From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Wed Nov 22 2006 - 14:58:18 EST
Even in a 'socialist' society there is struggle. How is it possible for such a society to have both 'harmony' and struggle? Allright then Jerry. We will have to think dialectically about it. In the literature on the topic, this question is answered basically in terms of type and scope. 1) What are we fighting/competing/struggling about? 2) What is the scope of that conflict? As regards 1), it is one thing to struggle for your daily bread and water (survival needs), it is another thing to compete for the best way to solve problems of humanity, nature and society. You can talk about global warming endlessly of course, if you are in the elite, but if you're out in the cold with nothing to eat, it's a fat lot of use and you'll burn whatever you can find to warm up. As regards 2) it is one thing for people to punch each other in a personal dispute, another for people to e.g. attack each other with nuclear bombs killing everything in existence. If I play a game of chess, there's also a conflict, but quite a different conflict from that which happens when people are killing and mutilating each other. In other words, you can never abolish human conflicts altogether, but you can change their type and scope. There can be a basic harmony as regards the essentials of human life, while the conflicts continue about how humans can make better progress. That is "culture". President Bush just recently went on record as saying "And I also would tell people that democracies yield peace. Democracies don't fight each other." His idea of the "good society" is that it is a democracy, and that democracies are peaceful. That is his faith. Any scholar (or anybody with common sense) however knows this is nonsense, they are very aware of the American liars intervening in the political life of other democracies with spies, propaganda and weapons. The real point is that Mr Bush cannot explain where the conflict originates from, he just has the mystical bogey of "terrorism". He thought he could just march into Iraq, topple the regime and proceed to build the New Babylon ( or the New Jerusalem) and wouldn't people be glad to have that. We socialists don't operate in this way (although some messianic Stalinists would). We see it as our task, like Marx, to explain what the "struggle" is really about, never mind the bullshit, and to investigate and tackle the problems at their source. That is the philosophical difference. Well I counted to ten, but my dinner I was cooking got burnt a bit on the stove. So you see the kind of problems I have here... :-) Jurriaan
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