1 Feb 2024 7:09 am
(PART III OF IV)
Continuing from PART II)
Socialism is primarily an economic system — the social production of goods and services. But, because the socialist movement was created to liberate the working class from subordination to a dominating, exploiting class, it's also about the general issue of the well-being of human beings in society. Therefore, it is a socioeconomic system.
And, as I have explained in several posts, socialism can, has, and does work for individual countries. It has lifted billions of people from poverty in several countries and created some of the world's most robust economies. However, since socialist projects are always viciously attacked by capitalist powers because of the threat to capitalism, the more socialist countries there are, the more likely they will survive the onslaught. Ergo, socialists strive toward a worldwide and thus borderless socialist project while simultaneously building socialism country by country. And there's nothing to suggest that anyone would have to adopt a collective identity with anyone else. Indeed, given the newfound ability to develop oneself as a human rather than continue to function as a mere appendage to a privately held means of production, people would finally be free to identify as they wish. And, with the economic motivations behind racism being removed, an ever-increasing number of people would no longer see themselves as being superior to people of different pigmentation.
I wrote: "First, I disagree that hierarchies are natural, inevitable, and incontrovertible. Evidence demonstrates that hierarchies are a very recent development vis-a-vis humankind's roughly 200,000 years of existence. Indeed, there have only been hierarchies within human relations since the agricultural revolution a mere 12,000 years ago."
Cannonpointer: "That isn't true, and CANNOT be true. The desire to breed demands hierarchy. Sexual selection enforces hierarchy. In pre-agricultural (hunter-gatherer) societies, the best hunters get the choice of cuts of meat, the best sleeping site, the most voice at the fire, and the choice of mates. Pre-agricultural Native American tribes had chieftains and an inviolable pecking order." CC Given time restraints, we must agree to disagree while moving on.
I wrote: "For their wholly self-centered reasons, the world's capitalist class' media and other organs of social control have convinced us that hierarchies are natural, inevitable, and incontrovertibly self-constituted, but it isn't so. Humans once lived cooperatively, and we can do so again."
Cannonpointer: "Yeah, no. Put me and you on Gilligan's Island, and we're in a battle for ****** before our pant legs dry off. Hierarchy is bloody well inevitable AND necessary to evolution, which is never-ending. The best-suited will be the most successful sexually. That's a hierarchy, and that's the immutable voice of evolution speaking its Truth - with a capital T."
When I speak of hierarchies, it's always within the context of fully industrialized capitalist societies - the best-suited societies to be transformed into socialist societies. I'm thinking in terms of societies that have the potential to eliminate material suffering and ones in which their citizenry is interdependent upon one another. I'm not thinking of a desert island on which a few people compete for sex partners. The dynamics of those two hypotheticals are separate and distinct from one another. One concerns the emancipating possibilities of a fully formed socialist society, while the other relates to some form of neo-feudalism.
(END OF PART III)
http://www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf