(this is a comment on a marxmail post, but since I am banned from that list, no one will read it except the general public of readers here: that’s the problem on the left, they never learn from their past and the authoritarian formula created by Marx, and then apply cancel culture to any critique, upgrade, or suggestion for the future)
Rehashing all these failed moments on the left and then simply reiterating the same old slogans for the future has drifted into its own counterrevolutionary brand. At a time when a revolutionary movement (but it may be that a reformist stance is inevitable, one could make reformism revolutionary ) is needed to confront the crisis of capitalism and climate where the left is dominated by Marxism and essentially stalled and inert, with listless websites and the capitalist boondoggle of the Verso book mill (from which I am also banned) churning oulala leftist boilerplate. The overall effect is counterrevolutionary. I had hoped that my The Last Revolution might jumpstart a new kind of left (with zero advertising and active suppression that takes time, a hundred new readers a day on the internet), but one that is ‘socialist’ as form of neo-communism: the ‘neo-‘ is essential: the whole past of Marxist/Leninist discourse is obsolete and will block anything new. It will succeed in spite of itself because if the public finds out the frozen left refused any critique they will really rebel, against the left, already the fate of Marxism which has thousands of critics in the twentieth century, all unread by Marxists themselves). In fact, the entire canon on the left needs to restart from scratch, recast the subject, and move past the useless baggage of historical materialism, beau mots economic snippets from Marx, dialectical non-sequiturs and ‘dialectical materialism’, etc…Theory has totally confused the left. Consider the recipe for a cake: it is simple, efficient, and effective. By analogy a constructivist path to a post capitalist socialism is needed and this will have much of the classic legacy, e.g. the expropriation of capital (perhaps only in the large-scale), a new form of economy that can still use (socialist) markets, a legally defined Commons (local/global), a real democratic setup that can also exert compassionate power in the crisis of ecology and laissez-faire, and a new international. The issue of rights/economic rights needs a solution once and for all. The endless partition of capitalists and wage labor has never had any resolution in any so-called democracy since Yankee Doodle Year 0. Finally a simpler solution to world history study is needed beyond economic reductionism.
The danger of theories is that values are excluded in the attempt to find causal laws. And the issue of individuality becomes a pastiche of bad psychology that even the man on the street can see is false.
The amount of work for the above is considerable indeed and we see at once how the Bolsheviks arrived in power having done zero homework and with no experience of liberalism and its superior systems of rights and economic functionality. The issue of markets has seen a lot a work and with any luck a new form of economy can be constructed (cf. my DMNC model). The public is heavily conditioned by propaganda, but the same is true on the left. The crisis moment is arriving and there is no left in place.
1848+: The End(s) of History 