On 4/4/2015 6:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi John
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 10:10 PM, John Mikes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
TELMO:
I did not expect from you to point to the 2 centuries old obsolete and
theoretical
exercise of Marx-Engels (irrespective of Lenin's intermitted LATER
speculations) as
"blueprint" for a (still?) viable(?) political system.
I don't think it was ever viable, and I don't think it's relevant to the current times,
as it is based on too many assumption from an era that is long gone (early Industrialism).
What I mean is, when people use the word "communism", there is a document that describes
precisely what this word is supposed to mean. A blueprint for communism.
I do think that Marx-Engels correctly identified social problems that remain being
problems to this day, namely the self-reinforcing nature of wealth inequality. The issue
is that their proposed solution seems to equalize society by throwing the majority of
people into extreme poverty and servitude.
It never got further than a tyranny of 'leftish-sounding' slogans by
pretenders. As
the original authors dreamed it up, it never (and nowhere) did get off from
the ground.
I know, I lived in a so called "Peoples' Democracy" (Called 'commi' system
- ha ha)
which was neither "peoples'" nor democracy. Nor Marxist, nor Leninist.
It was a Stalinist tyranny. And Maoist, Pol-Pot, plus a KimIrSen-istic one.
I would be very interested in any story you had to share about those times.
I agree that these societies never achieved anything resembling what Marx proposed. The
remaining communists of today tend to argue that all of past communist movements were
not sincere in their motivations. That might very well be true, but even then it is an
important piece of information on human nature. If we are trying to get from A -> B and
we always stumble on the same horrors along the way, maybe the plan is just not viable
for this world. So far we have learned that either communism is a terrible idea or
communist revolutions always end up being hijacked by sociopaths. To be honest, I think
both are true.
Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families. A lot of political
problems come from trying to extend ethics that evolved for families and small tribes to
nation states of millions of unrelated people. Capitalism has problems from the same
source. Owning a flint spearhead you made is unproblematic. If you own it you can
prohibit its use, sell it, bequeath it, etc. But when this idea was extended to owning
land it created problems. John Locke thought owning land was an oxymoron...you could only
"own" the temporary use of land. Didn't matter for hunter-gatherers, but it was problem
that had to be solved for agricultural society.
That now a lot the world's GDP comes from capital has created the same kinds of questions
about ownership of capital. Given that r>g in Piketty's analysis, is it a good idea to
allow the Koch brothers to inherit a billion dollar business (that their father built by
drilling for Stalin).
Capitalism - in my view an advanced form of slavery, following feudalism -
started
to destroy the entire human experiment on this Globe - way before the
"warming"
entered the picture.
It never 'faced' a competition of any 'socialistic' challenger. It
succumbbed to the
authoritarian religious tyrannies (brutal and violent, or just retracting
and
philosophical).
As with communism, there is a big gap between the theory and the implementation.
"Advanced form of slavery" might be a way to put it, but an even more cynical view would
be that there's always been slavery to some degree.
I believe that the big challenge that we face is how to move to a jobless society.
Worse, I think this transition already started but there is still no political will to
admit it. Robotics and AI are Marx's worse nightmare. In the limit, the number of
employees required by a business will tend to zero, while the ability of a business to
provide goods for the rest of us keeps being more and more leveraged by technological
advance. One of the realities about the current economic crises that few are willing to
admit: there simply are no longer jobs for everyone.
I think the best idea that we have so far is the universal flat salary.
The trouble with that is that when everyone has the same income nobody feels rich...and
people like to feel rich. It's Nietzsche's "will to power". So people who have $100
billion don't want to give up $99 billion to the general welfare, even though it would
make the world better and make no discernible difference in their life style. So they
instead use a few billion to persuade people to vote for politicians who won't tax them.
Brent
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