Good point DavidJS.

If human nature is fixed then aspirations for change are tilting at windmills. That would be as true for me as it would be for Glorfindel

I suspect Glorfindel's answer will be that we can change if we embrace [insert name of chosen god here.]

My response is that humans do change and their nature (while it may be hot wired) is multi-layered and subject to shifting emphases depending on the underlying economic nature of that society.

And economic nature of society itself changes over time through the conscious actions of human beings.

Passy - you denied being postmodernist, but surely your statement of relativism is just that?

You said: "What is natural to one society is not to another." Up to a point that’s true, but discernment is needed of what is dismissible as relative and what isn't. Can you say of female genital mutilation, and of general monstering of women, "It's OK in their culture"?

You describe religions as " left overs from an age of superstition, ignorance and mass poverty except for the ruling class". Really? Pursuit of the numinous is far from dead. The New Age phenomenon, egregiously gullible and commercially-driven, is one manifestation. But religion itself is certainly not dying - see Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, Chapter 4, section ‘La Revanche de Dieu’.

State-associated Christianity, since Constantine, has been a disaster, a betrayal of what Christ taught. Martin Luther King Jr said rightly: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”

You say "The idea that human nature is immutable is just wrong." Brave! Give me a SINGLE example of a successful utopia. New Australia - defunct. The USSR - a cesspit; Trotsky, though less coarse, was no less totalitarian than Stalin. Mao called millions dead "manure of history". Pol Pot. EVIL – same as The Grand Inquisitor! If you're interested in Russia immediately after the revolution, have you read Yevgeny Zamyatin's brilliant short novel "We" (1921)? Unnervingly prescient of the logical consequences of “scientific socialism”; written before Stalin.

The Soviet Union tried to create a 'new Soviet man' free from the shackles of past acculturation. Moral vacuum after 1991!

A few years ago in Melbourne I observed the demonstration protesting the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The Socialist Alliance stand in front of the State Library was manned by a young man sporting a DDR t-shirt. Great - emblem of a regime that shot people who didn't want to live there!

Passy, you say you "value democratic rule and production for meeting human need". But you don't envisage pluralist democracy. Socialist Alternative's website describes itself as "revolutionary Marxist".

After digging a fair bit into Socialist Alternative, the other half-dozen or so Trotskyist groups in Australia, and Socialist Alliance, I have to say in relation to ALL of you: I reach for the silver spike and hammer. WRONG WAY GO BACK, John. With an agenda like that, and the bizarre view that you Marxists have of the Australian people and their aspirations, I can think only of Brutus's words to Cassius (yes, out of context) : "all the voyage of their [YOUR] life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

I think MANY of the issues your SA website espouses are misconceived. Your attitude toward “Islamophobia” is crazy. Islamists would bury YOU, chum, including your championing of gay rights and feminism. Do you know anything about Islamic theology? I do.

The Current Edition contains an article by Liam Byrne "Was there a parliamentary alternative in Russia in 1917?" The article omits to point out that the Provisional Government which had ruled from March 1917 until the Bolshevik coup on 25 October had been acutely aware of its lack of legitimacy, because the Fourth Duma had been elected on a very restricted franchise. In late autumn, it staged free and fair elections for a Constituent Assembly with unchallengeable legitimacy as the will of the people. This finally met on 18 January 1918. Its 707 members included 370 Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs – 52%), 40 Left SRs (6%), 170 Bolsheviks (24%), 34 Mensheviks (5%), and 93 deputies from other parties (13%). It met on 18 January 1918 and Lenin had troops disperse it the following day. Even with allies from the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks were still barely 30% of the people's will. SO MUCH FOR DEMOCRACY.

Count me as implacably on opposing barricades to you!

I would have thought that capitalists would be more accepting of homosexuals than non-capitalists, such as the Marxists.

Capitalists don’t like to loose a customer, so they wouldn’t be readily turning a homosexual away, (at least if the homosexual had money to spend).

Marxists and various other non-capitalists on the other hand don’t seem to care much about anyone. They will put a bullet in someone whether they are homosexual, heterosexual, man, woman or child. This was done to many millions last century.

HRS “would have thought that capitalists would be more accepting of homosexuals than non-capitalists.”

I would agree.

Lets face it, socialist / communists believe no person should be allowed to stand out.

They should be allowed to wear only the same drab and dour garb.
(Theirs is not the place for creatively minded and artistic male fashion designers and hair dressers who talk with a lisp).

Alternatively the capitalists value and rely on the individuality and innovation of the creatively minded (gay or otherwise),

And your point about customers is true too, a capitalist will seek to service (poor choice of words on my part) the gay market no differently to the heterosexual market,

Agree with your comments too about the ability of the socialist/communists to our-count Hitler in terms of killing people in the name of their politics.

Passant’s article is just an example of the wedge politics of the failed who refuse to accept their political time had come

and now has gone

Glorfindel, I suggest people read an interesting 2005 article on the homosexuality issue by Rachel Morgan. http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=519&Itemid=106

In your more recent posts you say that we socialists are totalitarian leftist scum apparently because one demonstrator wore a DDR T shirt. That's an interesting way to form your views.

You say that you'll be on the other side of the barricades to me. That puts you with the imperialist butchers and all the homophobes.

You hold up the Constituent Assembly as the democratic alternative to the Bolsheviks.

First, these were elections for an assembly to develop a bourgeois constitution, not a parliament. Second, the workers, peasants and soldiers councils were more democratic since constiuents had the right of immediate recall of delegates. Third the Constituent Assembly elections were held before the ripening of the revolution.

The Social Revolutionaries' ticket was dominated by the right SRs. Few left SRs were on the ballot. The ripening of the revolution after the Constituent Assembly elections saw a swing to the left SRs on the ground and their split from the right SRs.

They were in the Bolsheviks' first government.

The working class was a small minority in Russian society. But given their social and economic power, they pulled the rest of society behind them. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was vindicated by the events of February to Novemebr 1917 with the culmination of the transfer of power to the councils. See Sandra Bloodworth's When Workers took power in russia.

The defeat of the German revolutions meant the Russian revolution did not have the material base to survive and led to the rise of Stalin.

If the Russian revolution was a Bolshevik coup, then it seems strange that the working class and peasantry fought a civil war for three years against the return of the capitalist class and landed aristocracy. The reds successfully defeated not only the reactionaries (who if they had won would not have set up democracy but fascism) but also 14 foreign armies, including Australia.

Coups don't have mass support.