The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist Futures_ ED3_11_25_22
At a time of escalating climate crisis, the American system is frozen in capitalist capture of the bourgeois state. This has created a genuinely baffling situation evoking revolutionary speculation even in those ill-disposed to such perspectives. Slogans of ‘Revolution’ are proclaimed by groups who would dare little in that direction. The confusion springs from sloganeering unconsciously speaking beyond itself, notably the phrase ‘Our Revolution’ from the activism of Bernie Sanders. We have tried a reminder of what the term ‘revolution’ must finally mean, with a focus on the US but with a putative invocation of a new International. Consider ‘Our’ Last Revolution.
Without revolutionary intervention to a form of ecological socialism, the world system will collapse under its capitalist regime. Time is short.
We are done. We have proceeded at high speed to a reconstruction of a new framework for a ‘neo-communist’ project inside a liberal system, to show that in principle a socialist project is far simpler than one might think from the complexities of the Marxist corpus. This model can throttle back and forth between a remorphed liberalism, and an eco-socialist commune, and a lifeboat vehicle in the calamity of system collapse. It is much more practical to do what computer programmers often do: remorph a given code set instead of projecting a new complex from scratch. Despite many echoes our formulation is distinct from the legacy, mostly botched, readings of ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist economies’.
Marxists seem oblivious to the problems of their legacy: they live in an imaginary world referencing ‘communism’ where the public thinks of North Korea. Unbelievably the same terminology stretches between grossly contradictory entities. This is especially the case with the Chinese non-exemplar, whose global influence remains despite its Stalinist core. No challenge to the abuse of terminology is possible. Thus our ‘neo-communism’ starts from scratch and never uses the robotized terms that generate cognitive dissonance and sheer revulsion. That the social public (by our definition also the ‘working class: they are passive with respect to capitalist domination) and not just the industrial proletariat could find in socialism a real bargain that could enrich their lives has become a lost cause in persuasion. Our challenge may be insufficient itself. but we can avoid terms in isolation. We don’t speak of socialism or communism as terms by themselves, but as predicates in multiterm systems: ‘democratic market neo-communism’ as ecosocialism, a complex specification that failsafes terms used in isolation. Chinese Stalinism is NOT socialism, over and out. But a mess of that size is beyond redemption, and we must move on with a new terminology. The core problem is ‘historical materialism’: it puts an immense obstacle in the way of grasping the meaning of socialism and it is an entirely egregious distraction. Who needs it? As a theory it doesn’t work, and in addition precipitates an entirely useless conflict between idealism and materialism, imposes a reductionist scientism on the complexities of history and culture and claims the status of science when in fact it is a pseudoscience and oversimplification.
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1848+: The End(s) of History 