Did I say the EU was run by Socialists?

Maybe the cock up the spendaholics made of their time in power has taught voters that nothing is free.

I love the ideal of doing away with the bosses, getting rid of the greedy bankers, the corrupt businessmen, the crooked politicians. So we can allow workers to own a share in the businesses they work for, letting them run the businesses and having the same workers run the country without becoming corrupt themselves.

Can you show us an example of a country where it has worked to the benefit the workers. So we can copy them and all go forward to a new and better future. This would be a truly wonderful thing and I long to see the example you would like us to copy.

Read "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell if you want to know a society were non-hierarchical socialism worked.

No can you give me an actual place where it has worked. A book is theory. Unless Wikipedia has it wrong.

Seems it's a part of Spain. Need an actual country that has adopted the ethics you put forward, so we can copy it and make out lives better.

thought paul was an expert at world history and economic systems as well. i guess i was wrong.

Paul, content should be seen and not heard.:2 cents:

As usual nothing to contribute and proves it all the time.

mafia_man I ask you for a country where it works and you give me a book to read.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia

Which, it seems, has nothing to do with running an entire country.

So I will ask again, can you give me a country to back up what you're saying?

It's an account of anarchism in Spain circa 1930s.

So you avoided my question. Why is that?

We all know why, there are no examples. Every single time anyone has tried to create this wonderful dream it's gone pear shaped and always the workers ended up with less, or capitalism was bank rolling it.

The places with the highest paid workers in the world are those run on a capitalist system. Redistribute the wealth made by capitalism, but capitalism still has to create the wealth first. And you have to leave a lot for the creators, or they go to where they are appreciated better.

Put workers in charge and it ends up a disaster most times. What usually happens is a Lenin starts is off with a dream and Stalin takes it over. Or a Pol Pot starts it and we know where that went.

The list of failures of countries who attempted your dream isn't long. The rest of the world knew it was a screw up.

N. Korea.
Cambodia
USSR
Cuba
China, until it adopted the capitalism system.

Yes we should do more to protect the weak, vulnerable, dispossessed and eradicate poverty. But I would rather be poor in a capitalist country than any that tried your experiment.

Now tell me no one has ever tried.

So you want us to all abandon a system that does work, for some experiment that never will. And what then will happen to the weak, vulnerable, dispossessed and poor?

Paul doesn't read books.

He didn't know that ""Homage to Catalonia" was a book, he does not know about the Spanish Civil war.

He does not read books. Even about subjects he supposed to be interested in like photography.

He just knows.

You could point out that Socialism even in the most backward countries like Russia without a history of democracy still made amazing advances under a distorted version of Stalinism. So much so that it out produced Germany and defeated German fascism saving Europe from an age of Barbarism. He would stick to what he has picked up from rags like"The Daily Mail".


He could find out lots of examples in his new country of good and bad socialism, but he does not speak Czech.

A strange person who says he knows it all, but refuses to read or learn.

Asking to show an example of a future structure of society while still in Capitalism, is a stupid as demanding from Oliver Cromwell that he show a working version of capitalism before destroying feudalism.

capitalism is failing 99% of the population in its rule of the markets. The 99% start to rule the market a new society will be build.

Mark. None of the countries you listed are socialist. They are all state capitalist countries where the dictators hold the means of production, not the workers.

Socialism isn't in competition with capitalism, it's an evolution of the system. Just like capitalism evolved out of feudalism.

Workers were never in charge in Russia. In fact the Bolsheviks killed all the people that tried to make that happen.

More that Stalin killed the Bolsheviks.

What can we say, Paul is a man of many trades :upsidedow

True.

I think things would have been pretty much the same under Trotsky or if Lenin had lived longer but that's debatable.

It was the anarchists I was referring to who didn't want the state to take over for a "transition period" which usually results in dictatorships. That's probably the major reason I don't agree with the Communist Manifesto.

Give a man all that power and he will never give it up.

I think it would have been very difficult to have built a democratic socialist state in Russia, but I think if democracy had not been totally destroyed in and outside of the party, land reform taken more slowly, build more cooperatives, give power to real soviets and trade unions...

Sadly History is what it is and not "what ifs".

We live in a dictatorship of the markets, the 1% control the world, political power and the media.

How do the majority take that power off them without structures, like political parties that risk dictatorship ?

In Egypt we see the weakness of idealistic movements without political structures ready to take power and make change.