Socialist Society: How we could live...

The objective is surely a society serving the needs of its People, and certainly not the ever-growing power and luxuries for a small group of the Super rich. For now, and increasingly, it is becoming Credit with ever-climbing interest rates that is replacing adequate wages, and which is certainly never the way to deliver either a productive or a fair society. It replaces earned capabilities, with heavy and onerous responsibilities: it replaces confidence and energy, with ever mounting difficulties and uncertainties.

Capitalism is not a planned, nor is it an adequate system! It has crises every few years, and calamitous, decade-long Slumps, and even World Wars - all to serve moneyed investors with ever bigger Profits.

Yet, such a system is not inevitable! In fact, it took a series of popular Revolutions to terminate its Feudalist predecessor, carried out with the universally supported slogans of:

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity

The role of revolution in establishing capitalism as the dominant system is often overlooked

...but, even with its success, these revolutions ultimately only greatly empowered a particular small section of the new Society - the owners of Land, Property and Wealth. And, whilever that systemic inequality remains, so will the continued rule of the rich!

A Society for all-its-people has to be very different indeed to Capitalism: for privilege and inequality guarantees a divided and unstable social system.

The lessons of the 20th century must be learned or we will all perish!

But, let us be absolutely clear what it is, at this time, that we desperately need. Instead of just the profit motive determining everything else, we must start with what the People need in order to live, and will work in order to achieve. And, to effectively deliver that, we must have the means to determine those needs locally, then nationally, and finally globally! For only then can we have a Planned Economy- supplying what is actually required to everyone that needs it.

And, clearly, that cannot only be about sustenance, resources and the wherewithal to achieve and distribute it all, but also the essential services to facilitate it too - such as Shops and Stores, Education and Health Services, as well as Leisure facilities, and adequate support for all those in need of extra help.

In this new world the "entrepreneur" is no longer the Hero, but the Enemy - shown to be a parasite rather than a creative.

Policies will have to be socially arrived-at, and then cooperatively delivered.

Democracy must exist at every level of Society, and always be superior to individual power: even elected representatives will be subject to instant recall and replacement if they fail those that they represent.

And, what could be achieved by all of this?

Without the profit motive governing everything, our cities may begin to look very different.

The congenital instability of Capitalism would have to be terminated! The benefits of invention and new technology would be available to all. All industry would be addressed to the needs of Society, including protecting our environment. No one would be rich enough to buy privilege or own the means of production or the means of communication. All Education would be free to all. All Health Services would be free to all. All Stately Homes will be converted into precious Communal Facilities, such as Schools, Hospices, Colleges, Research Centres, Sports Centres, Retirement Homes and many more. High Quality Council Houses would be the main form of Public Housing. Public Transport would be both cheap and sufficient everywhere. A great increase in both City and Country Parks would be instituted; and participation in the Arts made available to all!

And to safeguard all of this:-

The Banks would be Nationalised! As would all the major nationwide Services such as Electricity, Gas, Water, Railways, Air Transport and Roads.

But though planned nationally, they would be run Democratically, and not by an unaccountable  central bureaucracy. 

Socialism?

Rule by the People and for the People?

What about Democracy in the Workplace?

Can we really have Democracy when the workers in a workplace have absolutely no say in what they do there? Should the "bottom line" of profit for an owner totally and always outweigh the needs and interests of the workforce?

It certainly depends upon who owns the business! To make any real change they would surely have to be socially-owned.

Now, of course, the status quo is usually argued-for very differently. For, management insists that only those who now make the decisions are the only ones competent to do so: while the workforce just don't know enough to even be involved. And, when no one is informing the workforce, or even making available the necessary knowledge, that may well be true.

So clearly, as with Political Democracy, so must it also be with so-called Democracy-at-Work! All information must always be made fully available for everybody to be involved to have access and discuss what they are attempting to achieve. And, sufficient resources to overcome any advantage to the privileged, must be fully available to the workforce too.

Currently, the workforce is always totally deprived of such information. But, if full access, along with requisite time, were allocated to such information, the workers, being intimately involved throughout their worktime, will soon learn to handle it, and crucially, with very different objectives to either owners or managers. Indeed, it will amount to a revolution in the efficiency and creativeness of both the work processes and their organisation. How could it be otherwise - the motivations involved will be very different!

Prof. Richard Wolff and his colleagues have written and spoken at length about the need for democracy at work. 

Just compare a Steam Railway Charity run by unpaid, and fully-involved enthusiasts, with the current chaos in our de-nationalised, run-for-profit rail services in Britain today.

What we are talking about, has never been fully achieved anywhere! For, in spite of the clear advantages of Socialised State Planning in Russia and China, after their Revolutions, the workplace was still relatively unchanged from prior Capitalist organisation. For the managers were appointed by the central government. There was NO Democracy-in-the-Workplace!

Clearly, "Socialism" is not what they actually had in those countries, and it was easy for a privileged bureaucracy to emerge, who did not put the working conditions, or the opinions of the workers, high on their agendas at all, and absolutely never delivered any decision making into the hands of the workforce themselves.

Indeed, Democracy-in-the-Workplace would not only transform that institution, but also significantly transform the Working Class involved, because they will, themselves, not only make the crucial decisions in what they are involved with every single day, but they will also discuss and even argue with their workmates, as to what policies the company should be employing. Instead of being excluded from the decision-making that affects their lives, and the wherewithal to make those decisions, they should instead be fully involved in both, and will therefore learn by their successes and their mistakes.

Socialism has to involve real Democracy at every level, in a Society in which Inequality and Privilege have been permanently terminated.

Indeed, the whole approach to the education of the working class, whether they are to be skilled or unskilled, absolutely must transcend mere work-based training and crucially disseminate critical thinking and real Understanding too!

I have worked in every level of Education from Schools, Further Education Colleges and Universities, and even in teaching unemployed youth computer programming, via Youth Training. And, from that wide experience, it soon became clear that the usual separate approaches did not deliver.

A New Holistic Iterative Method?

Henry Moore in his studio. The best artists seem to use a form of Holist Iteration as an investigative method.

Prelude:

What absolutely must be included here as the basis of a determined Holistic Stance, is to replace the most often assumed yet always-significantly-misleading consequences of the usually unconscious Pluralist Stance in all our methods.

And, that inevitably means removing any assumption of eternal Natural Laws, and instead, recognising the alternative of a whole set of multiple, mutually-affecting factors, which are not only changed individually by their accompaying-context, but reciprocally by also modifying that context too.

Permanently-fixed, natural kaws were an historically- necessary simplification, in order to even begin to understand Reality. Clearly, Plurality was an attempt to adjust Reality to get a handle on it - to get approximate values, from a simplified law.

But now, we absolutely must adopt new techniques to better reflect the true interconnected nature of Reality - one of these must be Iteration.


Iterative Methods:

There is a key problem in attempting, as I do, to develop an Iterative Method, from a measured data sequence alone, especially if we attempt to do it without any assumed form of model, for a relation supposedly- connecting those data points, as has always been the case in the usually-employed iteration techniques. For, without some sort of model, there seemed to be no way of reflecting the nature of the factors that cause the trajectory revealed in those data.

Now, in dealing with this situation, it is essential that several things have to be made absolutely clear about the usual iterative methods.

They always use an Ideal Form, taken directly from Mathematics, as a basis, which had then been fitted- up to those data, by multiple substitutions of them into it, to give a set of simultaneous equations, in the constants of the general form, which can then be solved. The result is still the same general Form, but persuaded- to-approximate to Reality, BUT only within-the-range from which those data were taken.

They then “re-structure” that equation geometrically- upon-a-graph into a set of iterative-forms. Now, such a re-structuring involves a major geometrical and transformative use, because, it isn’t merely a manipulation of the ideal equation. It is actually the use of that formula in geometrically-finding a consequent set-of-forms - one for each variable, that can use a single-known-point, and substitute from it into these derived iterative forms to find another single point, and, thereafter, further points, with each one derived from its predecessor.

And, the iterative forms so derived never change!

Being based upon Geometry-in-Graphs, they are unavoidably pluralistic: for the separation of variables into distinct directional dimensions, necessarily excludes any mutual influences they might have upon one another. So these iterarive forms also perpetuate Plurality.

They are fixed, but their repeated-use always gives new points, but always some distance from the “known” point used, so that the action moves rapidly across the whole range of the “driving” function’s possibility space (along with the usual drift as with all such iterative techniques).

Remember, absolutely nothing new has been added to the original source equation, only-the-means-used to access the sequence of generated points, delivered one-at- a-time. And if, as I am convinced, that original formula is NOT the deliverer of the sequence, but a simplified and idealised approximation, then all its short-comings MUST inevitably be carried over into the iterative forms derived from it, and added to by the effects of iteration itself!

Now, the reader is certain to ask why do these forms sometimes deliver things closer to Reality than the original source formulae? It is indeed an important question!

But, as the only significant change, in the actual plotting, has been the zigzagging-about the whole range of that ideal function, then that, plus the iterative drift, must be what is adding something extra, which can reveal something that was not there in the original idealised equation.

But, that method can surely only be some sort of purely- pragmatic trick. It certainly isn’t here taking us ever- closer to a definitive set of actually occurring situations, but just others in similar-but-different positions, in well- scattered general areas. They are certainly not due to the real physical causes (which are never even mentioned, never mind considered, but only due to our chosen strictly formal methods).

Clearly, though pragmatically, it is also only when our purposes can be at least partially fulfilled by such frigs, that we will use them. But, if our purpose is instead to better understand WHY things behave as they do, then it can only mislead us away from that valid, and indeed, absolutely necessary intention.

Let me re-emphasize, there is the important point that current iterative methods are always pluralistic – just like the original equation from which the iterative forms were derived, it assumes the same additively-arrived-at formal “cause”! And, such will be, for the very same reasons, significantly misleading.

But no Real World phenomenon is driven by a single factor: the general situation will always include many different factors, and crucially, if a holist stance is taken, instead of a pluralist one, then these factors will all affect and, indeed, change, one another to some extent.

Absolutely no other factors are included in the usual iterative methodology – it uses only ONE. So, what should be down to the hidden mutual affects of all the other factors involved, is here due instead to a rigged-up version of the usual method.

And, here it isn’t the actual-contributions, but something- else that may deliver something “similar”.

The Alternative:

So, it is suggested that we address these problems, instead, through the use of Recursion, in addition to the use of real points, and absolutely none of the usual pluralist and iterative methods of the past.

With each new measurement, we start by using Difference Methods (or something similar) to reveal what powers of variables are appropriate in the most general polynomial Model. Then use our data again, but now in the usual way to find the still unknown constants of that model.

So far, this sounds like something already used in the past, but there is a significant twist! We do not stick with that form throughout.

So, instead, we now recursively do the steps all over again, including the next measurement made, and repeat the full set of processes, not only with this, but thereafter with every single new additional measurement made.

What will happen is an evolving form, changing with each new addition.

Exactly what the most general form would be, may begin with the assumption of a polynomial. But, if the evidence is against that model, we could add further non-polynomial terms. The crux of the method then becomes the comparison of a predicted location with the real measured one, and a subsequent judgement as to what changes in the adjusted general form might be required.

The original idea for this method was conceived of as the measurements being taken as the body in question was moving (as if we were the riders on a rocket in Space). But, of course, a full, extended set could be achieved, before any fitting up was attempted, and in some complex circumstances, where many dominant influences could regularly come-and-go, for then this method will come into its own.

Indeed, the processes of the method could be carried out completely after the Event, and once sufficient had been processed to get some sort of form, all subsequent positions could be associated with its own version of the form. Also, each new, as yet unprocessed position would be predicted from the current version of the form.

Studying the varying forms could tell us more about the changing-real-influences affecting an overall form, than one that is both always simplified and idealised.

Postscript:

Now, the reader must appreciate that what is being attempted here is entirely new!

First, it rejects Plurality as the current basis for such pragmatic manipulations.

Second, it is attempting to indirectly include aspects of Reality that are usually excluded.

Third, it is purposely recursive, as in the Buddhist Loka Sutta, as a means of constantly checking upon its own validity.

It will most certainly NOT be the last word in this area: it will take some time to break ourselves from “If it works, it is right!” - the credo of the farmed situations that perpetuate Pluralist Science.

This paper was published as part of Issue 62 of SHAPE Journal entitled The Whole and the Part.

Issue 62: The Whole and the Part

Read the latest issue of SHAPE Journal on The Whole and the Part: a loose collection of recent papers aiming to develop a nascent Science of Holism, by looking closer at the crucial oppositions involved: Plurality and Holism, the Whole and the Part.

The Whole and the Part

The Hermeneutic Cycle

Thought for Today

Bringing Holism into the Methods of Science

Why Holist Science and Iteration?

A New Holistic Iterative Method

Plurality & Holism, Mathematics & Reality

Multi-variable Relations

Dialectical Emergence

Socialism!

Rule by the People and for the People = Real Democracy!

Capitalism is not rule by the people, it is rule by the rich. 

It goes to war only to safeguard their Wealth.

The Working Class are sent to their injury and death to maintain or extend the dominance of their rulers. And, yet it never benefits the People.

Capitalism still has its regular Depressions and Major Slumps as in 1929-1940 and 2008-now, and it is always the People who suffer.

Yet, the current Slump, as usual, delivers for the Bosses the very best circumstances for reversing what gains the Working Class have made, and even promises the rich a return to their good-old-days of rule, and the old debased standards of life for the majority of the People. This makes them easier to exploit and makes greater Wealth for the Bosses.

Employment is UP, but only at lower wages and in insecure jobs.

But, what was it that the Working Class expected? What was this "Socialism" that they aspired to?They constitute the vast majority, and produce all of the Nation's Goods, Wealth and Services.

And, they do have the Vote.

If their needs and wants were paramount, the World would be very different indeed! Not a single Stately Home would still be occupied by the rich: they would ALL be used where they are needed most, for the old, and the ill, and for the young too! The enormous magnificent landscapes, surrounding those Stately Homes, would be for the People, in Leisure, Recreation and Sport, and even for Housing.

Making the rich even richer, would have to be totally terminated and reversed! Why should anyone have such Wealth, Privilege and Power?

You may well ask how the current imbalance was able to establish itself in spite of "Democracy"? It's an excellent question! So, here are a few more:-

• Is this Democracy independent of Wealth?

• Are the means of informing the People independent of Wealth?

• Can the Electorate sack their MP for not serving them?

• Are the largest Political Parties independent of Wealth?

I think you know the answers! So, do we have Real Democracy? You know the answer to that too!

Whilever Wealth can always intervene effectively, there will never be Real Democracy. The name for the only truly Democratic System which has been strived for, for centuries, and something we have so far failed to achieve, is Socialism.

To append what we currently have with the description of it being a Democracy, is not just a bad joke, it is a downright lie.

Chris Hedges: "Democracy has become a facade"

Hedges may not be a real socialist, but he hits a few nails on the head in this speech

Haunting Henry Moore

The different meanings of "socialism"

Richard Wolff strikes again! Have a look at the last third of the video for a debate on socialism, what it means to different people, and what it has meant historically. 

Fellow Prisoners by John Berger

A great piece, by the late great Berger.

You can read it here too.

Real Remembrance

As the Tories and their clerics continued to celebrate the First World War on Sunday, only one moment reflected its real Truth and Horror.

(Two of my uncles perished in that mangle of mud and blood, and it killed my illiterate Grandma when she heard.)

That moment was the tribute to Sassoon and Owen on Sky Arts. And their words simply must scream SHAME on our horrendous Ruling Class, who never gave a damn about the Working Class soldiers they condemned to death, and still don't.

Here's some real remembrance.

Dulce et Decorum Est 

BY WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

A Crucial Turning Point

Turning Point by Philip Johnson

When major redefinitions are both necessary and difficult

After almost a decade, as a full time writer upon Science and Philosophy, it was becoming increasingly clear that the wherewithal to fully address all the regularly-occurring, and clearly-evident problems, was still not yet sufficiently defined to enable me to "Make the Necessary Turn!". I had published almost 1,000 papers, and written a further 1,700, and most were sound in reasoning. But the core objective, which had gradually become clear, was still far from having been coherently presented as an integrated whole.

It would have to include a total demolishing of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, in Sub Atomic Physics, and also a much wider-ranging definition of a fundamentally different philosophical Stance, which would have to be Holistic.

The difficulty was, and still is, that literally all intellectual disciplines since the Ancient Greeks have been entirely Pluralistic, and have become intrinsically imbued in all the available and acceptable methodologies for all of my professional career in Universities in three different countries. Indeed, I had usually succeeded in academia largely because I could do the pluralistic stuff, and would still unavoidably commence any new problem via the old ways first.

But, so many attempts have come-to-a-stop resulting in classic Hegelian contradictions, and their unavoidable impasses, that I had to attempt to take his Dialectical Logic much further than Hegel had ever managed to do, and even Marx had not developed his Dialectical Materialism deeply-and-profoundly enough to tackle many Scientific Conceptions and Reasoning, such as occur in Mathematics and every single one of the Sciences.

As a competent mathematician, I naturally read Marx's Mathematical Manuscripts, but they did not help, so I had to begin to address the problems myself.

I soon began to unearth holistic truths within my usual professional researches into providing Computing assistance to a wide range of professionals studying in many very different disciplines. The Key Revelations finally occurred in addressing real, complex and expressive movements in Dance, in order to enable both the teaching of accurate Performance, as well as that of Choreography too. And, ultimately, I devised the first effective way of successfully delivering what the Dance expert required, with appropriate Access-and-Control, using computer controlled Multimedia of recorded resources.

Surprisingly, the main problems were caused in the very same way that both Zeno and Hegel himself had noted in dealing with Movement, and the latter had even begun to understand, and then concentrated upon, but, with him being an idealist, the sort of impasses I came up against were not what he would ever have encountered, never mind tackled.

Though this work certainly greatly enabled my necessary assault upon the required Philosophy to address Reality-as-is, there was still another major problem to do with the premises underlying any Coherent, consistent and comprehensive methodology in pursuing such a path.

The problem resided in the omission of an absolutely vital premise in Physics!

Towards the end of the 19th century, Michelson and Morley had conducted an experiment which "proved" that there was NO Universal Substrate involved in the propagation of light - no Ether, as it was then called, and a whole significant branch of Physics based upon the assumption that such a Substrate existed was dropped as untenable.

It most certainly couldn't be detected, but the formulae based upon assuming that it did still worked.

Maxwell's theoretical aether

Indeed, James Clerk Maxwell had devised his brilliant set of Electromagnetic Equations developed upon his now-discredited Model of the Ether, so I had to re-institute the Universal Substrate as an existing, but currently undetectable entity, and applying that concept alone, to all the Double Slit Experiments, enabled me to dispense entirely with all anomalies of those experiments, and all the assumptions of Copenhagen that had been devised to deal with them altogether.

But, that wasn't all that was required! There just wasn't a useable Holistic Methodology in Science at all. There was, however, a kind of holistic stance, but applied with a pluralistic Logic.

Clearly, I should explain.

Science, since the Ancient Greeks, had been an Amalgam of several contradictory stances, but always using the still-agreed-to basic tenet of Pragmatism - "If it works, it is right!", those involved in dealing with such things, simply switched between stances, until they found one which worked.

So, a "holist-component", within this approach, attempted to explain phenomena entirely in terms of the known properties of the components involved (it was that aspect which persuaded me to become a physicist). But, also severely modifying that sound stance, was the universally adopted Principle of Plurality. which insisted that all causative Laws were wholly independent of one another: they were fixed- everything could be explained merely in terms of the summations of eternal Natural Laws.

So, clearly, this severely disabled that stance from effectively coping with a clearly holistic and developing Reality. And, finally, those laws could be "correctly-encapsulated" in the Perfect Formal Equations of Mathematics - which is, of course, Idealism!

Now, believe it or not, this Amalgam was considered to be "The Scientific Method". It was neither consistent nor coherent, but it appeared to be "Comprehensive" due solely to the ubiquitous Pragmatic Tenet.

And Holism without Plurality and Pragmatism seemed to be totally impossible to apply, as its tenet was "Everything affects everything else!": and the key unanswered question was "How?" Just how, and in what ways, did the many affecting factors change one another?

Hegel called his solution to a complex changing reality, Dialectics, but he was only concerned with Thinking. Marx recast it as Dialectical Materialism, but never comprehensively addressed Science.

And, here's the rub, not only did Science need Dialectical Materialism, BUT Dialectical Materialism also needed Science.

And all this still had to be systematically addressed. Literally nothing had been done!

So here goes.......