The Last Revolution: Postcapitalist Futures…//ED5_5_2_23

The Last Revolution: Postcapitalist Futures

The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist Futures_ ED5_5_2_23

Notes moved to new Chapter 0/0 which will have a summary manifesto-style short version of the text.

We began with an intended manifesto which then by extension broke out of its own confines to a complexity that might stall its own realization. The basic point is that the democratic revolutions of the nineteenth century pointed to their own limits and the emergence of attempted completions began even as, for example, the French Revolution was still underway. A figure like Gracchus Babeouf makes the point with clarity A generation of socialists emerged and here Marx and Engels became interlopers who took over the subject and grafted their own theories onto the whole field to the point that even today we often equate socialism with Marxism. At the same time without the work of Marx/Engels the whole field of socialism might have simply died out and the leadership of the two was a heroic saga trying to jumpstart a conception of revolution based on the model of such as given. But the legacy of revolution is not so simple to sort out and the issue really begins in the early modern with the English Civil War and elsewhere in Europe. We might find that starting point earlier still in the Reformation and the Peasant’s Revolt of Munzer. Marx was well aware of the ambiguity of revolution in his delineation of the bourgeois revolution. But the question of a revolution beyond that was a conception with undefined terms….

This is a start for a new fifth edition, which is really a new draft, revision or extension, and these in this method of composition and production can occur several times a year, a useful state of affairs compared to the slow motion tortoise book production of (capitalist) publishers and the quietly self-censoring ‘working class’ of writers. The first edition already has earlier published texts as Kindle and paperback at Amazon, and I invite any group of social transformers to consider them: they are already as is usable early versions and ironically the simpler version called for than in this later edition. It also includes a lot of new notes, and will have a new chapter 0/0 to match chapter 0. The book began as a manifesto then became a book and could use a short summary of the overall argument which is also designed to point to the complexity of political systems in need of change. Although we insisted from that start on the ‘virtual’ character of all complots as actual politics, we did note the virtual option of devirtualization as the acitivities of the Red Fortyeight Group, still itself a virtual org of hotheads with designs on the future, enough to leave the elite with chattering teeth, no more. As with Halloween we adopt masks to scare people as ‘trick or treat’. Under the circumstances of our current global crisis, the current powers that be so allergic to revolutionary action in a stance of ‘conservative’ mentation are entering a slow but steady destabilization of the status quo and that needs a ready challenge to the fascist hyaenas circling the Washington complex as in our previous metaphor of a fire-extinguisher at the ready.  There is a hidden fascism gestating and our construct here is a thorough challenge to such hopeless idiots and their schemes. The book opens with a challenge to Marxists and as expected they have tried to completely ignore any criticism, but I think that the erosion of their position requires rethinking their intentions and ideology. We have left the iconic Marx/Engels at the masthead of a socialist futurism but warned that the association however unfair with the Bolshevik thence Stalinist outcomes has forced the issue of a complete restart. Marxism has always been a cult that simply ignored its critics and self-isolated into a frozen cadre. But I also think that many have gotten the point and are silent only because this now obsolescing legacy is all they have and on that point, they have my sympathies.

A recent post at redfortyeight.com has addressed the issue of Ukraine and attempted to see that war in terms of the failures of Marxism in China and Russia, and pointed to a possible real future for the American system stuck in its slide into imperial hegemony. In all the nonsense about ‘national interest’ it is very much in the interest of the US to consider something better than an imperialist capitalism and to consider a new ‘international’ as the right successor. Our DMNC model shows how relatively simple a new framework might be and the way it can bypass the confusions of all previous attempts to construct a viable socialist economy.

https://redfortyeight.com/2023/04/12/views-on-ukraine-war/
I have cautiously supported the Ukrainians and the Ukraine war, but I will include two dissenting views on the left, the first of which cites a new book on the issue from Monthly Review. These articles do not necessarily reflect my views.  Cf the links at the blog post cited…

The exposes of American propaganda are important and essential but the question of the Ukraine war is tricky. The question of American global hegemony is of critical importance as is the danger of nuclear escalation but the plain fact remains that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven so chillingly genocidal that regardless of politics one moves to rescue a drowning swimmer. The conflict is a true tragic deadlock: if you oppose the war after the fashion of the Vietnam protests you end up with Russia attempting to eliminate a whole people. If you support Ukraine you end up with their need to take back Crimea, and so it goes, like quicksand perhaps. The destruction of infrasture may be a coward’s or weakling’s tactics, but it is very real in practice and exhibits war crimes on a level that is hard to fathom. Putin’s invasion was a piece of monumental stupidity, and if he succeeds he will escalate further and the war will start over with another bite out of Eastern Europe, or so it seems. Nuclear wild card apart, the US will end up after this with increased global hegemony because we would not choose after this any consideration of either Russian or Chinese hegemony. That could be dead wrong. Still, we cannot predict this situation with any confidence. I think that the American imperial legacy has thrown into entire discredit the whole legacy of American civilization, but with Russian/Putin idiocy at this level it seems to make a comeback.
Still, exposing the lies here is essential and one has to consider what we are not getting from the news. The implications of the leaked documents are unclear but do they really change anything?
In any case, this is a challenge to the self-styled opinion leaders on the left who might assume agreement based on rhetoric against Yankee imperialists. Russia and Chinese are leftover messes of the left.
In the battle of the Romans against the Scythians I tend to side with the Romans, and their vaunted hegemony. In this case, …? In the end, both China and Russia are victims of the failures of Marxism, no doubt to oversimplify. The best thing that could happen is for the US to move to a postcapitalist transition in a post-Marxist neo-socialism done right, the issue of hegemony given over to a new and just International. In the endless claptrap by political idiots about ‘national interest’, a decent version of the above would more surely be in the real ‘national intrest’ of the slowing sliding away yankee doodle operation. My reverse propaganda is a version of ‘democratic market neo-communism’, liberalism as a trick play morphed into a sane neo-communism. That is the issue. This whole affair is really about the aftermath of Marxism, and the real aftermath must start over: in my The Last Revolution I consider a modeling tool that can sift through these combinations in a double play against rancid liberalism and rancid communism. I offer the same scale of thought to endgame commie grotesques of both Russia and China. Russia is haunted by its socialist failure and can never live it down without doing it right. Putin’s fanatasy of a greater Russia as of yore would be plain silly if it weren’t actually being attempted by this psychopath. Such a transition could be far simpler and realizable than we realize from the bad theories of Marx. That will require a level of intelligence absent in the post-communist after life of Russia, and essentially the same for China. I would demand a socialism in which I don’t get murdered in the first week. Such a thing doesn’t exist yet. But the temperatures are rising.

The idea of socialism strangely became a Marxist monopoly but the history shows that the basic ideas springing out of the era of the French Revolution were the starting point (what to say of the Diggers in the English Civil War). The point is that a post-Marxist reformulation is needed, although the cultic form of most socialist groups make a break with past inevitable. The generation since 1989 has frittered away a generation with nothing but repetition of the same old same old. The public simply won’t buy and the closed world of the Marxist cadres makes it hard to see the danger.

Material on conspiracy theories, the use of the term itself in the conspiracies of disinformation…

Is Chomsky a de facto covert agent? Towers of Deception, by B. Zwicker discusses the strange deception/disinformation of Chomsky on the JFK assassination, the 9/11 false flag, and the CIA.

The left should have long since studied the literature on JFK and 9/11, yet all of this is suppressed in a version of cancel culture. The text starts to document some of this in the Notes section in the Conclusion chapter

Some notes on the JFK assassination, the 9/11 False Flag Op, and Conspiracy Theory literature…

Studying the JFK and 9/11 conspiracy issues is complicated by the backdrop of conspiracy theory charges and countercharges in general: the worst thing about this quagmire is that the material can’t be rejected out of hand and one ends up stranded in half-truths, morbid speculation, and cover-ups that need closer attention. Here the tale begins with Adam Weishaupt (if not Sumerian conspiracies outstanding), the Illuminati and the Freemasons, the founding Fathers and central banks, along with Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Greenbacks, the echoes of the Illuminati in Marx’s manifesto, the Rothschilds lurking behind all of it, the Federal Reserve and Wilson, the Bolshviks (and Nazis) and capitalist/Rothschild money, etc… Dismissing the valid exposes of the JFK and 9/11 conspiracies behind this morass of ‘conspiracy theories’ in general is a brilliant/insidious tactic of disinformation.

A lot of  new notes and a projected new chapter or appendix on ecosocialism: how design a democratic ecosocialism that can create an open economy but one on favorable terms with the environment. A note on the text: Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA, E.G. Vallianatos, Google Books
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/10/can-political-ecology-save-us/
Ecology in America barely exists. Business as usual capitalism is so entrenched, it acts like a religion. It has its hierarchies of billionaires, and armies of economists and political (and other social) “scientists” preaching its dogmas. The countless faithful are willing to transfer even more of the national wealth to the billionaires, lest they, too, become servants of the elect. Their church is about monopolies and national and global control.
On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo, B. Latour et al.

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Capitalism, Consciousness and Meditation

If we examine world history we observe the macroevolution of meditation induction and in the so-called Axial Age this reaches a new level in the Buddhist and other movements: world history generates religions and their techniques, although these may go into rapid decline. The latecomer to modernity the so-called New Age movement inserts this issue with great force. But the rapid trivialization here becomes problematical, cf. the controversy over the Mindfulness Movement and its confusions, cf. McMindfulness: How… This should be an issue for students of capitalist ideology, but this requires complex historical study: the eonic model can be of great help here.
The capitalist process is relentless and tries to take over challenges to its control over consciousness…
McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, R. Purser

Has the science of mindfulness lost its mind? – PMC

The mindfulness conspiracy | Mindfulness | The Guardian

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This starts a new major version, but one that will be close to the main sequence of ‘editions’. Almost by intention the book has become a little complicated and a simplified account might help in another more general book. I still claim nevertheless that you can skip through this book’s core mainline to get to a streamlined and efficient socialist realization in just over a hundred pages. Although I admire Marx/Engels and consider myself a (liberal) neo-commmunist/socialist, I don’t think the Marxist path will work anymore. In the second international people moved into the socialist stream in droves, but we don’t see that happening now, for reasons many including myself have made clear. The old distinction of  ‘scientific’ versus ‘utopian’ socialism doesn’t work anymore either. Our DMNC isn’t utopian but more like a recipe, and baking cakes doesn’t require scientific method.  We just have ‘socialism’ which we must specify with constructivist steps. There is no inherent reason we have to force ‘socialism’ into the mould of historical materialism which reduced sociology to economic obsessions. The so-called DMNC model suggests/shows that constructing a postcapitalist system is not so difficult as it seemed when confronted with an abstruse historicist model of history that was critiqued almost from the day Marx’s works were published. We need a new kind of model, an empirical chronology of world history, and liberation from ‘economics’, another pseudo-science. We need something that can be taken up in an hour of explanation, to start, and a movement of some kind that breaks with the Marxist cult and can regain the enthusiasm of the general public, working class, middle to Universal class, even the capitalists, who are encouraged to a death bed conversion. Marx’s work was keyed to nineteenth-century proletariats but the working class in late capitalism needs a new analysis. Without abstruse theories and minds wrecked by Hegelian wicked thoughts freed from Marx’s jargon the path to socialism becomes a matter of 1. sane economies based on hi-level expropriation, 2 a new ecosocialist core based on sound environmental standards, 3. a new kind of democracy/social democratic as a direct descendant of liberalism yet open to the critiques  of the original socialists, able to absorb Marx’s X-ray into bourgeois democracy without the bias against democracy that lurked in the growing nineteenth-century distrust of democracy. There is no reason this can’t be achieved either by reformist or revolutionary avenues. How would you amend the constitution to create ‘democratic market neo-communism’ based on sound ecology, robust social democratic rights? Democracies need to be finished with domination by capitalist oligarchies. In two centuries plus since the Industrial Revolution not a single ‘democracy’ has gotten it right, whatever the dismally inadequate sneak attacks steps taken by FDR. The liberal world is so far condemned as being unable to even take care of its citizens in the blahblah of rights, but the consistent sabotage of economic rights. The question needs to be finished or global civilization will self-destruct. The issue of the working class has shifted in meaning now, but, in a real sense, so what? Capitalist economies partition across a divide of two sectors one exploiting the other and unable as a result to make capitalism work to found a social democratic synthesis built into a liberalism remorphed as a postcapitalist liberal neo-communism. This should be elementary in the way that ‘democracy’ became elementary, though not in the minds of the original founders of the American brand.  The coming climate crisis, next to the resurgence of the fascist right, makes the fire-extinguisher in place called ‘revolution’ an essential ‘gedanken experiment’ or ‘virtual model’. We would then need failsafed models of revolution and this done right can diffuse into the realm of reformist action. As the blind man said, we shall see. Although this new kind of liberalism will ban the gulag, we can consider one exception, the economists, who could be banished to a small island somethere in the Arctic far north in Canada. That would require Canadian versions of the DMNC. Go for it, and then subvert Yankee Doodle land for a new International. Ditto for Mexico.