: 3:Equality in even the most abstract sense.: 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.
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Why is it that when people attempt to deride socialist aims and values, they always portray them imbedded in some form of totlitarian structure. The straw man, of course, is 'Soviet' Russia and has served the anti-socialist cause well. It would be of comparable dishonesty to use Nazi Germany or (more currently) any number of countries such as Burma as defining capitalism. Your version of 'socialism' is equally skewed. The picture presented by many anti-socialists is of some nightmarish Borg-like structure. Do you imagine that those of us with socialist, (particularly anarchist) values on this board have any other feeling than revulsion at such a scenario. Or perhaps, realizing that our values do not support totalitarian structures, that we are simply "naive"? That we are simply child-like idealists? That we are "mislead? That we are...well stupid?
That collective ownership, designed for the satisfaction of a communities self-described needs, is somehow transformed into a bureaucratic class structure, imposing some sort of will upon a vast underclass is just that...a transposition to an opposite.
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?
: Perhaps a nuclear war would help? Maybe all this anti-nuclear activism has been secretly reactionary ...
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No. I think capitalism is doing just fine bringing misery to countless millions, let alone ecological destruction.
None.
