Here’s another fundamentalist essay. Someone in a mailing list said, and I quote:
This is the Socialist Party of the Netherlands version of our “Statement of
Principles”. I thought members might find it interesting and maybe use it for
discussion purposes at a meeting. Compare ours to theirs.
and my response is:
I also think a useful exercise is to write the shortest statement of principle encompassing a socialist world. Like, “egalitarian”. Do you need more? Can you derive everything else from that? It’s a give that we all need air, water, food, shelter… and have a desire to survive. Does that need to be stated? Okay, so I’m a reductionist. I have a science background. 🙂
Okay, the good old US of A is egalitarian in principle. Not in practice. That’s because the people who want more than others say that believing the principles is enough. If it doesn’t turn out that way in practice, that’s your own fault. That’s capitalism. You have principles leading to laws but you don’t have to enforce them. The system will “enforce” them naturally. We all know how experiment turned out.
We all like rules/laws that are enforceable. If we demand that, then capitalism doesn’t work, it’s not enforceable. If we were scientists and put forward a theory and then did some experiments and the experiments failed, we’d say that’ theory is wrong and throw it away. We wouldn’t go back to it later on, saying that, hey it didn’t work last time, but maybe it’ll work this time. We’re done. Okay, you don’t throw everything away, you modify the theory, change something, try that. Take capitalism, remove profit, run the experiment again, see what happens. Well, I just revealed that I think capitalism is more than egalitarian, it’s that plus a principle of self-importance. I’m more important than you. What I do is more valuable than what you do. I make profit on what I do. That’s what you need to remove. (I thought that was happening, like the idea that everyone in the soccer game gets a trophy. That seems to be okay for children but at some point someone starts giving bigger trophies to a smaller number. “Going pro.” “Time to grow up”. That’s too bad, because we know that children are better than adults at a lot of things. Let’s start electing children to Congress. The maximum age for eligibility is 12.)
What’s my point? Why do we all have to write different variations on the same thing? Or, write them down again, but needing to be different from someone else, otherwise it’s plagiarism. Why aren’t we done with something and move on to the next? It’s like in the environmental movement, you fight hard to protect something, then the administration changes, what is protected is now threatened again, and you have to fight all over again.
I’m sitting here worrying that this looks like a science majors versus english majors argument. I hope not. I’m not an english major, so I don’t know those methods and approaches. I know everyone reads the same archetypal authors to learn what’s good, then you try to develop something else, that’s unique, that’s “you”. Science seems very similar, but ends up with one story in one writing style that everyone agrees to use, and then they write a new chapter, not a new book.
Okay, maybe you’re going to drum me out of the party now. Maybe my way of thinking isn’t useful. When I read a long article by a deep thinker I think, whoa, what are all these nuances for, are they all equally important?
That takes me back to the start: I like a small set of principles. They aren’t deep. They aren’t subtle. Then, you need enforcement. That’s the hard part.
Category: Politics