what are you trying to prove with your insults Doug? are you implying the impossibility of a socialist agenda? who is fantasizing here? nobody is suggesting a _blue print_ for the future, as far as I can tell. Marx did not suggest either. Politics is a day to day struggle and what we can do is to take advantage of the circumstances in the context of limited resources available to us. In order to do that, once should first understand what the problem with the present system is. with of all its inequalities, declining living standarts, mass consumption, wars, diseases, nuclear power plants, sexism, racism, the system sucks by any human standarts. It is unsustainable from a political as well as a scientific point of view. Capitalism is the most unsustainable system that the world has witnesssed so far. Isn't an alternative system already implicit in the realities of our system and aren't the people have been taking action (and actually TOOK action in the past)? OH but NO socialist revolutions are a bounch of elite conspricies!! as for others too, people have been discussing for hours here whether it is "desirable"? or whether it is "necessary"? or whether it is "imaginable" to talk about socialism. Complete waste of time and pessimism of the intellectual. YES all of them! Too much semantics kills political praxis, and this is one of the reasons why the US left is so messed up, thanks to legacy of american individualism. divide and rule. We folks at least agree on the principles and take the necessary steps to bring about a certain set of agenda.. well, I think, you should read the post once again! and please leave aside your liberal bias for a while.. btw, it does not matter _where_ one lives-- Manhattan, Istanbul, Alaska, Dubai, Virgin Islands-- as long as one is critical of the system. Marxism is not limited to physical location. It is a universal world view....This sort of red-baiting reminds of the assults directed to third world progressives (Samir, Said, etc...) on the assumption that they can not be critical of US imperialism while living in the US. Mine Louis P wrote: >>The disappearance of fossil-based fuels is a whole other story. My guess is >that a radically different kind of life-style will be necessary in the >future for the survival of humanity. I don't think that this will be >palatable to many of the people who post regularly to PEN-L, who seem >rather committed to the urban, consumerist life-style found in the >imperialist centers. For those of us who have read and admired William >Morris, these alternative prospects might seem more attractive. I think >that people will democratically elect a new life-style based on the premise >of greatly expanded leisure time, less regimentation, decreased risks to >health and closeness to nature. Of course some socialists will continue to >see socialism as an extension of capitalist civilization with the working >class at the steering wheel instead of the bourgeoisie. But that's been a >problem for Marxism since the 19th century. >It's weird to hear this coming from someone who lives & works on Manhattan Island, but I'll leave that aside for now, along with my suspicion that a lot of this is the fantasy of an exhausted and alienated urbanite. >I don't see how you can achieve a William Morris-y arts & crafts lifestyle with a global population of 6 billion people. Maybe I'm wrong. If I'm not wrong, what is the ideal population, and what will happen to all the surplus billions? Doug
