Cooking the Books: Never Been Tried
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Young Master Smeet wrote:Quote:Election is a political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination, 3) election has nothing of its present political character.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm(my bold)
Yeah, 'no-one' will have domination – the collective, democratic, social producers will 'dominate', through their own authority. That's what democracy is, YMS.And since you are an individualist, you'll fight tooth and nail to refuse democratic authority.You see 'socialism' as a free-for-all for 7 billion 'individuals', and ignore the whole Marxist concept of 'social production'.
LBird wrote:Except in the minds of 'individualists', for whom the pre-property world was a condition of hippyish love and peace, man.There is a big difference between violence and organised violence (which is why the question of how to efine war is so tricky the further we go back into the past). At its most basic, pre-tribal society with loose kinship groups cannot sustain organised violence, there may well be individual violence, or personal violence, but the whole point of the development of culture has been mitigate and prevent such within-group violence.Attaining a society based on the free association of producers means we cannot institute within-group violence as an organising principle.Let's look at who Engels thought socialist society should be run:
The Devil Himself wrote:In a trade union, for example, does the whole union form its executive committee? Will all division of labour in the factory, and the various functions that correspond to this, cease? And in Bakunin's constitution, will all 'from bottom to top' be 'at the top'? Then there will certainly be no one 'at the bottom'. Will all members of the commune simultaneously manage the interests of its territory? Then there will be no distinction between commune and territory.The Germans number around forty million. Will for example all forty million be member of the government? Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed.If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is after all himself and no other.[…]With collective ownership the so-called people's will vanishes, to make way for the real will of the cooperative.LBird wrote:Young Master Smeet wrote:Quote:Election is a political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination, 3) election has nothing of its present political character.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm(my bold)
Yeah, 'no-one' will have domination – the collective, democratic, social producers will 'dominate', through their own authority. That's what democracy is, YMS.And since you are an individualist, you'll fight tooth and nail to refuse democratic authority.You see 'socialism' as a free-for-all for 7 billion 'individuals', and ignore the whole Marxist concept of 'social production'.
L Bird, your mind seems over occupied with the concepts of domination and submission, is there something your not telling us, you kinky little tinker?
LBird wrote:Yeah, 'no-one' will have domination – the collective, democratic, social producers will 'dominate', through their own authority. That's what democracy is, YMS.That's right, in democracy, people will voluntarily submit to the decision because it is in their long term interest (sometimes they will win the votes). In democracy among friends, the majority does not dominate, and sometimes a substantial and determined minority might prevail (usually where they feel very strongly and the majority only feel weakly).
LBird wrote:You're not just a poor Marxist, Vin, but a poor historian, too.'Power and socially organised violence' is not a product of the development of property – the product of that development of property is 'the state'.'Power and socially organised violence' pre-existed 'the development of property' – any examination of pre-class societies shows these social traits.Except in the minds of 'individualists', for whom the pre-property world was a condition of hippyish love and peace, man.Can you offer anything from Marx to back up your claim that I am a poor Marxist?Your condemnation of Marx's and the SPGB's view of socialist society as 'hippyish love and peace' – and your claim that human society is incapable of being organised withou violence – is the oldest bourgeois criticism of communism/socialism.Are you – the one and only democratic communist – seriously offering the old conservative view of human nature as a criticism of Socialism? This criticism of human nature goes back at least to Hobbes and Leviathan. Conservative philosophers throughout history have used this argument for the continuation of the capitalist state, so deep inside LBird I beleive you to be a bourgeois phylosopher.Instead of blindly criticising Engels I suggest you read him. You may learn a lot.You will not learn that violence in the 'individual's' genes means socialism is impossible.
LBird wrote:You see 'socialism' as a free-for-all for 7 billion 'individuals', and ignore the whole Marxist concept of 'social production'.We have social production today in capitalism. Doen't mean we have democracy. Your 'democratic communism' is a 'workers state' The SPGB stands for social production without class or state: just like Marx Next thread
Vin wrote:LBird wrote:You see 'socialism' as a free-for-all for 7 billion 'individuals', and ignore the whole Marxist concept of 'social production'.We have social production today in capitalism. Doen't mean we have democracy. Your 'democratic communism' is a 'workers state' The SPGB stands for social production without class or state: just like Marx Next thread
I guess I was right. Wonder where he will surface next
Not really relevant to the discussion YMS and others are having with LBird but what is the great difference between scenario A and scenario B?Scenario A: People democratically elect individuals who are experts on the subject to form a council where decisions are made about that particular subject.Scenario B: People democratically elect individuals who are not experts on the subject to form a council where decisions are made about that particular subject. The non-experts learn about the issue (unless we want them to screw up) and become more educated on the subject than those that elected them. They have, as I see it, basically become experts.Are any of the scenarios not examples of leaving decisions to elected experts? And are any of these scenarios undemocratic?
Sympo wrote:Not really relevant to the discussion YMS and others are having with LBird but what is the great difference between scenario A and scenario B?Scenario A: People democratically elect individuals who are experts on the subject to form a council where decisions are made about that particular subject.Scenario B: People democratically elect individuals who are not experts on the subject to form a council where decisions are made about that particular subject. The non-experts learn about the issue (unless we want them to screw up) and become more educated on the subject than those that elected them. They have, as I see it, basically become experts.Are any of the scenarios not examples of leaving decisions to elected experts? And are any of these scenarios undemocratic?You've missed 'Scenario C', Sympo:Scenario C (to use your terms): People democratically elect individuals who are experts on the subject to form a council where explanations are formed about that particular subject. These explanations are then explained to people, and if the people accept the explanations, they make the decision to accept the explanation. If the explanation is unacceptable, new experts are elected by the people.Power always lies with the people, not the experts.
lll I would be against electing anybody to anything! A sufficiently large number of people would be randomly selected to form a ‘council’, if you want, in order to make a democratic decision of that council on an expert issue. It would be up to them to decide what expert opinion to call upon in order to familiarise themselves with the subject. They would then make a decision. That decision would be voted on as either for or against by the whole of society but with the proviso that abstentions would be a vote for. This requires an understanding of the theory of statistics. That says that a sufficiently large sample will produce a vote or decision that would accurately predict a hypothetical decision made by the entire population if hypothetically the council was made up of the entire population. The accuracy of the prediction depends on the randomness of the sample and the size of the sample or how many people are selected for the council. The bigger the sample or size of the council the smaller the potential error in the accuracy of the prediction. Which can be calculated. So in other word if you want it to be accurate to +/- 5% you would select one sample size and if you wanted it to be +/- 1% you would need a larger one. However the accuracy of the prediction increases exponentially with sample size. Thus doubling sample sizes increases the accuracy 10 fold and so on. Without refreshing myself on the details of the theory something like 20,000 would be more than enough for predicting a global 5 billion vote. I have a grade A, A’level in statistics from when they didn’t hand them out like sweeties. They are tools that recently have been used more and more in science; eg the Higgs Boson experiment. Due to the ease of number crunching the data with computers. It was a real ball-ache in 1979. I think it would be essential for everyone to go on a statistics course, hah hah, and that would have to be the main subject on the communist education curricula for the likes of Anti science L. Bird. Although perhaps we might need a council to evaluate the validity of the statistical method? My younger sister is a total Muppet on this and is probably and as daft as L Bird but I think even she can get the drift of it. I had to recently talk her through and ‘cheat’ an online stats training work course she did; she is doing a degree in dealing with dysfunctional Lumpen proletariat and as previously one of them, and a bad child, they like her. Speak the language etc. It also has scope of course for deliberately and scientifically or subjectively ‘skewing’ the composition of the sample. Thus when it came to building a Dam in somebody’s Nimby back yard one could palpably skew the sample in favour of those likely to be affected. Thus if you were a Nimby; and a decision was made by a council over-represented with those affected at say 25% or 50%. Then maybe you would be more prepared to accept it. As regards the tyranny of the majority etc. It is source for goose stuff. As on a general thing over a range of potential issues you are just as likely to find yourself tyrannised as tyrannical. I have always thought that communism has two really serious problems that are overlooked and are in fact a major concern of ‘stupid workers’. One is pushy slime-ball intellectuals and peddlers of trust me I am clever. And the absurdity of having to vote on everything like the number of street lights in Peru.
LBird wrote:"Scenario C (to use your terms): People democratically elect individuals who are experts on the subject to form a council where explanations are formed about that particular subject. These explanations are then explained to people, and if the people accept the explanations, they make the decision to accept the explanation. If the explanation is unacceptable, new experts are elected by the people."So, for example if a council were to decide where to bury nuclear waste the members would say this to the the public "The council thinks we should put the waste in area X because of reason Y"Then people could say "What a stupid decision, let's replace these morons". And if the amount of people who would be in favor of re-election were bigger than those who were opposed to it, we would get a new council whose decisions hopefully would be less stupid according to the public.If this is what you consider to be scenario C? Because this is how I more or less envisioned scenario A.A problem that could be caused by this arrangement would perhaps be that people who are not experts don't feel that they're knowledgable enough about the subject to object to decisions made by councils. If the council goes "We're gonna do this because of that" I think there's a risk of most people, including myself, going "Sure, whatever".
Sympo wrote:If this is what you consider to be scenario C? Because this is how I more or less envisioned scenario A.You might be forgetting that I'm a Democratic Communist and a Marxist, Sympo. I'm not sure what your political and ideological beliefs are, but if they differ from mine, you might misunderstand what I mean. I've used your terms, to try to clarify for you, the differences between your 'scenarios', but things are a little more complex.For example, where you use the term 'people', I would use the term 'the class conscious revolutionary proletariat', and so you might be missing the class, developmental and revolutionary content of my point about 'who controls power'.Furthermore, your distinction between 'the public' and 'the council' is related to current political arrangements, not those which will be produced by the class struggle for socialism – to put it simply, in your terms: 'councils' will do what the 'public' tell them to do, not the other way around.
LBird wrote:You might be forgetting that I'm a Democratic Communist and a Marxist,LBird wrote:You've missed 'Scenario C', Sympo:Scenario C (to use your terms): People democratically elect individuals who are experts on the subject to form a council where explanations are formed about that particular subject. These explanations are then explained to people, and if the people accept the explanations, they make the decision to accept the explanation. If the explanation is unacceptable, new experts are elected by the people.Power always lies with the people, not the experts.Our resident Leninist and religious materialist L Bird never tires in offering up his guff by way of trying to explain the inexplicable. So now accroding to L Bird " the people" will elect the experts to develop explanations which are then relayed back to the people to vote upon, I seriously wonder if LBird has ever once thought about the practicalities of what he is saying. He is a complete dreamer who lives in a little world of his own There are thousands upon thousands of areas of expertise and many millions upon milions of different kinds of explanations covering every consceivable kind of subject area to which these experts are supposedly elected to investigate. How are "the people" – presumably the world's population of 7.4 bilion – going to have the time let alone the inclination to discuss and vote upon all these millions upon millions of explanations relayed back to them? Come to that, how are they going to know who these experts are that they are supposed to elect? What is the procedure by which they are to be elected? LBird doesnt say, He has an almost childlike utterly naive view of the world. At any rate, it seems that according to him, we "the people" not only have to vote on the millions of theories offered to us by the experts but on top of that, we now also have to vote on the experts thenselves!, Meaning all 7.4 bilion of us.will have no time whatsoever to do anything in life except vote vote vote and even then we will only be able to vote on a tiny fraction of what needs to be voted upon according to LBird. How dumb can you get? Seriously LBird, get a grip Incidentally, can LBird explain to me what if I want to become an astrophysist but am not elected by "the people" to become a designated "expert"? Does that not I am not allowed to study astrophysics and offer my own opinion in LBird's so called democratic communist society?. Will his thought police be knocking on my door at midnight and confiscating my computer along with my scribbled notes trying to make sense of some arcane astrophysical theory? How am I going to vote on the theory if I dont understand what its about and if only designated experts are permitted to form an opinion on the matter? Explain L Bird Above all, and here's the main point, lets us assume we just abandoned this whole silly harebrained scheme of LBird's and just let people develop their own interests according to their own inclinations. So some might very well develop these interest further and become experts in a field of their own chosng. Assuming there was no need for "the people" to vote on the theories developed by these individuals can LBird explain what power these individuals could possibly yield of "the people" in a society where all work in voluntarily undertaken and where all goods and services are freely accessible at the point of distribution? LBird repeatedly bleats that he has answered the criticisms of his critics – well let him answer this one What leverage, L Bird, will these experts be able to exercise of the population at large in a democratic communist society? The truth of the matter there can be none, You cannot see this becuase you dont understand what either communism is about or what democracy is about. . You are no "democratic communist" and that is pretty obvious from everything you have said
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