DJP
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I’m not an apologist, I’m a sympathiser. I feel very sorry for them. (Weak attempt at humour I know).
So it’s not wishful thinking or fantasy to think that some fringe candidate in a UK election will have a meaningful sway on Israeli military policy? Another interesting take.
I was asking more about how you thought this is connected to your more general claims about the impossibility of achieving socialism and the futility of even trying. The fact that the price of gas has temporarily fallen doesn’t seem to be here or there.
I was just merely trying to provide some evidence for my anecdotal assertion. And I wasn’t just talking about academic conferences for other academics. I’ve been to the grand total of one of them in my whole life. But doesn’t seem much point labouring over it here.
Communism, properly understood, isn’t an obscure idea at all. It’s widely known, internationally and especially in political theory circles. I meet and talk with people from all over Europe and wider that know about it. The SPGB didn’t invent communism – as we all know.
The SPGB, unfortunately doesn’t get a wide reach with its publicity. It could ands should do much better at using digital media. But that’s another back-seat driver comment from me. Make of it what you will.
TBH I don’t think SPGB vote shares are a very good metric of anything and, given the current climate, am also unsure of the publicity value of standing in elections. But that’s just my back-seat driver opinion.
Most people that understand socialism in the non-market sense will not have learnt it from the SPGB and most likely never even heard of it.
But there’s nothing in this which means that a mass socialist movement is a logical or psychological impossibility, just an indication of the long and lonely road to get there. Which we all knew already.
Even if they took the time to read the Leaflet the SPGB would be written off as cranks by 99% of workers. The minute they read the word “Socialism” it’s the kiss of death.
But that’s not at all true.
67 per cent of young Brits want a socialist economic system, finds new poll
Those changes were not the result of the conscious actions of the world’s population. How could they be? There were no means in place (videre licet, universal suffrage), to record the collective will, even in the extremely improbable likelihood one even existed.
You’ve made a silly slip up here. Something existing is not dependent on the possibility of it being recorded or measured. Obviously you know that.
But anyhow, a shift in the use of technology (BTW I can’t see how that can occur ‘unconsciously’, without people being aware of it), is different from a political shift in how a society organises itself. Technological determinism isn’t a useful way to understand politics.
Saito’s book “Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth” was published in English in January of this year. I guess that’s why he is appearing in places such as the Intellegence Squared podcast which do a have broad listenership. Can only be a good thing that some of these ideas, such as his conception of communism, are getting a wider airing.
I glad the conservatives, especially in their current BNP mode, are on the way out. But what follows from them will of course only be marginally different. Though marginal differences affect those on the margins most.
How much better these marginal differences will be for workers we will have to see. They will be inheriting a bad situation.
Schadenfreude is a hollow type of happiness.
