What does Socialism look like to you?

[tama]

40. May your wish come true :)

I've lived in ecovillages and studied permaculture (in the wide sense) so I have some idea of what you are talking about. And I like the vision of Garden Planet very much.

But back to the theme of this group. First, as theory socialism has been and is open to further theorizing, and from it's material foundation also Marxist socialism could be and should be developed to better respond to material limits of growth and the ecological challenges of these days.

As my basic progressive and revolutionary political philosophy is to avoid dystopian present and futures and to be open - in the spirit of continuous revolution - to various Others, I'm not opposing socialism or various socialist developments, and I'm generally supportive of better real life progressive examples such as Kerala, Cuba and recent Latin American socialist revolutions and Iceland etc. European revolutions, which have complex relations to local indigenous sustainable ways of life and their "primitive" communism/anarchy. Though not always unproblematic, these revolutions have been generally positive steps from the indigenous point of view.

Material growth as such is no more problem than child growing to into adult, after which there is qualitative change in the nature of growth, and e.g. Cuba's GDP is still well below global averadge. The most positive side has IMHO been that in Cuba the transition into sustainable organic agriculture has been done with initiative and support from the state, where as according to permaculturalist experiences capitalist states are anything but supportive but tend to create lot's of obstacles against founding more ecovillages and establishing sustainable practices. Ecuador's new constitution was the first to grant constitutional rights to Pacha Mama and those speaking for her, though there is now lot of tension between government (representing mostly the urban population) and indigenous rural peoples. The urban-rural divide (reflecting the deeper culture-nature divide) remains materially, spiritually and politically unsolved both in practice and at the level of socialist theory.

But urban population and consumerist attitudes will not just go silently away, and ecovillages and sustainable communities also realize we are all in the same boat, and even if you live in an ecovillage does not mean that you are not also part of the "Babylon" and all this collective insanity. As the Lakota prayer says, this is about all our relations.

I believe I'm speaking for many in this group when I say that red and green and black anti-capitalist forces - reformist and revolutionary socialists, anarchists, etc. are all always present in various mixtures in progressive anti-dystopian revolutions and developments, and our worst enemy is often ourselves, factionalism and too narrow dogmatism which keep us divided.