So finally we make it to the starting line.

That seems a bit utopian and pointless unless you are willing to shed some blood in achieving these aims. You must realise that there are people who own stuff who don't want you to take it away?

What about the other things that people want, you know, when they aren't at school or in the hospital? How do you decide how many X-Boxes to make. Or whether to invent them in the first place? Who decides these things, do you have a referendum every time you want to crate a better type of phone?

on a side note, is everyone who gave linux_user the +1 for socialism still as committed to that cause now he has defined it a little more?

I understand that entirely, and it's never going to happen in my lifetime (short of something catastrophic happening anyway). That's why, in the intervening period, I'll have to settle for social liberalism/social democracy and state intervention in our wonderful free market economy.

As for the matter of manufacturing goods there are many ways you could achieve this, depending on which particular model you wish to follow, be it different manufacturers which are managed by the workers and produce items according to demand, or you have a central office which decides how many items to produce and what new models are released. Anyone would be free to submit ideas for new products or services.

There has never been a truly socialist society apart from the early christian church. What we mean by socialism in Western Europe is a decent safety net and not the term used by the old communist nations.

That's a bit of a lazy cop out.
By saying "in my lifetime" you get to avoid saying how you would achieve that which clearly can't be achieved without totalitarian mind control and quite a lot of slaughter. But you leave yourself the fantasy of attainability at some unspecified time by some other means that you don't need to think about how.

Ultimately when you said...

You might as well have been speaking up for candy rainbows and the flying spaghetti monster while you were at it.

So, what you mean here is -1

The old communist states aren't even recognisable as socialism, they quickly became oligarchies obsessed with enriching top party officials at the expense of the working class they were supposed to represent.

What a load of twaddle, there's no reason socialism can't come about through democratic means.

So if 51% of poeple vote to create a socialist utopia by expropriating all property inlcuding that owned by the other 49%, then that's ok, democracy has spoken?

No? So maybe it has to 66% for and only 34% against before it ok to take away all of somebody's stuff, nullify all the contracts they have ever signed, and assign them a factory to work in?

Or does your fantasy include persuading everyone in the world to all become socialists at once?

But what we have now is a society where 10% get 90% of the gains since 2003 and everyone else is fighting over the scraps. So our capitalist solution is to make the poor poorer just so those doing a little better than average can have a tax cut. It is that sort of attitude that has lead to the revolutions across the middle east. Even Israelis are complaining about the high cost of housing and low wages. Longer term this will lead to mass protests and revolution.

The countries who've dabbled with far left socialist politics have wound up with 10% of the population owning 90% of the wealth (we're all equal, it's just that some people are more equal than others; or at least enjoying the highest standards of living while the population mainly scrape by), and in nations where they allow rampant capitalism... guess what? 90% of the wealth is owned by 10% (or less) of the population.

This tells me that, by and large, people are [LIFTED] no matter which variant of the economic model they follow.

If the 90% are so utterly incompetent that they can't arrange to create a political party and win an election, how are they supposed to pull off a revolution? One minute they are magnificently apathetic, the next they are suddenly dynamos? I don't like the sound of this revolution at all, it seems we are to be governed by a mob of backward morons.

What does it matter how much everybody has made since 2003? Why are we using such pointless short term stats to jusdge centuries of material progress? Is it more convenient than taking the long view?

And in all honesty, it's really quite disrespectful to compare your frankly trivial problems with those of an oppressed people who risk everything to overthrow real vicious dictators, losing actual arms legs and lives in the process.

There isn't one - but then I never claimed it did.


Bye then.

Perhaps you would be so good as to take your insults and bad attitude with you.

Especially these days, a revolution is actually easier than winning an election. In many supposedly democratic countries, the system is tilted to maintain the status quo. if you started a political party now, would you get any media coverage? probably not. How would you fund a conventional campaign and pay the deposits for enough candidates to stand to make for a parliamentary majority? Why would people vote for you, when the majority of the population is too disinvested in the political system to bother voting for anybody at all? To start a revolution, as in the Arabic spring, all you need is an internet presence, an idea and enough people who are disaffected from the standard way of doing things politically to get the ball rolling, and we've got millions of people like that.
Getting into government in the UK is said to cost 10's of millions of pounds. That's why all our political parties are riotously in debt and in hock to rich benefactors. How much did the people who ousted Mubarak have? Most of them were effectively penniless.


People are apathetic if and because they feel their actions are irrelevant. When there's barely a cigarette paper between the policies of the three major parties, why on earth would anyone bother to express preference? I expect the turnout at the next general election to be astonishingly low. That doesn't mean if you offer people the chance of doing something where they feel they can make a difference, they'll be equally apathetic.


Plus ca change, as they say.


2003 is a fairly arbitrary date, but a date 50 years ago is just as arbitrary. You have to pick a scale to measure against and if the hypothesis is sound, it will apply against almost all scales. So saying you can pick a scale where it doesn't work but that's not fair is a fallacy, if the hypothesis worked it would still work over the shorter scale. As I said earlier, capitalism leads to boom and bust, it's a matter of luck whether you live through more boom cycles than bust cycles. Someone born in 1910 has had a much harder life than someone born in 1950, because they'll have lived through several big busts and only a couple of booms, whereas someone born in 1950 is the opposite way around. Which is the better evidence of the proof of the hypothesis?


Sadly, I'm cynical enough to believe if we tried the same in the UK people would also die. Maybe not from bullet wounds, but dying from a head injury inflicted by a police baton still means you're dead.

Jon

That's a pretty lame excuse for not trying. What kind of hopeless loser would decide not to try the sane democratic approach, and just go straight to head chopping? And really, if you can use facebook to agitate millions into revolution, why can't you do that to get them to vote? How stupid have you got to be to decide to do things that way round?

The answer is that you can't use facebook for either purpose, there are no revolutionary conditions in this country, and no sign of that ever changing. Your millions of cohorts are a fantasy. Even all the students who like to riot about their thing that annoys them today aren't going to support a socialist revolution that takes away the jobs they want to earn degrees to get and force them to work in a state owned fish paste concern.


Yeah those are the guys whose instinct for revolution I fear, they sound super scary. If they are too [LIFTED] to vote, and too useless to form a party, they are too [LIFTED] to have a revolution and too useless to improve on the system they overthrew even if they got off their butts.


Better life? It's a bit of a stretch to measure that through economics. All you can say is that somebody born in the 50s had a better chance of material comfort than someone born in 1910. And you can say that the guy born in 1910 had a better chance of it than one born in 1870, and the 1870 guy had a better chance than one born in 1815. Economic boom and bust has little to to do with any of this, the material circumstances of each generation improve on those of their predecessors, a boom is when that happens at an accelerated rate, and a bust is when it happens at a slower rate. A depression is a temporary reverse.

Measuring this process over a pathetically short period like a decade or less is no better than climatologist who argue about the significance of a decade or less of weather, you need a larger sample to establish statistical relevance. The UK has been a capitalist economy since ... well it's hard to say, you could keep it loose and trace it back to the establishment of the first modern joint-stock company in 1600, or perhaps a tighter definition would say not until the abolition of the corn laws in 1846 and the era of free trade that event ushered in. Either way, 2003 to 2011 is not a viable sample for judging its impact and value to us.