Our reference to ‘socialist markets’ might be confused with the many attempts on the left to promote another brand also called market socialism. However, the definition (cf. Wikipedia) is in general vague and our usage is within range. The calculation debate arose with Mises who threw a monkey wrench into socialist thinking on social economics and its replacement of markets with planning. Although the left answered the challenge many times the debate, on the whole, was a grave liability on the left if only because most leftists in the range of Marxism never understood or ever knew of the debate. And, after all, the construction of the planned economy in Bolshevik Russia seemed to, in fact did, confirm the nature of the difficulty. Then a new development came into the discussion as the era of the computer suggested the possibility of computational software computing the immensely complex market dynamics that the Miseans gleefully warned was too stupendously complex for a bureaucracy of commie planners. Continue reading “Market socialism and DMNC/calculation debate”
Tag: DMNC
Exchange re: marxmail, Cuba and the Yankee hyenas…
Re: Marx beyond theories of history…neo-communism, and the context of evolutionary civilization
From: Nemonemini
To: j.x
Date: Tue, Sep 28, 2021 2:41 am
Thanks for reply, I will try to trust you aren’t a spy for the list, paranoia, but I am frustrated I can’t really post at marxmail: I include a link to a submission yesterday that got censored.
I have spent years on books dealing with socialism, marxism, etc, so it is not fun to get censored at marxmail
The books you cited and that I got I have browsed at high speed, but I have a backlog of hundreds of Kindle books on my cell phone: I try to read one or two a day
but I will try to speed read from the books you cited, plus study the Wikipedia pages. (note: books by Jodi Dean, Stuart Hall, Christian Fuchs…)
However, I am in a different universe, connected but different from the Marxist.
As my DMNC model of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ indicates I am a neo-communist
and that is a long way from the classical canon which is dysfunctional at this point,
Here’s the link to the post in question:
https://redfortyeight.com/2021/09/27/cubas-golden-opportunity-revolutionary-cuba-and-the-legacy-of-fidel-castro/
My thinking has moved on from classical marxism and I would like to communicate this to actual leftist groups.
I sent the link to the Cuban embassy just for the heck of it. HaHa. We talk about marxism, but we would both be dead
in the actual Cuba.
In a way Marxists are responsible for the mess in Cuba: the Marxist canon blinds followers to the obvious.
Consider my model: an utterly simple way out for Cuba. But instead, they will end up in collapse as capitalists
take over. The real blame is no doubt the inherent corruption of power by an elite. But Cuba has something special
about it. It is a sad reality: I could repair Cuba with ease, no idle claim, but can’t even post to Marxmail. You should double
check the Stalinist issue, as charged. There are many many thousands of stranded people like me on the left.
I am trying to finish my The Last Revolution. The crisis of the times is coming on fast. But there is no real left to deal
with the situation.
best
JL/nemonemini
Beyond the flawed Marxism to a new socialism: we were running out of time, now out of time?
postcapitalist_ futures_NWBK_ver2a_LFT_2021: The Last Revolution
I have been following Marxmail for decades without being able to contribute, then suddenly was able to post after Proyect’s passing. (He had actually and graciously allowed me to join the list in 2000 after being unsubbed by the old Pen-l, but that didn’t last long). But within days I was (apparently) unsubbed (I can’t figure out my status).
It is ‘my fault’ for rapidly (since I suspected this would happen) tossing taboo subjects into the mix: balling Marxists out over 9/11, (Darwinism, ran out time, but many posts here on left and that theory), Marx’s flawed theories of history. But I got a lot of links onto the list, and people are reading The Last Revolution, link above. So maybe, success?
I rushed that book to a usable but unfinished PDF form instead of a paperback to post on it on Marmail. I apologize for its rough spots but it makes its point more or less, and actually is better very short and as a PDF. The modern world has a huge tribe of leftist Marxists who are ideologically paraplegic given the confusions of Marxism. And the charge that it is really that ‘ism’ that led to Stalinism is unfair, but only up to a point.
My diagnosis/opinion is Marxism post Bolshevism has to reinvent itself (and drop the cult of personality in its Marx-ism name), consider the implications of ‘smashing the bourgeois state’. Instead, it would work better along the lines of my idea of (eco-socialist) ‘democratic market neo-communism’. ( I use the terms socialism, (neo-)communism interchangeably. This is not reformist compromise but a shift in reference to a four-term system, which is four times more complex than the one-term, but in a way simpler for that same reason. It can’t veer off into Stalinism, one would hope, because a democracy is not a democracy if it is not socialist (i.e. strong equality and shared resources and economic rights, etc…), and a socialism is not socialism if it is not democratic. With similar thinking about BOTH markets and planning (this time ‘socialist’ markets based on a Commons where capitalists now managers license resources from the Commons). This kind of system will work if a liberals system works. Marx made the whole question too complicated and his work has confused every generation of Marxists since.
It comes with a catch: you must expropriate (large-scale resources and Capital into a Commons, which is not State Capitalism)
Using this approach, Bolshevism was not a communism at all because it had no democracy. Period, in this four-term system. This kind of fail-safe would make it very easy to create a postcapitalist system that is really viable, subject to the ‘catch’. Note that both the US and China (and all other cases) are actually malformed versions of the above model which applies to all cases in theory. The US if you look close has some shared resources, but no socialist markets, etc…China has actually added (not socialist) markets to its still pseudo-communism, but has no democracy, etc,….
So, guess what, the US is not a democracy because it is not socialist. Thousands of critics have made the point in their own way for over a century, so the idea is not so strange. Capitalism has coopted democracy.
It may be too late to recast the system, by reform or revolution, but then we are doomed to go over Niagara Falls in a fireball of global warming.
Consider the issue of private property, that is Capital. To allow Exxon-Mobil et al. to own natural resources as private property was seen as unjust at the start but it has now become malevolent. The case of Exxon is that they knew in the seventies of the last century that they were doing something dangerous, but they suppressed their own research and still to this day are indifferent to their own reckless crime against humanity. Right now in the news of the Biden era bill Exxon is in the background trying to move one of its paid-for dummies in Congress to sabotage a last chance for some action on climate change. If you still believe in private property for resources like oil you may be a hopeless dummy, very much the American type.
Americans need to face reality: idiots! Idiots with the power to destroy a planet. Their manipulated stupidity is simply the way capitalism has always destroyed democracy. The danger was seen early on by the first socialists, taken up by Marx/Engels who took over and then monopolized the whole subject, but their mistakes have proven a curse and the failure of Bolshevism was always ominous: capitalism is now so entrenched and its victims so willingly brainwashed that it could be too late. The Last Revolution refers to the era of 1848 and its failed revolutions, with Marx/Engels very much in the mix. The socialists spoke then of the Last Revolution and their ‘prophecy’ should prove to be just that if we wish to survive. But this ‘revolution’ can in principle be reformist, because a reformist project can in theory makes constitutional changes.
Let us note that FDR-ism was trying to invent our DMNC model, but his New Deal still falls short. If only the (pseudo-) communists of that era, very much in play ca. the FDR constellation, could have had a better platform. But the Bolsheviks lurking in the background blocked anything beyond FDR-ism from happening.
Note again our point: Bolshevism was NOT communism because it had no democracy. And no ‘socialist markets’.
We should note also that our model of DMNC or ‘Democratic_Market_Neo_Communism_ver_5(2) is not about state capitalism, but a Commons, with its own legal checks and balances. Fake Bolsheviss with their private dachas controlling ‘state capitalism’ could never arise in a DMNC (with an eco-socialism in the mix). And so on.
It would have been relatively easy to set up such a system far earlier but the legacy of Marxism confused thinking, in fact, it was the lack of any thinking, since Marx refused to predict the future with anything specific.
Marx’s theories of history are the problem. Much of his other thinking is still very cogent. But the failure to model communism/socialism in specifies proved fatal.
The same could happen with our superior model: maybe still not complex enough.
We should cite Decoding World History because it offers a very simple outline of world history instead of the false economic fundamentalism of Marx.
postcapitalist_ futures_NWBK_ver2a_LFT_2021
9780984702930-LFM_text(2)
Decoding World History_ED1
DMNC and democracy in relation to socialism
Our idea of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ or a liberalism remorphed as (neo-)communism (or neo-socialism) and vice versa requires seeing that democracy in fact requires a kind of socialism, as this article from CP makes clear.
The supreme value of democratic republicanism is freedom, which can only be possible if the whole population enjoys the material conditions of freedom. Since poverty also entails dependence on the arbitrary dictates of others, social isolation, and the resulting vicious circle of physical and mental damage, it’s more than a matter of a bit of redistributive justice but must be actively eradicated. And freedom isn’t just about equality of resources. It requires reciprocity in freedom, which is only possible in a society where the political institutions recognize the civil equality of all its members who, then, must all have the status of materially independent social actors or equality of conditions.
Source: Republicanism For The Anthropocene – CounterPunch.org
Our DMNC could rescue Cuba //https://portside.org/2021-08-21/cuba-today-homeland-people-and-sovereignty
This is a useful article but is still stuck, as with the Cubans in the fallacies of original marxism: We must return to the teachings of Lenin and Trotsky. A workers’ state, as Lenin described in h…
Afghanistan: DMNC: ‘democratic market neo-communism’
Our idea of democratic market neo-communism is perfectly adapted to the kind of situation we see in Afghanistan. The ideas of democracy or socialism taken alone are not. The idea of democracy has suffered semantic chaotification and metal fatigue has set in. The Americans seem to think they have a democracy, which is laughable.
Our DMNC is a way to model social constructs and no doubt has its own limits. But the core concepts could allow a social construct that is functional at any stage of any social system/economy. Marxism enjoined the need to have a capitalist stage before a socialist or communist one. Surely that’s wrong, and the Bolshevik example correctly disregarded that but they couldn’t really manifest any part of their Marxist projections
Our DMNC can work at any point in any social system, and could even discuss a band of hunter-gatherers. That’s outlandish but in any case the point is that the construct can model systems with or without capitalism. It was a fiasco of wrong analysis to think that a stage of capitalism must precede socialism/communism (we don’t distinguish the terms). In the DMNC approach socialism and markets emerge together in parallel with a planning aspect in equal parallel. And that in the construct of a Commons, which requires a legal construct that makes equal participation in resources a matter of law with their own courts. It is not a form of state capitalism. The Commons is balanced with a set of economic rights. The corporate construct is easy to adapt here: social market managers (formerly capitalists) can license resources from the Commons and might even be able to bid for resources as shares, while in parallel other corporate types can operate with a high degree of planning. This is a multivalent system, therefore. The construct is democratic with a parliament, scrap the oligarchic Senate (or else…?).
This kind of system could be applied to Afghanistan tomorrow, and would work save only that the US has no intention of allowing anything beyond their muddle of fascist/imperialist domination.
This construct is matched with a variant system that expresses the idea of ecological socialism with its own legal add-ins.
The point here is that we can start with this kind of balanced tinkertoy model that can serve to visualize potentials and warn us of traps and create something more robust than hollow concepts of democracy or socialism.
There is a lot more here, but the basic format can apply any and all possible starting points, medievalist, feudalism, capitalism, archaic socialism (!) and reconstruct a new system in those contexts. The old versions of working-class revolutions require recasting, not hard to do, but the idea that the working class should take total control was unexpectedly flawed. But we can work this into a working-class model at the drop of a hat. The working class is a version a version of James Joyce’s HCE, ‘here comes everybody’ and if everyone who is a passive entity under capitalism is working-class then indeed HCE.
Note that this system re-contains, or re-applies multiple potentials in parallel, and in one version has an indifference level below which control top-down is marginal.
This is the kind of so-called utopian system rejected by Marx who preached scientific socialism, but a science here would have to construct a model, more ‘utopian’ thinking on the way to science. The distinction was pernicious and confused all discussions. Our model is neither scientific or not: it is not utopian in the speculative sense but a realistic remorphing of a liberal system under a commons, i.e. the expropriation of social resources into a general pool.
The US will never get Afghanistan right. An agency like the UN might well be able to oversee but not control a revolutionary restart as our DMNC.
Our thinking no doubt is still limited and one missing element is an international. We need something more than one country/one socialism but that said our DMNC can go either way: socialism in one country and/or an international.
update: ////‘Communism’ strikes out in Cuba, but capitalism will not solve the problem. Whore houses and casinos are the main interest of those yankees?
One more post on Cuba. First, do not trust the US. The US destroyed your economy with sanctions to prove that socialism doesn’t work. That’s a fraud plus, and a crime against cuban humanity. Who am I to advise anyone. But the powers that be are so stupid that even with a few points of mental X plus, I come out ahead, stupid, but less so. But the real issue here is finding some exit strategy that is better than capitalism or communism. No matter how hard they try Cubans will still be exploited by ye old Yankees. The double problem here is that capitalism will prove a debt trap, you have to borrow money while the older communism is run by an older marxism that is a monopoly of hopeless idiots. I have been suggesting a new model, DMNC, for several years, but the powers that be control larger opinion, where a blogger as here can’t really get past ten thousand readers a year and stay honest. Throw in Darwin critique and you are de facto censored. Note then that solutions exist, but the elite is far too stupid to get out of a rut, and the capitalist obsession makes it impossible. A simple set of answers exist but they won’t get past the brain-dead capitalist and/or pseudo-communist thugs/elites.
Cubans lost sixty years to pseudo-communism. They should have been a thriving socialism by now. What could work is the kind of hybrid we suggest that is planned, neo-communist, with a new kind of market, the socialist market, They can license resources to socialist entrepreneurs and thrive, with a system tries to harmonize opposites. But the current elites are too far in the past to remedy anything. Noone can give any advice. Scholars, journalists, who to say of politicians, can’t advise you, left or right. Economists can’t advise you: neoclassic economics is an outright fraud. Note that China sailed just past our DMNC model and then didn’t brake. The result was super fast development and otherwise a hopless mess, and dangerous types who think nothing of mass murder. So forget China.
But Cuba should stay on top of its prior expropriation and create a hybrid planned market system. But the elite pseudo-communists have to create democracy of some kind and they can’t be trusted on that. But sill it is possible for another hybrid: in one version we had a four party state:: a congress or parliament of three parties and a fourth party of a communist party also a presidential party. It is job is to guard the Commons. This fourth party is a sort of thought experiment in the duality democracy/authority. The latter is too tricky perhaps, but a useful exercise. Its members can never own property and must be a dedicated elite and one that can cede powers to the larger. That of course they will never do, perhaps. There are several variants. But the American rebs, with a sneaky elite in the background, ceded power to a constitutional succession. So who knows. It is a bad situation for mankind. You can’t trust politicians, you can’t trust communists, you can’t trust capitalists, you can’t trust the Pope or Christian control freaks, you can’t trust economists. So you are on your own. I fear the communist power elite in Cuba is too far gone to figure the way out. And the capitalist hyaenas are ready and waiting.
The point here is that answers are possible, but no one in the usual circles can figure out what they doing. This kind of system needs and international, but the confusions possible mount.
Is China Socialist? China is a pseudo-communist gangster state that is using capitalism to cover over its total failure as socialism….
Update 2:
Western Marxists still have the idealistic wish for justice that spawned the modern radical left. They would be liquidated day one by the Chinese so-called communists if they ever took power. The Marxist legacy is a hopeless failure, but it is not hard to start over and repair terms.
The left must move on and redefine its terminology. Our DMNC model could easily produce an economy as dynamic as the modern capitalist systems but still, be socialist (or neo-communist). Furthermore, these capitalist dynamos can’t respond to the regrowth era and are already dinosaurs: our DMNC can accelerate growth or go into static mode: and it is free of austerity issues (at least in principle).
Update: the question arises, how explain the phenomenal growth of China in the last forty years? But as noted in the post the reason is due to capitalism imported into one area of China. In any case, rapid development is characteristic of all systems we can see: England took off after 1780 and was well developed even before the introduction of rail. Germany’s take after 1870 was well underway by 1910. Japan’s development was even faster and exceeded that of most western nations.
So it is misleading to point to the fast growth in China. You can’t really compare the two categories: the stage of the American economy is long since in an alternate universe and its phenomenal growth after the Civil War is typical, as in each case.
———————-
The discussion is meaningless because we don’t define socialism. And we have suggested the left should move on to a new terminology and set of definitions. If you call China socialist you are implying a system with gulags, mass murder and totalitarian government is socialist. The refusal of Marx to define his terms is the ultimate source of the confusion.
Our remedy is to abandon the Marxist confusion (much else is useful) and adopt failsafe definitions: DMNC, democratic market neo-communism. Something can’t be socialist without satisfying a broader definition, that includes democracy, socialist markets plus planning, a Commons that is beyond state capitalism, and a careful ecosocialist extension. By this definition China is a total nothing. The Maoists murdered a million capitalists, created an archaeo=communist monstrosity and then cheated by using capitalism to get itself out of a rut.
Our DMNC could failsafe the definition and shows the way to do the job right.
Donald Trump asking Xi Jinping for Karl Marx reading recommendations, especially anything on “spiritual pursuit” Four days ago Michael Roberts posted an article titled “China workshop: …
Source: Is China Socialist? | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
DMNC and the puzzle of the russian revolution
Although we have adopted a critique of Marxism, and stand wary at ‘theory’ the issues in the history of the left present a set of puzzles for our new perspective. We have spoken to both reformist and revolutionary viewpoints, but the reformist stance is misleading: we can stage a revolution via reformist stance, however unlikely, if ‘reform’ can move to change a constitution and/or expropriate capital. The latter seems implausible but nationalizations actually occurred in the English Labor era, etc…The revolutionary path is equally tricky and this article on the issue of revolution, and the case of Lenin present, and warn of the immensely tricky steps to any kind of socialist/communist, in our case the neo-communism of our DMNC. Despite these differences we can in many ways simply substitute our model into the deliberations of the Lenin era. It is rare that anyone left or right can navigate this history of the Russian Revolution. Our stance is that ‘if only’ the Bolsheviks/marxists had had a better vision of a socialist outcome on the grounds of democracy, markets, planning, state capitalism/a Commons, and the relationship of a revolutionary party to a democratic party. All that said this by the book article by marxists shows how we need to be wary of socialist realizations, in the context of revolution. Another issue is that of the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin correctly/incorrectly took this notion to heart and he must have thought there was no contradiction in his claim to take the stance he represented the working class. At the start the mysterious constellation of factors seems to justify that but the whole game ended in failure. The term should be retired. But as this article makes clear a truly tricky set of factors were at play and Lenin, often accused of a coup, in fact moved in the context of working class thematics and in terms of the actual orgs thus in the working class ‘soviets’ to seize the moment. In the end our DMNC version would confront this tricky navigation though a complex chess puzzle. It seems that Lenin was successful but then the limits of the Marxist model moved to derail the remarkable revolutionary fait-accompli. But the Marxist package was anemic and the result in the end was hardly a working class soon again the exploited victim in the victim in the coming of Stalin.The democratic failsafe wasn’t there.
We have and again yesterday confronted the worsening crisis and noted how the justification for revolution starts to creep back into the reformist complacency. Revolution is becoming a duty having just watched a fascist wannabee liquidate 600,000 citizens. But the elder situation is far different: Russia simply fell apart as the army nearly dissolved as soldiers threw down their rifles and trekked home, in the horror of World War I which was the real ‘revolution’ by accident. The American military will sooner move to fascism than radicalize and the issue of ecology in the era of global warming moves swiftly past Marxist cliches to demand a whole new rethinking. The future here could be a fascist military, liquidation of the left, and bunkers in Sweden for the capitalist remnant. Capitalist mass murder can now move from six hundred thousand to a hundred million.
Capitalism has ceased to take humanity forward. It should long ago have been overthrown by the working class.
Source: The class, the party and the leadership: How to organize revolution
DMNC and the puzzle of the russian revolution
Although we have adopted a critique of Marxism, and stand wary at ‘theory’ the issues in the history of the left present a set of puzzles for our new perspective. We have spoken to both reformist and revolutionary viewpoints, but the reformist stance is misleading: we can stage a revolution via reformist stance, however unlikely, if ‘reform’ can move to change a constitution and/or expropriate capital. The latter seems implausible but nationalizations actually occurred in the English Labor era, etc…The revolutionary path is equally tricky and this article on the issue of revolution, and the case of Lenin present, and warn of the immensely tricky steps to any kind of socialist/communist, in our case the neo-communism of our DMNC. Despite these differences we can in many ways simply substitute our model into the deliberations of the Lenin era. It is rare that anyone left or right can navigate this history of the Russian Revolution. Our stance is that ‘if only’ the Bolsheviks/marxists had had a better vision of a socialist outcome on the grounds of democracy, markets, planning, state capitalism/a Commons, and the relationship of a revolutionary party to a democratic party. All that said this by the book article by marxists shows how we need to be wary of socialist realizations, in the context of revolution. Another issue is that of the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin correctly/incorrectly took this notion to heart and he must have thought there was no contradiction in his claim to take the stance he represented the working class. At the start the mysterious constellation of factors seems to justify that but the whole game ended in failure. The term should be retired. But as this article makes clear a truly tricky set of factors were at play and Lenin, often accused of a coup, in fact moved in the context of working class thematics and in terms of the actual orgs thus in the working class ‘soviets’ to seize the moment. In the end our DMNC version would confront this tricky navigation though a complex chess puzzle. It seems that Lenin was successful but then the limits of the Marxist model moved to derail the remarkable revolutionary fait-accompli. But the Marxist package was anemic and the result in the end was hardly a working class soon again the exploited victim in the victim in the coming of Stalin.The democratic failsafe wasn’t there.
We have and again yesterday confronted the worsening crisis and noted how the justification for revolution starts to creep back into the reformist complacency. Revolution is becoming a duty having just watched a fascist wannabee liquidate 600,000 citizens. But the elder situation is far different: Russia simply fell apart as the army nearly dissolved as soldiers threw down their rifles and trekked home, in the horror of World War I which was the real ‘revolution’ by accident. The American military will sooner move to fascism than radicalize and the issue of ecology in the era of global warming moves swiftly past Marxist cliches to demand a whole new rethinking. The future here could be a fascist military, liquidation of the left, and bunkers in Sweden for the capitalist remnant. Capitalist mass murder can now move from six hundred thousand to a hundred million.
Capitalism has ceased to take humanity forward. It should long ago have been overthrown by the working class.
Source: The class, the party and the leadership: How to organize revolution
