Anyone Have Ideas How We Can Get Socialism To Work?

Apparently the French are no longer so happy with Socialism.

It seems to me that you can only have socialism if almost everyone shares the socialist values.

When they don't all share the socialist ideals then people get upset with those who abuse the system.

My overall opinion is that it's an ideal but it's never going to work for an extended period of time.

Kind of... No matter what, capitalism is always more efficient than socialism, even if everyone is willing. Basically, socialism is forced contracts, while capitalism gives you the freedom to pick and choose.

I don't think that's a very precise thing to say.

The current president Sarko is a Conservative, the government has been
conservative since the beginning of the fifth republic.

Add to that that of the top two candidates, one was a Socialist, and that
the vote was close, with Royal getting 46%, and Sarko getting 53%.


It seems to me, that it did'nt so much have to do with socio-economic
policies, as it did with leadership skills.

More efficient for how many and what parts of the society? Is it not a documented fact that those who benefit most by capitalism are those who already had great wealth and power to start with ?



One should not have to be willing to work more than few hours a day to be able to afford the food to get to tomorrow. Since that is the conditions the capitalist system has created in the vast majority of truly capitalistic countries ( with no safety nets like western Europe, Scandinavia and North America) countries i think it shows that the average persons willingness to work 12 or 16 hour days for survival have not really enabled them to do so.

The reason people relatively well in some in 'the west' is because they have been able to resist capitalist forces and policies that consistently seeks to impoverish workers thus making them ever more exploitable.



Socialism has great benefits for the average person where capitalism has benefits for only the worse examples of the human species. Socialist systems is were workers ( and obviously this has nothing to do with the means of election) insist that there elected officials spend income taxes on THE PEOPLE and not use it for personal profit or corporate welfare. Capitalist systems is where the people are taxed and the money used to oppress other workers around the world while creating massive socialist corporate welfare schemes to keep that givens corporate bosses rich and the weapons coming of the assembly lines.



Certainly no mandate to go about changing France without the expectation of massive riots and general upheaval! The nearly 85% turnout in my opinion means that people are relatively sure of what they want ,or at least what they do not ( "Anyone But Sarkozy") want, and will resist if Sarkozy assumes too much support.



The conservatives ( more like reactionaries but anyways) are ALWAYS better supported by the media and tend to get their lies spread without objection while the left/socialist have to pretend towards the right , or at least the center, to avoid the US state department from getting involved.

I am only partly kidding btw...

Stellar

[edit on 8-5-2007 by StellarX]

I believe this is known as propaganda



Wrong.

Governments are created to provide for needs of the individual that are not well satisfied etc.

Anyway, mere government is not socialism. Socialism is form of government. It is a very particular and specific thing: the ownership of the means of production by the State.

If you are any kind of socialist at all, you know this already. So why are you deliberately muddying the waters?

Governments are in fact created by those who both seek power and want to remove themselves from the responsibility of doing anything the people want by having thousands below them to blame their inaction or misdirection on.



I don't recall that being the definition of socialism as ideally socialism is about 'the people( or at least private individuals)' owning the industrial capacity and resources of the country while the state ensures good living standards and expectations for the citizens that are over exploited by private enterprise or community. If the state owns the means of production 'the people' really do not as the state can be hijacked far more easily than private enterprises can. Such systems are more related to fascism/communism and capitalism than it is to idealized socialism.



I don't think he is and in my opinion any and all economic or resource centralization should be carefully considered due to it's nature of also consolidating power and allowing ever more efficient forms of exploitation.

Stellar

Rectifying ignorance, if not actually denying it


This is a cynical, one-sided definition of government that takes no account of the fact that governments in democratic countries rule by the mandate of the governed.

We are all trying i hope.



Sure it involves a good deal of cynicism but then i am looking at the world ,and perhaps idealistically, and do not think that it's 'what the people want'. If you think humanity wants this much violence, death and destruction and elects their governments to bring it about then we are bound to disagree!

What i perhaps did not make clear is that governments tends to collections of people who already think they are deserving of leading others and that they are very much the type of people that do not do enough introspection when it comes to their own failures and morally questionable behaviour. Our modern western political processes simply does not allow many 'good' people ( those who will truly represent the needs and wants of the majority) to rise to the top or take part in the executive branches. Maybe i should have just said that...

Ruling by the 'mandate' of the people is great but that is but a small part of democratic process that should ideally result in the people getting what they asked for.



But then maybe i have never considered Marx to be the spokesmen for socialism? Socialism is in fact ownership by the community ( NOT THE STATE) for the community and i find that the twisted Marx version of socialism should rather be called fascism as it later turned out to be. Socialism is not a monolithic movement and those who pretend that it is are not to be trusted.

If we are going to talk about modern socialism lets rather talk about Robert Owen than Karl Marx as nobody knows a damn thing about him and his not blamed for the USSR or any other exercise in fascism.



Well I am agreeing with Marx ( or he is agreeing with me) on that point 16 and that is exactly what i have said socialism so far. The public is NOT the government and they rarely get anyone who represents their interest close to positions where it matters.

After your clarification i will admit that your correction of DF were appropriate but i still disagree with your qualification that "the state should own the means of production" which is not what i think Marx had in mind and certainly not something the people wants either. After overthrowing their former landlord oppressors 'the people' are often forced that accept that compromise but it rarely works out as one form of tyranny is exchanged for something that might be hijacked with relative ease.

Stellar

Hi, StellarX. I was somewhat disappointed to see you making a distinction between Marxism and socialism, because I had thought you better informed. There are indeed forms of socialism that diverge from or even oppose Marx in certain aspects, but it is beyond debate that socialism, as the term has been generally understood for the past century or more, is a Marxian political philosophy. There are a few socialists who would take issue with this statement, but they're basically fringe dwellers who favour one or another of the defunct variations of socialism discussed below.

With regard to the other distinction you make, between the terms 'public' and 'state': when you examine the practicalities of 'public ownership' of the means of production, it turns out that some sort of body has to be instituted in order to discharge the administrative, distributive and other obligations of ownership. Over time, this body assumes the definitive qualities of a state. The process is outlined in this famous essay by Rosa Luxemburg.

Some forms of socialism reject the state and propose various replacements for it. One proposed prescription is ownership of production by small local groups or syndicates that are loosely allied to one another but are, in the final analysis, free and independent. This is called anarcho-syndicalism. The general description for socialist models of this kind is libertarian socialism, a term much beloved of one of ATS's most prominent resident socialists, ANOK. I believe df1 also favours it, though it is not always easy to say what he or she thinks.

However, all forms of libertarian socialism suffer the same fatal flaw as the authoritarian, Marxian kind; they regard human nature as malleable and perfectible, when experience clearly shows us that it is not.

As was made clear in dialogue with ANOK, df1 and others on this thread, anarcho-syndicalism is no more effective than ordinary socialism, because the syndicates must eventually disagree and quarrel among themselves. In the end one will prevail and you end up with the monolithic state once again. Or else you just end up with a mess -- a failed state.

If you did not know it already, you will certainly have recognized from the foregoing that Robert Owens' 'socialism' was in fact a kind of primitive syndicalism whose political consequences had not been completely thought through (Owens wasn't big on theory; he was more interested in ending worker exploitation and trying to arrest the progress of industrial mechanization). He made it work in New Lanark; but I think it is significant that such founts of human kindness and cooperation remain vanishingly rare upon the globe.

By the way, from the tenor of your posts in various threads on ATS, I should hardly have thought you likely to hold a brief for a man who denied that human beings should be held personally responsible for their own actions. That was Robert Owens.

I was equally disappointed to realise that you thought Marx should be considered the representative of all things socialist. His work has been horrible misrepresented but even at best it's my opinion that he was seeking a solution in big bureaucracy which is as open to exploitation and hijacking as any other. If 'the people' do not own the the industry directly ( cooperatives and the like) there is in my opinion little point in considering socialism and fascism as widely differing systems.



That is the way the elitist controlled media has represented it but i for one have not bought into that charade and i am surprised that 'true followers' of the socialist notion believe that central controlled economies will protect their freedoms. That type of socialism/fascism might feed you and give you a house and ( as your are now a controlled and defined commodity that is worth preserving) access to medicine but in our current world environment it's likely to take your liberty in return.

I refuse to accept that we should limit our understanding and investigation of the socialist philosophy to Marxism ( which is in my opinion not what Marx had in mind ) and i think one should dig far deeper and do away with the notion that 'the state' ( elected officialdom ) should have any control or say in Industry or the control over it.



And i have found that the fringe is what the media avoids talking about so here i am doing that talking. You can call me , or what i represent, all the names you like but i am not now and never will sanction big top down governments as controllers behind our destiny. Sure we can have democracy but democracy is often abused and we should have the double security of never allowing the state to gain control over industry. We may be able to control the actions of industry trough democracy ( when they represent fringe or foreign intervention in our economies), or democracy( when the government abuses it's mandate privately owned industry can intervene) trough industry but when the democracy IS the industry or the industry the democracy we are in trouble with few means to influence the system.

I understand that some may consider this hopelessly 'inefficient' but then i will show them that our modern economies are geared to efficiently transfer the wealth of the 99% to the 1%. I would rather have everyone gain a reason to compromise, 99% of us already do so on a daily basis, than allow those who rarely do any further usage of a system that is geared towards enriching them. If ALL countries were organized in this way i do not believe we would have wars of any magnitude and certainly not the world wars we are growing accustomed to.



People do not mind being led but the leaders should be at local levels as those who are having their interest represented are best informed as to their own needs. There is little or no evidence to suggest that removing the means of decision making from ground level to centralized command level is more efficient and we KNOW it ain't better for the average human being.



I do not buy into that as in the original intent of socialism the state will mostly be a administrative body that simply does not have the executive power to regain the power they once had. We have had systems that worked like this but in a world where the enemies of individuality and true cooperation have such centralized power/firepower it's hard to truly experiment without foreign intervention.



I do not think my beliefs on these issues are incarnate into any system i have so far heard of and i am simply working within the 'definitions' as i understand them.



I completely disagree for many, many reasons. Human nature is in my opinion quite malleable and 'perfectible' ( the more important issue is who's 'perfect') as proven by our varying cultural groupings and the observed affect of long term social engineering. Human beings are in my opinion products of their environment and whatever 'nature' we might have comes from forces applied to our characters from ( and before ) birth and onwards.



But when syndicates argue or fight there is a far far larger chance that the people involved had a active influence in either the creation of the problem or the outcome of it; in our modern states that is simply not the case. I for one am happy to risk the future of humanity on our ability to cooperate on ground level and in my opinion it's not worth building a future on a fascistic basis. I for one have been one of those who have benefited by the current corporatism/fascism/capitalism and while i am quite happy with what i have gained by it ( the groundwork for my current position were laid before my birth) i am NOT happy with how it was done or with the fates of those who made it possible for the few to live well.



This is not the middle ages and war has never been cheap before and we have good evidence that it's getting more expensive by the minute. For one syndicate to gain such power one has to assume that most syndicates are not interested in preserving the system of localized power and that is kind of counter to the fact that most seem to want just that but are prevented from implementing it by outside forces.



Industrial mechanization was introduced by the state employing taxes they got from the labour of workers and it only makes sense to prevent the state from centralizing power by robbing you of your primary means of participation.



I think a closer inspection of the non-elitist version of history might provide you with more than sufficient proof that the vast majority of people have always aspired to cooperation in as peaceful ways as resources allows for. It is this theft of the true history of humanity that allows for the kind of manipulation of society that we are becoming so used to.

Humans beings are not infallible and i for one do my best to look at their actions instead of the beliefs that they were ascribed or prescribed to.. I am not for indoctrination ( as he seems interested in applying) but i do share in the belief that human beings are largely products of their environments which may be altered by exposure to kinder variety than they are used to.

As to your other comment i think what i have said so far is quite consistent with my views on decentralizing control, redistributing wealth gained by exploitation, and then ensuring that the less you have the harder it becomes for others to take it from you. I know we can have a world were everyone can get rich and live very well and i refuse to be taken in by the propaganda that there has to be poor for some to be rich. The very rich are not simply getting richer for the sake of it but doing their best to impoverish as many as they can in the process.

Stellar

And there you have it


Thus the foundation of our disagreement. Our opinions on this subject are irreconcilably opposed. My belief in the invariability of human behaviour is based on three things: science, literature and personal experience.

The sciences I have in mind are biology, in particular evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology. I have little respect for the corpus of theory that informs traditional psychology and sociology.

You may wonder why I choose to mention literature. Well, a study of world literature shows us that people are the same from Beijing to Baltimore. A study of historical literature shows us that people were the same in Babylon and Egypt and Greece and Rome and they are still the same today. I am a professional writer and an empiricist. This evidence would be good enough for me on its own.

I shall not bore you with my personal experience.

So thousands of years of social engineering, persistent manipulation of our environment, history,access to energy and information has all been done despite evidence that human behaviour does not change? I find it hard to believe that scholars of history can claim that human aspirations/nature are exactly the same now as six thousand years ago.



Evolutionary biology should not in my opinion be applied to the study or evolution of human behaviour as there are frankly too many holes in our anthropology itself. If and when we figure out where the Summerian civilization came from virtually overnight we may gain some insight but until then i am not sure we can 'trace' anything with half the information missing being so clearly absent..



And in my opinion no one should...



If one takes great liberties with the information you are presented that might seem so but i do not believe that anyone can consistently argue that thousands of years of cultural indoctrination has not changed our expressions of whatever 'nature' we might have been born with.



I know that there are forces at work that wants to destroy our differences and cultural expressions and that they have been at this for a very long time. I don't think they have been doing nothing for so long and frankly the historic record tells me that they have in fact achieved quite a lot.



Please do as i have been wrong before. We may want to start with you defining for us what human beings were then and how they are now and why you think there are no important differences.

People who believe in a consistent human nature should after all be able to quantify/qualify that with archetypes or at least general behavioral trends.

Stellar

[edit on 4-6-2007 by StellarX]

What I mean when I say we are the same

When we read through the literature of the world and of the past, when we study the evidence of art -- tracing it back as far as you wish -- we see that people have always lived in social groups, had some kind of marriage or mating tie, wanted to be rich, wanted to be powerful, loved and hated, beat and stole from and double-crossed and murdered each other, built structures, sang songs, told jokes, made art, cheated on their sex partners, lusted for gold (or the local equivalent), dreamed, had nightmares, carefully raised their children in families or bands and... goodness knows what else. Read Ovid or Bocaccio or Shakespeare or -- heaven help you -- Petronius and you'll see people (and gods) behaving in all the same ways people behave nowadays, and for the same motives. Millennia of (attempted) social indoctrination haven't changed any of that. We've just adapted to our changing environment, like all successful species do.

[edit on 4-6-2007 by Astyanax]

I don't see how this is unepected or 'evidence' that we have not adapted how we interact in those social groups.



And the advent of religion and the 'blessing' of 'god' and the like does not speak to interesting 'developments' in that particular area? Why is 'marriage' ( or at least something mostly exclusive) proof that human nature is unchanging?

[quotte]wanted to be rich,

Thank you for replying to my last post, Stellar.


Your surmise is correct. I do indeed believe human society (the world we live in) to be a reflection, or more accurately a manifestation, of our human nature. This is precisely why I put no faith in political or social systems founded on a belief in the perfectibility of human nature.

This does not mean that I am a cynic about human nature. As I tried to show with the random list of examples I used in my previous post, human nature is multifaceted. It is neither good nor evil -- how can we imagine that it is, when it is human nature that does, but it is also human nature that judges the deed?

Human nature is mostly self-interested, but there is no intrinsic wickedness in that.

I don't think there is any point in tackling your ripostes to my last post one by one. We're sliding off the topic and I'm sure a lot of other members want to have their say too. Clearly you are from the Romantic tradition of political philosophy, a follower of Rosseau, while I hail from what you might call the Empirical school. There we must agree to disagree, and let matters stand.

Here is my theory. You cannot run a society with purely one ideology. As Df1 has been pointing out, there are many socialist programs in effect in this capitalist nation. That is the trick to being more one system than the other, tipping the system towards more of one than the other. We do not want a completely socialist system, we want the system to be more socialist than Capitalist, to the point where you just say its all socialist, even when it aint. That’s how we have Capitalism today.

Now I am going to list a few things here, and some of them may very well offend quite a lot of you, but the truth is the truth.

Step 1) Heavy Regulation of Private and Public Corporations
The very requirements of a corporation need to be redefined. No longer can a corporation exist if it is known to extract resources in a part of the world where it requires slavery and genocide which is fronted by a paid dictator, or group of them. No longer can a corporation conduct business if its sole operating existence is based on the destruction of the environment with no regard or intent to repair the damage it does. Any business would in fact be required to factor its environmental and social impacts. Any business that is found in violation will be heavily fined, with those who were directly in charge of such operations, as well as those who ordered them into it, subject to imprisonment. Repeated violation may result in the complete seizure of the business by the State to which it will either be re-modeled, or simply have its assets stripped down and used to fund repairing of any environmental damage, or compensation for any human rights atrocities.

Step 2)Crack down on the Enemies of Free speech
Society, and the people who make up our society will not be willing to do what’s is right when the very influences that advocate us to do what is wrong and to tolerate and accept injustice are allowed to freely express themselves, and indoctrinate others to spread the bad things in life. Crime and hate are Freedoms that society can deal without. What does a just and peaceful person lose by not being bombarded with hate and crime on a daily basis? What may an unjust and violent person gain by not being bombarded with the same on a daily basis? Proper documentation, and education on the subject matter would be more appropriate, but not the glorification ad indoctrination of it.

Step 3)A Proper Education
The real changes manifest themselves when the children who will steer the future have been taught to do such. We can’t expect to wake up tomorrow and change the world overnight. Education must be shifted from

But humanity's destiny is for the most part being decided on by a very tiny fraction ( think 0.00001%) that happens to control the vast majority of the wealth and wields power over much of the planet. How can we pretend that this world reflects 'humanity' when humanity is not in control of it? Is this not even more striking a question when you acknowledge that human behaviour is self interested?



I do not put my faith in any system and in my opinion 'faith' as such has little to do with making a system work. I do not believe in the notion of 'perfectibility' ( Stalin's notion of 'perfect'?) but i do believe that whatever human nature may be it can be stood on it's head with the correct application of propaganda and the creation of specific environments.



I believe that anyone who think the violence and strife in this world reflects 'human nature' to be far more cynical than they may wish to admit.



Much as i do not like giving Hitler and his types credit he did seem to understand that human nature was not 'good' or 'evil' but was corruptible/malleable.



But i believe that our judgements of ourselves stems from the perspective we were raised to judge ourselves by. I think not so secret , well not anymore, military or social indoctrination programs ( or just go look at the Spartans and the like ) can yield 'products' with a nature that is not very natural at all.



That is in my opinion quite accurate and hence the elite's desire to control the resources that might be used to drive people into conflict that they would otherwise have avoided as self interest dictates. Risking one's live for the state, church and such elitist groupings, is a entirely unnatural by almost any definition of human nature but it keeps happening despite our resistance. If one wants to argue that the world we live in reflects our nature how does one address such massive inconsistencies? Do one simply assume that human nature is unchanging and the hundreds of millions of people involved have all managed to set aside that nature without going completely insane in dealing with the open contradictions? I for one believe their nature is not like my nature and that we did not even start out the same and while i am not willing to argue that we start as blank slates, for obvious reasons, i think the slates are in fact different and will become ever more so as reflection of the environment.



I am sure there would be but i can't , and try not to, read much into responses that is not forthcoming.



I am sure they will if they believe their opinions to be worthy of discussion.



It's as it is as hard as it is easy to agree with Rousseau and i think the 'accusations' could be far more specific as i do not see how my beliefs could be called romantic in any way. I think i could in fact argue that a belief in a unchanging 'nature' is far more romantic than most of the related ideas i have.



I have never liked the 'agree to disagree' type thing and it's something i tend to reserve for family and friends and not for strangers on the Internet. If i do not mind much we should continue and see if anyone learns something or, god forbids, changes their mind on something small.....

Stellar

we need a NEW SYSTEM based on PRACTICAL THINKING that allows for TRADE and COMMERCE while maintaining a positive social drive towards individual FREEDOM and weakening the singular or government operative in the lives of the trade, though the trick is in the current state. Socialism is tooutopian in my mind, and dont think i dont want utopia.. But theres to many dangerous people, and until humanity either all changes at once, and burn all weaponry, and dismantles there hateful thinking and vengeful thoughts..there will never be peace until a mass earth cahnge occurs, like the flood pretty much was a big middle finger from God or nature i think.
HUmanity needs to mature more, before a utopia can be acheived. Take the thug off the street, the cops off the beat, and the wars to our inner minds with ourselves or in video games..then you can have utopia...maybe

I have no argument with that.



Socialism as we know it today ( Cuba, Western and Northern Europe etc) is not Utopian and in fact a compromise people are forced to accept when they are sufficiently organized to pose a threat to their rulers. Socialism basically promises the people that the centralized power wont be abused and as evidence it pretends that their needs can best be met by a intrusive state bearing 'gifts'. It's certainly far better than naked capitalism but it's still short of what the people aimed for even if they are now sufficiently distracted by the very real benefits such systems offers them.



I don't understand why the problems the world faces must always be blamed on some inherent destructive flaw in humanity and not rather in our inability to be brutal and vindictive enough to kill all those who attempt to oppress us? It is our HUMANITY and selfish interest in just surviving with whatever little we have that gets us into all this trouble and i really wish people would stop branding their fellows with such contempt. If you don't like that parts of human nature that me and the previous poster easily managed to agree on i suggest you pick another planet as you might very well be part of the problem.



You first!



I am not interested in Utopia as true freedom has inherent problems that prevents such systems from ever being ideal or perfectly good for everyone.



I would rather have the common man as well armed as any 'thug' thus making police pointless and the control of society so very much harder. We should do these things not for some Utopian dream but to preserve the freedoms we can still defend with relative ease in so many countries on Earth.

Stellar