> No Disneyworld! Anything but Disneyworld! You seem to have
> confused tasteless society with classless society.
>
Jim:
> Disneyworld is the ideal _statist_ society. It's not
> socialism. It's a hierarchical planned economy, akin to that
> of ancient Egypt. It deals with the left-liberal or
WS: You did not get the irony, did you? What I wanted to say by the metaphor of Disneyland as socialism that there is such a thing as socialism for fools - a never never land when all problems disappear, people do as they please without the need of giving anything back and life is a constant play and eternal happiness under the benevolent authority of higher Reason, a place that used to be known as heaven. Perhaps I am exaggerating a bit, but I do get that impression each time people start bashing "capitalism" for all social and personal woes they experience. By that logic, the disappearance of capitalism into its opposite - socialism I presume - all these woes will disappear, the history will end, and we all be living happily thereafter.
The way I see it, socialism will not eradicate any of these problems, not even replace them with better ones, as Doug quoted. People will still be hating and killing each other for pretty much the same reasons they are doing it know: power, sex, status, envy or fear. If socialism eradicates the importance of money in defining social status, other means of defining it will be found - look, sex appeal, place of residence, popularity, the right accent, hair color - the possibilities are endless. If socialism eradicates the drudgery of work, the drudgery of idleness will ensue, at least for most. If socialism eliminates marketing-centered mindless entertainment, then human-interest or fart-joke or kitschy-romance centered mindless entertainment will emerge.
What socialism will, imho, do is change the nature of human responses to contingencies of everyday life - from more individualist it-is-your-problem- approach embedded in the US-style capitalism, into more collectivistic let's-pool-risks-and-resources-for-greater-public-good approach that trumps individual interests. In other words, more housing coops, less individually owned homes, more public transit, fewer private cars, more public ownership of means of production and credit institution, less private profits and usury, more risk pooling and socialization of benefits, less privatization of benefits and socialization of costs, more public goods delivered, from health care to insurance to old age support to education to transportation, less fabulous fortunes. The nature of political discourse will also change form the current popularity-contest circus, to more rational discussion of impending decisions in citizens committees and planning commissions.
The rest, however, will remain the same. People will still abuse, control or cheat on their mates or spouses, they will still berate unpopular or low status groups, they will still try to avoid work and responsibility or do whatever wicked or stupid things they can get away with, they will still be sponging off emotional (if not material, as their material needs will be fully met) support of others, they will still derive sadistic satisfaction from misfortunes of others, and they still be looking for scapegoats to blame for their own laziness, stupidity, and everything that is wrong in their lives.
Jerry:
<<<Consider: humans emerged as a separate species as hunter-gatherers.
After a long existence in this condition, agriculture developed and spread
in various places. Practically, all hunter-gatherer societies are quite
egalitarian, almost to the point of "group-tyranny". Among
hunter-gatherers, with very few exceptions, there is a forced equality of
food division, for example, and asserting too much dominance usually leads
to exile. There is no reason to believe that from the time of human
emergence to the time of the agricultural revolution that hunter-gatherer
societies were much different. (They may have been, but what-ever
intelligent guesses we can make, point in the other direction.) It is
simply historically wrong to make the kind of statement that you make unless
you qualify it with " since the agricultural revolution there are no human
societies without internal class divisions (however defined)." But even
this may not be true, depending upon how you analyze isolated agricultural
societies that rely on subsistence farming and have no external pressures.
>>>
WS: Jerry, I know the spiel, I did read the _Harmless People_ and take an anthropology course or two. I just do not buy the argument. I think it is a nice heart-warming story that we all wish were true, but unfortunately it is a myth that uses the absence of evidence as evidence in its favor. Not a good thing, at least in science.
I think that hunter-gatherer societies were as hierarchical, exploitative and violent as any other human or primate society - we just do not have much material evidence of it, as such evidence usually survive in written records. I also understand that studies of fossil bone structure of pre-modern peoples reveal noticeable differences in nutrition, which suggests class divisions. Also Otzi the Iceman http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0115_020115iceman.html speaks to social inequalities in ice age societies. Perhaps the lines of class divisions were drawn differently, e.g. coinciding with tribal lineages rather than cutting across them. Perhaps the absolute size of material differences (i.e. ones whose evidence could be found) were not that pronounced as today simply because these societies did not have that much in general.
I also believe that social hierarchies and inequalities are not just a historical fluke, and accidental power grab that managed to perpetuate itself. These hierarchies are simply manifestations of our mental apriori categories ingrained in our brains that are hierarchically organized. We cannot think without hierarchies i.e. ordering things into classes that cannot even de defined without an apriori hierarchical order (the genus proximum and differentiam specificam thing). In short, living without hierarchies is unthinkable. The only thing we can do is to try to minimize the negative effects of these pre-ordained in our mental structures hierarchies on our fellow human beings.
Wojtek