I fear the red beast... yup communism

[Ludwig]

...and very blond ruthless people secretly controlling the world

Yeah, that's what people tell themselves when their lives are undeniably crap, in order to sublimate the causes of their ineffectual lifestyle situation into the result of external paranoid conspiracies, and thus avoid admitting the reality that it's their own fault for going along with "the system".

I think it's no accident that the country with the most well developed corporate dictatorship, and with the best political system and per-per-view public scientists that money can buy (yes suiree, the good 'ole U.S of A), is also the state with the most well developed conspiracy theory culture.

How can you deride others' "conspiracy theories" in the same sentence as talking of a "corporate dictatorship"?

Much as I find Jonny's post distasteful (to say the least), I'm not quite sure what point you are making.

Anyone with half a brain can see that there are conspiracies. The frightening thing is not how many fools are brainwashed, but how many people are brainwashed who should know better.

[fifthcolumn]

Communists are just the ultimate stage of having bosses.

Right now we've moved from more or less freedom to having the bosses own most things. Which is close as damnit to Faciscm.

Next the bosses will own *everything* including you and your body.
*That* is communism.

[mobbsey]

How can you deride others' "conspiracy theories" in the same sentence as talking of a "corporate dictatorship"?

# Chemistry Club networking events lead to fears of lobbying
# Do lobbying firms change government policy?
# Government report on pub laws was written by lobbyists
# Ex-ministers in 'cash for influence' row under fire
# Rupert Murdoch 'dropped Lord Patten's book to curry favour with Chinese'
# Campaigners mount bid to outlaw nuclear subsidies

Need I continue?? -- that's a few which immediately spring to mind. The examples are manifest, and certainly a lot more so than the alleged UN/European/Aryan/Masonic/Jewish/Liberal cabals* in control of our everyday lives. (* delete as applicable)

There are self-evidence forces in society which seek control -- but these are not "conspiracies", it's called by other more euphemistic terms such as "business", "politics", "sponsorship" or "stakeholder involvement".

They are only conspiracies if we compliantly join in with the overt myopia which plays down the minority control over society enabled by our modern democracy -- and allow that socially assented process to continue without an opposing witness. The problem is that most of the people making such a fuss over conspiracies are too comfortable within that same system to actively oppose it; or, like Mail/Torygraph readers, they are amongst the affluent minority who wield minimum power, however they might mythologise the threats to it, and who are paranoid about losing that control.

The point is to make your own fate, irrespective of the consequences or lengths that you may need to go to, and thus not to be the subject of other's control.

E.g. to take a fine example of this principle, ten years ago 'the powers that be' said "Battle Lost" to one person's alternative to the enforced monotony of modern life, and yet it's still there today. Here's another example, friends of mine in Shropshire who I advise you all to go and visit/go on their courses.

Basically, if you stand up and refuse in a constructive way, which exploits the manifest flaws in our social and political system, you can change the world -- you need not accept the fate dictated to you.

[energy-village]

V good post, mobbsey.

[Ludwig]

They are only conspiracies if we compliantly join in with the overt myopia which plays down the minority control over society enabled by our modern democracy -- and allow that socially assented process to continue without an opposing witness. The problem is that most of the people making such a fuss over conspiracies are too comfortable within that same system to actively oppose it; or, like Mail/Torygraph readers, they are amongst the affluent minority who wield minimum power, however they might mythologise the threats to it, and who are paranoid about losing that control.

I don't understand, though, what you are opposing their system with. Peak Oil is at bottom a practical and demographic problem, not a political one.

I'm not comfortable with the current system, but I think that before things get better, they have to get worse; much worse. People don't improve their character through being taught, but through experience, and sometimes that experience has to be bitter.

All around me I see people being sucked into behaving how the System wants them to behave and the idea that there is not a deliberate campaign to manipulate them is naive. All around you can see the - often very sophisticated - techniques of Nazi and Soviet propaganda being used on the people of the "free" world, every week we see more liberties being eroded, and the populations swallow it all because "everybody knows" that "it couldn't happen here".

In the case of young people, over the past 20 years there's been a campaign to remove training in critical thinking from the school curriculum, so that we now have a generation for which complacency and emotionally-based opinions are second nature. On the face of it, they're independent, they "don't take any shit", but in practice they are ripe for mind control because they'll succumb to the first person who flatters their inflated self-image.

Basically, if you stand up and refuse in a constructive way, which exploits the manifest flaws in our social and political system, you can change the world -- you need not accept the fate dictated to you.

These people are not changing the world. They are doing something sensible for themselves, they are in some cases deferring the inevitable, but they are not preventing it.

There was not much sign in Stalin's Russia of "manifest flaws in the social and political system" that allowed people to effect positive change. The only reason such flaws still (just about) exist in our system is that the gates of freedom haven't completely closed.

But we are almost there. Sooner than most people realise, doing the right thing may be a life or death decision.

[mobbsey]

These people are not changing the world. They are doing something sensible for themselves, they are in some cases deferring the inevitable, but they are not preventing it.

And if -- let's say admittedly hypothetically -- what would happen if everyone else did what they were doing?
...what would be the effect?

Be careful what you wish for; you might one day get it.

[Ludwig]

These people are not changing the world. They are doing something sensible for themselves, they are in some cases deferring the inevitable, but they are not preventing it.

And if -- let's say admittedly hypothetically -- what would happen if everyone else did what they were doing?
...what would be the effect?

One thing's for sure: it wouldn't solve the problem of how to feed 7 billion people without cheap oil.

More importantly, though, I don't know of a single example from history of disaster being averted through the wisdom of the masses. You might as well hypothesise about fairies at the bottom of the garden as about everyone suddenly doing the right thing.

"A man can dream," you might argue. Indeed, but don't assume that it will change anything in the real world!

Be careful what you wish for; you might one day get it.

It's not a question of wishing, it's a question of being realistic.

In the end, is a better life for all even what humanity needs? Maybe there is a purpose beyond that.

[mobbsey]

One thing's for sure: it wouldn't solve the problem of how to feed 7 billion people without cheap oil.

It's not a problem, it's a predicament -- it has no solution within the mainstream/conventional collective view that society has of itself.

More importantly, though, I don't know of a single example from history of disaster being averted through the wisdom of the masses.

You're thinking as an individual, not as a system.

This is the great flaw about modern pressure group lobbying/campaigning for social change. It's asking for "permission" -- outsourcing the "problem" for someone else to define and permit a solution for your to carry out -- which prevents more radical change. In contrast, if you act to do something yourself to redefine those collectively held norms, and those ideas are shared by others, then things will change for society as a whole.

Change is dynamic -- it can't be planned or delivered, only anticipated. In December 1955 the cultural world was split between classical, dance hall and jazz music. In January 1956 there was 'Heartbreak Hotel'. Then there was rockabilly and Bill Haley. Human society is driven by fashion, not so much in the cultural sense, but as a means of group cohesion.

Question: In 1955 did thousands of riotous teenagers sign a petition and lobby their MPs for rock and roll?; or did they protest in the streets, demanding that the Government give them some amplified driving Afro-beat in a 4/4 time? No. When offered Lonnie Donegan did they go "frack yeah!" and started to rock? Yes. And hence a new cultural wave straddled the globe, even violating the inner confines of the most repressive global regimes in Eastern Europe

If a few "average" people do something, or if something is being done by a movement outside the mainstream debate, then at the collective level it is ignored. Trends develop, they mature, and they die, most never registering on the social/cultural Richter scale. Every now and again, driven by new circumstances such as surplus food, new resources or new technologies, such minor trends can take on a relevance to a far greater group, and can propagate throughout society to a point where their support expands to encompass what is collectively defined as, the "mainstream" -- they become the new "normal".

However, what goes up must come down, at least in entropic terms. Therefore if we can pro-actively change our own lives, try and iron out individually the problems that reducing personal energy and resource consumption creates, then we can refine our ideas to get alternative/low consumption lifestyles "right". The moment we get it "right", taken against the background of the changes wrought by the "Limits to Growth", it will automatically appeal for a far greater number of people who "get it". Then, if you can maintain that initiative, you can change the world...

...but you have to consciously aim to do that, and initiate that process, otherwise it's not going to happen.

The people trying the practical alternatives, and being systematically persecuted because they don't "fit in" (e.g., most recently the Lammas eco-village getting hassle over building regulations), face a choice between complying with the "consensual delusion" of modernity, or applying their own perceptions of what's happening around them when making lifestyle choices. If you dig in, and struggle for what it is you believe you are meant to be doing (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, the best working definition for the term 'karma'), then you have a chance of succeeding. Just consider the odds -- if you don't try there's a 100% chance of failure, if you do struggle on then there a chance, albeit insignificantly small, that you might achieve some progress towards those ambitions... eventually.

But it has to be your change -- you have to make it happen. And, to return to the beginning, if you try and preconceive that solution in its entirety then you're not necessarily going to get that result (perhaps this is a natural limiting mechanism within social consciousness); adaptation, especially against a background of economic contraction, needs to be far more fluid to succeed. In contrast, if you have a more broad consensus, all heading in the same direction though not necessarily "on the same bus", then you've a greater chance of achieving a "critical mass" to affect a far broader segment of society.

[postie]

I am a Communist.... really, I am.

I wouldn't call myself a Commie though, I'm more of a Trotskyist.

[ceti331]

Combining the themes of communism, and ecology (return to sustainable agriculture, end of petrochemical agriculture & food distribution systems)..

..what springs to mind for me as a highly plausible nightmare scenario is Cambodias "year zero".. depopulation of urban centers where you can't grow crops, returning to primitive subsistence farming.
It would hardlybe a smooth process, after entire countries infrastructures & populations have been developed for technological, industrial, urban living.

This is why I don't want kids

[jonny2mad]

well couldn't those kids fight the commies

[ceti331]

well couldn't those kids fight the commies

Well if they take after me they'll be intellectuals, not fighters. The sorts of peeps that get wiped out in these year-zero scenarios.

I'm a geek, not cut out for physical activity so I concentrated on my mind. I could thrive in a world of machines and thats why the future looks SO bleak for me (unless the technological utopian singularity 'hype' comes to fruition)

There's going to be people in the countryside who have land able to make their own food, and people in the cities who can't.

The peeps in the cities will face starvation, and will either go out into the countryside to take food & land by force(with the advantage of superior numbers?), or some authority will pre-empt that process (the state survives by mutating toward communism via land-tax?), or perhaps via the market those who can will have bought up land for self sufficiency but with a plan ready to tackle the city dwellers.. (the latter is a bit like NWO depopulation ideas, peeps see the forces aimed against their survival from 'the rich' i.e. land or capital owners)

Whatever people call it.. whoever the winners & losers are, my bleak prediction is at the start there will be ~60m people in a mixture of varied industries, and at the some dramatically smaller number of people working the land leading a more primitive existence.

[mobbsey]

Remember that both Marx and Engels attacked Thomas Malthus, and even Kropotkin, in the first chapter of 'The Conquest of Bread', opens with a critique of 'Malthusianism'.

The theories which underpin organised socialism/communism are not much different to those at the root of capitalism -- and they all object to the notion of "ecological limits" because it represents a large dump in the punchbowl of the theories that they peddle.

Moving beyond economics, to create a philosophy that encompasses biophysical limits, takes you beyond the conventional application of just about every historical school of political theory -- from monarchism, to capitalism, to communism or anarchism. When you accept that you are fully a part of the environment which you inhabit, and that the limits of the environment to support the human system determine the operation of it, that engenders a wholly different approach to how we value and plan our systems of organisation. To address that we have to find a new philosophy which accepts limits, because all the older philosophies were designed to operate in a world without limits.

[ceti331]

Remember that both Marx and Engels attacked Thomas
The theories which underpin organised socialism/communism are not much different to those at the root of capitalism -- and they all object to the notion of "ecological limits" because it represents a large dump in the punchbowl of the theories that they peddle.

Moving beyond economics, to create a philosophy that encompasses biophysical limits, takes you beyond the conventional application of just about every historical school of political theory -- from monarchism, to capitalism, to communism or anarchism. When you accept that you are fully a part of the environment which you inhabit, and that the limits of the environment to support the human system determine the operation of it, that engenders a wholly different approach to how we value and plan our systems of organisation. To address that we have to find a new philosophy which accepts limits, because all the older philosophies were designed to operate in a world without limits.

Actually I see the cambodia Year Zero scenario (which usually gets called communism) as very much being about pragmatic limits.

There's X people, carrying capacity is Y, so if X > Y, send (X-Y) to the killing fields.

It seems all these 'philosophies' just differ on identifying who ends up there.
the rich? the poor? the ethnic minorities? the wrong religions?

Remember that both Marx and Engels attacked Thomas Malthus, and even Kropotkin, in the first chapter of 'The Conquest of Bread', opens with a critique of 'Malthusianism'.

Probably rationalizing killing off the rich. "there are no limits, it's the rich's fault we're facing starvation, for making Artificial Scarcity!"

IMO this is why "communism" has killed so many.
Not because it is some 'evil philosophy',
.. but because it's instigated once conditions of (local) overshoot crystalized.

The poor would have starved so they rebelled and killed off the rich first.

what should have happened under market conditions is that carrying capacity is signaled by people being priced out of settling down to make families... but some idiot came up with the idea of keeping the economy going by printing money out of thin air, buggering up the calculation the market was supposed to do.

damn housing bubble. Rising house prices were actually the market signal of capacity being reached.. yet people were celebrating it at the time!

[mobbsey]

IMO this is why "communism" has killed so many.

That's an arbitrary indicator -- after all, which has killed more?: communism; capitalism; or Christianity? If death is your prime metric, let's not forget Zappa's great quip that the Kama Sutra is better then the Bible because it's killed less people. The hundreds of thousands killed in the crusades and similar actions, and the millions in the "conversion" of the Americas, tell an equally grim story as Stalinism. For a philosophy that espouses "love thy neighbour", Christianity's done pretty well over history as a justification for mass slaughter.

What much of this thread has argued about is the popular mythologies of various "isms". It's the mythology, required to bridge the gulf between theory and everyday events, that's the flaw in all "isms". Any "monotheistic" system -- be that taking god, or money, or the "people" as its deity -- will fail because any static, absolute theoretical system cannot encompass the variations within the dynamic processes of the Earth's environment.

What matters is reality; that which we can directly measure an perceive, and whether our philosophy stands up to the challenges that reality throws at our daily lives. As far as I can see, no established school of thought has got that right. Accepting that principle you can perhaps make a better job at working out what it is you do "believe" about the world.