Discussed page

History

• FranzNahrada: The idea that "germ form" is something which you can describe and then "recognize in reality" sounds a bit strange to me. It seems to me like an idealistic construction of a desiderate which is deducted from subjective requirements. We do not know the exact shape of a post-capitalist society and therefore we cannot identify "the" germ form, and I think we cannot even say if there is more than one germ form, but we feel the need to describe elements of such a post-capitalistic society that are able to persist and grow and prepare the ground for transformation. The germ form position is basically the opposition to all political theories and practises that insist a social change can occur by mere will or by "occupying the command posts of the national economy". Therefore it is meant as an open position of looking at societal changes with the question of "unfolding potentials". Of course, this requires a look beneath the surface and some criteria might be helpful. But the concept of the germ form is as much influenced by observations and empirical facts as the observations is by criteria. There is no one way street.

Organization

I'm not sure how to do the multilingual stuff best. Some ideas which came to my mind.

• Discussion also in German (or may be even other languages)

  This is the suggestion I made on the parent page. This would address the difficulties of people to express themselves in a language different from their mother tongue. Unfortunately German contributions in other languages are only accessible by people who understand German. Therefore at least important contributions need to be translated to English.

  To do this it would suffice to have multiple languages only on talk pages and the respective main pages could be in English only.

• Content pages with different languages

  Another option would be to have the content also duplicated into two (multiple?) languages. This is a lot of work though and it's not clear who is ready to do such a job.

  If this is adopted there needs to be a way to organize this technically. Three ways come to mind:

  • Multilingual pages

    I.e. pages with an English and a German part.

    This would have the advantage that original and translation are closely coupled and thus it is easier to cope with differences.

  • German subpages containing translations

    I.e. a page with a German content is a child of the respective English page. Such a subpage then should be called German.

    This way the original and translation are loosely coupled. It would be a bit difficult to have German pages without their respective translations.

  • Separated structures

    I.e. a top level page for all English pages and another top level page for all German pages.

    This way two trees exist independently from each other and it is harder to relate to each other.

-- StefanMerten 2006-07-13 07:11:33

Research tasks

• Yes, I know that one can not abstract away completely from personal wishes / moral / ethics - but one can try. -- StefanMerten 2006-08-03 07:37:28

• A form means for me basically recurrent activities, something which can be repeated and identified. it is not necessarily the form of a society, but maybe a form to do certain things within a society. So society or culture might be the merger of several "forms". FranzNahrada