edit: warning, this post was all hacked out far too quickly, with too many other things going on and broken trains of thought. just so you know when u come across a half finished sentence.
so when we cut to the chase, we all want the same thing... for government to butt the fuck out a bit.
Me, sittin on the left these days, i see the corporates in government and realise that they have become all the things i despised of communist governments when i was a happy little consumer/climber/capitalist...
overbearing, opulent, too eager to
dictate.
with market forces, people don't always go for what they think is best, they'll tend to go for what's cheapest, what sells it's self best. if the ecconomy is to be the sole basis (as per ideologies which could be considered the marx of the right) for defining the spread of power, ie, "one dollar one vote" then those doing the voting dont realise the implications of their daily lives. when buying that packet of soap powder, you never realised you were voting for them to have power. we become vassels. Mere tools to be used by government, as government and companies become the same thing. the flow of the ecconomy is always up, so to the extreme,
money is power, power corrupts, it takes money to make money, yada yada. Basically, the government flows to become exactly what previous failed socialist governments have become... Fascists.
And that brings me nicely to my point. Socialism & Fascism.
It is not a defining feature of socialism to control every aspect of society... that is fascism. Fascism, or totalitarian statism, or Extremist Authoritarian, or a Tyranny.... all basically the same thing, is the system of government that expects total control over all matters
Socialism is a sound idea, it just doesnt work if you try to impose it, try to make everyone see that socialism must be adhered to and anyone else gets the chop!................. no. we've seen this happen so many times. It won't work if you fuck around and take away the democracy/participatory aspect of government. sure with participation/democracy you run the risk that the people will change their mind and no longer want it, but at least you dont have fascism.
the flaw in socialists that leads them to become statist, is the foolish belief that they know best, that the public are stupid. the public arent likely to get any brighter if you do everything for them, burn books and generally try to neutralise them so they don't change the plan.
sound familiar? it should, its what our right wing governments have been upto for decades, and the supposedly left wing governments too!!!!!!
here is a good example.
they say that man, above all else, craves power.
rightism let man believe he can achieve power by his own betterment/effort and can measure the power achieved against the power of others around. leftism lets man believe he has power because power is shared equally between all men which can be checked against others to see if they have excessively less or more power.
the rightism man sees the leftism government taking away his ability to gain power.
the leftism man sees the rightism government taking away their share of power.
so rightism man doesnt like what he's lost from leftism government's actions and gets pushed further into the corner of pushing for a rightist government as they wouldnt have taken away those power climbing freedoms.
so leftism man doesnt like what he's lost from rightism government's actions and gets pushed further into the corner of pushing for a leftist government as they wouldnt have taken away those personal freedoms.
problem is, both leftism man and rightism man are stupid because they never twig onto the fact that their own respective governments, despite promises to the contrary, never remove the constraints of the opposite wing government. and so with each successive change of power from left to right, we only see more restrictions. As Leftism Government takes power after a rightist government's term, there would be more restriction to ecconomic freedom, yet they, being a government, do not release the personal freedoms taken by the previous government. As Rightism Government takes power after a leftist government's term, more personal freedoms would be curtailed (its far easier to market your product if you helped shape the thinking of the consumers), yet they, being a government, do not release the ecconomic freedoms taken by the previous government. Its is a very rare thing to see a government GIVE freedoms to the people rather than taking them. many anarchists and libertarians will argue that it must be taken. I try not to get involved in that argument, but i will say that we certainly wont get our freedoms, our inalienable human rights, if we sit around on our asses doing nothing.
gilligan on socialism:
"There is no reward for a good job, there is no motive to work. It is using governemt as a shield to take everything from everyone so they are dependent on it."
but have you not considered that under such a system everyone would find a job they actually liked doing? ok sure, the majority would take longer out of work, but this would easily be made up for by the increase in productivity due to a very happy workforce. imagine it.... everyone with a job loves their job! even the most stringent ecconomist would see the silver lining in that idea. the reward for work sould be the work itself and what is achieved through that work, the motive to work sould be to feel passionately about your work, not because you simply need to do it to survive. being coerced through fear into doing something you dont want to do for the most of your time seems absurd to me, especially when that fear is manufactured. doing that to people on mass surely would have a very negative effect on society that would only grow and worsen with time.
the people's dependance on government is simply that age old class struggle. it is the system perpetuated by high climbers and rulers to ensure they get to, or stay at the top. there are some chillingly frightening insights into this in the book
"the grand chessboard" which i've heard quoted in "
truth & lies about 911 (highly reccomend everyone buys/downloads this). I havnt read the book, but it seems like i really should. not because its some fool with a typwriter who happens to agree with half of my political values (michael moore), but because its made by a guy who would despise my political views, has been on the inside, knows what he's talking about and isnt holding back on shit (like michael moore).
heh, u reading any of this crap? just wafflin down ideas, trying to better form the words around them to make sence, because we can't keep drudging through the same old crap, its time things moved on before we keep making things worse.