h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The peoples revolution is evolution in progress. Money is being devalued by inflation, we once thought in thousands and dreamed of millions. The billion is now the order of the day as we move towards multicultural capitalism.
Developed nations could move towards decapitalisation by organising all public services on voluntary basis.

"we once thought in thousands and dreamed of millions. The billion is now the order of the day"

Well, for some of us, it is. For others, millions is still dreamland. And for still others, it doesn't really matter, because you get the advantages of the private sector when the going is good, and the advantages of being propped up with tax-payers money when you feck it all up.

"Developed nations could move towards decapitalisation by organising all public services on voluntary basis "

Yep, some of them even seem to be trying to.

Sounds a bit like you are a revolutionist in waiting KB. <.smiley>
There will always be 'them' who will never go with us.
Capitalism has evolved out of need, it is corrupted by want..

Hee hee. Yes, I did mean China - but the US may well count as an example. Higherst equality rate in the developed world. World's highest per capita incarceration rate.

Pause for thought?

I suspect the revolution will have to wait until the latest Eastenders or Coronation Street episode has aired, and then again there is Britain's Got Talent and The Voice to run, the Football season has yet to finish and then there will be the European Championships. Then we of course shouldn't forget the Olympics and then there is Level 4 to go through in the latest Grand Theft Auto edition and ... and ...

Revolutions are, indeed, messy things and prone to disaster. Please don't think that I advocate them.

However...under certain conditions, as we've seen recently, they are bound to happen. And to some extent, surely we regard this as 'A Good Thing'. On balance do we approve or disapprove of the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan revolutions?* It's an interesting question whether we should we disapprove of Iran's 1979 revolution against a viciously autocratic regime on the grounds that it was suborned by something equally to the distaste of Iranian citizens?

Perhaps the trick is to aim to avoid revolution. One way to do this is by oppression. Another is via reform - and this takes us back to the question of to what extent Capitalism is reformable?

I would fully accept that there is a good handful of Capitalist nations in which life is tolerable or better for the vast majority of citizens. However, the economies of these is dependent on their position within a globalised, competitive market. Are the Market conditions sustainable? Or are there instabilities within global Capitalism that sometimes spill out into revolutionary change? Something to consider is that the Arab Spring was triggered by speculations on the commodities market.

Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight because fruit was too expensive, not because he fed up with the state media's editorial line.




Where was Marx on the desirability of revolution? Well he and Engels gor quite excited about the abortive, Europe-wide revolutions of 1848 but they were always behind the curve. These revolutions did achieve regime change in various places, but never quite the 'bourgeois revolution' that they anticipate. Perhaps there's an analogy with Egypt here: revolutionaries don't always get the new regimes they expect.**

I'd summarise Marx's stance as saying that revolutions are things that happen due to socio-economic conditions. When they happen, they're an opportunity for the politically minded to push things in desired direction

And this is where Lenin was coming from. Neither 1905 nor 1917 were a mass clamour for Bolshevism.

Also - Revolutions don't automatically make things better. The future has to be built out of the past. Lenin didn't listen to this part.







* How about the French Revolution? 'It;s too early to say,' - Zhou En-Lai.

** @Xan: I'm yet to me convinced that the Muslim Brotherhood's success in Egypt is a total disaster. While I'm by no means a supporter, they have given every indication so far as not the demented fanaticists they're assumed to be. I hope I don't have to eat my words.

By and large aren't most immigrants looking for a multicultural society with capitalist objectives ?

Well that's an impossible question to answer...

I assume that various individual immigrants are looking for the same disparate range of things as any other individual.

"Hee hee. Yes, I did mean China - but the US may well count as an example. Higherst equality rate in the developed world. World's highest per capita incarceration rate." [Edward the Bonobo]

Did you mean "equality rate" or "inequality rate?" Equality is usually taken as a good thing. If you meant inequality, did you mean economic inequality, or some form of social inequality? I would accept the first, but not the second. We have some social inequality, but I doubt that we're by any means the worst in the world.

It's interesting that a distinction can be made, between social and economic inequality, though: "economic inequality" is a "social" issue, if anything is.

Srry. Inequality.

US incarceration rates really are shocking. Is it widely known in the US? Is it thought of as A Bad Thing...or s sensible way of maintaining good order?

I am really shocked at the U.S. incarceration rates. There are regional variations. Texas seems to have built a lot of prisons, Massachusetts not nearly so many, even on a per-capita basis. California, which has to count pennies careful because of the crazy anti-tax groups, tends to let nonviolent prisoners out early so its prisons won't get overcrowded. Building new prisons would be too costly, and the state hasn't got the money.

paulh:

>>We have some social inequality, but I doubt that we're by any means the worst in the world.

*Developed* world. It's lower in (say) Finland, Denmark, Germany, Japan. Higher in Nigeria, India, China.

KB:
>>It's interesting that a distinction can be made, between social and economic inequality, though: "economic inequality" is a "social" issue, if anything is.

Indeed - I don't make the distinction. Even if we can (theoretically) move between social strata, is related to money. Economic factors booth affect people's life chances, the personal effort they will have to make and the risks they will be able to take*.

It is sometimes said that, compared to the UK, the US is a classless society. Rubbish!




*Louise Mensch had me yelling at the radio when she said she'd become a successful ClitLit author through her own effort. So she didn't have daddy's money to fall back on if it didn't work out, then?

"It is sometimes said that, compared to the UK, the US is a classless society. Rubbish!"

Well, indeed. I've heard the same comment about Australia very often, too: Rupert Murdoch and Shirley who cleans the public toilets in Melbourne station aren't divided by class. Not a bit.

And then there's the whole argument that racial distinctions are an economic construction.

Unlike Saudi Arabian women, American women are allowed to drive cars.

As far as equal access to the voting booth is concerned, the U.S. ironed out its problems in the Southeast area in the 1960s, roughly a century after the slaves were freed. Since then, something called affirmative action has come along, to help with the economic inequality problem. It has been argued that Britain's move to abolish slavery was based less on noble motives than on a desire to undermine the fledgeling American government by stopping slave-laden ships from crossing the Atlantic. Did Britain allow its women to vote before or after the U.S. did? If before, it can't have been very long before, because the suffragets were singing their suffrage song in "Mary Poppins," which is set around 1912. The U.S. gave women the right to vote in 1919.

I hope you haven't seen me assaying that the US is bad relative to the noble UK. I can happily (and treasonously ) list our faults.

The incarceration-propping-up-Capitalism one is just too good to ignore. If it makes you feel any better - the UK (and especially Scotland) is The Sick Man of Europe in terms of penal policy.

btw...Our female suffrage was also 1918...*but only for married women or women who were themselves householders*. Full suffrage on a par with men was 1928. (which not many people know - I only learnt it last week.)