[continued]

It's appropriate to think of Communist Parties as Mafia organisations, similar organisational structures, attitudes to morality, brutality and inherent fascism. I don't mean that they get around in fedoras, speak Sicilian and say 'Forgedaboudit' or 'badabing' a lot.

But in their practices they are indeed similar, since both forms of organisation are based on patron-client systems from top to bottom, on cliques who get to the top by violence, temporary alliances with other cliques, the super-exploitation of the people in their thrall, the ready recourse to hit-men (if on very different scales: the Mafia was small beer compared to Stalin or Mao), the easy attitude to notions of right and wrong, the utter opportunism of their actions.

There were some brilliant articles on communist parties as patronage machines written in the eighties, if one is interested.

No, capitalism is what we are stuck with. Cruel, grasping, unequal and very imperfect as it may be, like democracy, its uneasy mate, it's probably the best economic system around. I wouldn't be surprised if even Marx would concede that, if he could come back for a day.

Even if natural resources do not end, it is a wonderful dream to live a simpler life in a small-scale caring society.

But rather than praising the quality of such life, the author has chosen to use the stick over the carrot, that of dwindling resources - and is correctly being criticised for his errors in estimating our available resources.

Smaller and simpler societies can work and entice participation when they share common spiritual goals - materialistic goals on the other hand, which both capitalism and conventional-socialism embrace, call for a larger-scale industrialised and complicated society.

Due to today's lack of common spiritual goals, the ideal of smaller and simpler societies must remain just a dream. Some, the author among them, are (understandably) so desperate that they pray for the forces of nature, including resource-scarcity, to hasten the collapse of the existing large-scale industrial society, but that's not on the cards for a while yet, in fact for thousands of years to come as we currently live in the dark age of Kali-Yuga. Rather than using scare-tactics for trying to change others, the proper, positive and honourable way to live this dream, is to shed one's body and die now, then be reborn thousands of years hence in a different age when this dream-lifestyle is the norm.