: I can't win! If I say "communism" you would think I have been exposed to so much cold war propaganda that I don't even know Russia was a command-communism bearing little resembalence to what people wrote about communism. Becouse on this forum, Fassbinder and others regard socialism as a stepping stone to true (anarichist) communism, I thought it would be less confusing to call it "anarchy-socialism" showing that a socialism had 'graduated' to anarchy and was a communism. If I had said "communism" In that statement, you would have given me the usual diatribe of how brainwashed and ignorant I am by confusing "Stalinism" with communism. But It didn't work anyways becouse people like you love to argue over a single detail in a phrase-- as Fassbinders advice he gave to "Quincunx"; take a few words that show capitalism "brainwashing" or falacy of thought and chop it to peices.I'm trying to quit posting to this Debating Room; my primary observation about it is that my own input has encouraged some readers here to show us their ugliest sides, which in its turn has brought on the "flame-mania" endemic to internet political discussion. Though I'm sure my presentation of facts has helped some people who read this thing.
But I guess I owe Mark Bednarz an explanation, since he was decent enough to recognize that the sort of socialism I was discussing was not the variety once promoted by that ugliest of historical villains, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin.
The point was, that a life-situation where warfare over property, the sort of warfare that goes on with the cheats, scams, ripoffs, strikes, layoffs, bankruptcies, problems with the homeless, power-trips, looming recessions, etc. all a product of capitalism, dominates the social scene, that all this MIGHT NOT BE PREFERABLE to a social situation where greed was universally replaced by sharing and where people loved (and CHOSE) their work instead of hating their jobs, which they "chose" because market realities forced them to accept such jobs.
And this latter situation might be preferable EVEN THOUGH we know nothing about it (since it's never happened before in all of human history) and since industrial processes under capitalism have produced sums of "wealth" unequalled in human history.
Now of course there are problems with setting up the sort of anarcho-syndicalist or utopian situation (Bednarz gropes for a term like "anarchy-socialism" -- that's fine, it shows some creativity) I had in mind. For one, modern capitalism is extremely complex, and it's hard to see people making the decisions they currently make, moving huge numbers of things around the world, without using money or power as "steering systems," that's what Jurgen Habermas calls them in the THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION. (A small note for pro- and anti-capitalists interested in Habermas's analysis: you have to read both volumes to understand what he's up to, which is about $40 if you buy the paperback versions and about 1000 pages of reading. It's a commitment.)
My tentative offer to Habermasians, in favor of reviving the discussion about Marx, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, utopia etc., is that a movement to make capitalism "less capitalist" would have to be a decentralist movement, would have to shift power downward, away from elites on Wall Street, DC, Hollywood, Geneva, Frankfurt, Tokyo etc. and toward individuals with merely "local" power. This might make money and power less important as steering systems.
Now, to address Bednarz's criticism of my comment to Quincunx. Most of these cheerleaders for capitalism can't muster up an analysis of the intellectual caliber of the above monologue. Which makes me an elitist of sorts. But I use this elitism to defend the discussion about "alternatives to capitalism" against arguments that, at their core, are defenses of an elitism of the most insidious sort. Most cheerleaders for capitalism will try to blame the victims of capitalist development for being, well, "suckers," while asking us to celebrate the shallow consumerist "wealth" and while at the same time ignoring its social crises. A defense of capitalism, today, implies a defense of incredible inequities of wealth and power. It also implies a defense of an economic system which, like Lenin's pseudo-communism, replaces a relatively benign state of urban poverty with a particularly dreadful experience, today, of urban poverty, at an increasing rate worldwide. When the cheerleaders of capitalism disavow these things, only then will I begin to take them seriously.
The quintessential blood-and-guts description of this urban poverty has got to be Jeremy Seabrook's book VICTIMS OF DEVELOPMENT -- Seabrook visits the dispossessed masses of Sao Paulo, the AIDS-infected whores of Bangkok, the trashdump-pickers of Manila, the urbanizing poor of Cornwall, England, the surplus beggars of Bombay etc., as well as the "back to countryside" movements by the world's rural poor as they try to preserve their meager livelihoods against the false promises of The System, be it capitalist or statist.
That's about enough for now -- people hate reading long messages and this one is too long already.
