Hi Foxy,

Hope you're getting better fast : )

"The fact is I am happier now than I have been at any time in my life."

Precisely!...otb seems to imagine that women "of a certain age" are far unhappier than they are. If I could go back twenty years, I don't think I would want to. I feel physically and mentally at the top of my form.

Strange that : )

The problems of First World Feminists. What about you do your Marcel Marceau 'jazz hands' then and leave children alone to enjoy their childhood.

You can see where the ABC gets its leftist PC skew from. Here is the BBC, wasting UK taxpayers money popularising 'jazz hands' for looney, overbearing Feminist dominatrices.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/32032291/students-swap-clapping-for-jazz-hands-at-nus-event

"I've (OTB) been to many a school assembly, music, sports and other school get togethers."

Exactly why we need a 'Safe Schools' program, to keep the nutters out of the playground.

Dear Poirot,

I knew it.

You, like me, are far too busy, enjoying and living life
to the hilt.

May we continue to do so. ;-)

Joe,

"I was using the term 'socialism' in the old Marxist sense of 'communism'. The post-war Attlee government was, from that point of view, social-democratic. And probably vastly more democratic too."
But it was regarded as socialist by itself, its supporters, its opponents, and indeed the general public. It did a lot of nationalisation and there was a high degree of wealth redistribution. In what way is that not socialist?

It looks to me like you were using a strawman definition of socialism. Of course you won't find an example that avoids totalitarianism when you virtually build totalitarianism into your definition! But it would make far more sense to use a definition that socialists would accept.

"None of Marx's predictions seem to have worked out. And perhaps he knew that was on the cards, even in his own lifetime. If only he had lived for twenty more years, and advised the comrades 'Chuck it, boys, it's all bullsh!t.'"

Possibly, but I doubt it. Marx was famously overreliant on the labour theory of value, even though that was known at the time to be flawed, and he failed to properly engage with criticism of his work. I doubt another twenty years of life would've collapsed his cognitive dissonance.

Having said that, his prediction that under capitalism much more of the wealth would be claimed by the richest seems to have come true in my lifetime. Some of his predictions about how society responds to that may yet be vindicated.

Hi Aidan,

I suppose there is a difference between nationalising some major industries (social democracy), and nationalising all means of production (communism), across the board. I've never associated the Attlee government with totalitarianism, but that seems to inevitably accompany the communist version of socialism.

Marx might have been changing his mind; in his letters to Engels, one wrote to the other (I forget which) something like, "Britain is a strange country. Not only does it have a bourgeois bourgeoisie, and a bourgeois aristocracy, but it is in the process of creating a bourgeois proletariat." They also made ironic comments about the Italian communist's love for the Virgin Mary. So they may not have taken themselves completely seriously.

In his decades of industrial management work, from 1840 to 1890, Engels would have noticed not the simplification and homogenisation of work (as Marx predicted) but its increasing complexity and differentiation and need for more and more skilled workers in fields hitherto unknown, which goes right against Marx.

And one doesn't have to be a genius to predict that the rich will keep getting richer, and vice versa, that may even go back to Christ. With hindsight, I suggest that Marx's theories are what one might call these days, the 737 version of history: that one could throw a dozen Cessnas in bits into the air, and just perhaps, they might all come down in a perfectly-formed Boeing 737.

In other words, if you don't really know how to get from A to B, it's unlikely you will ever get to B.

Life's too short, Aidan :)

Cheers,

Joe