Thing is, no libertarian socialist or anarchist worth their salt would call for "the immidiate abolishment of the state", because we know that would just lead to a power vacuum. Rather, we need to abolish the subjective valuation of ideals that allows for the nation-state hegemony before abolishing the state itself, and this would have to be a very gradual process. An evolution, rather than a singular revolution.
Note that much of anarchism rejects the deterministic view of marxism, and the very idea of "phases of communism". Anarchism focuses its efforts in hierarchical social relations as an abstract, and is opposed to essentialism. The idea here is more that we have to change ourselves, our belief systems, ethics and motivations, before we can change the world. Communism can thus only occur more or less "naturally", it can't be forced.
Hierarchy is first and foremost a phenomenon within our conscious minds. It's the very idea that someone needs to take charge, lead us for the greater good. Deconstruct it, reduce its essence and you can find that societal functions can be organized without it. How can hierarchy exist as a material force in the world once it no longer exists in our minds?
https://youtu.be/vZ9myHhpS9s
this thread has gotten very dry and dour and off topic.
Don't worry dawg, I wasn't. Maybe I didn't make it clear but I was saying that other economic systems created equal pollution, therefore the problem doesn't lie with capitalism.
I'm open to the idea though, but thru natural evolution of what we got - not the revolutionary lark peeps woof about.
To be fair, I'd wish things were dramatically different than they are but maybe Warren's plan isn't that bad. We're at a point that it appears the only way to get rid of the Citizens United ruling and similar is an armed revolt and smash the system. But we all know how that will go. This solution will work until a better one comes along.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better. And holding companies more accountable is better. Blasting a plan because it's still capitalism and doesn't fix ALL the problems is shortsighted at best, dangerous at worst. Unless you come up with a way to mind control 7.6 billion people, you have to take baby steps when it comes to reworking an entire economy.
I seriously cannot conceive of a better system than a mixed-economy.
Is that a sign of the strength of the commune, or the weakness of the French after their devastating loss in the war?
The commune failed for the same reason the German revolution and Spanish anarchists failed. They were dependent on spontaneity, weren't organized, and lacked scale. They were easily cornered and crushed.
Can you explain to me how exactly you identify flaws in your revolutionary strategy if all of its failures are because they lose conflicts? Why are you coming up with systems that are only viable in a vacuum?
Because liberal revolutionaries faced the same adversity, and were even crushed on a number of occasions (like 1848). They still ultimately won and went on to create a system that actually fosters peace and mutual growth. They did this by only ever ideologically controlling a small portion of the world and its population.
Non-capitalist systems at one point spread their ideology over a large chunk of the world and still failed. Also, states that did manage to secure themselves, which were the more authoritarian socialist countries, went on to fail on their own.
Okay, fair enough. I thought what separated you from Marxists proper was immediate abolition and free access economies, the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
How is this different from the idealism of utopian socialism?
What makes you think hierarchy is just a bunch of abstractions, that there's absolutely no essentialist reason it exists? It sounds like your ideas are based on the slim chance that every division and hierarchy really is just a social construct that exists because we believe it so, that it's a false consciousness drawn from a ruling idea providing the logic for a ruling system. I don't think there's much support for this position.
I think you would find that your commonly-owned society would quickly reset itself back to old arrangements and restore private property, nations, and the bourgeois family. These things don't just exist for material reasons or because we were fooled into believing in them.
That sounds like a retreat from the materialism of the original communists that rejected the idealism of utopian socialists, and basically the idea that we don't have revolutionary classes, just progressive ideas that people need to internalize on a mass scale.
The book explains the differences between utopian socialism and scientific socialism, which Marxism considers itself to embody. The book explains that whereas utopian socialism is idealist, reflects the personal opinions of the authors and claims that society can be adapted based on these opinions, scientific socialism derives itself from reality. It focuses on the materialist conception of history, which is based on an analysis over history, and concludes that communism naturally follows capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism:_Utopian_and_Scientific
False Dichotomies? The Roman Empire eventually lead to several burgeoning monarchies and empires that had influence well into the Renaissance. For fuck's sake, the Crusades were fought when the Byzantines were asking for help and they WERE Eastern Roman.
And the very same arguments you're making about how great capitalism is are the exact same made for those systems at the time. The growth of Empire such as the United Kingdom were the first time in history a human could die from overeating and before World War 1 and the near total victory of 'progressive capitalist/democratic systems' as envisioned by the United States who just finished wiping out Native Americans whole cloth to feed that capitalist system. You are off your rocker if you somehow think that capitalism was somehow better than the previous systems, especially when before the US jumped into World War 1 we were making bank on the suffering of both sides as well as World War 2.
But sure, let's play this farce that Capitalism has promoted peace. Never mind that we fucked over the Iranians just because the British were terrified they'd lose their cheap source of fuel. Or how about our rampant consumerist culture fucking over the planet so hard that desertification is destroying Africa and leading to bigger issues of famine and loss of life.
Capitialism, is not more evil than any of the other systems, but it and Communism do a fantastic job of isolating our view of the damage we do to our planet. Either through pushing it onto poorer peoples with no infrastructure or proper government forces to protect them or in Communism's case, just outright saying deal with it.
I'd say the differences are a bit more substantial, but you're hearing my half-baked, self-thorized, egoist-leaning synthesis hodgepodge of anarchism here. Many ideas of marxism are perfectly compatible with anarchism, but the DotP, obviously, is not, and nor is the idea that state capitalism can be accepted as a socialist transition stage towards communism.
The main idea I've been trying to put forward here is the idea that a person's behavior can change following a change in thinking following experiences. Ergo, people can learn to act in an egalitarian manner, without hierarchy. I can't personally attribute that thought as utopian.
Hierarchies emerge due to the subjective valuation of higher ideals. i.e. "Someone needs to take charge and keep order for the greater good." I recognize this is a fringe position and I'm not really bothered by it. Frankly I've had thoughts of expanding on this theory
That's because it is. I'm not looking to provide an objective and rigourously scientific path towards communism. People will have to work out their own needs for their liberation in the contexts they find themselves in.
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