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.

Liberbara,

Hello friend, first of all: good job at approaching the subject with that disposition. 👍

I agree with the good people over here: action is key. I ended up becoming an especifista anarchist by helping out in social movements. The political position is pretty much based in your beliefs (that should of course, I argue, be guided by reason and evidence).

To find one’s way through practice is important. Your actions will be informed by theory, but having courage, patience and solidarity is mostly forged in the fire of praxis. I became to trust in mutual-aid and the power of self-management that way.

You already seem to be on the anti-authoritarian side of the talk, in that sense, you’ll find many perspectives here that can throw you some light.

Well, hope this helps out friend. Take care and ¡Viva la anarquía! 🙂

RadioRat,
@RadioRat@beehaw.org avatar

I’m not hung up on the theoretical particulars. Whatever results in eating the rich and abolishing coerced labor most expediently. In software, we iterate. Not sure why we can’t do the same with society.

intensely_human,

I mean, mad respect for doing all the reading.

That feeling of frustration with arguments about vague ideas, without a way to resolve truth, is what got me into engineering. I wanted to learn things that could be proven via working results, and I didn’t want to experiment on people so I chose to manipulate matter.

Eventually, I think that evolved into my current orientation toward free market reliance (rather than reliance on systems of rules) because I think the working relationships within a free market act as a sort of proof that each person’s needs are being taken into account.

It if skewed in favor of fulfilling some people’s needs more than others. But so are all the “let’s draw up a budget then divvy out the assets to each party” ways of arranging economic activity.

Basically, in the same way that psych studies are considered more reliable if they incentivize an honest response, I consider free market to be more reliable indicator of the balance of needs because each thing has to be bought so everybody’s prioritizing honestly. If somebody’s got no honest way of saying “I like that option!”, and by honest I mean putting their money where their mouth is and actually buying it, then they go off and seek new arrangements that do work.

Free market activity does tend to degrade into non-free market activity, as wealth accumulates. Maybe the one thing the government should do with money is tax pools of wealth and redistribute the money evenly, as UBI.

I’ve got zero problem with one person owning the capital and getting the profits, so long as the other person was free to negotiate or walk away, and still chose to just trade hours for flat wages with no stake in the upside.

So in that sense I’m pro-capitalism, so long as it’s in the context of a truly free market.

And no, “free market” doesn’t mean the market itself is free to do whatever. It doesn’t mean “free of the constraints of civility”. It means the people and companies in it are free to do what’s most profitable to them.

I could go on. I’m sorry I’m not trying to derail or anything. Is what I’m describing socialism? Does the UBI make it that?

EthicalAI,

I’m an engineer too, and I don’t think capitalism works from an engineering perspective very well. It naturally leads to monopolies, it’s just inevitable, which have the same natural ailments as centrally planned economies, but with unelected people at the top. A decentralized economy needs to be engineered to be as such, culturally and legally, on purpose. Up till now it was just a technological fact that economies were decentralized, not true anymore. And with automated production, labor should no longer be the basis of the right to live, especially as labor decreases on the limit to 0 with increased AI.

UBI is not a good solution in that it doesn’t change the power structure, we still are controlled at the government and in our jobs by the rich, which do not have any mandate from the people.

Just an anecdote, between engineers, depending on your age, my experience is the older I get in engineering, the more I realize how totally un-meritocratic managers are, and how much they suppress us. Buisness and government use scientists and engineers to achieve poorly designed goals for dumb or evil ideas, like war or profit. Be wary.

FluffyPotato,

Honestly theory can be nice but action is more important. Someone who organises and gets people to support workers owning the means of production while not even knowing what a Marx is is a better Marxist than someone who has read all theory but does nothing about it. So ultimately it makes no difference what ideology you follow or even if you discard all of it as long as you help the working class.

SinAdjetivos,

You might get some better perspective by looking outside the “European” sphere.

You seem to have some similar thoughts to the author of the zine here.. An except:

European Anarchism is “1) A history of iconic figures. 2) A set of increasingly radical ideas about social transformation. 3) A practice that has only been uniform in its rejection by those in power.” And that it is also a dynamic politic that invites its very destruction yet maintains composure of core principles: Direct Action, Voluntary Association, and Mutual Aid.

You may also find some of Öcalan’s writings interesting/enlightening.

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Why does there have to be a single ideology you adhere to? Personally, I believe parts of many different idealogies to create my own.

centof,

It is very easy to get discouraged with various ideologies as they are often based in the abstract and therefore hard to apply to the real world. With that said I’ll give you a slice of my own thinking / research on the matter. At a high abstract level, I think most economies needs to be more socially owned instead of privately owned and more market based rather than command based. Some possible theories and policies to help bring this change about are Mutualism and Georgism.

Mutualism encourages the concepts of mutual aid, workplace democracy and self management(cooperatives), and dual power. Dual power is essentially building alternative institutions to the ones that already exist in society until they can eventually supplant the existing institutions. Direct Action also plays a big role in anarchism in general and therefore Mutualism.

Also some georgism inspired policies such as a UBI and a Land Value Tax to be good starting points as far as policy as they are policies that could redistribute wealth from capitalists(1%) to the people.

There is obviously a lot more to unpack especially relating to Mutualism. Interestingly, there is a service built with the principles of mutual aid and direct action built and administered by @db0 called AI Horde.

The underlying principles of direct action, mutual aid, and to a lesser degree dual power are ones that be implemented in your own life and are good places to focus your research in my opinion.

EthicalAI,

I also think that mutualism is the best theory. My Marxist friend would tell you that capitalism will just incorporate your work into its superstructure though.

jlou,

Another cool Gerogism-inspired policy is common ownership self-assessed tax (COST), which can be used to collectivize the means of production while maintaining decentralized control of it.

In terms of direct action, we should just starting building postcapitalism now with venture communes of worker coops, and implement policies we want in the venture communes. This would even help with reformism because it would bring economic power to the movement, which could be turned into political power

RickRussell_CA,

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.

EthicalAI,

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?
jlou,

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.

EthicalAI,

AI creates a strong incentive for a planned economy, because the goal of markets was always that planned economies were “impossible”, but now they are not. Read the peoples republic of Walmart for more info. Or this YouTube video youtu.be/xuBrGaVhjcI

Remember too that like 3 hedge funds own every company in America, and the stock market is run by AI, we already live under an inefficient planned economy.

As for climate change, what you are suggesting when the public owns the natural resources, is socialism.

RickRussell_CA,

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.

jlou,

There are examples of it working with worker coops and some ESOPs that are more democratic.

Workers can jointly delegate to corporate leadership. Worker democracy doesn't mean that every decision is put to a vote. The decision-makers just have to be accountable to the workers not to some alien legal party.

The workers are de facto responsible for production. By the principle of legal and de facto responsibility matching, the workers should get the whole product

See: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

EthicalAI,

Property right theory is a bit complicated, you have to understand a few things.

  1. Property rights are a state derived system. That’s why we have weird things like corporate personhood, LLCs, land ownership, mineral rights, airspace, etc. Indigenous peoples did not have property rights. Monarchies had different property relations. Etc.
  2. Property rights can be divided into 3 fundamental rights, the right to use (usus), the right to the fruit of use (profit, fructus), the right to abuse (abusus) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct
  3. There is a historical lineage of the owning class, from monarchy, to mercantilism and slave societies, to modern capitalism, etc.

I’d say that the reason there’s not a system to demonstrate these ideas is not because they aren’t pragmatic ideas, it’s because power begets power.

The reason I say it’s easy to imagine life outside of capitalism is not because it’d be easy to get there, just that it’s easy to formulate.

Anyway to your points, capitalism is not “when people own things”. It’s when those who do the work (usus) do not get the profit (fructus). Usually this is justified through investment and usury (interest) or even permanent ownership by outside investors (stock). However investment can exist in other ways, through credit unions owned by communities who bank there, or even from government grants. Not to defend the soviets, but they had great science, and most of our own science is done through gov grants.

When you enforce the rule that only people who are doing the work may own stock, and then you grow your economy through democratic investment strategies, you are on your way to socialism.

Edit: In old religions usury was considered immoral, if usury is immoral how much more immoral is our current system of investing? I think we should go back to interest based business loans and grants and cut out this ownership class.

Abusus should also be democratically controlled under eco socialism. Because we have so much trash these days and the destruction of so many good things under justification of ownership. That’s another talk altogether.

bermuda,

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

jlou, (edited )

I was in a similar boat with respect to Marxism and anarchism.

My own intuition that something was wrong with capitalism became clearer to me when I read David Ellerman's work on the labor theory of property (Note: not value) and the theory of inalienable rights. His argument is one of the most powerful arguments in favor of workers' self-management, can answer many common criticisms and has a clear vision.

Here is a short article on PBS that introduces his argument: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-the-case-for-employee-owned-companies

hallettj,
@hallettj@beehaw.org avatar

I feel like I’m in the same situation - although I haven’t done as much reading as you have. I want a movement with concrete objectives to rally behind, but I’m not sure where to find it. Besides wanting things to be better, real wages have been flat for decades while cost of living has been going up. That makes people look more and more for some kind of dramatic change. I worry that fascists have been more organized than socialists in presenting people with an idea that feels like dramatic change. (It doesn’t matter if fascism won’t make anything better if people believe it when they lie and say it will.)

From what I’ve heard the school of socialism that most speaks to me is “economic revisionism”, despite that term being invented as a pejorative. The idea is that a series of reforms can be implemented within a democratic-capitalist system to shift to a democratic-socialist one. I think that although it has flaws we have a sturdy democratic political system, and we would lose a lot by toppling it. If revolutionary socialists or anarchists had ever come up with a comprehensive plan for a better system I might think differently; but everything I’ve heard of or read about is very hand-wavy. My understanding is that both Marx-Engels and Bakunin had ideas something like: we can’t predict exactly what the better future will be like, but it will emerge naturally if we eliminate barriers inhibiting better human behavior. I’m not willing to risk throwing out what stability we have in the hope that something better will emerge if we believe hard enough. I think the next fight is socioeconomic, not political.

I’ve heard arguments like, “incremental reforms will never work because capitalists will chip away at them to take back any power they lose.” I’m not currently sold on that argument because I think you’re likely to have an unstable equilibrium of assholes making power grabs in any system. I’ve also heard “capitalism is fundamentally broken”, but at this point in time I’m more optimistic about fixing the broken parts incrementally than about starting from scratch because I don’t know what the replacement would be.

What I’d really like is a discussion of what reforms would make things better for everybody which would hopefully lead to a concrete plan that people can point to when talking to politicians, protesting, striking, etc. Or even better would be a plan that is already formulated that I can start pointing to. That might include reforms to spread wealth more evenly like a wealth tax, closing tax loopholes, raising the minimum wage, more social services. It could include political reforms to help pry power away from the wealthy such as campaign finance reform, stricter rules around gerrymandering and polling place access, more regulation on politicized mass media. Ultimately I think what would be required to clinch the shift from capitalism to socialism could be to democratize capital which might be accomplished by ideas like requiring companies over a certain size to have democratic governance models and employee ownership, or limiting the amount of capital investment a single individual can make. I’m sure there is work on these ideas, but I don’t know where to look. I want to hear a discussion about what people more knowledgeable than me think.

A plan that caught my eye at one point was the book One Way Forward by Lawrence Lessig which Lessig seemed to want to turn into a political movement. I’m not sure what the state of that is.

Anyway, economic revisionism is not as exciting as the idea of tearing down everything bad, and replacing it with something perfect. But until I find an argument with an amazing new idea, it’s what I think is the most practical solution.

EthicalAI,

Glad to see others that don’t buy the idea that we should destroy the existing system without an alternative vision. When I read that, and we discussed it, I thought it was crazy. Sometimes I feel kinda gaslit by other socialists lol, like surely you don’t believe we should destroy without replacing.

t3rmit3, (edited )

I was reading an excellent piece recently about how the failure of Marxist-Leninists in the US to procure any real political power has resulted in them abandoning any effort towards practical change in favor of dogged rhetorical purity, and to some extent defining their rhetoric by the failure, if you will; i.e. if Communism can’t succeed here, then anything that appears to be succeeding must not be true Communism.

I came here to suggest you look up Mutualism and Proudhon, but I see in other comments that you’ve already landed there like I have.

Sometimes I feel kinda gaslit by other socialists

I see this mostly with the tea-sipping wannabe-ML revolutionaries (I live right adjacent to Berkeley, and there are lots of those here). Warfare is a tool of Imperialism and the State, and you can’t defeat States, whose entire shtick is large-scale societal systems of authority and regimentation, with community-level systems of mutual defense, in open battle.

Hundun,

I think I get you. In my opinion it all boils down to praxis: what policies are you advocating for, how, what interests do you align your personal choices with and why. At least, that is something people of different views can align on out of pure pragmatism. We may have different ideas about the perfect future, most of the steps we can and should take right now are, I think, easy to agree on. I’m glad to see that happening where it matters.

Tomassci,
Tomassci avatar

Ideology is useless if you can't put it to work, agree here.

mercury,

I feel like this is what happens when you are too attached to labeling yourself politically. Believe what you want

EthicalAI,

Sure, but I guess I want two practical outcomes:

  1. A theory of action, that can then be put into practice.
  2. A level of commitment to that theory of action.

So, like, I could put 100% of myself into something I think will definitely work, or I could put 5% of myself into something I think likely won’t work but I’ll try anyway, or anything in between.

Not just for internet debates or something.

Also I’d like to be able to effectively share my vision for the world and answer common criticisms.

sculd,

A “theory of action” is how we end up in disasters like the cultural revolution.

Real life is messy and cannot be simplified into one theory, at least not yet. Otherwise why do you think we have so many departments, so many professors and PhDs in so many subjects?

Lols,

what are the real world, practical examples of putting 5% into something you think likely won’t work, and what are the real world, practical examples of putting 100% into something you think likely will work?

life rarely if ever asks you for a complete political ideology, the vast majority of the time your influence on the world will be limited to specific answers to specific issues

EthicalAI,

I volunteer with DSA some, should I volunteer a lot, a little? Is electoralism a good avenue, is mutual aid? Does it matter if my comrades have other ideas, or is big tent prefered? Should we organize under the banner of socialism, or should we use a less tainted word? Should you try to be a social democrat instead just out of defeatism? Or maybe I just go off and be a good person, be charitable. Or maybe I start a commune.

Slotos,

Polish Solidarity movement. Knock yourself out.

Unlike Marxism, that nowadays requires religious mindset to fit in, and magical thinking to believe in, Solidarity movement is a practical example of people achieving goals together.

In general, if you look for a socialist movement that was actively persecuted by communists and corporatists alike, you’ll find something interesting to study.

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