Our model in some ways resembles Fromm’s vision but now we confront the grim realization of the revolutionary path needed to transition to postcapitalism, and its prospects seem at first hopeless. In fact, it would seem rather the case that the revolution is coming willy-nilly as possible system collapse as we watch the lunatics of government paralyzed, corrupt, capitalist stooges. The revolution can take a saner form as explicit revolutionary action rising to meet the ‘revolution’. Unfortunately the Marxist monopoly of thought without action is partly in the way. We propose our Red Forty-eight Group as an umbrella concept or algebra of movements: start to think immediately of the path through the chaos coming and the fascist devolution of capitalist controlled pseudo-government in place. In fact, we done just that: let X be the Red Forty-eight Group, a social-democratic construct! We have moved from Fromm’s fantasy to a realizable post-Marxist version of a realizable and efficient economy beyond private property and capital, with a constitutional format whose first stage is a transitional first version as our ‘democratic market neo-communism’.
This format at a minimum can be constructed as an overlay of the social structure we have already. Our model thus is not utopian in two senses, the ideal society, and/or the flawless ‘end of history’ fiction. Our DMNC model is in fact almost designed as less than perfect but with the basics of a postcapitalist starting point. It would require a violent revolutionary war, and all that entails. In a way the period since 1989 has been the end of Marxism also, save that the left doesn’t realize it. In its legacy Marxists have failed in every case, including the dead versions in China, and North Korea. We must move beyond the ‘ism’ that lead to their Stalinist nightmare. We can excuse Marx all we want but it won’t help at this point. We must recast the whole ideology and free it from its latent Stalinism. Not so hard to do on paper. The socialist/communist ideal is far richer than the sterile botch created by Marx and Engels despite their value as clarion call on public posters in the era of the early socialism and its strange twin, capitalism.
Fromm’s answer, which then as today has an air of utopian fantasy, was the devolution of mass automated consumerist society into small communities guided by what he called “humanistic communitarian…
1848+: The End(s) of History 