Thurs: May 26
Dated as May 29

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We have a new page showing how the eonic model or simply its basic data/chronology falsifies historical materialism. Marx was obsessed with creating a science/theory of history, and the fate of most theories is falsification. It is puzzling that Marx should have gotten stuck on this point, but he wanted to make the passage beyond capitalism a kind of historical guarantee. It doesn’t work and throws the whole Marx project into a kind of limbo. Let’s be clear: you can’t impose on humanity a theory of history that almost everyone else knows is false. Yet Marxists are totally stuck on this issue. They live in a cultic dream world and their fate is to have no further chances for social transformation. Even sympathetic socialists won’t stand for it.
We have bypassed the issue by sticking to simple chronologies of history and the result is surprisingly suggestive of what a real science of history would be, but we can’t carry out that project because we have both too much and too little data: for what we see the literature is immense, millions of books, literally, for what we don’t see very well, e.g. the Neolithic, we are left high and dry: we can’t conclude how to take the Neolithic (although it is obvious to the naked eye that a set of hidden transitions are probably there).

It is time to denounce the immense harm done by Darwinism and the stupid ‘scientists’ who enforce dogma there. The data of the eonic effect should be a university study as a solid foundation of a new kind of post-theory. But the dogmatists reign supreme and won’t even spit in the direction of anyone who dissents from the whole shebang of ideological pseudo-science enforced to keep people in a social darwinist economic culture.

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Wed: may 25
Dated as Thursday May 26

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From the new Preface
Is revolution a patriotic duty?
But is the American system crippled beyond repair, even for a revolutionary restart? The Last Revolution could start better in many places, but the US will soon destroy it. So the American case is perhaps the only starting point. The US was/is not really a democracy at all, ignored the warnings of the British it would be genocidal to the indigenous peoples, could not declare against slavery, created an endemic racist legacy, crippled Latin America and the Middle East with repeated imperialistic action, turned into a stooge of criminal Zionists, rapidly became a Wall Street oligarchy, is now controlled by covert agencies and that phantom, The Deep State, and murdered its own citizens in the 9/11 false flag operation, the inability to control gun laws and the reign of hundreds of mass murders,… The terminal brainwashing of the American Republic is a dangerous new Leviathan masquering as a republic.

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The legacy of Marxism is been a failure and made socialism seem unobtainable. Continue reading “The Last Revolution: Postcapitalist Futures….//version_5_26_22….//Is the (last) revolution a patriotic duty?” →

Thursday
Dated for May 22

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Models of economy beyond capitalism were beyond the capacity of the older left/marxists but the task is not so hard if you can get beyond the confusions amid clarifications of Marx et al. This version also gets around to discussing something mentioned was back: the lower indifference level in the DMNC model beyond the high level control system of market neo-communism: the idea is that below a certain level the higher-level control system of (socialist) markets/planning need not apply and can be, well, laissez-faire (to recycle ironically that detested term, here is a new sense. The state cannot control a whole system, and it dosesn’t need to so so to create a viable socialism.

The world of Sanders has inspired many, but his usage of the term Our Revolution to refer to socialism really meaning social democracy has done harm, he is hardly alone. And the problem is easy to correct. Stop double talk about socialism: if you use the term you mean to refer to a revolutionary transition. Sanders is a failure and it resent his posh Senate retreat zone while I remain in the limbo of capitalist pseudo-society. He was no working-class revolutionary.

We are in the last decade(s) for real change that can prevent disaster. Since the left of the last generation has accomplished almost nothing, I mean suggest a look at the text here…Failure on climate seemed inconceivable once: surely the US could respond to the crisis. But in seventy years it has done almost nothing and now the far right is making the situation even worse. We can’t wait for the off-chance of a Congress/Senate that can manage a Green New Deal.

Lots of changes in various parts of the book.

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How do we define a Commons, ecological, global, industrial? What is the meaning of democracy in the wake of the era of Rousseau: electoral or direct democracy… Democratic socialism will inherit these questions and our model is simple and clear, yet not fully specified in terms of constitutional thinking. Our treatment deals with issue of the working class in a new way. Marx focussed his whole effort on the working class but his stance is not consistent now. The working class in the US is really middle class and not revolutionary. What is the working class: as the set of wage laborers it includes elements of all classes. Taken that way we can indeed use the meme of the ‘working’ class as a basic core with multiple aspects. But we are doing more than freeing labor under socialism, we must also deal with issues of all classes, with universal class diversity, and with the very large near universal class of those who are wage laborers (but that includes managers in capitalist orgs) and/or those who are passive under capitalist domination. We can design a very powerful generalization here to include almost all classes and yet at the same time create a spearhead in the industrial proletariat and the issues of such labor. We can unify all this around a Commons, with a new International and move outward toward the field of globalization where the old proletariat is still very much in evidence

(This reminds me of Mr. H.C. Earwicker in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, a k a, Here Comes Everybody)

A post on Marx/Marxism…
We had a post on Marxism at the redfortyeight.com blog:
A Guide to using Capital as a doorstop….//Reading Karl Marx for the First/Last Time
We have been critical of Marx in The Last Revolution because of the way his framework has confused the left and created a corpus of bad theory that even its adherents never really understand. Marx is much too complicated and those who penetrate that obscurity suddenly realize he doesn’t know what he is talking about. His theories of economic history have no foundation in science and give a false view of history. He was never able to complete his Capital and struggled to clarify his own thinking. The title of this piece gives it away: you need a guide to read him, and that means you need a new elite or priesthood to mediate your opinions or views. You can’t deviate from the doctrine and if you do you are dangerously counterrevolutionary, etc… Instead, we need a simple recipe approach to constructing socialism with an economy that can function, a clear path to a new kind of democracy, a Commons that can mediate socialist markets plus planning, a set of ecological foundation principles, and a genuinely neo-communist (we can no longer really use the term ‘communist’) system that guarantees liberal, civil, and economic rights. The Marxist corpus has failed every time it was tried. We need to start over. Marxists can’t specify what kind of society they want, and in their focus on the (undefined) working class declare war on all other classes and provide no escape route for general participation of all such. In Stalin we actually see genocidal class warfare carried out (in a totally incoherent fashion)…

This article is interesting in any case but once again it shows the overall confusion in Marx’s later works and most of all his view of the Commune. But all we really need is the Communist Manifesto. Beating the dead horse of Capital is pointless now.

As to the Commune I would take Marx seriously with his warning about the working class and revolution. The problem is this period is unique and never replicated itself as a model. What’s wrong? But even there we are confounded by dubious theory. The Bolshevik revolution shows how the infamous botched meme, the dictatorship of the proletariat backfired in the Russian Revolution and produced the infamous dictatorship of the Marxist bourgeoisie claiming to operate in the name of the proletariat, this from devoted student of the Commune, who ended banned labor unions and exploiting labor to develop the backward Russia. A more careful approach is needed to the issue of a working-class state. The reality is that a system run by an elite will probably always seize control in the name of the proletariat. The Commune is a mystery in that regard, and it is a real challenge to any student on the left, but it failed as it declared war on the whole outstanding culture and turned working-class power into a zero sum game. But is Marx really right? A safer approach would try to create a working-class foundation inside a liberal system with economic rights guaranteed legally. In any case the Marxist left has never really made sense of their own position and the later works of Marx aren’t much help.
The solution here might be to see that a ‘Universal Class’ of all classes has many subsets among them the various ‘working classes’: defining the working clas as wage laborers includes elements of all classes. A Universal Class must work in terms of the full ‘working class’, see its interconnection with all classes. There the distinct working class of industrial laborers might be a vanguard. In any case Marx’s class analysis is a muddle and finally incoherent.
There is a lot more to discuss in this article, but let’s at least hope to shock ‘marxists’ out of their complacent confidence in Marx’s theory.

The Last Revolution: Postcapitalist Futures is a free download at redfortyeight.com sidebar
or the most recent version with a link good for a short period:
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Source: A Guide to Reading Karl Marx for the First Time

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