Response to Query “¿What makes you think that socialism / communism could
still work without it ending with a totalitarian state?”
Dear Reader,
I recently responded to an internet post query, in reddit,
accessible via --
-- which was stated as follows:
“¿What makes you think that socialism / communism could still work without it ending with a totalitarian state?”
I replied approximately as follows --
“GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES. All of those regimes that OP “Dr. Jordan B.
Peterson” cites in his post are actually cases of capitalism --
STATE-capitalism -- not of “socialism” or “communism” as described by
Marx. These pure-state-bureaucratic
ruling-class, ‘proto-state-capitalist’ regimes all arose in countries where the
industrial social forces of production, and the wage-working-class, were
profoundly underdeveloped. Hence, per
Marx’s theory, those countries could not even be eligible for, or capable of,
socialism as Marx defined it. What those
“semi-peripheral” countries were ripe for was, in effect, a transition into
industrial [state-]capitalism, via a new version of the violent and bloody
“primitive accumulation” of capital, such as had already occurred earlier in
the capitalist core -- Western Europe and North America [e.g., via the vile and
bloody-violent institutions of mass agricultural slavery and indentured
servitude].
The so-called “communist” revolutions, in these
capitalistically-underdeveloped, semi-peripheral countries, were, of necessity,
violent and bloody affairs, led by putschist, neo-Jacobin parties, homologous
to the bloody revolutions that created the transition to CAPITALISM in 1789
France, and resulted in a destruction of whatever vestiges of the rule of law
remained in those countries, and the installation of a one party police-state
dictatorship OVER what little there was left of an industrial wage working
class there.
“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The total lack of “checks and balances” against the power of the Lenino-Stalinoid absolute state guaranteed the absolute corruption of that state, and a regime of violent, bloody tyranny over the developing working class in those nations.
Karl Marx described communism, in “the Grundrisse” -- an
1857+ massive manuscript that became the first of several drafts toward Marx’s
“Critique of Political Economy” as a whole, of which “Das Kapital” -- all four
of its volumes -- forms but the first part of SIX planned parts -- as growing
out of the seeds of political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY already present within capitalism,
in the form of “share capital”, e.g., in the CAPITAL EQUITY stock principle of
“one share, one vote”. This principle,
Marx predicted, would become generalized in the transition from capitalism to
its “lawful” higher successor system, that of the democratically “associated
producers”: “Share capital ... is the
most perfect form (assuming the character of communism), together with all its contradictions.”
[Marx, Grundrisse]
In “Das Kapital”, volume III, Marx describes the transition
to communism -- as to how the embryo of communism forms within the womb of
capitalism -- in terms of workers-owned capital, e.g., democratically
worker-managed producers’ cooperatives, part of the stage that my associates
and I call “workers’ capitalism”, which is a growing, though vastly
under-reported, development today, in the U.S., in Spain, and in many other
nations-states within the geographical core of capitalism.
After the Paris Commune, Marx declared, as a democratic key
to communism, the principle that worker-elected worker’s representatives to all
governing bodies must be mandated and recallable by those that they represent,
and paid, for their services of representation, no more than the average
worker’s wage.
Marx also stated that, in nation-states where representative
democracy, with workers’ suffrage [workers having voting rights], had been
achieved, the transition to communism could typically be accomplished without
violent revolution, via the ballot box, within the rule of law.
We see the constitution of a rule-of-law, democratic
transition to real communism -- to ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’ -- as arising
via the popular recognition, and, later, via the constitutional establishment,
of three newly-discerned human rights which are fundamental to the protection
and flourishing of human individuals, and of humane society as a whole, in
advanced modern society. They are --
A. The human right of
‘CITIZEN EXTERNALITY EQUITY’. This right
enables citizens to vote for ‘‘‘public directors’’’, forming second boards of
directors, or second management committees, INSIDE each of the local operating
units of companies which produce and accumulate “externalities” -- e.g., deadly
pollution -- in those citizens’ local communities. These ‘boards of public directors’ negotiate
with the private directors/managers to reduce their annual operating plan
budgets of pollution, etc., “external costs”, with recourse to a popularly
elected “Tribunal for Externality Equity” if negotiations deadlock, and with
fees imposed for any external cost production still allowed in those annual
externalities budgets. This human right,
of “grass roots regulation”, supplements external regulatory bureaucracies,
typically “captured” and prostituted by the industries that they were supposed
to regulate, and also civil court litigation against deadly polluters, where
deep-pocketed industries can usually defeat underfunded citizen/worker law
suits.
B. The human right of
‘CITIZEN BIRTHRIGHT EQUITY’ [‘societal self-investment’]. Every child born under this new, Equitarian
constitution and Bill Of Rights will be a “trust fund baby”, in that each
new-born citizen will be granted, funded partly by ‘Citizen Externality Equity’
pollution fees, partly by ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity social rents’, a lifetime
fund, an ‘absolutely-portable’ PERSONAL, INDIVIDUAL-social-safety-net -- with
legislated restraints on its expenditure, to check the “moral hazard” potential
of such a fund -- to eventually cover all of the basic necessities of human
life-opportunity: health care,
college/trade education, first home purchase, business formation funding, and
reparations to victims in the event of conviction for a crime, etc. -- so that
every child born has a stake in society -- has “skin in the game” -- and so
that society has an investment in every child born, regardless of “what side of
the tracks” that citizen was born on.
Should an individual’s fund be exhausted, e.g., due to serial criminal
conviction reparations to victims, then that individual would fall back on more
meager external social welfare provisions.
C. The human right of
‘CITIZEN STEWARDSHIP EQUITY’. Lack of
access to means of production renders workers victims and playthings of the
whims, and of the “lawful” depredations, of the owners of capital. This human right provides workers with the
option of ‘collective self-employment’, via a policy of ‘ public venture
“capital” ’, supporting ‘collective entrepreneurship’ and ‘collective
innovation’. The Office of a popularly
elected national Custodian of Social Property grants charters to
per-legislation-qualifying citizen collectives, which then become Social Banks,
also organized as democratically self-managed ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’
cooperatives of a special kind, with each such Social Bank granted an equitable
allocation of credits for the procurement of means of production. The Social Banks compete for the most
perceivably-viable among other citizens’ self-organized collectives, that have
per-legislation-qualifying business-plans, whose qualifications include By-Law
requirements for internal democratic election/recall of their management teams,
which, once their business plans are funded by a Social Bank, become
‘socialized producers’ cooperatives’. To
survive, these ‘socialized producers’ cooperatives’ must prove themselves in
market competition against other socialized producers’ cooperatives, and
against remaining private capitalist firms, etc., that produce for the same
market(s). The ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity
socialized producers’ cooperatives’ do not collectively or privately “own” the
means of production granted to them by the ‘Social Bank’ that backs them, and
by the national Custodian of Social Property.
Those means of production are ‘‘‘Social Property’’’. The Citizen Stewardship cooperatives do have
stewardship over those means of production, a fact manifested in the ‘social
rents’ that they must pay, monthly, to the Office of the Custodian of Social
Property. These ‘social rents’ provide
income to the ‘Social Banks’ that backed these co-ops, and also help to fund
the ‘Citizen Birthright Equity socialized Trust Funds’, as well as to fund
means of production procurement for new ‘Stewardship Cooperatives’, to finance
‘technodepreciation insurance’, etc.
There has been a largely-successful ‘conspiracy among
opponents’ -- an ‘antagonistic cooperation’ -- between the unelected real
rulers of “western” [state-]capitalism, and those of “eastern”,
state-bureaucratic, Lenino-Stalinoid STATE-capitalism, to pass off the
pure-state-bureaucratic-ruling-class-dominated, totalitarian police-state
mass-murder regimes of “Soviet” Russia, Stalinist China, etc., as
“Communism”. In fact, they present
nothing at all like the ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’ that Marx predicted. They actually represent special, transient
forms of Orwellian [proto-]State-CAPITALISM, so that a form of CAPITALISM is
being fraudulently passed-off as Marxian communism!
Most people today, when they hear “Communism”, actually
think pure-state-bureaucratic State-CAPITALISM [as distinct from FASCISM or
NAZIISM, a form of State-Capitalism in which the private-capital-owning ruling
class is still either prominent or largely in-charge]. THIS IS THE BIGGEST “BAIT-AND-SWITCH” FRAUD
IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY TO-DATE!!! And
it has been co-perpetrated by the “western” capitalist ruling class [e.g., the
Rockefeller-eugenics, “people are pollution” political machine], and the
Lenino-Trotskyoid, Lenino-Stalinoid, and Stalino-Maoid “MarxIST” PSEUDO-Marxian
state-bureaucratic ruling classes!
Toward the end of his life, Marx foresaw, via his in depth
study of capitalist political economy, and of Russia in particular, etc., e.g.,
as he wrote in his draft letters to Vera Zasulich, and in the Preface to the
latter edition of “Das Kapital”, that social revolution was historically
imminent in Russia [Marx died in 1883.
The ‘“first modern Russian revolution’’’ erupted in 1905, 22 years
later].
He wrote that, if the Russian Revolution was accompanied by
a revolution in the capitalist West, e.g., in Germany, and throughout Western
Europe, so that the advanced productive forces [‘‘‘productivity’’’] extant
there could facilitate accelerated development of the social forces of
production [‘‘‘productivity’’’] in Russia, then Russia could escape the
violence and the other horrors of capitalist development -- including of the
“primitive accumulation” of industrial capital -- and accede more or less
directly from the remnants of primitive communism still then-extant in Russia,
to the “higher communism” that would then also emerge in Europe, and, later,
worldwide.
In this passage, Marx did not explicitly predict what would
ensue if the Russian Revolution was isolated in Russia, and surrounded by
hostile still-capitalist European and other powers. But the latter is exactly what did happen,
with WWI and the eruption of the ‘‘‘second modern Russian revolution’’’ in
1917, and the defeat of the 1918 revolutions in Germany and elsewhere.
Thus, Russia could not escape the horrors of the “primitive
accumulation” of industrial capital, which was made even more horrendous by the
desperation of the Leninoid state-bureaucratic ruling class to crash-develop a
“military-industrial complex” [cf. Eisenhower], so as to deter further
invasions by, and “save its ass” from, the encircling hostile
private-capitalist forces, hell-bent on snuffing out both the Leninist ruling
class, and the real remnants of the “Soviet” [i.e., the democratic “workers’
councils”] revolution.
Lenino-Stalinoid State-CAPITALISM became a new pathway for
the horrific “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital in the
underdeveloped, imperialized semi-periphery of the core capitalist system --
centered in Western Europe and North America -- a State-CAPITALISM falsely
labeled “Communism” by both its Western enemies and its Lenino-Stalinoid
promoters and beneficiaries.
The OP’s post calls to my mind the “dialectical theory of
everything” developed by a group that is relentlessly carrying forward Marx’s,
unfinished, work [by which I do NOT mean the state-bureaucratic ruling-class,
dictatorial perversions of the Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist, ...,
Castroist, IList, and Unist state-CAPITALIST ideologues, fraudsters, and mass
murderers] in the five key domains which Marx and Engels were not able to bring
to fruition before their deaths.
Those unfinished domains of Marxian theory and practice
include --
(1) that of the detailed nature of the Marxian dialectic
method;
(2) that of the dialectic of Nature, and of the Marxian
immanent critique of the ideology that pervasively compromises the modern
sciences, including, not just the economic and other social sciences, but the
natural sciences and mathematics as well;
(3) clarification, including clear and ‘quanto-qualitative’
definition, of the central Marxian concept of “the social forces of production”
-- of ‘the human-societal self-force of acceleratedly-expanding human-societal
self-re-production’ -- in relation to a ‘Meta-Darwinian’ concept of
human-species ‘‘‘fitness’’’ in terms of the rate of human-societal
self-reproduction, as well as the interrelated clarification of the core
Marxian concept of “the social relations of production”, e.g., of the
“capital-relation”, of the “money-relation”, of the “commodity-relation”, etc. This ‘Meta-Darwinian’ theory recognizes the
role of ‘the human PHENome’ as well as of the ‘‘‘the human GENome’’’ in
increasing the ‘self-force’, and thereby the rate of ‘self-production’, of
human society in accelerated expanded social self-reproduction;
(4) that of the detailed nature of the liberatory,
Political-ECONOMIC-DEMOCRATIC society -- founded upon the new, unprecedented
social relation of production, of ‘Generalized Equity’ -- which is the “lawful”
higher successor system to present, descendent-phase [State-]Capitalism;
(5) that of the detailed causation-dynamics of the
ever-worsening catastrophic global economic depression-crises, wars, and
genocides that advise us all of the growing need for us to transcend
[state-]capitalism, by creating that successor system, of grass roots
Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY.
That group is Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [see www.dialectics.info ].”
Regards,
Miguel
SOLUTION –
‘Equitist Political-ECONOMIC
DEMOCRACY’;
BOOK:
MARX’S MISSING
BLUEPRINTS
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