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

Pastey

Unfortunately- or perhaps not- I lost a whole post.

I suppose it is probably true that most Anarchists are Socialists- but very few politically and governmentally active Socialists are in fact Anarchists, certainly not as far as the rights of other people are concerned. It was very interesting to be specializing in the History of the Five Year Plans as a final year specialism and to meet "Communists" who refused to acknowledge that the Soviet Union historically had anything to do with Communism as they understood it..

In fact Socialism in practice (encouraged by German Socialism in the late 1880s) embraced the idea of democracy as a means of seizing control of the power of the State and then using that power in order to lay down the laws and rules for everyone else. As Max Weber said before 1914 a great theme of German history was "rationalisation" which, in short came down to Tom Paine's "Age of Reason" : and the French have rediscovered with the French Socialist Party back in power just how much Socialism seems to have embraced that Puritan Dream that Christ was awaiting the time when Puritans would seize power and start to pass "Godly Laws" imposing their special insight on everyone else, and that this would trigger the Second Coming and the Thousand Year Rule of Saints. As Ernst Roehm reminded Adolf Hitler, the Nazis were National and Socialist.

In fact I have suggested to many French people that their whole idea of the State and Government goes back to the historic "rule of a saint'- Saint Louis who made France the greatest country in Europe for 500 years. So the French believe in top-down government and the rules and laws of the State- as the equivalent of Papal Infallibility. And, of course, when they find that actually their 'saints' have feet of clay, they feel quite entitled to bring France to a State of anarchy. And Socialists in practice can do nothing without the Money system, so Socialism became synonimous with State Capitalism.

But enough of my laterally and universal thinking. As I have been told over the years h2g2 is not an appropriate site for my thought-processes.

Cass

Actually this insistance on "public" rather than "private" reminds me of Marx and Engels in "The Communist Manifesto" calling for the "communal ownership of women", to put an end to 'bourgeois marriage' that was just a form of prostitution. For a number of years in the late 1920s Communism banned marriage (and the Jewish Marxists who created the first Kibbutz scrapped the nuclear family in a bold new experimental society).. But as with equal pay, the practical need to get things done well by well-motivated populations forced the Party to go back to marriage and at least the chance of happy families as well as to Stackhanovism and the worker as Hero 'worthy of his hire'. So it is ironic that one of the most recent battles of the French Socialist Government has been to force through Gay Marriage on the basis that this has been Socialist Party policy and the protest vote against President Sarkozy handed the Socialists the right to lay down the law and enforce their morality through the monstrous authority of the State.

Cass

Peanut, you implied you thought it. Implication rather than statement is one of the problems of the internet, not being able to see body language as users type. Believe it or not it's also one of the tools that trolls use, not stating things but implying them. But I'm sure that's not your intention.

Cass, I agree with the communists that you've met. The Soviet Union may well have started with the intention of communism, but it didn't stay that way for long. The etymology of the word is shared with commune, both the hippy sharing, and the communication base.
The ideal of communism is that everyone is on equal standing, that all gains are shared equally. The problem with Soviet Russia is that it was run by capitalists. The majority of people were living communally, but the gains weren't shared equally. Communism, the living in a commune style, is something I've often thought of, and something that myself and some friends looked into years ago. We'd found and priced up buying a large house with a small bit of land on the outskirts of Oxford because none of us could afford to actually buy there. You have to make sure that you could live in close proximity with each other if you do it that way.
I think that the closest examples of communism historically in the UK are the soap towns. Mill and factory owners would build entire towns for their workers, providing free libraries, schools, theatres, churches and health care for their workers. Not quite communism though because the mill owner still kept the profits, and ran the shops in the towns so got the profits from those though. A lot of people think that these were very controlling empires, but when you look properly at it you see that the health and well being of the workers and their families was far superior to those outside the towns with no access to the parks, education and health care.

I do still think about setting up communal living, and I do think it's got a lot of ground. However in this capitalist driven society, to start it would involve a lot of money.

It seems to seem whatever I say you are looking for something bad in it, even if you follow it up I'm sure that is not your intention but the implication you are saying that it *could be* read like that.


Anyway I said my piece yesterday, I'm not spending today repeating myself I'll leave you and Cass to your discussions

That's both the problem and the beauty of the English language, the way the words and their meanings can be twisted and warped, to say one thing yet imply another.
People say that the English aren't expressive people because we don't wave our hands about or shrug when talking, yet you put us and the language into a text only environment like the internet and you suddenly see that we do have a lot of vocal and physical nuances that don't translate.

Which is why speaking directly and clearly, only saying what you mean in a way that can't be misconstrued, and using emoticons to replace body language is so vital. Because people will take what you say at face value, and will hold you to it.

And as I mentioned before, they'll hold it up to the rules, and regardless of your incorrect statement in post 3, the rules *always* apply.

Pastey

I would argue that the nearest thing to Communism was the English Society that existed before the conquest of England in the crisis of the first Millennium when Europe suddenly found itself beset by four new waves of Conquest and had to come to terms with and embrace the fact that the localised "English Peace" that had been established would have to fight in order to preserve itself and its English values- which actually takes us right back to the origins of this debate- the ideas of commonsense, commonweal and common-ownership within the h2g2 community.

Bland Brown and Tawney start of with a document held in a Cambridge archive from before the Conquest which detailed the rights and duties of people within English Society as was known to the author, who anticipated that the account might have to be modified. It quite specifically showed that more rights went along with more duties, so that those who really gave their lives in service to the community gained more- as in the assumption that those who became in effect professional soldiers, entitled to be well-looked after and know 'the joys of the Hall' in time of peace, were honour bound to die in "the place of slaughter" unless ordered otherwise by their leader. Hence at the Battle of Hastings the AS Chronicle said that King Harold fought bravely alongside all those who stood by him, who were honour bound to die on the battlefield once he was dead.. Perhaps some did not because William of Normandy had the support of the new reforming Pope, who had only become Pope because of crucial Norman support. After the Norman Conquest the 'failed' English military elite who had survived lost their positions, and large numbers seem to have made their way to Byzantium to fight in its foreign legions against the threat posed by Islam. I often wonder whether it is by this route that England became associated with St. George, who is now commonly thought of as non-English because he fought in 'foreign fields'.

But your mention of Oxford has great significance to me as Oxford was my 'home town' and my early years were spent very much as part of a particular Oxford activism that was determined to seize the opportunity to finally create a more general "English Peace", the Second World War having been fought to save the "Christian Civilization" for which Oxford served as a great repository by the time of Sir Thomas More. And Oxford has a long relationship with Utopianism since at least the time of More. To some degree one might say that one prime example from those years when I was growing up was Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, and, if you are interested in communes and communal living, you might study Cheshire's VIP experiment in 1946, when he tried to address the terrible problem of post-war economic depression and unemployment. It is an interesting story how the VIP experiment transmogrified into the Cheshire Homes which are now one of the largest global providers of care for the terminally ill.

Some account is given in "No Passing Glory" a biography written by Andrew Boyle in 1955, but Googling might reveal other sources of information.

Cass

The problem there though Cass is that the more people gave, the more they gained. It's the gaining more than others that makes it fall as an example of close communism in the UK. I think you're right that it *started* as such, but then the desire to gain more shows the introduction of capitalism, that old thing that has always killed off communism.

Pastey

But what they "gained" was not owned and so they were not rich. It really annoys me when people project "landownership" back into ages when it did not exist. The Feudal Tenures by which things were held from the King and not by any right were abolished at the Revolution after 1642, and were not restored in 1660 at the Restoration of the monarchy. But even then though the tenure could be passed on 'at will' the landowners did not have effective freehold tenure until the completion of the Enclosure Movement which was not actually complete until the mid-19th century. The "sitting tenants" and those with sub-tenancies had rights, as William Cobbett insisted until the English Poor Law was scrapped in 1832 in order to have a more general British system (Scotland had something akin to slavery. Ireland had licenced begging) the maintenance of the Poor in England was an integral part of the natural charge and responsibility that went with landholding.

But- as I have explained in my second Mrs Thatcher thing- it is now normal to think of Soviet Communism in terms of Stalinism, forgetting generally the time of hope into which she was born in 1925. In 1930 Dr. Birnie of Edinburgh University was perhaps a bit behind the times in his Economic History of Europe in which he saluted the genius of Lenin's New Economic Policy, which seemed to be doing very well with the commanding heights approach that kept large and potentially profitable industry in State ownership but allowed small-scale enterprise, of the kind that might well have thrived in the kind of small-scale sustainable mixed-economy based upon life on a human scale rather than that of monstrous Heroic Materialism.

But the long-drawn out tragedy of the decades up to 1914 came back with a vengeance.. The Capital investment that joined up the global economy as never before meaning that Capital and Land were more crucial than Labour drove down global prices for all Land produce, and therefore the earnings of land workers. This meant that Indian peasants emancipated from slavery in 1843, and the Russian serfs and US slaves emancipated about 20 years later faced often insurmountable odds in working their way up as had seemed possible in the 1850s. Down to 1914 prices for Landed goods fell by about one third of the 1870 level. But the IWW and the post-war problems drove prices up to about 2.5 times the 1870 level, and small-scale communal living suddenly seemed possible in a Brave New World. US smallholders. Russian 'kulaks'. Irish countrymen in the Irish Free State like people all across the new nations of Eastern Europe who were also reconnecting with their 'roots'. Briefly everyone could think that it was the good life. And the Soviet Union, which negotiated a trade deal with Britain's first Labour Government in 1924 could believe that the flourishing peasant system could produce enough for the USSR to become an important grain exporter, as Russia had been- exports that would be an important source of foreign currency that would pay for imports. But then global prices began to fall faster and faster, and farmers all around the world (if they could) tried to improve their production by means of Capital investment. In the USSR the widespread use of new technology like the essential tractor would only be possible by means of sharing, and the USA, which seemed to be the model for the Future, was increasing the Heroic Materialism which had begun in the age of the Combine Harvester, sales of which increased greatly in the late 1920s. Collectivization and the Five Year Plans were the only way that the USSR could hope to operate within the world as it was. And when the Capitalist world descended into World Chaos the USSR sent a delegation to the Word Economic Conference in London in 1933 offering to share its expertise with the rest of the world, because there was no unemployment in the USSR.

The official history of the Soviet Communist Party has a chilling phrase to cover the elimination of the Kulaks "The Red Army was used in every conceivable way to educate the peasants politically". But the "new order" that was embraced by the Post-War world was that things in this world must be managed from the top with laws and rules that are set down in accordance with the ideas of those skilled in Science and Technology (the knights of the modern era) with everyone else basically learning to live within the artificial mechanisms that are imposed upon reality. But the Money, just like the Ancient God of the Waters of the Earth (Enki), can not be so easily tamed, so any rigid system of just following the rules is doomed to fail and fall.

Cass

Capitalism isn't just about ownership of land, or even about ownership of goods. It's about having more than others. The extra benefits that the people gained were still gains over others. In true communism those "joys of the house" would have been available to all.

But that's also where it fails with the modern mindset, if you were to give the same to all regardless of what they put in, the majority of people I fear would not put in. The only way it works is if everyone puts in their all, does their best for the community.

If there are those that don't contribute to the community, then for them to expect the same returns and benefits as those that do means that communism, and in turn socialism and anarchy, will never succeed.

Which brings us neatly back to the need for rules. Until such as time as everyone contributes as much as they can then rules will have to exist. In this instance, we have the House Rules, which to be fair are pretty relaxed and flexible, what with everything being taken in context and all.

Pastey

The difference is that some people are rewarded in compensation for what they give up..on the basis of "The King must die"..

I recall my flatmate on our PGCE when we were looking for our first teaching jobs, of 'working class' origins like me but in his case East End Irish, who pointed out that we had sacrificed about seven years when we could have been earning and living an adult life, in order to pursue education in order that we might be of much more use to the world. But, as I have just mentioned to an ex-pupil, Jackson and Hargreaves in their early Sixties study "Education and the Working Class" discovered that wc children who went to grammar school and climbed up 'the ladder of opportunity' found themselves in a 'limbo', having sacrificed the most blessed things in an English life that come with the freedom just to live as 'our hearts desire' following the "way of life" and not the way of wealth. Family and friends are the greatest treasures, but some people have lost or never known what it is to be loved, and seek something else to fill the void. These are the unquiet souls that Society can exploit by giving them praises, and gifts and wealth so that they will sacrifice themselves 'for the greater good'. Jeremy Paxman produced evidence from a very interesting study, that he built upon, that showed to what an extraordinary degree people who became Party Leaders and Prime Ministers were very obviously 'driven' because of tragedy in their childhood or teens.

But the Industrial Revolution among other things led to the idea that somehow new wealth accumulation was actually merited and came with no obligations to the community. William Cobbett noted that the new rich who bought up the big houses when so many families were ruined in the agricultural depression after 1815 had no concept of the actual place of "The Big House" in the local community, the way that (as in Pride and Prejudice) the great house and its gardens was actually a public asset when the family were not 'in residence'. Cobbett on his Rural Rides freely used an Englishman's right to apply to the housekeeper or the gardener to visit the treasures that were being preserved and properly looked after for posterity.

The very close relationship between Nonconformity (with its social exclusion for 150 years or so) and Capitalism has often been commented upon by historians. Affluence and the successful pursuit of "The Wealth of Nations" was seen by many as a living proof of the virtue and superiority of the Puritan way of life, so that benevolent employers like Titus Salt whose Saltaire you have previously referred to, saw themselves as paternalistic father-figures saving the ordinary people.. A more obvious example is the Unitarian congregation at Birmingham which provided Joseph Chamberlain and the proto-municipal socialism which so inspired Beatrice Potter, semi-partner to her father a great venture Capitalist. Miss Potter so nearly becoming the second Mrs Chamberlain, but it did not work out. So she became Beatrice Webb instead and with Sidney brought about the Municipal Socialism of Greater London and designed the Victorian paternalism of the Welfare State: all of which has been based upon some expertise with money as a means by which wealth can be redistributed.

Beatrice Potter describes in her biography her obsession with Goethe's Faust and this image of heroically descending into Hell in order to rescue the damned, and the Welfare State embraced that idea that the money made by the rich could be used to save the poor. But actually, as the Jackson and Marsden study showed, most working class children in Huddersfield who did pass the 11+ chose to leave school at 15 and stay within the Working Class.

Cass

The nouveau riche of the industrial revolution threw up two sorts though. Those that kept the money and bought up the houses, and those that created the soap towns.
The first were the capitalists at heart, the others were the ones the tried to help their fellow man.

I think that's humans to a fault though, those that care, and those that don't.

Pastey

Far too simplistic.. Those that "care" are often really just trying to save their soul..Often, as in the case of Mahatma Gandhi (certainly one of the great souls of the twentieth century) whose sense of mission was deeply involved with teenage guilt when he betrayed both of his parents, and spent his life making amends by trying to serve the greater good- often at a cost paid by his family.. But there are fewer better examples of the price of 'greatness' being the inevitability of assassination. That is what often happens to those who know 'the joys of the Hall".

I mentioned earlier the delayed entry into adult-life of those with ambitions to really achieve, as commented on by my flatmate. Well when I went to work in the tough Inner City in what had been England's first comprehensive school I discovered 12 year olds who saw no reason to delay entry into adult life, or to invest time and energy in better equipping themselves to cope with the modern world. Like you they believed that the "joys of the Hall" should be for them too, and I note with interest that the age-gap between those who have early entry into adultlife and those who have to delay it, is more or less the same as the life-expectancy gap between rich and poor, a gap which is widening.. but then so is the other gap. Increasingly a degree or even a second degree is now a prerequisite for anyone with ambition.

I suspect that generalised love of one's fellow men is often a mask for the condition that h2g2 is constantly reminding me of "You have no friends". Because you can not have a sense of real community without a sense of belonging to a group of people who you know, and who know you, more than generically, and have rights over you and your time- so that you love them warts and all and 'accept us as a whole' as a pupil who often transgressed most of the rules once wrote of me as her class-teacher in a tribute poem.

Cass

"You have no friends" , yeah, I need to get that fixed.

Simplistic views on things though are often the better way to see and deal with things. If you get bogged down in the minutiae of detail then you can never move forward. Every individual truly is unique, and they change constantly. It's a harsh thing really, but at times the overview has to be the one that is used.

Hi Pastey

But unless you know the details and merely try to move on in ignorance of them you end up with the Dr. Frankenstein syndrome of creating or becoming a monster who has no actual place in the world, apart perhaps from the monstrous pseudo-virtual world that has been consciously created in the aftermath of the Second World War- a reality in which real power is consciously harnessed to apparent laws and rules- the power of money allied to Science and Technology.

I was amused to see that today's Headlines include details about the UK Arms Trade.. Weapons are just about the only thing that public opinion now really accepts has to be "world class" and to therefore cost the Earth. But as John Ralston Saul wrote in "Voltaire's B*******" (1992) drawing on his research thesis on how this all started in France under Charles de Gaulle, weapons development and expertise has been just about the only thing that the developed world was really able to market to the developing world- because thanks to the Cold War it was the only field in which democracies accepted the necessity for the pursuit of excellence and therefore the production of goods capable of changing the whole of History. This technology that we are using is the spin-off by-product of the Cold War. As Saul showed, after the Opec Oil Crisis which signalled a new level of independence in emerging States, NATO very consciously set about marketing the arms that any modern-non-nuclear State would need if it had aspirations of achieving true statehood.

Cass

I don't think it does create the Frankenstein syndrome to be honest. Now Frankenstein was a seriously clever bloke who set out to try and cure death. About as good a social aim as you could expect. However it didn't look at the overall, just at the individual. He looked at his ideal of curing death, and as such created what we're told is a monster. Although when you read the books and ignore Hollywood, you see a far more intelligent "monster", you see a creation that is able to rationalise its existence far better than the creator. Parallels with humans and religion abound.
Now, if the intelligence and the desire to help that Frankenstein had was aimed at an overall view of curing death, it may well have been a totally different story. Would he have used unwitting body parts? Doubtful. It's far more likely that he'd have worked *with* people suffering from disease or old age. And in the setting of the book old age was only in the forties.
Of course the following books and films got far more selfish in the aims.

Pastey

I just lost a long reply.. by just pressing "Preview" for once rather than "Post".. Probably just as well.

Cass

Probably your shortest ever post Cass

Yeah, the preview bug is known. I've managed to kill it in the next version of Pliny, but also managed to replace it with a more annoying version

Pastey

I wondered whether I had lost my connection- It does happen sometimes when I take the time to try to express myself fully..

And in this heat "life is too short" as they say.. As a classroom teacher for 37 years I just have a different idea of rules than you seem to have- having made a point of trying to "Humanize" the inter-action..

Cass

The issue is related to it timing out, which is daft because the timer is set to a lot longer.

And as you say, and as I'm fully aware of at the moment with my brother's illness, life is far too short. We are best to spend what time we have having fun and trying to help others to do the same

Pastey

But I have to disagree with you from my reading of Mary Shelley's great work, which I was interested to discover was also seen as an allegorical prophecy of times to come by Bertrand Russell, though he was not able to see the actual Human Reality of it as it played itself out through History . ..

Dr. Frankenstein thought that he had discovered the secret of Life- and set out to produce a new and better species of Human Being. Using body-parts from the Dead was just a handy way of getting the basic material for improving on the work of the original Creator. And, as you say, his Daemon was in many ways a superior being in all respects. But the Daemon was in some ways much like those of us who "climbed" way above our own parents fullfilling their ambitions, but ending up in somewhere life is next to impossible because we are alienated from all we know or come into contact with.

So Wordsworth is wrong "solitude" is no bliss- and was probably only so for him "on trips"- including those that were drug-induced.- though one way or another I suppose drowning the self brings some escape.. I wonder whether Russell was a happy man when he was not "playing God" as a great world figure.

The H.G.Wells short story on "The Valley of the Blind" is interesting- claiming to be drawn from a South American saying "In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king". He shows that to be one-eyed amongst the blind can become a living Hell, which makes escape or Death the rational option.

Cass