Squeers,

Sorry for my tardiness in responding to you, but I’ve been occupied.

Yes, totally agree with you. We are now getting further and further away from classic liberalism that I think we at least got close to having once (there are just larger malignant influences now), and now we need to fight the economic fundamentalists who are damaging the quality of our lives and making it so meaningless.

I was basically aligning conservatism (in the progressive sense) with classic liberalism. Whether true or not, but I think it is. Preserving society from the bad and disruptive elements – I just added responsibility. I’m not sure we have much of a society any more.

Life now just seems to be an ongoing battle, with lots of divisiveness.

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system where the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life wherever necessary.

“it's profligate, destructive and morally bankrupt”. Totally true.

I'm plane speaking.

Thanks Constance,

We are in agreement and you remind me to be careful not to reject conservatism in toto. It's all to easy as the enemy when it hinders necessary change, but it's also vital to preserving what's worthwhile.

Like any right-thinking person, I am thoroughly repulsed by totalitarianism, or any system that operates as Pericles has it, as a "command-and-control structure that denies individual creativity and enterprise", which unfortunately is what "Leftism" has come to be associated with in the popular imagination. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Just as I have to eschew prejudice and consider the merits of liberal conservatism, so too should those who make a strawman of leftist thought. Radicalism is not a mode of political economy, but a reaction to it--the body of society's antibodies and vital to its health.

I can sympathise with your being busy ..

Sorry, meant to say above, "It's all to easy to see it as the enemy".

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Dear Squeers,

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You wrote to Pericles: "it [our co-operative system ] remains destructive, unsustainable and morally bankrupt".

That sounds interesting. I have some serious reserves on the so-called independence and democratic practices of mutual societies and organisations in the financial sector, as I do with that of trade unions.

Would you be so kind as to elaborate?

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Squeers:
<Even supposing our co-operative system was the utopia you seem to cherish, it remains "destructive, unsustainable and morally bankrupt". Indeed that's the price.>

Banjo Paterson,

apologies, I'm pressed and that is rather garbled. As I hope the foregoing indicates, I was alluding to capitalism, which is anything but a cooperative. I was also attempting to quote myself and got that wrong too.
From my scan I take one of the arguments of Nick's article to be that the current system pushes ever outwards, economically, while neglecting its domestic mandate to provide. Economic growth is derived from unsustainable and destructive economic expansion, outside the State (as well as inside via internal consumption, which recycles and largly reappropriates what is directed back), that cannot even provide for prosperity, broadly, inside. Australia is a prime example, being one of the richest States on Earth, generating enormous wealth, which it couldn't possibly generate domestically, from the mining boom. And yet conditions in Australia are "maintained" at best. Why are the streets not paved with gold? Clearly because the wealth doesn't go to Australia in any qualitative sense. The money goes to various private interests, is recycled as consumption and drawn off again (overpaid miners are virtually molested by commercialism and fleeced of their incomes by reciprocal inflation), or its invested unsustainably in the farm: population and infrastructure growth at home, great little earners! Not only does the quality of life not improve, but the suburbs and infrastructure sprawl ever outwards (over farming land), all derived, ultimately, from exports and utterly unsustainable without them (and they can't be sustained). A classic example of a household living beyond its means--beyond husbandry.

Sorry to disappoint. Doubtless you have some dirt on the world's so-called cooperatives. Nothing escapes corruption in this world, where nothing is sacred. That's one of the reasons I'm a pessimistic realist. One can't set-up a hippie colony on the Gold Coast.
That doesn't make the concept of cooperatives evil, just vulnerable, even untenable. Ultimately, no other system can co-exist with global capitalism. It will consume all and then collapse.

Squeers, you said: "That doesn't make the concept of cooperatives evil, just vulnerable, even untenable. Ultimately, no other system can co-exist with global capitalism. It will consume all and then collapse."

Though it may upset the Shadow, what you have said is true and it seems to bring many of the points made on thread together nicely!

Well done, Sir!