very interesting point of view, ctsgnb.

To be honest i feel a bit uncomfortable with giving another answer here: first, because this is leaving the topic of your original thread-opening post and goes in some completely new direction. I understand that this is the off-topic part of the forum, but still i think there should be a minimum of "thread discipline" in effect.

Second, we are leaving the topic of some computer-related political problem (which i feel should be possible here - after all, we are doing a very political job. "Political" in the sense of "having a big impact on how society works".) for a solely political discussion. The former is at least bordering to the great topic of unix.com (which i would describe as "all things server/client"), but the latter is simply misplaced here. There are other places on the net where such discussions belong to (agreed - not many as polite as here).

Please do not mistake my further silence on this for lack of interest. I would be very interested in discussing this but i do not want to misuse Neos bandwidth for things he doesn't have in his scope.

I usually take in political things the same stance i am used to take as an engineer: if you want to make something you have to understand the applying laws and principles first. To build an airplane is only possible when you first accept that gravity exists and that things tend to fall when not being held up by some force. To describe any society in terms of "good", "bad" or any other affection is like calling a "world with gravity" "desirable": missing the point. A society is as it is and it will change when the effort to prolong the status quo becomes higher than the demand to change it - like the airplane will lift off when the force propelling it upwards overcomes the gravity which presses it down.

My personal opinion about when this happens is that it depends on the status of the development of productive forces. As they advance because technology advances production and the way things are produced changes respectively. If this change is big enough society will change to reflect this. Take slavery for example: it was not abolished when people realized that it is an unethical thing to do but when the way of production changed from (mostly) agricultural to (mostly) industrial. You can pick cotton with a bunch of slaves but when you try to let slaves write software you are probably in for a very nasty surprise.

For the same reason the compulsory school attendance was "invented" somewhere in the 18th century - because the demand for literate workers to read instructions was there, created by the industrial revolution which created the demand for an adequate workforce.

Sorry, but i beg to differ: i can't say anything about communism, because this system hasn't been tried yet and i am quite weak in scying. I can say for the capitalism, though, that it is completely indifferent about liberty: for what i know capitalism worked in Nazi-Germany as well as in the "democratic" Switzerland at that time and Nazism isn't commonly reagrded as the epitome of freedom at all. I could prolong the list of countries where capitalism worked best under quite suppressive regimes for quite a long time: Idi Amins Uganda, Somozas Nicaragua, Papa Docs/Baby Docs Haiti, ... Capitalism isn't suppression either, but: capitalism is making as much profit as possible. If that means to suppress then so be it, if it means to give freedom, than this is it. Just don't confuse to get freedom in capitalism with an "inner strive towards freedom in capitalism" - it just fits into the bigger plan.

Btw: the picture of "when (formal) law was absent we had the law of the jungle" is a story, probably put to eternity by luminaries like Hobbes with his Leviathan. In fact many studies of the savage societies (like Lewis Henry Morgans ethnography of the Iroquois or Johann Jakob Bachofen) show that mesolithic societies were remarkably well-ordered despite lacking formal authorities or armed forces like a police. The Iroquois Nation for instance was the first one in history to develop a constitution (in the 11th century), when "civilized christian lands" in Europe just started the crusades and the Inquisition.

Exactly this is the point: "responsibility" is just not the same as "making enough profit as possible". Which is why our "fat cats" don't show any interest in acting responsible - why should they? It is simply not their job.

"Political" was not meant as "vote for party a or party b" (which propose the same anyways). "Political" was meant in the sense of "opposed to being private".

I don't think it is possible to independently change the rules of society locally. Small communities with radically different rules will not likely change the surrounding society but either be treated as obscurities or be outright attacked by ther neighbors. Example for the obscurity treatment would be the Amish people, for the "attacked by the neighbors": the Albigenses or waldensian movements (not to speak of Hussites, or the followers of Thomas Müntzer).

bakunin