The Brexit Thread

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Dave said:
Links to support your opinion?
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Thirty years of reading Socialist Worker.

I presume you are aware of the furious debate in left/socialist circles about whether the EU is "reformable" (to more socialism) or not? Every since Strasbourg, more and more Eurosocialists/Internationalists took the view that Strasbourg entrenched a Hayeckian/Neoliberal polity and is to be discarded until it can be replaced with a more workerist/socialist union. Others disagreed, touting "join and reform from within". The Movement is riven.

For years Corbyn believed it was. Now he says he doesn't think so. You will find ample discussion about whether he's to be believed or not.
 
Arthur said:
Thirty years of reading Socialist Worker.

I presume you are aware of the furious debate in left/socialist circles about whether the EU is "reformable" (to more socialism) or not? Every since Strasbourg, more and more Eurosocialists/Internationalists took the view that Strasbourg entrenched a Hayeckian/Neoliberal polity and is to be discarded until it can be replaced with a more workerist/socialist union. Others disagreed, touting "join and reform from within". The Movement is riven.

For years Corbyn believed it was. Now he says he doesn't think so. You will find ample discussion about whether he's to be believed or not.
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You're clearly not a socialist, so how come you've been reading Socialist Worker for the last 30 years? Just curious...
 
C4Cat said:
You're clearly not a socialist, so how come you've been reading Socialist Worker for the last 30 years? Just curious...
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I'm intensely interested. Always have been. I don't really need to read stuff I already agree with. Besides, but for one or two small but critical anthropological points, I could easily be a radical socialist.
 
Arthur said:
I'm intensely interested. Always have been. I don't really need to read stuff I already agree with. Besides, but for one or two small but critical anthropological points, I could easily be a radical socialist.
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Interesting, I never knew that - I got the impression from your previous posts on myBB that you were rather anti-socialist
 
Arthur said:
Your impression is correct.
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So what are the small but critical anthropological points that make the difference between being a radical socialist and being anti-socialist (but continuing to read socialist literature for 30 years). Sorry for hijacking this thread but I find this rather interesting...
 
C4Cat said:
Interesting, I never knew that - I got the impression from your previous posts on myBB that you were rather anti-socialist
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From an interview with E.O Wilson

What I like to say is that Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species. Why doesn't it work in humans? Because we have repro*ductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring. The great success of the social insects is that the success of the indivi*dual genes are invested in the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the reproduction of new colonies.

This was I think one of the main contributions of the idea of kin-selection. We now understand quite well why most species of social insects have sterile workers, and therefore can have communist-like systems. In which the colony is all, the individu*al is only a part of the colony, and the success of the whole community is what counts far above the success of the individual. The behavior of the individual social insect evolved with refe*rence to what it contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of a human being depends on how well it can individually use the society. We have become insect-like only by extreme contrac*tual arrangements.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson

That is most likely the anthropological points Arthur was talking about.
 
C4Cat said:
So what are the small but critical anthropological points that make the difference between being a radical socialist and being anti-socialist (but continuing to read socialist literature for 30 years). Sorry for hijacking this thread but I find this rather interesting...
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1. Man is a rational animal endowed with free will. Human intellect and will are necessarily non-material, or they're a fiction.
2. Man's telos consists in the full actualisation and exercise of intellect and will.

C4Cat said:
Why continue reading the Socialist Worker though if you know socialism has no future
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For reasons rather similar to why a doctor studies disease. Socialism is a perennial temptation because it powerfully appeals to idealism, and many (but not all) of its isotopes rationalise compulsion and deny the transcendent worth of the individual (something the collective does not have).

But now back to Brexit.
 
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Arthur said:
1. Man is a rational animal endowed with free will. Human intellect and will are necessarily non-material, or they're a fiction.
2. Man's telos consists in the full actualisation and exercise of intellect and will.

For reasons rather similar to why a doctor studies disease. Socialism is a perennial temptation because it powerfully appeals to idealism, and many (but not all) of its isotopes rationalise compulsion and deny the transcendent worth of the individual.

But now back to Brexit.
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Can I start another thread? Is this something you're interested in discussing?
 
C4Cat said:
Interesting, I never knew that - I got the impression from your previous posts on myBB that you were rather anti-socialist
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Most grownups are anti-socialist. Or at least those that took 5 min to investigate how the world works should be. Socialist are naive children.
 
Peter Geoghegan
@PeterKGeoghegan

David Davis just said on news that there would ‘turbulence’ after no deal, as ‘the French cause difficulties at the border’. What happened to the sane country I moved to? And how did this crowd control Ireland for centuries??
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That's my boys. Starve the goddams.
 
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