Thoughts of Chairman Greenman

Reading: Pages of "Finnegans Wake", pages of Robert Goddard's "Past Caring", Guardian website, various Sunday Papers.
Listening: BBC Radio 5
Some comment from English Green MEP Caroline Lucas on the nuclear issue here.
Yesterday was the annual Levellers Day commemoration in Oxfordshire - some blogging comment here.
I have updated my links - with new links to some interesting sites, favourite authors etc.
Here are some thoughts I previously posted on Urban 75, on what it means to be a British (green/libertarian) socialist in 2006.

Socialism means the extension of democracy from the purely political to social and economic realms. This can be achieved by various means, nationalisation being one of the bluntest tools, useful in some areas and not in others. It is still seen as being useful for national transport systems for example, as evidenced by many opinion polls in this country and actual economic practice in others. It has generally been a failure when applied to productive industry in a mixed capitalist and globalist economy where finance capital has the upper hand - the finance capitalists simply move mobile capital to areas they can profit from, leaving closed pits and empty factories. So common ownership and democratic control over the bulk of the economy is only likely if working people force through things like global controls on capital movements, abolition of tax havens etc as a start and then move on quickly to challenge the power of the transnationals and the bankers. Other democratic and socialist economic forms are co-operatives and mutuals - again, these can be successful at the moment, but are more likely to be bullied, crushed or taken over in the globalist free market situation we are currently heading for. Therefore the first tasks of socialists of any description today are the same as ever - education, agitation, organisation towards the expression and exercise of the power of the workers, peasants (in parts of the world where they exist) and public servants that create and maintain the financial and human capital that the elite exploit. (An interesting recent booklet on these topics was Ken Coates, "Workers' Control")
Furthermore, being a socialist today must surely entail the consciousness that the capitalist economy is causing possibly irreparable damage to the ecosystems that sustain life on earth - any new economic arrangements must be sustainable as well as socially just. So to be a socialist today , you must also be green.