The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist Futures_ver_6_8_22
I am backtracking to an earlier version in order to work on the publication version…It is almost identical.———-
We spoke of ‘virtual revolution’ and that’s useful and relevant, but the question arises, what if our only option will soon be direct political revolution? The idea of ‘virtual revolution’ includes the possibility! But this is so far an exercise in free speech. And it offers no specific avenue for an actual realization, save one: if enough people agree to a transformation of some model like our DMNC, the current system just might collapse. If nothing else we must be ready for a fascist coup. And the coming climate calamity demands the politicians be fired on the spot. The issue of the CIA looms, and they have decades of experience undermining revolutions.
The powers that be have so much power that it seems absurd to consider revolutionary action feasible. Even so, like fire extinguishers in virtual readiness, we need to consider our chances as fascism, climate change/calamity, and political lockjaw loom. The politicians have all become paralyzed, in this and most countries. An entire generation has been lost with just about deliberate indifference to the fate of the planet. These politicians are what Marx saw all too well, have lost their right to rule. At that point the question of political legitimacy looms. Few seem to realize the criminality of this system. A lot of dot.gov types made a bundle on opium in Afghanistan.
The odds are tipping against reformist change (which doesn’t mean we give up on that: revolutionary intent can trigger reformist results). But it may have a last chance. A look at history suggests the revolutions in the early modern were indirect and almost serendipitous, and failures that succeeded after they failed: democracy of a sort did actually result. Consider the starting point of the French Revolution. We can see the need to consider the issue with care once we see the immense opportunities lost in the French, and Russian revolutions. We have suggested many ways to get past that. But the disastrous botch of Bolshevism seems like a permanent gift to the capitalist class. Marxists can’t seem to grasp the problems with this legacy and their partial responsibility for it
In any case, the political class may simply be abdicating: they are defeated in place and simply ply the dictates of capital, they know they’re licked and just tread water. And the capitalists now surprise even their harshest critics in the depth of their blindness and deliberate malevolent indifference, intent on destroying even the last chance. I once bought the idea that capitalism exhibited economic rationality but this…walpurgisnacht… I don’t think Marxism can do the job here. It is loathed by too many and has an evil reputation. Its theory is flawed. We have staged a complete break, save only the historical starting point of the challenge to capitalism.
Our DMNC model could most of the problems, would be highly popular with its rights and liberties, but with constraints on ecological questions, capital, and the exploitation of labor. Social democratic issues would be its forte and create a resolution of so much struggle to create simple economic equality. The whole system doesn’t need to destroy the bourgeois state, the fatal mistake of the Bolsheviks: the only substitute would be dictatorship. We should modify a liberal state.
The system appears destined to collapse: the moment will arrive when the state becomes dysfunctional and/or the right ignites a fascist coup, one already underway. If you think you will have the revolutionary option once the right takes over you are deluding yourself. We must consider (virtual) revolution now, and have something that the public and/or the working class can use as self-defense.
We are running out of time, and have no real left in place. Consider our (virtual) algebra of movements, The Red Forty-eight Group, become a virtual member, and consider: what of the coming calamity?
Prior version: Virtual Revolution….
….But…we are running out of time: the current (American) political class (and media) are dysfunctional and without intervention the American system is probably doomed.
Virtual Revolution? The idea of revolution is controversial, rarely understood, especially to conservatives, but we have recently seen a (counter) revolutionary coup, or farce, attempting to take over the government, starting with the capitol. Leftists with revolutionary considerations, active or virtual, idling for decades due to the legacy of Bolshevism, should take note of the way revolutionary action is now a rightist initiative, potentially fascist, but leaving the Left to its paralysis. We must consider revolutionary options then as self-defense against the revolution from the right. An idea can generate real change. One does nothing. But then doing nothing can fatal, as the climate crisis is left unaddressed by the failure of bourgeois democracy in the US. The political class is frozen in place as a whole civilization slips into oblivion.
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Although I respect the work of Marx/Engels as a foundational starting point the future almost always defeats efforts to defy its logic, as Oedipus learned the hard way. Stale reputation of Marx as a prophet is going to work a second time. But we can easily outwit historical mechanical degeneration with a simple restart, like a man of mediation who thinks ‘will in the now’, with a clarification of principles and new ways to consider the tricky nature of religious, secular, economic, and constitutional principles, this in the context of ‘democracy’. It is highly unlikely that the Marxist corpus can generate a new avenue to socialism, as Marx understood very well in his excessive refusal to legislate the future. A simple clarion call and a brilliant Manifesto seems right. The American system was destined to be replaced and it is just about written into the Constitution. An ominous echo of the period leading to the Civil War seems to echo in our own times as the curse of the original constitution’s compromise on slavery becomes the recurring nightmare of the so-called American republic and its endemic racism. The original constitutional framework may be beyond repair.
__________________prior versions and notes…
We need a socialist revolution, a new International, and an ecological revolution to create a global Commons. We have said little of working-class revolution but we will change that soon: the working class however is not defined very well: it includes all those subject to capitalism as passive persons (alienation). Then why pit the working in one set against others in another, all in the Universal Class. Further the creation of a working-class state is ill-defined and open to takeover by dictators claiming to represent the working, e.g. Lenin, with the loss of the right to even create labor unions. We would have to do better than that. Any working-class group is free to use this model as such. And a close alliance with working-class and union class struggles slips under our umbrella with ease. But in the end the working class moves to include almost everyone and it is the groups in the general Universal Class that will create a new society, one with robust socialist labor supports.
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The idea of revolution here is a kind of virtual meditation short of an actual project: that can change, but the point is to reflect on any such project. Marxism and especially Bolshevism created immense confusion with the idea and the results didn’t work.
Although the ‘end of history’ debate was mostly confused it did suggest that a socialist revolution must produce democracy, i.e. democratic socialism. Clearly the original Marx theories failed to do that: a ‘revolution’ seizes power but then must yield that to a set of democrats, yet, the idea seems unreasonably optimistic.
Any idea of revolution therefore must be very specific about the transition beyond the revolutionary cadre which is likely to confront counterrevolution and stall.
We have suggested ways to failsafe this process, but perhaps it needs more detail. A constitution must come into existence and it must become the standard. But this is not like the American (bourgeois) revolution, which shows a successful transition: many years passed after the revolution before the constitution appeared.
A virtual idea of revolution can be immensely helpful to see the complexities of what is required. To just chant slogans of revolution and socialism is baseless hot air, as the Bolshevik case made clear. The immense counterrevolution of course of the capitalists and the governments dominated by them made the project fail.
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Finished short section in Preface opening discussion of ecological/socialist issues. More to come in later chapters… Historical materialism, despite the efforts of figures like Bellamy, is a really poor perspective for eco-socialism. The eonic effect shows clearly the way the early modern is a balanced transition with the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement in synchronous counterpoint. The Romantic era is one of real sources of the coming ecology.
In general the eonic effect shows massive correlation with almost all the innovations, movements, religion, secularism, etc,… in world history. The idea that economics is the prime mover of historical eras and periods is simply false.
Marxists are completely closed in like a cult. I can’t even post a link at Marmail (I did once for a very early edition without much Marx criticism). Marxists would do well to study their critics, and this critique especially. Their opponents will.
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Starting to bring in a lot of eco-socialist material, and other issues. Marxists e.g. Bellamy are claiming Marx was an ecologist all along. The evidence is marginal but the attempt is worthy, however: trying to add ecology to the Marx canon is another round of Marxist monopoly cultism. The eonic model shows the far larger and better resources of the modern transition on ecology: cf. the Romantic Movement. Historical materialism has to be just about the worse approach to ecology possible.
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We have a new page showing how the eonic model or simply its basic data/chronology falsifies historical materialism. Marx was obsessed with creating a science/theory of history, and the fate of most theories is falsification. It is puzzling that Marx should have gotten stuck on this point, but he wanted to make the passage beyond capitalism a kind of historical guarantee. It doesn’t work and throws the whole Marx project into a kind of limbo. Let’s be clear: you can’t impose on humanity a theory of history that almost everyone else knows is false. Yet Marxists are totally stuck on this issue. They live in a cultic dream world and their fate is to have no further chances for social transformation. Even sympathetic socialists won’t stand for it.
We have bypassed the issue by sticking to simple chronologies of history and the result is surprisingly suggestive of what a real science of history would be, but we can’t carry out that project because we have both too much and too little data: for what we see the literature is immense, millions of books, literally, for what we don’t see very well, e.g. the Neolithic, we are left high and dry: we can’t conclude how to take the Neolithic (although it is obvious to the naked eye that a set of hidden transitions are probably there).
It is time to denounce the immense harm done by Darwinism and the stupid ‘scientists’ who enforce dogma there. The data of the eonic effect should be a university study as a solid foundation of a new kind of post-theory. But the dogmatists reign supreme and won’t even spit in the direction of anyone who dissents from the whole shebang of ideological pseudo-science enforced to keep people in a social darwinist economic culture.
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From the new Preface
Is revolution a patriotic duty?
But is the American system crippled beyond repair, even for a revolutionary restart? The Last Revolution could start better in many places, but the US will soon destroy it. So the American case is perhaps the only starting point. The US was/is not really a democracy at all, ignored the warnings of the British it would be genocidal to the indigenous peoples, could not declare against slavery, created an endemic racist legacy, crippled Latin America and the Middle East with repeated imperialistic action, turned into a stooge of criminal Zionists, rapidly became a Wall Street oligarchy, is now controlled by covert agencies and that phantom, The Deep State, and murdered its own citizens in the 9/11 false flag operation, the inability to control gun laws and the reign of hundreds of mass murders,… The terminal brainwashing of the American Republic is a dangerous new Leviathan masquerading as a republic.
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The legacy of Marxism is been a failure and made socialism seem unobtainable.
The reality is that it should be easy to establish a socialist system, as long as we confront the issue of Capital as private property. That’s the hard part, but the dynamics of a socialist society should be far simpler than the mental confusion about theory left by Marxism. Enough of it. Real socialism can be described in a few pages. We don’t need an elaborate theory of history, economic determinism, dialectic, battles with Hegel, battles between idealism and materialism, it is all useless and had confused almost everyone.
The main thing is to create a socialist economy that is functional, a task beyond the ken of Marxist/bolshevik derivatives. Beyond that the issue of democracy cannot be resolved in the dismissal of liberalism that lead to dictatorship. The trick is to create a neo-communism out of a liberal system, and add economic rights.
1848+: The End(s) of History 