:I'm pointing out that manners come in a specific form and are exercised toward a miniscule, insignificant fraction of the human race, and a concrete fraction comprised of people who we personally relate to.then why are manners in Aberdeen the same as in Penxance? Howcome its considered bad form anywhere in the world to take things without paying for them?, how could the Nazis produce a mass consciousness in a society of neigh on 80 million people?
:We cannot compromise with those whom we are not intimate and this utopian dream of compromise with the whole human race is a complete and utter fantasy. It is devoid of any social meaning.
Surely we do comprimise now, we comprimise when dealing with taiwanese car manufactruers, we comprimise with The Chinese, and the South Africans- why is intimacy a necessity for comprimise? Surely mutual interest is.
:... as soon as our wishes and desires occur opposite of the wishes and desires of others we have to begin finding solutions to this, what economists call, scarcity. When people here call for "socialism" it doesn't even mean anything, as they are simply expressing a warm and fuzzy feeling within themselves.
No, the solution i would propose to any form of scracity would be democratic agreement- the money system does nothing to scracity, because it doesn't limit the size of the pie, merely itss distribution, if a commodity were rare, all money would do is ensure that a tiny few got more of it, than the rest, there are other ways.
When I call for socialism I am calling for the common and democratic control of the means of production, and the consequent production to meet the designs and needs of the controling majority, not, as takes place presently, production for teh capital profits of a few.
: Like Marx, only few have ever attempted a comprehensive analyses of how such a world could come about and what it would look like.
Marx had a pretty clear analysis of how it woudl come about- teh working class, in roder to liberate itself, must abolish class, it cannot turn around, as the bourgeoisie did, and exploit another class, because there are not other classes.
: This is all part of tribal culture, situations taht Lark, Deathy, et al, have no conception of and would recoil at the idea of these coming about.
Slavoj Zizek makes a similar point, that all communities are formed by a shared transgressive enjoyement, or as Bataille would put it, a rigorous knoweldge of evil (Bataille wrote extensively about eroticism and human sacrifice), modern nationalism continues this (people who boast about the murderers in teh SAS, for example, or Swartzeneger movies), what are cathedrals but teh traumatic sublime, a place to find enjoyement,a nd thus organise a religious community. I am sure under socialism we will have festivals, and organise our enjoyement, but I'm also pretty sure that we won't go back to human sacrifice, since that was usually an expenditure, or mythic offering to placate the gods- science does away with this conspetion of the world.
:But, ancient tribes definitely could reconcile things such as human sacrifice with considering their tribe well-off. Remember, no competition for resources means that you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Modern society does the same- what is the death penalty but a ritual sacrfice to placate the moral law?
None.
