Equality does not imply sameness. Differences do not imply inequality. A woman is not less than a man (and vice versa) simply because of a difference in primary sexual characteristics.
As if the idea that all are created equal, and the results of the struggle for such things as women’s equality, civil rights, and gay marriage will simply disappear in a puff of smoke should society change.
Is minority tyranny any more palatable?
Frankly, yes, because if the minority goes mad with power, they can be wiped out with relative ease. What happens when the collective goes mad with power?
Fine, that’s your final goal, but what do you intend to do as a Socialist MEP?
The things you learn about some people! I had no idea, casdave. Brotherly greetings and all that.
Before I get down to the nitty-gritty in your post, I need to start off by providing general background with a quote from Marx - one that anyone who calls themselves Socialist ought to hold as a basic tenet of their politics: The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.
In other words, nobody can fight for, win, and build socialism on behalf of the workers; the workers have to do it themselves. It starts with things like trying to organize unions, for example, and learning how to fight for their own interests. Working people learn, both through winning and losing, that they can fight (and thus how to fight) and some might come independently to the conclusion that the whole system ought to be scrapped for something better.
This is where socialist politics and analysis come in; granted this will happen initially through the efforts of people who aren’t working class in origin but who, through understanding socialist politics, sympathize with them. But their job is not to pose as scribes, as guardians of Marxist holy writ, but to argue socialist politics and be active in the working class movement so that workers are exposed to the ideas and in some cases take them on as their own so they can argue with other workers.
It’s through this combination of workers’ struggle and political argument that people’s ideas change. Racist, sexist, even homphobic ideas and attitudes get shed rapidly - and permanently - when you’ve got Blacks, women, or gays and lesbians on the same side of the struggle as you are.
For example, when I was walking the line during the UPS strike in Maryland back in the late 90s (I didn’t work there; I was a Socialist out there in support) we ran across a couple of workers who wanted to fly the Confederate Stars & Bars at the Black scabs crossing the line. Another comrade of mine talked to them, plainly and non-confrontationally, about why flying that flag would offend their Black co-workers walking the line with them and they were a little surprised since they hadn’t thought about it that way. They quickly agreed and never flew the flag for as long as the strike lasted. A small, anecdotal example, but one that illustrates my point quite nicely.
Now to the meat of your post. I’d like to start off by pointing out what seems to be a stark contradiction in your thinking:
Compare this with
So on the one hand there is the tyranny of the minority, clearly an intolerable situation, but majority rule is also tyranny? No matter if it’s 95% to 5%, or 50.1% to 49.9%, someone’s always going to get oppressed? Where is the balancing point, if there is one?
It comes back to people’s ideas changing in the struggle for socialism. In learning how to fight against capitalist society to the point where it can finally be overthrown, people come around to the basic understanding that anything that sets them against other working people is a bad idea. And they don’t lose this understanding the day after the revolution; they take it with them and use it as a guiding principle in building the new world.
Human nature, for lack of a better term, is an infinitely plastic thing and very responsive to the surrounding environment. Some people may grow up believing the world owes them a living, but I’d wager that’s not the majority of working people - more like the trust fund babies and those listed in Burke’s Peerage. Working folk, on the other hand, are more likely to have had their interest in life beaten out of them by school, work, and daily life to the point where they just don’t care to try.
I’m assuming you have hobbies of some sort, or at least more than a passing interest in your day job, which means (in either case) that you genuinely care about something. Because of that, you want to put in some real effort to get enjoyment or satisfaction out of it. Now take that and increase its scope to the social scale - you have a whole world of people who had a stake in getting rid of the old system and in building a new one. This project requires involvement, initiative, ideas, and effort - and again, people aren’t going to lose the passion they gained in the fight to end capitalism; they’ll take it with them into building socialism. It takes getting them involved now, of course, but that should be blatantly obvious.
This would assume that socialists don’t have anything to say about the death penalty now, which is false. We oppose it, of course, and use it as an example of the injustice of the capitalist judicial system as a whole. Those ideas take hold in the struggle against capitalism and, at the risk of beating a dead horse, aren’t lost after that struggle is over. Overthrowing capitalism means overthrowing the death penalty, and people who fought to do so aren’t bloody likely to suddenly decide to have a plebiscite on the matter.
Good point here. This is a good arena for organizing resistance to decisions that affect working people negatively and a good forum for socialist analysis and arguments. Struggle can be built around this.
I’m here in Sweden but since I’m not yet a citizen I can’t vote in the elections; I am, however, working in support of a small grouping called ArbetarInitiativet (The Worker Initiative) that’s using the election as a forum for just such analyses and arguments. The goal isn’t to be elected - or promise change through the EU parliament if lightning strikes and AI candidates actually are - but to use the opportunity to present an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, pro-worker, pro-democracy viewpoint to a wider audience.
Excellent question indeed. This can’t be answered by one person, one party, or one parliament, to be sure.
This doesn’t answer his question - it just assumes that we can have worldwide socialism when every agrees to want worldwide socialism and everyone has exactly the same idea of what worldwide socialism means. There’s no indication you have any idea how to get to this point or how to stay at this point, assuming it can be reached.
Besides, capital punishment is hardly a capitalist symptom, despite the similarity of the names.
Yes it does - it makes an argument as to why a plebiscite on the death penalty would be a practical impossibility under socialism. The people who will build socialism will carry the idea of abolishing the death penalty with them from the overthrow of capitalism. Why would they suddenly decide to completely reverse everything they’d just fought for? Hypotheticals need not apply.
No. No, it doesn’t. Just as the struggle to overthrow capitalism has argument and debate among socialists and workers - which informs and exists alongside political action by those same people - at its foundation, so does the construction and administration of socialism. It’s not a monolithic political outlook that brooks no criticism whatsoever.
Something I’m well aware of. Nonetheless, capital punishment is a symptom of a justice system that has “equal justice under the law” as a slogan but not a practice, and this justice system operates under and is influenced by a social system based on private ownership of the means of production, aka capitalism. Opposing capitalist society and working for its end entails opposing the death penalty and working for its end.
Without a legal apparatus, which **psychonaut ** said would no longer exist, the ideas would not disappear, but their enforcement would. Do you honestly believe that the people of California who voted last year to ban gay marriage would treat gays equally in matters of employment and housing without the legal restrictions placed on them? That if we had a majority vote today about whether there should be no employment discrimation for protected classes that people would vote to uphold minority rights?
Minority tyranny is not palatable. A system that allows for a democratic republican form of government in which the concept of majority rule is tempered by numerous checks, balances, and restrictions to protect the rights of the minority is in my view, the best possible outcome in a world of diverse and different, if not necessarily unequal people. I’m asking psychonaut whether his world will have any such restrictions, or whether he advocates strict majority rule, which will inevitably lead to tyranny.
Just to be clear, psychonaut and I come from differing traditions - in fact I belong to an organization in the US which his organization’s website names as having gotten it all completely wrong. So, though your questions are actually quite good and I await his answers to them, please don’t assume I agree with the assertions that gave rise to them.
For my part, I say that yes, a system of checks and balances would probably be necessary for a while after the establishment of socialism, but they would not be permanent - when people are born, grow up, and live in a society where discriminatory ideas make no sense, what need of an enforcement mechanism to restrict those ideas?
Feh, keep forgetting things I wanted to say. Whatever system of checks and balances is required, it would be the creation of the people building socialism and not a carryover from the old society. The democratic republican form of government in the US, for example, has gamed the rules of election to make it virtually impossible for new parties to qualify for federal election funding unless you’re independently wealthy (e.g. Ross Perot) or you somehow miraculously garner 5% of the vote in a national election. Otherwise you’re permanently on fringe status.
So the death penalty is impossible under socialism? Inconceivable, even? No true socialist would ever be in favour of the death penalty? Does the death penalty existed outside capitalist countries? Does it exist or has it existed in self-described socialist states?
How about abortion? Drug legalization? How about any issue that is currently controversial in any way? Do they all cease to matter once the worldwide socialist mindset comes into effect, because that’s what it would take.
You have a dream, I see. That’s all it is.
Socialism, as the OP defines it, can exist only when everyone, or at least a very, very large portion of everyone, becomes altruistic. So long as people tend to be selfish, the concept cannot work.
This is where socialism has always broken down, in all efforts to initiate it as an absolute method of organizing a society. Sooner or later, someone, or many someones, decides to try and have something they want, when doing so isn’t really in the best interest of the whole. That’s the end of story at that point.
There are, of course, other problems with the concept, especially on a world-wide basis. How does the SPGB envision that the people of, say, China, will ever have a similar viewpoint upon what society as a whole needs worldwide as the people of, say, Australia do? China: big, highly and densely populated country with widely disparate incomes and assets among its people; Australia, big, but sparsely populated in general, with a somewhat less disparate division of income and assets among its populace. China: Asian in outlook, with a different religion and a different set of societal values from that of Australia.
Etc., etc.
Waste of time, frankly.
I’m not certain that this philosophy is compatible with basic human nature. Most people work in order to provide time and money to pursue leisure activities. I understand that in the proposed society, everyone would work at his or her “hobby” thus providing interesting work and a valuable product; but I just don’t see this as working out. If goods are freely available, there will be those who hoard them simply because they can.
Example: I’m a sculptor, and to fully kit out a good studio, it would cost me about 100K USD in supplies and tools. That’s a lot of stuff that I can just go and take from home depot without ever providing something in return. If my work is not well received do I have to give it all back? can I just keep trying while not really providing anything of immediate use to society or what? Maybe all I want to do is travel about the globe and explore, can I do that?There are plenty of people who will go and take stuff just to use it once, and hold onto it “just in case”.
So what I want to know is this: How will the oversight and regulation of the return to society vs the individual consumption be measured? How will the worthiness of products be judged? Certainly it isn’t sane to invest the same amount of dollars to fully kit out a studio/workshop for anyone who has an idea.
This would imply that there will have to be oversight, and regardless of what we call it or how we arrive at that oversight, that is government. Someone has to be responsible to ensure that goods and services are allocated sanely, and fairly.
“Relative ease”?! There are countless examples of minority tyrannies hanging on for decades or even centuries.
Yeah, and then the tree of liberty get replenished with the blood of tyrants. The ease is relative to trying to change a society where simple majority vote carries the day, where there is no center of power that one can lobby or petition or overthrow to effect change.
I bet your cause got a big boost when our financiers looted the world economy for trillions.
As an anarchist I agree with the OPs final goal. The only point we differ on is I don’t think you can trust any government to hold power even for a short time. Karl Marx foresaw the eventual withering away of the state - this was his only mistake. You can’t wait for the state to wither away, you have to establish anarchism immediately. You have to jump straight from democracy to anarchism without any intermediate stage.
It’s always the intermediate stage that has sunk socialism. No attempt at socialism has ever got out of that “intermediate” stage. Lenin didn’t expect his party to be in power for long, he thought the state would be dismantled within two or three years. He was wrong. He made the same mistake as Marx, thinking you need an intermediary stage. The intermediary stage is fatal to the whole enterprise.
You have to jump straight to anarchism but you can only do that when the whole world wants to do it. So it might be a few hundred years off yet. Whatever you do though, you can’t trust an intermediate government. This govenment will by definition be totalitarian since there will be no other ideas around. So your plan, by necessity, involves a short period of totalitarian government. You can’t have totalitarian government even for a short time. They never go away once you put them in.
Fellow anarchist jumping in here to disagree that “jumping” into anarchy will work, or that it is a smart thing to do.
Which only says to me that the stages tried so far have either been poorly thought out or poorly executed, or some combination of similar failings. The only reasonable conclusion is that methods A, B, & C were not good methods, were timed poorly, or were executed poorly. I don’t think it’s reasonable to conclude that the stage/method.etc. in and of itself is the wrong thing to have.
I disagree and I believe history disagrees with you as well.
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Well, when I said “jumping into” I meant more that society will naturally evolve into anarchism. You don’t need any socialism in the meantime.
Guess we have to disagree on that. I think government is wrong, ALL government, even short term government. Anarchy is the absence of government - I don’t see where all these stages come into it? We want anarchy not “stages” of government. I think it is reasonable to conclude that the mere fact of having stages is the problem given that no communist government thus far has ever withered away or looks like it’s going to.
So I’d say history’s on my side really.
ALL resources are scarce. Economics is the study of human behaviour and resource allocation under conditions of scarcity. The reason you don’t see the scarcity in a capitalist country is because prices control the production and consumption of goods that cannot be created in unlimited quantities.
Tell me: In your system, how do you know how many hammers to make? What do you do when there are only enough people to make hammers, OR to make saws, but not enough people to make both? How do you decide what percentage of your labor will be devoted to hammers vs saws?
How do you decide how many people will be doctors? What do you do when everyone wants to be a movie star, but no one wants to clean sewers? You’re abolishing money, so what incentive to do you offer to people to ensure that dirty, low-status, yet important jobs are still done?
If there’s only enough food to give everyone 1000 calories a day, what are you going to do with the person who chooses to consume 3000 calories and let two other people starve?
If there’s only so much land in London, and everyone wants to live in London, how are you going to decide who gets to use the property? What is your mechanism for stopping someone who wants to live in London from simply moving into the apartment occupied by someone else? What gives one person the right to an apartment and not another?
Who will build new homes, and why? What possible incentive do I have to go out and do some backbreaking work for someone else, when I could sit at home and surf the net instead?
With no authority figures, I assume you’d have no military? What do you do when your not-so-enlightened neighbors decide that they could use London more effectively than you can?
Who decides who gets the homes on the beachfronts, and who gets the drabby apartments next to the steel mill?
Really? Then it should be trivial for you to show that capitalist countries under-produce goods and services as compared to socialist and communist countries. Please do so.
Really? Are you saying that under socialism there will be an unlimited supply of restaraunts? How does that work? Why would anyone want to run a restaurant anyway? They can’t make money at it. How would they get their supplies? If they could, how would they ensure that their supplies are of high quality so they can make food that people actually want to eat?
So… No need for accountants in your system? No one needs to track production, or figure out forecasts for what will be needed next year and plan ways to make sure it can be made?
Do you have some specific numbers for your assertion? Just how many people in a typical capitalist country are employed in ‘non-productive’ pursuits? I’ll be generous and accept a number with ±5% accuracy - surely you’ve got such numbers since you’re willing to tear down society to achieve this efficiency. I have to assume you know what will be gained by that.
Specialization of labor doesn’t exist under capitalism? Are you joking?
Wow, what diversity. So a television guy can make computer monitors, and that’s your example of the lack of specialization in a capitalist country? Tell me, can that television assembly line worker fix my car? Perhaps grow some potatoes for me? Make me a shirt? Fix my teeth? Unclog my drains? Build me a road? Hell, even on a road crew, can the asphalt machine driver operate the line-marking machine? Can the guy on the television assembly line who screws the case together also operate the wave solderer? Can he be put in the test area and make sense of what the oscilloscopes are telling him?
You’d think that after a hundred years or so, basic questions like this would be trivially easy for your party to answer. I can hardly wait.
Ah. In that case we are not in disagreement on this point. I agree that socialism is not a lesser substitute for an anarchic state, but I can certainly see that it may be one step (or several) on the path which we end up taking.
We are, I think, quibbling semantically. In my view, society will certainly go thru many revisions of government, ultimately arriving at an anarchist state. Evolving towards it, if you will. The fact that we don’t have a viable anarchist state ATM is more a reflection of societal tendencies (we aren’t ready for it, in other words).
My disagreement with your earlier point was that you said totalitarian governments don’t ever go away. Like all governments they depend on the will of the people; that is, if enough people finally realize they have “had enough of this shit” they do indeed go away. Perhaps not peacefully, or easily, but they do cease to govern.
ETA: Thank you for the clarification. I’m going to bow out of this side discussion now, as I’m really interested in the OP’s positions and thoughts. Thanks again.