Postcapitalism As Ecological Socialism
This classic painting by Delacroix points to the era of the bourgeois revolution moving into a socialist future in the 1848 period, the era of Marx and Engels and the first challenges to the suddenly crystallizing capitalist order. It tokens our idea of The Red-fortyeight Group as a superset of liberal, socialist and communist groups, factions, parties and their futures in our own time as the prophecy of the Last Revolution takes shape at a moment of global system collapse.
Postcapitalism by Default
The US is almost finished as a (laughably so-called) civilization. But it has an exit strategy if it can against all odds produce a postcapitalist potential.
The ‘revolution’ option is enshrined in the lore of the original revolutionary outcome of American ‘democracy’. That the result wasn’t much of a democracy and points to a new future of the genre: an intelligent socialism is the prescription needed for a ‘real democracy’.
That may seem unrealistic but the future of the American system as is seems quite unrealistic…
Two Manifestos
Imagine that the whole literature of Marxist theory is obsolete and that the left has to start over. We
have done that here, at high speed with rough results. Less its bad theories Marx’s commentary is huge, and far more useful. We have a miniature corpus here, from scratch. In principle with this material, a viable brand of socialism (we actually refer to neo-communism) is possible and, in principle, easy. The days of big publishers are passing and there are many ways to produce books now without interference. Our idea is to produce a specific platform with DNA related to but distinct from Marxist brands and to show a specific model of social system, in detail.
The left should have been ready by now. What a moment to have ignited revolutionary (or even reformist) change. But the sudden surge of the BLM movement shows the reason: they are starting fresh where leftist/socialists are burdened with immense literatures they don’t understand.
This strange situation in the US is like an invitation to revolutionary transformation. And the situation can only get worse. There is some talk of the BLM movement producing a socialist movement. They should try. But a core socialist construct is easy to come by. Although crude and rough this model could produce a new social economy tomorrow with a good chance of success. Look at the bolsheviks: with the materials they had, there was no way to succeed. But a practical approach is actually not that hard. Let us be clear: advocating revolution is not realistic. But the revolution is coming on its own but will be coopted by the right unless the left can resolve the crisis.
The revolutionary option is rejected by reformists, and flawed, but the current system is itself revolutionary, in the midst of a revolution from the right. We talk to both groups with the reformists able to act in the present.
It is virtually impossible to conceive of revolution in a system so controlled as what we have now. But as this year shows, when the time is ripe, the ‘revolution’ happens out of the blue. The French and Russian revolutions were out of the blue. After four years of war the soldiers in the
WW1 trenches threw away their rifles and walked home. The revolution happened almost by default. The Tsar was laughed out and into extinction. Sadly the bolsheviks had no real program.
The way out of this chaos will be a combined approach to see what works. We should respond to a system that is subversive of its own legacy as it tries to pass into fascism with a counterrevolution’/revolution from the left that can recreate democracy, failsafed as socialism.
The current US can’t even handle its own post office: it is going, going…
Revolutions are often called out as illegitimate. But the situation now seems to be we can’t even manage a post office.
Instead of a theory of history, we should construct outlines: the basic outline in world history can be jotted down in a minute:
The Neolithic?
the era of Sumer and Egypt…after ca. 3000 BCE
the classical era…after ca. 600 BCE
the modern era after ca. 1800 BCE
‘Stages of production’ theory invokes a theory of epochs, but that doesn’t work: the chronology above actually resembles a sequence of of epochs. By declaring a sequence, feudalism, capitalism, communism, Marx elevated capitalism into an inevitable epoch, and that it is not. And he made communism a next stage, beyond human volition. The situation requires free agents, not historical pawns.
We are in the third near its beginning: the system is still young and trying to find a correct politics, with democracy setting a keynote.
That’s it. The whole useless baggage of historical materialism can be replaced with something far simpler.
With a simple outline, we see three age periods, we can study their economies ad hoc, empirically. That’s it for historical theory. We see that modern revolution is a novelty in world history and that should alert us to the potential latent in the modern system. Socialism/communism is not some antithesis of liberal democracy but, as the early socialists understand, the path to ‘real democracy’.
We need to go with what worked: democratic revolutions had an outcome. A socialist revolution must produce something in that spectrum. Go with what worked: the early modern democratic revolutions show that revolutions can succeed. Socialists should study their success (and failures).
The question of the working class is so confused now no one can make any sense of it. There is a simple answer: the working class may not be revolutionary as once thought, but they should be the center of gravity of a new democracy based on equality. And the working class is any kind of wage laborer. That is almost everyone except capitalists. Egad, by that standard the managers in corporations are ‘working class’. The endless confusion over the working class needs to be laid to rest. The problem is that the proletarian of the early days of the industrial revolution doesn’t exist anymore. The working class is really middle class now and the old formulas of Marx don’t work anymore. There is still a working-class in China, and our ideas should be sidestepping with ideas on an international. We have our plan for a real neo-communism in China, soon policies as to the Great Wall.
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The tide is turning towards a new socialist perspective, But if the past is any guide the left will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and end up in the same state capitalism rut run by a one-party elite that was the inexorable fate of Marxist incomplete models. A new socialist social system requires a lot of work, historical, legal, constitutional, and economic.
We have a set of books and materials dealing with a hypothetical movement called The Red Forty-eight Group, with a manifesto and a neo-communist construct, Democratic Market Neo-communism in the context of ecological socialism. <!–more–>
We have made the point that the core left legacy, viz. marxism, by never specifying the nature of what was proposed due to Mark’s reluctance to get specific has too often wasted opportunities in fruitless wrong experiments, most notably the debacle of bolshevism. In addition, Marxism is far too complex a system for practical use, a point lost on many Marxists. Further, the complexity of the system masks a series of wrong theories. We should consider that no science in the realm of history, sociology, or economics really exists. So the pretense of having one is simply ideological propaganda. In many ways the issue of socialism is fairly simple (with complications of realization): it is a question of recipes not of historical theories like historical materialism. Marx has a host of brilliant insights but his overall theoretical perspective as in ‘Stages of Production’ theory as ‘Historical Materialism’ is egregious and mostly false, subtracting form the general cogency of his general empirical observations.
Our DMNC model is just that: a recipe approach to a neo-communist system of a new type: it is both a realizable blueprint and a model you can tinker with: issues of politics, authority, democracy, economics, markets and planning, expropriation and a Commons, etc, remind us that we must create a society that people will find just, efficient, and legally sound in the context of shared resources, equality, economic rights, and ecological socialism. A socialism (we don’t distinguish between socialism and neo-communism unlike legacy marxism) in a real sense should be immediately attractive to its publics, possibly exempting the capitalists, and we should note how the left has ended up with an antagonized public. In that case, something is wrong: people prefer the exploitation they know because they fear the outcome of Stalinism.
A model like our DMNC has nothing to do with any of that, and frankly may even leave behind Marx and marxism, save for their historical epic saga. We can put Marx on posters, and skip the rest. Let us consider the American Rebs: they had no theory, only a set of recipes, between republicanism and a barely conceived democratic idea (suffering ironically the same kind of discredit now suffered by socialism) inherited from antiquity under a cloud of discredit. How ironically similar to our current situation. they brought it off, but the result clearly suffered the diagnosis of Marx and the socialists as to the bourgeois revolution and democracy captured by capitalism. So they sermonized about ‘real socialism as real democracy’.
The point here is that the left can’t just chant mantras of socialism: they have to win over a new public with some real guarantees and future projections that are realizable, just and resolve the ecological crisis and economic terminal capitalism.
The Anthropocene and The Coming of Postcapitalism
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The left is almost paralyzed: we have suggested the need to bypass ideological exhaustion with a new framework. In a way global culture is moving toward what in antiquity generated a new religion, and we see that in the ambiguity of the old marxism which is acting like a dead religion already. That is not what we want at all but the gist of a new and more intelligent secularism might help the various ‘lefts’ to reconstruct a social activism whether reformist or revolutionary.
we have suggested:
a new perspective on world history beyond the sterile Marxist historical materialism:
it is hard to think of a worse historical perspective for the left. It worked OK in the nineteenth century but is a burden now…
a new perspective on evolution beyond the sterile Darwinism and social Darwinism:
the original view of Marx was critical of Darwinism, but then the Marx cult took over, what a waste…
an intelligent secularism that is more than value-free social science and able to look at culture in terms of facts and values: that simple change is more than enough for a secular debriefing of religious traditions which are fading away and yet obstacles to the left
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Is ‘America’ doomed? Civil War 2.O…CIA in stealth mode…Death Valley temps the new normal…
The current race protests are making their grim point: the modern world was just on the verge of escaping slavery and it turned around and went backward. And Americans were a part of that tragedy.
There is at least a possibility of correction: after all, the Civil War was able to achieve abolition.
But the elusive nature of the problem has persisted and we confront another point of passage, civil war 2.0 or not.
The climate crisis and the pandemic added in show a system on the verge of revolution. We need to consider the path forward before the right and the CIA do it for us.
The question of capitalism doesn’t need a lot of theory. The point is simply the need to integrate social and economic functions, something rogue capitalism never allows as it blocks real social functioning. We don’t have much time left to change course here.
The whole system is going smash with no one to pick up the pieces.
A new approach is needed.
Decoding_World_History version 2x
This strange situation in the US is like an invitation to pass to revolutionary transformation. The revolutionary option is rejected by reformists, but the current system is itself revolutionary, in the midst of a revolution from the right. We should respond to a system that is subversive of its own legacy as it tries to pass into fascism with a ‘counterrevolution’/revolution from the left that can recreate democracy, failsafed as socialism. The latter has to be redefined and clarifies to the point that it has popular support. That Trump’s base is unable to see their own advantage in a real socialism shows the paradox all along of the populist right. It takes a pretty big screw up by the left for that to happen. We disown the past and start with a new far-left populist socialism with both a robust new type of economy and an emergency economy as the world system slides into chaos.
The tide is turning towards a new socialist perspective, But if the past is any guide the left will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and end up in the same state capitalism rut run by a one-party elite that was the inexorable fate of Marxist incomplete models. A new socialist social system requires a lot of work, historical, legal, constitutional, and economic.
We have a set of books and materials dealing with a hypothetical movement called The Red Forty-eight Group, with a manifesto and a neo-communist construct, Democratic Market Neo-communism in the context of ecological socialism.
We have made the point that the core left legacy, viz. marxism, by never specifying the nature of what was proposed due to Mark’s reluctance to get specific has too often wasted opportunities in fruitless wrong experiments, most notably the debacle of bolshevism. In addition, Marxism is far too complex a system for practical use, a point lost on many Marxists. Further, the complexity of the system masks a series of wrong theories. We should consider that no science in the realm of history, sociology, or economics really exists. So the pretense of having one is simply ideological propaganda. In many ways the issue of socialism is fairly simple (with complications of realization): it is a question of recipes not of historical theories like historical materialism. Marx has a host of brilliant insights but his overall theoretical perspective as in ‘Stages of Production’ theory as ‘Historical Materialism’ is egregious and mostly false, subtracting form the general cogency of his general empirical observations.
Our DMNC model is just that: a recipe approach to a neo-communist system of a new type: it is both a realizable blueprint and a model you can tinker with: issues of politics, authority, democracy, economics, markets and planning, expropriation and a Commons, etc, remind us that we must create a society that people will find just, efficient, and legally sound in the context of shared resources, equality, economic rights, and ecological socialism. A socialism (we don’t distinguish between socialism and neo-communism unlike legacy marxism) in a real sense should be immediately attractive to its publics, possibly exempting the capitalists, and we should note how the left has ended up with an antagonized public. In that case, something is wrong: people prefer the exploitation they know because they fear the outcome of Stalinism.
A model like our DMNC has nothing to do with any of that, and frankly may even leave behind Marx and marxism, save for their historical epic saga. We can put Marx on posters, and skip the rest. Let us consider the American Rebs: they had no theory, only a set of recipes, between republicanism and a barely conceived democratic idea (suffering ironically the same kind of discredit now suffered by socialism) inherited from antiquity under a cloud of discredit. How ironically similar to our current situation. they brought it off, but the result clearly suffered the diagnosis of Marx and the socialists as to the bourgeois revolution and democracy captured by capitalism. So they sermonized about ‘real socialism as real democracy’.
