I'm particularly interested in Bertell Ollman's

The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now): A Marxist Critique

And I think that from now on I must really encourage others to support this publication in any way they can. In the words of Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster,"If you read our articles online and you can afford a subscription to our print edition, we would very much appreciate it if you would consider taking one." Monthly Review is looking to start up "MR Zine" on Bastille Day,[July 14] which, by the looks of it, could include a more interactive website. What a fitting day to do so. There's real Canadian content here at times, as well, and I don't mean the neoconservative drivel of David Frum.

[ 03 July 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

quote:

---

The Renewing of Socialism: It is impossible to know what forms this new socialist renewal will take since it is still in the making and will be subject to continuing historical struggles. Yet it is not utopian to believe that present and future attempts to build socialism will reflect critical historical lessons derived from the past, as well as changing historical conditions that define the present....

First and foremost among these lessons is the dismissal of an empty fatalism that closes off the future and that claims that the socialist alternative to capitalism is economically impracticable, doomed to failure. The chief contention of the critics is that central planning cannot work and that socialism is therefore inherently inefficient and unworkable. Such arguments seek to turn the question of capitalism versus socialism into a question of the regulatory mechanism of the economy: market versus plan. Central planning of some kind (along with local and regional planning initiatives) is certainly a necessity for socialism and its greatest economic tool. In fact, planning, if emerging from the active participation of the population, is probably the only effective means for democratic participation in economic decisions and for the fulfillment of genuine popular needs. It is the fulfillment of such needs and the active, democratic involvement of the population in their fulfillment that are most important. The capitalist economy, which puts the market in command, completely closes off the possibility of the achievement of such universal goals.

---

quote:

---

In all post-revolutionary societies, the greatest danger, which must be guarded against through the continual participation of the population in the revolutionary process, is the reemergence of a new ruling class. Moreover, history suggests that any post-revolutionary ruling class, once it emerges, will eventually attempt to secure its position in society by returning the society to capitalism—as the best way of enhancing and perpetuating its own power.

---

quote:

---

Socialist democracy is not to be conceived as applying merely to the political sphere, narrowly conceived, but would have to extend to all aspects of public and private life: the factory, the check-out counter, and the office as well, and even the home.

---

Ollman makes a fun and educational game too!

quote:

---

[M]odern capitalism, with its need to make people believe they can make it while denying the great majority the means to do so, raising hopes and expectations and dashing them to the ground only to raise them again, and with its ubiquitous advertising, lotto, and talk of the American dream, is peculiarly adept in producing unrealistic dreamers who are also utopian thinkers. ... Rather than telling my many comrades in the social movements, if the shoe fits, wear it, I am only suggesting that if you find yourself wearing this shoe, you may want to consider why it fits.

---

quote:

---

The first step Marx took to unravel the mysteries of capitalism was to make a detailed investigation of the capitalist mode of production, or the specific ways in which wealth is produced, distributed, exchanged, and consumed in our form of society together with the relations between the classes involved in these processes (or what Marx was later to call “capital accumulation” and “class struggle”). After tracing the broad patterns found in the interaction between these processes and relations within the mode of production and those in a few other sectors of capitalist society, Marx set out to look for their preconditions in the past. The second step in this systematic use of the dialectical method is to look backward from the present. His main guiding question is—what had to have happened in the past for capitalism to appear and function as it does now? And his search for answers is as much deductive (proceeding from what he found in his survey of the present) as inductive. Then turning around—in the decisive third step—he takes what he has learned about preconditions reorganized as a set of overlapping contradictions, and projects them forward into the present...and beyond.

By following this procedure, Marx is able to conceive of the present as the future of its past which is in the process of becoming the past of its own future. What is now the result (capitalism) of its own preconditions is viewed as the precondition of what will soon become its result and its own negation. The point is that any conditions which arise in historical time are capable of disappearing in historical time. The broad relations they had with whatever helped bring them into being are reproduced when these conditions themselves are in the process of giving way to what comes next. Capitalism took and transformed but also rejected a good deal of its own preconditions, and will receive the same treatment from the society that follows it. In this way, examining what happened in the evolving relation between capitalism and the society from which it emerged can be an important guide to what socialism is likely to take, transform, and reject from capitalism. And throughout, it is organizing the major tendencies involved as contradictions—that is, as mutually dependent processes that simultaneously support and undermine one another while building up to a major collision up ahead—that enables Marx to project both the possibility of a socialist revolution and the kind of society which can follow from it.

---

quote:

---

utopian thinking presents us with consequences (the ideal) without causes, i.e., causes capable of producing such consequences—and therefore too with causes (what exists now) that have no apparent consequences. It is not a matter of the present losing some of its potential; its entire future dimension has been wiped out. Hence, it is not only the future that gets distorted in utopian thinking but also the present. It is futureless because it does not itself exist as a cause of its own future.
Being without an organically connected future, what sense can be made of the present? A lot of what is most important in present society, particularly as regards its dynamics, is not very visible at this moment. It only becomes more so as its effects begin to be felt, that is in the future.

---

quote:

---

the priority Marx gives to class has nothing to do—as is sometimes said—with idealizing workers, or with believing that exploitation is morally more objectionable than other forms of oppression, or that workers suffer more from exploitation than others do from racism and sexism. Rather, class, class interests, and class struggle serve as Marx’s main categories for investigating the role of people in society because they provide the surest means for analyzing how capitalism works and develops, what in it requires a major overhaul, with whom this can be accomplished, and—emerging from all this—what, in broad outline, the day after tomorrow (if we are lucky enough to have one) will probably look like.

---

quote:

---

But perhaps the most important argument against the utopian way of arguing is that, though it addresses our ideal future, it carries out the debate on their terrain. Instead of forcing capitalists and their “paid hirelings” to defend what is intolerable and unnecessary in present-day society, it allows them to sit back and pick holes in whatever sounds untidy or unlikely in our hopes for the future. It does capitalists the immense favor of letting them go on the offensive, rhetorically speaking. Marx’s analysis, on the other hand, which focuses on the irrational workings of the capitalist system and its devastating effects on our lives, is essentially a way of putting the capitalists in a defensive position from which no amount of rationalization will free them.

---

Before I had ever heard of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and, thus, the Austrian School of economics, I had enthusiastically followed the economics research undertaken by the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). My interest in the institute emerged after reading Dr. Stuart Kauffman’s fabulous book At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (published in 1995).

Dr. Kauffman is a member of the Santa Fe Institute, which is the world’s leading research institute pertaining to the science of complexity. A particular line, in Dr. Kauffman’s aforementioned book, struck me as important: “It is our quest to understand emergence of this ordered complexity all around us, in the living forms we see, the ecosystems they construct, the social systems that abound from insects to primates, the wonder of economic systems that actually deliver us our daily bread and astonished Adam Smith into the conceptualization of his invisible hand.”

It was this line, combined with the concept of self-organization, which gave me hope that brilliant scientists would produce research supporting the wonders of capitalism while demonstrating the reasons as to why socialism/central planning has utterly failed and has only lead to wide-scale poverty. After all, socialism/central planning is a concept antithetical to spontaneous self-organization. Unfortunately, the Santa Fe Institute’s economics research program—particularly in the area of poverty—has shown me that the socialistic paradigm, that is so common in academia, is literally blinding their research efforts.

Instead of promoting capitalism, which is inherently an unplanned, self-organized, and a successful economic system, SFI’s research regarding poverty has a Marxist class-struggle flavor to it while promoting wealth redistribution—i.e. taxation and redistribution, by a central governmental authority, with the goal of alleviating poverty.

In my opinion, logic has been completely suspended here. Thankfully, a few years ago, a friend introduced me to Austrian economics. It is here that I have found my intellectual home. I learned that economic calculation is impossible in a socialist commonwealth and that capitalism provides the best chance for all individuals to prosper. If the researchers at the Santa Fe Institute want to learn how to alleviate poverty, then their most fruitful research will come from using an Austrian perspective. This will require a radical paradigm shift. Ironically, it will be a shift back to accepting the truth that a robust economy is self-organized and, thus, an unplanned phenomenon.

For those who are not familiar with the science of complexity, it is a relatively new science that is somewhat difficult to define. At the heart of this science is the belief that spontaneous order—or self-organization—emerges as a result of physical laws, which clearly remain undiscovered. A broad definition of self-organization is as follows (taken from the book Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems):

Self-organization is a set of dynamical mechanisms whereby structures appear at the global level of a system from interactions among its lower-level components. The rules specifying the interactions among the system’s constituent units are executed on the basis of purely local information, without reference to the global pattern, which is an emergent property of the system rather than a property imposed upon the system by an external ordering influence.

Using this definition, I would strongly assert that central banks such as the Federal Reserve are formed under the pretense of providing an ordering influence to the market place, and yet, are completely unnecessary for a free-market order to emerge. The same can be said of a central taxing authority bent on creating a more perfect society via wealth redistribution. As I will discuss later, central banks and central taxing authorities end up as destabilizing influences and, therefore, cause disorder and poverty.

If one was to reword the above-mentioned description of a self-organized phenomenon into economic terms, then it couldn’t be done any better than the following quote from Dr. Murray Rothbard’s magnum opus Man, Economy, and State:

Directly, voluntary action—free exchange—leads to the mutual benefit of both parties to the exchange. Indirectly, as our investigations have shown, the network of these free exchanges in society—known as the ‘free market’—creates a delicate and even awe-inspiring mechanism of harmony, adjustment, and precision in allocating productive resources, deciding upon prices, and gently but swiftly guiding the economic system toward the greatest possible satisfaction of the desires of all the consumers. In short, not only does the free market directly benefit all parties and leave them free and uncoerced; it also creates a mighty and efficient instrument of social order. Proudhon, indeed, wrote better than he knew when he called ‘Liberty, the mother, not the daughter, of order’.

It is quite possible that there are no physical laws of self-organization responsible for the emergence of a free-market social order. Certainly, Dr. Rothbard did not advocate such a concept (i.e. that there are physical laws responsible for self-organization). Nevertheless, the great Austrian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek did feel that research regarding spontaneous, self-organizing processes was a worthy endeavor. For example, Dr. Hayek stated the following in his book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism: “Adam Smith nevertheless remains the butt of jokes even among economists, many of whom have not yet discovered that the analysis of self-ordering processes must be the chief task of any science of the market order.”

If I have done anything here, I hope that I have demonstrated an intellectual connection between Austrian economics and the science of complexity. Therefore, it would seem that the Santa Fe Institute’s economics researchers would be most interested in studying the free-market order as advocated by Dr. Kauffman (unless he really didn’t mean what he stated in his book At Home in the Universe). As I will demonstrate below, SFI’s scientists are defying logic and are advocating socialistic prescriptions for alleviating poverty.

So let’s get to the Santa Fe Institute’s suspension of logic. As I mentioned earlier, SFI is involved in researching the socio-economic issue of poverty. It appears to me that SFI’s researchers believe the solution to the problem of poverty lies with socialism instead of capitalism – which, once again, is an unplanned, self-organized economic system. As an example, here’s what was stated in the Santa Fe Institute’s 2000 Annual Research Report:

SFI is in the midst of hosting four interdisciplinary workshops seeking to better understand the persistence of economic and social inequality in both groups and individuals, its impact on the ability of groups to cooperate in the pursuit of environmental sustainability and other common objectives, and the capacity of governments and other collective actors to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity given the constraints of global economic integration. The workshops address the following topics (I’ve shortened the workshop-topic descriptions without preventing you from getting the gist of each topic):

Poverty traps. For economic, cultural, technological and institutional reasons, otherwise identical individuals often suffer or enjoy divergent fortunes as a result of differing initial conditions; as a result individuals, ethnic groups, nations and other entities can remain locked in poverty.

The intergenerational transmission of economic inequality. The impact of parental wealth and income on offsprings’ economic success is substantial…

Inequality and environmental sustainability.

Globalization and egalitarian redistribution. The freer movement of capital, goods, people and information is thought to raise the costs and compromise the effectiveness of some national policies designed to raise incomes and economic opportunity for the least well off.

Plain and simple, these workshops will provide no contributions to gaining a better understanding of poverty. The Santa Fe Institute is merely seeking ways to help government redistribute wealth, via taxation, in order to alleviate poverty. This is not science, it is scientism. Nowhere have I found any research from SFI pointing to governmental central planning as a key cause of poverty. To me, this makes no sense considering SFI performs research regarding self-ordering phenomena. Wouldn’t it make sense to explore the idea of making a free-market economy even more robust so that poverty could be alleviated (i.e. looking at deregulation, abolishing the Federal Reserve, eliminating taxes, etc.)? A left-wing paradigm clearly can lead to a suspension of logic, especially considering that Ludwig von Mises has shown that economic calculation is impossible in a socialist commonwealth—refer to Dr. Mises’ excellent book Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.

For me to make the claim that the Santa Fe Institute is seeking ways to help government redistribute wealth via taxation is a strong statement, although it is self-evident from looking at the above-mentioned socialist-flavored workshop topics. All doubt will be removed once you read the following quote from an interview with Sir Robert May, who sits on the Santa Fe Institute’s Science Board. I found this information on page six of the Summer 2001 edition of the SFI Bulletin. This section of the article was ironically subtitled “Making Coherent Contributions”:

He also has ideas about applying complexity theory in the social sciences, particularly…economics, a field he sees as desperately in need of “transforming insights that respect data.” And the advent of e-commerce provides a fruitful new area to explore. One possible topic is taxation. “As money becomes more and more virtual it is going to become harder and harder to levy taxes,” he argues, “other than from individuals that are located in particular places in ways that much of commerce is not.” He suggests an SFI program to explore the implementation of new tax regimes to offset the inaccessibility of commerce, and the social consequences that might follow from a shift of the tax burden from corporations hiding out in cyberspace to individuals who the government can still find.

In other words, the Santa Fe Institute wants to help government hunt you down and tax you wherever you may be in the world. Of course, Sir Robert May is making the mistaken assumption that government creates wealth when the opposite is true. Government destroys wealth and perpetuates poverty.

As any adherent of Austrian economics knows, inflation is a hidden and redistributive tax. Moreover, it is a central bank that causes inflation. When a central bank can create money out of thin air, the power to depreciate the value of money is frightening, and eventually socially devastating. Let’s look at the United States’ Federal Reserve and its long-term destruction of the dollar’s purchasing power. Since the Federal Reserve’s founding in 1913, the dollar’s purchasing power has depreciated by over 95% (go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Inflation Calculator, at www.bls.gov, and you can confirm this horrific destruction of the dollar’s purchasing power).

If having the government create money out of thin air leads to prosperity, then Argentina and Brazil should have become the world’s wealthiest countries by the end of the 1980s. Instead, the ravages of inflation lead to greater poverty and massive social unrest in both of these countries. It is simply amazing that the Santa Fe Institute’s research scientists haven’t figured this out yet. Families in America are having more difficulty making ends meet because the prices of goods and services are rising over time, directly due to the dollar’s depreciation brought on by the Federal Reserve itself. Using a little bit of logic here, doesn’t it stand to reason that it will be more difficult to climb out of poverty if the prices of goods and services are rising continuously? The very government the Santa Fe Institute wants to serve, is the same entity that helps perpetuate poverty through the pernicious tax of inflation.

Naturally, Austrians advocate a 100% gold standard. Through a socio-economic selection process, gold and silver emerged as money. When gold and silver are used as media of exchange, the tendency is for the prices of goods and services to decline over time. With this being the case, logic would also dictate that declining prices, for goods and services, should alleviate poverty over time as well. Once again, I have not seen any research from the Santa Fe Institute regarding the positive role that a gold standard would play in the battle against poverty. Keep in mind that governments hate gold because it restricts a government’s ability to spend money on every pet project that comes down the pike. A gold standard forces government to live within its means just as American families must do.

A favorite tax amongst those who view the world with a class-struggle (i.e. Marxist) paradigm, is the estate tax. By taxing an estate, government believes it is taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Moreover, it is attempting to prevent “the intergenerational transmission of economic inequality” (to use SFI’s words). In reality, the death tax has produced results that are exactly the opposite of its essential goal—i.e. to redistribute wealth in order to help the less fortunate climb the socio-economic ladder. Republican Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn’s April 5, 2001 press release titled “House Buries Death Tax” provides excellent insight as to how the death tax tends to perpetuate poverty instead of alleviating it. She stated the following:

This onerous tax has a crippling grip on economic expansion and doesn’t discriminate when it comes to victimizing Americans. Victims of this tax can be found in minority communities, where it takes an average of three generations to build an economic foothold in the community – but this tax puts a stranglehold on growth – causing minority-owned small businesses to close shop after only a couple of generations. Because of the death tax, women in particular are struggling to pass their businesses on to their children. This was confirmed by a recent survey of women business owners where 60% of the respondents indicated the death tax will hurt expansion plans. Sadly, that’s after women were given equal access to business loans just 25 years ago.

It is interesting to note who was in favor of scrapping the death tax. Congresswoman Dunn received the support of over 100 organizations including the following four:

The Black Chamber of Commerce

The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce

The National Indian Business Association

The Nature Conservancy

These people understand that wealth redistribution is tantamount to wealth destruction. If this was not the case, then LBJ’s “Great Society” program would have been a smashing success. The best way to allow people to climb the socio-economic ladder is to let them keep their own hard-earned money. Confiscatory taxes only serve to make it more difficult for all families to grow wealthier over time. Members of the above-mentioned organizations know this. It is time for the central planners—and their enablers such as the Santa Fe Institute—to understand that the outcomes of their plans tend to be the exact opposite of what they had hoped. The death tax provides a perfect example.

For the Santa Fe Institute’s economics research program to regain sound footing, it must shed its Marxist-colored glasses and get back to its fundamental research of spontaneous order. In their research, I am sure that they will find that liberty, a rule of law securing private property rights, and sound money (i.e. gold) will provide the conditions for a robust economy to emerge without the need for central planning. In turn, poverty will be alleviated over time. Of course, Austrian economists already know this.

In closing, I want to pass on a powerful quote from Friedrich A. Hayek. This quote came from his marvelous book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. For clarification purposes, when Dr. Hayek uses the term “extended order” he is referring to a complex adaptive system (a free-market economy):

I have been attempting to explain how the extended order of human cooperation has evolved despite opposition from our instincts, despite fear of all the uncertainties inherent in spontaneous processes, despite widespread economic ignorance, and despite the distillation of all these in movements that seek to use allegedly rational means to achieve genuinely atavistic ends. I have also maintained that the extended order would collapse, and that much of our population would suffer and die, if such movements ever did truly succeed in displacing the market. Like it or not, the current world population already exists. Destroying its material foundation in order to attain ‘ethical’ or instinctually gratifying improvements advocated by socialists would be tantamount to condoning the death of billions and the impoverishment of the rest.

If the Santa Fe Institute continues on its path of serving government through promoting taxation and redistribution, then its goal of helping reduce poverty will be met with the exact opposite result. Just look at the results of the death tax and at the results of the “inflation-fighting” Federal Reserve. Conscious central planning/socialism has increased poverty all over the world.

Should the Santa Fe Institute become serious about understanding spontaneous processes, in the field of economics, it will discard any pretense that somehow conscious central planning has anything to do with spontaneous economic processes. Such an intellectual error is breathtaking yet can be rectified by shifting to an Austrian paradigm. At this point, they will come to understand that abolishing the inflation-happy Federal Reserve and abolishing confiscatory taxes will be the best economic policy prescriptions it could ever make to help alleviate poverty.

No here is the link.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/englund/2005/0701.html

I also do not take credit for Eric Englund words because I included his name as the author of the article.

Did you read what he has to say faith?

Eric put out his article for all to read on a free website. If he didn't want other people to read his article and pass it along he would of not put in on a free website for anyone to read and copy. As long as he is given credit for his article there is no breech of his copyright. The reason people like Eric put their articles on the net is so more people can have a chance to read and learn from the what he has to say.

If you still believe I've breech his copyright I strongly suggest that you contact him and let him know.

quote:

---

Pinochet did not destroy Chile's economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman's trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatised the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatised 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward ... into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile's industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. ...
So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.

---

So what examples from nature and "spontaneously self-organizing" structures tell us is that in the absence of planning there will be *some* kind of economy, and it will probably maximize *something* (most likely human biomass). It does *not* tell us that the features of such an economy will be anything we might desire. Evidence so far suggests that in fact they would not. The best examples of situations for real spontaneous self-organization in the economy would be areas of Africa where governance has broken down. Not economic paradises as far as I can recall. Life in the natural state is ugly, brutish and short.

quote:

---

Fidel: A quick glance at Eric's article, and maybe I mis-read it, but I think he's pushing economics vin Hayek and Chicago school of economics.

---

"Eric Englund is an adherent of Austrian Economics." Close enough.

Deno: your story comes from a website with links to a "geopolitical news in focus" for investors. There I found the U.S. State Department, the FBI, the White House, Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon and other institutions of, for lack of a better description, U.S. imperialism. But thanks for the handy listing of all these links. If I want to study the enemy I know where to look.

Geopolitical News in Focus: Tips for the discerning bourgeois who wish to expand their capital.

Eric Englund's website has a fine collection of publications available for purchase. The leading lights include Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek et al, with titles like "Democracy: the God that failed", "The Black Book of Communism" and other gems .

[ 13 July 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

Austrian school has nothing in common with Chicago school of economics. Mises believe that only gold and silver should be used as money to create an economy that will last over the very long term (Centuries) . Freemen and his band of idiots believe gold is a relic that has no place in a modern economy. Freemen answer to all financial crisis is always more liquidity (fiat money created out of thin air) While Freemen believed in the free market for everyday Joe and Jane he has always believed that"central planning from a Central Bank is necessary to keep a modern economy running smoothly. Mises on the other hand correctly understood that central banks will always eventually destroy the fiat currency they create because of human politics and human frailties.

Socialism practise through government or through the monetary system (Central Banks) will always destroy themselves and make the majority of the population much poorer as a result. The funny thing is, in the next decade we get to watch the US, Canada and most of the rest of the world destroy their economies when the Hyperinflation that Mises predicted will always come about when any society uses fiat monetary system begins.

quote:

---

money to create an economy

---

Shouldn't it be the other way around?

In order to see examples of how irresponsible the state, any state, can be, one need only look at the numbers of deaths caused by state-involved war and atrocity. The very sad fact of researching this article is that I have limited the figures to include only the highest numbers of deaths and only the events of the last century.

For the sake of brevity, this list does not include any event under 600,000 deaths – and there are hundreds. Even if the time period were expanded to include the American Civil War, it wouldn’t make the cut at an estimated 558,052 killed. Recent events like the international embargo against Iraq resulted in the deaths of 350,000, again, too "small" to include.

It is hard to even comprehend these numbers as they tend to minimize the lesser events in terms of deaths. They make the Soweto Uprising an almost insignificant number at a mere 600 killed by police in South Africa. But ask the victim’s family members of it and the word "insignificant" would be the last word to come to mind.

In the twentieth century, an estimated 188,000,000 people have been killed due to war, revolt against and abuse by totalitarian regimes, and conditions resulting from these. This number includes about 6,450,000 people killed in events considered "lesser unpleasantries" that aren’t listed below. (Source: Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century)

quote:

---

Originally posted by Doug:
If Austrian economics wasn't good enough for Austria, let's certainly not bother with it here.

---

I think both The Road to Surfdom and The Great Transformation were published in Vienna. Vienna, itself, has chosen socialist government longer than any other city in the world with a pause during the years of fascism. Karl Polanyi fled Vienna in 1935 when socialist points of view were not tolreated by the Nazis. Karl came to Southern Ontario, and later taught at Columbia U in New York. His wife was barred from entering the States because of her affiliation with European communist organizations.

Smithian laissez-faire capitalism waned in the 1930's across the western world. Lord Keynes, Baron of Tilton, traveled through Russia debating with socialists and communists on how to fix a broken system. He was influenced greatly by the Swedes. Keynes' theories shaped several important western economies, including our own.

JM Keynes won the debate between Cambridge and Austrian schools, and von Hayek's students later abandoned him for Keynesian economic thought. Keynes sent von Hayek a copy of "The General Theory" as a momento.

[ 14 July 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Hayek's laissez-faire ideology depended ultimately on his theory of knowledge, which was basically that you couldn't really know anything except by direct individual experience. An individualistic theory of knowledge led to an individualistic theory of economics; a very limited theory of knowledge led to the position that any kind of planning was inherently problematic, because nobody could possibly know enough to plan well or intervene with any expectation of success.

Of course, anyone who reads, agrees with and follows Hayek's ideas has in doing so implicitly jettisoned the theory of knowledge that underpins those ideas. And anyone who depends on any kind of technology, believes in the existence of culture, et cetera ultimately must realize that knowledge isn't really like that. Building upon information from outside one's experience is not a perfect process, for sure--it's fraught with pitfalls, as one can fall victim to everything from errors to oversimplifications to losses in communication to outright lying propaganda. Yet it certainly happens--our lives would be impossible without it. Hayek's approach, like certain flavours of postmodernism, was probably an overreaction against the overconfidence of certain modernist/Enlightenment approaches, with their certainty that knowledge just stacked upwards infallibly as long as rationality and/or scientific approaches were employed. Either that or it was an excuse for what was convenient to believe.

Wainwright suggests that knowledge is socially constructed (not, mind you, that we create the facts we know--but that what counts as and can be more or less relied on as "known" is arrived at through a social process). This results in a quite different approach to what sorts of planning and intervention are workable than Hayek's view of knowledge.

Incidentally, the right has this tendency never to use the word "planning" unless the word "central" is right beside it. But much of the modern left favours decentralized planning. Heck, much of the back-when left favoured decentralized planning. Thus, planning rather than abdication of responsibility for how things go. And not "spontaneous" organization, but organization developed and designed consciously by people together, in a social process. But not central, but distributed, democratic, with many voices speaking.

quote:

---

Jeff:
What drivel! All it proves is that wars kill millions. It is perfectly possible to create a state which does not involve itself in wars.

---

quote:

---

It's all part of the inherently destructive nature of civilization.

---

Get rid of government/state and there would not be any militaries. Take the state of Germany away from Hitler and he would of been nothing more the a broken down bigot instead of a dictator who caused the death of 10's of millions of people. Do I need to remind you that Hitler was democratically elected to government before he created his dictatorship. The same goes for Stalin, Mao, Napoleon, Cesar and the Khmer Rouge.

History shows us that it doesn't matter if the government is on the left, right, or if they were democracies, they all have a history of killing their own people and the population of their neighbours. All democracies eventually destroy themselves and turn into some kind of dictatorship.

I found this on the net a few years ago and printed it. I don't remember where I read it but I've always kept it.

At about the time the original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence."

Bondage means dictatorship;
From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

Ok Rabbble Babblers!

When you see how corrupt the Liberals, Conservative and NDP are in Ottawa today. When you see George W Bush go to war with any nation that has a large supply of oil.

Guess where we are today?

Get rid of government/state and there would not be any militaries. Take the state of Germany away from Hitler and he would of been nothing more then a broken down bigot instead of a dictator who caused the death of 10's of millions of people. Do I need to remind you that Hitler was democratically elected to government before he created his dictatorship. The same goes for Stalin, Mao, Napoleon, Cesar and the Khmer Rouge.

History shows us that it doesn't matter if the government is on the left, right, or if they were democracies, they all have a history of killing their own people and the population of their neighbours. All democracies eventually destroy themselves and turn into some kind of dictatorship.

I found this on the net a few years ago and printed it. I don't remember where I read it but I've always kept it.

At about the time the original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence."

Bondage means dictatorship;
From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

Ok Rabbble Babblers!

When you see how corrupt the Liberals, Conservative and NDP are in Ottawa today. When you see George W Bush go to war with any nation that has a large supply of oil.

Guess where we are today?

Not at all

I must read many more books then you since you can't seem to put more then 8 words together.

quote:

---

When government is reduced to the point that it no longer has any real power over it's citizens, only then will we be safe from some future Hitler or Stalin.

---

Schweeet.

Without the power of the state they could never kill then amount of people that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Napoleon did with the power of the state.

My point is, they might be able to kill 100 or many 1000 people but without the power of government they could never kill 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 people. That is the difference.

Anyhow, like yourself, I sometimes wonder "what the hell's so damn special about rule of law, anyway?" After all, whenever countries are destabilized, and have no de facto government, they always work it out peacefully among themselves. And if not, some local warlord will usually spring up to help them in their transition to comfortable, state-free living.

Well said

Histroy shows us that the odds are high that you or your children will rue the day you chose an organized state over a hut, a rabbit, and peace.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Hinterland:
Go away.

---

It becomes more apparent every year that what Ludwig von Mises repeatedly declared throughout his extensive works is true, that there can never be an inbetween of the two political-economic systems of capitalism and socialism -- that is an inbetween that remains an inbetween. All systems that try to promote a mixture of both free enterprise and state intervention inevitably evolve into some form of authoritarian statism. There are three major reasons why this is so. Let's investigate each of them in detail.

Interventions Bring More Interventions

1) The first reason why the welfare state cannot sustain freedom is the famous Misesian thesis: Government interventions always breed economic dislocations that "necessitate" more government interventions.

For example, no government can pay for the extravagances of welfarism solely with taxes, for the productive members of society will stand for only so much taxation. Thus the politicians in power inevitably turn to the expedient of monetary inflation through manipulation by the Federal Reserve to pay for their extravagance.

Here is where the chain reaction of government interventions and dislocations really begins to play havoc. You can't inflate the money supply through the Federal Reserve without eventually causing higher prices. If you try to stop the rising prices with government price controls and rigging of the markets, you then limit profits; but you can't limit profits without lessening personal production, and you can't lessen personal production without eventually causing product shortages. But product shortages raise prices still further, and if price rigging is in effect, create economic chaos, malinvestment, black markets and corruption. If you attempt to control all the factors of production and the goods and services they produce in an effort to eliminate the chaos and corruption, then you must also control consumer choices and personal ambitions, for they determine what the factors of production are to produce. But you can't control consumer choices and personal ambitions without controlling the human mind; and you can't control the human mind without controlling education, the press, television, movies, books, etc. There is no end to the mania of government intervention except all-pervasive intervention -- i.e., dictatorship.

The Keynesian Revolution

The rationale for government intervention and control of the economy stems from several sources, one of the most important being the Keynesian revolution of the 1930's and its emphasis on "macro" rather than "micro" economic theory. This revolution shifted concern in the field from the interactions of individuals (micro) to the interplay of aggregates or collectives (macro).

Ultimately this meant in practice the subordination of the rights of the individual to allegedly higher "goods," i.e., the good of the economy, the expansion of the GNP, the building of a Great Society. This in turn led to the gradual justification by the Supreme Court of the right of government officials to coercively regulate individuals in greatly expanded areas, so as to promote the construction of such a Great Planned Society.

Because their emphasis is on aggregates, welfare state (or macro) economists automatically think in terms of expanding the economy's supply of money, dispensing the public's revenues, revamping the nation's priorities. Groups, cities, minorities, society, rather than individuals, are the important entities in their theoretical processes. And because of the profound influence that Keynes had, macro economists now seek to co-ordinate the nation's aggregates by manipulating its money supply, wage levels, business profits, and savings from Washington.

Here lies the major flaw of the interventionist paradigm, however: To think in terms of manipulating the profits, consumption, savings and investments of a society presupposes thinking in terms of manipulating human beings. You can't control money, wages, price levels and ratios of private consumption to public expenditures without also controlling people themselves. These phenomena are all merely effects; people and their thoughts, ambitions and actions are the causes.

Since, from a scientific standpoint, it does no good to attempt to alter or plan effects without also controlling causes, our planners in Washington, who wish to control and regulate our nation's economic productivity in an efficient manner, must ultimately try to control and regulate the causes of that productivity -- which are the thoughts, ambitions and actions of the men and women that create it. This will require some form of authoritarian political system.

At this juncture in history, welfare state theoreticians are concerned mostly with sparse and haphazard controls over human actions (through economic regulations), and over human thoughts and ambitions (through educational controls). But the nature of cause and effect relationships in reality will mandate further evolution of control. Our regulators and bureaucrats will gradually be led into an authoritarian system, which will ultimately require the methods utilized in a dictatorship. Of course, it won't be called a "dictatorship," just as nations such as Sweden today avoid the term in favor of a "humane socialist democracy." But if the government's controls are pervasive and arbitrary, and the individual's rights are not objectively defined, the nature of the system will be dictatorial.

The Swedish Nightmare as Prototype

Despite the fact that individual freedom shrivels to the most minimal of levels under Swedish style welfarism, America's "liberal" academic leaders tacitly applaud such a system, considering it to be a theoretical model of what Western nations should strive for.

This, in the face of socialism's collapse in the USSR. This, in face of the fact that government regimentation of the socio-economic order always leads to widespread chaos, stultification and despair.

Several writers in the past three decades have exposed the nightmarish cost of Sweden's massive state welfarism -- Roland Huntford's The New Totalitarians being the most celebrated. Under the benevolent guardianship of an all powerful, centralized state, the Swedes have totally relinquished their independence in exchange for a numbing and somnolent existence of the hive, where soul-crushing bureaucracies stretch their obtrusive tentacles into every nook and cranny of life. Taxes reach to the 90% level, one's children are nurtured as wards of the state, names become numbers, obsequiousness is admired, alcoholism and drug addiction are rampant, and ennui is everyone's constant companion.

Naturally our statist intellectuals here in America solicitously deny that they seek such all-pervasive authoritarian control, maintaining that they want only to intervene a little bit, and "redirect resources," "smooth out disparities," "create a perpetual prosperity." They don't intend to build a monstrous mega-state. But as we have seen, eventually they will have to if they intend to control things from Washington.

Centralized state welfarism must become dictatorial, just as the domestic dog that joins with wolves in the wild must become a feral beast, just as a deadly virus unleashed upon human cells must attempt to snuff out those cells' lives, just as all forces of reality set in motion must move on to the ultimate destiny established by their natures.

In his monumental study of 20th century bureaucratism, The Myth of the Welfare State, Jack D. Douglas analyzes this self-reinforcing nature of statist growth, and why centralized, interventionist governments inevitably evolve into more and more dictatorial forms:

"The megastate ratchets up slowly, always in the guise of 'serving the common welfare' and generally in the pretense of meeting a crisis. Once the bureaucratic regimentation of everyday life has become pervasive," it begins to bring about acute socio-economic crises such as inflation, recessions, shortages, monopolies, etc., which create "alienation and outrage" throughout the country.... "These crises triggered by the higher levels of statist bureaucratization then become the enabling crises of further ratchets-up in statist powers -- it becomes a vital necessity for 'the common welfare' to 'solve' the problems being caused by the drift into statist collectivization by increasing the bureaucratic regulations, which in turn produce new crises that must be solved by further, ratchets-up.

"The drift into statist regimentation of life is, thus, an autocatalytic process -- it reinforces itself, or feeds upon itself. The drift upward into greater regimentation accelerates because the new statist attempts at solutions to problems destroy the old ways of dealing with them, and build ratchets under the dependencies on the new statist 'solutions' as people restructure their life commitments in expectation of continuing those statist dependencies. At the extreme, statist bureaucracies first breed a generalized dependency in individual personalities and then in whole subcultures, whose members transmit this dependency to new generations....

"The drift into the massive regulation of life by statist bureaucracies is partially hidden from its victims by massive self-deceits and by massive political deceits.... The slowness of the drift allows the people to adjust to each step into submission, hardly noticing it and easily excusing it as merely a small encroachment. It also allows those who remember what life was really like before the drift into the 'iron cage' of bureaucratic regimentation to die off before the contrast is stark, thereby preventing their effective challenges to the agitprop indoctrination of the young." [Transaction Publishers, 1989, p. 24. Emphasis added.]

Thus all Keynesian welfare states, that utilize a mixture of economic freedom and government intervention, must inevitably establish pervasive dictatorial controls over most of the political, economic and educational activities of their people. It might take many, many decades for a nation to work itself into the position whereby its regimentation is widespread and insufferable, but that day will come when there is such socio-economic chaos and stultification resulting from all the "ratchets-up" and "crisis solutions," that the government will finally give up on even the pretense of freedom, and suspend the basic rights of the people.

Special Privileges to Factions

2) The second reason why the welfare state cannot sustain freedom is that government welfarism destroys a limited-objective framework of law, by extending special privileges to certain segments of society at the expense of other segments.

For example, it grants protective legislation to banks at the expense of the depositors; it gives special tax breaks to corporations at the expense of individual earners; it awards job quotas to ethnic minorities at the expense of the better qualified applicants; it conveys welfare subsidies to the less productive at the expense of the more productive; it passes monopoly laws to favor unions at the expense of the employers and workers, etc.

To put it more bluntly, the welfare state destroys the philosophy of "equal rights for all" in favor of "special privileges for factions." It is a doctrine of legalized favoritism that must, by its very nature, lead to dissension, corruption and tyranny.

Our intellectual leaders should consider the following: What possible hope for peace and good will can there be when some men and women (by joining into a large enough protest group) are allowed to use government coercion and intervention to gain their desires, while all other men and women are required to use only their own productive effort?

What possible kind of life can people live when the degree of their freedom is determined, not equally by the prestipulated law of the Constitution, but unequally by the variable whims of bureaucrats -- whims that can descend upon one at anytime in order to pacify the demands of the Wall Street banks, or the mega-corporations, or the AFL-CIO, or the welfare recipients, or the environmentalists, or the gay advocates, or Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition? What kind of social climate develops when people are penalized for their ability and self-reliance, and rewarded for the power of their lobbies on Capitol Hill and their protest marches in the streets? What kind of individual freedom and economic stability can we have when men and women are subjected to such injustice? What type of country will evolve from such a nonsensical and arbitrary rule?

The last four decades of political-economic turmoil in America have shown us what type of country -- a totally chaotic assemblage of special interest groups all protesting for and squabbling over whatever privileges, controls and subsidies they can extract from the Federal Government. And none of them willing to contemplate the destruction of individual freedom they are perpetrating in the process.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Deno:
Then don't read my messages

---

edit: this is a discussion forum. maybe i'm a crusty bitch with no sense of humour, but it would be nice if you would participate in a discussion instead of putting up essays.

[ 15 July 2005: Message edited by: Nikita ]

quote:

---

Originally pasted by Deno:
The Swedish Nightmare as Prototype

blah blah blah

---

Social Democracy, is and always has been statist socialism, using parliment and the state to regulate society. There are other brands of socialism that are libertarian. And there is a difference between government and the State. Read some anarchists instead of American conservative wing nuts. Like Produhon, or Kropotkin. Its called direct democracy today, then it was called federalist anarchism. Simply put pinhead, it means that all the people in the community participate in the decision making. The State requires elected representatives and thus conflicts with self government of the people.

By the by rather than quoting that failed austrian economist Von Mises, read some Benjamin Tucker the american anarchist, who most American Libertarians claim as their own, though he too would oppose von Mises and Hyaek. Von Mises and the Austrian school had their chance and they blew it in the 1920's as Karl Polayni properly dismissed them in his book the Great Transformation, when the Austrian Kroner was inflated thanks to recomendations of von Mises, and then Austria had buckets o bucks worth nothing. As Polayni said of the Austrian School: " the surgery was a success, but the patient died."
Its called supply side economics and it produces inflation.

While we are at it attacks on Keynes from the right are pretty useless. The reality is that capitalism adapts as workers demand reform. Something the Social Democrats understood, which is why they sought state power.

As Negri points out in Marx beyond Marxism, Keynes was a natural outgrowth of the Bolshevik Revolution and the world wide General Strikes of 1919. Keynes was an apologist for real world capitalism, which needed to adapt or it faced extinction from a workers revolution. So it adapted to state capitalism for a period of fifty years which in the post war period produced wealth and an end to class war.

That was a pretty substantial change in capitalism.
And it forced the social democrats, like Broadbent to declare that we can have a mixed economy.
your exortation of Von Mises is the economy of fuller brush salesmen and multilevel marketing, where you produce nothing but buy and sell.
Its the ultimate objective of economics of Empire, where one Imperial regime, like ancient Rome, relies on production by others to retain their wealth. And we know what happened to Rome.

Deconstructing Hayek

You have obviously never read any of Mises or Hyaek's work or you would know that the about statement is 100% false.

Typical socialist, can't argue with facts so you make something up that make your argument sound valid.

Here's a link to some of Mises" work.
Why don't you educate yourself before you make false statements

web page

quote:

---

Originally posted by Deno:

If your looking for a Pinhead then I suggest you look in the mirror.

---

that your should be "you're". It's a contraction of "you" and "are" as in, "If you are looking for a Pinhead...".

"Your" is possessive.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Deno:
[i]
Typical socialist, can't argue with facts so you make something up that make your argument sound valid.
web page

---

Thanks for the link, very interesting. I'll definitely take a look through it, but if your [sic] concerned about misrepresentation of thought, you need go no further than the Forward of Economic Freedom and Interventionism:

quote:

---

The main doctrines of Mises' principal antagonists—Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes—have been discredited. Their names are not so widely cited as authorities. Their collectivist theories are no longer taken as "gospel" by the man in the street.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Rufus Polson:

Incidentally, the right has this tendency never to use the word "planning" unless the word "central" is right beside it. But much of the modern left favours decentralized planning. Heck, much of the back-when left favoured decentralized planning.

---

Good stuff. Corporations and their top-down hierarchies have been described by Noam Chomsky as centrally planned mini-states in and of themselves. Corporations are centrally controlled. The current goals of corporations and multi-nationals seem to be to negotiate control of state power and decision making for labour and environmental laws by way of internationally binding trade agreements where those laws affect corporate, centrally planned and narrowly focused profit agendas. Corporations seek dictatorial powers. Predatory capitalism seeks intervention in the market when they lobby governments at all levels. Where few corporations exist in a sector of the economy, competition exists for a while before the most benign competition is swallowed whole in order to manipulate market prices in their favour to the disadvantage of consumers, a highly coercive aspect of the right's version of free market. The invisible hand of laissez-faire tends to bestow great wealth on the few at the expense of the many by ripping the heart out of democracy.

Polanyi said, Laissez-faire was planned while planning was not.

As Einstein said, capitalism really is a transition phase of human development from colonialism to whatever in hell it is we have now, a nothing stage. The next logical phase of human development is socialism, or a society centred around workers instead of the solitary self-interest of a handful few.

quote:

---

J. K. Galbraith:

The high salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market reward for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture from an individual to himself.

---

[ 15 July 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

---

Under the benevolent guardianship of an all powerful, centralized state, the Swedes have totally relinquished their independence in exchange for a numbing and somnolent existence of the hive, where soul-crushing bureaucracies stretch their obtrusive tentacles into every nook and cranny of life. Taxes reach to the 90% level, one's children are nurtured as wards of the state, names become numbers, obsequiousness is admired, alcoholism and drug addiction are rampant, and ennui is everyone's constant companion.

---

But Swedes elect their governments, and have done so for a century. So the author must necessarily have contempt for those poor beknighted fools who keep choosing "slavery" over his version of "freedom".

quote:

---

Originally posted by jeff house:
poor beknighted fools

---

Jeff, it's the usage police here. (See, we do also go after people we agree with.) "Poor beknighted fools" would be people who've been tapped on the shoulder by the Queen of England. Think you mean "poor benighted fools," unless all of Sweden received a "K" while I wasn't looking.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Hawkins:
What would Walmart do?

Unless we can destroy ALL power structures... fuck why try, at least Looney Toons was actually funny sometimes.

---

quote:

---

Magoo:
Ya. Back in the good old days when we wore a rabbit around our loins for warmth and slept in bark huts there was no violence or warfare. When small communities discovered other small communities they said "Hey, you're different! That's so cool! Let's invent the lever together!"

---

Your right mags, this shit has been happening since prehistory. Doesn't change the fact that primitive life was perhaps the most egalitarian existence we can concieve of. All the problems of prehistory were multiplied fold after fold with civilization. Obviously the answer is to destructure, however it must be more then that. The dead Fred Perlman once asked the question why do we desire our own opression? The late anarchist John Moore tacked this. His answer was to be contantly aware of the power complex that structures out daily lives. He made the point that fascism stems from micro-fascism.Though he went to far by suggesting that all power relations be destroyed.

People like John Zerzan have done well to point out the pathology of civilization. However there is the real fact that there may be something to human pathology that needs to be explored,why were the Neanderthals(who are on the end of alot of speicisist insults) seemingly more egalitarian the n us for example. These are the deep questions that must be asked. Whatever leads to a more egalitarian existance, a decentralised, non-formalized, afinity based form of organization is a given.

quote:

---

"We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition,"

---

I would say that if we do not come to terms with modernity and civilization there will be a collapse anyhow. I'd like a free society to come out in a different more liberating way(though I feel this will not happen) The one thing about an anarchist society is that self-sufficiency will be pretty much forced as opposed to what civilization is does. I do believe that a world of 6 billion could make the transition to a permacultural society, it's already happening in the 3rd world to a fair extent(with those damn capitalists holding access to seeds) This is something that can be fixed. Oh and in a post-collapse society the survivers will be the lucky ones.

As for the the primitive thing, I think the other groups were band societies.

Imperialism is not invincible! [Chavez]

"The U.S. people are our brothers"

He added that all empires come to an end. "One day the decay inside U.S. imperialism will end up toppling it, and the great people of Martin Luther King will be set free. The great people of the United States are our brothers, my salute to them."

"We must start talking again about equality. The U.S. government talks about freedom and liberty, but never about equality. "They are not interested in equality. This is a distorted concept of liberty. The U.S. people, with whom we share dreams and ideals, must free themselves… A country of heroes, dreamers, and fighters, the people of Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez."

Christ "revolutionary"

Chavez thanked Spanish intellectual and director of Le Monde Diplomatique Ignacio Ramonet for saying that Chavez was a new type of leader. He said he is inspired by old types of leaders such as Christ, whom he described as "one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters, the redeemers of the poor, and one of the greatest revolutionaries of the history of the world." The President mentioned Venezuela’s independence hero Simon Bolivar, Brazil's José Ignacio Abreu Elima, Che Guevara, "that Argentine doctor that traveled through the continent in a motorcycle and who was a witness of the U.S. invasion of Guatemala in 1955, one of the many invasion of the U.S. empire in this continent," and Cuban President Fidel Castro.

“Capitalism must be transcended”

"Everyday I become more convinced, there is no doubt in my mind, and as many intellectuals have said, that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can’t be transcended from with capitalism itself, but through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. But I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed from Washington," he said.

"We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition," he added.

Chavez said that Venezuela is trying to implement a social economy. "It is impossible, within the framework of the capitalist system to solve the grave problems of poverty of the majority of the world’s population. We must transcend capitalism. But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything. That’s the debate we must promote around the world, and the WSF is a good place to do it."

He added that in spite of his admiration for Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, he said Che's methods are not applicable. "That thesis of one, two, or three Vietnams, did not work, especially in Venezuela."

The President cited Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky by saying that "each revolution needs the whip of the counterrevolution to advance."

**********************

This last quote is very interesting. The Yin and the Yang of revolution while it is still fresh.

Chavez spoke of a unity of spirit from Mexico to Patagonia, of realizing the dream of a united Latin America and he spoke very well indeed. Here is my favourite. [I wonder what it sounds like in Spanish?] Chavez repeated the words of Argentine independence hero José de San Martin "let’s be free without caring what anyone else says."

That's very beautifully expressed, even in translation.

[ 15 July 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

All I'm saying is that turning our back on technology isn't feasible to any degree, no matter how far I can stretch my mind, and believe me, no-one, including the most recent decendents of tribal societies, really want to go That far back, however we might define it. Some room for some "devolution" perhaps, lots of useless if not harmful technologies and structures, but I'd have to see what's being referred to directly to say anything more on that. There are real problems with industrial societies but I think its a self defeating mistake to frame it in any sense as untreatable or *the* problem in itself. I also think its mistake to confuse market activity with "capitalism", markets of a sort predate "capitalism" and in reality exist in every society to some degree. None of which are really free and all with disadvantages, but ones I believe can be balanced and minimized if looked at in the sense of engineering and sociology. I believe even some Marxists recognise some differences between personal property (like our own homes, tools or bank accounts) and socalled "private" property. One school called "Unoists" who say they recognise that much (among other mistakes in traditional Marxist thinking) but someone like Nick Beltov could probably tell you more about them than I could.

Monetary economies (which is closely linked to any sort of technological societies) might tend towards concentration of wealth and power by itself, but monetary policies can also be adjusted towards more egalitarian pursuits and limited by other interests and systems, they can't be done away with either in any high technology society. (not without huge problems attached) Mostly it just seems to me that organizations of some sort or another always seem to spring up out of sheer practicality. I don't know if all that makes what I'm trying to say anymore clear.

[ 15 July 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

Let's take a devasted, incredibly poor country, put dedicated socialists at one end and rapacious capitalists at the other, and see what happens.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Doug:
If Austrian economics wasn't good enough for Austria, let's certainly not bother with it here.

---

ROFL.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Krago:
That sounds like an interesting experiment.

Let's take a devasted, incredibly poor country, put dedicated socialists at one end and rapacious capitalists at the other, and see what happens.

Maybe we could call the country "Korea".

---

Good choice. Let's see how the capitalists make use of the 14 percent of total arable land area in North Korea and severe weather patterns in what is mainly mountainous country. We'll criticize hell out of them as they try to grow food on about 500 hectares of workable land while we laude our own good fortune with Ottawa and Okanagen Valleys, Idaho, Florida, Mississippi, lush California; a natural acquifer region of Ogalala and vast expanses of the High Plains region for which mechanized farming has turned 25 percent of it into desert since 1980.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Deno:

Event
Dates
Estimated Deaths

Congo Free State
1886-1908
8,000,000

Mexican Revolution
1910-1920
1,000,000

World War I
1914-1918
15,000,000

Armenian Massacres
1915-1923
1,500,000

China – Warlord Era
1917-1928
800,000

Russian Civil War
1917-1922
9,000,000

Soviet Union under Stalin
1924-1953
20,000,000

China – Nationalist Era
1928-1937
3,100,000

World War II
1937-1945
55,000,000

Eastern Europe Post-War Expulsion
1945-1947
2,100,000

Chinese Civil War
1945-1949
2,500,000

North Korea
1948 to present
2,500,000

People’s Republic of China under Mao
1949-1975
40,000,000

Tibet
1950 to present
600,000

Korean War
1950-1953
2,800,000

Vietnam War (including Vietnamese, Laotian & Cambodian internal conflicts)
1960-1975
3,500,000

Rwanda & Burundi
1959-1995
1,350,000

Ethiopia
1962-1992
1,400,000

Nigeria
1966-1970
1,000,000

Bangladesh
1971
1,250,000

Cambodia, Khmer Rouge
1975-1978
1,650,000

Mozambique
1975-1992
1,000,000

Afghanistan
1979-2001
1,800,000

Iran-Iraq War
1980-1988
1,000,000

Sudan
1983 to present
1,900,000

Kinshasa Congo
1998 to present
3,300,000

Totals
1886-2004
181,550,000

web page

---

This a very interesting list, absodamnlutely. Funny how not even one social democratic state, not even that ugly vile "air conditioned Hell" the "totalitarian" state of Sweden, made it to the list of genocidal states.

How cum?

[ 16 July 2005: Message edited by: Che ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fidel:

Good choice. Let's see how the capitalists make use of the 14 percent of total arable land area in North Korea and severe weather patterns in what is mainly mountainous country. We'll criticize hell out of them as they try to grow food on about 500 hectares of workable land while we laude our own good fortune with Ottawa and Okanagen Valleys, Idaho, Florida, Mississippi, lush California; a natural acquifer region of Ogalala and vast expanses of the High Plains region for which mechanized farming has turned 25 percent of it into desert since 1980.

And we'll block humanitarian aid to the fascist bastards, too.

---

According to World Facts, North Korea has 17,000 km2 of arable land (not 500 ha) supporting 22.7M people. South Korea has 17,100 km2 of arable land supporting 48.6M people.

From about 1993 to 2000, N. Korea experienced record low rainfalls. Half of annual rain falls in three spring and summer months. Thousands of hectares of farmland are regularly submerged in water and silt. Typhoons are an annual occurrence in a country where about 14%(almost 17 thousand sq km, for Drago) of the country is arable. And much of it is vulnerable to severe coastal weather patterns. N. Korea is a mainly mountainous country about the size of the state of Mississippi.

The point is, N. Korea is not the Napa or Okanagan Valley, Drago. And the Yanks have been known to block humanitarian aid to N. Korea as well as Cuba, illegally according to the UN.

Sorry if you've had to learn something, Drago. It must have been easier believing that N. Korea's an axes of evol nation.

[ 17 July 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by rsfarrell:
Don't defend North Korea's economic system. It's idiotic. Functioning economies buy food, or use ammassed stockpiles, when harvests are bad;

---

Meanwhile, anywhere from six to thirteen million children continue to starve to death around the capitalist third world each and every year while 80 percent of those nations suffering chronic hunger export cash crops to "the market." That's "idiotic and indefensible" as is IMF/Washington consensus and structural adjustment programs that dictate privatisation of third world economies first and foremost and
basic infrastructure in the never never. We gave up on Smithian laissez-faire for a lack of results in 1929 and so did Augusto Pinochet when he fired the Chicago Skool graduates in 1985 as poverty doubled in Chile after just nine years of ultra-conservative economics.

In fact, it's planned and enforced genocide.

[ 18 July 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Just got back from a vacation with the family and I was under orders from my wife to leave the laptop at home. Sorry I have not responded to your question before now.

I can guarantee that most of you lefties will hate what I have to say and that my grammar will be just as bad as my other messages. All I ask is you read all of this message before you shoot your sling and arrows at me.

I'm not suggesting that Keynes was a Marxist.

What Keynes did is come up with economic theories that gave the world's central banks the excuse they needed to start setting up the conditions for the removal of gold and silver as the foundation of the world monetary system. The reason the central banks which are controlled by a few rich elites wanted to remove the general population from a bimetallic (gold and silver as money) or gold backed monetary system to a completely fiat currency monetary system (paper or digital money made out of thin air with a new debt created) is that they knew that if they could get sole power to create all of their countries currency and get their government to impose legal tender laws to give them a monopoly on their countries money creation, they would have more power then any elected President, Prime Minister or any government leader. Having a monopoly to create a country's currency meant that the elites over a period of time could steal all of the wealth created by workers in their countries by encouraging workers to accumulate more and more debts to make up for the loss of purchasing power of their wages because of the ever increasing prices of all the necessities of life caused by the over issuing of the nations money supply . The elite's knew that if they threw in a few socialist perks to the general population like free health care, unemployment insurance and government pensions for all workers that most of the population and all socialists would gladly give up their freedom to use real money (gold and silver) for everyday transactions and replace the nation's monetary system that was based on gold and silver which was not anyone's liability to a fiat currency monetary system that they alone controlled.

When any given population uses only gold and silver as money for wages, debt repayment and everyday economic transaction over a long period of time you have a situation where the middle class and working poor are slowly becoming more wealthy because the purchasing power of their wages keeps it's value over time while human productivity keeps increasing because of new technologies that we clever humans keep inventing. As we get more productive with our newly created technology the price of everything we make and all necessities of life get cheaper over time while our wages generally stay the same so the working poor can eventually move his or her status to the middle class and the middle class can begins to accumulate wealth as they get older.

This is the trick that the elites play on the socialist, for the price of a few government programs for the poor and middle class. The elites got the sole right to print and create all of our currency we use today and slowly over time got most of the population to go into debt. All these government programs that socialist were demanding for the poor were only possible within a fiat monetary system and the elites were only to happy to help government start up these programs because it did not cost the elites a dime of their own wealth and they knew that the expensive social programs would eventually lead the government to accumulate more and more debt making the elites richer and richer In fact, the monopoly to create all the money in their countries meant that they were able to increase their wealth and power over government 100 fold while the everyday Joe and Jane public saw their standard of living slowly erode by debt accumulation. The general public could buy more things with their ability to borrow money which created artificial demand for just about everything forcing all prices up and a major increase of the money supply. It is this power to create money out of thin air which creates a new debt that has caused the price inflation we've experience since the first central banks were created. As prices for everything moved up workers soon found that their wages could not keep up with the cost of living so many decided to borrow even more money to keep their current lifestyle which only added to the fact that they were getting poorer. This meant that the gap between rich and poor kept rising over time and will continue to rise as long as the central bankers of the world are allowed to keep issuing fiat currencies with the full protection of legal tender laws. The elites with their monopoly on money creation were able to come up with a system that guaranteed that they would always increase their wealth and power at the expense of the poor and middle class with the full support of the socialist and general population.

What is so very sad about this is ALL fiat currency monetary system collapse when the debt loads of the population becomes so large that the elites will have no choice but to hyperinflated the money supply to try to stop massive bankruptcies and defaults of most of the general population, businesses and government. When, not if this hyperinflation happens the socialist will watch helplessly as all of the social programs they worked so hard to get from government disappear as the government goes bankrupt and the middle class is destroyed. This is the irony of today's situation for socialist, if we were still using a bimetallic monetary system today with individual freedoms and rule of law, there would still be some poor people but most of the working population would be middle class or higher. The catch is that in a bimetallic monetary system, government would not be able to borrow money at will like they do today so all the social programs it created would have to be paid for from the tax base. This would mean that there would be no or very few social programs for the poor because the taxes to pay for all the social programs we enjoy today would be so high that most of the population would refuse to pay such high taxes. Since this means that some people would be going hungry, all the socialist would be screaming for the government to do something like creating more social programs. The only way government could ever create enough social programs to help all of the poor without a horrendous tax rates on all workers of the country is for the government to go off a gold and silver monetary system and replace it with a fiat currency monetary system which is always controlled by the world's richest and most powerful people. A fiat currency system would allow the government to create all the social programs we want for the poor, but at a terrible price. That price is the fact that the elites will only increase their wealth and power under such a system at the expense of the poor and middle class and this would basically defeat the very goals of socialist for a more fair and equitable society. A fiat monetary systems based on debt will always eventually puts most of the population, cities and provincial governments in debt to the point that a financial and economic collapse is inevitable when the interest payments on the debt they accumulated bankrupts the entire economy. History shows us that the last gasp of a fiat monetary system that is heavily in debt is hyperinflation. When hyperinflation destroys the middle class by destroying the purchasing power of the fiat currency that the general population uses, the end game of the fiat monetary system has arrived. As prices begin to move up every hour of every day most of the population will eventually refuse to continue using the fiat currency and government will finally bankrupts itself and we will lose all of the social programs that the socialist worked so hard to get. So the end result is most of the population gets poorer, the elites get richer and we still end up with no social programs for the poor. Elites win, socialist and workers lose, game over!

Everything I wrote above takes many decades to work it way through so while one or two generation of the population get social programs for most of their lives the system is not sustainable over the long term and eventually all social programs we have today that socialist are so proud of will fail. My guess is we are only a few years away from the hyperinflation stage so this means that I expect most or all of the social programs that Canadian's enjoy today will disappear sometime between now and 2015

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

How cum?

It just hasn't happened yet.

Please read this short article

Deno

The Great German Inflation

As long as the inflation was working, socialist labor leaders and the socialists of the chair were all in its favor and taught that not the increase in quantity of money but the unpatriotic behavior of the profiteers was the cause of the depreciation of the Mark. After inflation was over they changed their minds. Now they accuse the "capitalists" of having of set purpose made the inflation to enrich themselves. For the German public mind every misfortune is due to the machinations of the "exploiter class."

Not everyone or even many in all cases, but I would not discount the growing discontent with the global middle class (well to upper class Canada in all but a few select neighbourhoods). Hyperinflation on a global scale will lead to a widening of socialist causes not their demise, because the problems are so "fucked up" that will lead to such a collapse that people will ask what more elitism will get them. The destruction of "elitism" will not bring the values that protect our current culture of elites (namely libertarianism).

I point to argentina because of its growing expropriation movement and turning the production wealth into common wealth. The principle underlies a lot of the co-operative industries.

Thanks for the well thought out response Hawkins

I disagree with your notion that Hyperinflation on a global scale will lead to a widening of socialist causes not their demise. When our fiat currency is worthless and cannot buy the food or energy we need to survive, people will only be interested on where their next meal is going to come from or how they will pay for the energy to heat their homes in winter, assuming they even have a home. People will not have the time or luxury to set up the next socialist paradise.

Our societies today are too specialized to allow the barter system to work well over time so some new currency that people can trust must be used so we have some kind of economy to feed and supply the necessities of life for the general population. The only money that has worked well over the last few millenniums is Gold and Silver, so the new currency must be backed by Gold. Since many of today's central banks like Canada's have sold most or all of their gold they held for the public trust to the elites, it is the elites who will be the ones to supply the gold needed back up the new currency on the condition that they continue to control the supply of the new currency. Nothing will change.

History shows us that dictators usually rise from the rubble of hyperinflation. Hitler, Napoleon, and Lenin are but a few.

On your last point on individualist, no socialist paradise will ever change humans from being a individualist which millions of year of human evolution made us today. This is the one point you lefties never seem to grasp, socialism or collectivism goes against human nature so it is always destined to fail. All people are always looking out for number 1, which is themselves and their families. This is just as true with socialist as it is with individualist

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Deno:
obscurantist

Please read this short article

Deno

web page

---

Deno,

No thanks

I make it a personal challenge to myself to read opinions and essays that are at polar opposite of my own view of the universe. I believe that if I only read opinions that agreed with me then I could never learn anything new. I know that I don't have all the answers so I'm willing to look at what the people that are oppose to my view have to say to see it they have an insight that I can learn from.

.Over the last year the money supply in Canada, as measured by M3, has increased by 9.8 percent. With all the media interest surrounding the increasing US money supply (4.3%), it is surprising that the Canadian increase, at more than twice the US level, receives little attention. What we do hear from the media is that core inflation rates for both countries, over the same time period, is increasing by less than 2 percent

What is the explanation for this disparity?

web page

If you go back to 1914 when the Bank of Canada was first created up until today, $100 of goods and service in 1914 cost $1802.86 today

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

quote:

---

On your last point on individualist, no socialist paradise will ever change humans from being a individualist which millions of year of human evolution made us today. This is the one point you lefties never seem to grasp, socialism or collectivism goes against human nature so it is always destined to fail. All people are always looking out for number 1, which is themselves and their families. This is just as true with socialist as it is with individualist

---

Huh boy, the human nature argument is so much bullshite. First of all whatever nature we had has been beaten to a coma by culture, language, and symbolic thought in general. 2nd point is that we are existential animals(even when we had a nature)
How else did we create this mess know as civilization in the 1st place. Anyway being existential means you can create whatever fucking reality you want. Many indiginouse societies of past and present do not correspond to what you view as "human nature". They've been collective societes forever. Peter Kropotkin did well to debunk this in his book "Mutual Aid". And even if you have an egoist perspective does not nessarily make you selfish. Max Stirner pointed this out. You look out for you 1st, but it can be in your self-interest to think about other living things.
I tend to think this way.

quote:

---

I know that I don't have all the answers

---

quote:

---

This is the one point you lefties never seem to grasp, socialism or collectivism goes against human nature so it is always destined to fail.

---

From this Corporate mentality(those who are placed in Government positions), exuberate the finer qualites of our human nature, to effect the publics view with "a slant" that might have been about the direction of sharing, in open borders?

You have to understand that the sigificance underlying change is held by those who carry the flame, for what ever direction society can be directed?

In this case the history of capitalism will have it's leaders, and those in the communities who support such enterprizes, without ever knowing that they are par and parcel of the fabric of idealization, no matter which way that thread runs. Become voices, of the corporate owned.

But truly what revolution might have changed the course of direction and break up of a society to have it come back one day in a different form. Better then it first began, and what form shall this venture take?

Will it include a religious tolerance? A recognition of the indivdual aspiration for developing a deeper truth to the nation of builders?

quote:

---

If you go back to 1914 when the Bank of Canada was first created up until today, $100 of goods and service in 1914 cost $1802.86 today

---

Well said!

I agree with you completely!

In many cases conservatives are much worst then socialist. George Bush is a good example of that.

I find both socialist and conservatives scary because they both use the power of the state to lie, cheat, and kill to get their way. Let the individual who's on the left or right that disagrees with them be damned.

The middle Class has been getting smaller and poorer for about 45 years now, but most of the loss has happened ever since Nixon took the world off the gold standard back in 1971.

Wages have not kept up with inflation. Today, in most cases it takes 2 incomes to keep a family of 4 or 5 in the status of middle class, back in 1950 it took one income. Even with 2 incomes many family are having trouble keeping their head above water so many are using the equity in their home or their credit card to pay for everyday living expenses.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Deno:
This a very interesting list, absodamnlutely. Funny how not even one social democratic state, not even that ugly vile "air conditioned Hell" the "totalitarian" state of Sweden, made it to the list of genocidal states.

How cum?

It just hasn't happened yet.

After the hyperinflation stage when most of the population is penniless and hungry, your so-called social democratic state will be bankrupt and turn into a totalitarian state. It does not matter is this new government is on the left or right they will begin to kill some of it's own citizens or the citizens of their neighbouring countries.

---

Sweden like all the countries in the world today uses a fiat monetary system that is controlled by the worlds riches and most powerful people. In the next few years all fiat currencies will begin to fail including the Krona. When this happens we will see if Sweden can stay civil to each other and their neighbors.

I hope you are right and I am wrong!

BTW obscurantist, check out this link, if your not too bored, that is.

quote:

---

The middle Class has been getting smaller and poorer for about 45 years now, but most of the loss has happened ever since Nixon took the world off the gold standard back in 1971.

---

The seventies did see it start to shrink, but many would dispute that the loss of the gold standard was the cause. Think OPEC cartel and the reversal of progressive taxation policies.
It was the very expansion of the welfare state in the 50's and 60's that forced the US and because of Bretton wood, the rest of the world off the gold standard in 1971.

The Oil shock of the early 70's were directly caused by the US moved to go off the gold standard. OPEC countries balked at using inflated dollars from the US.

The funny thing is OPEC is more responsible for the low oil prices of the 80's and 90's then any other group or cartel. The Oil shock of the 70's caused by OPEC and the US move to go off the gold standard moved the price of oil much higher then the fundamentals of supply and demand would of otherwise dictated. Even with a devaluing US dollar the oil price was much too high. This manipulated oil price of the 70's sent the private sector on a oil discovery and production binge that saw production of oil by the early 80's go through the roof and way ahead of world demand. It took up until this decade for demand to catch up with oil production. Today, demand for oil is now starting to exceed oil production so higher oil prices are here to stay.

Lard tunderin' jeesus please check out this website.

web page

Scholl down to the first chart of the CRB index. This chart is a commodity index that began in 1956.

When you look at the chart you will see that commodities prices were quite stable with a small deflationary biases up until 1971 when the US went off the gold standard. After 1971 up until today commodities have jump to a much higher trading range then anything seen before America went off the gold standard. Like oil, commodity prices shot up too fast and too high so by 1980 they were in a bubble that burst and sent commodity prices into a 20 year bear market. You can see by the chart that at the beginning of 2004 the CRB index has had a breakout of its 20 year bear market trading range and has continued trading up until today. This chart is a year old and today the CRB index is at 306.

Looking at this chart, do you really think that the huge move up in comodities in 1972 has nothing to do with the removal of the gold standard by the US?

Deno

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

Agreed

It was both spending on the military and social policy.

I should of added the military spending on the Viet Nam War and the Cold War.

In the early 60's they called it Johnson's policy of Guns and Butter.

Hawkins, thanks for bringing my omission to my attention.

Deno

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

This is the point Vigilante.

In a purely capitalistic system with zero social programs for the poor, the very rich elites eventually make all the rule which they make sure those rules are always for their benefit at the expense of the working class.

In a communist system like the old Soviet Union or in China today, it is the hierarchy of the party who makes all the rules and they also make sure that those rule are for the benefit of the leadership elites at the expense of the working class.

In a social democratic state like Canada or Sweden today, the welfare state could not exists without a fiat monetary system which is always controlled by the rich elites for their own benefit at the expense of the working class. In this case, the social democratic state seems to work well for most of the population until it collapse under the weight of the debt created by the fiat monetary system. The only people not affected by this collapse are the rich elites who protected themselves by buying all the gold they could before the collapse.

Under all three system the working person will always eventually lose.

Why?

Maybe, this is human nature at work.

There will always be a small percentage of the population that will do everything they can to manipulate, steal and control the rest of the population. This seems to happen no matter what kind of political system the population chose to govern themselves with.

There could never be a social paradise because human nature makes it impossible.

Even if some saintly man or women grab power and set up the perfect social paradise, it will only last as long as the saintly man or women stayed in power. The person who replaces the saintly person will pervert everything that person tried to achieve. Also the odd of some do gooder taking power is almost nil because they would not have the ruthlessness to make it through the human politics to grab power. Anyone able to grab power is anything but a saint.

Deno

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]

[ 27 July 2005: Message edited by: Deno ]