Gerard says: Right comrades what do you think of this. It's a planned alternative that I dug up from some irish socialists but since we're all looking for a way out from capitalism I dont think labels are important.Me: I thought it was a combination of good stuff and some stuff that needs rewriting.
Socialists: *All foreign ownership of land would be banned and any such would be owners as now exist would have their land taken from them.
Me: What I would understand is that foreign ownership implies giving power to people who follow some high-consumption, predatory way of life, power that belongs to a better community, and that's why some people would see it as a bad thing. "Foreign ownership," according to this idea, means ownership of localities by conspiracies of foreign capitalists. I have no idea what it means for socialists to pander to sentiment against "foreign ownership" in Ireland, however. Here in America, we Euro-Americans have problems admitting that we're the descendents of "foreigners," especially when we put on the pretenses of nationalism in order to exclude new immigrants from the American "melting pot."
Socialists: *All farming land would be run by co-operatives functioning independentally from the state along the lines of need.
Me: Now this looks like the real meat and potatoes of this socialist idea. (I have no idea how it would happen without the mass revival of an agrarian consciousness of some sort -- hopefully we could be organized into co-operatives, so that somebody would be there to start planting when spring came.) It is the cheap, market-produced food of the monopoly capitalists that creates the market conditions for the subordination of the countryside to the city, a subordination that needs to end if we're to have a sustainable society. It is the worldwide spread of resource-intensive methods of agriculture (and dislocation of family farms) that lays the ground for class struggles, eco-disasters, and the slum-ification of the world today. Think, citizens: if you had control over where your food was coming from, maybe you would have a lot more power to tell the boss to get lost, wouldn't you? These people have a clue.
Recommending, as these people did, that society "cut greenhouse emissions" and "halt deforestation," is not going to create a sustainable society all by itself. The people who met in Kyoto last year had no clue, therefore, as to how to create such a society, because AT THE MOST the smokestacks and the trees was all they were talking about, nothing real about ceding social control to democracy in order to prevent eco-collapse. It has to be done democratically, not hysterically. Here's an economic summit that might help straighten things out.
Socialists: *There would be widespread nationalisation of main industries and financial institutions; Personal ownership of industrial or commercial companies outlawed, the only means of opting out from state control would be by way of adopting co-operative organisation.
: *The system of government would be decentralised, with administrations working for a central governing body; this body may be democratically elected following a transitional period.
Me: These look to me like administrative mandates that are going to run afoul of each other. What if your decentralized government did not agree on how "personal ownership of industrial or commercial companies" was to be outlawed? Decentralism means taking power away from the industries and giving it to the communities, to be sure -- however, the question then becomes, "who is the community?" So I just see this stuff as re-administering the political terrain for social complaints without really solving the problems of how communities are to "come together" under the conditions of (dying) late capitalism.
I'll skip the rest of it, as I think the public would have to come to certain conclusions about their fates under capitalism, to make any sense of it at all. Oh, yeah, and when you want to set up a new syndicate to take over for the old one, you want to make sure your new syndicate isn't an evil one.
None.
