Dave B
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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.
l Hi Adam I have ordered that book re a Marxist on historicity of Jesus. Thanks for the recommendation. I have made a contribution on Wikipedia re the asses’ head thing of the oldest ‘representation’ of JC; 200AD Mine was the Apion, Josephus, Origen and Celsum thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito
Proto Marxism ,funny money and fictitious capital “From Demetrius” 37-41AD L. ANNAEUS SENECA,ON BENEFITS By Seneca BOOK VII. ……is brought out of the same dark pits as gold and silver…………. Thus far we have dealt with actual substances; but some forms of wealth deceive our eyes and minds alike. I see there letters of credit, promissory notes, and bonds, empty phantoms of property, ghosts of sick Avarice, with which she deceives our minds, which delight in unreal fancies; for what are these things, and what are interest, and account books, and usury, except the names of unnatural developments of human covetousness? I might complain of nature for not having hidden gold and silver deeper, for not having laid over it a weight too heavy to be removed: but what are your documents, your sale of time [????????????], your blood-sucking twelve per cent. interest? these are evils which we owe to our own will, which flow merely from our perverted habit, having nothing about them which can be seen or handled, mere dreams of empty avarice. Wretched is he who can take pleasure in the size of the audit book of his estate, in great tracts of land cultivated by slaves in chains, in huge flocks and herds which require provinces and kingdoms for their pasture ground, in a household of servants, more in number than some of the most warlike nations, or in a private house whose extent surpasses that of a large city! After he has carefully reviewed all his wealth, in what it is invested, and on what it is spent, and has rendered himself proud by the thoughts of it,… http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3794/3794-h/3794-h.htm
I have read and am in possession of two of his translations.N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: A Personal Record (Oxford, 1955)Dan Theodore, The Origins of Bolshevism (Secker & Warburg, 1964)Sukhanov was a sort of Menshevik and eyewitness to the Russian revolution. The infamous Bolshevik meeting to initiate the October coup was held in his flat whilst he was out; his wife was a Bolshevik. Sukhanov wrote a much more detailed account covering the first 12 months or so; the Carmichael translation and 600 page book is an abridged version of that. In the 1984 addendum he confirms that the bolsheviks had received massive funding from the germans from 1917 to 1918 etc Dan Theodore was a key Menshevik and became its leader from abroad and from the mid 1920’s. Drifted towards a Trotskyist position and wrote a long article/letter to the manchester guardian attacking stalins show trials in 1930’s as they were happening.
I don’t dispute that the explosion of mental health problems in the western world is real and that people are suffering from being unable to cope, ‘adjust’ or ‘function properly’ in our society etc. I also accept that some of these drugs and therapies can supply short term relief. I am not interested in just kicking people crutches away like booze. What I suspect in an Erich Fromm Sane Society thesis is that they are not actually ill but responding in a human way to an inhumane environment.
Well I obviously wasn’t endorsing the Bolshevik Subbotnik position. But is interesting that in the middle of 1920 he was actually “saying” stuff like; We shall work to do away with the accursed maxim: “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”, the habit of looking upon work merely as a duty, and of considering rightful only that work which is paid for at certain rates. We shall work to inculcate in people's minds, turn into a habit, and bring into the day-by-day life of the masses, the rule: “All for each and each for all”; the rule: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”; https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm something that would “requires decades”. It is connected to the excellent description of communism by Lenin in April 1920, with context. V. I. LeninFrom the Destruction of the Old Social SystemTo the Creation of the New ………..During these two years we have acquired some experience in organisation on the basis of socialism. That is why we can, and should, get right down to the problem of communist labour, or rather, it would be more correct to say, not communist, but socialist labour; for we are dealing not with the higher, but the lower, the primary stage of development of the new social system that is growing out of capitalism. Communist labour in the narrower and stricter sense of the term is labour performed gratis for the benefit of society, labour performed not as a definite duty, not for the purpose of obtaining a right to certain products, not according to previously established and legally fixed quotas, but voluntary labour, irrespective of quotas; it is labour performed without expectation of reward, without reward as a condition, labour performed because it has become a habit to work for the common good, and because of a conscious realisation (that has become a habit) of the necessity of working for the common good—labour as the requirement of a healthy organism. It must be clear to everybody that we, i.e., our society, our social system, are still a very long way from the application of this form of labour on a broad, really mass scale…………." http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/11.htm After all the state capitalism stuff from late 1917 to 1919? The state capitalism stuff did dry up in 1919 to be substituted by this kind of subbotnik rhetoric. But obviously it made its return again from late 1920 onwards with ‘socialised state enterprises’ being run on a ‘for profit basis’ and a categorical restatement of the state capitalist thesis in the state of the union address of 1922. As endorsed and explained to the international young communists by Trotsky himself in the same year. The Mensheviks were somewhat more cynical and explained it away as a opportunistic ruse to get more dedicated and general ‘leftist’ support and volunteers to fight the Bolsheviks civil war when they had their backs to the wall. Ie Letter to Sylvia Pankhurst "…. the struggle for Soviet power, for the Soviet republic, which is able to unite, and today must certainly unite, all sincere, honest revolutionaries from among the workers. Very many anarchist workers are now becoming sincere supporters of Soviet power, and that being so, it proves them to be our best comrades and friends, the best of revolutionaries, who have been enemies of Marxism only through misunderstanding, or, more correctly, not through misunderstanding but because the official socialism prevailing in the epoch of the Second International (1889-1914) betrayed Marxism, lapsed into opportunism…." https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/aug/28.htm The result was that the membership of ruling class Bolshevik swelled to a staggering 400,00 which must have been getting close to or even above 1% of non peasant population. They obviously thought the a ruling class of 1% was unsustainable and there were plans then, which were enacted later to trim it down to something more like a 99.9% to 0.1% ratio. "….The idea is suggested by the Central Committee of a party with from 100,000 to 200,000 members (I assume that that is the number that will remain after a thorough purging; at present the membership is larger)…" https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jun/28.htm The ignoramus L bird is still babbling away about ‘power’ relationships and the technocratic class thing and democratic control of scientific truths etc etc. Obviously completely oblivious to the fact that this debate raged and developed from the late 1920’s hitting its Zenith in the 1940’s. And even Orwell’s ‘1984’. With the Bruno Ritzi thing near the beginning that Adam has had transcribed for us on Marxist Org etc. Which we, me included, did some time again with the Burnham and also ignorant Michael Albert Parecon thing. I mention it because they are running with it with a series of four articles on Truthdig at the moment. Part four is at; http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_final_stage_of_the_machiavellian_elites_takeover_of_america_20170427 With a very contemporary neocon and deep state and populism slant on it. There was a really excellent 20 page essay on it all by Mattick in 1943. It is a bit heavy but it sort of gets better toward the last third of it. https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1943/machiavellians.htm I think Richard Pipes is tied up into all this kind of stuff. His book on the Russian revolution was well worth a read I thought. Even though he didn’t understand the Bolshevik ideological ‘Marxist’ heritage which I think is necessary to make sense of it.
Well there are very, very old ideas that what ones needs to do is to live a ‘meaningful life’ is by modifying or analysing ones own personal behaviour outlook or philosophy etc. In that restricted sense it is to start with egocentric as in what is good for me. [Egocentricity also seems to have it place in the SPGB theory in that communism is only good because it is good for me. A position I don’t totally agree with.] There are more of them than one can shake a stick at; so there is platonic vice and virtue thing and Seneca like Stoicism etc. Positions that aren’t all that far from your own. As well as stuff from Epicurus and Diogenes type cynicism etc. And then there is even the perhaps trans cultural and trans historical asceticism of the ‘Judaic’ communist, albeit misogynistic, Essenes. But at least superficially it falls into behavioural egocentric ‘self-help’ category; eg just because I have just read it, Ruby Waxes book ‘Frazzled’ which runs with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. These things have admittedly a certain proselytizing aspect to them. But like what is the point in that exactly? Are they just trying, in expending energy and time, to be altruistically helpful to others; which is fair enough. Or are the married drinkers and smokers getting in the way of your own preferred way of life? In the same way as for some of us that ubiquitous bourgeois consciousness amongst the masses is getting in the way of our preferred communism. This has a history of course. The early communists wanted to clear out and set up there own communes Eg the Cabet people as well as the Shaker communists. [You would think you would be interested in them as they didn’t believe in matrimony, or sex for that matter either.] I suppose for us we want to have meaningful lives by proselytizing a communist consciousness with its own ‘principles’ but would think that your ‘principles’ are just either the paraphernalia of bourgeois consciousness, or irrelevant to communism. If I could believe that by stopping smoking, drinking and taking drugs and living a more ascetic life style etc communism would come along as night follows day etc I would be all for it. But I don’t. Although I do appreciate that ‘meaningless’ consumerism and drug induced escapism oils the wheels of the present system, and wouldn’t want to trivialise attempts to avoid it. There is a massive legal pharmacology, get them hooked when young even when still in the womb , opiate based and ‘neural toxin’ anti depressant, Prozac, pill popping Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in the US. RT News have been running documentaries on it. Opposing getting pissed, or not eating pork, as a principle and ‘thing in itself’, for example, out of any kind of context is ‘transcendental’. We have all made arseholes out of ourselves when drunk and some things that would have been best left undone etc. But we have also meaningfully enjoyed ourselves as we wouldn’t have done sober? As to Chris Hedges and Christianity etc for which I am guilty of provoking your response. There are two positions. The Calvinistic and Capitalist one. Believing in a set of ‘meaningful’ principles or faith as it is described is sufficient to buy your egocentric way into a alcohol and matrimony free heaven. The other is the more Hedge’s like and communistic? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed", but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds." Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.— James 2:15-18
this one from Lenin was more err? interesting.https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm
it comes under the “Communist subbotniks” movement thing I think? There is quite a bit of it from Lenin around 1919 on it re unpaid gratis labour etc. just one link on it from Lenin below; https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jun/28.htm
Strategy and Tactics of the Class StruggleA Private Circulation Letter from Marx and Engels, (First drafted by Engels)We cannot, therefore, go along with people who openly claim that the workers are too ignorant to emancipate themselves but must first be emancipated from the top down, by the philanthropic big and petty bourgeois. Should the new party organ take a position that corresponds with the ideas of those gentlemen, become bourgeois and not proletarian, then there is nothing left for us, sorry as we should be to do so, than to speak out against it publicly and dissolve the solidarity within which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad. But we hope it will not come to that. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/09/17.htm
This is really old hat. Why drag a ‘Miller’? Lenin infamously used that quote in ‘What Is To Be Done’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm
presumeably this is your good self? The ancient slavery gave way to the feudal serfdom of medieval times and the latter gave way to the wage slavery of modern times. The three modes of production have one thing in common, and it's the fact that they each are based on the exploitation of man by man. They each are also aimed at the perpetuation of the exploitation of man by man and thus the perpetuation of the social division into the exploiting class and the exploited, the economic inequality, and what in my view happens to be the greatest and gravest social injustice as described above. The institution of private property, matrimony, and the commodity economy have always been hand in hand with the institution of the exploitation of man by man throughout history to contribute to and perpetuate both the economic inequality and the social division into classes, and thus they've contributed to and perpetuated the greatest and gravest social injustice to my knowledge as well. Thus, I think it's clear as day now why none of them, i.e. slavery, serfdom, wage slavery, private property, matrimony, the commodity economy, the economic inequality, and the social division into classes, are in harmony with the Principle of Healthy and Meaningful Living. Humanity, if it wants to be civilised through and through, must make the Principle of healthy and meaningful living its LIFE PRINCIPLE and get rid of all institutions and culture that fail to harmonise with the Principle of Healthy and Meaningful Living. https://hubpages.com/politics/the-RIGHT-VIEW-of-CIVILISATION
Well Einstien’s cosmological constant was a fiddle at the time but it is back in the frame again in a slightly different form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant The guy who discovered it was stunned by the data that he collected and couldn’t believe it and thought they had made a blunder as well and when he published his stuff that he would end up a laughing stock and it would be the end of his career. He ended up getting a Nobel prize for it. There are a lot of seminal pieces of scientific advancement achieved by people expecting a completely different results or ‘truths’ from experiments. So much for scientist creating truths rather than the material world shoving them in your face. On anti gravity and dark energy etc they are looking at the possibility of ant-matter having anti gravity at the moment which would be neat explanation. I think it on the record that I had thought Das Capital Marxism was probably a load of bollocks even though I had been in the SPGB for sometime. I read and changed my mind and think it is basically OK. Anyway. You appear to be refusing to tell us what meaningful living is; other than getting pissed and smoking weed always interferes with it? It surely is a matter of WHAT IS IT rather than just WHAT IT IS NOT. Lots of artistic creation has been inspired with people being off their heads on one thing or another. All these extreme ‘Muslims’ aren’t supposed to drink does that lead to meaningful lives? Or is it matrimony that leads to that kind of thing? I really would like to know what area are you coming from is this Buddhist type ‘shit’ or chop your dick off hermit Christianity?
