Some more warbling on my pet subject: the social. I have “ranted” on this here and elsewhere. in fact sometimes people do think im a silly old so and so for going on about something that they all take for granted. But this is where i always say - what”s the point of theorizing or thinking about anything if we aren”t willing - or able- to go back right down to first principles. leaving out “fancy jargon” for the moment - at the simplest level, if we are ever going to usefully make sense of Anything, we need to all start from the same clean slate - or at least - be able to look at the first principles involved in any discussion. Any talk of any aspect of society - globalization, nations, economics, capitalism, socialism, global markets - all of this is highly complicated by the fact that not only are most of us not even thinking of the same thing when we use what has effectively become “buzz-words” in many ways, but also the simple fact that it all comes down to what we understand or mean when we think about the social. Or rather, that a hell of a lot of us aren”t at all thinking about it at all. As i”ve said elsewhere, there”s a great big hoo-ha all over the bloody place about “markets” and global markets, and generally it has become accepted practice to forget about the fact that markets and economic activity are nothing but subsets of social activity. So if we are going to theorize about markets, or “globalization” we”re not going to get anywhere without considering first and foremost about the social context.
Voila! - simple one might think, aha but as some of us can see - simplicity is a stepping stone to clarity and as Machiavelli might have said, who wants clarity when a whole bunch of confused people are much easier to manipulate.
Anway - focusing now more specifically on that much maligned term “socialism”. First off let me say there”s this great big idea/myth floating around all over the countryside that somehow if you have any progressive aspirations or ideas on society and people and on trying to live collectively together ( and face it - what else are we going to do? Fuck off to Mars - maybe until then we”re stuck here so we”d better learn to get along one way or the other. Simple again? Ha.) and somehow you espouse some idea that leads some other person to say ah! you sound like a “lefty” ( whatever that may mean- seems to be anyone who”s not a fascist of some sort - and if that”s the case, fine by me as i consider fascism a highlighly significant problem - and guess what - those of you with limited imagination - i ain”t referring just to mr. hitler or mr. stalin there are a WHOLE bunch of people in my book under the heading of fascists - more on that later) or a “socialist”. Now of course if the latter, a lot of people imagine you must be “a Marxist” or if they”re feeling not too “let”s box u in” that day - simply socialist. which is fine by me - but then again, presumptuous assumptions come to the forefront and you find out that lots of people - including a large bunch of these “socialists” imagine there is only one thing that could possibly mean i.e. you must be a “statist”of some kind. I use the term statist in a more sociological sense rather than the standard economic one. ( see the Wikipedia entry for a nice explanation) Loosely - let”s say the assumption is we must all be in favour of some big state-y centralist control type scenarios - or that - in order to have any progressive ideas, we must be in favour of a big fat government telling us all what we must or mustnt do and “regulate” per se. Now this is where i say we need to all re-think what we understand and mean by “public” - (as in a lot of people”s heads if you refer to the public interest the first thing that comes into people”s heads is “government”. [you know the silly dichotomy between govt. /private etc. ] ) - “regulation” etc. My understanding is that it doesn”t matter shit about all this - what we need to understand instead - institutions, and organizations. Very simple? or not. Big central institutions - public or private - generally end up being structured and organized in such a way as to limit the individuals within them -and this is where my interest in them stems. We need to think about distributed, decentralized forms of organization. How our social organizations work is of fundamental importance to all of those main issues listed way up above, is basically my point. And to understand that we need to think about social dynamics and organization.
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So the reason for my excitement - simply an indication that someone else has thought ( or may have done!) about this business of the “social”: check out this LSE Public Lecture - on Thursday 23rd February:
Taking the “Social” in “Socialism” Seriously
Speaker: Professor Erik Olin Wright, Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin
23 February at 6.30pm in the Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE
“While the word “social” appears in both socialism and social democracy, generally it is invoked in a loose and ill-defined way. In practice, socialism has generally been understood as a highly statist project of social transformation. This lecture proposes an alternative grounding for the idea of social-ism, one which places “social empowerment” at the centre of the institution-building agenda.”
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