My friend, there is an ideological ocean between “workers should collectively own the means of production” and “we need an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence to enforce communism.”
we need an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence
We already have one. Americans just need to keep believing the monopoly is working for them, rather than for their bosses, or the system of compliance falls apart.
It’s not because we have a boner for authority, it’s because history has shown us that, under the current conditions of global capitalist/imperialist hegemony, such a state is a necessary step in the process of reaching a classless society. It’s simply not possible to go directly from where we are right now to where all socialists want to end up. That’s why anarchism has never had a win that’s lasted more than few months before capitalist forces crush it.
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.
There’s an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There’s a reason why there’s not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.
Calling it “authoritarian state” kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly “authoritarian leaders” benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women’s rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language… Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays
Current western Europe (Germany in particular) still has free education, free Healthcare, guaranteed housing, legalized LGBT marriage and weed, and many things more, and you don’t go to Siberia for making a joke about the leader.
Union and party membership were obligatory BTW, if you didn’t want to be labeled as a troublemaker.
Lmao, Germany has guaranteed housing?! Germany has Vonovia, a company that hoards real estate and rents it in terrible conditions, and own about 500k+ houses. In what universe does Germany have guaranteed housing when Berlin tried to implement a directly democratically voted rent cap on housing and it got repelled by the tribunals a year after it began?
Free healthcare in Germany is absolute bullshit. Yes, it’s free, but the quality of healthcare is astonishingly low. I’ve had the misfortune of living there for a few years, and the whole system is horrendous, especially for how ludicrously expensive it is compared to other European countries. In Germany, you have sick senior people queuing at 7AM in frosty winter mornings STANDING ON THE STREETS to be able to see the family doctor, you can consider yourself lucky if you can wait sitting in a stairwell indoors while waiting for the doctor. It’s beyond me how German people aren’t constantly on the street complaining about this bullshit, again especially given the absurdly high costs of public healthcare there.
Funny that you also mention freedom of speech, when in Germany they are literally arresting Jewish people for expressing antizionist and pro-Palestinian points of view. The actual Nazis run rampant though, friends of the police if not outright members of it, with an extreme rise of the far right.
European countries are under fascist rules right now it’s terrible. And many still die of hunger or improper housing or hygiene. I’m thinking particularly about France because I’m from there, but Germany has similar issues
I mean this with all sympathy, after all, I used to share views similar to your own before I started taking Marxism seriously, and to dismiss you would be to dismiss myself, and thus the capacity for change. When you simplify Marxism to “workers should collectively own the Means of Production,” you remove the entirety of Marxism, as such a thought was common even pre-Marx. When you simplify AES to “authoritarian states with a monopoly on violence to enforce Communism,” you assume greater knowledge of the practice of building Socialism than the billions of people who have worked tirelessly to bring it into existance for the last century.
With all due respect, and no “I’ve read more than you so my power level is higher” nonsense, have you read Marx?
With all due respect to theory, I’ve seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand, and basically leaves those people out of the conversation and acts like their opinions don’t matter because they haven’t read the right books or have the right education.
The differences between academic unions and blue-collar unions were always stark to me, and when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee (in terms of Tolkiens ideas of the kind of good, kind, but simple people he met in WWI). Constantly telling those people that they don’t know enough to be involved isn’t ever really a positive way forward, in my opinion, and anything where it’s forced from the top-down on those people instead of having their input is something I’m against, sorry. You can’t explain away taking away people’s right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.
I’ve read some Marx, but never got my hands on an unabridged copy of Capital, nor did I finish it because it was pretty tedious. I personally think Debord had way more profound things to say, and Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own. Mixed with McLuhan’s Understanding Media, I’m actually partial to think communications might actually be neck-and-neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding them. I mean, Debord thought that too, which is why he thought he would be remembered for his board game Kriegspiel, (a war game focusing on lines of communication) not for SotS.
ve seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand,
It kinda irks me seeing comrades engage with people assuming they’re arguing in good faith and immediately it turns out it’s just unabashed western chauvinism. The fact that you refer to Debord is just the icing on the cake.
I’ve read Debord, guy had a good fifteen page essay hidden inside The Society of the Spectacle and then over a hundred pages of masturbatory inscrutability of the kind Zizek perfected and good old french chauvinism. I put more stock in the works credited by people who actually achieved revolution and then a better quality of life for their nations through them. A social science requires falsifiability.
On the other hand, there is Lenin boiling down in a hundred pages a very thorough understanding of Marxist thought and the critical steps the revolution must take to defend itself as well the reasons for it. No fluff, no academicist posturing, just keeping in the Marxist tradition of making the subject only as complex as it needs to be. Then he went and fucking proved it with his practice.
Capital isn’t an entry level text, is a thorough study of the mechanisms of capital, the value form, the objects of financial speculation and their interaction with the real material economy. Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, even Socialism: Utopic and Scientific by Engels are through, clear, and concise. And they work.
Yea, I try to make it a rule to engage in good-faith almost regardless of what the other person is saying unless it’s clear that nothing can come from it, be it reaching the other person or reaching onlookers. In this case, it was more for the latter.
when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee
Samwise Gamgee isn’t a good person, he’s a fictitious character in a fantasy novel.
You can’t explain away taking away people’s right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.
You need to have something before it can be taken away from you.
Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own.
Then you know the illusion of choice isn’t the same thing as a people’s right to self-governance. And further, that a movement of people in opposition to a media established regime is not stealing their neighbors’ liberty by asserting some of its own.
Not even if all the TVs and radios and newspapers say so.
I am not trying to tell you that your opinions are “invalid” or “worthless.” You raise a good problem well known by actual, practicing Marxists among Western “Marxists” that seek to endlessly critique society without changing it. However, it would be a mistake to not learn from Socialists in the past and present who have a wealth of experience and lifetimes of analysis to draw from. Rather, my goal isn’t telling you that you don’t know enough to be involved, but that I think you are making a critical error in attacking Socialists based on what I believe are misconceptions and misunderstandings, and this hurts leftist movement.
I think if you made an effort to understand what these billions of Socialists believe in and are committed to, you would better understand if their ideas and systems are valid or not. I think without reading theory that you are only going to have an incomplete and partial view, and this, while not delegitimizing your opinions and views, certainly harms the integrity. Celebrating an “end to theory” was something the Socialist Revolutionaries adhered to pre-revolution in Russia, and this was proven a mistake, while the Bolsheviks’ strict adherence to theory and mass worker organization proved correct.
Kinda? If you want to have an opinion of Marxists, I would read Marx and historical accounts by Marxists to even understand better what they are trying to do better, rather than Anarchist critiques of Marxism. Your initial comment came out attacking Marxists, so I tried to contextualize that more.
I don’t know how to more emphatically tell you that Debord was such a Marxist his many of his theses from Society of the Spectacle literally were copying/detourning Marx lines. His “plagiarism is necessary” thing is something he lived up to when writing the book. Like three quarters of things in the book are other writers words twisted into what Debord wants to talk about. The Lettrists/Situationists were literally building on what came before.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
So you’re saying you only believe hierarchical societies with monopolies on violence are viable societies? Where a strong-man makes the decisions from the top-down for everyone else?
There is no room for decentralization of control or a non-authoritarian dominance? There is no room for socialism grown from the bottom up organically instead of forced from the top down?
Why must the idea of “state” equal “authoritarian state with monopoly on violence?” There is no other such type of state we can imagine?
Markets aren’t evil, workers who own the mean of production will still be trading with other groups of workers who own their own means of production. A t-shirt factory will be trading with a textiles factory. Capitalism just raises the importance of markets to the detriment of pretty much everything else in life.
Hierarchical? Yes, we need administrators, managers, planners, and other forms of necessary hierarchy as we continue to work towards more complex production at larger and larger scales. Even Anarchists concede this point.
Authoritarian? What constitutes “authoritarianism,” any hierarchy? If you oppose all hierarchy, it sounds like you disagree with even mainstream Anarchism, and seek to return to more tribal modes of production, scavenging and whatnot.
Grown “from the bottom-up?” Yes, Marxism has historically been accomplished by Proletarian revolution and organization, it hasn’t succeeded from tiny terrorist cells throwing coups. Mass worker movements are what achieved Socialism.
A “strong-man” making all of the decisions? No, and that’s not how AES states actually existed. Nobody argues for such a method, if that’s a euphamism for full public ownership of property, I ask why you separate the people from the government at that point.
As for the idea of an “authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence,” I don’t know what you specifically mean here. That sounds to me like all states, sans the as-yet undefined “authoritarian” bent. AES is democratic, so there must be something you don’t like but haven’t defined yet. Furthermore, trying to “design” a perfect society is Utopianism, and doesn’t actually focus on how to build Socialism from where we are.
Markets aren’t evil, correct, at low levels of development they are highly useful. However, the goal is full Public Ownership, as Central Planning becomes far more efficient at higher levels of development. A system of “worker coops” would inevitably work towards either a regression into Capitalism or centralization into Socialism, a problem shown and worked out in Anti-Dühring by Engels.
Overall, I think you owe it to yourself to read more historical accounts of AES and how they function, Blackshirts and Reds as I linked earlier is a good start.
Yep, that’s the problem with making such a structure the focus of the economy, and not just another element subservient to the Public Sector and government in general. Easy to take advantage of individualists in a cooperative based economy than a collectivized one.
Easy to take advantage of individualists in a cooperative based economy than a collectivized one.
Idk about that on it’s face. The Cuban people face endured a hellish onslaught of violence and oppression from abroad. They wouldn’t have endured without a high degree of cooperation and comraderie.
By contrast, the Eastern European economy underwent full collectivization without a strong fraternal foundation. Their residents were ripe for divide-and-conqueror when the Iron Curtain fell.
This isn’t an either-or issue. You need both enthusiastic participation AND organized collective ownership to achieve a lasting Socialist state.
I was not aware the Cuban economy had a significant fraction of cooperatives, outside of the more recent growth in the last decade or so.
There’s been quite a few instances of organizations which are progressive under capitalism being used by forces of reaction against a socialist government. The trucker’s strike under Allende and the actions the trade unions took against Burkina Faso under Sankara leading to their banning come to mind.
I was not aware the Cuban economy had a significant fraction of cooperatives, outside of the more recent growth in the last decade or so.
Hard to get information in or out of a country under siege. You’ve just got to talk to people who lived there.
It’s incredibly hard. And lots of people just want to get out. But the degree to which anything still works in Cuba is mutualism. It’s always been mutualism.
AES is democratic, so there must be something you don’t like but haven’t defined yet.
Well to be fair, I’m probably closer to anarchist than strict socialist because to me decentralization of power and communications is how you solve a lot of this and no societies that exist or have existed have really tried it in the sort of capacities we could try it at this point in history, I believe. There’s just no society who has even come close yet. I do think we were held back slightly technologically and communications have progressed to the level that things can be more decentralized, a la citizen communications like the barbed wire telephone network. I think current iterations of democracy are all really outdated and that there’s been plenty of new options to try but there is no political willpower in any society to pursue those things.
I wouldn’t say I ascribe to Critical Theory, but the general idea of “there is no perfect anything, we must always be critiquing and trying new ways” speaks to me. So hanging our future on 200 year old ideas without any progression or growth of those ideas feels foolhardy to me.
Do you have specific issues with the real democratic structures of AES states that you can point to further decentralization helping with? Most AES countries practice a sort of “top-down, from the bottom-up” form of democracy. Essentially, building “rungs” of councils that start at local levels, elect delegates for regional councils, who elect delegates to further levels as necessary. This is both centralized, in that the highest level has the final say, but decentralized in that the higher levels only make decisions pertaining those lower to them, and can change delegates or practice recall elections. It gets more complex than that, obviously, but this seems as decentralized as is practical.
As for your support for “critiquing everything,” you sound like a Marxist-Leninist. Criticism and Self-Criticism are core concepts of Marxism-Leninism, and the practice of repeating the dialectical materialist cycle of turning theory into practice to refine theory and refine practice is the core to Marxist-Leninist knowledge. The base of Marxism isn’t simply 200 years old, but thousands, it’s a cumulative effort of the early materialists, the early dialecticians, Capitalists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, Utopian Socialists like Owen, Dialectical Idealists like Hegel, and more. We keep Marx’s ideas (and Lenins, etc) inasmuch as they are still valid, and by our analysis they overwhelmingly are.
Do you have specific issues with the real democratic structures of AES states that you can point to further decentralization helping with?
I understand how all this works, and I think those are systems built on human communications systems of the 18th century, not the 21st. I think communications have come so far that we need to consider that more decentralization and distribution than we already have isn’t going to somehow make things worse.
Current iterations are Napster, and I want us to be be Bittorrent.
Like I said elsewhere, I think communications and how they alienate us from each other has potentially become the bigger issue than commodities separating us, which is why I’m less interested in Marx and more interested in Debord/McLuhan.
Like how McLuhan talked about the history of ancient Egypt and how, after the invention of papyrus and use by the military, the power in society went from the Priest caste, who previously were the only people who could write, to the military caste, because their writing was current, prudent, and useful in everyday life. It changed power relations in society based on a different type of communications system. Modern communications, especially software are literally language made manifest and so much of our world runs on it all now that the private corporations that own it all can effectively put a gun to the world’s head and say “do what we say or we make it all stop working.” We can also look at the flip side, the Great Firewall of China, which endlessly spies on all its citizens and even gives them cute popups to remind them that cops are actively watching their online activity, and why friends of mine used to risk running Tor exit nodes because they wanted to support dissidents in countries who were blocking their communications.
Those systems that I described came from the 20th century at the earliest, and are regularly iterated upon to better meet the demands of the people. I’m not saying your focus on communication is wrong, but that you shouldn’t attack others if you aren’t aware of their actual history or developed theory, as you casually tossed aside frequently in this very conversation. Even with China, Western companies spy to an even greater degree and yet China was specifically singled out, I think this method is entirely unproductive and further alienating.
I literally expressed that Western tech companies can and will hold a proverbial gun to the worlds head to get what they want and you attack me for “singling out China.” Okay.
My point was that communications are fucked when they’re controlled by centralized powers instead of decentralized and citizen-controlled. Like I said, there isn’t a modern country that does this right. They’re all draconian fuckheads who want to spy on their populace but have privacy for those in positions of power. It’s not the system, it’s humans, and it’s that kind of shit that you have to face when designing societies (remember the Utopian thinking you brought up?) that when you’re centralizing power of any kind, you’re creating more opportunities for despotism. Currently, everywhere, all communications are pretty centralized. We don’t have lots of rogue communications in most countries, partially because even things like encrypted communications still have to use hardware owned by communications operators to be able to get from Point A to Point B. I’m just interacting with Lemmy, but on the way back and forth, my data passes through all kinds of privately-owned infrastructure that I have no control over.
Once again, this is why I think communications are currently neck and neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding how their function changes society and alienates us from each other.
My friend, there is an ideological ocean between “workers should collectively own the means of production” and “we need an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence to enforce communism.”
I swear to god westerners have had over a hundred years to read The State and Revolution and we’re still having the same dumb fucking argument.
In the time y’all take to talk shit about any revolution that actually succeeds you could have read about twenty books on the subject.
We already have one. Americans just need to keep believing the monopoly is working for them, rather than for their bosses, or the system of compliance falls apart.
It’s not because we have a boner for authority, it’s because history has shown us that, under the current conditions of global capitalist/imperialist hegemony, such a state is a necessary step in the process of reaching a classless society. It’s simply not possible to go directly from where we are right now to where all socialists want to end up. That’s why anarchism has never had a win that’s lasted more than few months before capitalist forces crush it.
Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds:
There’s an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There’s a reason why there’s not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.
Calling it “authoritarian state” kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly “authoritarian leaders” benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women’s rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language… Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays
Current western Europe (Germany in particular) still has free education, free Healthcare, guaranteed housing, legalized LGBT marriage and weed, and many things more, and you don’t go to Siberia for making a joke about the leader.
Union and party membership were obligatory BTW, if you didn’t want to be labeled as a troublemaker.
Lmao, Germany has guaranteed housing?! Germany has Vonovia, a company that hoards real estate and rents it in terrible conditions, and own about 500k+ houses. In what universe does Germany have guaranteed housing when Berlin tried to implement a directly democratically voted rent cap on housing and it got repelled by the tribunals a year after it began?
Free healthcare in Germany is absolute bullshit. Yes, it’s free, but the quality of healthcare is astonishingly low. I’ve had the misfortune of living there for a few years, and the whole system is horrendous, especially for how ludicrously expensive it is compared to other European countries. In Germany, you have sick senior people queuing at 7AM in frosty winter mornings STANDING ON THE STREETS to be able to see the family doctor, you can consider yourself lucky if you can wait sitting in a stairwell indoors while waiting for the doctor. It’s beyond me how German people aren’t constantly on the street complaining about this bullshit, again especially given the absurdly high costs of public healthcare there.
Funny that you also mention freedom of speech, when in Germany they are literally arresting Jewish people for expressing antizionist and pro-Palestinian points of view. The actual Nazis run rampant though, friends of the police if not outright members of it, with an extreme rise of the far right.
Harz IV guarantees housing.
Damn, you should tell that to the 700k homeless people in Germany, I’m sure they’ll be happy to know that
I don’t know them.
European countries are under fascist rules right now it’s terrible. And many still die of hunger or improper housing or hygiene. I’m thinking particularly about France because I’m from there, but Germany has similar issues
Harz IV, bro.
I mean this with all sympathy, after all, I used to share views similar to your own before I started taking Marxism seriously, and to dismiss you would be to dismiss myself, and thus the capacity for change. When you simplify Marxism to “workers should collectively own the Means of Production,” you remove the entirety of Marxism, as such a thought was common even pre-Marx. When you simplify AES to “authoritarian states with a monopoly on violence to enforce Communism,” you assume greater knowledge of the practice of building Socialism than the billions of people who have worked tirelessly to bring it into existance for the last century.
With all due respect, and no “I’ve read more than you so my power level is higher” nonsense, have you read Marx?
With all due respect to theory, I’ve seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand, and basically leaves those people out of the conversation and acts like their opinions don’t matter because they haven’t read the right books or have the right education.
The differences between academic unions and blue-collar unions were always stark to me, and when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee (in terms of Tolkiens ideas of the kind of good, kind, but simple people he met in WWI). Constantly telling those people that they don’t know enough to be involved isn’t ever really a positive way forward, in my opinion, and anything where it’s forced from the top-down on those people instead of having their input is something I’m against, sorry. You can’t explain away taking away people’s right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.
I’ve read some Marx, but never got my hands on an unabridged copy of Capital, nor did I finish it because it was pretty tedious. I personally think Debord had way more profound things to say, and Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own. Mixed with McLuhan’s Understanding Media, I’m actually partial to think communications might actually be neck-and-neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding them. I mean, Debord thought that too, which is why he thought he would be remembered for his board game Kriegspiel, (a war game focusing on lines of communication) not for SotS.
It kinda irks me seeing comrades engage with people assuming they’re arguing in good faith and immediately it turns out it’s just unabashed western chauvinism. The fact that you refer to Debord is just the icing on the cake.
I’ve read Debord, guy had a good fifteen page essay hidden inside The Society of the Spectacle and then over a hundred pages of masturbatory inscrutability of the kind Zizek perfected and good old french chauvinism. I put more stock in the works credited by people who actually achieved revolution and then a better quality of life for their nations through them. A social science requires falsifiability.
On the other hand, there is Lenin boiling down in a hundred pages a very thorough understanding of Marxist thought and the critical steps the revolution must take to defend itself as well the reasons for it. No fluff, no academicist posturing, just keeping in the Marxist tradition of making the subject only as complex as it needs to be. Then he went and fucking proved it with his practice.
Capital isn’t an entry level text, is a thorough study of the mechanisms of capital, the value form, the objects of financial speculation and their interaction with the real material economy. Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, even Socialism: Utopic and Scientific by Engels are through, clear, and concise. And they work.
Yea, I try to make it a rule to engage in good-faith almost regardless of what the other person is saying unless it’s clear that nothing can come from it, be it reaching the other person or reaching onlookers. In this case, it was more for the latter.
Samwise Gamgee isn’t a good person, he’s a fictitious character in a fantasy novel.
You need to have something before it can be taken away from you.
Then you know the illusion of choice isn’t the same thing as a people’s right to self-governance. And further, that a movement of people in opposition to a media established regime is not stealing their neighbors’ liberty by asserting some of its own.
Not even if all the TVs and radios and newspapers say so.
I am not trying to tell you that your opinions are “invalid” or “worthless.” You raise a good problem well known by actual, practicing Marxists among Western “Marxists” that seek to endlessly critique society without changing it. However, it would be a mistake to not learn from Socialists in the past and present who have a wealth of experience and lifetimes of analysis to draw from. Rather, my goal isn’t telling you that you don’t know enough to be involved, but that I think you are making a critical error in attacking Socialists based on what I believe are misconceptions and misunderstandings, and this hurts leftist movement.
I think if you made an effort to understand what these billions of Socialists believe in and are committed to, you would better understand if their ideas and systems are valid or not. I think without reading theory that you are only going to have an incomplete and partial view, and this, while not delegitimizing your opinions and views, certainly harms the integrity. Celebrating an “end to theory” was something the Socialist Revolutionaries adhered to pre-revolution in Russia, and this was proven a mistake, while the Bolsheviks’ strict adherence to theory and mass worker organization proved correct.
Bud, I’m reading theory, and you’re literally telling me I’m not reading the right theory.
Kinda? If you want to have an opinion of Marxists, I would read Marx and historical accounts by Marxists to even understand better what they are trying to do better, rather than Anarchist critiques of Marxism. Your initial comment came out attacking Marxists, so I tried to contextualize that more.
I don’t know how to more emphatically tell you that Debord was such a Marxist his many of his theses from Society of the Spectacle literally were copying/detourning Marx lines. His “plagiarism is necessary” thing is something he lived up to when writing the book. Like three quarters of things in the book are other writers words twisted into what Debord wants to talk about. The Lettrists/Situationists were literally building on what came before.
Sure, and I am telling you that based on your assertions thus far he evidently isn’t enough to actively take a hostile stance towards Marxists.
I have known Marxists, and they didn’t self-ascribe the term “tankie” to mean “Marxist.” In fact the ones I’ve known would bristle at the suggestion.
How could any socialist country protect the workers without a state in 2025?
So you’re saying you only believe hierarchical societies with monopolies on violence are viable societies? Where a strong-man makes the decisions from the top-down for everyone else?
There is no room for decentralization of control or a non-authoritarian dominance? There is no room for socialism grown from the bottom up organically instead of forced from the top down?
Why must the idea of “state” equal “authoritarian state with monopoly on violence?” There is no other such type of state we can imagine?
Markets aren’t evil, workers who own the mean of production will still be trading with other groups of workers who own their own means of production. A t-shirt factory will be trading with a textiles factory. Capitalism just raises the importance of markets to the detriment of pretty much everything else in life.
Hierarchical? Yes, we need administrators, managers, planners, and other forms of necessary hierarchy as we continue to work towards more complex production at larger and larger scales. Even Anarchists concede this point.
Authoritarian? What constitutes “authoritarianism,” any hierarchy? If you oppose all hierarchy, it sounds like you disagree with even mainstream Anarchism, and seek to return to more tribal modes of production, scavenging and whatnot.
Grown “from the bottom-up?” Yes, Marxism has historically been accomplished by Proletarian revolution and organization, it hasn’t succeeded from tiny terrorist cells throwing coups. Mass worker movements are what achieved Socialism.
A “strong-man” making all of the decisions? No, and that’s not how AES states actually existed. Nobody argues for such a method, if that’s a euphamism for full public ownership of property, I ask why you separate the people from the government at that point.
As for the idea of an “authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence,” I don’t know what you specifically mean here. That sounds to me like all states, sans the as-yet undefined “authoritarian” bent. AES is democratic, so there must be something you don’t like but haven’t defined yet. Furthermore, trying to “design” a perfect society is Utopianism, and doesn’t actually focus on how to build Socialism from where we are.
Markets aren’t evil, correct, at low levels of development they are highly useful. However, the goal is full Public Ownership, as Central Planning becomes far more efficient at higher levels of development. A system of “worker coops” would inevitably work towards either a regression into Capitalism or centralization into Socialism, a problem shown and worked out in Anti-Dühring by Engels.
Overall, I think you owe it to yourself to read more historical accounts of AES and how they function, Blackshirts and Reds as I linked earlier is a good start.
Or have right-wing factions armed and trained by the CIA to overthrow the government and do a bunch of crimes against humanity during the 90s.
I don’t know enough about Yugoslavia’s economy to say whether their coop-centric model was responsible for the stagnation and high unemployment rates.
Yep, that’s the problem with making such a structure the focus of the economy, and not just another element subservient to the Public Sector and government in general. Easy to take advantage of individualists in a cooperative based economy than a collectivized one.
Idk about that on it’s face. The Cuban people face endured a hellish onslaught of violence and oppression from abroad. They wouldn’t have endured without a high degree of cooperation and comraderie.
By contrast, the Eastern European economy underwent full collectivization without a strong fraternal foundation. Their residents were ripe for divide-and-conqueror when the Iron Curtain fell.
This isn’t an either-or issue. You need both enthusiastic participation AND organized collective ownership to achieve a lasting Socialist state.
I was not aware the Cuban economy had a significant fraction of cooperatives, outside of the more recent growth in the last decade or so.
There’s been quite a few instances of organizations which are progressive under capitalism being used by forces of reaction against a socialist government. The trucker’s strike under Allende and the actions the trade unions took against Burkina Faso under Sankara leading to their banning come to mind.
Hard to get information in or out of a country under siege. You’ve just got to talk to people who lived there.
It’s incredibly hard. And lots of people just want to get out. But the degree to which anything still works in Cuba is mutualism. It’s always been mutualism.
Well to be fair, I’m probably closer to anarchist than strict socialist because to me decentralization of power and communications is how you solve a lot of this and no societies that exist or have existed have really tried it in the sort of capacities we could try it at this point in history, I believe. There’s just no society who has even come close yet. I do think we were held back slightly technologically and communications have progressed to the level that things can be more decentralized, a la citizen communications like the barbed wire telephone network. I think current iterations of democracy are all really outdated and that there’s been plenty of new options to try but there is no political willpower in any society to pursue those things.
I wouldn’t say I ascribe to Critical Theory, but the general idea of “there is no perfect anything, we must always be critiquing and trying new ways” speaks to me. So hanging our future on 200 year old ideas without any progression or growth of those ideas feels foolhardy to me.
Do you have specific issues with the real democratic structures of AES states that you can point to further decentralization helping with? Most AES countries practice a sort of “top-down, from the bottom-up” form of democracy. Essentially, building “rungs” of councils that start at local levels, elect delegates for regional councils, who elect delegates to further levels as necessary. This is both centralized, in that the highest level has the final say, but decentralized in that the higher levels only make decisions pertaining those lower to them, and can change delegates or practice recall elections. It gets more complex than that, obviously, but this seems as decentralized as is practical.
As for your support for “critiquing everything,” you sound like a Marxist-Leninist. Criticism and Self-Criticism are core concepts of Marxism-Leninism, and the practice of repeating the dialectical materialist cycle of turning theory into practice to refine theory and refine practice is the core to Marxist-Leninist knowledge. The base of Marxism isn’t simply 200 years old, but thousands, it’s a cumulative effort of the early materialists, the early dialecticians, Capitalists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, Utopian Socialists like Owen, Dialectical Idealists like Hegel, and more. We keep Marx’s ideas (and Lenins, etc) inasmuch as they are still valid, and by our analysis they overwhelmingly are.
Does that make sense?
I understand how all this works, and I think those are systems built on human communications systems of the 18th century, not the 21st. I think communications have come so far that we need to consider that more decentralization and distribution than we already have isn’t going to somehow make things worse.
Current iterations are Napster, and I want us to be be Bittorrent.
Like I said elsewhere, I think communications and how they alienate us from each other has potentially become the bigger issue than commodities separating us, which is why I’m less interested in Marx and more interested in Debord/McLuhan.
Like how McLuhan talked about the history of ancient Egypt and how, after the invention of papyrus and use by the military, the power in society went from the Priest caste, who previously were the only people who could write, to the military caste, because their writing was current, prudent, and useful in everyday life. It changed power relations in society based on a different type of communications system. Modern communications, especially software are literally language made manifest and so much of our world runs on it all now that the private corporations that own it all can effectively put a gun to the world’s head and say “do what we say or we make it all stop working.” We can also look at the flip side, the Great Firewall of China, which endlessly spies on all its citizens and even gives them cute popups to remind them that cops are actively watching their online activity, and why friends of mine used to risk running Tor exit nodes because they wanted to support dissidents in countries who were blocking their communications.
Does that make sense?
Those systems that I described came from the 20th century at the earliest, and are regularly iterated upon to better meet the demands of the people. I’m not saying your focus on communication is wrong, but that you shouldn’t attack others if you aren’t aware of their actual history or developed theory, as you casually tossed aside frequently in this very conversation. Even with China, Western companies spy to an even greater degree and yet China was specifically singled out, I think this method is entirely unproductive and further alienating.
I literally expressed that Western tech companies can and will hold a proverbial gun to the worlds head to get what they want and you attack me for “singling out China.” Okay.
My point was that communications are fucked when they’re controlled by centralized powers instead of decentralized and citizen-controlled. Like I said, there isn’t a modern country that does this right. They’re all draconian fuckheads who want to spy on their populace but have privacy for those in positions of power. It’s not the system, it’s humans, and it’s that kind of shit that you have to face when designing societies (remember the Utopian thinking you brought up?) that when you’re centralizing power of any kind, you’re creating more opportunities for despotism. Currently, everywhere, all communications are pretty centralized. We don’t have lots of rogue communications in most countries, partially because even things like encrypted communications still have to use hardware owned by communications operators to be able to get from Point A to Point B. I’m just interacting with Lemmy, but on the way back and forth, my data passes through all kinds of privately-owned infrastructure that I have no control over.
Once again, this is why I think communications are currently neck and neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding how their function changes society and alienates us from each other.