From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Thu Feb 28 2002 - 00:17:25 MST
On 2/27/02 10:06 PM, "Neil Blanch" <neilb@nswcc.org.au> wrote:
> This leads me to
> think that perhaps a communist-style society that retains real & sustainable
> human rights is only possible once a certain level of technology (most
> importantly energy & material abundance technology) is achieved, and
> furthermore that today's world of capitalism & free markets is only a short
> term stage in social evolution necessary to achieve the level of
> technological advancement that makes a "free" communist society possible (&
> desirable). Any thoughts on this?
At *any* stage of technological evolution, a truly communist society would
only be "desirable" if individuals in the population utterly lacked
creativity in figuring out interesting things to do with excess capital.
The fundamentals of economics are invariant with respect to levels of
technology; the problems of communism and capitalism don't go away with
technological advancement. Even the basic socialist doctrine of providing
"basic necessities" for all members of society is problematic because in
practice "basic necessity" grows and scales to include as many things as the
population and/or government will allow in the definition i.e. what most
people would consider to be a basic necessity today would be viewed as an
absurd luxury a hundred years ago. All that has really changed is the
definition of "basic necessity".
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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