Tag: Jacobin

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

marxmail@groups.io | The Nation Names Bhaskar Sunkara Its New President

The Nation Names Bhaskar Sunkara Its New PresidentJim—3:04pm #14822 https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/bhaskar-sunkara-president/One can only imagine what Lou Proyect’s reaction would have been to this.

Source: marxmail@groups.io | The Nation Names Bhaskar Sunkara Its New President

Congrats to Bhaskara, and I have often cited articles from Jacobin here (Jacobin, a botched title from the start, Bhaskara is no radical) but I have no illusions about where they are coming from. This so-called left has a strict cancel culture for true radicals and I could never expect a single article or reference to, say, The Last Revolution, at his ragmag. In the end the stance of such people Jacobin, to The Nation, etc, remains in a kind of limbo of classy reformist imaginary. Bhaskar’s ‘The Socialist Manifesto’ is not socialist and coopts the manifesto genre for its own jargon, not unlike Sanders’ ‘Our revolution’ that bit the dust a while back.
I would like to contribute a perspective in that context. It will never happen. I don’t understand the world of faux left journalism, but I can see clearly its limits and the way it moves to coopt the truly radical efforts needed at a time of desperation and a civilization on the way to collapse. The Jacobin meme is one I critique in The Last Revolution, but they were those who tried to start a real revolution in the realm of the French chaos of Revolution. Might we expect a Jacobin phase at Jacobin? Or is Bhaskar upper middle-class radical fluff. I hear the sans-culottes even now, guillotine the culotte.

The Nation Names Bhaskar Sunkara Its New PresidentJim Farmelant3:04pm #14822 https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/bhaskar-sunkara-president/One can only imagine what Lou Proyect’s reaction would have been to this.

Source: marxmail@groups.io | The Nation Names Bhaskar Sunkara Its New President

The Left in Purgatory

Socialists in the United States are stuck. How do we become masters of our own fate?

Source: The Left in Purgatory

The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist_ Futures_ver_x14z1FNL_14z1xa_2_14_22
This lament resonates with our take here on neo-communism, but the overall stance of this ‘sort of’ a left might benefit from our discussions of the Last Revolution. There is no mystery to the socialists in the US being stuck (and they may be stuck almost everywhere, in fact): the core of the ‘ancient left’ from the nineteenth century had a Marxist driver that is now dysfunctional and too dated, plus, that foundation remains to hold back new thinking. Groups who consider themselves reformists have shown far more creative activism than the moribund zombies of Marxism. But they don’t have the horsepower to really be activists for change, unable to examine their own choice to be impotent. Let’s look at the reality: a capitalist system that is a de facto totalitarian economics won’t yield to reformist efforts, period. Continue reading “The Left in Purgatory” →

marxists are to blame for their own demise: the (revolutionary) left must be postmarxist///Is This the Left that Jacobin Wants?: Chris Maisano’s Perilous Drift Towards Post-Marxism 

One thing is clear now: a radical/revolutionary left must be postmarxist.
Marxists have made a hopeless confusion out of their own legacy. And in part, the problem lies with Marx, who tried to make socialism/communism a Marxist monopoly. In fact, he succeeded and the result is that activists end up in a dilemma as here. The Left is in a ridiculous condition: to try and build socialism inside the Democratic party has to be the dead-end of the new century. But they can see that a third party is virtually impossible. No doubt this is because of the way such things are rigged, but before Bolshevism such parties were abundant, with, to be sure, great resistance in the US. But the fact remains that after 1989, the Marxist left has stalled in its own refusal to account for their failures. Thirty years later the Marxist group is still chanting boilerplate Marxism, refuses any criticism whatever of the canon, worships Marx as some infallible prophet, and expects to convert the public to historical materialism as the master philosophy superior to all others. Continue reading “marxists are to blame for their own demise: the (revolutionary) left must be postmarxist///Is This the Left that Jacobin Wants?: Chris Maisano’s Perilous Drift Towards Post-Marxism “ →

marxmail@groups.io | Ten Years After Occupy, We Have a Left That Matters…???

From marmail: One could not get a better example of the irrelevance of the left than this article, and it is entirely fitting that it appears in Jacobin. Contrary to the inflated fantasies of this article, the “left”, with Jacobin a prime example, is almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening in the working class. On the one side, Trumpism, with all its fantasy life, is rampant. What is the “left” as Jacobin describes it doing? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/astra-taylor-book-review-remake-the-world

One could make a similar criticism of Marxism, and Marxists: they have no visible radical movement save a series of a proliferating websites. To be fair, the capitalist regime has succeeded in creatinga crypo-totalitarian system, in the US and elsewhere.

We have suggested over and over again the need for a new brand of postmarxism that can be popular and trustworthy to a public that is served up nineteenth century thinking. At least checik it out.

Our short book The Last Revolution preseents a complete new brand of socialist/neo-communism as a practical reformist/revolutionary platform. Marxists should consider the confusion their theories create in a field where a booklet of around a hundred pages can rewrite the subject.

https://redfortyeight.com/2021/10/20/the-last-revolution-ver_21ax/

Source: marxmail@groups.io | Ten Years After Occupy, We Have a Left That Matters

socialism would cut poverty by 100%…//Medicare for All Would Cut Poverty by Over 20 Percent

Plus, the red forty-eight group could take over capitalist orgs like jacobin…

Medicare for All doesn’t just provide everyone with the care they need, free of charge. It’s also a potent anti-poverty program, reducing poverty by over 20 percent and increasing poor people’s incomes by 29 percent.

Source: Medicare for All Would Cut Poverty by Over 20 Percent

Socialists tying their heads in knots: a real program/praxis is easy…

So-called socialists and Bhaskar Sunkara is barely a socialist beyond being a social democrat (? fair, everyone is hiding behind coopted terminologies), have attempted to manage some form of social democratic progressivism where the so-called revolutionary socialists are being sidelined into marginal status. Everyone is confused even as the real conditions of socialism are reappearing over the horizon.
Thus this book can only called too far to the left by system drones, and evidently they populate the LRB more or less exclusively.

We have suggested a different approach: everyone has been confused by marxism, and is bemused by the theories of Marx which are so tricky noone really understands the subject.
At a moment of crisis when it is clear that capitalism is failing still the left cannot get its act together.
We have critiqued marx’s theories because of this and suggested a simple praxis. The immense literature pro/con of professors, windbags and socialist halloween types needs to be written off. A constructive project of what we have given as an example in ‘democratic market neo-communism’ shows at once how easy it would be to create a viable postcapitalism, easy given the achievement of expropriation in some form.
Imagine the american system in which everything remains the same except for the declaration of expropriation. The whole game could continue beautifully as before, but with an immense inner change of principle. The above is actually too simple, but the point is clear.
The point is that in a smarter world we could resolve the false dilemma of liberalism/communism at a stroke. In practice there could be difficulties but the point is to elude the false opposites of liberalism and communism. Socialists get nowhere because they can’t define what they are doing, while capitalists have transformed themselves inexorably, jeckyll/hyde, from the heroes to the villains.
The point is these debates are a dead letter. We must create a system that works beyond the dualism of capitalism/socialism. Over a century of the marxist left this simple resolution has proven impossible because current marxist would rather see something fail then contradict marx. A good example is venezuela: a virtual planet of leftists ought to be trying to help this experiment, but instead we see doctrinaire consistency that would prefer to see the instance fail so the ‘real (marxist) revolution’ can occur. That is sheer idiocy.

The simple gesture of expropriation as a foundation makes the rest of the idiotic rumination from marx onward irrelevant.Marx/engels say as much in their manifesto. The later world of Capital, the book, has so confused everyone they cannot act. Expropriation might backfire and end in civil war, but the doctrines of phony socialism from DSA to Jacobin and Sanders are not going to arrive anywhere because t he bourgeoisie will remain in control.

Odd to see such a gaseous attack on Sunkara’s book for being too far to the left. It is like the centrist pile-on against Warren and Sanders last night as if they were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/millennial-socialism-and-its-limits/

Source: [Marxism] Millennial Socialism and Its Limits – Los Angeles Review of Books