Wednesday, April 3, 2019

New Socialism

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power--Daniel Webster


Chris introduced me to this Netflix show about Formula One racing. I expected to hate it but it was very good...so far. I was overwhelmed with fatigue and went to bed.


The Pirates were as bad in the Opener as they could be.


It is said the Pima Indians have a very high suicide rate that is raised by their inability to separate themselves from their fellows: If one Pima kills another he feels morally obligated to take his own life in return. This made it very difficult to have native policemen on reservations because they often would kill themselves after fatal confrontations. One wonders if the recognition of the individual--so dramatically developed by Christianity, Shakespeare and the Enlightenment--was just missed by the Pimas and they never were able to balance away from the more primitive conjunction with the tribe. Or can these qualities really be learned? 


Frenzies have emerged in the modern West as individuals search for significance, in experiences in youth, in diversion and information in age.


Lent's root word is the word for long or lengthen, probably in reference to the lengthening days of the season. By the 11th century, Lent, or Lenten, had taken on the specialized Christian usage it has today, and by the end of the 14th century the “spring” meaning was obsolete except in a few agricultural terms. In fact, Lenten is the earliest English word currently recorded in the OED for the season between winter and summer; the first citation for the word spring in this meaning is from hundreds of years later, in the 16th century.




                                          New Socialism


There is an interesting article on the socialism revival by Kristian Niemietz. This is a portion:


"This socialist revival is, of course, neither a homogeneous movement, nor a fully worked-out policy program. But if there is a common thread, it is the belief that emerging forms of socialism could be completely different from anything that has flown under that ideological banner in the past. For these new socialists, socialism doesn’t necessarily mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. Nor does it mean a command-and-control economy, directed by a distant, technocratic elite. It means experimenting with new forms of social ownership and democratic decision-making, devolving power to the grassroots, and empowering ordinary working people.


When explaining away the failures of the past, it was assumed that the hierarchical, stratified character of failed socialist projects had been a result of some deliberate political choice. Which is to say: It was believed that previous socialist experiments had failed because the leaders of these movements caused them to be centralized and autocratic as a matter of design—as opposed to a democratic socialist system based on mass participation and a radical decentralisation of power.
But the truth is that mass participation and radical democratization always had been idealized by socialists, including by socialist leaders who led successful national movements. But these dreams never survived, because it simply isn’t feasible to run a large society and a complex economy in this kind of participatory way. Democratic socialism works perfectly fine in small, self-selecting and homogeneous high-trust communities with relatively simple economies, the prime example being the Israeli Kibbutz. But that model is not scalable (and hasn’t even aged particularly well in Israel itself). There is a reason that, even at the height of the Kibbutz movement, Kibbutzim never grew beyond a certain size. There seems to be an upper limit of around 1,500 people, and even that is rare: Most Kibbutzim have fewer than 500 members.
Regardless of what socialists say they want to build, socialism can only mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. It can only mean a command-and-control economy directed by a distant, technocratic elite. The reason it always turns out that way isn’t because revolutions are “betrayed” by selfish or undisciplined actors, but because no other path is possible. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that every generation needs to learn for itself..."

As Mr. Williams says, "Sharing is fine when you know everybody's name."

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