For those that you point at as the 'remaining Socialists':

I don't know much about Plaid Cymru. I don't think that the SNP are particularly 'socialist' any more than Labour are. They are an alliance of people with varying political views who support Scottish independence.

I wish they'd got a clear majority in the Scottish parliament, I'm sure that their government would have split apart pretty quickly. As it is, the pressure of their precarious situation will probably keep them together. I wish we could just have the referendum and get it over with (they would lose).

As for Respect, there may be some well-intentioned people associated with it — shame about their leader. I pity anyone trying to defend an anti-war viewpoint when the main spokesman of their cause in the UK is George Galloway.

Got more thoughts on this but I'll save it until I get home from work.
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(,   ,') -- eep
"This option is deprecated, as it is conceptually flawed." -- man psql

I'm  not sad at socialism's passing as I think it is a pie in the sky doctrine as people are self evidently not equal in abilities or moral sense  but I am saddened at the human cost in terms of shattered communities and the emergence of underclass.

I don't think the UK minimum wage is that low by international standards. Wikipedia has a big list of minimum wages by country and I can only find 4 with higher minimum wages (Switzerland, Australia,Luxembourg,Ireland). We're ahead of France for instance.

It's odd that you're not mentioning taxation and spending as a socialist issue, too. If you look at a graph of taxation as a share of GDP we're pretty high up the list, higher than Germany for instance.

It seems to me you're kind of redefining things a bit: "if Blair did it, it can't be socialism".

The emphasis on reducing inequality rather than absolute poverty also seems to be another fairly new idea, at least to be given such emphasis. Yes, there was always talk of redistribution, but it's because that was considered the best way to help the poor. This explicit idea that it is a moral good to reduce the wealth of the rich in itself, rather than as a means to the end of alleviating poverty, doesn't seem to me to be a part of traditional socialism.

In that respect, you seem to me to be saying "Gordon Brown cannot be a socialist because we're changing the definition of socialism to be something Brown doesn't agree with".

My brother and I were yammering on about this stuff one night.  He's a butcher, part of a meatcutter's union, and generally a little further left than I.  We were talking about how, in the 80s there seemed to be an actual left / right dichotomy that wasn't based on fundamentalist religious extremism.  There were staunch fiscal conservatives, folks who believed in nothing but the individual and fuck everyone else, and there were socialist liberals who wanted the protection of an even playing field in an us vs. The Man mentality. The political discussion was loud, slow, and messy.  There were no clean solutions.

Somewhere in there, in between the jingoism and saber-rattling of Ronnie RayGun and Maggie Thatcher vs The Supreme Soviet, we lost the entire scope and view of agrarian and industrial society.  Sudden-like, any such economies and the many devices that propped them up and protected them from The Corporation were seen as third world, unpatriotic, communist nonsense.  At the same time in the US, The Corporation was granted the same protection under the law as The Individual, making companies the constituent.

All of this change occurred with lightning speed between 1984 and now, and what we're driven by now is snippets of highspeed info poured into every available nerve ending at unreasonable rates. We're no longer as sharply divided idealistically; the left and the right have merged to center politically, with the only remaining divides being lifestyle and religion.

Socialism and other industrial and agricultural age -isms get lost on the abrasive shower of ones and zeros that make up our daily lives. We're too obsessed with self and our plight to defray the loss of society to the consume-and-supply cycle. There's no room for old fashioned outmoded behaviors.  Whole new methods have to be described, built up, and torn down in record spans of time.  Neoconservatives supplanted by progressives supplanted by CenterOfCenter supplanted by KnifeEdgeBalancePointOfCenter etc etc.

No time for a messy system that requires so much raw time and effort to foist on an un-trusting society raised by RayGun and the March Against Communism, not in the First World.  Maybe in Chavez' Venezuela. Maybe in sticky third world countries where the populace is still hands-on with the soil.

But here in the lofty sterile infobabble tower of the Consumer First World, we're out of time for socialism, democracy, communism, and any inefficient memes.  Clean the edges off of it, make it teardrop shaped, subject it to market studies and behavior modification, and you end up with the current mess of "progressives" which so well describes someone with no conviction.
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"You bring the weasel, I'll bring the whiskey." - kellnerin

"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
I think that people, in the West, have decided that the form of Capitalism we have is the "best obtainable system". Note: obtainable. This is an imperfect world, after all. I think you can say of Capitalism what Churchill said of Democracy.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. In all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Thus, the organization which may once have been intended to further the goals of, say, securing for the workers the full fruits of their industry eventually morphs into an organization whose goal is self-preservation.

Apply that to state ownership of the means of production and you get, Rover, Triumph, Jaguar, and other State owned industries driven right into the ground by the State. The workers are now unemployed, the corporations are either moribund or owned by Americans or Chinese. That's what Socialism (in the Real World, rather than in theory) led to.

The voters saw this, and voted accordingly.

Earth First!
_{(We can strip mine the rest later.)}

For example, instead of dropping the amount of tax collected, they instead collect the tax and offer the tax credit back.  Wasteful of resources and people's time, but that's another few hundred added to the Turkey Army.

Until, of course, GTLSB's drag taxes catch up with them and they start feeling the pinch of the tax tax tax and spend spend spend method themselves.

Despite presiding over a very prosperous decade, our national debt is still growing at a frightening rate.

You've obviously never worked in the computer games industry.

The chance of winning that golden ticket, or even a pewter one is decreasing. Education is key they said, pfffft. (See my sig)

The Czar of Accounting. No Nit Too Small To Pick

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It's political correctness gone mad!

I don't know enough history to read between the lines of a text written in 1917. On the other hand the traditional model of a merchant venture is that a capitalist buys some stock, hires some workers, sells the fruits of their labour, and makes a profit or a loss. The fruits of industry are shared between capital and labour. In this reading full is a weasel word: clause four is actually saying "expropriate the bastards".

I also worried by "the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible". What are the limits of the possible?

For some people it will be just obvious that industry needs differentials and incentives. The charge hand is paid more than the labourer. The foreman is paid more than the charge hand. The skilled workman is paid more than the unskilled. The necessity of what is needed limits the possible.

Others will see no need for wages to depend on responsibility or skill. Obviously a family man needs enough to feed his family, while a single man can do with less. Beyond that, no inequality is necessary.

There is an unbreakable link between our roles as consumer and producer: in aggregate we must produce what we would consume. If a line of work is less popular than in the past (perhaps there are new and pleasanter alternatives) how can the economy adjust to the shortage of workers? Employers can raise wages hoping to attract more workers. Shoppers cannot shop around to avoid the employers passing on the wage increase in higher prices because all the employers are recruiting from the same pool.

Perhaps as consumers we are not willing to pay extra. In that case the labour shortage is met by reduced production and reduced consumption. Or perhaps we love the goods that we are ourselves reluctant to produce and do pay the higher prices needed to fund the higher wages needed to recruit some of us to the work. Either way supply is matched to demand and the workers are matched to the jobs that need doing.

Well that is the capitalist/free-market fantasy of how it is supposed to work and a pretty unrealistic fantasy it is. Nevertheless there are feed back mechanisms and they point in the right directions.

I've watched out for how this is supposed to work under socialism. Socialists don't seem to have any story to tell at all. I respect and admire Tony Benn for facing the difficulty and trying to give an answer. His idea is radical democracy. We will have big meetings, lengthy discussions, and thrash out the answers we need. I cannot see it working at all.

Return to "the full fruits of their industry", there is another issue about capital formation. Capitalism has a feedback loop. The incompetent capitalists tend over time to command less capital, while the competent capitalists tend to command more. Marx saw this as a contradiction. Society would be dominated by a handful of super-rich. Well, maybe, but that feedback, of funding success rather than failure, is vital. Socialism has never had an equivalent mechanism, merely some hand waving about trusting experts.

Oh dear, I've ended up being much more controversial than I intended. I really want to make a fairly modest point, and I've probably failed already by prefacing it in such a combative way. Sorry.

The point I really want to make is that a political creed needs a story about how society is supposed to work. It needs to be a good story, and it needs to be good in three ways:

1. It should describe a good society, one we want to live int.
2. It should make good sense, there should be a good chance it will actually work
3. It should go into a good deal of detail, following through the workings of good mechanisms. Who mends the sewers? Who will mend the sewers in 50 years time? What is the mechanism so that society just works and we are not always having big meetings to argue and improvise from crisis to crisis.

I think that a revival of socialism is inevitable, for two simple reasons. First capitalism sucks. It works fairly badly in practise. Second the people who have lived through the socialist experiment and have wept the bitter tears when it worked even worse than capitalism are growing old and dieing. Soon the practical problems of socialism will be forgotten.

So it will revive. But will it merely be a cyclical revival, repeating tragedy as farce? The important question is how to avoid that.

The internal contradiction that nobody likes to talk about is the contradiction between our roles as producer and consumer. We want wages to be low so that goods are cheap and we can buy more for our money. We want wages to be high so that we have more money to spend. We want technological improvements in productivity so that goods are produced with less labour and more cheaply. We don't want improved productivity and job losses at our work place. (and we don't want to be wasting our life on pointless busy work, so we want to be able to believe that we are modern and efficient even if we are not)

The theoretical weakness of socialism was manifest in this very contradiction. We had a trades-union/producer version of socialism. In protecting the workers against the bosses it also protected the workers against the consumers. But the workers and the consumers are the same people. Socialism didn't make sense.

Under capitalism the tension between our roles as producers and consumers is resolved by linking the markets for goods with the markets for labour via companies that, being private, have no claim on the public purse to subsidise wages or prices. This works fairly badly. Critics jump on the difficulties and rush to reorganise society on more rational lines.

In their haste, people fail to notice that the problem which capitalism solves so poorly is difficult and subtle. The revival of socialism depends on addressing this problem squarely and finding a good answer.

Socialism fails to achieve it's goals because it assumes that the government is benevolent - but that doesn't mean it hasn't changed the world.

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Cur etiam hic es?

Your idiotic, "dreamer" ideology led to the deaths of millions at the hands of men and women who would speak sweet lies of solidarity as they engaged in the exact same hoarding you see in every human being. Instead of rewarding those who contributed most to the commonweal by creating wealth, you rewarded those who stole it by means of the oldest con. Congratulations, you're fucking retarded.

Now tell me why ethanol subsidies are a great idea for the environment while the price of food marches ever upward.

Astro Pulp. Updated Mondays. Usually.