Greetings Economists, The small groups seem unable to match stability, and growth that religions often exhibit. On Aug 21, 2006, at 9:26 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Where socialists have not been successful, socialists tend to become unattached with one another and spend time trying to prove how much they are smarter, more radical, etc. than other socialists primarily and liberals secondarily -- a phenomenon known as sectarianism.
Secular organization that materially changes people's live for the better have a great deal to do with governmental support organization. I was reading about the Communist Fourth Army approximately 1938 to 1941 in which there was this chaotic atmosphere of different political, social, religious groups growing together in the regions around Shanghai. The communist had a reputation for being incorruptible, fair, liberating, providing tangible changes. Their left culture was vibrant and interesting. The communist went into the country side and rooted themselves in various strata of the countryside. Branch and cell structure and the civil war were very intense places for people's being to be tested about their commitment to material ideas. These days in the U.S. we get this sort of silly business about the Marxist religion. As if there was this sort of chapel where the Marxist went to pray. But they really mean the emotional commitment people feel to the socialist vision of the future of an equal society. The great Communist social movements were partly text based theory from the economic analysis of Marx onward, and the stupendous emotional intensity of the great wars. Could the Russian Communists have won their revolution without WWI? After WWII in the U.S. great social movements on the left were torn down, but the civil rights movement still sprang up. What was the 'secret' that the U.S. discovered here? I think the big media supplanted the meeting place as a place to disseminate knowledge. The auditorium, the work place meeting, the street corner rally all the many places where if you needed to talk to a lot of people at once, the Capitalist could do to millions at once on TV. It's form, it's knowledge supplanted day to day connection. Sitting there in front of TV everyone gained knowledge of a mass society. What is Socialist knowledge? Is it the texts? Is it the mass movement? Is it governmental power? Why can Nepalese communists root themselves in this very moment and grow and we can't? Aren't we able to see New Orleans as a massive organizational moment lost to Socialism? Functionally the Capitalist is bound to control business for profits sake. It is a dictatorship of the few against the many in which the weapons of coercion do work well to bust groups up in the here and now. But as Yoshie says above socialist spend their time fighting with each other, judging and comparing. Unable to take the raw material offered to us to build and unite. The great Capitalist media are one to many. They have already shown their opposition to networked information in their quest to protect intellectual property. The central aspect of the network information structure is human cohesion into social groups. The exchange of knowledge is a direct social threat to Capitalist Intellectual Property. If it were just training workers in math and science, in book learning, then the intellectual power is there in the working class. Yet as Yoshie says, we languish in petty 'EMOTIONAL' squabbles. Oh woe is us. We are beached and cannot find our way back to the sea of people. thanks, Doyle Saylor
