scientists of the world unite
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We should resist the temptation for blueprints or ready made plans. A lot of members like to play at this utopian world-building but it is divisive and exclusive of those who don't share your plan. We should leave it to the Zeitgeist Movement. Or as William Morris put it
Quote:The only safe way of reading a utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author. So looked at, Mr. Bellamy's utopia must be still called very interesting, as it is constructed with due economical knowledge, and with much adroitness; and of course his temperament is that of many thousands of people. This temperament may be called the unmixed modern one, unhistoric and unartistic; it makes its owner (if a Socialist) perfectly satisfied with modern civilisation, if only the injustice, misery, and waste of class society could be got rid of; which half-change seems possible to him. The only ideal of life which such a man can see is that of the industrious professional middle-class man of to-day purified from their crime of complicity with the monopolist class, and become independent instead of being, as they now are, parasitical. It is not to be denied that if such an ideal could be realised, it would be a great improvement on the present society. But can it be realised?I think you have a point that we should not have them as party policies or part of our principles…We have council communists that advance the argument that these alone are the only form of democracy for both in the process of revolution and then inside socialism itself as its main administrative organ. As you argue on libcom, this is exclusive, excluding a wide variety of alternative and perhaps more appropriate and representative models, stemming from local cultures and local history.I don't think Morris was not arguing we shouldn't discuss and debate and speculate about what sort of society socialism will be and why we should strive towards it. Otherwise he wouldn't have bothered with his novel News From Nowhere, or give so many lectures on work and art in the future in socialism. However, returning to my original post….Why can we not engage the scientific community directly in their exchanges? We all know how they often are too involved in their pet projects to not see the wood for the trees.We had the Production for Use Committee which did offer feasible solutions to various short-comings caused by capitalism. I would have thought addressing a body of scientists, absorbing much of their data, but challenging the possibility of their success within capitalism would be a fruitful strategy in that we take their own findings and press them to take them to their full logical conclusion. Why capitalism will not implement reforms except those that are compatible with it and therefore no threat…and so with the result they will be of minimum effect…Along such lines as that but hopefully expressed more nuancedI simply suggest that scientists need lessons on political economy in addition to their particular area of expertise. The problem i raise, is how do we do that since,imho, they have a disdain for the non-academic qualifications of socialists, despite a history that contradicts this devaluing of our ideas.
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