We've Been Here Before... And Fixed It Before...

[WillyT]

[msongs]

1. then "I welcome their hatred" now "bipartisan" nt

[cthulu2016]

2. So what is our WWII?

[Jackpine Radical]

3. The climate/energy crisis.

Put people to work building a 21st-century infrastructure. Our need for collective action is actually much greater than in 1941-45.

[limpyhobbler]

6. yep now we just need to convince our "leaders"

good answer, the solution is really staring us in the face isn't it. Nothing blocking it except politics and I guess the chamber of commerce etc.

[Betty Karlson]

9. God bless you for saying that! n/t

[tk2kewl]

10. Imagine.

What did the GAO audit of the Fed say? Something like a total of $27 Trillion given away or loaned with little or no interest. Imaging if all of that cash had been spent on 21st Century energy and technology infrastructure. Wow.

[99Forever]

17. A simple and esquisite solution ..

.. that stands almost no chance of seeing the light of day under our current political structure.

Perhaps American Spring will change that dynamic.

[jwirr]

19. Totally agree. If we do not start with that 21st infrastructure we are going to be in deep trouble.

[Vanje]

4. Do you know Dorthea Lange's photograph project

...was funded by the WPA.

[unionworks]

5. Occupy 2012! n/t

[getdown]

7. those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it

[Sherman A1]

8. Precisely

[socialist_n_TN]

11. True. But for how long was it "fixed"?......

And if the "fixing" wears off in a few years, is it really "fixed"? Do you really want to saddle your children and grandchildren with "fixing" it again in a couple of decades?

[Jackpine Radical]

12. That option may not even exist

if we don't get it at least half-assed right in the next decade.

We can't afford to keep maintaining the soulless, insatiable parasites at the top of the pyramid any more. We need those resources in order to put the biosphere on a sustainable footing--a goal that is absolutely antithetical to the designs of Big Everything.

[socialist_n_TN]

23. Agree. It's become a life and death struggle for the entire

human race. If we don't get it right this time, we might not have another chance.

[lunatica]

15. Except the "fix" did work and didn't wear off

It was systematically dismantled. Different.

[socialist_n_TN]

22. Nope not different. That's what capitalism DOES...

systematically dismantle any restraints put upon it. As blind pig said downthread, both Roosevelts thought they had "fixed" it and both were wrong over the long term. It will NEVER stay "fixed".

So that brings us back to my question. Do you want your children and grandchildren to be fighting this battle in a generation or two?

[Jackpine Radical]

24. think that the fundamental problem lies in a realm beyond

the doctrines of socialism, liberalism, or any other political "fix." Almost any hierarchy seems to become dominated by power-junkies, regardless of their nominal ideology. Witness the history of the Soviet Union, or of China. No matter how democratic and humanistic Marx might have been, those acting in his name have often perverted ins teachings.

Autocrats of all stripes love centralization, at least up to the level just beneath them, and seek to pull power away from the people and political structures under them.

In too many cases, the following model applies:

Marx:Marxists::Christ:Christians

I have been preaching the virtues of leaderless organizations here, and have been watching the worldwide popular movements of the past year. What I see is a global populace using new tools such as the social media in uniting, informing itself, and initiating a loosely coordinated series of actions. There is no strongly hierarchical organization, there are no permanent leaders, but there is a group decision-making process. There is planning. People see what needs to be done, and do it, be it setting up an aid station, distributing food, or cleaning up litter.

I think we are nowhere near discovering the potential power that springs from universal one-to-many communication, in which any person with an idea can communicate it to others, and watch it go viral if people start finding merit in it. In fact, the whole movement rests largely upon this power.

Socialism to me means an equitable distribution of both goods and power. In the past, attempts to enact socialist policies have always relied upon centralized power in the hands of a few leaders--in other words, a power structure not too different from those of the capitalist countries. Both the capitalist and socialist power structures severely limit the freedom of the ordinary person.

The leaderless direct democracy exists in direct contradistinction to the hierarchical model of organization that has been typical of human societies for the past several thousand years.

In fact, I think that the new leaderless organizations may best be compared to a number of pre-agricultural societies, such as those of the woodland Indians of North America. Among many of these tribes, the leaders had no institutional power beyond that of persuasion. A given person might develop a reputation as a good leader of war parties, and people might look to him when it came time to raid an enemy. He would lay out his scheme for battle and everyone would talk about it, making modifications based on suggestions from the group members. If you didn't like the resulting plan, you were free to express your differences, and, ultimately, you were free to go your own way if you could not resolve those differences. Leadership was not a paid position. A good leader was simply someone who could get most people to accept his ideas. In daily life, he lived in the same way as everyone else, engaging in the same economic activities and suffering the same hardships.

Historically, that sort of direct participatory democracy could only function in small groups because people needed to meet face-to-face. The advent of agriculture pretty much destroyed this type of democracy, for two reasons, both related to the increased availability of food. First, the population increased beyond a size that could comfortably meet and confer, and (much more importantly), the extra food meant that not everyone had to spend all their time trying to feed themselves, so some leisure time became available. Priesthoods and monarchies arose based on the new infrastructure. The priests specialized in acquiring (real or imagined) knowledge, and the monarchs specialized in building power structures and regulating the lives of their subjects. Sometimes the priests and rulers were one and the same, and sometimes the roles were separated, but they always stood in alliance, reinforcing and checking each other's power.

Modern government descends from the social structures and social assumptions that arose with the advent of agriculture. All such governments are hierarchical in nature, and tend to be marked by imbalances in information flow. That is, the rulers and priests controlled access to information through one-to-many communication devices, while the peasantry were limited to (at most) one-to-one (or at best, one-to-a-few) communication with each other, and only very limited forms of communication with their rulers and priests.

The Industrial Revolution that began in the 18th Century is often cited as the next phase after the Era of Agriculture. I think this is a somewhat overblown notion because while the advent of the machine did shift power balances around somewhat among the ruling classes, it did not fundamentally change the hierarchical, centralized nature of social organization--except, in some ways, to facilitate its development and amplify its scale. The same pattern of one-to-many communication for the powerful and one-to-one communication for the masses persisted.

Only now, in the Information Age, is this ancient model starting to break up.

I see the Occupy movement as the first, embryonic stirrings of a totally new mode of social organization that will bring global changes to the species that are at least as significant as the changes that occurred with the Agricultural Revolution.

I believe that the advent of mass one-to-many communication in the hands of the people will permit us to recapture the advantages of tribal self-government, to break down the walls of hierarchy, and institute a species-wide, totally democratic network of self-governance unlike anything the world has ever seen.

[socialist_n_TN]

25. There's a principle of most communist groups .....

called "democratic centralism". I'm sure you're familiar with it Jack, but for those who aren't, in a nutshell, it means that the members of the vanguard party engage in THOROUGH debate over principles for as long as it takes to decide an issue by a majority vote. THEN after the issue is decided, the members support the position that was debated on and passed by a majority vote. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT THE ISSUE IS NECESSARILY OVER. It can always be brought up again at the next meeting. The minority opposition ALWAYS has the freedom and resources necessary to bring it to the table again. At least that's the way it is SUPPOSED to work. This means that the vanguard is NOT a rubber stamp for a single leader, but is the true representative of the working class. The ideas bubble up from the bottom and the vanguard helps to implement them.

In bureaucratic centralism (of a Stalinist model), the bureaucracy decides FOR the party and debate and disagreement can be cut off and even punished. IOW, bureaucratic centralism is a top down model. Democratic centralism is bottom up. The "democratic" part shares a lot with anarchists. But both are needed. Without the dicipline of the "centralism" nothing will get done, not the least of which would be defending a revolution from a capitalist counterattack. The democratic part would confine positions to those agreed upon by the majority of the working class and COULD BE CHANGED AT ANY TIME THE MAJORITY CHANGED IT'S MIND.

I also see where this part could work even better today than in the past because of the ease of communication in today's wired in world.

[blindpig]

13. And now we gotta fix it again.....but the fix never really takes.

Teddy Roosevelt thought he had fixed it...

FDR thought he had fixed it....

But ya can't fix capitalism, it's deficiencies are endemic, as long as it is standing it will come back for the whole ball of wax, as it has.

When the fix just won't take it's time to scrap the mutha and get something different.

[getdown]

14. the fix is in

the system

but the people never really "take" responsibility for their own and their government's actions.

How to fix that.

[lunatica]

16. The fix took. That's why it was systematically dismantled over 30 years.

A surgeon can fix you but if someone comes along and cuts the stitches open and infects the wound it's not the surgeon's fix that was defective.

[blindpig]

18. That definition of insanity....

the one about doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.....

and the fix never took. Ten years after the active phase of the New Deal and Taft-Hartley was enacted, and here we are today. The capitalists will never accept regulation, it is antithetical to their enterprise, they must necessarily seek every advantage, lest their competitors steal a march on them. It is imperative that we end this anti-human, anti-ecological organization of production, it corrupts all it touches.

[WillyT]

20. So I Guess We Gotta Fix Capitalism... The Same Way You Fix A Dog...

Dog still functions, but in a mild-mannered way.

[rustydog]

21. We need to rebuild our infrastructure, roads, bridges, dams..renewable energy etc

Representative Jay Inslee's book: "Apollo's Fire" has some excellent ideas for rebuilidng America.

We built ourslves out of a great depression, we can do it again.