples of very small proto-socialist societies is that the kind of 1:x relations used in these small societies will not be sufficient (or very useful) to run a society of a much larger scale and complexity. Just as I think market relations tend to be very inefficient for a very small society with simple production processes.Let's take, by way of analogy, an armed band. 10 guys with sticks. If you have 10,000 instances of ten guys with sticks, you don't have any qualitative difference in scale, merely a greater number of instances of the same scale. If you meld that 100,000 men into a coherent fighting force with a command/control structure, you have a fighting force on a much greater capacity and scale.
Alaric wrote:Ah! I think we mean different things by scale. The problems facing large societies are different to those facing small societies. Consequently, while some cooperative peer-to-peer interaction may be sufficient to run a society the size of Tristan Da Cunha (<200 peope) it does not follow that this peer-to peer interaction is sufficient to run a society of 6.5 Billion. Why is it that very small cooperative societies exist (and have existed) but no larger ones have? There may be many explanations, but one is scalability.I think we were understanding the same thing. My point was that market society does not grow by increasing the numbers involved in market interactions, but the numbers of such interactions. So, instead of, say, an organisation of 10,000 people, what you have is 5,000 1:1 interactions happening relatively autonomously. At each stage there are still only 2 people in any given 1:1, but you could increase the, lets call it width, of such activity to 100,000 people simply by increasing the numbers of 1:1'sObviously, socialism, like capitalism, will need large and complex organisations, but it will still need the logic (and situation) of a similar autonomous interactions. p.s. Please note, I am not a Mister, I'm a Master…
Alaric wrote:I do not understand. We live in a capitalist world. We do not need to demonstrate it is feasible to have a capitalist world as we live in one now. I do not see the current capitalist system as failing. It might, but it is not currently failing relative to a medieval village.My point was, if it didn't exist, on paper it would look unfeasible and the market relations breakdown and become supported by bureaucratic administrative mechanisms.
Alaric wrote:"Also, do we need to scale these interactions, or spread them? A market interaction remains a buyerseller relationship even when embedded in much more complex processes the same would occur for democratic non=market interaction between different co-operative socialist agencies."I don't really understand what you are saying here, be more specific please. Which processes? Which evidence type are you referring to?What I am saying is that markets don't scale, all that happens is there is more of them, so we need to look at concrete peer-to-peer interactions that will occur in socialism, rather than an overarching and complex plan.BTW, you're right that co-ops and armies have coercive power behind them, but charities and voluntary organisations, which consume millions of hours of labour time, do not.
On a crappy keyboard, so will be brief:1) No-market interactions and organisations on a massive scale do existFord, General Motors, Massive CorporationsThe NHSThe Armed forces of various states.2) Yes, it could be argud that they are ultimately tied to markets, but within them are co-operative organisational models, albeit hierachical ones.3) Co-operatives, though, do exist on a similar scale to these organisations, and show that domination is not an essential characteristic of co-operative operation. On the question of scalability, it would be difficult to demonstrate that market interactions scale (arguable in that they don't, and what worked in a medieval village is failing now). Also, do we need to scale these interactions, or spread them? A market interaction remains a buyerseller relationship even when embedded in much more complex processes, the same would occur for democratic non=market interaction between different co-operative socialist agencies.
1) Fewer hours don't negate harder work, the simple actions of working with machines can be construed as harder more intensive work (and of course, job seeking is work too, which is definitely made harder).2) You mean your spurious atom and walking analogies? OK, the difference between the nucleus of an atom and non-monetary economic activity is that the same ends (transfer of resources, division of labour and produiction) can and are achieved by co-operative methods as can be and have been achieved through market mechanisms, thus money can be demonstrated to be non-essential. You're thus more on the ball with your walking analogy, which does achieve the same ends as driving: and whether that is better is a judgement call; we could do away with cars and walk everywhere.3) Vast enterprises are run on a co-operative basis, with people working together and not charging each other for their time, with administered quality controlled processes of production from beginning to end. We're well past the Wright brother's moment. Good science is looking very hard at the obvious, which goes under our noses every day.4) I believe people should make political choices based on the cards they're dealt. At the minute, we've got 7's high, but we might be able to bluff our way through to the redraw and get a better hand later.
Alaric wrote:Less work: Actually we do not know if there will be less work. We know that given the current political economy a certain fraction of man-hours is speant on providing essential goods. We do not know that this will be run as efficiently under different political economies. You also presume the labour going into "planning" in capitalism is more than in socialism. Yet again this is not obvious.I presume no such thing, in fact it could take more work to actually plan socialism, but we have the resources to actually expand the supervisory/planning aspects of production. The assumption of less work is made on the basis of the fact that under-capitalism labour saving technology means harder work, but under emancipated labour will mean actually not needing to work.
Alaric wrote:Rocket Analogy: I believe the party case is at the: "oh look we fired a rocket 30 yards" stage. Not the stage of discussing the colour of the rocket nor the precise workings of the valves. I don't believe we are yet at a stage of understaning analagous to understanding escape velocity, the physics behind maintaining a stable orbit, or whether it is ether or vacuum out there.When the Wright brothers flew 200 yards they proved the concept, within ten years there were tens of thousands of planes in the air flying thousands of miles. We have a plethora of different mechanisms for non-monetary interactions.
Alaric wrote:If we don't have to make the choice then we might as well stop discussing this, because its all out of our hands.We have as much choice in this as we have in falling in love and with whom. I'll never fall in love with someone I'll never meet. We can imagine relationships, we can hone our social skills and prepare ourselves for seduction and proposition, but we still have to wait for circumstance and biology to play their part.
Well, taking the traditional difference between reforms and reformism into account, I was just suggesting I can think of worse things for people to be doing than preventing loss of life. And, hell, when we take on state power some non-lethal ways of putting down "slave holder" revolts would come in handy…
Alaric,I'm happy to discuss the feasbility of socialism, but you took us off on the wee tangent about whether people should (that word again) have a balance sheet of risk/benefit before they go about making socialism.To take your rocket analogy, though, at the early stage of such a project, all that is needed at the early stage is the idea that it is possible. Once rockets ame into being, people realised that space flight could happen. The senate committees that approved the project didn't concern themselves with the colours of the rockets, or the precise mechanisms of the valves on the air feed pipe. What they did satisfy themselves of, was that there would be enough minds sufficiently capable of dealing with such problems on the job. The idea was agreed in principle, and then people began to work towards the minutia.Currently, 1 in 20 of the available human workforce is unemployed. Many millions more are involved in tasks that exist only to support the existing system of society, and millions more in administering and we can call this planning it. If we consider repurposing every accountant, actuary, insurance broker and stock broker, with all the ancilliary mathematical and computational expertise that associates with them, we know we have the capacity to work out a lot of difficult problems.The answer to most of your list above is: we'll have a ruddy long and fierce argument about it. Different methods will be used in different bits of the world, as happens now.A partial answer to point four above, though, is that we could look at minimising the amount of work anyone has to do. If the claim that we could feed, clothe and house every man woman and child for two days work a week each holds up (and I think it does), then that's what we're looking at, divvying up the two days work (of course, I'd expect a lot of other work to happen in the other five, but they'd be "hobbies").
Quote:This whole discussion I have been trying to get a discussion about the feasibility of socialism. However, as soon as you realised that you don't actually have any good evidence for this you started trying to avoid the debate. And now we have ended up with an argument of the form "We don't need evidence for the revolution is foretold.".I usually find it unwise to try and second guess the motivations of those I'm debating with: I am not a mind reader, and there is good evidence to suggest you aren't. As it stands, you are promoting an utopian position, I am trying to oppose it. I've no interest in trying to prove that Castles in the Sky are feasible, I'm interested in how society is and the underlying logic of its movement. Further, I don't think they should fight for the whole hog, I think they'll have to. Beyond that, all we need is to be aware that mechanisms other than the monetary exist and can work, thus meaning that working class emancipation is possible and the end choice needn't be barbarism.
As Bernard Shaw wrote, Anarchy is a game at which the police will beat you. They are the biggest bestest anarchists of them all. Fighting them is pointless and futile (and unnecessary), since the political machinery of state can be captured via the ballot box.Frankly, persuading the police to kill fewer people through soft-power tactics sounds like a good service to our class.
