Sara Robinson posted this on Facebook. Apparently the author is a friend of hers. I would love to talk to him about this -- I agree with some of it but not all of it.
What do you think?
--Kim
Democratic Socialist policy is excellent. We need a much more radically progressive country and world.
But if you want Democratic Socialist policy, you have to abandon Marx entirely. Almost everything that is left and good in policy, from wealth taxes to reparations, you can get to via the Golden Rule and basic common sense.
Everybody keeps trying to "fix" or "update" Marx, but you can't. You can't fix Marx with Gramsci. You can't fix him with Crenshaw. Hegel was an overrated philosopher and Marx got almost everything wrong. Almost everything the left does wrong is because they're still hobbled by Marx and can't mentally escape it.
No, the rich don't operate from "capitalist class consciousness." They behave as distinctly, stupidly and emotionally as your next door neighbor, and are subject to the same delusions, conspiracy theories and whims. Rich people aren't brilliant and conniving and self-interested. They're generally pretty dumb and driven by petty BS.
No, there isn't a proletariat, bourgeoisie and capitalist class. Life is *way* more complicated than that. That wasn't really even a thing in the 19th century, and certainly not now. The fact that blue collar workers are mostly right wing and wealthier college educated white collar workers are now left wing is breaking so many Marxist brains. They can't handle it, and they're doing huge damage trying to reverse it or explain it away. Stop.
No, wanting nicer things and updated technology isn't a bad thing due to the false consciousness of consumerism or whatever. Smartphones and fusion cuisine are good, actually. Trying to repress that human creative instinct is bad. Luddism is bad. Figure out equitable distribution instead and keep the creativity going. If nothing else, you'll get obliterated by the societies that stayed more creative and open than yours did.
No, you should not in fact be analyzing your every interaction with every other person based on intersecting hierarchies of oppression and calibrating accordingly doing the complex social math in your head. It's not how normal people engage with the world. That is a terrible way to interact with people on both sides of the interaction, it's reductionist and dramatically reduces social trust, and it comes off as weird. Be good, kind and generous to everyone you meet, especially those less fortunate than you. Uplift the voices of those who suffer structural oppression. But also, stand up to bullies of all kinds. Far too few people actually stand up to bullies.
No, humanity was never in a good "perfect" state until it was corrupted by tyranny or capitalism or whatever. Capitalism itself was a force multiplier on mercantilism, which was a modest Animal Farmish improvement on feudalism. Not unless you want to try to go back before *agriculture*, and even then just take a cursory sample of ethnographies of pre-ag societies and get a load of the violence and even in-group oppressions. Humans aren't corrupted by external oppression. The evil we do is intrinsic. We extincted the mammoth before we could even write. Communism fails to create justice just as capitalism does, because humans in positions of power will never fail to oppress unless there are strict controls on their ability to oppress. You cannot deconstruct or revolutionize your way to a better society. A better world is an entirely *constructivist* project, requiring a technology-based freedom from scarcity and a rules-based prevention of oppression by those with power.
No, capitalism doesn't have contradictions that guarantee its own destruction. Capitalism coexists with society at large. It does tend toward redistributing all resources to the very top at its own expense. But you know what else does that? Monarchism. Also, hilariously, state communism. And then what happens? The elites get offed in violence and stuff gets redistributed. Capitalism isn't going to die of its own accord, because social forces will always keep it under just enough control not to. Yes, that frustrating liberalism will always keep the Revolution just out of reach--and even if it doesn't, the Revolutionaries will just get to the top of the pig pen and then *they* will have to figure out how to efficiently distribute resources managing scarcity and competition with other nations, with a medium of exchange and the tools for groups of people to invest in big projects, with their own "characteristics." No one ever actually leaves Omelas, because that's not a thing anyone can actually do. We're all stuck here with those problems inside of us.
No, fixing society won't come in the form of a revolution of the working classes in class consciousness. Take a look at what actually happens every time that is tried in violence. If you are trying to massage society or accelerate things until you get there, you're just doing damage. You're taking ivermectin to beat COVID. It doesn't work and you'll probably kill the patient trying.
Just....start over. If you want a better world, ask yourself how you would want the world to be, that you could reliably say would work if everyone adopted the same philosophy--and it has to be reasonable that everyone would, in fact, adopt that philosophy alongside you. (Nobody wants to have three hour committee meetings to decide how many varieties of toothpaste the Collective Toothpaste Makers should make. Get real. No, people aren't going to go back to living in communes of 300. Stop.)
Start with those answers: effective mass distribution of wealth where people get rewarded for creativity and work but not obscenely, people-oriented living spaces where no one suffers from misfortune, respect for the commons and for the natural environment, general social freedom to be who you want as long as your behavior isn't selfish and antisocial, etc.
You don't need Marx for any of that.
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