by Last_Historian » Tue 02 Feb 2010, 20:30:57
OK, perhaps I won't leave permanently. I will behave differently, though. I will no longer allow myself to be baited by trolls or have words put into my mouth. I will not post more than once every day or two. And I will utterly ignore SG and Pretorian - two people who have shown themselves to be malevolent slanderers and in the case of the latter, a true Stalinist who would eliminate those whose ideas counter to their own.
1. Major assumption certain people make here: Communism = political mass murder, hence Communists = aspiring tyrants. That is false.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'K')arl Marx... posited that communism would be the final stage in society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution and only possible after a socialist stage [the "dictatorship of the proletariat"] develops the productive forces, leading to a superabundance of goods and services.
I do not see how anyone could validly view the above as a bad thing.
Furthermore, Marxism is a valid and widely used analytical tool for explaining trends in sociology, politics, economics, psychology, etc. The fact that it is despised by people irrevocably infected by Cold War propaganda is regrettable but ultimately irrelevant.
What I am doing is a reinterpretation of Marx's (who in his day borrowed from Hegel) vision, to one more situated for our age: a transitory "ecotechnic dictatorship" to usher in a post-scarcity Green Communism - either by changing social values away from materialism, or by achieving a technological singularity.
2. To those who really want to indulge in rhetoric about how "Communism" killed 100mn people, note that by using the same standards capitalism has killed a similar number -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_ ... Capitalism.
For the record, I don't have any dislike for capitalism, except obviously in so far as its unrestricted practice is leading us to collapse. Political theories are only as good or bad as the people and societies which implement them.
3. Another thing. Whether you like it or not (I don't like it), the fact of our overshoot
means that increasing coercion is inevitable because of the simple fact that all political systems when under increasing stress tend to rigidify. If anything, the safeguards I have suggested be built into an ecotechnic dictatorship will make it a far more liberal system to live under than traditional authoritarianism or anarchy.
4. $this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Jotapay', 'Y')ep, Last_Historian would forcibly turn us into sheep who have to do what the technocrat leaders say. Or else we will be mercilessly stamped out (his words).
Willful misinterpretation. There have to be technocrats will set limits and restrictions based on the results of objective modeling studies, because normal people won't do that by themselves (see tragedy of the commons). The contents of surplus production - i.e., the ones that aren't necessary like a sustainable energy infrastructure or geoengineering should the need arise - can be democratically determined through opinion polling and the like.
will be mercilessly stamped out after legal trials; there is nothing particularly tyrannical about it. Do not force fed words into my mouth on this forum. I will not tolerate it.
5. $this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Olaf', 'I') think this sounds like one of the worst ideas ever and that your theories lack a basis in reality. What will you call it? 'Criminal Idol' perhaps?