"As socialist-democrats, we belong, in truth, to no sect, no school. Or, rather, if we are obliged to come up with a description of ourselves, we should say that we are of the critical school. For us, socialism is not a system: it is, quite simply, a protest....
"The objective of socialism is liberation of the proletariat and eradication of poverty, which is to say, effective equality of circumstances between men. In the absence of equality, there will always be poverty, always be a proletariat.
"Socialism, which is egalitarianism above all else, is thus the democratic formula par excellence....
"The underlying dogma of socialism thus consists of reducing the aristocratic formula of capital-labor-talent into the simpler formula of LABOR!... in order to make every citizen simultaneously, equally, and to the same extent capitalist, worker, and expert or artist.
"In reality as in economic science, producer and consumer are always one and the same person, merely considered from two different viewpoints. Why should the same not be true of capitalist and worker? of worker and artist? Separate these qualities in the organization of society and inexorably you create castes, inequality and misery; amalgamate them, on the other hand, and in every individual you have equality, you have the Republic. And that is how in the political order, all these distinctions between governors and governed, administrator and administered, public functionaries and tax-paters, etc., must some day be erased. Each citizen must, through the spread of the social idea, become all: for, if he be not all, he is not free: he suffers oppression and exploitation somewhere."—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Election Manifesto of Le Peuple)
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Thanks for posting this quote.
Pierre Proudhon and one of his followers - Silvio Gesell in my view are the most relevant thinkers today. It is interesting that in the Communist block Pierre Proudhon was dismissed as a 'petit bourgeois philosopher', while at the same time being portrayed as an extreme leftie on the capitalist West. He is equally hated by the Bolshevik style statists, and by the rentseeking class.
It is nice to see people who quote him on Steemit, which otherwise dominated by the tribe of randists.
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All systems have very good ideals and aims, socialism, democracy, anarchy, communism, all have good intentions, but all of them have to face the fact that human beings are greedy and will never be satisfied with what is allotted to them, which is why eventually all systems fail, there will always be someone who wants more, more control, more power, more land, more everything and despite all the idealistic people in the world nothing can change this.
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There's no such thing as perfection, but there are better and worst systems. The key is to create institutions that balance or limit power, make it harder to abuse power, etc. Representative democracy with representative recall is a hell of a lot better than a totalitarian dictator with no checks on his power. Anarchism and socialism, in particular, are kind of based on the assumption that people tend towards corruption and abuse of power, which is why they seek to reduce or eliminate unnecessary power relations.
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Representative democracy is a cauldron of corruption, you just have to look around any country that is supposed to be a democracy it's just a huge pot of corruption, anywhere, EU, UK,US Japan, South Korea, Australia etc and every once in a while they create a scandal someone goes to jail and everyone says see democracy works, theft doesn't pay, but in reality it does pay, these are just shows for the public. As for a totalitarian dictator, look I'm from Honduras, we have a representative democracy and we have consistently been the poorest country in Latin America for the last 100 years, we try to hide behind Haiti, but Haiti is not really a part of Latin America except to keep Honduras out of last place, hell, you look at statistics and we are in fact worse off than Venezuela, Nicaragua for years was a totalitarian dictatorship under Somoza and they were way better off than us, so no, representative democracy is no great deal.
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Non sequitur. Democracy is a necessary condition for justice, but not a sufficient one. I mean, if you have representative democracy but don't enact the right economic reforms, then democracy won't do you any good. If the economic structure creates poverty, recessions, lack of progress, and inequality, then representative democracy is no help UNLESS it is used as a means of changing economic arrangements.
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Now we've come full circle, I told you things don't work for the simple reason humans won't let them work, why are we even going on with this, democracy is never going to be used for changing the lives of the wretched because people are greedy, merciless and egoists, I told you all ideologies have good ideals but none are going to work, what you are doing is presenting excuses, forget it they won't work.
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Every government system is already good enough if there is no war (or upcoming one), no? :d
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No, I don't think so. Most governments have created and upheld systematic inequality and injustice, even in the absence of war.
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No, i mean it's better. We still have a hope. Would be much harder to try building something from nuclear ruins. There will always be inequality and injustice.
Do you know any modern projects about improving government system? Hmm. I'm curious.
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Estonia is expirimenting with digital democracy. Ranked-choice voting, land value tax, and universal basic income proposals and pilot programs are interesting.
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