Category: democratic market neo-communism

 Russian vultures (oligarch mafia) prey on hapless Cuba

https://groups.io/g/marxmail/topic/cuba_capitalist_restoration/99107778?p=,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate/sticky,,,20,2,0,99107778,previd%3D9223372036854775807,nextid%3D1684800098831428837&previd=9223372036854775807&nextid=1684800098831428837

Important article(s) on Guevara and Cuba interacting with the Russian oligarch(s). A moment of peril as the Yankee vultures get an assist from the Russian vultures. Poor Cuba. But there is a way out here which noone can seem to take;
We have discussed Cuba many times here and have tried to show how our DMNC model of (eco-socialist) ‘democratic market neo-communism’can help to resolve the constant and destructive indecision between Marxist axioms or dogmas and capitalist ideology and its deceptive liberalism. We see here a perfect example of the indecision over how to proceed as the Marxist fundamentalism fails and drives thinking back to capitalist capitulation. There is hardly anything more incompetent than the Bolshevik (Marxist) legacy and its limits in practice rise to overwhelm practical and effective socialist economy (a subject with absolutely no exemplars, not Bolshevik Russia, not China, not Vietnam, let alone Cuba).
The DMNC points beyond single-term sloganeering ‘socialism (or communism)’ and demands one do four things at once (or five with the ecosocialism angle, or more): create democracy ( multiparty parliament or Congress, next to a revolutionary guardian party in the context of revolutionary authority tending to (Leninist, what to say of Stalinist) dictatorship (laughing out of the ballpark the obsolete and utterly absurd (archaic) term dictatorship of the proletariat), find a resolution of planning and markets in a hybrid system based on a Commons, socialist markets being based on a Commons by really existing revolutionary expropriation of large-scale capital but with a lower threshold indifference level where the neo-communist state allows multipolar social mixtures: under the umbrella of enterprises under the Commons (not the same as state capitalist ownership: the Commons is checked-balanced between state and individual. This allows low-level markets (small farms, shops (petty bourgeois, egad), small start ups (like the first years of Apple, etc …) and individual careering, etc) in a mix of regulation and a touch of anarchism. A key factor here is a new kind of international, although our system is designed to work in one country. This system will thrive on trade within strong limits and might find external investment but NEVER allows control by external capital. Anything that grows beyond the threshold enters the large-scale Commons sector. This not communism but neo-communism. You must leave behind the whole morass of marxist confusion and start over.

This kind of system could produce a robust economy in the context of socialism in a manner that is light years beyond the club-footed Bolshevik/Marxist state economy formulation while at the same time being a genuine socialism with genuine markets of a new kind.  One could modify the American Constitution in a week to match this model. It would be far better to start from scratch but the Leninist temptation will always move to wreck the heritage of liberal rights. But these are vital and will be accompanied by new companions, economic rights along with new versions of labor unions. Note this model seems silent on the working class. It is in fact keyed to that issue but the working class meme has been misunderstood on the left (although it was clear enough in the early stages of industrial capitalism). The working class tends to be a hybrid of the middle class. This model allows one to throttle up or down on the working class meme. If the ‘working class’ is all those who wage labor then most of the middle class is working class. The classic left was in a muddle on this point. The point is that capitalism partitions into population sectors (classes?): a bourgeoise (bad term now) or capitalists and everyone else, middle class etc… This partitions in permanent conflict (class struggle).

One shakes one’s head in frustration as the same old fallacies occur ad infinitum at which the capitalist vultures arrive to second guess the inexorable failures of the archaic socialist models.

Cf. The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist Futures_ ED5_5_2_23

‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History | Portside

The Marxist left has often been challenged on its prophetic declarations but here we find the reverse (see below): ‘…will never become a socialist country…’
We have no proof here that this is so.
The legacy of Marxism despite its overall cogency was self-defeating from the start and if socialism never happened in the US it is in part due to the fact that socialism was never defined and like a bad pointer in programming simply became analogous to a computer crash.
In our time the issue has shifted: in a crisis of creeping rightist fascism and climate change the issue of capitalism will have a new judge: the logic of events in a rapidly dwindling planetary ecology.
In The Last Revolution the issue has been given a re-compute and system reset: we might acknowledge that ‘socialism’ cannot be realized, but the same can’t be said for ‘democratic market neo-communism (DMNC)’: it has never been tried and doesn’t stand for anything in the Bolshevik, second international, or even Marxist legacy. The strictures therefore do not apply.
But more than that our new model is a careful trompe l’oeuil and blends or remorphs liberalism as neo-communism, and neo-communism as liberalism.
We cannot say this is impossible unless we also say that liberalism is impossible.
In any case, the choice will soon be fascism and a new leftist alternative, one that must be wary of its past and cease and desist from Marxist/Bolshevik boilerplate with a formulation that is failsafed, democratic, yet an ecosocialism empowered to deliver liberal/capitalist networks from their democratic revolutions to their social democratic successors. We can’t say that the original brand is valid at the end times of liberalism destined otherwise to fascist barbarism…

America was never, is not, and will never become a socialist country. It is where socialism goes to die. Just over a week ago, the Republican led House of Representatives handily passed a resolution denouncing the “crimes” of socialist autocrats like Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot and rejecting the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.

Source: ‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History | Portside

A new sentimental Marx’s resurrection as a ‘true (Hegelian?) Christian’…This Christmas, Radical Christianity and Marxism Can Inspire Us to Build a Better World

The conventional understanding of Marxism as doggedly anti-religious is wrong. In fact, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, Christianity and Marxism have at times inspired in humanity a radical sense of hope to build a more just world.

Source: This Christmas, Radical Christianity and Marxism Can Inspire Us to Build a Better World

This is an interesting article but it exhibits the hopeless muddle that Marxists and its lefts find themselves in, like an army stuck in mud about to face final defeat from the resurgent right aiming at turning Yankee Doddle land into a neo-fascism. First, the article (which is nothing if not interesting) quotes Marx on religion:

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

— Karl Marx, 1843
These two paragraphs contradict each other and can’t be sausaged into consistency.

Then the article moves to the opening statement above trying to claim that Marx wasn’t really against religion, then moves to Hegel on religion, Marx’s tidbits of Hegel, no reference to Kant save in disguise swipe, and then after the typical citation of Nietzsche (the standard way to be rid of Kant by frantic existentialists), moves to Aristotle via MacIntyre.
Continue reading “A new sentimental Marx’s resurrection as a ‘true (Hegelian?) Christian’…This Christmas, Radical Christianity and Marxism Can Inspire Us to Build a Better World” →

What Might an Ecosocialist Society Look Like? – System Change Not Climate Change

Our DMNC model is designed to be able to realize a version or versions of ecosocialism: e.g.
Why can’t the problems that ecosocialism would solve also be remedied within the current global capitalist system?

Source: What Might an Ecosocialist Society Look Like? – System Change Not Climate Change

The Last Revolution beat Jacobin to it…??//Gorbachev Couldn’t Reform the Soviet System — but a Better Socialism Is Possible

I have to wonder if my The Last Revolution isn’t echoing here! It is a comprehensive effort to create a ‘blueprint’ of the kind cited here. In any case, my The Last Revolution (which Jacobin has been informed of invited to download the free copy PDF, I am fairly sure they are aware of it) tries to comprehensively formulate that ‘better socialism’ discussed at Jacobin. They are welcome to consult my text but since I am ‘canceled’ at such places and at Marxmail, etc, …, I doubt if they would deign to communicate. The new commie elite must already be in place complete with embryonic class rebirth….(cf. the editors of all the various leftist magazines and literature…I am not a member with a self-published book, the new route to discussions on the left)…The danger on the left in a revolutionary moment would be the outbreak of violent conflict with crypto-Stalinist marxist cadres who can’t change a single word in Marx…
Some observations: the article never references the fact that a revolutionary change is implied by such a new system (although in my text I certainly allow the reformist alternative). All of this is evidently supposed to just happen…Discussion of revolution and its aftermath is essential along with failsafes against re-Stalinization and derailed revolutionary power…The failures of Marxists have been very stark here. One can’t just pass over the issue in silence
: in my view the whole legacy of Bolshevism PLUS that of Marx needs to be left behind in order to start over. It is important to be clear here because many self-styled agents on the left make a canon dogma of Marxism and the Jacobin ‘Blueprint’ will end up in a hash with Marxist thinking (which remains useful in fragments in the backgroud) and/or denounced as some counterrevolutionary piece and/or …

: The Last Revolution restarts without Marxism, citing only the historical drama of Marx/Engels in the 1848 era… The left needs to get past the whole morass of Marx/Hegel, the failure Marx’s theories, the useless baggage of historical materialism, dialectical materialism…A new socialism needs a new historical framework that is not still more Marx boilerplate and reductionist scientism applied to history in the form of confused economics. The Last Revolution has a new strategy there with a snapshot version of the simple outline in my ‘eonic model’
: The left has to screw up its courage and deal with Darwinism, plus the twin conspiracies of JFK and 9/ll, including the issue of Israel/Mossad and in generatl the crimiinal mafia running the American government and behind the drug trade at the core of the Deep State
: A lot more here, consult the Last Revolution with its plethora of notes, and its own limitations: it needs a more specific ecosocialist project. The DMNC model is a kind of container for ecolotical socialism..
: I may have misjudged the Jacobin people here: this was perhaps just a floater piece, with no intention to reference climate change, etc, etc… But the issue has a new standard in the complexity and detail of the Last Revolution….

In any case despite suspicious caution I welcome any suggestions here despite the fragmenetary nature of the discussion.

In The Blueprint, a book I’m cowriting with Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Beggs, we lay out an alternative vision that disaggregates the issue of workers’ democracy from the issue of consumer preferences. The most important reason socialists have always advocated democracy at the workplace is that the workplace is the place where most adults have to spend at least half their waking lives most days of the week. No one should have to spend all that time taking orders from bosses over whom they can’t exercise any kind of direct democratic accountability. And the lack of democratic input in deciding what happens to the product of workers’ collective labor — the lack Marxists call “exploitation” — generates an utterly indefensible level of economic inequality.But there’s no reason that democracy at the workplace, and marketless planning of those public goods where markets generate the most socially undesirable consequences, can’t coexist with the use of market mechanisms to solve the information problems that plagued even Gorbachev-era Soviet planners. In the model outlined in our book, full democratic socialism would entail not only domains like health care and education but banks and other commanding heights of the economy would be state-owned. The remaining quasi-private sector would be made up of competing worker-owned cooperatives that would essentially rent the physically means of production from the public as a whole through grants from state-owned banks. When all this is combined with a robust civil society, a free press, and real multiparty elections, it is possible that such a setup could give us a world fundamentally different from both what existed in the Soviet Union and the neoliberal order that’s become globally hegemonic since the USSR’s collapse.

Source: Gorbachev Couldn’t Reform the Soviet System — but a Better Socialism Is Possible

 Gorbachev and the perennial lost opportunities of the Marxist legacy

Gorbachev had a great opportunity but he was unable to take advantage of it and the reason is the failure of the Marxist legacy which consistently misleads everyone who deals with it(including its critics). One winces at the lost potential of the moment and what might have been possible with the new kind of model we have looked at, viz. The DMNC approach which is neither capitalist nor communist but a new way to look at the whole question could have navigated better the idiocy of the Reagans and Thatchers. The sad part is that the sacrifices to achieve expropriation as the classic challenge to private property got thrown away. It was a mistake to have gotten entangled with Reagan and Thatcher, to put it mildly, and whatever the tragic confusions of Bolshevism the solution was not neoliberalism. A close look at the American behavior here shows that the aim wasn’t even capitalism, but the destruction of Russia at the hands of sheer vultures.

Gorbachev could have invented a new form of socialism beyond the utter stupidity of classic Bolshevism: a form of market socialism, a reset of the muddle of planning, etc… The failure of Bolshevism is taken as the failure of socialism, but neither socialism nor communism were every tried in Russia. Never. The whole phantom of Marxism/Leninism was a bum steer from the beginning. We must grant the distortions caused by the great Civil War, but in the period of Gorbachev that wasn’t a factor. Gorbachev was almost on the right track: but social democracy wasn’t the answer either. The Left derived from Marxism forever goofs at the critical moment, and the opportunity lost in the Gorbachev moment is the last greef goof of Marxist idiocy: the path to a real socialism is tricky but in many ways much simpler than the sterile state capitalism spawned in the era of the Bolsheviks.

Russia would not have become a Communist state without Lenin or ceased to be one without Mikhail Gorbachev. At either end of the 20th century, each man played a decisive role in pushing history in a radically new direction it would not have taken otherwise. The path chosen by Gorbachev after he became Soviet leader in 1985 was in some respects more surprising than what Lenin had done in 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution was driven by a terrible war, while Gorbachev’s attempt to modernise and re-energise the Soviet Union was a voluntary choice.

Source: Why Gorbachev Was One of the Greatest Failures in History – CounterPunch.org