Re: Oh, I've been around longer than that...

Thank you for your very thoughtful and interesting reply. Just a few words in my defence... My remark about Trump, Musk et al being the worst humans who have ever lived did have a point, which is that the likes of Hitler and so forth were certainly evil people, but even they did not know that their activities were destroying the material conditions for our own long term species flourishing. Now, however, we know the science, we know what our activities are doing, and the oligarchs and politicians in charge of America, and their overseas lackeys, simply don't care. That is why I am inclined to say that, at least in this regard, they are a step up from the great dictators of the past. My own view is that capitalism can hardly ever be anything other than oligarchic. Economic and political power are not independent variables. Collective ownership does not of itself guarantee any degree of freedom, as we have seen with the likes of Pol Pot and Stalin and so forth, but if oligarchy is to be replaced by democracy then superceding capitalism is a precondition. What is necessary if we are not to replace one form of tyranny with another is that the socialism must be thoroughly democratic and libertarian, rather than Leninist; which is exactly why I am an ecosocialist. I just don't see how a system which hands the greatest economic power to those who are the most greedy and the most ruthless can possibly solve the ecological crisis. In any case, the danger of violence is not currently from the left: it is from the morphing of capitalism into fascism that we're seeing around the world, and that always seems to happen when capitalism comes under real strain, including challenge from below. The root of the problem is the divide between those who own most of the wealth and everyone else; and, in the face of the crises our species, and the entire ecosphere, are confronting, I find as I grow older that I have simply lost patience with piddling half-measures that don't address the underlying systemic issues. So I'll take rent controls if offered, but actually we all know that landlordism must be completely abolished. I'll take properly funded public schools, but really all schools should be like Summerhill in Suffolk, with attendence at classes voluntary, and the rules of the school decided democratically by the pupils. I absolutely agree that boysexual men are not, in the round, any better than anyone else. It is, indeed, a disappointment to me that so many of us, whilst we reject society's condemnation of pederasty, are still marinated in contemporary ideology in other respects.