Our idea of democratic market neo-communism is perfectly adapted to the kind of situation we see in Afghanistan. The ideas of democracy or socialism taken alone are not. The idea of democracy has suffered semantic chaotification and metal fatigue has set in. The Americans seem to think they have a democracy, which is laughable.
Our DMNC is a way to model social constructs and no doubt has its own limits. But the core concepts could allow a social construct that is functional at any stage of any social system/economy. Marxism enjoined the need to have a capitalist stage before a socialist or communist one. Surely that’s wrong, and the Bolshevik example correctly disregarded that but they couldn’t really manifest any part of their Marxist projections
Our DMNC can work at any point in any social system, and could even discuss a band of hunter-gatherers. That’s outlandish but in any case the point is that the construct can model systems with or without capitalism. It was a fiasco of wrong analysis to think that a stage of capitalism must precede socialism/communism (we don’t distinguish the terms). In the DMNC approach socialism and markets emerge together in parallel with a planning aspect in equal parallel. And that in the construct of a Commons, which requires a legal construct that makes equal participation in resources a matter of law with their own courts. It is not a form of state capitalism. The Commons is balanced with a set of economic rights. The corporate construct is easy to adapt here: social market managers (formerly capitalists) can license resources from the Commons and might even be able to bid for resources as shares, while in parallel other corporate types can operate with a high degree of planning. This is a multivalent system, therefore. The construct is democratic with a parliament, scrap the oligarchic Senate (or else…?).
This kind of system could be applied to Afghanistan tomorrow, and would work save only that the US has no intention of allowing anything beyond their muddle of fascist/imperialist domination.
This construct is matched with a variant system that expresses the idea of ecological socialism with its own legal add-ins.
The point here is that we can start with this kind of balanced tinkertoy model that can serve to visualize potentials and warn us of traps and create something more robust than hollow concepts of democracy or socialism.
There is a lot more here, but the basic format can apply any and all possible starting points, medievalist, feudalism, capitalism, archaic socialism (!) and reconstruct a new system in those contexts. The old versions of working-class revolutions require recasting, not hard to do, but the idea that the working class should take total control was unexpectedly flawed. But we can work this into a working-class model at the drop of a hat. The working class is a version a version of James Joyce’s HCE, ‘here comes everybody’ and if everyone who is a passive entity under capitalism is working-class then indeed HCE.
Note that this system re-contains, or re-applies multiple potentials in parallel, and in one version has an indifference level below which control top-down is marginal.
This is the kind of so-called utopian system rejected by Marx who preached scientific socialism, but a science here would have to construct a model, more ‘utopian’ thinking on the way to science. The distinction was pernicious and confused all discussions. Our model is neither scientific or not: it is not utopian in the speculative sense but a realistic remorphing of a liberal system under a commons, i.e. the expropriation of social resources into a general pool.
The US will never get Afghanistan right. An agency like the UN might well be able to oversee but not control a revolutionary restart as our DMNC.
Our thinking no doubt is still limited and one missing element is an international. We need something more than one country/one socialism but that said our DMNC can go either way: socialism in one country and/or an international.
1848+: The End(s) of History 