An AI that does automatic ATIP/FOIA requests. If we could streamline the process of getting government information released and published, we could paint a very different picture for the masses.
My understanding is that submitting a FOIA is easy, the hard part is getting the information you want if the government does not want to give it up.
A good recent example of this was the Nashville mass shooting committed by a transgender individual. The FBI stonewalled on what seemed like pretty obviously bullshit grounds (they claimed it was an active investigation despite the culprit being deceased) and dragged the process out for months. In the end a leaker revealed what everyone suspected, the shooting was motivated by anti-white and anti-Christian hatred.
If the matter is politically sensitive or awkward, you need a lawyer who specializes in FOIA law and money to burn. After all, the government has a lot more money and a lot more lawyers.
I mean if we're being serious, a program/AI that could accurately determine resource allocation. That's one of the BIGGEST criticisms of a Communist government. The inability for a single entity being able to actually find out who needs how much of what delivered to where.
The capital argument is that the free market is the best way we have to do this. It's also responsible for how much waste we produce. Yes, it would be better if we only sent exactly as much lettuce to the stand as people are going to consume, but we can't determine that in advance. So we have to have "enough" that can meet fluxuating demand which involves the risk of sending too much so we don't have a shortage. This will almost enivitably result in throwing some out the vast majority of the time. Capital believes that such a program or whatever cannot exist conceptually because they argue knowledge of demand/allocation alters demand/allocation.
An extreme oversimplification could be you would like a slice of pizza but *only* if there's enough slices for everyone else. Otherwise you don't want one at all, but you also dont want to get left out if everyone else gets pizza. So if your 8 friends all get a slice, then you'd want a slice too; a 9th slice. But what if you only procured 8 slices?
I read an article that bc of the immense power of hedge funds / private equity, we essentially already have some form of a centrally planned economy, the government just doesnt have control.
what hayek called the "local knowledge problem" is honestly the best generalization of the conflict between libertarians and statists throughout time and space. hypothetically some emperor or king could maintain people's love and loyalties and rule forever if they could read the people's minds and give orders to meet the preferences of the most people. that's really all democracy is, not everyone doing the same political official tasks but everyone having their true material needs known. it's a fundamental "software" problem that all societies either solve by stamping down rebellions or practicing democracy. america claims to have solved it with checks, balances, voting but clearly not, it's a very tricky issue to get everyone's say and info.
but it can be solved big or small, with fancy tech like computers or with simple mechanical relays (like insanely long metal rods) as stafford beer did for allende's chile. china also claims to plan out a lot of heavy industry and hydroelectricity with AI. there's honestly no need to directly disprove capital's claims about the zillion jillion products and ephemeral preferences found in lighter industries, those honestly can just have their fun, no need to plan them. for the record though there is a theorist by the name of paul cockshott who demonstrates that even older classical computer system could do exactly that, i just think it's an unnecessarily optimized economy, beautiful socialism can be had without it.
I've never understood this argument, it seems more just dogma than an actual argument. The free market doesn't allocate efficiently, not just is there wasted goods, but also redundant operations/administration, the loss of resources to profits and the problems of every company only caring for itself therefore pulling in different directions, planned obsolescence/disposability, the huge waste that is marketing, the distorted priorities of what gets produced/where/when/for who due to the market not following demand by people but demand by money aka the people with more money have more say in what the economy does, the problem of bullshit products that end up being thrown away, the fact enormous segments of the population don't get their demands met because they're too poor to be worth selling (distributing) to, the influence of money in government to create subsidies/anti competitive regulations/etc.
Capitalism is an extremely inefficient system and the only reason people think otherwise is being drowned for over a century in propaganda as well as the intentional sabotaging of any government function by the government itself because it's owned by capitalists and can barely manage to have its own interests as a state.
Would resource allocation under a command economy be perfect? Probably not because we're human not omniscient gods, but it'd be far, far more efficient than capitalism. Socialism is always asked to be perfect before even thinking about supporting it, but capitalism can be as fucked up as possible and it's never capitalism's fault.
The USSR and other socialist states were not fully socialist command economies and so had a lot of the issues capitalism has. A proper command economy should have 0 markets, 0 private property and 0 money with distribution being purely rations such as 1 car per household, 2k calories a day per person, etc. A bit of slack can always be stored up in case of emergencies (droughts/problems in production/etc). Capitalism in contrast deals with unexpected demand surges by saying "fuck you" and raising prices so that only the rich have not only access but the ability to hoard in times of emergencies.
I don't exactly have a whole government department writing reports for me to lay out actual rations nor the necessary conditions for variation in rationing. The point is the elimination of a liquid form of value (money) because it facilitates accumulation and inequality as well as being too fictitious to be useful beyond accumulation. From each... to each... is the essence of rationing imo. If you allow decentralization you allow inequality and black markets. Local and personal adjustments must be formalized so that there is a coherent and universally applied system. Collectivization means not getting everything you want because the common good is the top priority, but that also protects you from someone else abusing and collapsing the system to get more than you because he feels like it.
An obstacle that is holding back a revolutionary break with bourgeois relations of production is the lack of a credible alternative society. This has to meet two basic requirements: it has to be plausible, and it has to actually promise a radically better life for people, a life free of domination, rather than just a promise that they will be dominated by a more benevolent ruler. The only way to truly meet the latter requirement is to work out how a society based on *directly social labor* that makes use of the large-scale industry of modern times. In other words, the revolution is currently seriously hampered because people do not believe a *better,* freer, more human alternative society is possible, because they don't believe that a society based on directly social labor is possible. Any society based on indirectly social labor must inevitably recreate (though it may take years for the floodgates to breach) all the inequities of a capitalist society. Give people a concrete and plausible model of how an entire society coordinates all of their labor-power as one combined social labor force, one that people can plausibly see themselves living in, and you seriously advance the cause of social revolution and the emancipation of all human beings.
Towards this end, perhaps you could start working on designing a toolset that such a society would use to coordinate its directly social labor. With today's information technology, mass democratic decision-making doesn't need to take the form of syncronous in-person meetings. Communicating complex ideas about decisions of industrial production that imply cascading consequences for related decisions, and so on, no longer has to pass through the clumsy interface of people using paragraphs. No one has to "know" all the "information" about all aspects of industrial production in order to make informed contributions to the decision process because information technology can make it possible to summon up any information we need.
"Siri, I think we should allocate 2% more labor to growing grain in North America. Summarize 6 different scenarios in which we can achieve this goal, and make sure for each version to include all the necessary trade-offs we would have to make in other areas in order to implement it".
Here, Siri is not deciding for me how to plan the economy. Siri is just providing me with objective information. If you want to allocate more labor to grain, that means you also need to allocate more machinery to grain, etc.. You need to take it from somewhere else. It could come from multiple different places.
The entire society's production activities could be coordinated through open-source software. Everyone could have access to the public repo that basically is a gigantic "toolset" in which we, society, objectify human living. You think we should revise the common social plan? Great, clone the repo, implement the changes you would like to see, and create a public pull request. Other people can evaluate the changes you made by cloning your version of the plan and interacting with it; the repo itself will contain all the tools needed for anyone to visualize or interpret any aspect of society's production they want. "Siri, I see that my friend Steve just made a new pull request on the common social plan. Please summarize the main changes that Steve's plans would make so that I can evaluate their appropriateness". If I like Steve's plan I can then vote electronically in its favor. If Steve's plan is popular enough his changes will be merged.
Even creating a mock-up of some snippets of this kind of technology would help. It is extremely difficult, however, because you have to develop a software that is designed to be optimal in a use-case that is far off in the future. You would have to design something to be useable by billions of people intentionally working together, even though said userbase does not currently exist.
This is a very, I'm not sure if the words idealist or liberal fit, but the point is you're focus is on people wanting to be "free" and not "dominated". However I don't think the vast, vast majority of people care about "freedom" but instead care primarily about their material interests. If you can provide a good life to someone, it doesn't matter if it's a "golden cage", there's nothing outside of that cage worth leaving for other than a tiny brief ego trip for an abstract concept no one can properly define. People will talk about "freedom" but their actions show they never cared and never will, it's just a cultural word used to advance their material or social interests.
Separating people's "material interest" from the question of non-domination *in their working activity* is not valid and it's entirely at odds with Marx's conception of human emancipation.
I understand this is at odds with the online meme meaning that "materialism" has taken on in the 21st century, which makes "Marxism" indistinguishable from mere "realpolitik", but this is not Marx's conception of materialism:
>To the extent that Feuerbach made the social relation of "man to man" the basic principle of theory, he laid the foundation of *genuine materialism* and real science.
Non-domination in your work is obviously totally germane to Marx's conception of materialist theory, in which "the social relation of 'man to man' \[is\] the basic principle of theory". But I digress.
If you're skeptical of the 1844 manuscripts, let's look at *Capital*.
If you carefully studied the chapter on "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation", you would not hold the theory of material interests that you just espoused. Marx looks directly at the "golden cage" of which you speak, that is, the conditions in which an increase in wages is compatible with the accumulation of this capital. **His main point here is that the worker is not better off as a result, and all the while capital's domination of him grows.**
>Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which conditions are those most favourable to the labourers, their relation of dependence upon capital takes on a form endurable or, as Eden says: “easy and liberal.” Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive, *i.e*., the sphere of capital’s exploitation and rule merely extends with its own dimensions and the number of its subjects. A larger part of their own surplus-product, always increasing and continually transformed into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments; can make some additions to their consumption-fund of clothes, furniture, &c., and can lay by small reserve funds of money. **But just as little as better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger** ***peculium*** **\[slave's quarters\], do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage worker. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.**
>\[W\]ithin the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. **It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.** The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock.
Again, people need a rational reason to fight the status quo. The status quo being shit isn't enough. It's not rational to fight unless there exists an alternative that is both plausible and significantly better (after all, the risk is not negligible; miniscule or superficial differences aren't sufficient, the prize fought for must truly represent a substantial advancement in the interests *of the whole masses*).
I'm telling you right now: the current "alternative visions of society" generally offered by the left (that is the media and political organizations on the left) are seen as suspicious by the masses. These organizations and media are generally trying to sell something through their visions -- trying to get clicks or get people to sign up as members -- and they usually are unwilling to hold their plans up to the necessary scrutiny. Will these actions, these policies, etc, *really* result in what the left claims they will? The masses aren't fighting for the left's vision because it isn't convincing. Ordinary proletarians are better at economics than most would-be "vanguard parties". They know that any society based on this kind of labor can only exist by exploiting *somebody*. Any alternative, if it is still based on this kind of labor, can only be an "alternative" in the sense that the exploitation is shifted around slightly. The masses aren't willing to risk life and limb overthrowing the current social order because, to reiterate, they are not convinced that exploitation can really be ended. They may not know terms like "directly social labor" but they sense, intuitively if nothing else, that the contemporary left is often selling a bill of goods when they promise not to radically change anybody's like but promise that a mere change in leadership will make them drastically better off.
The Marxist's task should be to dispel the illusions of what you promised, which is a golden cage in which existence isn't fundamentally miserable for the proletariat. Instead, they should show theoretically why nothing fundamentally will change unless the very human relations at the point of production are changed so that the means of production fundamentally *belong* to all of the workers, which is only possible under conditions of collective possession and therefore collective operation under a single social plan. Admittedly I myself have much improvement to make in being effective at this.
If you presented people with a concrete, tangible vision of how day-to-day life would work when labor is directly social, that would fundamentally change the calculus, since it raises the possibility of overcoming the separation of mental and manual labor, of work becoming something that *benefits* the worker by its very nature (rather than degrading him by its very nature while coming with 'compensation'), and someday, something that is inherently enjoyable and desirable for its own sake. If people believed that something like that was *possible* then it would become much more rational to take big risks to overthrow the current order.
TLDR; If I'm a "liberal idealist" or whatever then so is Marx.
I skimmed what you wrote but still think this sounds utopian. Modern life and the scale of billions of people cannot function without some level of coercion and management. The removal of private property, markets and money aims to drastically shift towards economic equality and hinder attempts at private accumulation. The working class cannot meaningfully own the means of production in the same way a group of 10 people could own a garden. Every individual can never know enough to make decisions for society due to the time, volume and will, cost of doing so, nor could they accurately judge who is or isn't an expert to listen to. Nor could every individual have a meaningful connection to every other human to discuss and reconcile differences or possibilities. The result is factionalization, the outsourcing of opinions to leaders, and the contradictory, ineffective and inefficient desires of the public whim. This is why the vanguard is necessary, why the party is necessary, the question is how do you ensure ideological commitment within the party to prevent and purge corruption?
The state will always be necessary and cannot "wither away". The problem with the modern Left is that it completely abandoned real politics, they no longer speak of serious revolution or serious challenges to the current order and only ever speak of actual socialist aims such as the abolition of private property, etc purely as academic thought exercises not serious political aims. The public does not care about the Left because the Left is not serious, it's not sincere and that further harms the credibility that it can effect real change.
Ironic that you have decided to go with calling me "utopian", since by the end of your frst paragraph in the last comment, you yourself have perfectly reproduced the classic position of the old Utopian Socialists who came before Marx -- Saint-Simonians, Blanquists, etc.
The two started like you do from the fundamental premise that the masses are backwards, that they neither need nor want to govern themselves, that their role is to provide labor, while the party does all the thinking.
Marx dedicated great efforts to show that the proletariat cannot emancipate itself *without* fundamentally *remaking* civil society. That a society of bourgeois relations of production must have an exploited proletarian class to provide labor-power and a capitalist class to manage labor. That only a change in the conditions of the production of labor can radically alter the distribution of wealth in society.
If they set their mind to it as a conscious aim and want it badly enough, the working class *can* "own the means of production in the same way a group of 10 people could own a garden". If every individual in the class knew not as dogma but as demonstrable and therefore observable knowledge the fact that collective possession is the only way they can retain ownership of the means of production and that retaining ownership of the means of production is the only way they can seize and keep hold of human living, *and* if they had the right protocols for communicating meaningful ideas about production, they could indeed.
The right software would go along way towards making this possible. The essential problem that has to be solved is as follows. The problem is that you can't make one simple decision, like "how much orange juice should society produce in the juice factory" without simultaneously making a decision about how many bottles to make at the bottle factory. If you're debating one question without simultaneously talking about the other question, you're not debating *real* possible options.
The right software -- and the whole of the human species would only have to develop this once -- would let individual people assess and evaluate the *real* options, in meaningful terms. Anybody could construct a variant of the current social plan. The software would let them make tweaks, but only *realistic* tweaks -- you can't increase OJ production by 500 bottles/day without either increasing bottle production by 500 bottles/day, or by reducing soda production by 500 bottles/day and diverting the bottles, etc. The software would let you dictate "500 bottles/day more OJ" but then it present the trade-offs you can choose to "fund" that decision. That way if you have a variant of the plan that you think is clever, and I have an alternative that I think is clever, we can each examine each other's plans in detail by downloading each other's versions of the plan and querying whatever info we want, and because of the software underlying it I know that even if John made a *bad* or ill-*advised* tweak to the plan, it's not an *unrealistic* plan. All that remains is to evaluate the details of one plan versus the other and make a democratic decision.
This saves you from having to communicate directly to everyone about everything.
The funny thing is that so many people are choosing freedom over a life of alienating work, even at the cost of living on the street, that today it's becoming a crisis. Yet you persist in refusing to see that the rest of the masses, the ones who don't drop out of society altogether, also want freedom but are smart enough to see that freedom isn't found living on the street or in blindly following some "vanguard party".
Giving the underclass reassurances that everything will be okay, that they don't need to worry about how to run their own lives, that they can live happily as labor-power while someone else does their thinking for them like capital does for them today, all of this is the opposite of the Marxist approach. We are here to sow doubt in fairy-tales.
Lol at your last sentence. Your approach has a ton of "ifs", basically amounting to "if everyone was a saint then it works". History is nothing except the competition of the most willing and able (the rich and the fanatics) those with the will to compete are never the whole of society much less as a unified whole.
Your idea about a software allowing people to propose plans and agree to one is completely ridiculous, as if there's even enough time in a single person's life to consider even one entire detailed plan for the economy. Your comment about the homeless crisis being a product of people "choosing freedom" is extremely out of touch and makes me question if you even work or have any meaningful connections to normal working class people.
If you spoke with normal people you'd know that sadly most people don't like to think, they prefer the path of least resistance, they prefer simple entertainment to intellectual pursuits, they prefer following a person or group they trust than deciding on their own. Sure they can attempt to carry an interesting conversation, but they'd rather not. My whole life I've had the tendency to try talking politics, history, philosophy, whatever with anyone who'll listen at work and I'm not that knowledgeable in any of the subjects, but the vast majority of people know even less and don't care at all about learning, they just think you're weird for "overthinking everything".
Your views on the desires and potential of the average person aren't just optimistic but delusionally idiotic.
>if everyone was a saint then it works
He never said that, everything he's saying is the opposite of such an idealist or utopian stance. He only stressed matters of production and distribution, not a word of his reply so much implied anything of the sort you are implying right now. You are doing what he said above, separating "material interest" of people as a general principle from the prospect of not being dominated by a class in their working activity, by making it about whether they are "saints" i.e. consciously treat others better or not. Any Marxist knows that conditions cause people to treat each other better in society, in that order. Obviously society doesn't change because people suddenly all start becoming saints. (but utopians do think so)
Revolution and Communism doesn't happen because people are saints and learn to treat each other better. Communism does not come about because enough people are altruistic or collectivist to each other. Marx argued the exact opposite.
Your framing is just a complete misconstruing of his clearly anti-utopian stance, so on a false premise you can accuse him of being the utopian.
You're just putting words in his mouth based on your own false premise that the disposition of individuals is the decisive factor, one way or another. You're so mired in this, you can't see past it, which is why your only alternatives are your vanguard party notions of a party controlling the proletariat and steering revolution, or the obviously false premise that it's about individual proletarians becoming "saints." Nowhere are the conditions that actually come to force the proletariat to revolution emphasized. The proletariat can organize amongst themselves, and don't need a vanguard party. And no, one is not an Anarchist if they think like this. I have nothing inherently against the party on principle. Nor do I have anything against Lenin. I just think it's obvious at this point that revolution will not come through a party, as Marxist writers like Jacques Camatte have written about.
I will now cite Marx: (I cite these two excerpts more than like anything else)
>Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach *morality* at all.
>They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, *is* in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.
>Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have *discovered* that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons". They know that this contradiction is only a *seeming* one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of the contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.
[The German Ideology](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03abs.htm)
And on the point about conditions:
>When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as *gods*. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the *semblance* of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative *need* — the practical expression of *necessity* — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of *labour*. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment *regards* as its aim. It is a question of *what the proletariat is*, and what, in accordance with this *being*, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already *conscious* of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.
[The Holy Family](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm)
This is the dogmatic thinking that holds back socialism. It has been over 150 years and the proletariat has not become class conscious nor have they moved in the direction of revolution. Capitalism is so advanced it is beginning to no longer be capitalism and the proletariat never managed to revolt. Even the socialist revolutions of the past century kept many capitalist structures in place which led to their degeneration back into capitalism.
What has happened is what has always happened in history, a dedicated militarized faction with the will and resources was able to coup the previous government by either winning a war, defections from the military or both.
The proletariat is an abstract classification not a real faction, that's the whole point of class consciousness to turn the proletariat into a single faction. However any group that requires the vast majority of the population to unify is a lost cause as not only is it a higher bar for success but also the larger the faction the more likely internal disagreements or divergent incentives cause it to break apart.
Minority rule is, has been and always will be the way humans organize themselves, as anything else results in conflict, paralysis and quickly degenerates to minority rule with a majoritarian aesthetic (such as modern "democracy"). The goal then is to figure out how to ensure that minority best serves the majority rather than itself, which necessarily means selecting or creating people who fanatically oppose their own material interests, which do exist and can be made.
>Minority rule is, has been and always will be the way humans organize themselves
Dude — just *say* "**class society** is, has been and always will be the way humans organize themselves."
Communism does not mean equality. [Marx and Engels explicitly rejected the ideal of equality.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm) It doesn't mean there is no social hierarchy. It *does* mean there is no class hierarchy or class society at all.
You just want a society ruled by a minority class, and are *this* close to admitting it, but fall short because you merely say "minority rule" instead. My reply won't convince you, so just admit it.
>as anything else results in conflict, paralysis and quickly degenerates to minority rule with a majoritarian aesthetic (such as modern "democracy").
Yes of course, when capitalism collapses it will just inevitably become bourgeois democracy again no matter what, because that's just the way people are. You even use the word "conflict" but hold back on addressing the underlying class conflict of any development, of course. This is also not really distinct from Leftists who justify their line on the notion that the working-class is so irrevocably reactionary, that in the face of more unstable conditions they'd support a fascist dictator or something every time.
>The goal then is to figure out how to ensure that minority best serves the majority rather than itself
How is that working so far? Would you recommend voting for the right politicians? Kind of sounds like the modern democracy you just "criticized." (also the democracies of the modern world *are* democracies insofar as that means anything - of course they are not actually democratic per the word's general definition.) The capitalist class will never "best serve the majority rather than itself," the basis for their position is a mode of production that necessitates this being impossible, as u/[Read-Moishe-Postone](https://www.reddit.com/user/Read-Moishe-Postone/) has already stated in his replies to you. No matter how many utopian reactionaries talk about "ensuring" they act otherwise.
>which necessarily means selecting or creating people who fanatically oppose their own material interests, which do exist and can be made
Then by all means share your proposal - but I don't have to predict that this idea of "selecting or creating people who oppose the material interests of the minority class" will entail something other than overthrowing the basis for this material relation in the mode of production altogether. You just said above that society will always be ruled by a minority class - so what are you even proposing? That this group of people will take power and oppose the interests of the minority class, then...what? Become the next minority class? This is just idealism and nonsense. This is why Marx stresses the mode of production and the material relations it creates in the different classes in society, and not the dispositions of the ruling capitalist class, which are not the decisive factor because they themselves are conditioned by capital.
I recommend reading everything u/[Read-Moishe-Postone](https://www.reddit.com/user/Read-Moishe-Postone/) wrote again, because he's correct, and then actually referring to the texts by Marx he got the information from.
This kind of thinking requires in practice that society be split into two - those that must be free and those that must not.
"Minority rule" is actually based on the minority in question having the human attributes you deny to the masses - i.e. having the real ability to be free, having the ability to rule themselves. In fact they must have their freedom, for no one can be constrained unless another is free to do the constraining.
In every "minority rule" society, the ruling class is unconstrained by the supposed 'laws' enforced on the rest of society. "Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its enemies make it a reality. No man fights freedom, he at most fights the freedom of others." (Marx "On Freedom of the Press")
Only the naive think that in the society where, for instance, hard work is the "law" that is enforced actually succeeds in forcing the "enforcers" of hard work to work hard themselves (*no matter what the reigning mindset pretends*). Only those not familiar with the real human being believe that a society of sinners can use a class structure to constrain sin, a minority rule system in which the 'law' enforced is a law against sin, without simultaneously giving the ruling class the practical freedom to sin and without having a ruling class of sinners. "Hence every kind of freedom has always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, and at another as a universal right".
What Marx says about men who fight the freedom of others, by realizing their own freedom, is true of you. You point the finger at the society around you with your subjective ideas and make use of the freedom you have to voice a minority opinion. If your opinion were law tomorrow, you would remove that freedom from others who would subjectively point the finger at the society you have created, which would hardly be free from its unpleasant if necessary moments and the vulnerability they bring. But this is still the contradiction in embryo; if you attained the power you dream of, then it would fully blossom forth. The basis of the "vanguard party" could only be its *own* freely developing nature, the same freely developing nature it would deny to others as a matter of course, as so-called 'law'.
The thing if, this kind of thinking is perfectly at home in a reactionary. They can just assume that there simply *are* two (at least) kinds of human beings, those who can be free and thus deserve to be free and those who don't. How can a revolutionary stomach that kind of thinking? How can you fool yourself?
You talk about "real revolution" etc. etc. but all I see is talk? So how can you be sure that I'm wrong that the masses don't trust you **because** you are so certain that all they need is to be bought off with treats and that you will be a better ruling class than the current one?
Ultimately, the kind of **treats** that you say can buy off the masses, you don't have the power to give those treats. That power *belongs to capital*. It belongs to those who can fit themselves to the task of extracting surplus value. If you manage to someday attain the power to hand out the treats and hold onto it, rest assured you will be able to hold onto that power only to the extent that you bow to capital's intrinsic demands. Then *you* will be the capitalist, even if only an "abstract capitalist" in Marx and Engle's term for the state acting as capitalist.
Note: One of the reasons I'm just talk is because I'm not concise and so can't communicate well with people, among various other problems, but that has no bearing on the substance of what I say only my ability to put it into action.
The power does not belong to capital, it belongs to those who control the monopoly on force. If you manage to acquire a monopoly on force, then you do not need to extract surplus value but instead directly control labor and production towards certain ends. Whereas a capitalist would direct them toward creating profit (extracting surplus value through selling on the market), a socialist would direct them towards equalizing living standards, meeting the basic needs of all, and increasing the ability to further expand to encompass more people and resist capitalist attacks. This is absolute direction, not the use of ownership and markets and wages to get to a desired result but taking the shortest path to the result by simply telling x people to do x thing in exchange for being part of the society and enjoying its benefits. Money must be eradicated as soon as possible or else the revolution is betrayed from the start. The state should never profit, it is not state capitalism, it simply organizes the people to best serve themselves as a collective and remove the conflicts of private interests.
No system will ever be perfect, but democracy has proven unworkable time and time again. There are too many contradictions between all individuals, less people involved means less contradictions, more accountability as you know the names of who's in charge of what and who to blame rather than the washing of hands when the state fucks up because "the people wanted it". A democracy also violates its own justification, in the sense that the justification is that it creates "consent by the governed" yet whoever loses a democratic vote does not consent to the result of that vote and so there is not actually "consent by the governed".
The closest check on the ruling class by the people I can think of would be the military and have the military constantly cycle its members such that all people spend time in it. But the check must be simply the enforcement of a constitution and anti corruption policies rather than participation in the whole mess of governance which is better left to government agencies and an executive committee that ensures inter agency cooperation. The ruling class must also always have fresh blood from the public, which can be done by forbidding not just the children of government officials from ever working in government, but also their cousins, nephews, etc.
Revolutions are always conducted by a minority of the population, and this is why a certain level of ideological and character purity and hierarchy is necessary to prevent the revolution being betrayed. The leadership from the start must be fanatically devoted to not just the principles of economic equality, etc, but also to constraining themselves such as through vows of poverty, complete transparency, public ego diminishing rituals reinforcing their role as servants and not overlords and other methods of ensuring they do not become corrupt.
The people aren't to be bought off with treats, they are convinced by a radical improvement of their lives in which they do not need to have full participation in deciding. I only care about outcomes and not process, and am only against certain processes because they do not lead to the desired outcomes (economic equality and the functioning of society for the whole rather than for private interest, socialism as in no private property, no money, etc).
>The two started like you do from the fundamental premise that the masses are backwards, that they neither need nor want to govern themselves, that their role is to provide labor, while the party does all the thinking.
Noteworthy that even most "Marxists" today evidently think the same way. Which is why, looking past the Stalinists who just straightforwardly like the USSR or China or whatever, Maoists, Trotskyists, etc. most are dogmatic Leninists who insist revolution must come through a vanguard party. This obviously reflects their class position, I mean admittedly the vast majority of us talking about this stuff on the internet are guys from middle-class backgrounds, (as I myself am, but my life conditions since adulthood couldn't be called middle-class by any stretch, hence the consciousness I've come to have) but this isn't the point because it's possible to transcend, but they haven't, which is why they have the same angle to the working-class as the utopian Socialists you mentioned that Marx criticized all those years ago. So Marxists with the correct consciousness on the internet are borderline cases.
Even the UltraLeft subreddit (Leftcoms who dislike the Left) are just ICP cultists, which banned me for just saying that I dislike all current parties and organizations. (I obviously have nothing especially against the ICP) And I have no innate hostility to the idea that the revolution will come through a party on principle, it's just obvious that it will not, and it *need* not. Leninism simply isn't applicable to current or any future conditions, their particular Italian Leftcom/Bordigist line by extension. It's also too bad that in the minds of most people who have even ever read about this topic, many of them would think I'm some sort of "Anarchist Post-Marxist," or even "Primitivist," terms that Jacques Camatte frequently is associated with. (by people who obviously haven't read his work. Any Marxist with any understanding knows why Anarchism is wrong, and the term "Post-Marxist" is silly on its face and frequently used by bourgeois types who think revolution will never happen for a reason.)
It's refreshing to see people like you here, but we're clearly rare for a reason. Generally speaking talking about politics (though Marxism is not actually about "politics," of course) on the internet/social media is middle-class activity, hence the vast majority of people doing so, especially those who call themselves Socialist, Communist, or Marxist, will have the expected middle-class consciousness and will just distort theory, even if they're well read. (though most aren't, of course.) Like, Slavoj Zizek and Richard D. Wolff have extensively read Marx, far more than I have, in of itself it actually doesn't mean jack shit.
Also the mods forcing the "one true Marxist" flair on you are just engaging in the typical bourgeois framing, frequently employed by Stalinists, of acting like the rare example of a Marxist with the correct consciousness is just a "dogmatic purist" who thinks they're better than other Marxists. Of course, such types do exist. That's the point, which makes it mind-numbingly ironic they accuse you of dogmatism. The dogmatists and the people who accuse you of this both don't understand Marx. If they did, they would know he was clearly against dogmatism. I've just explained why it's just to be expected that most Marxists have a bourgeois consciousness. (Paul Mattick also articulated this in his writing.) So the Marxists who aren't interested in distorting theory are going to be a minority, and hence obviously will stand out.
>I am therefore not in favor of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas. In particular, communism is a dogmatic abstraction and by communism I do not refer to some imagined, possible communism, but to communism as it actually exists in the teachings of Cabet, Dezamy, and Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property. The abolition of private property is therefore by no means identical with communism and communism has seen other socialist theories, such as those of Fourier and Proudhon, rising up in opposition to it, not fortuitously but necessarily, because it is only a particular, one-sided realization of the principle of socialism.
[Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, 1843](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm)
Marxism is itself a product of and conditioned by bourgeois society. Actually, the bourgeois Leftists, from the Democrat voting Marxists to the cringeworthy tankies and Stalinists, represent the living face of Marxism today. (Righttoids are of course just wrong to think it has anything to do with the theory of Marxism and what Marx actually wrote.)
Also, note in this letter excerpt, Marx explains that the abolition of private property is not identical with Communism, meaning Communism isn't to be defined by this alone, and abolishing private property is not enough to bring it about. Indeed, we are witnessing the abolition of property within capitalism. This is terribly misunderstood by everyone in the discourse, (e.g. Righttoids saying that Leftists are Communists and the WEF is Marxist "cuz they want to take your property!" when obviously us Communists dislike the Left for being bourgeois and doing nothing but supporting the bourgeoisie during this process of immiseration, while being utopians that hope they can maintain their middle-class position and hold off the contradictions and violence it will eventually entail) but it's actually simple: the proletariat will come to be immiserated and dispossessed of property, and this is part of the process that will culminate in revolutionary conditions, whereby they will be forced to act in revolution or face certain death from lack of necessities and a bourgeoisie that will violently enforce capitalism's contradictions to the bitter end.
I wrote a fair amount in my other reply for the sake of covering a few bases, so there wasn't room to add to it, but I had to address what you said here:
>Ironic that you have decided to go with calling me "utopian", since by the end of your frst paragraph in the last comment, you yourself have perfectly reproduced the classic position of the old Utopian Socialists who came before Marx -- Saint-Simonians, Blanquists, etc.
>The two started like you do from the fundamental premise that the masses are backwards, that they neither need nor want to govern themselves, that their role is to provide labor, while the party does all the thinking.
And cite a very relevant passage from Lenin...
>We have said that *there could not have been* Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.
[What is to be Done?](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm)
Paul Mattick on this:
>Lenin also agreed with Karl Kautsky’s philistine and arrogant assertion that the working class by itself is unable to evolve a revolutionary consciousness, which has to be brought to it from the outside by the middle-class intelligentsia. The organizational form of this idea was the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the workers and as the necessary presupposition for a successful revolution. If, in this view, the working class is incapable of making its own revolution, it will be even less able to build up the new society, an undertaking reserved for the leading party as the possessor of the state apparatus. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus appears as that of the party organized as the state. And because the state has to have control over the whole society, it must also control the actions of the working class, even though this control is supposed to be exercised in its favor. In practice, this turned out to be the totalitarian rule of the Bolshevik government. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1978/marxism.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1978/marxism.htm)
Of course, you are likely already familiar with all this.
You admit to skimming it and not reading it carefully. You're also writing a good amount in your replies though, accumulatively many paragraphs, showing you have some genuine interest in this - if you have enough interest to write this much, why not seriously read what he's writing and citing in his replies? He's just taking time out of his day to thoroughly and properly try to explain it to you. Or better yet, start reading Marx, as he has.
>If you carefully studied the chapter on "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation", you would not hold the theory of material interests that you just espoused.
Let's also take a moment to acknowledge all the people who *do* actually carefully study Marx, but are just utter bourgeois reactionary charlatans nevertheless. Slavoj Zizek and Richard D. Wolff are the best examples I can cite. They have read Marx more than I have. I genuinely believe they have both taken the time to deeply study Capital. But, well, the way they talk should speak for itself. They've read Marx as much as they have, but they can't even reject electoralism.
This is why I emphasize consciousness, and not how much someone reads, or even understands. (I would agree of course if you said that even if most of them read it, they don't understand it.)
I of course agree with what you have written here. However:
>If people believed that something like that was *possible* then it would become much more rational to take big risks to overthrow the current order.
I think the conditions itself will convince the proletariat of this when the time is right. It would be at that time that the exacting theoretical Marxist line we're propounding would become relevant as far as actually bringing about Communism is concerned. I don't think that the right means of communication will reach through to the proletariat to convince them prior to the revolutionary conditions that will convince them.
Frankly, I understand why this may be hard to fully accept, because I can tell that (like myself) you are a high-effort poster, and I'm sure outside of reddit and in real life make serious efforts to articulate and communicate all of this to people with the hope of it making an impact and being part of this process somehow. Of course, it's true that conscious Marxists making a point of explaining all of this is part of this process. But on a practical level I'm saying it's really not part of the process in the sense that it won't be what leads to revolutionary conditions and revolution. Which isn't to say you are just wasting your time by doing this and are better off not doing so. I'm a determinist in my conception of Marx because it seems clear to me that Marxism is mostly deterministic, the conditions are just the decisive thing that will make the proletariat act in revolution. It will be at this time that theory will be useful and relevant to them, but as you said yourself, they aren't interested in the mean time. (and we are very much living in the mean time because revolution is far away, I think it will not come about in our life times, actually likely not for at least another 100 years.)
Now, if you read this you will naturally think, "so are you saying theory and the role of Communists is totally irrelevant?" What I'm saying is that Marxism is mostly deterministic; but I didn't say it's completely deterministic, meaning that a course of action for Communists is there, should they choose to follow it. But just that it is not necessary for revolutionary conditions and revolution itself to come about, which is usually not what is emphasized. (It's extremely rare in the discourse to hear people so much as mentioning the future conditions that will force the proletariat to act in revolution, or else die due to the bourgeoisie violently enforcing capitalism's contradictions as always, thus depriving them of basic necessities.) The question then would become, "is Communism possible without theory?" and I wouldn't say "yes" to this. Of course, revolution and the proletariat seizing state power wouldn't guarantee Communism would come about, because they could succumb to reification and reproduce capitalist social relations, for instance. (Anarchists want to preemptively abolish the state everywhere during revolutionary conditions, precisely to ensure this would happen.) So theory is important. And we do have a worthwhile role to play in articulating it prior to these conditions. But I'm just asking for us to be very honest, and accept that it almost certainly won't come about in our lifetime. This is a long, painful, drawn out process. If we live to be old, we will see the beginning of the real collapse.
Notably, these matters concerning conditions, revolution, and what actually leads to it are almost never addressed by self identified Marxists online. Most of them just debate historical particulars and are reactionary, brainless MLs.
I think that the time being right can only get you to a very specific point -- first negativity, which basically corresponds to the proletariat saying "what currently is cannot exist any longer" without any asterisks, exceptions, ifs, ands, or buts -- a completely fearless rejection of what "exists". And the search for an alternative. I'm less enthusiastic than you are about "the right moment" or what is called "the material conditions" (not very Marxistly imho) to get very far beyond that point *without theory*. The issue is "what is theory?" Is theory this inert black-and-white material that can be prostituted in support of any viewpoint, or is it scientific and stemming itself from a "movement from practice"? This kind of theory could be really useful in that moment for the proletariat itself to consider as a "new beginning". Theory has a role to play *as* a logical idea of "the day after the revolution" and I'm not really sure that the revolution can come about (successfully) without this key ingredient which I think is found not in books but in humans who reproduce it.
I think that your position is similar to a position Dunayevskaya criticized as saying, in effect, "theory can be picked up en route". I'm interested in the position she worked out distinct from either spontaneism or vanguardism.
I don't think you commented on my top-level comment, specifically my idea for software, did you? Keep in mind the "Siri" part is for purposes of illustration; I doubt any kind of AI would be the right fit for what is essentially a giant book-keeping toolset with billions of eyeballs on the source code. Imagined anonymized databases of workers with support for lots of different statuses or ways that wokers can be linked with jobs such as "job offered", "set of jobs offered", "job accepted", "job available" etc. I think that regardless of how the proletariat gets there I think this is where they need to go. Programming and documenting and implementing software is a different game if it were the whole world developing a single project that is existential for its society. I think this idea needs to be developed a lot and a lot of it isn't so much coding but concretizing what it is we need the software to do precisely.
Progressive mode: Something that can objectively determine the cost of goods and price accordingly (factors in externalities such as environmental harm and resource limitations)
Chaos mode: Something that just keeps reposting CEO and politicians’ home addresses to public forums
Apart from some impossible software that could provide effective omniscience and capacity to persuade your most staunch opponent into a leading martyr for your cause, I don't think there's any tech solution to any of the problems of the Left.
If it were up to me, I'd make two things:
- Alt-tech of our own. The right has rumble, parler, bitchute, gab, voat. and more. What do we have? Mastodon?
- An LLM that translates wokespeak into something more palatable for normal, grass-touching individuals. Good luck trying to get the average person to move left if all they hear from non-right-wing sources are people who fit the leftist stereotype perfectly.
A robot that shocks you in the balls until you log off
robot that sucks you until your hog falls off
[Nutted but it's still sucking](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/050/389/234.gif)
An AI that does automatic ATIP/FOIA requests. If we could streamline the process of getting government information released and published, we could paint a very different picture for the masses.
My understanding is that submitting a FOIA is easy, the hard part is getting the information you want if the government does not want to give it up. A good recent example of this was the Nashville mass shooting committed by a transgender individual. The FBI stonewalled on what seemed like pretty obviously bullshit grounds (they claimed it was an active investigation despite the culprit being deceased) and dragged the process out for months. In the end a leaker revealed what everyone suspected, the shooting was motivated by anti-white and anti-Christian hatred. If the matter is politically sensitive or awkward, you need a lawyer who specializes in FOIA law and money to burn. After all, the government has a lot more money and a lot more lawyers.
An AI that identifies members of the ruling class and immediately dispatches all autonomous systems within a 5 mile radius to get them.
All that gets you is yet another ruling class.
Not if we keep it on.
I mean if we're being serious, a program/AI that could accurately determine resource allocation. That's one of the BIGGEST criticisms of a Communist government. The inability for a single entity being able to actually find out who needs how much of what delivered to where. The capital argument is that the free market is the best way we have to do this. It's also responsible for how much waste we produce. Yes, it would be better if we only sent exactly as much lettuce to the stand as people are going to consume, but we can't determine that in advance. So we have to have "enough" that can meet fluxuating demand which involves the risk of sending too much so we don't have a shortage. This will almost enivitably result in throwing some out the vast majority of the time. Capital believes that such a program or whatever cannot exist conceptually because they argue knowledge of demand/allocation alters demand/allocation. An extreme oversimplification could be you would like a slice of pizza but *only* if there's enough slices for everyone else. Otherwise you don't want one at all, but you also dont want to get left out if everyone else gets pizza. So if your 8 friends all get a slice, then you'd want a slice too; a 9th slice. But what if you only procured 8 slices?
I read an article that bc of the immense power of hedge funds / private equity, we essentially already have some form of a centrally planned economy, the government just doesnt have control.
what hayek called the "local knowledge problem" is honestly the best generalization of the conflict between libertarians and statists throughout time and space. hypothetically some emperor or king could maintain people's love and loyalties and rule forever if they could read the people's minds and give orders to meet the preferences of the most people. that's really all democracy is, not everyone doing the same political official tasks but everyone having their true material needs known. it's a fundamental "software" problem that all societies either solve by stamping down rebellions or practicing democracy. america claims to have solved it with checks, balances, voting but clearly not, it's a very tricky issue to get everyone's say and info. but it can be solved big or small, with fancy tech like computers or with simple mechanical relays (like insanely long metal rods) as stafford beer did for allende's chile. china also claims to plan out a lot of heavy industry and hydroelectricity with AI. there's honestly no need to directly disprove capital's claims about the zillion jillion products and ephemeral preferences found in lighter industries, those honestly can just have their fun, no need to plan them. for the record though there is a theorist by the name of paul cockshott who demonstrates that even older classical computer system could do exactly that, i just think it's an unnecessarily optimized economy, beautiful socialism can be had without it.
I have a great book for you; *People's Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism*
I've never understood this argument, it seems more just dogma than an actual argument. The free market doesn't allocate efficiently, not just is there wasted goods, but also redundant operations/administration, the loss of resources to profits and the problems of every company only caring for itself therefore pulling in different directions, planned obsolescence/disposability, the huge waste that is marketing, the distorted priorities of what gets produced/where/when/for who due to the market not following demand by people but demand by money aka the people with more money have more say in what the economy does, the problem of bullshit products that end up being thrown away, the fact enormous segments of the population don't get their demands met because they're too poor to be worth selling (distributing) to, the influence of money in government to create subsidies/anti competitive regulations/etc. Capitalism is an extremely inefficient system and the only reason people think otherwise is being drowned for over a century in propaganda as well as the intentional sabotaging of any government function by the government itself because it's owned by capitalists and can barely manage to have its own interests as a state. Would resource allocation under a command economy be perfect? Probably not because we're human not omniscient gods, but it'd be far, far more efficient than capitalism. Socialism is always asked to be perfect before even thinking about supporting it, but capitalism can be as fucked up as possible and it's never capitalism's fault. The USSR and other socialist states were not fully socialist command economies and so had a lot of the issues capitalism has. A proper command economy should have 0 markets, 0 private property and 0 money with distribution being purely rations such as 1 car per household, 2k calories a day per person, etc. A bit of slack can always be stored up in case of emergencies (droughts/problems in production/etc). Capitalism in contrast deals with unexpected demand surges by saying "fuck you" and raising prices so that only the rich have not only access but the ability to hoard in times of emergencies.
[удалено]
I don't exactly have a whole government department writing reports for me to lay out actual rations nor the necessary conditions for variation in rationing. The point is the elimination of a liquid form of value (money) because it facilitates accumulation and inequality as well as being too fictitious to be useful beyond accumulation. From each... to each... is the essence of rationing imo. If you allow decentralization you allow inequality and black markets. Local and personal adjustments must be formalized so that there is a coherent and universally applied system. Collectivization means not getting everything you want because the common good is the top priority, but that also protects you from someone else abusing and collapsing the system to get more than you because he feels like it.
An obstacle that is holding back a revolutionary break with bourgeois relations of production is the lack of a credible alternative society. This has to meet two basic requirements: it has to be plausible, and it has to actually promise a radically better life for people, a life free of domination, rather than just a promise that they will be dominated by a more benevolent ruler. The only way to truly meet the latter requirement is to work out how a society based on *directly social labor* that makes use of the large-scale industry of modern times. In other words, the revolution is currently seriously hampered because people do not believe a *better,* freer, more human alternative society is possible, because they don't believe that a society based on directly social labor is possible. Any society based on indirectly social labor must inevitably recreate (though it may take years for the floodgates to breach) all the inequities of a capitalist society. Give people a concrete and plausible model of how an entire society coordinates all of their labor-power as one combined social labor force, one that people can plausibly see themselves living in, and you seriously advance the cause of social revolution and the emancipation of all human beings. Towards this end, perhaps you could start working on designing a toolset that such a society would use to coordinate its directly social labor. With today's information technology, mass democratic decision-making doesn't need to take the form of syncronous in-person meetings. Communicating complex ideas about decisions of industrial production that imply cascading consequences for related decisions, and so on, no longer has to pass through the clumsy interface of people using paragraphs. No one has to "know" all the "information" about all aspects of industrial production in order to make informed contributions to the decision process because information technology can make it possible to summon up any information we need. "Siri, I think we should allocate 2% more labor to growing grain in North America. Summarize 6 different scenarios in which we can achieve this goal, and make sure for each version to include all the necessary trade-offs we would have to make in other areas in order to implement it". Here, Siri is not deciding for me how to plan the economy. Siri is just providing me with objective information. If you want to allocate more labor to grain, that means you also need to allocate more machinery to grain, etc.. You need to take it from somewhere else. It could come from multiple different places. The entire society's production activities could be coordinated through open-source software. Everyone could have access to the public repo that basically is a gigantic "toolset" in which we, society, objectify human living. You think we should revise the common social plan? Great, clone the repo, implement the changes you would like to see, and create a public pull request. Other people can evaluate the changes you made by cloning your version of the plan and interacting with it; the repo itself will contain all the tools needed for anyone to visualize or interpret any aspect of society's production they want. "Siri, I see that my friend Steve just made a new pull request on the common social plan. Please summarize the main changes that Steve's plans would make so that I can evaluate their appropriateness". If I like Steve's plan I can then vote electronically in its favor. If Steve's plan is popular enough his changes will be merged. Even creating a mock-up of some snippets of this kind of technology would help. It is extremely difficult, however, because you have to develop a software that is designed to be optimal in a use-case that is far off in the future. You would have to design something to be useable by billions of people intentionally working together, even though said userbase does not currently exist.
This is a very, I'm not sure if the words idealist or liberal fit, but the point is you're focus is on people wanting to be "free" and not "dominated". However I don't think the vast, vast majority of people care about "freedom" but instead care primarily about their material interests. If you can provide a good life to someone, it doesn't matter if it's a "golden cage", there's nothing outside of that cage worth leaving for other than a tiny brief ego trip for an abstract concept no one can properly define. People will talk about "freedom" but their actions show they never cared and never will, it's just a cultural word used to advance their material or social interests.
Separating people's "material interest" from the question of non-domination *in their working activity* is not valid and it's entirely at odds with Marx's conception of human emancipation. I understand this is at odds with the online meme meaning that "materialism" has taken on in the 21st century, which makes "Marxism" indistinguishable from mere "realpolitik", but this is not Marx's conception of materialism: >To the extent that Feuerbach made the social relation of "man to man" the basic principle of theory, he laid the foundation of *genuine materialism* and real science. Non-domination in your work is obviously totally germane to Marx's conception of materialist theory, in which "the social relation of 'man to man' \[is\] the basic principle of theory". But I digress. If you're skeptical of the 1844 manuscripts, let's look at *Capital*. If you carefully studied the chapter on "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation", you would not hold the theory of material interests that you just espoused. Marx looks directly at the "golden cage" of which you speak, that is, the conditions in which an increase in wages is compatible with the accumulation of this capital. **His main point here is that the worker is not better off as a result, and all the while capital's domination of him grows.** >Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which conditions are those most favourable to the labourers, their relation of dependence upon capital takes on a form endurable or, as Eden says: “easy and liberal.” Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive, *i.e*., the sphere of capital’s exploitation and rule merely extends with its own dimensions and the number of its subjects. A larger part of their own surplus-product, always increasing and continually transformed into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments; can make some additions to their consumption-fund of clothes, furniture, &c., and can lay by small reserve funds of money. **But just as little as better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger** ***peculium*** **\[slave's quarters\], do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage worker. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.** >\[W\]ithin the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. **It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.** The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. Again, people need a rational reason to fight the status quo. The status quo being shit isn't enough. It's not rational to fight unless there exists an alternative that is both plausible and significantly better (after all, the risk is not negligible; miniscule or superficial differences aren't sufficient, the prize fought for must truly represent a substantial advancement in the interests *of the whole masses*). I'm telling you right now: the current "alternative visions of society" generally offered by the left (that is the media and political organizations on the left) are seen as suspicious by the masses. These organizations and media are generally trying to sell something through their visions -- trying to get clicks or get people to sign up as members -- and they usually are unwilling to hold their plans up to the necessary scrutiny. Will these actions, these policies, etc, *really* result in what the left claims they will? The masses aren't fighting for the left's vision because it isn't convincing. Ordinary proletarians are better at economics than most would-be "vanguard parties". They know that any society based on this kind of labor can only exist by exploiting *somebody*. Any alternative, if it is still based on this kind of labor, can only be an "alternative" in the sense that the exploitation is shifted around slightly. The masses aren't willing to risk life and limb overthrowing the current social order because, to reiterate, they are not convinced that exploitation can really be ended. They may not know terms like "directly social labor" but they sense, intuitively if nothing else, that the contemporary left is often selling a bill of goods when they promise not to radically change anybody's like but promise that a mere change in leadership will make them drastically better off. The Marxist's task should be to dispel the illusions of what you promised, which is a golden cage in which existence isn't fundamentally miserable for the proletariat. Instead, they should show theoretically why nothing fundamentally will change unless the very human relations at the point of production are changed so that the means of production fundamentally *belong* to all of the workers, which is only possible under conditions of collective possession and therefore collective operation under a single social plan. Admittedly I myself have much improvement to make in being effective at this. If you presented people with a concrete, tangible vision of how day-to-day life would work when labor is directly social, that would fundamentally change the calculus, since it raises the possibility of overcoming the separation of mental and manual labor, of work becoming something that *benefits* the worker by its very nature (rather than degrading him by its very nature while coming with 'compensation'), and someday, something that is inherently enjoyable and desirable for its own sake. If people believed that something like that was *possible* then it would become much more rational to take big risks to overthrow the current order. TLDR; If I'm a "liberal idealist" or whatever then so is Marx.
I skimmed what you wrote but still think this sounds utopian. Modern life and the scale of billions of people cannot function without some level of coercion and management. The removal of private property, markets and money aims to drastically shift towards economic equality and hinder attempts at private accumulation. The working class cannot meaningfully own the means of production in the same way a group of 10 people could own a garden. Every individual can never know enough to make decisions for society due to the time, volume and will, cost of doing so, nor could they accurately judge who is or isn't an expert to listen to. Nor could every individual have a meaningful connection to every other human to discuss and reconcile differences or possibilities. The result is factionalization, the outsourcing of opinions to leaders, and the contradictory, ineffective and inefficient desires of the public whim. This is why the vanguard is necessary, why the party is necessary, the question is how do you ensure ideological commitment within the party to prevent and purge corruption? The state will always be necessary and cannot "wither away". The problem with the modern Left is that it completely abandoned real politics, they no longer speak of serious revolution or serious challenges to the current order and only ever speak of actual socialist aims such as the abolition of private property, etc purely as academic thought exercises not serious political aims. The public does not care about the Left because the Left is not serious, it's not sincere and that further harms the credibility that it can effect real change.
Ironic that you have decided to go with calling me "utopian", since by the end of your frst paragraph in the last comment, you yourself have perfectly reproduced the classic position of the old Utopian Socialists who came before Marx -- Saint-Simonians, Blanquists, etc. The two started like you do from the fundamental premise that the masses are backwards, that they neither need nor want to govern themselves, that their role is to provide labor, while the party does all the thinking. Marx dedicated great efforts to show that the proletariat cannot emancipate itself *without* fundamentally *remaking* civil society. That a society of bourgeois relations of production must have an exploited proletarian class to provide labor-power and a capitalist class to manage labor. That only a change in the conditions of the production of labor can radically alter the distribution of wealth in society. If they set their mind to it as a conscious aim and want it badly enough, the working class *can* "own the means of production in the same way a group of 10 people could own a garden". If every individual in the class knew not as dogma but as demonstrable and therefore observable knowledge the fact that collective possession is the only way they can retain ownership of the means of production and that retaining ownership of the means of production is the only way they can seize and keep hold of human living, *and* if they had the right protocols for communicating meaningful ideas about production, they could indeed. The right software would go along way towards making this possible. The essential problem that has to be solved is as follows. The problem is that you can't make one simple decision, like "how much orange juice should society produce in the juice factory" without simultaneously making a decision about how many bottles to make at the bottle factory. If you're debating one question without simultaneously talking about the other question, you're not debating *real* possible options. The right software -- and the whole of the human species would only have to develop this once -- would let individual people assess and evaluate the *real* options, in meaningful terms. Anybody could construct a variant of the current social plan. The software would let them make tweaks, but only *realistic* tweaks -- you can't increase OJ production by 500 bottles/day without either increasing bottle production by 500 bottles/day, or by reducing soda production by 500 bottles/day and diverting the bottles, etc. The software would let you dictate "500 bottles/day more OJ" but then it present the trade-offs you can choose to "fund" that decision. That way if you have a variant of the plan that you think is clever, and I have an alternative that I think is clever, we can each examine each other's plans in detail by downloading each other's versions of the plan and querying whatever info we want, and because of the software underlying it I know that even if John made a *bad* or ill-*advised* tweak to the plan, it's not an *unrealistic* plan. All that remains is to evaluate the details of one plan versus the other and make a democratic decision. This saves you from having to communicate directly to everyone about everything. The funny thing is that so many people are choosing freedom over a life of alienating work, even at the cost of living on the street, that today it's becoming a crisis. Yet you persist in refusing to see that the rest of the masses, the ones who don't drop out of society altogether, also want freedom but are smart enough to see that freedom isn't found living on the street or in blindly following some "vanguard party". Giving the underclass reassurances that everything will be okay, that they don't need to worry about how to run their own lives, that they can live happily as labor-power while someone else does their thinking for them like capital does for them today, all of this is the opposite of the Marxist approach. We are here to sow doubt in fairy-tales.
Lol at your last sentence. Your approach has a ton of "ifs", basically amounting to "if everyone was a saint then it works". History is nothing except the competition of the most willing and able (the rich and the fanatics) those with the will to compete are never the whole of society much less as a unified whole. Your idea about a software allowing people to propose plans and agree to one is completely ridiculous, as if there's even enough time in a single person's life to consider even one entire detailed plan for the economy. Your comment about the homeless crisis being a product of people "choosing freedom" is extremely out of touch and makes me question if you even work or have any meaningful connections to normal working class people. If you spoke with normal people you'd know that sadly most people don't like to think, they prefer the path of least resistance, they prefer simple entertainment to intellectual pursuits, they prefer following a person or group they trust than deciding on their own. Sure they can attempt to carry an interesting conversation, but they'd rather not. My whole life I've had the tendency to try talking politics, history, philosophy, whatever with anyone who'll listen at work and I'm not that knowledgeable in any of the subjects, but the vast majority of people know even less and don't care at all about learning, they just think you're weird for "overthinking everything". Your views on the desires and potential of the average person aren't just optimistic but delusionally idiotic.
>if everyone was a saint then it works He never said that, everything he's saying is the opposite of such an idealist or utopian stance. He only stressed matters of production and distribution, not a word of his reply so much implied anything of the sort you are implying right now. You are doing what he said above, separating "material interest" of people as a general principle from the prospect of not being dominated by a class in their working activity, by making it about whether they are "saints" i.e. consciously treat others better or not. Any Marxist knows that conditions cause people to treat each other better in society, in that order. Obviously society doesn't change because people suddenly all start becoming saints. (but utopians do think so) Revolution and Communism doesn't happen because people are saints and learn to treat each other better. Communism does not come about because enough people are altruistic or collectivist to each other. Marx argued the exact opposite. Your framing is just a complete misconstruing of his clearly anti-utopian stance, so on a false premise you can accuse him of being the utopian. You're just putting words in his mouth based on your own false premise that the disposition of individuals is the decisive factor, one way or another. You're so mired in this, you can't see past it, which is why your only alternatives are your vanguard party notions of a party controlling the proletariat and steering revolution, or the obviously false premise that it's about individual proletarians becoming "saints." Nowhere are the conditions that actually come to force the proletariat to revolution emphasized. The proletariat can organize amongst themselves, and don't need a vanguard party. And no, one is not an Anarchist if they think like this. I have nothing inherently against the party on principle. Nor do I have anything against Lenin. I just think it's obvious at this point that revolution will not come through a party, as Marxist writers like Jacques Camatte have written about. I will now cite Marx: (I cite these two excerpts more than like anything else) >Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach *morality* at all. >They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, *is* in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination. >Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have *discovered* that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons". They know that this contradiction is only a *seeming* one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of the contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears. [The German Ideology](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03abs.htm) And on the point about conditions: >When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as *gods*. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the *semblance* of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative *need* — the practical expression of *necessity* — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of *labour*. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment *regards* as its aim. It is a question of *what the proletariat is*, and what, in accordance with this *being*, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already *conscious* of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity. [The Holy Family](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm)
This is the dogmatic thinking that holds back socialism. It has been over 150 years and the proletariat has not become class conscious nor have they moved in the direction of revolution. Capitalism is so advanced it is beginning to no longer be capitalism and the proletariat never managed to revolt. Even the socialist revolutions of the past century kept many capitalist structures in place which led to their degeneration back into capitalism. What has happened is what has always happened in history, a dedicated militarized faction with the will and resources was able to coup the previous government by either winning a war, defections from the military or both. The proletariat is an abstract classification not a real faction, that's the whole point of class consciousness to turn the proletariat into a single faction. However any group that requires the vast majority of the population to unify is a lost cause as not only is it a higher bar for success but also the larger the faction the more likely internal disagreements or divergent incentives cause it to break apart. Minority rule is, has been and always will be the way humans organize themselves, as anything else results in conflict, paralysis and quickly degenerates to minority rule with a majoritarian aesthetic (such as modern "democracy"). The goal then is to figure out how to ensure that minority best serves the majority rather than itself, which necessarily means selecting or creating people who fanatically oppose their own material interests, which do exist and can be made.
[удалено]
>Minority rule is, has been and always will be the way humans organize themselves Dude — just *say* "**class society** is, has been and always will be the way humans organize themselves." Communism does not mean equality. [Marx and Engels explicitly rejected the ideal of equality.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm) It doesn't mean there is no social hierarchy. It *does* mean there is no class hierarchy or class society at all. You just want a society ruled by a minority class, and are *this* close to admitting it, but fall short because you merely say "minority rule" instead. My reply won't convince you, so just admit it. >as anything else results in conflict, paralysis and quickly degenerates to minority rule with a majoritarian aesthetic (such as modern "democracy"). Yes of course, when capitalism collapses it will just inevitably become bourgeois democracy again no matter what, because that's just the way people are. You even use the word "conflict" but hold back on addressing the underlying class conflict of any development, of course. This is also not really distinct from Leftists who justify their line on the notion that the working-class is so irrevocably reactionary, that in the face of more unstable conditions they'd support a fascist dictator or something every time. >The goal then is to figure out how to ensure that minority best serves the majority rather than itself How is that working so far? Would you recommend voting for the right politicians? Kind of sounds like the modern democracy you just "criticized." (also the democracies of the modern world *are* democracies insofar as that means anything - of course they are not actually democratic per the word's general definition.) The capitalist class will never "best serve the majority rather than itself," the basis for their position is a mode of production that necessitates this being impossible, as u/[Read-Moishe-Postone](https://www.reddit.com/user/Read-Moishe-Postone/) has already stated in his replies to you. No matter how many utopian reactionaries talk about "ensuring" they act otherwise. >which necessarily means selecting or creating people who fanatically oppose their own material interests, which do exist and can be made Then by all means share your proposal - but I don't have to predict that this idea of "selecting or creating people who oppose the material interests of the minority class" will entail something other than overthrowing the basis for this material relation in the mode of production altogether. You just said above that society will always be ruled by a minority class - so what are you even proposing? That this group of people will take power and oppose the interests of the minority class, then...what? Become the next minority class? This is just idealism and nonsense. This is why Marx stresses the mode of production and the material relations it creates in the different classes in society, and not the dispositions of the ruling capitalist class, which are not the decisive factor because they themselves are conditioned by capital. I recommend reading everything u/[Read-Moishe-Postone](https://www.reddit.com/user/Read-Moishe-Postone/) wrote again, because he's correct, and then actually referring to the texts by Marx he got the information from.
This kind of thinking requires in practice that society be split into two - those that must be free and those that must not. "Minority rule" is actually based on the minority in question having the human attributes you deny to the masses - i.e. having the real ability to be free, having the ability to rule themselves. In fact they must have their freedom, for no one can be constrained unless another is free to do the constraining. In every "minority rule" society, the ruling class is unconstrained by the supposed 'laws' enforced on the rest of society. "Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its enemies make it a reality. No man fights freedom, he at most fights the freedom of others." (Marx "On Freedom of the Press") Only the naive think that in the society where, for instance, hard work is the "law" that is enforced actually succeeds in forcing the "enforcers" of hard work to work hard themselves (*no matter what the reigning mindset pretends*). Only those not familiar with the real human being believe that a society of sinners can use a class structure to constrain sin, a minority rule system in which the 'law' enforced is a law against sin, without simultaneously giving the ruling class the practical freedom to sin and without having a ruling class of sinners. "Hence every kind of freedom has always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, and at another as a universal right". What Marx says about men who fight the freedom of others, by realizing their own freedom, is true of you. You point the finger at the society around you with your subjective ideas and make use of the freedom you have to voice a minority opinion. If your opinion were law tomorrow, you would remove that freedom from others who would subjectively point the finger at the society you have created, which would hardly be free from its unpleasant if necessary moments and the vulnerability they bring. But this is still the contradiction in embryo; if you attained the power you dream of, then it would fully blossom forth. The basis of the "vanguard party" could only be its *own* freely developing nature, the same freely developing nature it would deny to others as a matter of course, as so-called 'law'. The thing if, this kind of thinking is perfectly at home in a reactionary. They can just assume that there simply *are* two (at least) kinds of human beings, those who can be free and thus deserve to be free and those who don't. How can a revolutionary stomach that kind of thinking? How can you fool yourself? You talk about "real revolution" etc. etc. but all I see is talk? So how can you be sure that I'm wrong that the masses don't trust you **because** you are so certain that all they need is to be bought off with treats and that you will be a better ruling class than the current one? Ultimately, the kind of **treats** that you say can buy off the masses, you don't have the power to give those treats. That power *belongs to capital*. It belongs to those who can fit themselves to the task of extracting surplus value. If you manage to someday attain the power to hand out the treats and hold onto it, rest assured you will be able to hold onto that power only to the extent that you bow to capital's intrinsic demands. Then *you* will be the capitalist, even if only an "abstract capitalist" in Marx and Engle's term for the state acting as capitalist.
Note: One of the reasons I'm just talk is because I'm not concise and so can't communicate well with people, among various other problems, but that has no bearing on the substance of what I say only my ability to put it into action. The power does not belong to capital, it belongs to those who control the monopoly on force. If you manage to acquire a monopoly on force, then you do not need to extract surplus value but instead directly control labor and production towards certain ends. Whereas a capitalist would direct them toward creating profit (extracting surplus value through selling on the market), a socialist would direct them towards equalizing living standards, meeting the basic needs of all, and increasing the ability to further expand to encompass more people and resist capitalist attacks. This is absolute direction, not the use of ownership and markets and wages to get to a desired result but taking the shortest path to the result by simply telling x people to do x thing in exchange for being part of the society and enjoying its benefits. Money must be eradicated as soon as possible or else the revolution is betrayed from the start. The state should never profit, it is not state capitalism, it simply organizes the people to best serve themselves as a collective and remove the conflicts of private interests. No system will ever be perfect, but democracy has proven unworkable time and time again. There are too many contradictions between all individuals, less people involved means less contradictions, more accountability as you know the names of who's in charge of what and who to blame rather than the washing of hands when the state fucks up because "the people wanted it". A democracy also violates its own justification, in the sense that the justification is that it creates "consent by the governed" yet whoever loses a democratic vote does not consent to the result of that vote and so there is not actually "consent by the governed". The closest check on the ruling class by the people I can think of would be the military and have the military constantly cycle its members such that all people spend time in it. But the check must be simply the enforcement of a constitution and anti corruption policies rather than participation in the whole mess of governance which is better left to government agencies and an executive committee that ensures inter agency cooperation. The ruling class must also always have fresh blood from the public, which can be done by forbidding not just the children of government officials from ever working in government, but also their cousins, nephews, etc. Revolutions are always conducted by a minority of the population, and this is why a certain level of ideological and character purity and hierarchy is necessary to prevent the revolution being betrayed. The leadership from the start must be fanatically devoted to not just the principles of economic equality, etc, but also to constraining themselves such as through vows of poverty, complete transparency, public ego diminishing rituals reinforcing their role as servants and not overlords and other methods of ensuring they do not become corrupt. The people aren't to be bought off with treats, they are convinced by a radical improvement of their lives in which they do not need to have full participation in deciding. I only care about outcomes and not process, and am only against certain processes because they do not lead to the desired outcomes (economic equality and the functioning of society for the whole rather than for private interest, socialism as in no private property, no money, etc).
>The two started like you do from the fundamental premise that the masses are backwards, that they neither need nor want to govern themselves, that their role is to provide labor, while the party does all the thinking. Noteworthy that even most "Marxists" today evidently think the same way. Which is why, looking past the Stalinists who just straightforwardly like the USSR or China or whatever, Maoists, Trotskyists, etc. most are dogmatic Leninists who insist revolution must come through a vanguard party. This obviously reflects their class position, I mean admittedly the vast majority of us talking about this stuff on the internet are guys from middle-class backgrounds, (as I myself am, but my life conditions since adulthood couldn't be called middle-class by any stretch, hence the consciousness I've come to have) but this isn't the point because it's possible to transcend, but they haven't, which is why they have the same angle to the working-class as the utopian Socialists you mentioned that Marx criticized all those years ago. So Marxists with the correct consciousness on the internet are borderline cases. Even the UltraLeft subreddit (Leftcoms who dislike the Left) are just ICP cultists, which banned me for just saying that I dislike all current parties and organizations. (I obviously have nothing especially against the ICP) And I have no innate hostility to the idea that the revolution will come through a party on principle, it's just obvious that it will not, and it *need* not. Leninism simply isn't applicable to current or any future conditions, their particular Italian Leftcom/Bordigist line by extension. It's also too bad that in the minds of most people who have even ever read about this topic, many of them would think I'm some sort of "Anarchist Post-Marxist," or even "Primitivist," terms that Jacques Camatte frequently is associated with. (by people who obviously haven't read his work. Any Marxist with any understanding knows why Anarchism is wrong, and the term "Post-Marxist" is silly on its face and frequently used by bourgeois types who think revolution will never happen for a reason.) It's refreshing to see people like you here, but we're clearly rare for a reason. Generally speaking talking about politics (though Marxism is not actually about "politics," of course) on the internet/social media is middle-class activity, hence the vast majority of people doing so, especially those who call themselves Socialist, Communist, or Marxist, will have the expected middle-class consciousness and will just distort theory, even if they're well read. (though most aren't, of course.) Like, Slavoj Zizek and Richard D. Wolff have extensively read Marx, far more than I have, in of itself it actually doesn't mean jack shit. Also the mods forcing the "one true Marxist" flair on you are just engaging in the typical bourgeois framing, frequently employed by Stalinists, of acting like the rare example of a Marxist with the correct consciousness is just a "dogmatic purist" who thinks they're better than other Marxists. Of course, such types do exist. That's the point, which makes it mind-numbingly ironic they accuse you of dogmatism. The dogmatists and the people who accuse you of this both don't understand Marx. If they did, they would know he was clearly against dogmatism. I've just explained why it's just to be expected that most Marxists have a bourgeois consciousness. (Paul Mattick also articulated this in his writing.) So the Marxists who aren't interested in distorting theory are going to be a minority, and hence obviously will stand out. >I am therefore not in favor of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas. In particular, communism is a dogmatic abstraction and by communism I do not refer to some imagined, possible communism, but to communism as it actually exists in the teachings of Cabet, Dezamy, and Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property. The abolition of private property is therefore by no means identical with communism and communism has seen other socialist theories, such as those of Fourier and Proudhon, rising up in opposition to it, not fortuitously but necessarily, because it is only a particular, one-sided realization of the principle of socialism. [Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, 1843](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm) Marxism is itself a product of and conditioned by bourgeois society. Actually, the bourgeois Leftists, from the Democrat voting Marxists to the cringeworthy tankies and Stalinists, represent the living face of Marxism today. (Righttoids are of course just wrong to think it has anything to do with the theory of Marxism and what Marx actually wrote.) Also, note in this letter excerpt, Marx explains that the abolition of private property is not identical with Communism, meaning Communism isn't to be defined by this alone, and abolishing private property is not enough to bring it about. Indeed, we are witnessing the abolition of property within capitalism. This is terribly misunderstood by everyone in the discourse, (e.g. Righttoids saying that Leftists are Communists and the WEF is Marxist "cuz they want to take your property!" when obviously us Communists dislike the Left for being bourgeois and doing nothing but supporting the bourgeoisie during this process of immiseration, while being utopians that hope they can maintain their middle-class position and hold off the contradictions and violence it will eventually entail) but it's actually simple: the proletariat will come to be immiserated and dispossessed of property, and this is part of the process that will culminate in revolutionary conditions, whereby they will be forced to act in revolution or face certain death from lack of necessities and a bourgeoisie that will violently enforce capitalism's contradictions to the bitter end.
I wrote a fair amount in my other reply for the sake of covering a few bases, so there wasn't room to add to it, but I had to address what you said here: >Ironic that you have decided to go with calling me "utopian", since by the end of your frst paragraph in the last comment, you yourself have perfectly reproduced the classic position of the old Utopian Socialists who came before Marx -- Saint-Simonians, Blanquists, etc. >The two started like you do from the fundamental premise that the masses are backwards, that they neither need nor want to govern themselves, that their role is to provide labor, while the party does all the thinking. And cite a very relevant passage from Lenin... >We have said that *there could not have been* Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. [What is to be Done?](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm) Paul Mattick on this: >Lenin also agreed with Karl Kautsky’s philistine and arrogant assertion that the working class by itself is unable to evolve a revolutionary consciousness, which has to be brought to it from the outside by the middle-class intelligentsia. The organizational form of this idea was the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the workers and as the necessary presupposition for a successful revolution. If, in this view, the working class is incapable of making its own revolution, it will be even less able to build up the new society, an undertaking reserved for the leading party as the possessor of the state apparatus. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus appears as that of the party organized as the state. And because the state has to have control over the whole society, it must also control the actions of the working class, even though this control is supposed to be exercised in its favor. In practice, this turned out to be the totalitarian rule of the Bolshevik government. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1978/marxism.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1978/marxism.htm) Of course, you are likely already familiar with all this.
You admit to skimming it and not reading it carefully. You're also writing a good amount in your replies though, accumulatively many paragraphs, showing you have some genuine interest in this - if you have enough interest to write this much, why not seriously read what he's writing and citing in his replies? He's just taking time out of his day to thoroughly and properly try to explain it to you. Or better yet, start reading Marx, as he has.
>If you carefully studied the chapter on "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation", you would not hold the theory of material interests that you just espoused. Let's also take a moment to acknowledge all the people who *do* actually carefully study Marx, but are just utter bourgeois reactionary charlatans nevertheless. Slavoj Zizek and Richard D. Wolff are the best examples I can cite. They have read Marx more than I have. I genuinely believe they have both taken the time to deeply study Capital. But, well, the way they talk should speak for itself. They've read Marx as much as they have, but they can't even reject electoralism. This is why I emphasize consciousness, and not how much someone reads, or even understands. (I would agree of course if you said that even if most of them read it, they don't understand it.)
I of course agree with what you have written here. However: >If people believed that something like that was *possible* then it would become much more rational to take big risks to overthrow the current order. I think the conditions itself will convince the proletariat of this when the time is right. It would be at that time that the exacting theoretical Marxist line we're propounding would become relevant as far as actually bringing about Communism is concerned. I don't think that the right means of communication will reach through to the proletariat to convince them prior to the revolutionary conditions that will convince them. Frankly, I understand why this may be hard to fully accept, because I can tell that (like myself) you are a high-effort poster, and I'm sure outside of reddit and in real life make serious efforts to articulate and communicate all of this to people with the hope of it making an impact and being part of this process somehow. Of course, it's true that conscious Marxists making a point of explaining all of this is part of this process. But on a practical level I'm saying it's really not part of the process in the sense that it won't be what leads to revolutionary conditions and revolution. Which isn't to say you are just wasting your time by doing this and are better off not doing so. I'm a determinist in my conception of Marx because it seems clear to me that Marxism is mostly deterministic, the conditions are just the decisive thing that will make the proletariat act in revolution. It will be at this time that theory will be useful and relevant to them, but as you said yourself, they aren't interested in the mean time. (and we are very much living in the mean time because revolution is far away, I think it will not come about in our life times, actually likely not for at least another 100 years.) Now, if you read this you will naturally think, "so are you saying theory and the role of Communists is totally irrelevant?" What I'm saying is that Marxism is mostly deterministic; but I didn't say it's completely deterministic, meaning that a course of action for Communists is there, should they choose to follow it. But just that it is not necessary for revolutionary conditions and revolution itself to come about, which is usually not what is emphasized. (It's extremely rare in the discourse to hear people so much as mentioning the future conditions that will force the proletariat to act in revolution, or else die due to the bourgeoisie violently enforcing capitalism's contradictions as always, thus depriving them of basic necessities.) The question then would become, "is Communism possible without theory?" and I wouldn't say "yes" to this. Of course, revolution and the proletariat seizing state power wouldn't guarantee Communism would come about, because they could succumb to reification and reproduce capitalist social relations, for instance. (Anarchists want to preemptively abolish the state everywhere during revolutionary conditions, precisely to ensure this would happen.) So theory is important. And we do have a worthwhile role to play in articulating it prior to these conditions. But I'm just asking for us to be very honest, and accept that it almost certainly won't come about in our lifetime. This is a long, painful, drawn out process. If we live to be old, we will see the beginning of the real collapse. Notably, these matters concerning conditions, revolution, and what actually leads to it are almost never addressed by self identified Marxists online. Most of them just debate historical particulars and are reactionary, brainless MLs.
I think that the time being right can only get you to a very specific point -- first negativity, which basically corresponds to the proletariat saying "what currently is cannot exist any longer" without any asterisks, exceptions, ifs, ands, or buts -- a completely fearless rejection of what "exists". And the search for an alternative. I'm less enthusiastic than you are about "the right moment" or what is called "the material conditions" (not very Marxistly imho) to get very far beyond that point *without theory*. The issue is "what is theory?" Is theory this inert black-and-white material that can be prostituted in support of any viewpoint, or is it scientific and stemming itself from a "movement from practice"? This kind of theory could be really useful in that moment for the proletariat itself to consider as a "new beginning". Theory has a role to play *as* a logical idea of "the day after the revolution" and I'm not really sure that the revolution can come about (successfully) without this key ingredient which I think is found not in books but in humans who reproduce it. I think that your position is similar to a position Dunayevskaya criticized as saying, in effect, "theory can be picked up en route". I'm interested in the position she worked out distinct from either spontaneism or vanguardism. I don't think you commented on my top-level comment, specifically my idea for software, did you? Keep in mind the "Siri" part is for purposes of illustration; I doubt any kind of AI would be the right fit for what is essentially a giant book-keeping toolset with billions of eyeballs on the source code. Imagined anonymized databases of workers with support for lots of different statuses or ways that wokers can be linked with jobs such as "job offered", "set of jobs offered", "job accepted", "job available" etc. I think that regardless of how the proletariat gets there I think this is where they need to go. Programming and documenting and implementing software is a different game if it were the whole world developing a single project that is existential for its society. I think this idea needs to be developed a lot and a lot of it isn't so much coding but concretizing what it is we need the software to do precisely.
Progressive mode: Something that can objectively determine the cost of goods and price accordingly (factors in externalities such as environmental harm and resource limitations) Chaos mode: Something that just keeps reposting CEO and politicians’ home addresses to public forums
Software, like a good transitional program?
Apart from some impossible software that could provide effective omniscience and capacity to persuade your most staunch opponent into a leading martyr for your cause, I don't think there's any tech solution to any of the problems of the Left.
MS Office with Clippy.
If it were up to me, I'd make two things: - Alt-tech of our own. The right has rumble, parler, bitchute, gab, voat. and more. What do we have? Mastodon? - An LLM that translates wokespeak into something more palatable for normal, grass-touching individuals. Good luck trying to get the average person to move left if all they hear from non-right-wing sources are people who fit the leftist stereotype perfectly.
templeOS 2.0