Tag: marxism

A new website: Postcapitalist Futures

This will get its own doman soon, til then:
https://wordpress.com/view/history-and-evolution.com

Marxists need a new kind of left, and by no means only Marxists:
the public should be in revolt against the genocidal horror underway
in their ‘republic if you can keep it’. Our formulation is either reformist
or revolutionary. The revolutionary moment is arriving on its own, in a cascade
of crises. As climate change accelerates the system will enter breakdown.
The key slogan of all boy scouts is, Be Ready.

The times are at the brink. We stand by as a fascist counterrevolution from the right, piously
sermonizing revolutionary cadres and ideologies moves via perverted counterrevolutionary crypto-fascism
to undermine democracy as a mad president carries out genocide in public in a pandemic as
the public takes it as a news item as gaping paralytics.
We are starting a new website Postcapitalist Futures for a series of resources on the left.
The left is almost paralyzed, and that in part is due to the dated character of basic marxism.
We advocate making Marx/Engels classic portraits in a core heroic saga
and moving to a critique, long overdue, of classic marxism (from which however
we quietly pilfer some of its key memes).
We need a new formulation of socialism, and some ideas for postcapitalism reconstruction.
We have two mini-manifestos and an idea for a left group, The Red Forty-eight Group, which
is like a model generator for neo-communist social projects: democratic market neo-communism.
Like it or not capitalism is coming to an endgame phase, and must be ready with some idea
of what to do next. The right is ready with fascist options, while the left is mostly
sloganeering terms with no referents.

Our thinking is addressed equally to reformist and revolutionary perspectives.
We remind our readers however that the Yankee Doodle system, called a democracy,
began with a revolution, and was pegged as ‘a republic if you can keep it’, now a
a peculiar form of Trumpocracy with capitalist flavor.

Free will versus ‘stages of production’ theory

The stance of the marxist left influenced by scientism has stood on the ‘no free will’ side of a classic dialectic.
Surely that is a mistake, as is the theory of historical materialism. In the final analysis the issue of free will should be more open on the left and be able to consider the radical challenge of Kant et al. There is no reason not to embrace the dialectic as such, but the strangeness of the ‘stages of production’ theory have crippled the whole range of marxist theory.

The left already has an alternative in Kantian ethical socialism...

Source: Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins on free will – Uncommon Descent

Letter to the Socialists, Old and New

Socialism is making a comeback but it is important to see that the older brand is played out and that a new generation will be done a disservice if they fall into old grooves. Time is short but no work is being done to recast the old legacy into something new and practical and the result will be a kind of sluggish inaction stuck in a dated version of marxism. We have critiqued marxism, after praising its historical moment and the way it created a way station to the future. But after the legacy of Bolshevism, the subject must start over and become a new framework. Continue reading “Letter to the Socialists, Old and New “ →