Marx was right that socialism (being unstable) is a transitional stage, but was wrong that it leads communism.
Few radical political promoters of the common good, having arrived in power, have the financial means necessary or the raw brute force at their disposal to actually buy or seize the means of production, much less ban private property.
It is then, only natural that they aim for something just as good, which is to control the means of production through government without the inconvenient need to actually acquire, own, or operate them.
That's fascism, the natural evolution of that form. Fascism is the leveraged-buyout version of socialism, socialism-on-a-budget. Affordable Socialism, to fit within the limited budgets of community organizers everywhere.
Former socialist Benito, founder of fascism, surely thought so.
Why would I even bother? FFS it's just a simple contraction of "British Exit" and only someone with the obtuseness of Bill Sloman would have difficulty with such a simple concept.
For every complex question there is a simple *WRONG* answer.
The problem is that they have said they want to "leave" but also want keep all the single market access that being a member of the EU gives. There is no way that the EU will permit that.
It is pretty much like demanding to be let into a club but refusing to pay the entrance fee to the doorman.
The turkeys voted for Christmas - now they will find out what it means!
Plenty of Brexiters them have voters remorse but it is too late now. (they only intended to give "The Establishment" a good kicking)
On Friday, September 16, 2016 at 6:09:32 AM UTC+10, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wr ote:
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Marx made a more serious mistake, in wanting to replace collective democrat ic control with the leading role of a properly indoctrinated party. This wa s widely regarded as misguided in 1870, when it got him thrown out of the i nternational socialist movement, long before "communism" meant what it does today. This all happened long after the historical period that interests J ames Arthur, so he doesn't know a thing about it.
Modern socialists have worked out that they don't have to. The free market optimises production pretty effectively. Natural monopolies have to be kept out of the free market, and things like health and education work rather b etter when collectively controlled and financed.
James Arthur is stuck with the idea that because the free market works tole rably well to optimise manufacturing and production (if regulated to preven t abuses), it works just as well everywhere else.
Modern socialists do aim to regulate the means of production, stopping them from degenerating into monopolies, or dumping poisonous wastes in the wate r supply, but controlling them requires much too much detailed information to be all that practical.
Not at all. Fascism subordinates the interests of the citizen to the intere sts of the nation state, which makes it one more form of oligarchy, not all that different from communism. The interests of the one-party nation state were of course defined by that single party, and the various communist par ties around the world have behaved remarkably like fascist parties.
Democratic socialism doesn't go in for one party states, and expects to see a variety of parties offering a variety of flavours of socialism from whic h the electorate is free to choose.
He stopped being a socialist before the latched onto the - pre-existing - n ationalist tradition. Even as a socialist he seems to have been communist-i nfluenced - "Mussolini continued to promote the need of a revolutionary van guard elite to lead society."
You do seem to be addicted to the idea that communists are socialists. Comm unism is a perversion of the basic ideas of socialism, in that it sets the communist party apart from - and above - the rest of society.
Somebody who thinks that the people that own the USA ought to run the USA i s of course subscribing to the same kind of authoritarian nonsense, but Jam es Arthur should be able to realise that there are anti-authoritarians arou nd, and you can run a country in a way that makes the ruling elite answerab le and responsive to the will of the people.
It does help if you spend more than the US does on educating everybody, and if you spread out the money that you do spend on education so that most of it doesn't end up getting spent on the children of the rich. US education standards are notoriously variable, and Trump's supporters do seem to have got the wrong end of that particular stick.
It was made perfectly clear from the outset that if we left the EU, we'd no longer have access to the single market. We chose to leave in spite of that threat. I know what the government is up to. They are doing what they claim for once: trying to get the best possible deal out of leaving. There's nothing wrong with that. But if at the end of the day there remains *one single shred* of supranationality we have to accept in return for single market access either in whole or in part, then it's a price *not* worth paying. And I would remind you that the British people have already made their minds up on that. But I wouldn't be one bit surprised if the EU caves in, because everyone knows tariffs and trade barriers would hit THEM far harder than they would hit us. That is the one silver lining to our balance of payments deficit cloud!
I know that you are in the business of being totally obtuse, but internatio nal cooperation is a necessary part of international trade. If the UK wante d to exist in isolation, without imports or exports, it could eliminate eve ry single shred of supranationality, but it couldn't mount a credible milit ary defense if it went down that route.
The EU was being painted as imposing more regulations than you liked, but i f you want international trade, you are stuck with international standards, and you were better off negotiating as a member of a substantial trading b lock than you are going to be on your own.
The British people have been lied to by a bunch of particularly irresponsib le self-promotors, who got a whole lot of publicity out of persuading some of the voters to vote against their own best interests, then bailed out as soon as they'd had their symbolic triumph.
The EU is about 500 million people, and the UK as whole (and Scotland and N orthern Ireland both voted to stay in the EU) is about 64 million.
Losing the UK market is going to lose the EU a lot less business than the U K is going to sacrifice by dropping out of the EU.
The EU is still going to be close to being biggest single market on the pla net - the Chinese GDP may be marginally larger, but there's not a lot in i t - and the UK is just 15% of that.
Having free access to a large market lets you tool up for high volume manuf acturing - manufacturing ten times the volume typically lets you halve the unit price - and whatever the UK might have been making in that kind of vol ume is going to be a lot harder to move, and the cheap Italian washing mach ines you are used to buying are now going to be stuck with import duties to protect your tiny washing machine sector (or as much of it as survived Tha tcher).
You can dream of the EU "caving in" but it isn't going to happen - it's big and you are small.
If you want to limit your market to just one country. US companies always had a big local market with common rules (think UL,...). The EU created a similar large market (even bigger than the US by population) by unifying the rules. And most rumors about overregulation where just rumors and FUD.
Why would the U.K. be in any way limited? ISTM that people in other countries who previously wanted U.K.-made goods would still want the same fine products, and be as eager to buy them as before.
What you're describing is the EU becoming a club whose new purpose is not unifying Europe by facilitating friendly trade, but dividing it by excluding non-members.
I don't know enough to comment on the EU. Here in the U.S., virtually
100% of the people who dismiss the notion of over-regulation have never read a single regulation, and would have a stroke if they tried.
(One regulation can go one for a hundred pages of complex tests, requirements, and legalese, with heavy penalties for mistakes.)
True, but more often used to divide X into X and X'.
My comment, in this case, was confined to the overreach or non-overreach of the E.U.'s regulations regime.
It's bizarre to think a 60-odd million seafaring people with a thousand+-year history suddenly need a dimwitted-distant nanny to run their lives, so that they can ... trade?
But I think you've answered that--it's not that you need a nanny, but fear not being part of a club devoted to punishing non-members.
Shrug; so what? Brexit screws the UK in many ways; that's merely one.
Besides it is neither spiteful nor unnecessary, for several reasons. It is merely good capitalism in action.
Nope.
Once we were more advanced than other nations in terms of knowing how to exploit knowledge and natural resources to our advantage. With commendable and reprehensible tactics we turned that into imperial power.
But now other nations have learned from us, we no longer stand out from the pack. We are just another small nation on an island. Now we need all the friends/allies we can get.
Well, since Maggie has destroyed much of the UK industry to replace it by money trading, there are not so many "fine products" anymore.
So you mean every golf club has to welcome anybody even if he does not contribute the the maintenance of the green? You seem be a socialist :-)
I'm in the avionics business. I know how complex and strict regulations can be. And since I also often fly I am happy that is so because I want to get down to earth again in one piece.
I am also glad that I do not have to certify my equipment in every European country but can go to EASA and have a certification valid in whole Europe. Having an EASA certification will usually even be recognized by the FAA without much hassle. Having a string European organization helps with this. Otherwise each small country has to deal with the subtle US protectionism.
The British aren't short of home-grown fatheads, and supplied an appreciable proportion of the Brussels fat-heads.
Cursitor Doom wouldn't be surprised, because he seems to get his information from the Daily Telegraph, who know that the right-wing lame-brains who are silly enough to read it don't want information but rather a steady supply of soothing nonsense.
Everybody else knows that the UK hasn't got much to bargain with. It's got 64 million people, and not all that much manufacturing. The EU has has 440 million people and the French and German manufacturing industries.
The UK used to make a lot of money out of financial services, but put them on the wrong side of a tariff barrier and nobody is going to use them.
Of course. Nothing has actually happened yet. It is useful to think about what might happen, if UK's politicians haven't got enough sense to find a way to weasel out of doing what the voters told them to do.
That's a very polite way of describing it! I'd say Sloman's spouting his usual brand of ignorant and ill-informed anti-British hogwash. Nothing would please the mean-minded and ill-wishing Sloman more than to see the UK plunged into third world levels of poverty as a consequence of leaving his precious Marxist superstate, the EU. Sadly for Sloman and his ilk, though, it's simply not going to happen.
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