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How are the socialists at fault?

You think Blair was a Socialist??.......LOL!!

People seem to confuse being left wing culturally with being economically left wing. The socialists/communists lost the economic argument long ago with the collapse of the soviet union and the fall of the Berlin wall which is why we now have NEW Labour. But they have now switched the battle ground to social matters which is why we are now under the thumb of political correctness, further EU integration whether we like it or not and the failed comprehensive system etc.. Now that Labour and Conservatives have essentially the same policies it really doesn't matter who you vote for anymore. I for one will be abstaining.

Firstly, socialism is far from communism. Secondly, the Soviet Union was not communism, merely masquerading as such. Thirdly, neither socialists nor communists are to blame for the state of the country. This has came about due to government being non-representative, we need proportional representation and more referendums.

Socialism is not too far from communism, they both believe in common ownership of the means of production and distribution and an egalitarian society. In fact many saw socialism as simply a necessary first step towards communism. And how exactly was the soviet union not communist? I don't claim to be an expert on the Soviet Union but that is a new one on me. You are certainly right about the government being non representative and I'm all for referendums although as may happen with the Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty, they will just change the wording and have a new referendum until they get the "right" result.

PR would only lead to an even bigger mess. The current elected dictatorship where the 'sheep' are whipped by threat or promise would be worsened, as all MPs would be desperate to keep their place on the party lists so we would have even less independent voting than now!

If any ideology is to blame for the current state of the UK, it is the illiberal, extreme right wing neocon policies of Tony "war criminal" Blair and Gordon "one term" Brown. They make Thatcher look like she was a soft touch.

The old USSR never every had anything that came close to Communism. If you doubt that, read Marx's The Communist Manifesto and compare what he envisioned with the policies of the USSR between 1917 and the death of Stalin in 1953. The Communist vision of "rule by the proletariat" was quickly abandoned after the revolution and permanent militaristic dictatorship became the norm. Marx's Communism was nothing to do with dictatorship.

Communism, as theorised by Marx, is indeed Utopian. However it has one inescapable overriding flaw: it does not allow for human nature. The practise of Communism and it's lesser form, Socialism, has been proved in the 20th century to become irredeemably corrupt - hence the 'true' definition of a Socialist as someone who wants equality for all - but only until he's got it. (.....or should that be 'true Socialist'?)

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I think a vote for Labour and Conservative would mean a continuation of the system that has led to the endemic corruption we see in parliament today. Rather than abstain or give votes to an extremist party, you could opt for the Liberals. They already have a commitment to reform the voting system and bring in a more representative government. Proportional Representation has been successful in Scotland and other countries. The number of MPs could be reduced as part of this reforming process. We could adopt a constitution at the same time.

I strongly disagree. PR emasculates the electorate leading to executive drift and diluted policies. If extended to the single transferable vote - candidates are intimidated for fear of losing their place/ranking on the party lists. PR has arguably only been marginally successful in Scotland where the Parliament has itself only limited powers. You only have to look at Italy (a new government every 9 months for 20 years!) to see how ineffectual it can be.

I do agree we are over-represented. The US with over 300 million people only has 465 Congressmen and 100 Senators. UK has more legislators per head (and Cabinet/Ministers) than almost every other country. 'Efficiency cuts' to government would significantly improve streamlined government, and facilitate more open and accountable management. (Fewer 'fiefdoms' and sacred cows!)

The US population is half your figure of 600 million.

I find this thread rather disturbing, both for the complete ignorance shown by many of the posters, and for the view being expressed.

Blair, Brown left wing? Believing in common ownership? What they have stood for is furthering the privatisation of public services, war-mongering in the middle east, dismantling civil liberties and the promotion of racism through their desire to play tough on immigration. As Mr. Martin says, they make Thatcher look like a wishy-washy liberal.

And Mr. Fisher - I assume, then, that what you want is a one party state? In fact, what you are asking for is a fascist state. Don't swallow the lies of the BNP - under their slick PR, they're a bunch of Hitler-loving Nazi swine. The only people better off if they get elected will be the rich and powerful.

To G Shortt. 'pologies! Mental extrapolations overreaching input! You are correct. 306 million according to Wolfram Alpha. But it does not affect my argument!

That kind of line of arguement is a logical fallacy. There's no point claiming ignorance is being spread my friends if you go to proceed it yourselves.

Yes Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ceascaeu, Blair, Brown etc. etc. may not of been 'TRUE LEFT WING' in your minds but for all intents and purposes they are/where left wing in one form or another. One man's defintion is different than anothers.

Hindsight makes everyone a genius, these people believe/d they where and are left wing and claim/ed to be. You can't have your cake and eat it.

It's like religion, no one would be classed as truley religious today if the critera for being so was following and acting out every word and law in their holy books. Why is this so??? because it's unworkable in reality with the human condition, much how every left wing politican ends up making 'un-left' policies and decisions because obviously pure left theory is just that 'good theory' and unworkable in reality.

I feel sorry for that Engels chap if only he got more input into the manifesto it would of been more coherent in reality and with humanities natural state, Marx get's all the credit yet all he did was sit around as a scrounger living of other peoples money thinking the theory but never trying it, Engles was the one who did all the legwork.

Look we can sit and argue till the cows come about left leaders, but let's remember one thing none of us have been in their poistion. It's easy to crow in from the outside and criticise but it's different having millions of lifes depending on you.

And on the UK front boy oh boy we need to get this Labour shower out fast. But the Tories or Lib Dems shouldn't get a free ride. No way this old way of politics needs to end now.

As much as some people may hate it we need Greens, UKIP and yes even the BNP and any other smaller parties to have a least one or two MP's in the house to keep the big parties on their toes. So the people have a mandate and not the big parties who end up becoming self serving after one term.

Proportional representation wouldn't help us, with the ballooning 'benefits class' we have, it's likely we'd get a government dedicated to maintaining a strong benefit structure that comes from where?... A short sighted couple of terms like that and our country wouldn't be in a recession it would be dead, as anyone who was working and could leave the country (to get away from the rising taxes) would leave.

I think what we need is a government made up of representatives from each trade and occupation in charge of their relevant sector; an education minister elected by the eduction sector, a health care worker elected by the health profession to speak up for matters relating to health care and yes a representative elected by those on benefits to support the welfare of those who really need them (if they have been on benefits then they are likely to want the deserving to receive what they need to live and prosper plus they could help put together a system that is less easy to fool than our current one).

The point is that the pandering which each government does before election time would disperse into an individual pandering to his/her sector instead, which would counter much of the cross-purposed policies which we encounter in today's politicians. The only tricky part is how wide or how narrow we would have to tie the boundaries (e.g. do we have a 'carpenter's minister' or simply a 'tradesman's minister'? a 'banker's minister' or simply a 'financial minister'? and would each of the branches of the armed forces get a minister or would we just have a 'military minister'?).

This would never happen since the logistics of putting together a government system like this would take years, but it's nice to dream (as I think Marx was doing), people are greedy and in any government system, no matter how inept it may look, there is always someone doing well out of the deal who doesn't want the boat shaken.

J. Bray, you do realize that most of the laws and policies passed today... and mostly for the last half century, have been on behalf of lobby groups? An excellent example is to look at who got bailed out, at all the help massive corporations are getting, and at the rise of patent laws in almost all sectors. None of these are results of pandering to voters, and they are far more damaging to the economy and peoples' well-being.

And your proposal is to have a "representative" (read: lobbyist) from each sector in charge of the relevant government taxes? That's like saying to lobbyists, "you know what, you've had a hard time all these years, bribing and corrupting the government to get what you want. Here, instead just have it all for free, allocate taxes and laws as you like for your sector, build all the monopolies and cash cows you like." Thank the gods you're not in government.

I heartily recommend you read something like Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State, or Mises' Human Action, to gain some knowledge of how markets and governments work. At the moment, all you've proposed is a medieval guild-like government structure.

Personally, I'd like a vote on whether we let people like YOU stay in the country. Perhaps we could repatriate you back to Germany, 1933. Idiot.

Oh yes, before I forget, is the answer to your question: "This is Sparta!"?

Of course I realise the sway lobby groups have, what I suggested was to let them thrash it out amongst themselves and get rid of the façade that the government in power was 'chosen' by the populace. Whatever sector you work in, that's the sector you can vote in, then the lobbyists can thrash out over who gets what. for every 100000 workers we could have 1 lobbyist, it could get all the stuff that goes on behind closed doors out in the open. Democracy is failing and this is a suggestion I thought I'd put out there. It wouldn't work, like I said, because people are greedy and it would collapse into a mess. I just don't think democracy works on the scale we have it, it worked in ancient Greece because chances were you could pass 2 or 3 representatives in the street on a normal day. Our ministers are so detatched from some parts of life that an injection of people who know what it's like to work in a given sector might improve that sector's lot; if it doesn't we could at least say that they were fairly represented. I'm just sick of 'career politicians'.

In regards to Mises' Human Action, I just don't buy the idea of the isolated individual; it isn't man in his natural state. I'll admit that we work on other people's (specific) projects far more often than on our own with the tacit belief that we may gain some satisfaction from doing so; be it monetary or otherwise (this makes working for others an individually motivated meta-action).

However my motivation for many of my actions actions is derived from my loved one's expectations of what I can achieve as an individual. We see this in children and teenagers all the time; teachers and parents demonstrate their pleasure at the child living up to expectations and their dissatisfaction with the child failing to meet these. If the child is not guided they would not learn at the rate at which most children do and I think it would be foolish to assume that just because we leave home this practice ceases. No matter how you look at it you are not constantly in charge of your own life, unless of course one chooses genuine hermitdom; which is simply another case of others dictating a life choice but this time in a negative capacity. At the very least your actions will always be tempered by the expectations of those who's opinions you trust and from whom you wish to attain the least disapproval.

Since both Rothbard and Mises appear to take what I perceive to be a rather naive perspective on human motivation as their starting point I can't wholeheartedly get on board with either project, but I must admit I'm not familiar with the entirety of either work so in further reading I may see something which makes their ideas easier to take on board. All I can say at the moment is that people are far more complex than the concept of the isolated individual allows for especially if we're supposed to believe that every action which one performs is the result of careful reasoning. If this is the foundation for the rest of the work then it doesn't look too stable to me but I'll admit I could easily be wrong due to my unfamiliarity with either work. If you want to see what leads me to think of the isolated individual with constant reasoned action as an untenable position read Heidegger's conception of 'Being in the world' in his book Being and Time. There's a brief outline of what he says on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being-in-the-world#Being-in-the-World You can't always trust Wikipedia but this article is fairly accurate, however it doesn't really capture the social dynamic put forward by Heidegger in which human intentionality cannot be cut of from the world (and this includes the social world to which one belongs).

For an example of socially lead intention consider watching someone excitedly point at something out of view, chances are we'll try and turn our heads (or even move our bodies) to see what that thing is; 'borrowing' the appeal from someone else's body language, very little concious deliberation goes into this and this tendency to desire and act without reason, leads a much of the advertising and other marketing ploys which we encounter in day to day life.

I also meant to add a thanks to you, I've never encountered either of these works before and I'm currently doing a PhD on social cognition so these texts should be quite an interesting addition to my reading list. Sorry for looking so negative but as I say I've never encountered them before; they do look like an interesting way to look at the nature of social dynamics my only criticism so far is the notion of intentional action as always resting on reasoning over personally beneficial ends which appears to be implicit in the beginning of Mises' book. At the very least this notion of intentional action doesn't explain addiction and similar 'bad ends' motivation.

Hitler? Left wing? Really?

The fact is, as stated above, socialism doesn't account for human nature, but that's not to state that human nature is the be all and end all of man. Socialism holds that we can become more than greed personified, we can destroy the veil of ignorance and false consciousness (quite ironic being on Amazon though) and see that our wants and needs are shaped everyday by the invisible hegemon. If you're sick to death of Brown/Blair, then who you're really angry at are neo-liberals, who combine left wing social values (for the most part), a focus on rights culture, etc, to divert the masses attention away from the true problems in front of them, namely social and above all economic inequality.

The BNP will gain more seats, because quite frankly, people are uneducated in political language and therefore are never given cause, effectively, to see beyond the veil of ignorance. The BNP exist on hate, remove the hate and problems and we remove the need of the party, they will suck on the lifeblood of British politics, but hopefully, in light of the recent election results, a swing to the left will occur when the disgusted mobilise against middle England.

J. Pappenheim,

I do like your ideas on the BNP. However, the comment 'exist on hate' is slightly misguided. The BNP started out as a single issue party (immigration) and came from the NF and other race hate organisations but its emphasis has shifted since. Whilst core members are obviously just horridly Fascist people who believe in holocaust denial and have an irrational hatred of Islam above any other faith, there are always these people around, the real question should be focused on the fringe members and voters like Mr. Fisher (above) who probably isn't a Nazi holocaust denier who considers all non Caucasian people as subhuman (this is an assumption, i don't know him personally, he may be) but is just dissatisfied and has turned to a radical party... millions did it in Germany 1933.

The removal of 'hate and problems' is an interesting phrase, does the hate arise from the problems or do the problems arise from the hate? i know that this sounds like a chicken or egg type riddle but it is actually a fundamental view of Human Nature - has the BNP's recent popularity arisen from an innate distrust of outsiders and those that are different from us or have the social problems caused by poor and inconsistent immigration policies led to this politicised racism?

To change topic completely, i just can't leave that human nature line. I am sorry, but the founding of socialism as a political philosophy is based in a view of human nature, it is a belief in the social aspects of human nature over the innate selfishness that liberals such as Bentham suggest. Some socialists - such as Gramsci who you took the term hegemon from - believe in a malleability of Human Nature through social conditioning, but even Gramsci saw this as a betrayal. I will use the infamous Marx as an example; he believed that it was in the nature of an oppressed class to overthrow their oppressors - he based his whole dialectic materialism on it - and he also believed that it was in the nature of the ruling class to cling on to power as long as they possibly can. I think you meant a selfish human nature, such as Benthamite individual will, which was much like Thatcher's 'no such thing as society' in so much as the belief that nobody works for the good of society, just for their own.