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Post by mrsonde on Nov 14, 2018 16:58:59 GMT 1
If you can't see the difference between "delegated representative" and "elite", there's no point in arguing with you. As ever with you Utopian idealists, you're always blind to the difference between theory and practice. Communism has now been tried in about thirty different nations - always with the same dismal result. Almost from the start the "representative" function is lost, as "delegates" become appointees from on high, and any possible challenge to them are liquidated or disappeared as "counter-revolutionaries". So - who or what is to stop this inevitable rule by the Party elite, once they gain power? Ever asked yourself that most basic of questions? The crucial question Proudhon asked Marx, over 150 years ago? Count the hundreds of millions of lives and untold suffering the world would have been spared had Marx bothered to think about an answer. Highly debatable. In Yorkshire, probably, and in South Wales. Not in Notts, and in a wide range of smaller fields. Who knows what would have happened had there been a debate, and the miners had been given all the facts? It was no secret Thatcher had spent three years preparing for this showdown, and they'd be voting for a strike that would last for at least 18 months before any effect. The power workers had already declared they wouldn't be acting in support given the new laws. The only way they could possibly win would be to first win public support - which most decidedly they didn't have, at that stage. The police weren't politicised. They enforced the law, and the law is made by politicians, that's all. What you should be asking, given the revelations about Jones and a host of other Union leaders since the late 60s, is how much Moscow paid him. |
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Post by alancalverd on Nov 14, 2018 18:04:56 GMT 1
Deviating even further from the subject, I'm intrigued by the fact that communists seem to have won most if not all the wars they got involved in, but their society disintegrated internally thereafter. Any thoughts on both statements?
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Post by fascinating on Nov 15, 2018 9:09:38 GMT 1
mrsonde said "The point is is that there is no such thing as "the State" - it's a legal fiction, and always has been. "
I am finding that difficult to understand. I can see that, to take one example, Middlesbrough football club, is basically a human concept that is not really grounded in physical reality. Similarly with countries, though they do have physical territory. But that's the case with many things in human society. Are we to say that there is no "United States of America", no "State of Israel" (the official name of that country)?
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 16, 2018 14:44:34 GMT 1
mrsonde said "The point is is that there is no such thing as "the State" - it's a legal fiction, and always has been. " I am finding that difficult to understand. "Fiction" was infelicitous - "convention" would have been more apposite. The many jobs the term "thing" is asked to do is causing this difficulty. The point I was not really making but obliquely passing by was that this "thing", this social construct, is not existent, though it is "real" (a term that has similar multi-level references) - the critical distinction is rarely made in normal speech, and this leads to all manner of confusion, some of it dangerous. It's the same point Thatcher was equally blithely making with her unfortunate "there is no such thing as society" comment. True, and an important message in the context in which she made it, but without elaborate explication it confused many people, and enabled many others, often wilfully and mischievously, to misinterpret her meaning. It's an interesting question, but regrettably not one I've the time or spare attention capacity to get too embroiled in at present. I can recommend a highly competent treatment of this whole nest of questions: John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality. You can probably get it for two or three quid on Amazon. I think it's fair to say it's a modern philosophical classic. Highly readable, not technical, but profound and far-reaching. I don't agree with him 100% of course, we have radically different metaphysical foundations, but for the most part his argumentation is superb. |
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 16, 2018 15:13:32 GMT 1
Deviating even further from the subject, I'm intrigued by the fact that communists seem to have won most if not all the wars they got involved in, but their society disintegrated internally thereafter. Any thoughts on both statements? I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I don't agree with your premise. I suppose you could say they "won" the Chinese Civil War, with a lot of help from the Japanese (though not the Russian, really - that was more of a coup against the real victors, who fought more for democracy - in the proper, Western sense, rather than the ersatz Communist corruption of the term.) They won in Vietnam, unsurprisingly, given the enormous imbalance in the forces involved. On the other hand, even given a similar imbalance, they were soundly beaten in Korea, where the Americans were somewhat more serious about their work. We - the Western allies at least - beat them in Malaya, Burma, the Philippines, and Japan. Finland beat the Soviet Union in WWII, India held off the Chinese to a stalemate, and Afghanistan turned into a far more severely humiliating rout than Vietnam. The Soviets beat the Nazis, it's often said; though only just, and it's inconceivable they would have done so were it not for the assistance of the US and Britain (and the converse is highly improbable, pace the enjoyable fantasies of Robert Harris, Len Deighton, Philip K.Dick, etc.) As for the internal disintegration - more an inevitable consequence of the system's inherent inefficiency and necessary long-term exhausting oppression of its populations, I would strongly argue. It doesn't work, full stop - you can force it to apparently function for a few decades, evidently, but eventually the polity crumbles under its own bureaucratic weight and popular yearning dissatisfaction. I suspect globalised neo-liberalism has similar internal impossible contradictions - it's just taking a bit longer, perhaps, before the inevitable catastrophic collapse can no longer be avoided. |
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