: Apparently it is more 'just' to support an educated bureaucratic elite, whether Plato's 'geometers' or the modern Party apparatus. Failing that, we shall have a common ownership, unregulated by a state, which has a fully conscious populous who simply know what is correct and good, via osmosis. In return for losing the industrial state, I am offered ... the primitive village. In place of a law of property and ownership, I must accept ... what? Rule by charisma? Popular opinion? Demagogues? Have we learned nothing from populism? Has Makhno been completely forgotten?*sigh* Its strange really that people always bring up points about charismatic leaders, its sad really- do you honestly beleive that you would follow a charismatic dictator? Are you easilly swayed by every charming voice? All accusations agaihnst mob rule assume mob as other, and the speaker as the rational self. Dem,ocracy means an absence of leaders, rule by teh rational indivuals collectively. Do you really trust yourself so little?
Socialism would require the productive capacity of industrialism.
People would understand the values they need to run their own lives, why should they regulate themselves, protect themselves form themselves?
Makhno was a leader of a peasant uprising, the working class is better educated, and better organised.
Basically DrCruels arguments are elitist, and are based on a fundamental distaste for co-operativing with, and trusting, both otehrs , and himself.
: To be free, I must lose the right to own. To do as I desire, I must forgo the objects of desire. Who will 'own' what I must use? Why, everyone, of course! And what will I be free to do? Why, whatever everyone else thinks I should do, of course!
No, you'd be free to do what you want, you'd own everything.
: If I must give, according to my ability, with nothing to show for my labors other that a collective permission to live, I am hardly free.
No, because you can reward yourself from the communal goods as you feel is propper, and gain teh respect and recognition of your fellows.
: Here is where socialist ideas shine. What could be more equal, but for everyone to have an equal share in everything? Strange, that this never seems to be true in practice. Those that man the military force of the soviets, or those involved in distribution, or in some other part of the bureaucracy necessary to manage all that communal property, always seem to do better than the rest. Perhaps it is true that capitalism must be destroyed, before the socialist system will work. Only when this system of "consumer goods for achievement" is destroyed, only when the masses are brought down to an equally miserable condition, without hope of release, will there finally be a chance of making this sort of arrangement stable. Might this be the appeal of the primitive village?
No, what rubbish, your examples come from Russia, which was a state capitalist regime, tehre would be no bureaucracy, no one would have more than others- teh medieval village simply shows the way in which most human beings have lived communally and co-operatively in history. We're not talking abouit going back, but going forward.
