: Let's start with:: : The world is filled with people who are jerks regardless of thier political persuasion....
: Hardened cynicism *yawn*. It became hip in the '80s, another product of capitalism.
Perhaps a quick whip through each entry you have provided may be a nice start for you to re-evaluate your own...or perhaps you are too busy staring into the clouds dreaming up clever ways re engineer us all.
: :and I am tired of everyone who says that this is an indication of an oppressive regime or ideology that does not care about people.
: This, friends, is what Freud would call "transference." Blame others for accusing one of having an "ideology that does not care," after saying in the same breath that "the world is full of jerks." Kevin may be hardened and cynical, but it is the fault of others that he is hardened and cynical, for they accuse his attitude of being uncaring.
Yap yap yap...time to revisit your text book. It is nice to see that you can take things out of context and place them back into an argument that serves your own purposes.....not a unique character trait...yet I am sure that hitler was looking for a few good men like yourself. Either that or you should cite certain sections from the bible and preach on what they mean out of context for us. The point was that regardless of what political system you are discussing, the perceptions of many people will be invariably diverse....we all have different ideas, perspectives and views....to me a great guy is a jerk to you.......starting to follow?
: :I never had anything given to me.....I had to go to school take loans, and go to the library and read and grow my perspective and work part time jobs and live in crowded apartments to achieve a standard of living I am proud of.....You don't think because I went through this I can not appreciate the value of hard work, sacrifice and drive to accomplish?
: I'm sure that many people who contribute to this Debating Room would salute the value of hard work, for they are especially interested in those who work hard yet don't have a "standard of living."
Read what I said again and try to make some sense of it....not all of us wasted a portion of our life on a rent protest for some misguided idealism and well developed anger......what did you accomplish, other than reinforcing your own perceptions of repression.....did I tie a brick to your ass and tell you that that is the best you can do? It is like any other system sammy....you need a blacksmith, a barber, etc....
: (skipping)
: : I feel bad that you experienced that, and it must have been a lonely time. Yet to arrogantly say that capitalism creates so few personalites worth meeting speaks highly of your attitude and bias than any truth....to see your point..every socialist I talk to is so out of touch with reality, they are boring.
: Which of course explains why Kevin likes to have endless e-mail debates with people whom he thinks are "socialists." Come on, Kevin, despite your protests that we're all "boring," you at least like to chat with us. Admit it.
Some more than others.......:
: American capitalist society has turned out cookie-cutter consumers, and it is a byproduct of a previous longing of mine to escape from this reality that I find it boring. They all like driving in their cars to the mall, buying things, storing things in their homes, they like going places (and being tourists), they like working and getting paid (in jobs they perform like good bureaucrats) in order to support the scary realities of rent, or of real estate finance... none of these cookie-cutter consumers are "bad people" for liking these things, and for forming the modern version of Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD in the process, it's just that, from where they stand, there's nothing else to do. The commonly perceived need for spirituality in American life is a response to the boredom imposed on people in the form of the "consumer lifestyle" which they perceive little choice in adopting. One can see this pattern thoroughly documented in sociological ethnographies such as Bellah et al.'s HABITS OF THE HEART.
Oh bullshit....just because you have decided to pick up a book that fits well into your context does not mean that you are correct...It is funny and ironic that you have all this passion for marx and his theories, when you continually speak of the average mindless citizen who just gets up and kisses his wife and eats his cornflakes and heads into work for another day of kissing peoples asses. Unlike you, I know that this is not the reality....There are many people who actually like their job, are challenged by it, and enjoy the people they work with...a novelty for you, considering you have gotten us all figured out. I imagine every time you see a family in a mini van you must cringe. That is the sad and boring tone of all of your arguments...that they are flowered by such a passion, based in your own ingorance and very basic, generic, and (sorry buddy but its there) cynical view of life in capitalist utopia.
Your experience with what you beleive to be capitalism only proves to me that you watch too much tv, and at the same time are under the dellusion that your talents and skills are worth more than they really are.....It must be difficult to watch all of these rotten, silly, misinformed consumers exercising their rights when you seem to know what is not only best for them, but best for all of us.....what is the difference from this indoctrination and the one you will provide? Oh yeah....I forget we all get to seek glorious ideas as one......get real...If I want to get off my ass and go and buy a mini van, it is not because I like the commercials, or I associate success with the van, or I like chrysler, or Ford, or my neighbour has one....I will get one because they are roomy and I have three kids.....go figure...I suppose when you start to think that people who go out to work each day, and do mindless petty tasks in the bureacracy you speak of, can actually make an intelligent decision that is well informed.....sorry to let you down buddy, but your view of the world and its evils seem to have more to do with YOUR attitude about them.....
: :The glorious idealism and morality of this imaginative system appeals to the heart strings of youth, yet is unachievable politically or economically. One of the things that everyone forgets is that an economy has to be viable to afford social programs....if the society is not wealthy it can not afford to have social programs.....
: Karl Marx has beaten Kevin to this last argument by a few decades. Sure, socialism would require wealth. But since capitalism has, up to now, overproduced and overconsumed gross material wealth (while denying it to the world's majority) however, they type of wealth especially needed at this time (for that 5/6th of the world's people who don't go to sleep hungry each night) is a wealth of the imagination. Socialism couldn't happen as a "social program," at any rate, so if we have the least interest in socialism as a subject to be explored, we need to toss out "social programming" as an option.
And when you even begin to understand how to tackle your option? Who decides what is fair? Who distributes? Who manages this economy and factor utilization? Who decides what we should each have? Who will instruct us to accept this ideology? Who sets prices? How do we deal with cultural issues?...when you are ready to get out of the clouds and get into the details.....get going.
: All of Kevin's following arguments presume laws of property, money, and government power, things Marx wanted to abolish, as such laws enslave people to "their" things, to exchange values, and to bureaucratic status. Whereas Marx, on the other hand, wished that humanity would be FREE of these things -- he thought that when we were free of the whole power trip, work would be fun, giving would be easy, and power-trips would merely discredit their trippers. Social programs, on the other hand, would require a hierarchy of social programmers and social programmees, the concept of redistribution would require laws of property requiring us to own and hold "our" possessions (and in this regard it might be said that "our" possessions have us) so that they could be "redistributed" to others for "their" ownership and holding. This is what provides the kernel of truth to Kevin's assertion that redistribution is difficult. An alternative to property might be material democracy, which would take on an economic form if, perhaps, it were arranged as a cooperative of work cooperatives.
: To make a serious vision of socialism happen, we would not only need to imagine a society that would create bonds of mutual trust without laws enforcing property, money, and government power, we would need to imagine that such a society would also create the material wealth that people need.
: As regards needs, the truly imaginative people today are the world's working poor, for they have scaled back their idea of "needs" to the essentials of life. The working poor may need a more imaginative idea of what counts as a job, but this they've mastered. Michael Jordan might think he needs a $31 million annual salary and a $40 million contract with Nike, but such a thought is itself a byproduct of the high-intensity material consumption and concentration of wealth of the capitalist system, the same system that allows Nike to pay its workers, especially those in Asia, nearly nothing, and sell shoes to kids on the south side of Chicago for $90 a pop, which they kill each other for.
Boo hoo.....The way to get the poor back to work and have them help themselves is to assist in the development of the economy so that they have the opportunity to develop themselves and their country...And no, my blindly idealist and trajically therhetical pal..this does not mean working in a field for two dollars a month.....this is about establishing an infrastructure in which people can take pride in what they do and exercise thier individual rights....it is no secret why mexican immigration is an issue...it is because all jobs in the mexican economy are underdeveloped as governments like this attempted to exercise all the control you talk about.....she don't work baby...the best way to help the poor is to give them the tools to develop their own countries and achieve their goals, beit socialist (japan)....you are fighting a losing war sammy.......sounds like you may have a great book to write one day....yet you are not the only one on the planet that has read das kapital, and the communist manifesto and been affected by its charms......you will soon see that your idealism is respected over here, but your notion of how much control you can impose on anyones beleifs or nature are well outside your control.....why do you think lenin forced the revolution.....it surely was not because he thought it was coming round the corner any time soon......why do you think he thought that....put it together.
