Iāve 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:
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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. Iām just not excited about this ideology at all, and I think itās become a bit cringe to continue down this path. Capitalism and state is stronger today than itās ever been. I think this has lived past its valid era.
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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 Iāve never read an anarchist treaties on how to manage the nuclear arsenal anarchically. The more you organize anarchism though, the less itās anarchism. I also worry about how much this turns into vigilantism and mob violence.
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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 ātrueā to me. However, even more so than #1 or #2 this very much lacks a revolutionary theory.
Then thereās the infighting. When you read the literature everyone āprovesā each other wrong and shows how their ārevolutionary visionā 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 donāt 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 hasnāt been obtained.
Sorry thatās 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.
I think youāre 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, itās synonymous with a class of people who do not work extracting value from those who do. Itās 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 isnāt authoritarian.
So Iām all on board with that level of socialism, there are two problems:
i believe theyāre called communities instead of sublemmies. too reddit.
I donāt like overloading words that much. Too vague.
in the english language, like many other languages, we can prevent āoverloadingā of words by using context.
Except that the word community and the word community both have important uses within the context of Lemmy, so context doesnāt help us.
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.
AI creates a strong incentive for a planned economy, because the goal of markets was always that planned economies were āimpossibleā, but now they are not. Read the peoples republic of Walmart for more info. Or this YouTube video https://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.
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. Thatās why Iām 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 thereās 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 ācapitalā in capitalism consists of that land and those machines and patents. Sure, there is room for workersā cooperatives and such in this realm of owning entities, although I donāt know that itās something we can force.
With respect to this:
Iām 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 canāt decide what to sell by a worker vote, except in some edge cases. I feel like thatās 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.
Youāre not wrong. Iāve often said that capitalism cannot plan in any meaningful sense. Nobody in the system cares about stability tomorrow if they can get rewarded today.
Property right theory is a bit complicated, you have to understand a few things.
Property rights are a state derived system. Thatās 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.
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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct
There is a historical lineage of the owning class, from monarchy, to mercantilism and slave societies, to modern capitalism, etc.
Iād say that the reason thereās not a system to demonstrate these ideas is not because they arenāt pragmatic ideas, itās because power begets power.
The reason I say itās easy to imagine life outside of capitalism is not because itād be easy to get there, just that itās easy to formulate.
Anyway to your points, capitalism is not āwhen people own thingsā. Itās 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. Thatās another talk altogether.
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 doesnāt 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/