Sunday, June 17, 2018

Response to Query “¿What makes you think that socialism / communism could still work without it ending with a totalitarian state?”



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






























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