Socialism

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

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.

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

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 @[email protected] 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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! 🙂

Think Marxism is scientifically flawed? Think anarchism lacks vision? Think infighting is too much? Then it sounds like you'd agree with soulists.

Soulists follow a scientific paradigm that centers psychology and solves psychological problems of human nature in tandem with what Marx called material problems. We view capitalism and the state as social constructs, building upon intersectional feminist theory and addressing them as problems of propaganda and informational warfare.

We don't need to have a revolution to start doing praxis. Overthrowing Capital and the state is one of our big goals, but there's tons we can do to build our society before then, and we're already doing it. We know exactly what our end goal looks like, because we've already done it on a small scale. All we need is to amplify our warfare.

While we have plenty of issues with reactionaries infiltrating the community, our position in these struggles is always to side with the marginalised. Queer, BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, etc. If someone has a different perspective than us but still stands with the oppressed, then we stand with them. That's because we don't believe in a single reality, so there's plenty of room for differing views to coexist. It's common for us to believe in all the gods, of every religion, just to be tolerant of everyone. Of course, we leave behind any exclusionary parts of all religions.

Most of us generally agree with this manifesto explaining soulism: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/a-soulist-manifesto-4d0456dcb75a

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?