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Im Anticapitalist. But I havent found a socialist ideology I really agree with.

I’ve just finished a Marxist book club reading series, including Lenin and Marx and Rosa and several others.

My original studies were on anarchism. Graeber, Chomsky, lots of Anarchist Library articles.

My new studies are Postmodernists. Foucoult, Derrida, Marcusa, etc.

First things first:

  1. I think Marxists are way too proud of themselves and what they call science. I find Marxism useful but little more than a nice to discuss academic theory. I find serious flaws with it, and am annoyed that so many people seem to identify so strongly with it. In that way im very much in agreement with anarchists and postmodernists. The other thing is that Marxist-Leninism was infiltrated and defeated by capitalism many many times now, and sometimes even without its defeat it led to dystopia. I’m just not excited about this ideology at all, and I think it’s become a bit cringe to continue down this path. Capitalism and state is stronger today than it’s ever been. I think this has lived past its valid era.

  2. I think anarchism has a lot more truth and wisdom, but is not very powerful. I am unsure how to bring about this kind of society, which is true communism. It seems it will always devolve into a retelling of Marxist stages of history, feudalism, monarchism, capitalism. However I do think there are ways to prevent this if people are mass educated and localities are armed to prevent domination. But also, we live in a day of nukes, and I’ve never read an anarchist treaties on how to manage the nuclear arsenal anarchically. The more you organize anarchism though, the less it’s anarchism. I also worry about how much this turns into vigilantism and mob violence.

  3. I agree a lot with postmodernists, the concept of truth and morality since learning all the atheist rhetoric in my 20s are very vague to me. Understanding cultural truth, media power, the disparity of grand narratives, the collusion of the Everyman with the system (rather than it being purely a class duality) is “true” to me. However, even more so than #1 or #2 this very much lacks a revolutionary theory.

Then there’s the infighting. When you read the literature everyone “proves” each other wrong and shows how their “revolutionary vision” is impossible and not worth doing. People in socialist theory argue so strongly about such vague ideas. People really think that they are looking to achieve a thing called socialism, but I don’t think they will ever be satisfied with any system they find themselves in. They set impossible goals and then yell at the clouds that it hasn’t been obtained.

Sorry that’s my rant, I also am yelling at the clouds at my own intellectual defeat. I kinda feel like the best we can do is a kind of nihilism and intentional community.

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  • I feel that those who jump on anti-capitalism have no real idea how products are made, and how things are bought, sold, marketed.

    There seems to be a sort naive belief that we can return to an era of cottage industry, and that somehow we'd still have iPhones and power plants and such without folks owning land and machines and patents. But even if you imagine a power plant built without capitalism -- say, built by a beneficient government -- the people building it are capitalists. The people mining the coal and shipping it to the plant are capitalists. They want money in return, so they can feed their families and establish their personal economic security, so that they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, etc.

    Folks say that history is just a record of the robber-barons robbing everybody, and I tend to agree. It seems likely that this is the case because only the robber-barons actually succeeded. I think the onus is on folks who claim we don't need the robber-barons to show that a system CAN succeed without them.

    I feel like the long term answer is to let the robber-barons do their thing, but only to a degree, and use government directed by democracy to keep the abuses of capitalism under control. This is difficult, but it seems to work in most wealthy countries, except for a glaring few. If there's a better system, I have yet to see it in operation.

    • I think you’re lost then, this is the socialism sublemmy.

      I used to think like you, but then I realized capitalism is not synonymous with markets or being paid, it’s synonymous with a class of people who do not work extracting value from those who do. It’s very simple to not have capitalism, simply have national credit unions instead of banks, and coops for buisnesses. This replaces CEOs and Bankers with democratic governance and isn’t authoritarian.

      So I’m all on board with that level of socialism, there are two problems:

      1. Getting from here to there involves going THROUGH the ruling class, the capitalists, as they control the government, media, and war machine.
      2. We are about to reach AI and Climate Change tipping points, and planned economies are about to become a must because of these things (inevitably). How do we make this planned economy non authoritarian? Can we do it in any kind of open source anarchic sort of way, or does it demand state violence?

      • i believe they're called communities instead of sublemmies. too reddit.

      • Climate change can be addressed with common ownership of natural resources, which would include carbon tax policy.

        Why does AI create a need for a planned economy?

        In terms of what is possible, we could also use non-market mechanisms such as quadratic funding to allocate resources towards public goods that are available to each according to need. These mechanisms combine the egalitarianism of democracy with the flexibility that markets provide.

      • It’s very simple to not have capitalism

        I think that if it was simple, we could point to more practical examples.

        To make myself 100% clear: I am progressive, I want workers to unionize, I want government to support worker rights to the Nth degree, etc. That's why I'm here. But I think a working solution is going to converge on something like the German model where corporate governance is a tripartite effort of company owners, unionized company workers, and government.

        If there's a version of this in which the things used to make stuff (from land to machines to patents) are not owned by some entity, I have yet to see it work. And ownership of the means of production IS capitalism. The "capital" in capitalism consists of that land and those machines and patents. Sure, there is room for workers' cooperatives and such in this realm of owning entities, although I don't know that it's something we can force.

        With respect to this:

        and coops for buisnesses. This replaces CEOs and Bankers with democratic governance and isn’t authoritarian

        I'm not really clear on how workers decide what to make, and how much to make, and where to get their inputs. That seems to me a classic case for corporate leadership. You can't decide what to sell by a worker vote, except in some edge cases. I feel like that's a classic path back to Soviet-era starvation: not enough people making food or toilet paper, way too many people making crazy military hardware, not enough middlemen/brokers/traders (who, it turns out, are kind of essential to market organization).

        I could be convinced, but I want to see it actually work.

        We are about to reach AI and Climate Change tipping points, and planned economies are about to become a must because of these things (inevitably)

        You're not wrong. I've often said that capitalism cannot plan in any meaningful sense. Nobody in the system cares about stability tomorrow if they can get rewarded today.

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