I bank with a co-operative, work for a co-operative and owe nothing to the banks outside of these organisations. Isn't it about time we started thinking of co-ownership of our lives and our future?
Democracy as we know it is false in the sense that we are not really connected to democratic values outside of voting in our rulers (dictators).
When at work we should be asked our opinions about life at work, replied to anonymously or openely without fear of being persecuted or favoured.
There should be a trust to save earnings and profits to that is untouchable and declared openely.
there should be someone to listen to and represent constituents (fellow workers) through democratic voting for a representative(s).
There should be a written constitution debated and declared legal.
There should be an independant Registrar to hold binding arbitration in disciplanary and work related matters.
There should be scrupulous honesty with suppliers, co-owners and customers. And accounts must be accessible to fellow workers.
The object of society should be mutual prosperity and happiness.
Horizontal supervision shoud be the norm to prevent theft of co-owned wealth from being wasted. This should apply to ALL layers of the company, especially of the board of directors, all of whome should be democratically elected.
Local and International charities should benefit from a percentage of profit.
Local communities shoud be involved and supported from all local businesses ready to roll up a sleeve or donate equipment or funds.
Like I have always said, I believe in democracy, just not the present one...
alan-b'stard
10-20-2008, 10:37 AM
Some may think the above is a pipe dream. Well, actually no, the company I work for has all the above in our constitution. It is the first company I have ever worked for that has democracy and the local community at its core.
It is not Nirvana by any means because work is tough sometimes as we all know. But the only other time I had any say in any other company was as a train driver and only because we had a great union. The union was democratic, London Underground Ltd were not.
I have lost two jobs just for opening my mouth to injustice at work. In other words democracy for the most part is seperate from the workplace in almosty all cases.
I would trade any job for this no matter what the wage. I prefere democracy at work to the pound in my pocket and a dictator on my back.
Well, Taco, it seems to me you are accusing me of shit strirring, when the opposite is true. I have always told the truth in as few as words as possible. You seem to lack words completely... Soon you may lack funds, lack a job, a home and lack a future. Don't forget who predicted this brew from the witches of capitalism. The people who put us on this river without a paddle are possibly (though unlikely due to ignorance) your heroes. In other words, not me. ;)
Some people I know, that obviously don't know me ask, why not help the system by being less socialist? To which I reply, what? help the crippled beast lay waste to me and mine again and millions upon millions of others? No way!
alan-b'stard
10-25-2008, 08:47 AM
The communist manifesto, still a best seller and possibly the best seller of all time beating both the bible and the Koran and Mao's little red book easily, is still available over 150 years after publication, and in more demand today then ever before.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
alan-b'stard
10-26-2008, 07:55 AM
This passage, I think really sums up the present mess... I must have read this booklet a hundred times and it never fails to amaze me and MAKE me think.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.
alan-b'stard
10-26-2008, 08:08 AM
So, this is what the manifesto says about 'private property'. You all should read the manifesto if you want to do battle with me. I am urging my managers to read it if they want to discuss politics with me... ;)
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The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social STATUS in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage labor.
The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
alan-b'stard
10-26-2008, 03:27 PM
We have a choice to make, each and every one of us. War or peace? If the present situation continues then war will come. So, socialism or religion? I know which I prefere. But maybe compromise will be the order of the day? A lot of people are going to suffer, that is for sure.
I will leave you with that thought.
Commander
10-27-2008, 10:40 PM
Rob, with all due respect bro, it looks odd when you reply to your own post over and over, heheh. :look:
All kidding aside, good reads, thx. :beer:
alan-b'stard
10-28-2008, 04:56 PM
Hey, Commander, you know me, if there is no response, I increase the volume ;) Now I can leave it and move on... :beer:
alan-b'stard
10-28-2008, 07:46 PM
Finally, we have established, the history of human endevour is constant revolution. One state of being, once concidered sublime is conquered by another state of being, another way of living, another society. From the beginning of humans this has been the patern. In every epoch most people thought this would not change in their lifetime and often it didn't. Time itself changed the reality of the old into the new. We live in a time of change. The old ways have not helped the majority of people on this planet. Most still live in absolute poverty, even many (most?) in the industrialised west. We are still ruled by a minority. Democracy is a joke (ask anyone). Is it impossible that things may change through a revolution? Think about it. :Peace:
Commander
10-28-2008, 10:16 PM
Hey, Commander, you know me, if there is no response, I increase the volume ;) Now I can leave it and move on... :beer:
Heheh, indeed! Sounds like something I do at a gig, lol.
alan-b'stard
10-29-2008, 12:39 PM
A quantum of solace...
A Quantum (see above, Marx). Definition - The smallest discrete amount of any quantity (plural: quanta). ie wages for a labourer.
The smallest physically realizable unit of something.
Definition of solace: - the comfort you feel when consoled in times of disappointment; "second place was no consolation to him"
comfort in disappointment or misery
comfort: give moral or emotional strength to
consolation: the act of consoling; giving relief in affliction.
alan-b'stard
11-07-2008, 02:36 PM
Hey. Taco. Remember this?
Well, Taco, it seems to me you are accusing me of shit strirring, when the opposite is true. I have always told the truth in as few as words as possible. You seem to lack words completely... Soon you may lack funds, lack a job, a home and lack a future. Don't forget who predicted this brew from the witches of capitalism. The people who put us on this river without a paddle are possibly (though unlikely due to ignorance) your heroes. In other words, not me.
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240,000 jobs lost in the US in one month alone. Did I lie? That is a lot of misery for so many good working people. Do ya get it yet? Or do you feel sorry for the rich?
alan-b'stard
11-08-2008, 02:51 PM
Johnny Cash Busted lyrics
My bills are all due and the babies need shoes,
But I'm Busted
Cotton's gone down to a quarter a pound
And I'm Busted
I got a cow that's gone dry
And a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills
Getting bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away,
But I'm Busted
So I called on my brother to ask for a loan
'Cause I was Busted
I hate to beg like a dog for a bone,
But I'm Busted
My brother said, there's not a thing I can do,
My wife and my kids
Are all down with the flu
And I was just thinkin' about callin' on you,
'Cause I'M Busted.
Lord, I ain't no thief, but a man can go wrong,
When he's Busted
The food that we canned last summer is gone,
But I'm Busted
Now the fields are all bare
And the cotton won't grow
Me and my family's gotta pack up and go
But I'll make a living, just where, I don't know
'Cause I'm Busted
Johnny Cash Busted lyrics
golos
12-02-2008, 08:53 PM
Socialist are funny although somewhat sad and ignorant.