"Through the knowledge and choices that the new communications technologies allow to flourish, people like myself see the likelihood of a better future, one in which the big media empires will be redundant and 'melt into air'."

Hear hear.

And note that the new hope of a better society that Barry aspires to will not come from central planning, public ownership of the means of production, or government control, as the idiot leftists have persisted in believing in, and which defines their beliefs. Even the rusted-on leftists are finally coming around to understand the concept of individual sovereignty.

We have already established that what Barry is praising here as bringing a likelihood of a better future, would be illegal under the socialism he advocates, and under total government control including the right of censorship, on the grounds that the technology in question is "social wealth": http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0

So once again all the socialists can come up with is a jumble of self-contradictions. And these are the people we are supposed to believe will lead us to a paradise of human liberation.

Many many people are not online while others are illiterate. Others cannot afford internet connection.
Many people only follow sport media and advertising agencies know that with their niche marketing that might sustain some viablity.

I think most people want to hear news in major media before they believe it, but how wrong can they be.

At least social media is open to truth and comment including criticism.

Well, after the hacking debacles, I wonder if the right to privacy isn't a far more important right!
Nothing wrong with fair dinkum investigative journalism, along with lawfully protected sources!
Always providing it is exposing the shonks, rather than the peccadilloes of so called celebs, or just ordinary if eccentric folk with unusual, relatively harmless interests.
Investigative Journalism? YES!
Moral or thought police? NOOOOOO!
Automatic mega data collection? NO NEVER EVER!
There's already laws that allow that data to be collected, kept, stored and examined, with the production of a legitimate warrant!
As I said, the right to inherent privacy may now be far more important, than the so called right to know; or so called public interest.
I for one, have absolutely no interest in what other folk, even so called celebs, get up to in the privacy of their own homes or allegedly private backyards; I mean, there's plenty of that stuff on the net, back, front, centre, standing on your flamin head, or stood upright in a hammock.
Well some people do like to do everything the hardest possible way!
All licentious lascivious levity aside. One recalls how Princess Diana was hounded to her very untimely and patently horrific death, by scoop hounding paparazzi!
So lets get some real privacy laws enacted, before we start fretting too much about so called press freedoms.
Which if misused as seen recently in the Senate, can amount to virtual moral blackmail; or worse, virtually/actually decide who runs the country!
Sure we need to be informed, sometimes by those heroes who expose important truth; always providing, it's only their own life and liberty that's risked or placed in harm's way!
What is best for the country and in support of real freedom, must be measured again the whim and caprice of patently power hungry, obscenely rich and incredibly powerful, king making media moguls!
Perhaps these self serving folk and their ilk, motor mouth shock jocks, need to be somewhat restrained, rather than further empowered!
Rights must always be accompanied and tempered by responsibility; and indeed, national security!
Rhrosty.

JKJ, the social ownership of means of production is precisely what would enable individuals to be freer - for instance, from the alienating necessity of wage labour for the profit of the very few. This is the C21st and we are seeing how this is possible due to technological change that is changing the social relations of production. We are seeing just how capitalism creates its own gravediggers. If you think the press will be freer under some kind of concentrated private ownership of media, then you are mistaken. It hasn't happened yet under capitalism. This is why the left oppose any attempts by the state or corporations to filter and control the Internet - a great communist device, if left unfettered, based on the principle of 'from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs' (to which I add for this century: 'and their fantasies and dreams').

My main concern is that once an upsurge in people's discontent with worsening economic and social conditions begins to morph into a revolutionary movement, you will begin to see emergency measures to "protect democracy from its enemies". A crack down on free speech will be part of that, particularly reporting on state repression.

byork

So your dream is a situation where everyone has to ask the permission of everyone else in the world before sending an email?

If not, you're not talking about the social ownership of the means of production. You're talking about the *private* ownership of the means of production as the only way to achieve your ideal. Individual liberty and property rights are what you fundamentally oppose, remember, because as soon as anyone co-operates with anyone else, it's "social wealth", and then either society - everyone in the world - must grant permission before using society's property, or more likely, the state has a unilateral right to dictate all the terms, remember? You're only demonstrating your complete confusion and self-contradiction.

JKJ, I think you are the one who is confused - and very closed-minded. Not much point trying to argue with you. The Internet remains the finest example of the case for social ownership. The current threat to it comes from concentrated private ownership and the state. Sharing stuff is 'piracy' under capitalism. Under social ownership, it wouldn't be. There is no reason as to why permission from the state would be necessary. Meanwhile, in the here and now, the Australian government is cracking down further on our liberties - and please don't tell me this is a socialist government.

JKJ

You have an interesting definition of social ownership. It means either that everyone on the planet is in on every decision or alternatively a dictatorial government decides everything.

byork and David

Obviously if the means of production are privately owned, that's not what Marx or anyone ever meant by social ownership. It's you two who are totally confused.

byork

1.
Given that you have failed to understand the most basic concepts in Marx's theory - he stood for the public not the private ownership of the means of production - what makes you think you're in any position to judge whether he left a rich legacy of thought? You don't even agree with it yourself!

2. Given that the pamphlets you were distributing in the 1960s were "social wealth" according to your own definition: "cooperative effort of many workers" - (you didn't make the paper or ink, did you?)
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0
- therefore according to your own theory they were not your property, and you had no right to distribute them until you first obtained the *political* decision which, according to your theory, is the basis of an ideal society.

You told us: "What I stand for is basically the extension of democracy into the social and economic realms, which means social wealth belonging to those who produce it..."

So according to your own theory, everyone who participated in producing those pamphlets- the foresters who cut down the trees, the people who made the ink, the guys who drove the trucks - owned those pamphlets, and you had no more right to use those pamphlets than, according to your theory, a capitalist has to profits. But you didn't get the decision of whatever you mean by the extension of democracy into the social and economic realms, did you? Or does that expression just mean "Barry York can do whatever he wants with other people's property?" What does it mean? It doesn't mean individual liberty to privately own the means of production, does it?

Can't you see you're caught in an absurdly confused self-contradiction of both yourself and Marx? You are, aren't you?

Don't get me wrong. I think it's great that you have finally understood the importance of individual liberty, and how the *private* ownership of the means of production and individual liberty provide for a much better and fairer society.

JKJ, it was my support for individual liberty that led me in the direction of Marxism in the first place, back in the 1960s, so please stop misrepresenting me. I feel no need to account for your ignorance of the topic.

So are you saying that Marx stood for the private ownership of the means of production?

JKJ. You seem unable to understand the distinction between means of production (ie intermediate inputs) and final output.

You are also fixed on the idea that social ownership will not allow decentralized decisions on deployment.
My earlier comments on this question can be found here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0#294763

JKJ,
Here is some homework:
http://brightfuture21c.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/brightfuture-online-wp.pdf

David
You seem unable to understand the distinction between means of production (ie intermediate inputs) and final output. Your idea that social ownership will allow decentralized decisions on deployment has been disproved here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0#294763

JFAus
You need to do some homework. Everything you're arguing has already been disproved here:
http://brightfuture21c.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/brightfuture-online-wp.pdf

Now that we have disproved all the socialist arguments to their own standards and their own satisfaction, we are left with this fact: the author's idea that Marx stood for private ownership of the means of production is simply wrong, and so is anyone who agrees with him. They are floundering around in total confusion, trying to argue that a state of private ownership of the means of production, demonstrates the superiority of socialist theory and ideals. It's positively clownish.

Barry York's article is a load of malarkey.

He advocates for press freedom and says that the current trend to limit freedom of the press is proof of a "move to the right". He then says that press censorship is being advocated by the Liberals, Labor and Greens. I wonder what the former Communist party luvvies in the Green party would think of them being labelled "right wing?"

The primary instigator of political censorship in the press are the Left who have sucked up to the "immigrant vote" to support 18C. Notice how Barry did not even mention 18C? That is too much of an embarrassment to the Left.

The issue of press censorship in wartime is a tricky matter, and if Barry had an ounce of intellect he would have written an article trying to define where the limits of freedom of speech exist in wartime. That would have been an interesting topic, but instead Barry just wants to kick the right using any excuse he can.

The difficulty of advocating complete press freedom in wartime can be recognised by three examples.

Keith Murdock's grandfather famously by passed British censors in WW1 to report to the that the situation in Gallipoli was extremely serious, and that soldiers were dying by the thousands for no good reason. That is an example of responsible journalism during wartime.

On the other hand, during WW2, the US press released a statement by an idiot US politician who bragged that the Japanese could not sink US submarines because they did not know that US subs could dive below 60 metres. The Japs promptly reset their depth charge fuses and began sinking US subs. This statement was the cause of over 1000 US deaths in the submarine service.

Then there was the incident during the Falklands War when the BBC announced to the world that 2nd Para was about to attack Goose Green, just as the troops moved off to what they hoped would be a surprise attack.

Censorship in wartime is a thorny issue, and can never be a moral absolute either way.

LEGO, I have expressed opposition to 18C elsewhere. Point taken about war-time but...

I am always amused when someone tries to breathe life into the now extinct dinosaur of Marxism.

Marxism was not only responsible for the murders of tens of millions of the citizens of Marxist countries, but also the most brutal repression of the press in living memory.

Similarly in Aus it has been the left that in recent years that has tried to impose controls on the freedom of the press, with the new regulation proposed by comrade Conjob being the of the most restrictive seen in the free world.

Hi Shadow Minister

The Stalin and Mao regimes did a remarkable job of pulling their countries out of the Middle Ages. And we mustn't forget the communist leadership in the defeat of fascism. Post-war generations owe a massive debt.

Capitalism is a dinosaur not Marxism. Marxism is at the early mammalian stage. It doesn't have much of a present but does have quite a future ahead of it as the gap widens between what capitalism can deliver and the possibilities in a 21st century industrial society.

Shadow Minister, Conroy represents no left-wing tradition or outlook known to history. He would not even regard himself as a leftist. He would share your view of the evil Marxists. Which may give you something to think about: Marxists also don't like him for his attempts when in power to restrict freedoms, especially the Internet filter proposal.

David
Your foolery has been completely demolished here http://mises.org/Books/mespm.PDF.

I suggest you make an effort to get out of the intellectual kindergarten you have chosen to immure yourself in.

Running away from the humiliating demolition of your entire economic theory that your received here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0
only proves that you're intellectually dishonest as well as stuck in a time-warp of early 19th century economic theory that happens to be demonstrably wrong, which is why you can't answer my questions and just run away. Grow up.

To Barry York.

I take serious exception to your claim that censorship is a product of "right wing thinking". All totalitarian governments, both of the left and the right, have censored the press as a way of controlling their populations. Almost all 19th century governments could have been called "right wing" and all of them supported press censorship in one form or another. Newspaper editors had to watch what they published or they would find themselves in jail.

The socialist left were once a new force in world politics and they unsurprisingly opposed everything that the right wing status quo supported. The Left claimed to be the champions of press freedom, until they got into power themselves and messed things up, at which point they too realised that the press needed to be muzzled. They had become the very people that they once claimed to despise.

Their problem was, that in the west, freedom of the press had already become a done deal. Thinking people had realised that the freedom to express opinions and debate political and social problems was the foundation stone of a free, secular democracy. Here in Australia the push to remuzzle the press was begun by the Gillard Labor government as a way to protect their holy ideology of multiculturalism. Critics of multiculturalism had to watch what they said or they would find themselves in court like Andrew Bolt. The Left were the new reactionaries.

Even in Socialist sanctified Sweden, Muslims are now such a serious problem, with nightly car burnings, a rape epidemic, and no go zones for Swedes, that the once overly tolerant Swedes had become alarmed. But Swedes who need to know how bad their society has become have taken to reading Norwegian and Danish newspapers because the socialists in Sweden are so desparate to hide the truth about multiculturalism, that there is almost a complete ban on the press saying anything negative about it.

LEGO, Just as Conroy cannot seriously be regarded as left-wing, so too the Gillard government was hardly left-wing. Her party has no need to even pretend to be socialist let alone implement policies that Marxist-influenced leftists could support. Bailing out failed capitalists anyone? Internet filter? DEFINITELY NOT left-wing policies.

Since the decline of the Left in the early 1970s (the highpoint was 1968), a pseudo-left has filled the vacuum, which has made it very easy for the right to win the debate. The rise of this pseudo-left is part and parcel of the shift to the Right in our general political culture. You - and others here - are experiencing the difficulty when confronted by a genuine left-wing outlook. On the issue of press freedom and free speech, you are on the same side as leftists who prefer the colour red to green, and who, like you, support general notions of progress.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad there are people like Chris Berg, classical liberals, of the IPA, as he does a very good job on all this. The censorious pseudo's are way to his Right, as I like to tell them. I even participated in a public debate with Chris, on his side, against two individuals who supported Finklestein. There is barely an audience for my kind of 'red left' point of view anywhere, including the ABC (which prefers the right-wing-conservative/pseudo-left paradigm). I set up my blog in the hope of changing this situation

DM,

Marxism is a failed philosophy. It is so far against human nature that it requires a brutal tyranny to get it to function, and even then performs vastly less efficiently than capitalism producing grinding poverty, ecological destruction and human rights violations that exceed that even of Hitler.

What rescued the Chinese economy was not Mao, but the capitalism that replaced the iron food bowl.

BY,

If you look at the general politics in the country, Conroy being an ex union hack in the labor party is definitely left of center, perhaps not as "left" as those on the fringes, but not in any way center or center right. Big central government was the hallmark of Juliar's regime and was more socialist than liberal.

The internet filter is not right wing politics either, and there have been far more attempts to limit freedom of the press by the left than the right.

SM, Big central government also characterised Howard and Menzies - and Bush in USA - were they left-wing? Conroy's union affiliations hardly put him on the left. Unions are not left-wing. They're just legal state-sanctioned bodies representing less than 20% of the workforce.

BY,

"Unions are not left-wing" you must be kidding! The unions are the hot bed of socialist entitlement in the country.

As for Menzies, Howard and Bush being for "big government" I find the breaking up of monopolies and privatisation of common wealth assets to be somewhat contrary to your claims.

Big government as understood by most of us is the government trying to insinuate itself itself into the production of goods and services, making government owned monopolies such as the NBN.

SM, Menzies certainly left a lot for Keating to privatise! By your measure (and mine), Australia has never had a socialist government. You make a common mistake, I suspect, in conflating nationalisation with socialism. Marx and Engels had a different view, one hwich I think defines a left-wing position. As Engels said wrt Bismark: "But of late, since Bismarck went in for state ownership of nationalised industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating now and again into something of a flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic." (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific; Moscow, 1970, page 70)

Engels went on to point out that state ownership "does not do away with the capitalist nature of the productive forces . . . The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with."

The unions make no claim to be socialist and, as part of the legal structure of the capitalist system, cannot be regarded as left-wing, given that they accept the parameters of the system. That they want more from the system for their members is hardly left-wing. Wanting to overthrow capitalism - wanting socialism - that's left-wing. Once upon a time there were union leaders like that but they were still running organisations bound by the laws of the land

BY, I think you are confusing socialism with communism.

socialism definition. An economic system in which the production and distribution of goods are controlled substantially by the government rather than by private enterprise, and in which cooperation rather than competition guides economic activity. - (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

Note that even in the Soviet Union, workers worked for a wage.

Generally left wingers advocate greater government involvement in providing goods and services, whilst conservatives advocate for the limitation of government to public goods and services, and rewards for employees based on effort and competence.

Unions while working within a capitalist system, have almost universally supported left wing parties and advocated for government involvement in production and against privatisation

Socialists don't believe in censorship, Byork? Gee, that's funny, national socialist Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Communist China, and every East European country in the Warsaw pact who had socialism imposed upon them by Russian bayonets, all had strict censorship of the press. You do your credibility no good when you make statements of breathtaking inaccuracy.

Your claim that the unions and the ALP are not left wing leaves me shaking my head in pitying wonder. I Joined the ALP in 1971 and I had to join the Electrical Trade Union to do it, because the ALP is quite obviously the party of the unions. I also had to take an oath to support "the democratic socialisation of Australian industry" even though nobody believed in that crap anymore. They are still the requirements to join the ALP today.

The strength of the unions is now centred upon those unions who represent the public service. That is why the public servants in the ABC have allowed the ABC to become the public relations arm of the ALP. To this end, the unions oppose privatisation of any industry now under government ownership. My own union, the ETU, is currently conducting a campaign to resist the privatisation of the electrical power generation industry. The socialists know they can never convince the Australian people again to support the idea that the government should own the means of production. But where governments still do own industries, they will fight to maintain that state of affairs to the bitter end.

The ALP may have made some concessions to economic reality in that they know that socialism does not work, but that hardly equates to them now being right wing free market capitalists. The government subsidies to failing car industries is just another means of buying the working class vote in areas of high unemployment, and the ALP could not give a damn if every Australian built submarine sounded like a rock concert under water, or cost the Earth to build, provided that unionised Australian shipbuilders built the subs instead of the Japs.

SM, your definition of socialism is unsatisfactory because it looks only at government involvement - the surface - rather than at the social relations of production based on private appropriation of socially produced wealth. By your definition, every post-war government in Australia has been socialist because there has always been a high level of government control through regulation of provision of goods and services. Socialism is not the abolition of the wages system, as you point out, but no-one has claimed that it is. Government involvement in the economy is determined by the needs of the system. In 'downturns' there will be heavier government involvement to try to keep the zombie alive - regardless of who is in power. You must regard Bush jr as a real socialist!

Jardine K Jardine, I have read quite a lot of Austrian economics, including Rothbard. They just assume what has to be proven, that we need the profit motive.

They have nothing new to add on the subject. And their calculation argument rest on that assumption despite their claims to the contrary.

Their main contribution is to sheet home the importance of the profit motive in a market economy, something I wholeheartedly agree with.

I refer readers to may paper of a few years back:

http://werdiscussion.worldeconomicsassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/McMullen-SocialismNH.pdf

The following sections are particularly relevant:

2. Dissecting the economic calculation argument, starting on page 2.

3. The motivation problem, starting on page 6.

David
Everything that you have argued on economic theory has already been totally demolished here:
http://werdiscussion.worldeconomicsassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/McMullen-SocialismNH.pdf

"They [Austrian economists] just assume what has to be proven, that we need the profit motive."

No they don't. Prove it.

byork
You're just confused over names.

According to your theory, any product of social co-operation should be under political control.

So either you support unlimited government power over everything and the elimination of human freedom, or you don't understand what you're talking about.

Which is it?

It's no use telling me I'm confused or ignorant - I'm using your definitions and your theory!

Don't tell me you believe in freedom. How can you possibly reconcile that claim with your own statement that any product of social co-operation should be under political control. What freedom would not be caught by such a provision?

To BYork.

Your argument appears to be, (correct me if I am wrong) that the left wing no longer exists because both Labor and Liberals are right wing parties. Therefore, everything bad that happens in Australia can be blamed on the Right?

Well, that is a novel interpretation of reality.

Regardless of whether the Labor Party still believes in Socialist economic theory, it is still a left wing party. It looks after the interests of those working class people still "working" in government controlled industries and resists privatisation of those inefficient, featherbedded, and rort riddled industries. It will look after the interests of unionised workers even in private industry, and can never stop thinking up new ways to buy the working class vote by making the employers pay for it. (17.5 % loading on holiday pay, retrospective legislation compensating workers who lose their jobs, MERT, compulsory employer funded superannuation, four weeks annual leave, and the 35 hour week).

It is also a left wing party because it looks after the interests of the ever growing class of non productive and counter productive members of Australian society (dole bludgers, pensioners, criminals, terrorists, "refugees" and "aborigines." The Labor Party is a left wing party because it conforms to the classic left wing principle within democratic societies of buying the vote of the unproductive by taxing the hell out of the productive and pretending that you are Robin Hood. It is also left wing because it conforms to the classic socialist principle, that everybody is equal, amd everybody should be equal. And if it can't make everybody equally rich, it can sure as hell make everybody equally poor. It loves spending taxpayer money to the point of insolvency, but perversely, it despises the very business class that pays most of the tax.

Like every left wing party in the western world, it is actively involved in staying in power by increasing the numbers of unproductive through immigration, soft "refugee" policies, and any policy that will encourage birth rate differentials between the non productive and the productive to increase.

Get it in your head, LEGO, pensioners past and present are the people who built the Australia you live in today.

Either you new 'trendy' lot in this country pay lump sum cash or pay bit by bit fortnightly to use existing services paid for or maintained by pensioners, or go live in the desert where there is no services or benefits at all.

As for media/press and Aborigines, go talk to the deceitful ABC and other media editorial and have them report truth, about how it was decided years ago to collect coloured aboriginal children from full blood families, because the half-blood children were not getting due or equal care from the fullblood dad's they did not belong to.

Then add the true and very significant alcohol addiction problem to the aboriginal story. Stop blaming past government for trying to do the best thing under the circumstances at the time.

Media failure to tell the truth about the alcohol problem is linked to fact that grog sales pay money for media advertising, and many politicians are big drinkers.

Failure of media to tell the truth is linked to ongoing alcohol related death of aboriginal people, negligence with intent comes to mind, possibly involving genocide.

There is need for middle of the road politics and honest reporting by media.

LEGO you have a damn hide putting pensioners and Aborigines in the same category with dole bludgers, terrorists and criminals.

Byork,

The definition I gave of socialism is from the encyclopedia Britannica and is echoed in every other place I have looked. I would recommend you read it as it describes the government CONTROL of production not just INVOLVEMENT.

What conservatives are looking for is small government, i.e. government that capitalism occurs in a fair and competitive legal environment, that infrastructure is provided where and when needed, that consumers and the environment are protected, and that public goods that benefit society as a whole such as public health, a safety net, schooling etc that would not be provided otherwise are provided.

The difference is that socialists want governments to run major businesses such as airlines, power generation, health funds, etc that can be run far more efficiently by private industry.

Communists and Marxists are the extreme version that want governments to run all businesses. This has been shown to be an abject failure.

So who is in control, government or the press?

Shadow Minister, Britannica actually endorses my definition of socialism, not yours. I checked. Here it is: 'Social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. According to the socialist view, individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. Furthermore, everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members. This conviction puts socialism in opposition to capitalism, which is based on private ownership of the means of production and allows individual choices in a free market to determine how goods and services are distributed. Socialists complain that capitalism necessarily leads to unfair and exploitative concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of the relative few who emerge victorious from free-market competition—people who then use their wealth and power to reinforce their dominance in society'. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/551569/socialism In your definition Stanley Bruce and Bob Menzies were socialists - not to mention George Bush jr.

To JF AUS

There are 830,000 people in Australia on disability pensions, which is a figure higher than the total number of wounded Australia suffered in WW1 and WW2 combined. You don't have to be too smart to smell a rat. All of those Jihadis now running around Syria and Iraq with AK-47's are on the disability pension and their wives and kids are safely parked on Aussie welfare. Add to that number the ever growing number of women on single mother's pensions who have multiple kids to multiple fathers. I have that in my own family. My cousin's daughter has had two illegitimate kids to her ex husbands illegitimate son. She now has six kids and every one of them is on the dole in Bateman's Bay surfing, taking drugs, and getting into trouble with the local police.

The Labor Party's primary constituency are those people on social security. That category just happens to include pensioners (both deserving and undeserving), aborigines, criminals, drug addicts, "refugees", and dole bludgers. I am sorry if it hurts your ears to hear the truth.

Byork

Bollocks,

If you read my original definition it (though more condensed) mirrors the definition you have just given. I would suggest that you actually read it. When you have, you will realise that it does not imply that regulating society comprises socialism.

No, according to my definition none of those you mentioned are socialists.

SM, as I said originally, your definition was superficial and purposely left out the essential feature of social relations. Bruce and Menzies and Bush jr were all big government men, big regulators. No point continuing with you, given that you know neither what socialism is, nor what socialists believe.

Byork,

You claimed "By your definition, every post-war government in Australia has been socialist because there has always been a high level of government control through regulation of provision of goods and services."

Which is clearly false.

My experience with socialists is that the meaning differs from individual to individual. The problem that socialists have is that none of them can reconcile the collapse of every socialist system, nor provide plausible changes to the previous models that would prevent their collapse.

Shadow Minister, socialism means a switch from private ownership, particularly by the rich, to collective ownership by everybody.

The question of control, ie, the locus of decision-making, will depend on the type of decision. Some decisions will be more centralized some less so. The claim that socialism necessitates excessive centralization is erroneous. Even allocation of investment funds can be decentralized.

The claim that socialism has been shown to be an abject failure is lazy thinking. 20th century socialism had some very specific and contingent features. You had communists coming to power by historical accident in backward countries scarcely ready for capitalism let alone socialism. And then the regimes in slightly less backward eastern Europe owed their existence purely to the arrival of the Soviet Red Army. A future revolution in advanced capitalist societies will not be a cake walk but it will have a far more solid economic and social foundation.

LEGO, "Socialists don't believe in censorship, Byork? Gee, that's funny, national socialist Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Communist China, and every East European country in the Warsaw pact who had socialism imposed upon them by Russian bayonets, all had strict censorship of the press".

National Socialism in Germany had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with stopping socialist revolution and then regulating the economy in the interests of the dominant capitalist class. You must think the German Democratic Republic was democratic - after all, it had that in its name. Hitler used the popularity of socialism for very anti-socialist ends. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was built for socialists and communists. Hitler's economic policies shifted from privatisations, when they served big business, to tight regulation, when it served his war objectives. He was anti-socialist, an extreme Right-wing anti-communist.

You have acknowledged that it can be legitimate to impose restrictions on press freedom during war and that is what happened after the Russian revolution, when 14 countries sent in troops to try and restore the old order and then when Britain allowed the rise of Hitler, rejecting Stalin's pleas for collective security against Hitler, and a devastating war resulted.

As for East Germany et al, I applauded their downfall, as did every other leftist I know. I marched in solidarity with Polish workers and students on a May Day march around 1970 or 1971. State capitalism without democracy is not socialism. Mao used the term 'social fascism' to describe such developments. He had the post-war Soviet Union in mind.

China during the cultural revolution witnessed a flourishing of newspapers and big-character posters. They were hardly party mouthpieces, given that many were 'bombarding the headquarters'.

Again, the problem is ignorance about socialism and what its proponents actually stand for. If you think Conroy is on the left, then you're bound to get it completely wrong

LEGO,
Do you mean to say 830,000 people in Australia on disability pensions are all involved in false pretences and misappropriation of public money, or should you refer to those milking the system as pension thieves or similar?
As for Jihadis running around Syria as you say, surely it is the law that is at fault for letting them and their family be on an Australian pension.
Yes, it seems many single mothers are using the system, but that too involves misappropriation of public money that is fault of Parliament for allowing it to continue.
It does not hurt me to hear the truth, however the truth is that I think you should be referring to thieves and criminals and bludgers without pointing the finger directly at pensioners and aboriginals in general, as you did in your earlier comment.
Cheers.

DM,

The problem with socialism is that people will never be ready for it. It works well in kibbutzim where everyone is committed to the ideal, but where the majority of people are motivated not by the communal good but by achievement and reward, the socialist system can only exist by force.

Secondly where all the methods of production are owned by the state, and decisions are made by political appointees not entrepreneurs the results are usually bad ones, and the products are the crappy rubbish that those in the soviet union were forced to buy.

Is anybody else having trouble figuring out where Barry York is coming from?

He submits posts that appear to give the Left a serve, and then he comes right out and shows his true colours by advocating the state ownership of the means of production. He even claims that "social control" of the means of production "would make individuals freeer." Jesus, what planet is this bloke from?

Planet Earth calling Barry York. Socialist economics on this planet failed in every state and city it was tried. How many times does something need to fail before you figure out it is a bad idea? But socialism is not just economics. Socialist social theory based upon the notion that all people are equal, and that they must be treated absolutely equal, unless they are poor, crime prone, and totally dysfunctional, in which case the "rich" must be at fault through discrimination and oppression, and they must pay to make the poor the equal of everybody else. What the Left wants is a society totally dependent on the state for their incomes. This idiotic notion is presently sending previously wealthy European nations broke.

Angela Merkel summed it up best when she stated that the reason for European economic stagnation Europe's biggest problem was because "Europe had 12% of the world's population, 26% of the world's manufacturing capability, and 56% of the world's welfare recipients." The Left thinks that growing the welfare dependent in every capitalist society is the way to go. That is why they support third world immigration into first world societies. Third worlders are still dumb enough to believe in socialism because they like the idea of somebody else paying for their upkeep. And you can bet that every third worlder who scores a goal and makes it into a first world country will vote for the socialists to keep the gravy train flowing along.

The inevitable end of that sort of thinking can be seen in what happened to Detroit. Democratic Party socialists, black minorities, and greedy and uncompromising unions thought that they could squeeze the capitalist golden goose forever.

LEGO, where I'm coming from is the 'red left' tradition - definitely not green. Of course, this causes cognitive dissonance in those who believe in 'Watermelons'.

There is nothing left-wing about climate alarmism because it's reactionary and anti-progress. The doom-and-gloom outlook of the pseudo-left in general is the opposite of the revolutionary optimism of a real left-wing outlook.

Regarding socialism, the USA has a capitalist economy which, like all other capitalist economies, relies on tax-payer, or 'state', funding especially in times of periodic crisis.

Detroit is a fine 'tribute' to capitalism, when even state subsidy can no longer keep the zombie system going. All that plant, equipment, tools, machinery, technology - means of production - standing idle while most of the locals are out of work. That is the system you seem to support.

Under social ownership of means of production, the workers would have the opportunity and ability to make productive use of those means of production, real wealth would be created by and for the producers. But under the system you seem to prefer, production and employment are at the whim of the 'one percent' (or a fraction thereof) who own the means of production.

Needless to say, the capitalist system is also hopeless when it comes to innovation, with those market-driven big companies largely dependent on state-funded universities and research institutions to fund the R&D that serves them.

So, where I'm coming from is a fairly standard orthodox left-wing position influenced by Marxism. Just because the ABC regularly promotes the pseudo-left does not mean that a real left outlook does not exist.

Oh, OK. So, you support socialist economic theory and socialist economic progress, and sneer at the "psuedo left" who do not want to build dams and nuclear power stations?

Well, there is just one thing wrong with socialist economic theory. It doesn't work. It has never worked. Even the Russians and the Chinese have given up on it. How many times does something need to fail before you figure out it is a bad idea?

Detroit is an example of socialist economic theory combined with socialist social theory. Detroit was a powerhouse of manufacturing, especially the car industry. The powerful car unions demanded and got wages and conditions far exceeding the industries capacity to pay. (seven weeks annual leave, highest manufacturing wages in the USA, pensions for retired workers, "workers" who were paid not to work because the car companies were forbidden to lay off redundant workers, and generous medical and dental plans) which sent the companies broke. No amount of reasoned argument pointing out that the unions position was clearly making the companies uneconomic did anything.

The cities race demographics highlight the problem of socialist social theory. The city was once almost entirely white with a low crime rate, But prosperous communities will always attract minorities who are welfare dependent and crime prone. As minority infestation continued, corrupt politicians saw the advantage of appealing to the ever growing welfare dependent minorities as their new electorate. The bureaucracy became bloated as Democrat administrations were repeatedly elected giving high wages to public servants. The educational system collapsed as socialist "progressive" educational theory administered by the USA's highest paid teachers resulted in more students graduating to prison than graduating high school. The cost of supplying ever growing welfare for the unproductive minorities, as well as increases in costs for public servants, police, law courts, and prisons, fell upon the productive who were eventually taxed right out of existence.

The Republican Party in the USA is now competing with the Democrats for the welfare dependent vote, which means violating their own cherished free market economic practices to buy the votes of the unproductive

LEGO, do you really believe that dams and industry did not undergo tremendous rapid development under socialism in Russia and China? That is a unique and inaccurate view, I think.

As for Detroit, it could not be socialist if the means of production were in concentrated private hands. Are you seriously suggesting that Ford, Chrysler and General Motors were democratically owned by the workers? That production was not geared to the interests of the 'one-percent' who own the plants and machinery, etc?

No, ownership was in private hands, a tiny group whose sole interest was in maximising profit. We see this all the time - human lives wasted, souls alienated, the future blighted - all because the capitalists can make decisions affecting the lives of millions of people whose labor makes the profits for them.

Of course, workers will fight against speed-ups, wage-cuts and lay-offs - as they did in Detroit - but it makes little difference in the end because they do not have power. Yes, democracy allows everyone a vote but under this system 'compared to the power of capital, parliament is a mere talking shop'.

Have you wondered why there is always unemployment under capitalism (except in war time)? If it is not overt unemployment, it takes the form of 'welfare' - people who might otherwise be productive given the opportunity, people who want to work, yet they are kept at a certain level through welfare dependency? A 'reserve army of labor'.

And now capitalism - despite the billions that are injected into it by governments around the world - still cannot provide basics like free public health and free education UNLESS on the basis of debt.

Neither the Republicans nor Democrats have a solution to the problem of zombie capitalism. Bush jr's "socialist" quasi-nationalization of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG merely created the Tea Party while Obama's tax-payer funded bail-outs of capitalists created the Occupy movement

byork, so what is the solution?
I socialism the answer?
How can free health and education be provided?
How would doctors and nurses and teachers earn money to pay for their daily living expenses?

Anything that is the result of human effort cannot be "free" and it is mere childishness to think and talk in those terms. The question raised by any attempt to use government to provide goods is never whether they can be free, but only whether they are to be obtained on the basis of voluntary transactions respecting people's individual liberty and property, or violence-based transactions treating people as the instruments of others' will.

JF Aus

With stuff like healthcare and education, I think the important thing is that everyone can afford the best. In the case of healthcare everyone needs to be covered for expensive catastrophes or particularly high annual health costs. You don't need a formal insurance scheme as such for this. We can all be "insured" from birth and it is paid for through taxation. In a society where no one is poor I am not too fussed by the idea of people having to pay for doctor's visits or routine blood tests. Also being able to choose your own GP, cardiologist, physiotherapist etc is a must.

Since each generation needs a new fully functional generation to follow it, people with no children have an obligation to assist with child rearing and this includes education. So there is a definite role for taxation here. Taxation also smooths out the burden over a life time. When you were having children you benefit through the tax system while in other periods of your life you are contributing. Furthermore, I am a little bit uneasy about a child's education being purely a parents' concern as if children were there private property. It is important that schools and teachers are highly accountable for education quality and spending and parents need to be actively involved in their children's education. I don't think this requires fees just so that parents can feel like entitled customers instead of grateful recipients of government largess. Although you should have choice over schools wherever possible and funding allocated according to students enrollments.

LEGGO

Detroit was not an example for socialism. It was the effect of class struggle kept very much within the confines of capitalism.

Under socialism workers will have guaranteed employment but definitely not a guaranteed job. With economic change jobs will come and go. When your current job disappears you move to another one after a period of retraining if necessary. Workers in a particular enterprise will not be entitled to take industrial action to obtain better wages and conditions than other workers. They will however be well organized to ensure they get what they are entitled to and to struggle to ensure that work relations are continuing to develop along socialist lines.

See my earlier comment on 'socialism has failed'
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16816#295857

The main point is that socialism is a post-capitalist society. It cannot emerge from conditions that are still basically pre-capitalist.

Shadow Minister, yesterday you said:

"Secondly where all the methods of production are owned by the state, and decisions are made by political appointees not entrepreneurs the results are usually bad ones, and the products are the crappy rubbish that those in the soviet union were forced to buy."

There will need to be a lot of transparency in the appointment of people to responsible positions and in the assessment of performance. Bottom up supervision will be part of this.

Economic units would be quite entrepreneurial. They would not simply be told what to produce and how to do it. They would bid for projects. There would be a range of funding agencies they could approach with investment proposals. Small teams could form start ups and approach these agencies.

Individuals would not be seeking personal profit although costs and revenue would still play a part in economic decisions.

To Byork.

I made no judgment on the pace of socialist economic progress, I just wanted to figure out where you are coming from.

In regards to Detroit, it was doing very well out of free market economics until the Socialists in the form of the unions and Democrats started getting into power. Your claim that the poor oppressed workers were suffering under the iron fist of the greedy bosses is laughable. Seven weeks annual leave? "Job banks" where unemployed workers sat around doing nothing and getting paid for it? That is hardly capitalism, is it?

Have I ever wondered why there is unemployment in capitalist societies? Are you serious? Look mate, I came from a Housing Commission area where probably half the people were professional social welfare recipients. My own teenage mates threw in their jobs when Whitlam came to power so that they could sit on the dole and go surfing every day. They laughed at me because I still went to work. You must have come from some leafy middle class suburb if you think that most of the unemployed are the oppressed.

I worked with government owned Elcom and saw with my own eyes the rampant featherbedding, over manning, drunkenness, general bad attitudes, special privileges, entire rooms full of sleeping "workers", and gross over payment of the government "workers". I knew then why socialism failed everywhere.

One reason why we have high unemployment in Australia is because we keep importing it. 95% of Afghans are unemployed after five years residence and it is even worse for Iranians who are 98% unemployed after five years.

What western societies now have is the welfare state which is hardly an idea supported by self reliant capitalists. But we might have kept up the welfare state if the lefties had been honest enough to admit that many of their constituents were social parasites, and if they had been smart enough to figure out that you could not keep importing crime prone and welfare dependent minorities forever without destroying your economy

Dear Mr McMullen.

Fifty years ago, the world was divided between two competing economic systems, socialism and the free market. China and Russia were the two main advocates of socialism and where are they now? Both of them have given up and gone free market. Both of them could no longer pretend that their socialist economic system was in any way superior or more efficient than the free market. It was extremely painful for both of them to admit that they were wrong for so long. But they could no longer find excuses to explain away to their own people, the glaring differences between the prosperous free market societies and their own miserably poor economies.

I find it incredible that people like yourself are still trying to claim that socialism beats the free market. It must be something religious, like the Flat Earth Society or Creationism. How is it that you reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears and continue to advocate the "merits" of a clearly failed system? How many times did it need to fail before the penny drops?

I have explained how socialism destroyed Detroit and all you can come up with is some blatherings about "class struggle" that you did not elaborate on. Could I remind you that another thing the socialists promised which they failed to deliver was a "class free society"? What resulted was something more like a triangular feudal system where most of the people were on the bottom and only a very few fat cats were at the top. Neither Socialismn or the free market can make everybody equally rich, but socialism sure as hell can make everybody equally poor.

LEGGO

Feel free to check my recent OLO posts for relevant comments on the history of socialism.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/user.asp?id=44958

And if you want to refer to things that happen in a capitalist society as "socialist" I cannot stop you.

Regarding your comments to byork, it is good to see we have a similar attitude to the dole LOL. Under socialism there would be no dole. Everyone will be working or in re-training. There will be a bit of short term frictional and structural unemployment. That's it. Problem solved.

I imagine all those Afghans and Iranians on the dole are having a ball, not. I am sure most of them would prefer a job. I think most dole recipients are in a position that could not be described as enviable. Ditto for those who have been moved from the dole onto the disability pension

David McMullen
"With stuff like healthcare and education, I think the important thing is that everyone can afford the best."

You're not comparing apples with apples. The limitation on people "affording the best" is caused by the scarcity of resources. This is the original economic problem, that gives rise to all economic action and all economic theory.

All you're doing is assuming that, by vesting control of production in government, you're magically making the scarcity of means go away. But if that assumption is available, we could equally apply it to capitalism. To compare apples with apples, all we would have to do is use the tactic that you did with socialism, and declare that the problem "would" be solved by capitalism. It's idiotic. It's asinine. It's infantile. You need to graduate out of intellectual kindergarten. You obviously have not understood the first thing about economics. All you're doing is squalling for scarce resources to be stolen at gunpoint from other people, and devoted to satisfying your wants.

Plus, given that the scheme you propose is not to be voluntary, you have not justified the use of threatening to electrocute or shoot people to force them to submit and obey. You're talking moral gibberish as well as intellectual.

To David McMullen.

I don't intend to wade back through your previous posts to other contributors trying to figure out how you managed to think that socialist economic failure is somehow success, and how the successful free market economies are failures. I would prefer to concentrate on what your responses are to my posts, and I would prefer you to give some thought to replying to what I have written.

You have not given me much to work with this time. You have completly ignored my request to explain why Russia and China threw off socialist economics, probably because you know that it is because the Russians and the Chinese knew socialism did not work, and that is painfully embarrassing to you.

In regards to Detroit, your premise appears to be, that since the USA is a free market economy, then if Detroit fails economically, then it is the fault of the free market.

Such a position is absolutely wrong. Where the governments of free market economies ignore the basic principles of the free market in order to obtain electoral advantage by buying the votes of self interested demographic groups through blatant pork barrelling, the result is usually economic catastrophe. And socialism is not just an economic theory, it is a social theory which advocates (among other things) a welfare state. It is the welfare state which is rotting out the free market economies from within, exacerbated by the socialist commitment of ending world poverty by the simple expedient of having every person in the third world immigrate to the first world.

It is no surprise that those countries which have moved way from the free market economies the most, and embraced socialist humanitarianism ideology with it's attendant twin vices of high third world immigration rates coupled with a welfare state, that are in the most trouble. If you harbour heretical beliefs contrary to your orthodox socialist comrades on such things as the welfare state, then you would be best advised to keep your mouth shut, or you might end up with an ice pick in your head.

JKJ

I concede your point about scarce resources - taking "afford the best" literally would mean devoting most of GDP to education and health care. Just taking health care, decisions have to be made about how much should be allocated to medical research, the construction and running costs of hospitals and medical schools, per capita availability of expensive medical equipment etc. I suppose deciding the level of GDP devoted to health care would be a bit like the way it is at the moment - inertia and people's expectations. The main change I think would be greater funding of research.

The Australian Tax Office does not electrocute or shoot people to get the tax revenue we currently spend on education and health. So I don't think a socialist tax office would need to. As for expropriating the 0.01 per cent, that may provoke acts of violence and rebellion that will need to be dealt with severely.

LEGGO

These are my past comments relevant to the notion that socialism has been proven to be a failure.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0#294584
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0#294710
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0#294763
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16816&page=0#295857

The problems of Detroit are the problems of the existing order which most people call capitalism. This order includes a lot of government interference in the economy, much of which has perverse results. Firms, entire industries and regions capture government policy for their own interests while much of the bourgeoisie sees the need to avert revolution through the welfare system.

Free marketeers subscribe to what could be called a utopian pristine capitalism. They do not see that the actions of government are endogenous to the market system. They are not some external imposition by 'socialists'.

I would imagine when the next global financial crisis hits most of the bourgeoisie will insist that governments "do something" or look as though they are doing something no matter how ineffectual. Only the stalwarts at the von Mises Institute and the Cato Institute will call on the government to just get out of the way and let the crisis take its course. Everyone else knows that would simply further inflame mass unrest.

David
Your first paragraph runs into the economic calculation problem. You went out backwards failing to defend your argument to have solved it, here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0
remember?

To put it another way, given you have conceded that resources are scarce, there is no rational way for you to know that we need "more" research, independent of profit and loss. The issue is precisely how you know whether, and what, other human wants should be sacrificed for the sake of that "more", how you know which are less important, and whether your proposed policy would be providing
1. too much
2. too little, or
3. just the right amount
of research.

You have no rational way of demonstrating that in units of a lowest common denominator, and therefore lose the argument.

"The Australian Tax Office does not electrocute or shoot people to get the tax revenue we currently spend on education and health."

The socialists have already lost that argument here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764&page=0

The only way out of this is to try to claim that taxation is voluntary which is nonsense. Not even the state agrees with you, because all arms of the government define it as compulsory, so you haven't got a leg to stand on.

"The Australian Tax Office does not electrocute or shoot people to get the tax revenue we currently spend on education and health."

They threaten to, and if they don't get obedience and submission, yes they do. Why do you think cops carry tazers and guns when it's illegal for you and me?

Your claim that tax is voluntary is flatly incorrect, end of story. You're just wrong.

"So I don't think a socialist tax office would need to."
So according to you, tax would be voluntary under socialism?

Sounds like either:
a) a libertarian paradise, or
b) you're confused and self-contradicting, or lying.

Which is it?

JKJ

The two links just take us to the comments page. You need to provide links to specific comments.

I would imagine that contributing one's share to common provision would be something that people would feel happy about. Avoidance would be seen as like theft - taking without giving. Of course this would depend on people feeling that tax collection was equitable and the funds well spent.

David
"You need to provide links to specific comments."

I'm just reflecting back to you, your tactic of posting links in substitution of rational argument, like your attempt to squirm out of your defeat on the economic calculation argument by posting links to your own works. You sent me on an errand to construct your argument for you - I'm just doing it back to you. According to you, it's a valid argument. So go ahead: find where you're wrong; or admit your tactic was invalid and you have no basis for your claims to have solved the economic calculation argument.

"I would imagine that contributing one's share to common provision would be something that people would feel happy about."

a) It is moral gibberish to talk about violence based transactions AS IF they are voluntary. You might as well call war "peace".
b) we have already established that you support the use of aggressive violence as the basis of these so-called "contributions", remember?
c) if it's true that they're "happy" about paying tax, then there's no need for tax, is there? According to your (wrong) theory, if the Tax Act is repealed, government's revenue will be no less, because people will just write out a cheque for the same amount and voluntarily send it in to the government.
d) the reason they're not doing this is because your theory is wrong.
e) you have not established that paying forced tribute to a privileged class of coercive monopolists is "common provision" rather than the mere extortion/exploitation of a protection racket. Therefore you're assuming what's in issue, which is circular, which is fallacious, which is irrational.

"Avoidance would be seen as like theft - taking without giving."
That assumes that everyone's labour and the fruits thereof presumptively belong to government. In other words, you believe people are chattels owned by the government - and you JUST HAPPEN to be a socialist.

"... this would depend on people feeling that tax collection was equitable and the funds well spent."
No-one including you believes that, because it's not true.

Socialism failed everywhere it was tried and it is hardly "lazy thinking" to point out what is self evident reality.

The elephant in the room that you refuse to acknowledge, is that if socialism is viable, why did every socialist country that was not in the iron grip of some tyrant throw off socialism at the first opportunity? This is a question I have posed to you twice now, and twice you have dodged it. I can tell more about my opponents mindset from the questions they do not want to answer, than from the questions they feel comfortable giving a reply to.

You do not want to answer this question because you yourself know that the only way that socialism can be both implemented and maintained is through armed force. It is an unnatural system of economics based entirely upon idealism and it's only adherents are idealists and people gullible enough to believe it's empty promises. Your claim that socialism would not work in pre industrial societies looks odd, when you yourself extolled the virtues of socialism in advancing economic progress in such countries. It seems that the latest lame excuse for true believer socialists is that socialism can only succeed when it begins in an already successful and prosperous free market society. Success must adopt failure to succeed.

Idealists believe that the perfect society can be constructed by intelligent people and they invented socialism as the supposed way to achieve it. It is all based upon the logic that human beings are inherently altruistic instead of self interested, and will always act logically and with reason for the common good. And it would work too, except for the little inconvenience that human beings are not robots. Humans only think logically when all other means are exhausted. If people thought logically and with reason, there would be no obesity, no speeding tickets, no drug abuse, no unmarried mothers, no crime, no extreme sports, no high cholesterol, and no fashion.

The socialist way to solve overpopulation would be for some committee to simply tell teenagers to stop thinking about sex.

Hi Barry,

I've just found this thread. I was fascinated by your quote:

"Censorship should be resisted in all its insidious forms. We should be vigilant of the gradual erosion of our freedom to know, to be informed, and make reasoned decisions in our society and in our democracy".

So, in those dozens of 'socialist' states, over a combined hundreds of years of experience, how did that go ?

One aspect of the Gramscian 'march through the institutions' seems to always be to demand of existing societies what has never been tolerated in any 'socialist' state.

Please explain :)

Joe

At
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764#294776

you said:

"Basically you have not taken the discussion any further than Marx, who simply assumed without any real explanation, that the profit motive would disappear under socialism, and that the working class would benefit more economically from socialism than from capitalism."

At
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764#294799

I mentioned that my papers devoted considerable space to how socialism would dispense with the profit motive. Given that this was a major theme of the two articles and they were adequately sub-headed I do not think there was any need for me to be more specific. I also found your comment odd given that you had read at least one of my papers.

Not good enough, sorry.

I am not to be sent on an errand to construct your argument for you. You need to make it in this forum here, otherwise it's just an appeal to absent authority (your own), and I can refute it according to your own standards by merely saying that everything you are arguing is disproved here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16764#294799
which is what you're doing.

How do you like it? Do you consider that an adequate form of argument? If yes, then you lose, by your own standard. If no, then you lose, by your own standard.

You see David, it's no use pretending you understand Marx's theory and its refutations, and how to re-arrange the economy of the world, if you can't cope with the requirements of logic at the simply syllogism level. If you can't even establish that your argument meets the minimal level of being merely logical - which you can't as we've just seen over and over and over again - then what hope do you have?

Joe,

Happy to explain but need two parts, word limitation.

If you are who I think you are, then you were once a communist or at least on the revolutionary left. If I am right, then I will ask you: were you on the left because you supported censorship? Was that a core value? Or, did you actively oppose censorship (as the rest of us did)?

I just want to establish that many people were and are attracted to the Left because of those values. Having said that, I am very aware of the censoriousness today of many old comrades who seem to have changed while still none the less claiming to be of the Left. I regard them as pseudo's.

I like the way you put 'socialist' in inverted commas because, again, if you are who I think you are, you would understand that we NEVER supported the social-fascist regimes in Europe or, for that matter, Cuba. Our understanding of Marxist dialectics meant we could comprehend that things turn into their opposites and that struggle is essential against that happening.

Yes, I regarded the Soviet (pre-1950s) and the Chinese experiments favourably. But I also came to understand that they were more or less doomed to fail, in the long run, because they were such backward systems. They lacked the economic development of capitalism and democratic culture. You too would know what Marx said about the preconditions for socialism being necessary.

Of course, I would not argue that there was a free press in the Soviet Union prior to it adopting state capitalism after WW2. Russia was invaded by armies of 14 countries after the revolution, then had a civil war, then the pro-fascist fifth columnists and then the worst war in human history unleashed upon the Soviet by the Nazis (with Britain and US initially standing by and hoping).

What was the capitalist countries' excuse for strict censorship during the war, and in the intervening periods?

Are you not aware that even Britain, the mother of parliamentary democracy, only became democratic in the parliamentary sense in 1929?

Part two, Joe:

As for China, my understanding is different to yours in that I believe that the cultural revolution when it was led by the left in China did result in a flowering of competing newspapers and more importantly big-character posters. At the time, western conservatives bemoaned this chaos. I was inspired by it, and I suspect that you might have been too.

You will say that I was wrong to see it that way but this does not alter the fact that the values to which I adhered, and still adhere, were committed to free speech - letting the hundred flowers bloom.

We are in the C21st now. If you look at how democracy and capitalism have developed and changed over the centuries, you will notice that things have taken time since the English revolution of the mid-C17th. Yet there is still a hereditary element to the British parliament. And you expect socialism to be faulted by a measure against an idealised C21st democratic capitalism?

Do you really want the multi-billionaire owners of Google to have the power to decide to cooperate with China's anti-communist, undemocratic, regime in censorship the Internet? Or do you want to see the 'Net owned by everybody and liberated from concentrated ownership?

Hi Barry,

Yes, you got me, I was a born-and-bred pro-Soviet Communist until I was about 19, then flicked to the Chinese until my late thirties, after which I've been a sort. of agnostic.

I don't think it's a matter of either/or - it's not a choice between Britain 1929 and Google OR free speech and restricted censorship - was free speech ever really encouraged under any socialist state ? In that sense, was socialism ever any freer than the most restrictive capitalism, e.g. China ? Yes, certainly, things turn into their opposites all right.

In its defence, I can appreciate that, in a hostile world, no socialist state can tolerate the complete freedom of expression. But this is hardly one of its strengths, particularly when this is used as a pretext for the extermination and incarceration of vast populations. Clearly though, double standards are being employed when we demand something under capitalism that we know very well would not be tolerated under socialism, or some other Perfect Society under whatever name.

If we are to stand up for free expression, we must also be aware that , in order to preserve it, we must forever tolerate an imperfect society, one with wrinkles and warts, which tolerates other groups that we wouldn't have a bar of. Nor they with us. That might be as good as it gets: a permanent un-revolution.

Joe

Joe,

I don't think I ever thought I was involved in a struggle for a perfect society; though maybe when I was a total idealist earlier on in high school. I'm surprised by your references to that. I thought and still think that everything constantly changes, and that once one set of contradictions are resolved, a new set will emerge. Which I guess is another way of saying: 'Life's a bitch but I wouldn't want it any other way'. And it certainly is the opposite of seeking perfection, final resolution, or 'Sustainability'.

You can find my email address with my bio note on this thread, so please email if you'd like to catch up in person one day for a beer/wine/latte/coke - or all the above.

Jesus, Joe and JKJ, we have a couple of True Believers here in Byork and David McMullen.

It just goes to show the power of Faith when it comes to people suffering from Obsessive/Compulsive disorders. No amount of reasoned argument can ever put a dent in their deep psychological need to believe in a perfect ideal. Such people make for great Vegans, Nazis, Socialists, Creationists, Inquisitors, Anarchists, extreme Greens, Jihadis, and advocates of any other cause where absolute commitment to an unobtainable ideal is the only choice a true person of virtue can make.

Take Jihadis and Creationists for example, and compare them to our two socialist friends. Both are obsessed with a religious ideal, and Jihadis in particular are confronted by the same conundrum that Barry and David face. The more Islamic a society is, the more of an economic and social failure it is. Exactly the same can be said of Socialism. No matter what the socialists tried, and try they most certainly did, it always failed. But the boys in ISIL or the socialists are never going to see what everybody else can see. All they see is the ideal.

And an avalanche of fossils is never going to convince a Creationist that the world is more than 6,000 years old. They just come up with the perfectly "logical" excuse that dinosaurs were just the animals God killed off at the time of the Flood.

Barry and David's excuse for socialist failure is as silly as the excuse of the Creationists. Socialism never failed, it was just never properly implemented. David claims that socialism can only work if it springs from an already successful free market economy. Only True Believer's could swallow that.

But once those potty ideas are accepted and internalised, everything becomes clear for Barry and David. Socialist repression, censorship and mass murder was never the fault of socialism, because the Chinese, Russians, Cubans, Khmer Rouge, the East European regimes, and North Koreans were not socialists. So there.

And 18C is not the fault of Socialists because the Labor Party is not a socialist party

Loudmouth

Re your comment at

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16816#296049

I think we can say in hindsight that capitalism risked nothing in allowing the pseudo left to "march through the institutions".