: I once asked you what constituted a majority---51%, 75%, or 90%. You responded (in post 2673): '[t]he vast majority will do nicely, enough people to sustain socialism, and to ignore the threats of the state and side-line reactionary minorities.' In post 2693, you stated that 'finicking about exact numbers is pointless...everyone will have free access, only those that wish to retain property and exploitation will find themselves denied.' You have (a thousand times) dodged the issue about 'majorities'---or, to put it more to the point, the issue about minorities. What happens to the minority? Your assumption that a global minority will acquiesce to the decisions reached by a global majority seems to be predicated upon your own (theoretical) willingness---'beholden' is the word you use---to acquiesce. Why do you assume everyone else will view (and act upon) 'fairness' as you do? This is where, I believe, your argument---and W.S.M.'s idealistic 'plan'---falters. You mention (global) consensus; is this before or after the revolution 'ignores' the 'side-line reactionary minorities'?No, I have said that the reactionaries will be ignored, and the majority will go ahead and enact their plans and use the means of production as they will, teh reactionaries can either fuck off and form a little island community somehwere, they can recognise defeat, or if they actually try and use violence to stop teh will of the majority, they will be restrained. If I gave a figure, say 75% for the majority, your next question would be 'what if there were only 74%?'. In fact, just looking back, this very answer is in your question, tehse people will have access to the goods of society, they will have a chance to co-operate, no one will be 'forced' (say at gun point) to co-operate because socialism cannot work under such conditions. Likewise socialism cannot happen until the VAST majority want it, and are prepared to sustain it, reactionary minorities would find themselves in no position and with no hope to restore their old rule, and would have to accept the REALITY of the revolution. The revolution cannot happen until the majority of people on earth are prepared for it. I hope this clears up teh point about minorities once and for all.
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: I applaud your vision of the entire world cooperating. I do not consider it readily practical, however---religious, nationalistic, and gender differences come to mind. I anticipate that you will assert (the orthodox Marxist line) that once class differences are dissolved that these other differences will sort themselves out. You state, '[w]ithout class there cannot be marginalised perpetually ignored sections of society, merely differences of opinion on specific issues...' Let us consider nationalism. May we agree that many nationalistic differences have come about by the (uneven and arbitrary) geographic distribution of resources?* This is a very cogent reason why struggles between different nations (ideologically expressed as 'ethnic' or 'racial' nationalistic differences) come about. If, as Marxists would have it, all means of production would be shared (go into the hands of the 'proletariat'), would this significantly change the original, uneven, and arbitrary geographic distributions that often determine the economic fortunes of different nations?
1:My view of such divisions is that I doubt communal ownership will automatically wipe them out, but until property is abolished, we will be in no position to try and end such divisiomns, not all the SPGB think that way, but hey.
2:A majority of people on earth must have wanted socialism, for there to be a revolution, that means a priori they must have rejected nationalism in all its forms, this is something that can be achieved by spreading socialist consciousness throughout the worlds population.
3:If all the worlds means of production are shared, on teh basis of need and free access to the goods of society, then geographical poverty will be overcome, thats the whole point of world socialism, all regions of the world will have access to the wealth of the world, based on need and not capacity to exchange.
Whilst we're on it, I have a couple of questions for a change:
1:Will all your communes be entirely self sufficient? Or will they exchange between each other:
i)If so, how do you account for their differences in means of production (i.e. that some will have car factories and others not), and further, how would you square this with the fact that Marx saw differences in teh meenas of production and geographical wealth as the starting point for social division of labour?
ii)If not, how would such a system of society benefit fiolks in relatively poor, resource wise areas of the world?
: (These geographic differences are what I consider when I ask: will poor countries wage revolution to achieve a level of abundance equal to the West, or will Western countries wage revolution to lower their level of abundance in order to share with the poor countries?)
Living conditions will varying according to the climate and needs of an area, the revolution will be to replace poverty with comfort. The west will not need to lower their abundance to raise that in other countries', since theirs will be ahieved by the freed labour of their own peoples.
: Again: what about vote-minority 'otherness'? Or are you presuming
(without any empirical evidence) that once class is abolished everyone in the world will have a similar perspective (except for presumably minor disagreements on mere 'specific issues') and therefore vote similarly?
No, but I would suggest that there would be no stable other, no constant group that finds itself in a minority, forced there by a relation of economic need, rather tehre would be differences of perspective and opinion, which would have to be debated upon and argued through.
This is the strain of absolutism (mixed with idealism) in your thinking that I refute---the idea that perspectives (on such a grand scale as 'global socialism') can become so uniform.
Well, teh idea of capitalism is pretty uniform now, one idea can be held y billions of peopel. Ending property does not end difference of ideas, it merely ends property as a barrier of interest, preventing teh proper resolution of ideas.
Again: you mention 'the idea of humanism, of a innate value in single human biological entities.' One value? A single, fixed value? Or, put to a vote, what makes a minority 'beholden' if there is no (centralized) authority, as W.S.M. claims?
I think you are conbfusing value in that sentence with ideological values (ideas) for each entity, what I meant was that each biological human is valuable in its own right as a human. People are 'beholden' if they enter into a democratic process to accept its outcome- it happens a lot you know, people accept election results, laws only exist because we agree to obey them, all governments are anarchies at heart. People can be governed by their bvalue systems, by their custom, and by their desire to make socialism work, and recognise the mutual interest involved in their activities.
: Consider Marx: '[L]anguage is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.'(1)
Yes, and if language is an innate biological factor of humans, then humans exist only for other humans, for society.
: Now, Skinner: Verbal behavior is 'behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons.'(2)
: And, finally, Wittgenstein: 'Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.'(3)
He also said if lions could speak we couldn't understand them...
: Simple statements, profound conclusions. Now, Chomsky is clearly on the other side. His pan of Skinner is well known; his lesser known (and less renown) pan of Wittgenstein furthers his stance.** And what is Chomsky's stance? Briefly put, it is that (a) grammar is universal, (b) grammar is hereditary, and (c) grammar is rule-governed instead of contingency-shaped.
If language were not so, how could all languages be translateable? How could humans learn it, there is not enough data, unless you are appealing to an innate semiotics of behaviour (BTW, the behaviour in teh Witty quote is just the kinesic aspects of language, semiotics, which are also common to all languages.) Grammar is not universal, grammar is based on a generative grammar that is common to all language, a set of switches, a deep structure underlying teh whole of language. Certainly, Grice and his maxims of speech seem to hold, and that we have a certain logical process operating around our linuistic patterns, Likewise Brown and Levinson apply rules to politeness that make it rule, internalisation and contignecie based...
Chomsky, as 'radical' as his political beliefs may be, is a mentalist in the field of language.*** And mentalism, if I may be so bold, is simply another form of creationism, replacing religious deities with 'subconscious drives' that are equally magical and subjective...
This is why I regard behaviourism as a tad reductive, you reject all attempts to even try and examine the internal structures of personality and mind.
: This may be a good place to cite an authoritative definition of reinforcement. 'A reinforcement is defined as an event which increases the rate of a response which it follows.'(4) This is how I use the term. Are there 'values' attached to the word?---Not when we use this rigorous usage (which tends to remove 'reward' from the meaning).
All words have the values of their social spwaning ground imprinted upon them. In a society in which a certain value spreads then it talkes more control over human behaviour, withouit needing a specific agency to enforce it.
