To Marxmail

Thanks for this reply and also to Hari Kumar for his kind response. I am sorry for the confusion over the issues cited and the cc messages to group members. The question of cultism can be set aside save to note that the debates over 9/11 and evolution won’t go away. The question of historical materialism requires some commentary. I have been following this list for a long time without being able to contribute, but recently I saw an opening and have taken that up controversially. as it seems. I have written a short book The Last Revolution at high speed to move into this opening.

It is a bit rough, unfinished and barely proofed but it points to its basic clearly enough. For better or worse we live in a world of Print on Demand and a flood of books that are outside the peer review or scholarly disciplines. But that is now the best path to dissent. Verso has published thousands of books on Marxist historical materialism, but what if all of those books are suddenly obsolete? I am pointing to something that is creeping up on the left and needs a warning. That’s all. I have written extensively on history in a way that the peer review rejects but that doesn’t matter anymore. I wrote a recent post at my blog (three linked together): Art, evolution and design. It is easy now to show that a science of history is the now-dated sense cannot work because its real dynamic shows an aesthetic (and ethical) aspect, a finding that voids historical materialism in a kind of falsification (a fate that comes to most so-called sciences sooner or later). This is an aspect of a new and different way to study the question of history. We see in fact that all those books from Verso are in fact obsolete. The point here is that as the world tries to move toward socialism the Marxist context will suddenly make the effort in that vein fail: the capitalists will, and they have dozens of other issues like that, try to show that Marx’s theories are wrong, and they will be correct. The issue won’t go away: a new kind of post-Marxist theory is needed, or better yet no theory at all. In fact, that makes Marx’s other insights actually work better. All this is a preamble to the realization that a new framework is needed for revolutionary socialism. The left needs to reinvent itself asap because as things stand now it is one of those cases where you realize too late you are going over the falls. In a way, I have already made my point, so mission accomplished. It is easy to produce a new framework and even a blueprint for socialism/(neo-)communism. But time is short, a strong post-Leninist left was needed long since, but can’t develop. Bellamy has attempted that, but his claim that Marx was an early ecologist may or may not be correct, but the result now is to have braided the bright and upcoming ecosocialism to all the fallacies of Marx’s theories. The left is going to get one last chance for a path to postcapitalism and needs to consider what it is proposing already a small army of ‘experts’ ready to turn the public off of socialism as the path to fascist barbarism takes hold to a grim probability. If you set aside theories of history that will always be wrong you can adopt a very simple and intuitive platform that speaks better to a public now brainwashed against radical socialism.
I have a number of resources on these issues, Decoding World History, The Last Revolution, and a blog with thousands of posts on all these issues. The world of Common Dreams represents a form of the reformist left that is lively and vibrant with a dozen orgs of placard protest movements, but the ancient Marxist warnings re: revolutionary transformation need to stop being filtered out of the potential pathways to a postcapitalist future.