Date: Sun, 25 Jun 95 10:41:37 BST
From: Ron Press <anclondon-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: Elephants


Hi

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> From Chris Burford I feel a consensus
is emerging in some quarters of this list that there are conflicts
and contradictions in all societies. I recall Lisa emphasizing
that the sort of non-industrialized tribal societies that are
sometimes idealized, nevertheless contain conflict.  I would go
further and say that the processes of conflict are *part* of the
dynamic that keeps a society together.

The yardstick of success is efficiency in producing competitive
commodities for the world market.
				       <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

(First) With respect to feeling elephants in the dark. Please
Chris my friend be careful to distinguish between the two long
things that hang down at the two ends. Especially when it had a
bowel motion.

(Second). The yardstick you propose is even less than
mono-dimentional. Even capital is forced to use more complex
measures of their failures to succeed.

(Third) The stability of an organism is its ability to keep in
dynamic equilibrium with its environment and to be sufficiently
flexible to accommodate those changes which occur. This dynamic
equilibrium is an intermeshing of hundreds perhaps thousands of
dialectal processes. ( Perhaps contradictory is a better word?) It
is the very dynamic interacting processes that supply the
stability. (Dialectics?) The organizational system under capital
allows for much variability and flexibility. The USSR instead of
increasing the possibilities of interactions and variability
within a framework of Socialism increased the centralization of
control. Decreased dynamism and flexibility decreased the
stability. Hence under a change in environmental pressures (
Desire for consumer goods, desire for travel, a 40 year period of
peace, need for innovation and greater freedom of thought and
publication and so on ) the dramatic collapse occurred.

Sorry to be boring but it was the system of organization of
socialism that failed.

(Fourth) You mention non-linear processes. I think we are in
danger of generating a new broader meaning for a relatively
precise mathematical operation or system. A system described in
mathematical terms as Non-linear, is not necessarily oscillatory,
nor leads to an attractor,  ( Subject to addition and modification
by mathematicians on the list)

ron opress


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