Socialism of 21st Century -- a view

[Larynx]

Not sure which is the correct forum section for this topic. But anyway:

A new online book "Socialism of 21st Century" gives an opinion about 120 different topics in Socialist politics. Some of the thoughts are quite interesting, some others a bit controversial.

Website: socialism2 (.com)

[Q]

So, who wrote this? This just seems to come out of the blue.

[sixdollarchampagne]

I haven't seen the book, but "21st Century Socialism" was supposed to be what Chávez was running, in Venezuela. As such, it represented, at least, a serious departure from Marxism, since such "socialism" was being constructed before the destruction of capitalist rule, while workers were still being exploited. It always seemed to me that one sure way to discredit socialism in the eyes of working people, is to call a capitalist-ruled situation, like Venezuela, a bourgeois republic with a market economy, to call such a situation "socialist." Which is why, "21st century 'socialism,'" sub-reformism, in other words, less "socialist" even than Allende's rule in Chile, should be opposed from the left – because it's completely phony.

[Lord Daedra]

I haven't seen the book, but "21st Century Socialism" was supposed to be what Chávez was running, in Venezuela. As such, it represented, at least, a serious departure from Marxism, since such "socialism" was being constructed before the destruction of capitalist rule, while workers were still being exploited. It always seemed to me that one sure way to discredit socialism in the eyes of working people, is to call a capitalist-ruled situation, like Venezuela, a bourgeois republic with a market economy, to call such a situation "socialist." Which is why, "21st century 'socialism,'" sub-reformism, in other words, less "socialist" even than Allende's rule in Chile, should be opposed from the left – because it's completely phony.

But shouldn't we be at least a little sympathetic towards them?

[Red Enemy]

Probably a bunch of reformist, parecon jibber jabber.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Skimmed through some of it, and it looked absolutely ridiculous

[Kotze]

WOULD THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ WHAT THEY COMMENT ON PLEASE KILL THEMSELVES THANK YOU >:|

So here's your first actual reply.

I agree with some of point 5, the idea of tariffs on stuff that is cheaper due to more lax environmental regulations. Agree that helping the poor should rather work through increasing their income instead of subsidizing specific products (point 6). Agree about making product information more transparent to the consumer, especially regarding longevity, and making new sales and 2nd-hand and buying and renting available together (points 9 to 15).

The author gets that there's something weird about patents and copyright (16, 17, 28), but lacks radical clarity about what to do about it (even mentions something about license fees "calculated per installation on a computer" at some point, tsk).


When we own a product exclusively, it is reserved for our personal possession around the clock, also when we don’t use it. Locked in our private closet while we are away. In some cases this idle ownership, possessing a product when we don’t use it, is a significant and avoidable cost. If we can share and somehow schedule the ownership of property, it might be possible to get what we want and need, when we want and need it, without owning it exclusively around the clock. This would make our lives a richer experience, without us being any richer in monetary or absolute material terms.:thumbup1: You could have an entire thread just about that "lean ownership" stuff (points 26 to 29).

Missed opportunity to plug the land-value tax under point 34.

I don't understand point 40:
One generation of population eat more than they earn, and the next generation must tighten their belts to pay the bill of the previous generation (...) The workers who pay taxes for pensions, should have a legal right to get the pensions that they have paid for.Might as well outlaw getting cancer :P Think physically. What happens on the macro scale is that you don't really store up anything for the future with any pension scheme, some of the output by those working goes to those to young/old for working, whatever the economic/political system is. Now is now. What old people can get now depends on technology and stuff available now.

From point 41:
Full employment would not change the salary bargaining possibilities of workers in any essential way.There must be significant stigma of a significant fraction of jobs, similar to unemployment, for that to be true.

I agree that living expenses for children should be met in a way that asshole parents can't easily use that for themselves (point 48).

There's a lot about tweaking stuff from the consumption side (I wouldn't call that dumb, but meh) and too little about controlling what you create yourself. I also like having scale factor standards so my toy ensembles make sense (point 63), but do you really think (you are the author, OP, aren't ya) that Lenin would have approved his mug on the publication of such a nerdario wish list? Can you imagine Lenin say, "The Internet browser must remember what the user was doing and writing, just before a network connection error crashed a page download" — in a section of a socialist manifesto? That was under point 67 of 120.

Point 67. Of 120.

I mean, yeah, I agree with that, and I can imagine myself saying that in a conversation with you while beating a Golden Dawn fash to death with his own leg, bullets buzzing around us in a civil war spanning at least the whole eurasian continental plate, but that is because I am insane and even I wouldn't put that in a pamphlet.

Oh, and welcome to Revleft. If you want to rework that thoroughly and shrink it by a factor of 10, you can PM me :)

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I haven't seen the book, but "21st Century Socialism" was supposed to be what Chávez was running, in Venezuela. As such, it represented, at least, a serious departure from Marxism, since such "socialism" was being constructed before the destruction of capitalist rule, while workers were still being exploited. It always seemed to me that one sure way to discredit socialism in the eyes of working people, is to call a capitalist-ruled situation, like Venezuela, a bourgeois republic with a market economy, to call such a situation "socialist." Which is why, "21st century 'socialism,'" sub-reformism, in other words, less "socialist" even than Allende's rule in Chile, should be opposed from the left – because it's completely phony.

To be fair to the Venezuelan government, they haven't made a strong case that the political system in venezuela is actually socialist, just that they are "building" socialism whatever that means. Chavez initially ran on a social capitalist platform and only radicalized when mobs of leftist workers put him back into power after he was toppled by the "old guard" elite.

[Yuppie Grinder]

If Venezuela is so god damned socialist why is it still a nation state.

[Yuppie Grinder]

But shouldn't we be at least a little sympathetic towards them?

No.

[Kotze]

The text is not about Venezuela :closedeyes:

It's a hodgepodge of ideas. They aren't all wrong, but the focus is strange in that it is very zoomed in for the most part.

I'm not so much interested in a specific policy that may benefit the working class, but in an overall structure of how decisions in groups come about and are enforced, so that policies that benefit the working class are likely to prevail. The text is like the promise of an epic science fiction story, the kind that builds another world in your head, but almost all that world building turns out to be about details; towards the end I almost expected a section about how in Aspergia all the door handles are designed in such a way that they don't need some label that says push or pull since everybody knows such door handles are an abomination, and several pages with drawings of proper handles.

[Q]

WOULD THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ WHAT THEY COMMENT ON PLEASE KILL THEMSELVES THANK YOU >:|

So here's your first actual reply.

Classy.

I don't just read any wall of text, just because someone made a thread about it. I'd at the very least like some sort of introduction and know who wrote it.

[Jimmie Higgins]

WOULD THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ WHAT THEY COMMENT ON PLEASE KILL THEMSELVES THANK YOU >:|Yes, please make your point without the hyperbole and making light of suicide in the future.

[el_chavista]

The term "socialism of the 21st century" comes from the title of a book written by the professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico Heinz Dieterich in 1996, and was linked to the Bolivarian revolution since its early years, when Dieterich was considered one of the political mentors of Chavez.
Currently, Dieterich defected because his ideas were never implemented in Venezuela and has become a political enemy of Chavez.

The "21st century socialism" is a tendency for all sorts of utopian socialists (Dieterich), actual Marxists (Lebowitz), Marxists wannabe (Chávez), and, more generally, any layman who wants to invent out his own "revolutionary" theory, such as this "Mydas" from Helsinsky, Finland :lol: