A battle for the soul of socialism.
Source: Marx, the Paris Commune & socialism’s two souls: What liberation are we fighting for? | rs21
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A fascinating article but still the problem remains that socialism has nothing but a confused hodgepodge of ideas its proponents can never realize or clarify. What is the problem? Socialism should have come into existence in the generation of its birth after the take-off of capitalism. Its chances now are against a colossus of pseudo-democratic oligarchic mafias armed with massive armaments/armies, covert agencies specialized in defeating revolt/dissent, and an economic system so labyrinthine that ordinary notions of socialism cannot correctly analyze. Marx’s influence is confusing to all later adherents who struggle to grasp the germano-hegelian jargon swamp that Marx bequeathed to followers for whom he had a hidden contempt, as his remarkable treatment of Weitling reminds us. Such a system is elitist all over again, save that the elite itself can’t figure out Marx. The clear failure of Marx’s theories of history next to his often brilliant extra-systematic insights again confuses the faithful who have lost the ability to critique and therefore understand anything of the now useless baggage of marxist ideology to replace the capitalist. Marx’s combination of hyperintelligence, arrogant domination, and feckless science muddle has created a rogue elephant on the loose. To be sure, Marx struggled to create a systematic corpus for an exodus from his castigated ‘utopian’ socialist muddle of early socialism and to make it a canon that could exert authority against a wasteland of stray ‘socailisms’, but that strategy can’t make critical errors and has to get it right the first time or the result is not the science Marx proclaimed but still another brand of ‘utopian’ tinkertoys that at least offer a pool of variant DNA, sadly dismissed and put out of existence. Marx’s flawed system then surged in the Second International, but failing in all cases to find a venue, save in the anomalous case of Bolshevism. Lenin realized however that socialism could start anywhere anytime and pressed on with the Russian anomaly,but the hidden tragic flaws of Marx’s system derailed the whole attempt as it devolved into Stalinism.
We have a host of suggestions here, but basically, it might help to leave behind ‘theory’ in the sense of science. There are no sciences of society, sociology, psychology, or even evolution. From basic science, physics to biochemistry, the buck stops just around the evolutionary zone where the failure of theory is beyond even the awareness of biologists. And,sure enough, Marxism added a further cement block to drag it down, Darwinism, turning natural selection into a genocidal ‘class war’ weapon. To be sure, Marx had a brilliant analysis, which doesn’t require his Big Theory, of the way the factor of bourgeois domination and capitalism seep into and take over ‘democracy’. But the case of the US Rebs, which fall under that critique, nonetheless shows an early path attempting democracy (with hints of democratic socialism manque in its stunning focus on equality, however soon vitiated, unprecedented for its time).
The only revolution that really succeeded was the humble revolt of the American Rebs, nowhere near as smart, or smart ass, as Marx who made a total mess where the Rebs actually produced (serendipitously perhaps) a republic, a later diagnosed as bourgeois revolution with a strange democratizing potential, despite the near stealth anti-democratic elements foisted on the experiment by its elite slaveholders: the issue of slavery fairly well scotches the effort that looks ridiculous in retrospect but which shows a case where dirt farmers at least brought a revolution to term and showed more intelligent any of the nutjob marxists who come later.
The moral then is to consider the core idea of a republic quite compatible with a socialist brand, and then consider how it can realize increasing democracy as it manifests a socialist music/economics. It has a key obstacle the early Rebs didn’t have: the need to contain capital in a socialist container instead of the let-be/laissez-faire that made a revolution much easier in its outcome sequence. But the problem is not beyond solution: a simple requirement that ‘capital’/property at high level be annexed into a Commons, leaving the rest as is would be a minimal version of socialism that could be realized easily once the coming crisis of capitalism is seen finally for what it is. That means, no more Exxons and all such macro-capital formations. The lower level can by and large be left as is.
Our ‘democratic market neo-communism’ shows how easy it is to construct a variant of liberalism as a socialism/commnunism, dispensing with Marx’s distinction of the two. Such simple recipes could work fine, until Marxists get a hold of them.https://redfortyeight.com/2021/09/05/whos-the-bigger-obstacle-to-socialism-the-cia-or-the-cadre-of-marx-idiots-marx-the-paris-commune-socialisms-two-souls-what-liberation-are-we-fighting-for-rs21/ link sent to marxmail, obviously will be suppressed.
A battle for the soul of socialism.
Source: Marx, the Paris Commune & socialism’s two souls: What liberation are we fighting for? | rs21
1848+: The End(s) of History 