Thoughts on power, wealth and information
As I watch the unfolding of current events, particularly inspired by OWS & the general open-source movement on the Web, I'm coming to see that the distribution of power is more fundamental than the distribution of wealth.
The problem with all strongly-hierarchical governing bodies is that they tend to concentrate power on the top at the expense of everyone else. The maldistribution of wealth is merely the grease that lubricates the gears of the oligarchy--ANY oligarchy, whether nominally royalist, socialist or capitalist.
Furthermore, I see more clearly every day how the distribution of power is dependent on the distribution of information. Oligarchies don't do well without their secrecy. That is why everyone is in such a frenzy to punish Manning & why Anonymous is such a threat.
My goals for society amount to seeing that every person can get what they need to be free from want, and beyond that, to live up to their full potentials as human beings worthy of being trusted to mostly govern themselves.
I don't think any of the traditional systems of government have shown any great capacity for delivering these basics. Not capitalism, not feudalism, and not socialism as it has been enacted in practice. This is a time of great peril, but also of great opportunity for change and experimentation.
Although I fundamentally disagree with the reductionist/determinist philosophy endorsed by Skinner in Walden II, there is one idea in the book that I think is worth salvaging--or, more accurately, enshrining. That is the idea of the experimental society. Given a goal, you keep trying things and tinkering with them until they work to satisfy the goal. If, for example, you have an inefficient or ineffective system of welfare, you solve the problems by experimenting with the system until it does what you want. You don't throw your hands into the air and give up on the original goal.
I don't too much care whether the economy is mixed, strictly co-operative, or whatever, as long as it serves the goals I outlined. The key is simply to value every person, to seek the welfare of all, and to take into consideration the needs of those who cannot effectively speak for themselves, while maintaining a sustainable relationship with the rest of the planet. Is that too much to ask?
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That's why socialism is considered a stage of development, but not the end product. It's meant to preserve peoples and resources against other hostile capitalist states.
But yes, since it develops out of the decay of the capitalist state, there are still a lot of lopsided areas of development, and that need to "have" power is probably one of them. Attempts to mitigate it by making most areas of the political arena public by various collective structures are one way historically this has been addressed. Writers are still doing analysis on a few states to describe why this failed or succeeded in different places.
It's definitely a work in progress, because the consciousness of humanity that we must intervene in our historical process to save humanity is still so new. Heck, in the US we're still fighting a large faction who think that Jesus was a capitalist and that God wants poor people to receive their reward in heaven.
I love the idea of people-powered systems and OWS has tons of potential. That potential can also be undermined by the existence of the remaining system of capitalism. It has to be dismantled to get the full potential of people "on-line". Otherwise it's like you have this great computer, but it has a trojan that keeps attacking everything. You might try to work around it for awhile, but eventually it is going to do what it was designed to do. Eat everything useful. 