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 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.
Glad to see others that don’t buy the idea that we should destroy the existing system without an alternative vision. When I read that, and we discussed it, I thought it was crazy. Sometimes I feel kinda gaslit by other socialists lol, like surely you don’t believe we should destroy without replacing.
I was reading an excellent piece recently about how the failure of Marxist-Leninists in the US to procure any real political power has resulted in them abandoning any effort towards practical change in favor of dogged rhetorical purity, and to some extent defining their rhetoric by the failure, if you will; i.e. if Communism can't succeed here, then anything that appears to be succeeding must not be true Communism.
I came here to suggest you look up Mutualism and Proudhon, but I see in other comments that you've already landed there like I have.
I see this mostly with the tea-sipping wannabe-ML revolutionaries (I live right adjacent to Berkeley, and there are lots of those here). Warfare is a tool of Imperialism and the State, and you can't defeat States, whose entire shtick is large-scale societal systems of authority and regimentation, with community-level systems of mutual defense, in open battle.