We are reposting a post from yesterday discussing a Jacobin piece that seems to echo our take on issues of a real socialism in practice. In a moment of paranoia I thought it a kind of take off on material we have been producing here for over two years, with a whole series of books on all that: the age of kindle has arrived and we have around ten books on these issues and it is even possible to archive blog post series in kindle and we have several like that such as The Anthropocene….etc: we can list all those later.
Whether the article is truly derivative or not is a lost cause and we should be glad to be having some influence. But better watchit, the R48 group cadre could be arriving at the offices of Jacobin (in Viking helmets) to take over.
More seriously we should be a glad a new milieu is emerging that sees the need for reifications of possible socialisms. You suddenly realize that noone on the left has done their homework, has no idea what they are talking about, have no grasp of the quagmire of economic theory (nor of its history), never discuss the calculation debate, and turn to a Marx quote as a tranquilizer or I Ching to resolve all possible doctrinal issues.
We can puckishly pull rank and issue homework to these gremlins.
Since this world of Jacobin may have an academic focus we can suggest some ‘projects impossible’ for those with access to university libraries: a history of the calculation debate. A clarification of the sources of marginalism and the equilibrium model, the nature of economic theories, and why they fail, and in general the black hole of planning questions, etc…
Every socialism needs the equivalent of the great Krugman/Wells text book one that is clear and without marxist propaganda, but able to get past capitalist mystifications of economics.
We can comment on tidbits of this article at length but we might point to our take on ‘utopian versus scientific’ socialism in dozens of posts here: we have a link to them via our search box.
Our points are multiple: the original critique of ‘utopian’ socialists makes sense in its historical context but it implied that Marx/Engels had created a science in its place, that dread claim that subjected the left to a century of confusion. At the end one is forced to revert to a revised ‘utopian’ approach (dropping the word ‘utopia’) that actually constructs a socialist model and instead of historical materialism adopts a new view of world history that sees the fallacies of Marx’s ‘stages of production’ theory.
Our model of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ allows a simplified approach that uses markets in a sphere of planning and thus is able to bypass the calculation debate. And it has a third sector at a lower indifference level that is semi-anarchist, etc…The idea of worker’s cooperatives can be worked in but in the end worker ownership is no better than capitalist ownership: we invoke the idea of a Commons in place of worker control and/or state capitalism. The legal basis of a Commons needs to be worked out. Our model is so vast however it can easily allowed independent subsector experiments with worker cooperatives and a modified worker ‘socialist ownership’ subject to the Commons (??).
This model is both top down and bottom up, democratic but with a strong presidential authority that can guard the revolution but which has few powers beyond that.
There are many aspects to our (ecological socialist) ‘democratic market neo-communism’ along with a system of checks and balances and a remorphing concept of making liberalism into a communism and communism into a liberalism.
I got the Wells/Krugman textbook at Amazon for a few bucks years ago, now all the used copies have been bought up and such books are horrendously expensive and the whole morass of economic books is completely capitalist and out of control. It might help to study a book like Griffiths on quantum mechanics to see the way a real theory works and the basic idea set that economists have been trying to crib for a century with no success. In a way since neo-classical economics is debatably fallacious top/bottom mainstream leftists don’t need to bother with it, but a technical cadre of socialist economics is likely to reinvent all that inside socialism a clear way to access the whole legacy is needed. Who knew that equilibrium models were in part invented by socialists and one might examine a figure like Walras in that respect. The issue of marginalism is genuinely obscure and outsmarted the left (and most capitalists): if the subject is nonsense why did three nineteenth century economists discover the idea independently. The answer might be that the ‘marginal’ idea is perfectly good until you mix it with calculus, etc…
I think a critique of historical materialism can’t be avoided: the fallacies of economic analysis applied to history are out the window at this point.
I have to recommend a short/long study of our ‘eonic effect’ in case you thought either’s Marx’s or any other ‘scientific theory’ of history was going to work….
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Looking back, the warnings of Marx and Engels against fixation on an unknowable future have a convincing air about them.
Source: We Need to Say What Socialism Will Look Like
https://redfortyeight.com/?s=democratic+market+neo-communism
https://redfortyeight.com/?s=utopian+scientific+socialism
https://redfortyeight.com/2019/03/06/lo-the-lowly-debugger-remorphing-incrementally/
https://redfortyeight.com/2019/03/06/dictatorship-of-proletariat-hal-draper-9780853457268-amazon-com-books/
Reading this article I have to wonder if they haven’t been influenced by our DMNC. Perhaps also, not, since they haven’t understood our approach. Nonetheless this article makes me feel like the Jacobin crowd is ripping off my critique of marxism, even as they reintroduce marx on the surface. The author is confused completely and the more he worships marx the worse he gets…
Consider this confusion: the basic error of Marx/Engels is externalized to others while they end up right all along. The fixation of Marx on an ‘unknowable’ abstraction, communism, was the source of disaster…But now he is the source of a correct view ripped off from elsewhere.
A future socialism needs to forget marx and start over…marx’s idiocy will enter to confuse everything…
The utopian versus scientific socialism issue we have discussed many times here…
We could go through this whole piece but the probability is that incompetent people with a will to power with a pastiche will determine the result, an obvious critique of Lenin/Stalin. That’s a reminder that celebrities and power types will end up with flawed concoctions. Still another disaster socialism will be the result….
This essay is still useful, but I could find no clear statement as to a reformist or revolutionary perspective. Jacobin thinking.
Our DMNC is no doubt flawed but it at least focuses on multiple things in tandem: the full combination ….all at the same time…
democracy, authority, anarchism, communism versus/and/or a Commons, planning, markets, internationals, socialism in one country… parliaments, presedents, one party states, many party states, the calculation debate, market clearing, civil liberties, economic rights, three sector systems,…
and much else…
Actually this essay is useful, somehow our line of thinking is in the air: we can pick off its flaws easily, along with our own. But I doubt if we can ever make to the snob level of the Jacobin clique. Who needs it? Our take is also flawed, no doubt.
Looking back, the warnings of Marx and Engels against fixation on an unknowable future have a convincing air about them.
