Questions for Communists

First let me say: even though I have identified as an anarchist in the past, I want to make it clear that I'm not the type of person who says, "Theory is stupid!  We don't need theory, we need action!"  No - what we need is theory.  Lots of theory.  That's what we need more than anything else.  We need more theory.  Not just "more" theory - better theory.

The main question I want to ask every communist is a very simple question.  It can be asked in few words - in fact, it can be asked in one word: How?

How would communism work?  How would a classless society function?  How do you abolish the value form?  How do you abolish the general formula for capital, M-C-M'?  How do you abolish commodities?  How?

I want granular details.  I want logistics.  How does sewage work?  How does garbage disposal work?  How does the energy sector work?  How does AI fit into this? 

Because I've observed that the best way to get a Marxist to shut up is to ask them what they want.

They'll tell you what they don't want, but never what they want.  They'll say true socialism has never been tried.  They'll say it's not Stalinism, not Maoism, not anarchism, not Bernie Sandersism, not Social Democracy, not the Nordic model, not mainstream liberalism, yadda yadda yadda... it's something else.  But what exactly? 

What I hate is when a Marxist intellectual says, "Well, I don't have a blueprint."  Then what are you doing?  Why are you wasting your time?  Get to work!

Are you telling me that you expect people to potentially die... potentially kill... for... what?  You don't even know what?  The Marxists - they've got nothing.  Nothing.  No plan.  They literally don't know what they're doing.

There's almost a feeling of vertigo when you realize that this whole enterprise is built on nothing.  No plan, whatsoever.  No method for coming up with a plan.

And the worst is like, when people are like "Well, I don't know exactly how it's going to work, but I know it's going to be awesome!"  Like they're trying to psych themselves up.  That's when you really get the feeling that this is a multi-level-marketing scam.  Like, they don't know what's going on any more than you do.  You're not even talking to the con-men.  You talking to the people who were scammed by the people who were scammed by the people who were scammed by the people who were scammed by the con-men. 

Because, look: if you want this to be successful, if you want the working class to take control of the means of production, you're going to need to convince the working class - which is, you know, billions of people - not only that you have a plan - not even just that the plan can work, like it can actually works, like it actually functions - no - that's not enough - you have to convince them that your plan can work better than capitalism.  Grow up, treat us like an adult, and put forward your plan, explicitly and clearly.  We need plans.  Lots of plans, from lots of theorists.  Then the workers can look at the various plans, and we can take a little from plan A, a little from plan B, take plan C and change certain things, and so on.  That's what the workers being in control means.  It means that the workers choose between plans.  That's what you've got to work on.  That's what you've got to bring to the table.  Make a convincing argument not just that capitalism is bad - we all know capitalism sucks.  But you've got to convince us that your system will work better. 

You've got to come up with a plan now.  If you wait til later, it will be too late.  It may already be too late, frankly.  I hate it when communists are like, "Oh, we'll figure it out later.  Let's build a revolution, and then we'll decide."  No.  The middle of a war is the worst time to come up with a plan.  You need to at least start planning now.  Do you have any idea what war is like?  Like a civil war?  You're going to plan an entire economy in the middle of civil war?  Really?  You think that's when you'll come up with a scientific theory?  You're insane if you think people are going to create a functional economy from the bottom up in the middle of a civil war.

We need plans.  Military strategists come up with plans.  Not just one plan: multiple contingency plans.  If A happens, you do X.  If B happens, you do Y.  And military strategists have a saying, which is, first you plan for the battle, then, once the battle starts, you throw out the plan.  Because now you're confronting reality, and of course there's things you didn't consider when you were planning.  But still, it's worth it to plan beforehand, and then throw that plan out.  Because that will start you thinking about what you need to think about.  Right now, communists are not even thinking about what they need to think about.  They're thinking about Shakespeare and metaphysics and Stockhausen when they should be thinking about food and water and plumbing and how the energy grid works and Coase's theorem and Nash equilibria and how to solve optimization problems.

I want to know how.  And that means two things: how the proposed future mode of production will work, and how we get from here to there.  But of the two, how the mode of production works, far in the future, is the more important question.  

Because, look: we've had this debate before.  Edward Bernstein famously said "The goal of socialism is nothing.  The struggle is everything."  But Rosa Luxemburg wrote her famous "Reform or Revolution?" arguing against Bernstein, saying that you do need a clear understanding of what you want as a goal in order to devise a strategy for how to get there.  Because if you don't have a well worked-out theory that can tell you whether what you are doing is actually socialism, with clear, unambiguous criteria, the movement is eventually just going to break down into standard liberalism.  At best.

Here's the thing - I just said, the best way to get a Marxist to shut up is to ask them what they want.  But actually, I know what they want.  What do they want?  Do they want the dictatorship of the proletariat?  No.  Do they want socialism?  No.  Do they want communism?  No.  What Marxists actually want is to be the smartest person in the room.

And they're very good at it.  They've got a snappy, clever answer for everything.  Truly.  They always sound, not just clever.  Right.  And yet, without a plan, their clever words are vacuous.

Without practice, without even a plan for practice, that is, without any positive content, Marxism becomes mere rhetoric.  Communists may not have a plan, or a hope, but they have an answer for everything.  Something impressive.  Something unanswerable, indisputable, final.  Something that makes them sound very clever.  Something to change the subject.

But even as rhetoric, Marxism fails, and for multiple reasons. One reason is as follows: think of Howard Zinn's title, "You can't be neutral on a moving train" - meaning, if you're on a "train" that is headed for disaster unless someone hits the breaks, if people are debating whether or not to pull the break line, to put on the air of neutrality is to take a position, the position of allowing the train to crash and everyone aboard to die.  It's a pretty powerful and persuasive rhetorical stance.

But it's rhetorically weak to say "You have to do something, to make X happen - but if you don't do anything, X will happen anyway."

Notice what kind of argument that is.  It's not a political argument.  It's a sales pitch.  What they're basically saying is: this is going to happen, so you want to get in on the ground floor.  Be an early investor.  And like, okay.  I don't have a moral problem with that.  If you're doing a sales pitch, do a sales pitch.  Fine.  But again, an early investor in what?  Again, if we're not being clear about what is being sold, here, other than your position in the flow chart of an organization, then it feels like a pyramid scheme, like multi-level-marketing.

Without a clear political program, Marxism just becomes an exclusive club - and in that sense, it works very well. Indeed, it excludes just about everyone. Everyone feels very unwelcome.

(This gets into another thing which has historically been a tactical problem with Marxism, which is that it has sometimes excluded religious people.  But that's a topic for another time.)

This was part of Lenin's success - he made Marxism into an exclusive club - and that's what people want. They want to feel that prestige. unlike the Mensheviks, who let all the riff-raff in - or at least that's how they were perceived. Actually, they were exclusive too, but not as exclusive as the Bolsheviks. Of course, it's not successful at bringing about worker control of the means of production, but it is successful at promoting your career, establishing your place within the elite, so in that sense it's very successful. And who cares what happens after your death? The fact that Lenin had no legacy - why should that matter to Lenin? As Valerie Solanis said, why should we care about future generations, or even whether there are any future generations? As long as Lenin and his buddies get to party with the cool people, that's all that matters, right?

What I would say to the neo-Stalinists is not so much: "How could you?  How dare you?  Stalin was such a bad man," etc., etc..  I would just say: it's been 100 years since Stalin came to power.  You haven't had a single new idea since then?  What are you, stupid?  Did someone drop you on your head?  Get a life!  I guess I'm being mean, but my point is that the neo-Stalinists need theory just as much as everybody else. 

And then there's the "New Left," which rejected Stalinism, but... it's like, where is it?  It was just an announcement of a new left, but.... We're still waiting.  It never materialized.  We don't need literary analysis, we don't need psychologizing - and that's what the Frankfurt School mostly gave us, with The Authoritarian Personality, and Erich Fromm, and Marcuse, or the analysis of language, like Habermas - that's all superstructural.  We need new economic theory.  And theory of the state.  Preferably both, in such a way that they make sense with each other.

My attitude towards Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, postmodern, "post-Marxists," etc., etc. is actually all the same: it's not so much that I'm against vanguardists because "vanguardists are mean" or whatever - it's just that - you guys aren't the vanguard.  I'm sorry, but you're not.   I'm not against the vanguard.  It would be cool if there were a vanguard.  It would be great!  But there is no vanguard on the left that I can see.  

What is a vanguard?  The essence of a vanguard is that they are the most theoretically sophisticated sector of the proletarian movement.  You've got to have the ideas that eventually filter down to the rest of the masses.  But that's not happening.  Instead, the left can be divided into 3 groups, in terms of their practical political commitments: you've got the Marxists and anarchists who are tailing the liberals - who are the real vanguard - like Slavoj Zizek.  Group 2 is people who reverse that, and tail the conservatives.  And group 3 are people who are trying to recover or revive some previous version of the left.  Most people on the left are a mixture of all 3.  But no part of the left is doing what a vanguard would do - that is, have ideas that then spread out to the masses.  No part of the left is having any new ideas at all!  You can't call yourself a vanguard if you haven't had a new idea in 100 years.

(I'll grant one exception - there was one time in recent memory that the left intelligentsia acted as a vanguard to the broader population, and that was on the topic of police abolition - defund the police! - that was an idea that in the 90s, you really only found it in the fringes of the extremes of the political left - and occasionally also the political right - and then it spread out to a wider population, with BLM and so on.  I'm not sure how wide. (It was an extreme concept from the 60s New Left, which was a blending together of leftist ideas and right libertarian ideas - Carl Oglesby and all that.) And of course, as soon as reached the broader population, it fizzled, because it was half-baked.  You can't change the elements of the superstructure without transforming the economic base.)

The right, by the way, is beating us in the ideas race, and the effectively the vanguardism race.  The right keeps on having new ideas.  Constantly.  In the last 100 years, they keep on reinventing themselves, adapting to changing circumstances in the development of productive capacity.  Fascism, which was quite different from traditional monarchism and the religious right - then libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard, etc., then esoteric neoconservatism of Leo Strauss, etc., I consider postmodernism an idea from the right, and it culminates in like, Dugin; now we've got Nicolas Nassim Taleb, Curtis Yarvin and the neoreactionary movement, Nick Land and the accelerationists, etc..  They're eating our lunch.  I wish the left were as inventive as the right.  It's like they come out with something new every week.  This is the one area where we should have the advantage over the right - they've got the money, the power, the institutions, etc., but we're supposed to have the ideas.  And yet we haven't had a new idea in 100 years.

(Taleb is particularly interesting, because in a way, what he's doing is a lot like what Marx did: he's offering a critique of political economy - a critique of economics - a critique of economism, if you like.  As Taleb put it recently, some fields don't work in theory, others don't work in practice.  Economics is unique in that it doesn't work in theory or in practice.  But his critique of economics leads him to a new kind of conservatism.  Maybe that's not so different from Marx.  In some ways, I see Marx as a kind of conservative.)

So, put up, or shut up: let's get some new ideas!  What's your plan?