Dear Yabby,

Grok makes good points about "democracy".
Government intervention and participation in these decisions is usually a partnership between them and corporate elites. Arundhati Roy says that: "For contractors and politicians, just the building of a dam makes them a lot of money".(3,500 big dams built in India in the last fifty years - 40 percent of the world's big dams).
For instance, Enron once signed a secret contract with the Indian Government that guaranteed that corporation profits that added up to 60 percent of India's rural development budget.
So government and multi-nationals are in bed together. We've been here before, Yabby, so you know what I'm going to bring up next...the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank - who open the door to the multi-nationals to deal with governments (or even dictate to them) to assist in centalising resources and denying autonomy to the common man.

Correction: that should be 3,300 big dams built in India in the last fifty years

Yes, Poirot, a pox on capitalism. I'm sure many of us on this thread would agree wholeheartedly.

But Grok,

There must also be very many of us who have spent our lives, perhaps from early childhood, working towards (where possible) and waiting ,waiting, waiting for that socialist exemplar, some form of socialism which did not either degenerate quickly into the most ghastly fascism (Cambodia, Ethiopia, the USSR, China, Congo-Br, Yugoslavia), transform itself into some form of state capitalism (China, Vietnam), turn itself into a morally bankrupt, armed camp (North Korea) or fizzle out (Zimbabwe, Cuba).

Marx has been dead for nearly 130 years. There have been umpteen uprisings, rebellions, communes (Paris, Canton), revolutions, guerilla wars, all over the world, all attempting to put some form of socialism in place - and, in my view, all have failed. We can blame capitalism for this (well, what the hell did you expect 'it' to do in response to imminent overthrow but fight back ?) especially US capitalism, but one way or the other, failure has been the upshot. Many of us, I'm sure, feel that we have p!ssed our working lives away going into bat for socialism (as we may have interpreted it) and got nowhere, that's it all been a giant con.

[TBC]

Grok,

[cont]

So given that there must be something better than capitalism, and that socialism seems not to have worked anywhere, what do we do now ? Where do we go from here ? The temptation seems to be to go backwards, to some pre-capitalist Eden, to the idylls of medieval times, or of Paleolithic 'communism', or to find validity in and praise for 'anything but the here and now' such as Islamist extremism, or deep, dark Greenism: ultimately anti-people ideologies.

But can we build on democracy and what Marx would have seen as the vital contributions of bourgeois social development, i.e. the Enlightenment, equal human rights, advanced human organisation, etc., and to get beyond these valuable achievements to build better societies ?

You can slag Popper, but if revolution, cutting every Gordian knot in sight, has not worked, then can better societies be built incrementally ? Slowly ? Painfully ? But without sacrificing vast human populations in the process ? After all, what is more important, some theoretical ideal, or the people who are supposedly to benefit from it ?

And just on the topic of human nature, above: I'm sure that no two people contributing to this thread would agree on everything: put any two of us in a room and we would be disagreeing within five minutes - true ? People are not automatons - we each have our own life-experiences and interpret the world variously on those bases. There never will be (I fervently hope) just One New Man (or Woman) - we always, I certainly hope, will argue like cats in a bag. MY socialism, or whatever supplants it, will be unpredictable, even unplannable, utilising the genius of a multitude of individuals.

I wonder what that sort of society would look like ?

Just asking :)

Joe

Alan Kohler, on his "Business Specatator website, makes some
interesting comments this morning. Australia is far more
socialist then China. In Australia the workers largely own the
means of production through their super funds, dividends from
those means of production are regularly paid by companies and
workers benefit through both dividend payments and company
tax payments. In China the State largely owns the means of
production and workers are paid nothing but a wage.

So there you have it Groky, you live in a socialist heaven :)

Poirot, yes indeed the Indians have built alot of dams. The nation
would starve and the cities would run out of water without them.
The Indian people benefit.

Loudmouth:
As I've covered a few times here already: 'stalinism !== socialism'. So "going to bat" for stalinism, for one thing, has been a guaranteed trail of tears for millions over decades. Which OTOH doesn't prove much *more* than that stalinism is NOT socialism -- no matter what anyone says.

And indeed: many people have decided that, if we cannot move forward (based on just this one set of experiences and no other, whatever number of its variations over some few decades) then we must move -- by their inexorable 'logic'... backward. But what kind of dumb logic is that. Small is NOT beautiful in the wrong context, for instance. But dialectical logic would make that clear -- proving here AFAIC nothing so much as that Gilbert Holmes doesn't understand his ABCs of dialectics...

The thing is to KNOW what socialism is all about -- and very few do, obviously -- and therefore come to understand that it has never really been TRIED yet. And that too, as well, by socialist logic and a scientific, historical understanding of past and present society, **that the planet has never been more ready for socialism than it is right now**.

I'll get to the specific stuff you ask about in a following comment.

As for Yabby: he of all people, even unknowingly (uncomprehendingly) points to the true fact(!!) that even in capitalist Oz, many aspects of society are actually MORE socialistic than in China(!!) -- even including corporate organization of social production: and even its 'control' by large pools of workers' capital pension funds(!) -- tho' of course, as usual, he doesn't know what to _do_ with these facts: much as a little boy stealing a joyride on a big tractor or his daddy's car, can really mess up what he thought he was on about...