A whole…alternative?…world is watching.

And my small part of that hoped-for-alternative is assuming or at least hoping that these will address the ‘non-political-economic’ contradictions, such as patriarchy, militarism, anti-ecologism, racism, imperialism, statism, consumptionism (the really, really, popular commodity fetishism)…[fill this space].

And I am hoping, expecting, David’s Full Monty will be distinctly, dramatically, sharper than the waffle of the Kilburn Manifesto (written by people for whom I have individually the greatest respect). [Posted here because discusion is closed there].

Just as one example of this the first plank of the Communist Manifesto calls for the application of all economic rents to the public treasury. This is merely another way of saying we require the state not explicitly nor tacitly grant the ignoble powers to privately tax others through economic-rent-taking. In contrast capitalism surrenders to the corruption of capitalist ‘human nature’ by no longer demanding such strict adherence to the republican/democratic ideals of the bourgeois revolution. Once that corruption door is opened it leads to the pure corruption of capitalism.

So a socialist state deals effectively with the oft cited problem of ‘human nature’ (though I think we are really talking about the nature of humans coping with the pure corruption of capitalism). A capitalist state surrenders completely to the corruption of capitalism. It stops trying at all to confront such corruption. A socialist state both punishes capitalism, frowns upon capitalism, and thus allows the equality before the law and autonomous fulfillment of those no longer forced to cope with capitalism to flourish. The measures within a socialist state that rein in the capitalist abuses also make space for human beings to express a different side of their nature. In contrast a capitalist state both rewards the capitalist impulses (adverse incentive) and rewards the most sociopathic capitalists (adverse selection) and thus undermines the liberty of everyone else (with socialism we have nothing to lose but our chains).

In feudalism there were two ways to grant exclusive use of land. One way is to grant usufruct which is the mere use of the land. The other way is to grant title which grants the privilege to also take exchange value from use of the land (to sublet the land). In the bourgeois revolutions, that oft cited ‘human nature’ led us to mistakenly adopt a ubiquitous grant of title (which in the US is explicitly prohibited by our US Constitution), and instead have implicitly granted title in land. Such title in land encourages rampant rent-seeking and power-mongering and undermines the access to use the land.

Such economic rents amount to what we call in the US ‘taxation without representation’ and when such taxation is privatized it leaves the government to find new novel forms of taxation to replace that pilfering of the public treasury. End the granting of title and we recover for the public treasury an abundance that would allow at least a modest guaranteed income (though such a social welfare guaranteed income becomes largely unnecessary when we live up to the unbending republic ideals of such a socialist state).

Path to Prosperity for US All shows just one way to finish the job capitalism started for us: https://www.facebook.com/PathToProsperityForAll

Donnard White is asking why the twentieth century communist regimes were totalitarian. The truth is that communism only succeeded in countries where there was hardly any proletariat – something that is completely necessary according to Marx. They therefore had to create one quickly and that needed a great deal of coercion. This would not be necessary in the developed societies of the present. We need to look at why the left was only powerful in countries that were ill-suited to it.

In those times it was a case of capital vs. the state in a battle to control the economy. The fall of these ‘command economies’ seems to prove that state control doesn’t work. But what about the people? We should start a new struggle for control involving capital vs. the people: If the economy was democratised then it would not be the rich elite who controlled it but people in general, and it would be more likely to produce what people want, as David Harvey wants. It could be done by having co-op style memberships of large corporations to keep shareholders in check.

If anybody is interested in these ideas try http://www.therealcommunity.weebly

So if the fact that USSR and others were totalitarian makes any idea related to communism a totally stupid idea then why doesnt the fact that a large percentage of capitalist countries in africa and asia are nightmare totalitarian states make all ideas about capitalism stupid? Certainly average person in communist USSR (or USSR colonies like Checzoslovakia or East Germany) lived better than average person in capitalist african countries (or capitalist colonies like Honduras and Haiti or indeed huge swathes of the capitalist world) did or indeed does now. Everyone in communist Yugoslavia (before “market reforms” where they instituted forms of capitalism)certainly lived better than many people in developed countries. It is useful for propagandistic purposes to compare totally backward countries who are under constant attack by a coalition of worlds superpowers against said superpowers, who as a matter of course rob most of the world to get their wealth. Why not compare backward communist countries against backward capitalist countries? I would suggest that communist countries compared quite well. An excellent illustration is Russia, who, after switching from communism to capitalism took a nose dive in living standards of russians and never recovered.

That is not to say that communism as it was practiced in the USSR or similar countries is something to aspire to. But certainly specific ideas that communist countries preached (usually not practiced) are quite valid for debate.

Also i have found that constant references to “human nature” (which nobody in the world knows anything about) are just propagandistic bullshit. If there is anything that is known about human nature it is the fact that the way a person behaves is in a huge degree dependant on the circumstances of ones upbringing. In other words, if you live in a society where the dominant institutions (the market) promote greed and dishonesty then by process of natural selection people will be selected for those traits and thus those traits will be magnified. However if one would grow up in society whose institutions positively select for some positive traits like solidarity and emphaty then people those traits are going to be magnified. Certainly only an incredibly closed mind would argue that those different institutions should not be considered.