Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Read the piece about the proposal to go to consensus decision making at the General Assembly because of the supposed "Tyranny of the Majority". This is confusing, because if you're really doing consensus it's almost impossible with a very large group. But there's a possibility that what's being advocated is something called 'consensus' that actually involves folks who can't get a majority getting their way. If so, and, actually, even if not so, it's ironic that people in a group that says it represents the 99% are complaining about the Tyranny of the Majority.

There'd be little harm there, at least in the short term....re: Gingrich's advocacy of a Moon Base.

Although I'm no scholar of the Soviet economy, based on what I've read my impression is that it resembled a series of big box stores and corporations. Instead of locally controlled, cooperative, stores, you had a few large, generic ones whose mode of operation was dictated from above, and who sold a small number of mostly generic, standardized goods. At one time some Eastern Bloc countries didn't even have restaurants, bars, or cafes, but only collective cafeterias and dining halls owned by workers' organizations. I bet the situation was the same in Soviet Union. Farms weren't run or defined by people who had worked the land for centuries in a communal, cooperative, way, but by guidance from central tractor/fertilizer/technology stations who ran the farms like agribusiness. I'm not sure how the factories were themselves organized, or who had the power, but my understanding is that they were monolithic, megalithic, and non-competitive--except when they needed to fulfill the requirements of the plan.

A better way to organize things would be to have a communal, community controlled economy, also directed by a greater plan, but run cooperatively. The stores and factories would be owned by society as a whole, but would be decentralized and would compete with each other in a heavily regulated way. Anarchy, Left Libertarianism, Left Marxism, lend themselves to a limited market if it's kept in check, which is why the Right wingers have tried to co-opt it. In fact, Individualist Anarchists often talk about a simultaneously socialist and market based system being possible.

Thumbs up from here.

Which is why so many countries have reverted to it. Stalin cast himself as the Red Tsar, although he never used the term, playing up the memes that tsarist autocracy had used for several hundred years, presumably in order to 'build socialism'. Mao became the Emperor, and the Chinese leadership collectively assumed the role of the Imperial bureaucracy. Bruce Cummings commented in an interview on Democracy Now! in December that a very minor Soviet official gave him his opinion that Kim Il Sung's son would replace him, and that his grandson would follow in turn, presumably based on the idea that North Koreans had never experienced democracy and so were treating rule by a dictator as just another monarch. This style of leadership has to be the biggest cop out of all, where leaders eliminate democracy and promote the cult of the autocrat in order to more easily get things done. They inevitably say it's populism, but it's nothing of the sort.