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:
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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. 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.
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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 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.
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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 “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.
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?
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.