Sociable Ducks etc, Dunedin, Land-Rents and Socialism, +1 Interesting.

[tcpip]

Attended Simon Lay's Peiking Duck restaurant last week with caseopaya, recumbenteer, Louise B, Robyn M. and Anthony L.. Had the opportunity to practise a little Tetum. Followed up latter with a dinnner with Brendan E., which included watching Contact and The Walking Dead.

Settlement for our planned retirement home in Dunedin finally achieved after quite a saga. Now we know the cost of not implementing the resource rents as originally proposed. $60 billion over the next ten years extracted from useful labour, and productive investment and reductions in public goods and services. BHP is laughing all the way to the bank. Even as a landowner, I still vastly prefer the socialisation of land-rents over any taxation. It is a thoroughly just form of socialism as it concentrates on what is common property by birthrate and collects the value in an equitable manner; those moral justifications are aside to its efficiency and effectiveness.

Neglected to mention in the last post my attendance at the Melbourne Atheist Society to hear Rick Barkers excellent talk on changes to the Australian "fitness landscape" and specifically the extinction of the megafauna (including everyone's favourite, the diprotodon optatum). Apropos, last two services at the Unitarians consisted of a rather conspiratorial talk on HAARP and a somewhat lightweight discussion on US military bases and independence. Discussion on Russia: The First Socialist Country continues. Livejournal socialists group has its own debate on the nature and character of the Soviet Union.

Very interesting talk on how to by-pass password-locked screensavers... on Linux (recumbenteer). Wikipedia protects your right to evil (from reddragdiva). Somewhat amusing article on the Nine Traits of a veteran UNIX admin (sounds rather like Buddha's "eightfold path" or similar).

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I have, incidentally, been idly wondering if at some point I should tackle the questions surrounding Trotsky and what he rather nimbly called primitive socialist accumulation. That most critical period stretching roughly from 1920-1924, I think, contains a great deal of the starkest conceivable political and historical irony in terms of which of the Bolshevik leaders are behind which kinds of basic policy approaches at any given time, and that's nothing if not a fascinating field of study.

(Much of the drama of the internal Bolshevik power struggle later on, after Lenin's death in 1924, is, I think, that a lot of the people -- often right up to Trotsky -- get nabbed in some of the most critical instancess by their own rules, which they merely happen to find themselves at the receiving end of. The legendary ban on factions is probably the most archetypical example of this phenomenon.)

And then there's Bukharin, who executed one of the most complete and startling intellectual volte-faces of the period -- I think you've raised some of the complexities that attach to him before. The more I read about the man, the more I'm beginning to think there was something truly interesting going on there.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Primitive socialist accumulation was one of those concepts that seems to make some sense, but the actual application diverged so far from the theory that it cannot be honestly said that it was ever tried.

One of the things that I find particularly interesting about the period is how Trotskyites insist - and I should know I used to be in that political world - the ban on factions within the CPSU was supposed to be temporary (and OK, it was during a war - that makes it understandable if not excusable). However, lacking a formal statement to that effect resulted - as you say - in Trotsky being hoist on his own petard.

A study on Bukharin would indeed be very interesting indeed.

I have been given some thought on developing a pamphlet-sized book myself concentrating on the early decades of the Soviet Union...