Socialism, What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers, Part One – The Abolitionary

The Marxism-derived left has a strange secret: it can’t really envision a new society along socialist lines. The idea of worker’s cooperatives is highly suggestive but in isolation the idea is a pipe dream.
I refer then to my The Last Revolution for an attempt at a viable and comprehensive model for what I call ‘democratic market neo-communism’…

My wife asked me what other kind of society could we live than the one we are living now. I suspect that most people have the same kind of question. It is difficult to imagine another kind of life …

Source: Socialism, What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers, Part One – The Abolitionary

Toward a post-Marxist neo-communism…the failure of Marxism, and the capitalist destruction of social democracy

Source: Perspectives on Capitalism and Socialism: Polling Results from Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom | Fraser Institute

These results show that in principle socialism could be a massively popular framework in the current context of capitalism in crisis. The left needs to reformulate its platforms in order to achieve something more than social democratic/welfare state ‘socialism’.
As we have noted here over and over, the left in the context of Marxism is its own worst enemy and has plied the stale Marxist dogma system decade after decade without a murmur of critique or any sense of innovation or moving on. Such is the muddle here that the general public cannot differentiate in their minds core left Marxist socialism from the pseudo-socialism/communism of China, or North Korea! The current left is incapable of disentangling themselves from these monstrosities. It is a hopeless position, in fact, and there is no chance of reviving this dead corpse given the state of mind of Marxists who are stuck in the cultic fixation on Marx/Engels and their flawed and useless ‘historical materialism’ and ‘dialectical materialism. How is someone going to embrace a cogent and real left if one must swallow these by now archaic monstrosities. The whole field becomes the religion of uncritical followers who cannot get past boilerplate leftism with constant repetitive quotation syndrome.
The only solution is to start over and create a viable and robust ‘new socialism’ that disowns the legacy of the Marxist starting point, which we might note completely took over and monopolized the original socialists and created a closed ideology instead of an active research project. The result is immense literature that is now essentially a dead letter.
In The Last Revolution, I have tried to attempt this restart by starting over with a new formulation, one that displaces Marx/Engels to a historical promontory and reformulates the whole framework of postcapitalism, and this in the new context and crisis of climate change. This framework of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ shows how a true communism can create a sound economy, in the context of achieving classic social democratic aims as economic rights, in the context, not of state capitalism but of a Commons and a global initiative of a new International free of the Stalinist imperialism of thugs. Marxists fumbled the ball on markets, and a framework of socialist markets in the context of a Commons, along with the now maturing technologies of planning, can make a robust socialist system thrive.

The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist Futures_ ED4_2_26_23
The public cannot embrace a ‘real socialism’ because they have never been given any real platform to that effect; small wonder it balks at anything beyond the welfare state version.
Marx and Engels fit very well into their own time and place and produced a vibrant cascade of global influence in the Second International. But the Leninist Bolshevism revealed at once the limitations of Marxist thinking and showed how easily, almost inexorably, it could slip into dictatorship. The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term forever confusing, has to be one of the worst ideas ever proposed for socialism, granting that its original meaning has been lost. Marx was a very dominating figure and completely eliminated all dissent in his limited framework. The classic Manifesto is all that is needed (although that work is itself flawed) while texts like Capital are hopelessly confusing with their half-baked ‘theories’.
Social democracy isn’t enough, and we can see how even that has been successfully marginalized by capitalists.

We have but to watch the pitiless and almost deliberate destruction of the Amazon Basin, and the total failure of any party whatever to offer any rescue, to consider the dangers of anything less than a global Commons.

The world needs a real socialism, one that can deal with the issue of private property in the large: the massively destructive field of global corporate domination is the original target of real socialists, but the expropriation factor is botched by Marxists who idea of state ownership is, in reality, simply another form of tyranny. The creation of a true Commons with checks and balances, and a global component and version is the real challenge. For those who always had doubts about the challenge to basic capitalism, we can say that times have changed: the dangers of capitalism have become acutely visible beyond even anything that Marx foresaw and we can see that capitalism in its current form is a danger to the planet and to the whole of global civilization. A half-way sane neo-communism that breaks with the past and creates a simplified yet coherent platform beyond the dogmatic dead cliches of Marx/Engels could prove very popular for the simple that it speaks to the general interest at a time of terminal crisis. This initiative can be revolutionary and/or reformist. It is clear that we have waited too long, and have lost a golden opportunity in the Second International’s tragically flawed Marxism. And yet the tragedy of Bolshevism could easily have been avoided. The powers that be have remarkably strengthened to the point that even minimal social democracy is impossible to achieve via political measures. A strange thing has happened, in the name of democracy an authoritarian system of near total control has arisen along with a fascist cabal of ‘deep state’ and covert agency operatives that have crafted a ‘democratic’ monstrosity that is in danger of a final outcomes as fascism with a democratic face.

‘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 True and Visionary Radical, Martin Luther King Jr. Was No Moderate 

In his absorbing profile of the writer Alex Haley (author of “Roots” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”) in the New York Times Book Review a year ago, Michael Patrick Hearn made a familiar mistake. He wrote: “Politically [Haley] he was a moderate, philosophically more Martin than Malcolm.”

Source: Opinion | A True and Visionary Radical, Martin Luther King Jr. Was No Moderate | Common Dreams

Venezuela needs to finish the revolution, and soon…how about our DMNC? a solution tailormade for the Bolivarian impasse 

We have suggested a dozen times ways for Venezuela to proceed but the problem is the failure of the left to have ever produced a real path to real socialism/communism.  The left has no path to soci…

Source: Venezuela needs to finish the revolution, and soon…how about our DMNC? a solution tailormade for the bolivarian impasse – 1848+: The End(s) of History

Washington’s “Democracy Promotion” Fails Spectacularly in Venezuela 

We have commented on Venezuela many times here, with the criticism that it is a democracy, of sorts, that should become a democratic market socialism after the model of our DMNC. In any case, the stance of the US is almost pathetic and after so many fascist interventions in South American states the idea the US can preach democracy to anyone is ridiculous.
https://redfortyeight.com/?s=venezuela+DMNC

Regardless of US efforts to overthrow the government and cause the populace to turn against their elected officials in the face of punishing sanctions, President Maduro has endured and resisted. Even the follow-the-flag Washington Post must acknowledge that “a recent poll from Andrés Bello Catholic University and pollster Delphos indicated that more respondents would vote for Maduro than Guaidó.” Of course, no one ever voted for Guaidó in the first place because the US-anointed “interim president” had never run for national office.

Source: Washington’s “Democracy Promotion” Fails Spectacularly in Venezuela – CounterPunch.org

Commentary:…//How socialism helped to seed the landscape of modern religion | Aeon Ideas

We started last week to consider the left and the various new age movements. This essay below has done a lot of our work for us, an useful history. We see only Marxism now and not the many other contributions to socialism from a religious perspective. It is an understandable situation in some ways: Marx wanted to create a secular socialism, one that was scientific. But he failed to find a science and much of the complexity of ‘spiritual’ subjects and their histories was simply eliminated from discourse, a form of ‘cancel’ culture. Continue reading “Commentary:…//How socialism helped to seed the landscape of modern religion | Aeon Ideas”