Tag: socialism

 Born-again semantics

Good question, what is socialism?…we just linked to an article on the chinese treatment of the uighurs and that in the name of communism, evidently.

Naive marxists seem not to realize the impression they give in sharing a common terminology and ideology as thy promote their subject in the abstract. Issues they would disavow in a second nontheless stick to their promotion of a ‘common’ set of themes on the left. The result is the stalled public image and promotion of a reasonable socialist theme to a paranoid public that will likely undergo surveillance as a result of minimal interaction.
It is an elementary mistake by leftists and the danger doesn’t seem to sink in.
We have always demanded disassociation with the old left and its bolshevik legacy. You can try, probably in vain, to distance marx and his theories here, but it doesn’t work on the whole. Use marx historically, but then move on. The whole subject is passing into oblivion and marxists should drop the label and start over.
Our idea of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ may itself be too connected with the past but at least ‘neo-communism’ can’t be confused with historical usage and demands a new definition from scratch. This is not the same as rejecting potential aspects of sociaism and communism, but even these labels are prone to misunderstanding. We must use them with care and declare at once their break with historical marxist ideology.

This DMNC is an at first unfamiliar set of redefinitions and most importantly can’t be rejected on the basis of historical versions now in rejection. It hasn’t been tried and has multiple checks to abuse and in fact is a far more effective starting point, etc…
We must hope that our the raw terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ now ‘neo-‘ are not beyond salvage…

Source: what is ‘democratic market neo-communism’…?//What is Socialism? – 1848+: The End(s) of History

still another lost opportunity…//Evo Morales Finally Went Too Far for Bolivia – (saith that organ of the booerzhwoiZ) The Atlantic

The articles on bolivia from the left have apparently not gotten the situation straight, at least according to the atlantic (gasp!#). I fear that the left suffers from its own disinformation, and the question of what is really going on in bolivia is up in the air. We might take this article at face value, factual, for the sake of discussion ( a previous post today discussed the issue of revolutions in another article, with a lot on the revolution in Bolivia; Revolutions in Action). As far as I can make out, neither venezuela nor bolivia has had a revolution, in the sense of socialism/communism. It is well to review ‘revolutions’ in bolivia via, say, wikipedia, to put the immense amounts of attempted change (revolution?) in perspective throughout the twentieth century. Imperialism has been a terrible foe, but at the same time, the current bolivian situation looks to be still another lost opportunity for…what, revolution?! The atlantic article brings in fukuyama, usefully, and we examine the issue of democracy betrayed, evidently, and defended and the whole question of the left…etc…We will adjourn to our basic viewpoint at once:
noone in all these slogan-revolutions had any plan of action, and in bolivia the pseudo-revolution ends without democratic frames, or at least some ambiguities. As we have said many times: the revolution must remorph liberalism into communism with democracy, and communism into liberalism, with democracy. Continue reading “still another lost opportunity…//Evo Morales Finally Went Too Far for Bolivia – (saith that organ of the booerzhwoiZ) The Atlantic” →

To Confront Climate Change Humanity Needs Socialism

Humans may not survive. Reports from the UN’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change provoke images of land masses drowning, fleeing populations, starvation, terrible droughts, terrible storms, migrating diseases, new deserts, and intolerable heat. It’s an “ecological Armageddon,” says one expert. We hear about “the sixth extinction,” the geologic epoch that is our own. It’s called More

Source: To Confront Climate Change Humanity Needs Socialism – CounterPunch.org