Individualistic Socialism

[zeitgeist]

There was a time in the Western civilization when property rights were not clearly defined, when peasants worked on fields together and animals were kept in common feeding areas and the community harvested the yields together. My question is, could it be that we are on the path to this organizational structure again?

Information increasingly is the value added product of importance, but information is free and the more it is being shared, the more valuable it becomes. You can't define property rights for information. What you can do as a firm is to hire individuals of different specialization and you can pay them according to their perceived usefulness, but in the end they are free to leave and take their knowledge with them. A free association of creative workers who cannot be bound to anything.♥

I call this model individualistic, because different from the peasant and herder time, the knowledge workers of today have different specialization and creativity. Yet, it is socialism in the sense that the organization they all work together for is nothing but a free-flowing structure around free artists and scientist. Mangagwrs and CEOs are nothing but 'people-smiths' whose job it is to make our knowledge workers feel welcome, connected and happy.

An utopian future theme?

[Arz Sra]

Indeed Utopian dear . Hope you won't mind me quoting from somewhere ( I could write but that man has explained the whole fragmentation better) and saves my fingers -

" What is the source of all this trouble? I'm saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That's part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, it's far over 20%."

" ...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call "sustained incoherence"."

"What I mean by "thought" is the whole thing - thought, felt, the body, the whole society sharing thoughts - it's all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it's all one process; somebody else's thoughts becomes my thoughts, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thoughts, your thoughts, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings... I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department. They don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on. Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, "felts" and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes...although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure.... Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before. Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a "systematic fault". It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere. You may say "I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem". But "my" thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I'm trying to look at, or a similar fault. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates. (P. 18-19)"

- David Bohm



System cannot save itself. What you state seems quite Utopian to me.

[zeitgeist]

Oh well, was worth a shot ...

[SkylightMT]

I don't think we'll ever be able to give up property ownership unless we give up agriculture. Farming the land made us see the land as a valuable possession with competition for it.

[pianoperformer]

Thread moved to World Affairs, unless there was a specific reason that you placed it in Spirituality.

[desertrat]

The idea of forming a commune is not new . If all the people living in this type of set up want it ,it can work. On another forum there was a link , a commune looking for skilled people . I posted a link on this forum . Its old and they may already have all the people they need . If asked I will look for it. desert rat