by americandream » Sat 28 Aug 2010, 19:08:25
When all the hope and band aid is finally installed and in place, what will determine resource allocation in your utopia bearing in mind that Marx was merely a scientific analyst of human nature in the material order we call society and the best mode of resource allocation for the largest class.
His was quite a simple analysis premised as it was on the rather simple formula: man = material conditions. The rest were merely prescriptions to achieving the formula. Capital cannot co-exist within that formula nor can labour within its reverse. These are objective facts neither one of us can escape given the compelling nature of the material.
In other words, subject a man to the rhetoric of personal gain and he wil so act, irrespective of whether it is couched in the language of ethics, Christ, Allah, Buddha or the other obscurantist ideas that proliferate, reformism being a fact of all systems subject to more compelling imperatives.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Joseph Matthew', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'I')t's funny how the thought of communism arouses fear in some. No no, we wont have money, we wont have bad folks, we will raise the kids to love all and most of all we wont be communists.
This is all pie in the sky. There wont be any change without struggle. No rich fat cat Rolls Royce driving tycoon is going to roll over and hand you the keys to this castle. You will have to take it or forever be consigned to polishing his boots.
No one is saying this is going to be easy, or that it won't require a shift in our collective understanding.
If it helps, your contention is a logical fallacy; the False Dilemma -- a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are other options.
Factually, as a society, one of our greatest strengths is in expressing & supporting what is deemed favorable to all. As one example: In general, most people consider anti-social behavior as disdainful, and we treat those who express it with disdain.
If the common definition of anti-social behavior included exploiting others to gain more resources than one could reasonably use in their lifetime, we'd start to our attitudes towards Mr. Rolls Royce change; indeed as a social animal, he'd change himself to some degree.
As it is today, such exploitation is lauded in our economic system. When we change that structure, by say... eliminating the advantage to undesirable behavior, so we change what is socially acceptable.
Stated simply, this is not a defeatist's movement; it's a progressive social movement -- by definition it aims to help move society forward progressively through modern understanding; let's exist at the front of our great path, not behind it?
A relevant question is "how much more failure do we need to go through, how many people need to needlessly suffer & die, before we look at things differently"?