Trying to explain it rationally is a mistake and nothing will happen. Denial cannot be seen. What happens in the mind is on a different level to what happens materially.

When will banks start lending again for mortgages?

http://www.meltfund.com/2013/06/when-will-banks-start-ending-for.html

I hear you. Talking about the non material, whatever that might be, is a commitment few are willing to make. That is why nothing ever happens.

Your question is rightly about how pigs in pokes were bought 30 years after the days when such little belief in official accounts was held and in a time after the discovery that official valuations were almost entirely unreliable. I think you are on the right track. Due diligence doesn’t really matter – what the buyers thought they were doing is key. They must have had a value for what they bought in mind. Then we come to the issue of ‘who salted the gold mine’. Unless the buyers actually knew they were buying dreck and didn’t care because of bonus incentives or positions taken. If Frances is right that Nat West ws lucky, Amro unlucky, we are left with the question as to why we pay people so much for guessing games.

Stalin was Lenin’s inevitable Frankenstein’s monster, a creation that evolved from the violent measures employed in order to maintain the revolution. I would suggest that the same thing would happen again as it is unlikely that the majority would rally behind a hammer & sickle, red star etc. In fact it looks very much like the forces of the right would be the preference judging by what is happening in Europe. So the first job would be to defeat the right, this victory in order to be sustainable would need to be worldwide & I imagine would need repressive controls over populations who might not be too keen on being part of a totalitarian state.

You mention Democracy, something that as far as I can tell the various forms of Communism has had not much use for. Will you allow the proletariat to vote ? Will you allow candidates to stand from social Democrats etc ? or will you decide that you know best what is good for the people ? Will dissension be allowed within books, the theatre, in pamphlets, films, newspapers etc ? How will you deal with strikes that threaten the Motherland ? & how do you propose to control billions of people, if there is any left that is, after the nuclear shoot out with the US.

You propose a version of the all controlling state, one that I would consider to be fundamentally no different to the Fascist version, in as much as for the construct to survive it has to crush all resistance.

I must admit to being vague about what I would like to see developing, but the essence is something that is based on localism,using money that is not issued by banks, central or otherwise, a system of voting that is as close to pure Democracy as possible, backed by a forum open to all citizens where issues are discussed & debated, no lobbying or political donations allowed & as much as possible to try & make everyone feel as though they have a place within this community.

I don’t believe in Utopia & I know that with the best intentions there will be problems, as there were in the hippy communes which I think started with similar ideals. It turned out that the Alpha’s in the group became dissatisfied with the equality & gradually tried to enforce their dominance leading to the eventual destruction of the group, sound familiar ?

If this pipe dream is just that & I had to make a choice from what we have now & the 2 extremes of right & left, I would choose the former, because it’s deprivations & tatty Democracy are still better than what the other 2 have conjured up & unlike them there is some possibility in changing it for the better for the least cost to the innocent.

I cannot imagine how you can show why or how your new Communism would be a much improved system, especially on a gigantic, & I suspect uncontrollable scale, to me it reeks of power & massive collateral damage & I hope for yours & our sakes you never make commissar. That is all I have to say on this subject.

“Perhaps i am missing something but wasn’t communism kind of fashionable in the USSR not so long ago ? with various other flavours of it in China & elsewhere ? Maybe I am wrong but these systems were run by small elites who I assume did very well as opposed to the vast majority of their populations who were stuck in a competition between Joe & Mao as to who could become the biggest mass murderer in history”

Stalinism was not Communism, Stalinism was state-capitalism that could never compete with Western style Capitalism. The Eastern bloc economies were all run under centralized Soviet control.

China too has had to bend in face of aggressive Western Capitalism.
It too is a has centralized control just like the Western ‘democracies’.

Capitalism doesn’t allow any other alternative to exist. What is needed is global economic revolution where Capitalism is completely destroyed. Communists always recognized this as a prerequisite to achieve freedom from the tyranny that is Capitalism. Democracy and Capitalism can never occupy the same space. How can they?

Socialist democracy cannot exist within a Capitalist framework. How could it and yes it is a pipe dream.

“You assert that communism has never been tried, so you presumably also have no experience of how people would behave under that system”

I have no experience of how people would behave under Communism. This is true. I only know how people behave under Capitalism. How else could they behave under a system that is brutal and destructive in every conceivable way.

We need revolutionary thinking and that does not include the rehabilitation of Capitalism in any of it’s manifestations.

i can tell you a story i have experienced. As a Swiss i did an apprenticeship at one of the bigger banks in Switzerland . As an apprentice you work 3 days and go 2 days to college. I always questioned everything i was told. After years working in the bank i finally quit (i had a job offer with Rothschild which i didn’t take, instead i went on a surftrip and became a photographer). When i left the bank i had a last talk with the person in charge for all the apprentices. I told him that in all these years we haven’t learnt much and have no clue how the real economy works. We are told to sell all this crap we don’t understand to our clients who even understand it less. So, there was always the lies from the banks side. What happened is, that this guy told me to shut up and he is happy that i leave (i was the one to confront him infront of everyone). Few years later he became head of the investment banking and he got into buying another bank in Austria. The bank they bought was full with laundered money, black money and all the shit you can possibly think of. I don’t know who was responsible for due dilligence, but the bank lost hundreds of millions of swiss francs and the guy is still in charge! I wonder if it is pure ignorance, stupidity or outright fraud, but one thing is for sure, the people in charge will never held responsible for the damage they have done. I have been someone who has warned all my friends allready during the internet bubble, then warned them of the collapse in 2008, no one believed me. About one year ago, i met one of my friends who told me that everybody was laughing behind my back about what i am saying, but he also said that i was the only one who knew what is about to happen. So, people want to be fucked, cheated and lose a lot of money. It seems to be a symbiosis between the bankers and the clients. One last thing, i got all my infos mainly through the daily reckoning website and started to read alternative infos. Over the years i started to read also blogs like yours and again i thank you and all the people like you who put up so much good work and brains to it to make us understand better!