Hi Brian

You mentioned a important point I think with your;

"It may also help to mitigate against the very dangerous and off-
putting idea (held by some socialists, it should be said) that
socialism would predominantly be a centralised system of production
with lots of hierarchical levels of decision-making, committees and
referenda."

I think that how we would propose to democratically organise this
socialist society of ours is as much as a bugbear as how we would
organise production.

The problem can be seen as that we would have to be spending a huge
amount of time voting on everything. As well as the problem that
people who couldn't be bothered and just wanted to get on with their
lives would end up being organised by the congenital political hacks
who like nothing better than organising and arranging other peoples
lives.

There is actually a simple solution to this that works well if not
impeccably on a large scale. It is scientifically or mathematically
based and basically means the larger the group the less time each
individual has to spend `voting' and decision making.

It is probably far too radical for the conservatives but I would
like to know what is wrong with it. It is based on the mathematical
modelling of statistical sampling.

I posted something on this a long while ago on spopen and got no
response, so I think I will put it here.


"The theory of statistical sampling is well established and is based
on mathematical fundamental first principals not on empirical
evidence ie it is true. Ignoring people lying and not responding
etc. a sample of 5000 people randomly selected from a population of
say 50 million in a yes /no issue there will be a 99% chance that
the (%) voting figures (of the sample or poll) will be within +/-2%
of how the total population would have responded.

Ballpark figures and it is probably better than that .

The history of exit poll data discussed at length on this election
fraud issue, despite the major potential problem of lying and the
actual one of non response/participation in the order of 50%, has a
really impressive record. Non participation is an important issue as
a poll will then only tell you what people who are prepared to
answer a poll are thinking. In opinion polls normally in excess of
60% refuse to respond.

This is a shocking thing to say but it is true, there is no need for
200 million people to vote as a poll of 20,000 (properly organised
under correct criteria) will give you exactly the same result every
time. Science uses this principal all the time it is embedded in the
theory of experimentation. We wouldn't have (to have a) lying and non
participation problem in our system in a secret (or non secret) poll.

(On a complex issue like nuclear power where everyone could not
possibly spend their time in understanding all the complex and
technical information they would need to make a `rational' decision )

In the democratic process why couldn't we do it on a jury type
system but with big juries . If there is a complex subject to be
decided we get the experts to provide reports etc and argue amongst
themselves and get a Jury of 10,000 ordinary people randomly
selected to go through all the evidence.

The stats people would tell us what sample size was needed to
achieve levels confidence required etc. You could put all sorts of
safe guards in if you wanted, the ability to cancel the decision if
a majority and (or) over 30% ? of a plebiscite voted against it .
You could also (democratically) skew the sample population to
balance local versus global interests etc. A delegate or executive
committee could (perhaps) just pass these Jury votes on the nod or
not, or whatever.


In practice most if not all would just go through or the jury
investigation be repeated or expanded.

You could even be given (everyone) the option to vote on every
single issue or just tick one box that says " I agree with all jury
decisions unless stated otherwise" or a non vote would be considered
a yes to the jury vote.

If you had a voting population of 30,000,000 and jury of 3,000 we
could make 10,000 decisions a year by each person only having to
vote once.

What goes onto the agenda is another issue. The required sample size
(of the poll) as a % of the population drops dramatically as the
population size increases eg with 10 million you might need 1,000
whereas as for 100 million you would need 5,000.

Even at a local level , lets say a constituency of 50,000, we could
have weekly "parliaments" of say 1000 randomly selected constituents
voting on resolutions put forward by another body. That way I
wouldn't have to spend more than 2% of mine time voting which would
be too much for me but close
enough to 0%."


http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spopen/message/4020





--- In WSM_Forum@yahoogroups.com, "Brian Gardner"
<brian.gardner132@...> wrote:

>
> Hi Paul, Hud and others,
>
> I have a lot of sympathy for the view being expressed that we can -

> and indeed should - discuss how socialism may (repeat, may)

organise

> production in the absence of the market, in relation to statistics
> available in the here and now.
>
> Firstly, it can help to bring home to a listener/sympathiser just

how

> badly capitalism meets human needs in a concrete fashion.

Secondly,

> in my view (and there is no evidence for or against this, just my
> optimism) if & when people get the opportunity to analyse those

areas

> of production that they are expert in (ie their own work/workplace)
> from a practical socialist perspective for themselves, it could

turn

> out to be a very important consciousness-raising step. Rather

than

> coming across socialist ideas in the abstract it would be

practically-

>

I think socialism-communism is easy to be understood if we read the proper
ideas, that is my main point, workers, first, must be educated politically,
and the desires to build a new society must exists, and it must be
understood also, and we must a militant of a socialist party, we can not
make a revolution as a lone ranger, otherwise we will be jumping from one
reform into another reform.

I am just describing my personal experience, from which other people can
learn and avoid those mistakes, probably for you, it would be easier,
because right now you are in touch with the proper people that have made it
easier, it is already being served on a silver plate, and you are in the
middle of a real socialist party that have accumulated more than 100 years
of experiences, you do not have to go thru the same exorcist process that I
had to go through, but we it gave me also a strong foundation, because class
struggle is one of the biggest struggles on earth, it has been carried for
thousands of years by mankind

What I said is that the concept of commodity expressed by the socialists
is different to the concept expressed by the bourgeois economists, and many
of them do not even understand the real meaning of commodity, that is
something that you must frankly accept, that you are still influenced by the
bourgeois conception of the commodity,

We are not against commodity in the sense of the use value of things
produced by the workers, what we want to eliminate is the value of exchange
of those commodity, and we are not saying that workers must give up what
they have, workers do not own anything it is only a bourgeois illusion, in
certain part of the world workers apparently own certain commodity, because
those are the toys given by the rulers in order to keep the workers
conformed to their own personal situation, and keep them attached to the
point of production, and to make them believe that they are better off that
others people from the rest of the world, but in those countries, the
exploitation is higher and the surplus value is higher too. . We do not even
own a piece of land in the cemetery

The biggest commodity on earth, it is labor power, and your are selling it
every day, every hour and every seconds, and sometimes we sell it forever,
and the capitalists are the one that are buying our labor commodity and in
some places that are getting it for free, with the increase of technology
and the speeding of the production

On 28/10/2007, tetraedronico <tetraedronico@...> wrote:
>
> Marcos,
>
> For what I understood, you are very experienced in matters of socialism
> and I have no doubt about it.
> You say that for everybody, learning Socialism is "difficult, lenghty and
> painful", that you learned it the hard way by making a lot mistakes, that
> you first believed the marxist-leninist theories but later you wake-up and
> decided that Lenin and Trotsky were wrong, and that many communist still
> believe this and that they're wrong. I respect your oppinion, but I don't
> agree that learning socialism is that difficult, furthermore, I don't
> believe Socialism SHOULD be like this. Socialism should be a series of
> simple concepts that every human being can understand quickly, we cannot
> afford that every single human being can go to a similar process that you
> went through in order to learn what Socialism truly is. Just look at my
> example, I believe in the same Socialism that you and most of us here
> believe and I didn't had to suffer the leninist theories, I'm not an
> ignorant either, I know that leninism is responsible to what happen in
> Russia after the bolchevik
> revolution, I know what a vanguard party is, and I have always known this
> since probably many months know. Please stop trying to diminish or
> dismissing my comments just because you feel I'm an ignorant, for example,
> in our previous exchange, I was saying that people won't give up easily
> their material possesions, they won't give easily their TV sets or SUV's and
> you said to me that I don't understand the concept of commodities. You're
> trying to dismiss my point based on your conclusion that I'm an ignorant,
> but you're still left with the duty of proving me wrong: That people will
> easly be willing to give up their possesions (Just because Marx says so).
> I'm telling you, people won't be willing to do this, and if we try to do
> this they will only keep rejecting us. I know I'm not willing to give my
> possessions, for what I understand, we can live perfectly a Socialist world
> and have them. I don't want to live in a socialist society that is worst
> than this
> one in terms of what choices does it brings.
>
> Tetraedrónico
>
> ----- Mensaje original ----
> De: Marcos Colome < UPRalmamater@... <UPRalmamater%40gmail.com>>
> Para: WSM_Forum@yahoogroups.com <WSM_Forum%40yahoogroups.com>
> Enviado: domingo, 28 de octubre, 2007 12:23:09
> Asunto: Re: [WSM_Forum] Message for Robin
>
> I am not saying that you are stupid, what I am saying is that many things
> in
> order to be understood they require the proper knowledge, even Hegel said
> that we must go thru the pain and suffering to obtaing the knowledge, the
> vanguard party is a concept elaborated by Vladimir Lenin, and it is well
> explained on his work What is to be done ? and that book used to be the
> training book for new members of any communist party, as well the book
> about
> Historical Materialism written by Martha Hannecker, ( today she is the
> political counselor of Hugo Chavez, and before she was the political
> counselor of Salvador Allende ) and her book contained my philosophical
> errors, because she based most of her ideas on Lenin Materialism and
> Empirocriticism, which has been critiqued by Anton Pannecock, and he has
> proven that Lenin was not a philosopher.
>
> I did conduct many study groups about those two books, but I did not know
> the idea behind of that book ( What is to be done ) until I started to
> read
> the oppose view about the vanguard party written by Raya Dunayeskaya, but
> Raya did not know the all the philosophical mistake made by Lenin on his
> philosophical book, but I did Anton Pannecock, which gave the ground to
> question Leninism, and I knew most of the works of Lenin, and by reading
> the
> works of the SPGB I was able to go deeper in order to be able to reject
> Leninism. The new member that joins the SPGB?WSM were in better shapes
> than
> me, because they did not have to go thru the same process like I did.
>
> There are thousands of communists that are still hanging in those ideas,
> even more, Leon Trotsky that wrote millions of words, died believing in
> the
> vanguard party, and believing that Russia was a socialist nation.( while
> others people had a different view ) even Lenin had given the clue, when
> he
> said tha state capitalism was a stage toward socialism, in reality he was
> recognizing that he was mistaken, and he knew that it was impossible to
> build a socialist society in a backward country like Russia, where
> millions
> of peasant did not provide support to the bolshevik, they only wanted
> land,
> bread and freedom, which was the main slogan of the bolshevik party
>
> A college degree will not give anybody the political education in order to
>
> understand certain topics, I met many factories workers that knew more
> than
> me about socialist ideas. Many years ago, I had a friend called Felix
> Martin
> that he was well versed on the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach and he gave me
>
> lectures about Hegel Science of Logic, and being a proletarian workers he
> was the editor of a newspaper.
>
> Workers do not even understand the concept of a bourgeois party, when most
> of the workers are always voting for the rulers, if they had the proper
> ideas or concept about the purpose of a bourgeois party, they would not
> stand behind their own rulers, a bourgeois party is the political and
> economical representation of the interests of the rulers, therefore a
> socialist party is the representative of the political and economical
> interests of the working class, and it is the only instrument that the
> working class would be able to take control of the state and to do the
> collectivization of the means of productions and the purpose at the
> present
> time of a socialist party is to provide the proper political education to
> the working class,
>
> We are learning socialists ideas every day and it takes times and years to
>
> understand , because we learn by the experiences of others peoples, I have
> learned a lot with the old members of the WSM?SPGB and I started in the
> movement when I was a very young person, and I still I am learning, and I
> if
> am learning it does not mean that I am stupid, it means that I am ignorant
> of many topics, and still, I am ignorant about many issues,
>
> Marx and Engels did not have times to cover certain topics, and many times
>
> the had to change or correct their ideas, because capitalism was not fully
> developed and it only existed in a few countries, and they learned many
> ideas from the workers, even more, before the Manifest was written, the
> workers had already provided many of those ideas, ( some people says that
> Marx is the movement from practice into a theory ) and in certain moments
> they were mistaken too, Marx was only able to complete one volume of
> Capital, and he said that in order to write his complete works, they had
> to
> be written again, and by reading the Grundisse we can see that he was
> going
> to write six books
>
> On 28/10/2007, tetraedronico <tetraedronico@ yahoo.com. mx> wrote:
> >
> > You said:
> > "I think you must work a little more in your ideological education, then
>
> > you will understand the concept of a socialist
> > party"
> >
> > What?? I never said I was opposed to forming socialist parties Marcos,
> and
> > I did understood you when you mentioned the vanguard parties, this is
> why I
> > said that I agree with you, that the truth about socialism is not like a
> > revealed truth that the church use.
> >
> > But yet again you try to make me feel like I'm a stupid that I don't
> know
> > about the basic concept of commodities in the eyes of Karl Marx and now
> you
> > said I don't know about the concept of "socialist parties" either. I'm
> not
> > the stupid you think I am or do I need to join the vanguard party in
> order
> > to receive the revealed truth?
> >
> > Tetraedrónico
> >
> > ----- Mensaje original ----
> > De: Marcos Colome <UPRalmamater@ gmail.com <UPRalmamater% 40gmail.com> >
> > Para: WSM_Forum@yahoogrou ps.com <WSM_Forum%40yahoog roups.com>
> > Enviado: sábado, 27 de octubre, 2007 23:55:08
> > Asunto: Re: [WSM_Forum] Message for Robin
> >
> > Socialists do need a party, in the same manner that the bourgoise needs
> a
> > party. without a political organization it would be very hard for the
> > working to be able to create the collectivization of the means of
> > productions. I think you have confused my message, I am talking about
> the
> > vanguard party, the vanguard party is totally different to the World
> > Socialist Movment and its companion parties. We do not have a central
> > commitee, and we do not have leaders, our guide is not the Leninist book
> > What is to be donde? this is a different conception, the vanguard party
> is
> > a conception of Karl Kautsy and Ferdinand Lasalle placed in practice by
> > the
> > bolshevik, we were opponents of the bolshevik and Lenin since the very
> > beginning and history has proven that we were totally correct. Before I
> > joined this party I did a long homework, before joining this party I was
> a
> >
> > member of the Socialist Labor Party of the US.( which I consider a good
> > party ) If for any reason I must leave this party, i will not join any
> > other party, (or I will join the SLP, even that I do not agree with
> > socialism in one country,) because this is the best party in the whole
> > working class movement. I think you must work a little more in your
> > ideological education, then you will understand the concept of a
> socialist
> > party
> >
> > On 27/10/2007, tetraedronico <tetraedronico@ yahoo.com. mx> wrote:
> > >
> > > I don't believe that one need to pay a fee to become a socialist or
> make
> >
> > > contributions to earn a right to say anything about socialism. I've
> seen
> > > here some folks making distinctions between party members and
> > sympathizers,
> > > in such a dismissive way that pains me because I'm not a member, never
> > been
> > > and I'm not sure I will.
> > >
> > > I don't think people necessarely need to join a party to become
> > > Socialists. A socialist to me is a person that believes in the
> > fundamental
> > > principles behind socialism, this is not a secret society as far as I
> > know,
> > > where the truth is only revealed to the upper members of their clans,
> so
> > I
> > > agree with you Marcos, Socialism is not a revealed truth communicated
> > from
> > > above, nevertheless we need to be mature enough to know how to
> confront
> > our
> > > ideas with the rest of our group and be humble sometimes to leave
> behind
> > > certains erroneous and preconceived ideas like this one of Socialist
> > Society
> > > equals Homeless-like Society, this is a fallacy and it is very
> important
> > to
> > > understand so that we can approach non-Socialists and demistify this
> > notion
> > > that only brings fears and create unreasonable rejection, Socialism is
> > very
> > > unpopular because it's widely misunderstood and it is our duty to be
> > well
> > > inform and well prepared when we spread the word. The last century
> > > revolutions that ended up in State capitalism has been very
> unfavorable
> > to
> > > this movement to the extent that most people think that we want to go
> > back
> > > to such kind of society, like peasants in a Russian state, or being
> > homeless
> > > in eastern Berlin, or having a one-child policy on top of us, or
> living
> > in
> > > the missery of the Cuban state, we need to work harder in order to
> draw
> > a
> > > clear line between a pseudo socialist state and a world wide Socialist
>
> > > society and what should the people expect from the two antagonistic
> > > philosophies.
> > >
> > > Good night.
> > >
> > > Tetraedrónico
> > >
> > > ----- Mensaje original ----
> > > De: Marcos Colome <UPRalmamater@ gmail.com <UPRalmamater% 40gmail.com>
> >
> > > Para: WSM_Forum@yahoogrou ps.com <WSM_Forum%40yahoog roups.com>
> > > Enviado: sábado, 27 de octubre, 2007 20:27:53
> > > Asunto: Re: [WSM_Forum] Message for Robin
> > >
> > > Have you ever been a member of any vanguard party ? Under the vanguard
>
> > > party, members must agree on everything that comes from the central
> > > committee, and the so called democratic centralism never works, and
> even
> > > if
> > > you do not agree in certain issue, one must agree because it was
> > approved
> > > by
> > > the central committee, and the only ones allow to write in the
> newspaper
> > > are
> > > the members of the central committee, and they are the only one
> > authorized
> > > to speak in public representing the party. I have seen more freedom of
> > > expression in the WSM than in other so called communist parties. You
> > > should
> > > join the RCPUSA and raise a critique against a saint called Bob
> Avakian,
> > > or
> > > against a pope called Mao Tse Tung, wait for the results, or the
> > > Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada and raised a critique against Hardian
> > > Vains, or the MPUSA that were similar to a convent or a monastery, at
> > > least
> > > in the WSM we can raise a critique against Marx, Engels and we have
> > > demystified Vladimir Lenin, I saw certain situation where the members
> of
> > > the
> > > central committee and the members of another organizations were
> killing
> > > each
> > > other just based on ideological and organization differences
> > >
> > > On 27/10/2007, Paula <pmce@btinternet. com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Robin
> > > > The only solution to capitalist problems is to join - or as a
> > > > minimum, not disagree with - the SPGB.
> > > > Anyone who thinks that they have an alternative route to socialism
> > > > will be shot down in flames.
> > > > So don't come to our forum Robin, and expect to get away with
> > anything.
> > > > Graham has my full backing.
> > > > Paula
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> > >
> > > ____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _
> > > ¡Sé un mejor besador!
> > > Comparte todo lo que sabes sobre besos.
> > > http://mx.yahoo com/promos/ mejorbesador. html
> > >
> > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >
> > ____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _
> > ¡Sé un mejor besador!
> > Comparte todo lo que sabes sobre besos.
> > http://mx.yahoo com/promos/ mejorbesador. html
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >
> >
> >
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
> __________________________________________________________
> ¡Sé un mejor asador!
> Aprende todo sobre asados.
> http://mx.yahoo.com/promos/mejorasador.html
>
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