u/Hot_Relative_110

One of the key reasons I consider myself a communist and anti-capitalist is because I 100% believe that capitalism drives forth social alienation and that the logic of accumulation and survival defeats any attempt to maximize human dignity or freedom. I liked the concept of communism promoting a society where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

I relate to individualism on a more psychological level than anything; distress and incongruence should be a variation of alienation in this case, and not having the room to critique or having to walk on eggshells in order to do so rarely creates favorable outcomes. In particular I’m concerned about the full extent of self-expression and the rights thereof, being able to dissolve so many of the rigid and traditional barriers or structures that prevent development, being able to develop yourself without having to worry about how many hours you’ve put in and whether rent will eat into your ability to live freely. When free expression becomes less and less important, more scrutinized and less valued, what happens to all the alienated? When people feel like they give too much to society or the collective without getting anything back, can that distress be considered selfishness—do we just not care?

More importantly, I’ve always been skeptical of what the dictatorship of the proletariat actually means. I’d argue that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, together with the instruments of the state, base their power and support on a cultural hegemony like Gramsci discussed, as well as a general soft-power rule. A lot of self-justifying because apparently capitalism is ”the only system where you can make something of yourself.” It is, put simply, something that bases itself in self-interest, self-development, and the illusion of voluntary participation. Shouldn’t a communist revolution base itself initially on these same principles rather than pure control, any notion of a greater good, etc.; who cares about a greater good when you’ve got a family to feed? If Marx was right that material conditions shape worldviews, which I largely understand it to be, it would still leave the door open to self-interested individuals based on their own priorities or desires, repressed or otherwise, emotional or material.

Im open to clarify if this question is confusing, but more broadly, are concepts like humanism and individualism inherently incompatible with the more anti-idealist and collectivist views of communism; on what basis have these values been described as pure idealism?

So I very often have random spurs where I write stuff down, and as I’ve recently started reading a lot more Mao Zedong, its sort of mixed his own ideals with mine and I started writing down some ideas or policies inspired by Mao, plus rhetorical strategies for gathering support. Looking for feedback on some of these ideas. Please keep things respectful and I hope for some great and enlightening discourse :)

• Third Worldism and Dependency Theory
• Capital mobility, deindustrialization, the effort against left-Democrats and the working class, race-to-the-bottom, impossibility of reform, corporatism as an effective delay.
• Denunciation or abolition of market and profit logic; temporary or necessary retaining of some aspects of commodity production.
• Resolving antagonistic contradictions by addressing the conditions behind them.
• No investigation, no right to speak.
• Two participations, one reform, three combinations.
• Production independence as the correlative of centralization.
• From the people, to the people.
• Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
• Unity-Criticism-Unity.
• Rejection of primitive socialist accumulation.
• Joint-stock cooperative labor (factories, shops, shop-floors, farming, etc.).
• Iron Rice Bowl.
• Participatory, grassroots, consultative democracy; the People’s Congresses and democratic centralism.
• Soft power and evolutionarily stable strategies.
• Generalized economic planning.
• Performance-based criticism, independent and qualified auditing, counter-proposals.
• Rejection of material balance planning. 
• Embedded transit within dense and ecological urban areas and a national transit plan.
• Recall and denunciation rights with investigative qualifications.
• Automatic joint-stock deductions through mutual banks, credit unions, and the national central bank, all for expanded reproduction, management and production costs, and the public welfare fund.
• Free expression of speech, tradition, culture, religion, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ideals, disillusionment, mental illness, etc.

 

I wanna get into contact with more mutual aid networks, party orgs, etc. I’m 16 years old, junior year in high school, and kinda overwhelmed given the circumstances plus extracurriculars, but I wanna get involved. I live in California around Stockton and don’t really have much mobility, plus I’m almost certain there isn’t really an org or anything where I can protest and I don’t have much money of my own. But we do have P&F and other orgs, so I was wondering if there was any way to stay in the fight? Thank you all, and solidarity forever

Standing against the Cuban people is, by all means, completely unacceptable in their fight against the imperialists and the criminals and oligarchs who had long done their bidding. I think that Cuba is one of the strongest examples of socialist democracy, of mass participation, of democratic centralism and the broader principles of upholding the dictatorship of the proletariat in the world as it stands. The National Assembly of People’s Power and the people’s councils seem to be great examples of this. Even as I hold significantly more left-libertarian views, I can’t deny this progress.

Still abiding by the principles of central planning, they seem to still hold many participatory and autonomous systems within state enterprises and thus grant their workers a considerable degree of autonomy and control. Cuba’s strides in biotech and healthcare also shouldn’t be ignored for any reason whatsoever. Cuba, beyond being naturally beautiful as an island, is dedicated towards development.

Beyond this, they face collapse because of the starving-out of the Cuban people and the constant pressure the United States puts on innocent people, shamelessly as the imperialist regime they are hellbent on bringing Cuba back to a time of crime, globalist and imperialist extraction, and poverty. I’d like to hope that we, whether in the United States proper or elsewhere across the world, can stand in solidarity and support Cuba, not merely as socialists and anti-imperialists, but as human beings who hate to see such a beautiful island and people suffer so much at the hands of our government.

When evaluating what went wrong with the Soviet economy, we keep going back to issues to including a widespread lack of reform, and an all around shortage economy much less perceptive to producing and distributing goods for consumption than they were capital goods; steel, coal, weaponry, etc. The works of the Soviet economy in industry shouldn’t be forgotten as a country that, while reliant on private capital in the beginnings of its economic development, transformed a post-feudal society into one with immense industrial prowess that was even able to relocate and rebuild during and after WWII. Beyond these specific circumstances, however, is a concerning lack of competence within this same economy so incredibly competent in developing heavy industries than they were sustaining a steady supply of consumer goods.

The issue that I keep coming back to is how difficult it is to quantify consumer goods; without more of this fancy talk, basically, how does a central government plan what consumer goods several thousand different places need, all that the same time and with little room for error? And how do they even define what consumer goods are for different parts of a society if they’re not necessarily uniform?

A lot of people assume (incorrectly in my opinion) that you solve this issue by tying the central plan to markets, which just turns “production for consumption” into a new and more intense form of commodity production with deeper capitalist logic. *Instead,* I’d argue that keeping some elements of capitalist structure, that being a more flexible or localized form of production or management without relying on markets or exchange, and trying local production to local demands, would make light industry much more effective.

[my own proposals start here; if you don’t wanna read em all, just skip to the bottom]

Moreover, if *absolutely* necessary for the state to control the “commanding heights of the economy,” then why not give this more federated structure *to* light industries while retaining that centralized control over things like steel or other concerns?

Additionally, when it comes down to structure, investment, and distribution/redistribution, you could replace one-man management with either collective or democratic leadership, essentially a “free association“ of some sorts. Socially what this tends to do is increase morale, give workers the sense of responsibility and belonging, and actually increase productivity, which when all put together could make output more efficient. With investment, you could have either one state bank or a collection of credit unions or mutual banks that automatically pool together a deduction of the value created by the workers themselves to reinvest into industry. I’d argue for a mixed investment system to make sure that certain associations or enterprises don’t lag behind and have access to more investment where necessary. With distribution, I’m a bit less perceptive or persuaded by consumer councils because of how reliant they could be on mass participation and the angst thereof; maybe local soviets could give local enterprises and associations information on what to produce and how much. Or maybe you could do one of two things; indicative pricing, which is still reproducing commodity production in a different way, or you could even have kind of a “give-away” shop to track local demand; see what people take more of and less of and tie demand to that.

TLDR; I do think overall that a socialist economy needs some kind of decentralization, and I’d furthermore argue that the typical argument that this degree of economic centralism doesn’t exactly have the same basis that arguments in favor of political centralism might have; outward pressure. There’s a profound difference in decentralizing for the sake of “personal liberty” and because it could be more efficient. This long ass paragraph was just me giving some examples on how this could happen.

Here’s where I do;

1. The First World still shares a common feature; an affluent ruling class with concentrated economic power, a labor aristocracy, a broad petit-bourgeois rural culture and a significantly exploited lower class deep in poverty; universal or extreme affluence in a given society does not immediately disqualify it from being a First World country, as exploitation and extraction is still a defining feature.
2. The culture of present capitalist society has become increasingly consumerist, passive, conformist, and everyone treats the other as a simple means to an end; the present first world is that of the egoist. 
3. The artistic cultures of urban America and creativity are less crucial commodities unless industrialized, therefore succumbing to its growing replacement with commodified art and gentrification.
4. Reform in modern capitalism is far more difficult than before given capital mobility, which has fundamentally weakened and eroded the labor aristocracy and has pushed toward a phenomenon comparable to the capitalist class dangling their keys over the proletarians’ heads; race to the bottom economics essentially takes already commodified labor and attempts to prostitute it beyond existing extents.
5. China, while their emphasis on Leninist principles and a whole-process people’s democracy, is a corporatist regime that has used Marx’s emphasis on national development and social reconciliation, has become a society that organizes innately parallel interests in labor, the state, and capital into one large national plan, and is becoming rampantly consumerist despite state direction and social reinvestment. It has also joined the ranks of the First World despite their contradictory antagonisms with Western society and partakes in the exploitation of African labor and resources, which includes union-busting, collaboration with regional warlords, and poor toiling conditions. 
6. The Nordic Model and the broader welfare state still depend not just on the exploitation of labor and the extraction of surplus value, but also on their dependency on historical post-war subsidies to combat communist influence and the labor of the Third World, as well as the less fortunate of the more developed societies. 
7. Vanguardism is an obsolete organizational model, as is immense centralization, given historic failures in economic organization and towards popular responsibility in favor of technocratic bureaucracy. It assumes that power fails to corrupt, that production is a constant trend, that local information can be adequately balanced, among various concerns. Anarchism, conversely, has its own fundamental issues; can voluntary, non-binding federations contrast against the militaristic capitalist states we’re bound to face? 
8. The liberal arguments of eternal and natural truths or convictions stand nowhere near the basis of materialism or empiricism, however typical Marxism fails to account for psychological or sociological conditions that material conditions can influence.

 

hearing people like Ossoff, Beshear, or other people go against the GND is a bit weird, but then you hear them say “well of course, that place is a lot more centrist than a lot of other places.” which yeah, as a Californian, obviously I’m not the brightest bulb in the room with statewide politics in Georgia. But I think that theres a method to actually forming a coherent policy that isn’t just “we’re going to do *something* green, which means that we’re going to eviscerate West Virginia and the entire Rust Belt along with it“ or whatever people like to accuse it of being. Once you actually elaborate on a policy, which I know someone as articulate as say, Jon Ossoff could do, it starts to become less “someone watched Greta Thunberg once” and more “fuck, this person might actually change something.” it could be a really strong strategy if it’s targeted and specific enough in what it intends to accomplish

This is more relevant to the American economy, yes, but the point still remains. Like it’s such blatant proof of Marx’s theory of commodified labor and is, in my opinion, extremely important to understanding the dynamics of modern capitalism and the overall impossibilist nature thereof. If the working class already has their labor or labor-power commodified, what outsourcing and capital flight have done to this is make labor and the prospect of employment something that the capitalists can essentially dangle over our heads like keys (I was going to call this key’s theory for a sec before I realized that it was already probably a phenomenon everyone’s already talked about, and plus the name sounds stupid). So then what do a lot of American politicians do? They race to the bottom. Given the prevalence of right-to-work, the fears over higher taxation and wages pushing capital out of a given region, etc. the capitalists have more sway than ever. It also should prove to more people that social democracy or democratic socialism is a significantly more difficult system to try and implement in a given society thanks the circumstances of RTTB economics. Even if you treat innately self-interested economic groups like labor, capital, and the state as ones that can be reconciled and made to serve a common purpose, the present scrutiny on labor-side organization and power makes it so that this is almost impossible. Moreover, as if it weren’t obvious enough, the left has ample opportunity to “seize power” or build a coalition coherent enough to take on the established political class, notably within parties like the Democrats; when are we going to encourage them to realize that they have more sway in not voting than voting for their preferred candidate?

Idk this was more of a rant but like damn

I’ve taken an interest in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and what I like about Maoism in particular is the concept of the mass line, anti-bureaucracy sentiment, the revolutionary potential that the rural peasantry possesses, the role of criticism and self-criticism, third worldism, and the elements of the Cultural Revolution that did include worker‘s self-management and autonomy. I do not, however, come fully to terms with centralism as a whole, because while I can somehow reconcile the fact that anarchism isn’t necessary pragmatic in the grand scheme of things, I also dont think that we exist in a false binary; I don’t think that, even in using the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat“ or “the people’s democratic dictatorship“ that democratic centralism has too often put an emphasis on over enterprise control, stable management, and more executive delegation. This isn’t an outright rejection of democratic centralism as a political system, but I have some major skepticism about full-on centralism. It’s part of why I like Maoism, but in that situation, it’s not entirely clear why or how a society elevates its vanguard while still using concepts like the cultural revolution to either hold them accountable *or* outright remove them. And could anyone possibly be exempt from this? I’m very skeptical of concentrated power anywhere, so I’m wondering if that’s contradictory to being an MLM. Thank you for engaging :)

I’m fairly sure that I’m transfem? Like my entire questioning whatever has been a journey I can only describe as being worse than anything I’ve ever fucking felt but that’s an entirely different story.

Title’s pretty self explanatory. My mom refuses to not talk about my god damned hair in a single motherfucking conversation we have, and it’s driving me insane.

I in my ever so cis mind figured I’d be like every other guy in a good 10 mile radius and cut my once shoulder-length hair into a taper fade. It was… alright. Probably why I got my first girlfriend. Now ex girlfriend. Unrelated, but I never knew that you could hate someone so much to the point that you feel like you deserved their estrogen instead of them having it. Weird.

In recent days I’ve been growing out my hair. I don’t feel like making my dad spend the money on me, and besides I’ve always hated cutting my hair. Obviously it’s in the awkward stage so I look like a gay raccoon at best, but it’s better than looking like an e-bike kid who reads at a first grade level and has had 14 talking stages and no girlfriend the entire eight grade.

Except maybe not because my mom, and to a lesser extent my dad, won’t shut the fuck up about my hair. If I had a penny for every time my parents told me “you need a haircut boy,” I’d have enough money to lobby Congress to exempt me from short hair fucking permanently. It drives me fucking insane. I wake up yesterday and drag my miserable ass to breakfast; she says it again. I get ready to go to my aunts birthday party; she says it again. I’m AT my aunts birthday, she fucking randomly comes up, pushes my hair away, and starts rambling about how handsome I am and bla-di-fucking-blah. I seriously wanna throw up dealing with this bullshit.

By the time I’d gotten home having somewhat NOT flipped over a table, I felt like absolute shit. It got so bad that I just ended up trying to fall asleep on the bean bag in our living room because I just couldn’t walk up the stairs without aching a little bit more. Eventually she left and me and my dad decided to play some Madden. Fuck the Commanders for making me lose, by the way.

I asked him a bit about therapy. He hasn’t really been too on it but I do sympathize with him. He works like crazy. I’m going crazy, but that’s neither here nor there.

TL;DR: fuck.

I definitely am no capitalist. Let that be clear before I start to say anything at all.

I have, at many times before, called myself a Marxist-Leninist, or just a Leninist, or just a Marxist, or even a Maoist. There are, after all, a lot of different tendencies in Marxism, and even with my more anarchic ideas, I put a lot of scrutiny on pure statelessness.

That being said, I don’t think that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as a general concept, not even going back to the original Leninist philosophy, makes sense as a governing principle for any given society. Even by reaffirming that Marxism-Leninism and various other tendencies thereof has been the universally accepted and recognized tendency of socialist states, the underlying contradiction I feel comes down to how Marxism-Leninism created the social dynamics for its own fall. It does deserve greater scrutiny than “socialism failed because capitalists attacked it,” because that either simplifies or ignores the various failures in governance that led to some form of capitalist restoration, some of which came voluntarily by Marxist-Leninist governments. Not to mention that by that logic, anarchism too develops a much stronger case for itself, but let’s discard the debate between anarchism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism for now.

The first problem that I have with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is democratic centralism as an overarching and universal principle. Firstly, we’ve put far too much emphasis on the ”centralism” part of the concept historically and have often overlooked the legislative AND executive power that lower delegations, or soviets, are supposed to have. Moreover, when made universally applicable, at which point can a failed or flawed policy be reversed or changed without contradicting “freedom of debate, unity in action?” At what point does criticism, or even self-criticism, become an effective tool against bureaucratic failure?

More importantly to me, there seems to be a tendency to apply the logic of democratic centralism to economic planning, which given the concerns listed above, in all honesty, is an absolutely atrocious way of addressing the economy. Acting as though state ownership and planning in one large information center is either A) adequately socialist as opposed to cooperative labor, B) a good way of balancing out supply and demand within a complex and modernized economy, whether by material balances or a different system thereof, C) not a gateway into overinvestment into long term megaprojects, heavy industry, or the military industrial complex, and D) a good way to allow that same complex modern economy to be as flexible as it needs to be, means that a lot of people have made the incorrect assumptions about economics.

These incorrect assumptions have often build the material conditions for capitalist restoration through, ironically enough, reform or revolution. An economy thereby organized around the principles of democratic centralism only exists, in practice, in North Korea. That‘s one out of the 5 Marxist-Leninist states still in existence, of the near 30 that have likely existed throughout modern history. I think that marketization or liberalization of the economy is also an incorrect, yet important miscalculation of material conditions, as it fosters inequality irrespective of where applied, but still puts a larger emphasis on the needs of consumers and allows for localized information and production, an entire independent logistical framework, a way out of poverty, increased flexibility and cohesion, non-governmental investment institutions… I would make the case that the failures of Marxism-Leninism in terms of sustainable economics can be mitigated by some degrees of decentralization, localization, flexibility, autonomy, etc. in planning and management, even if you retain markets as a merely indicative tool. Calling capitalism, in a “state controlled form,“ THE necessary means of development towards a socialist society seems a bit redundant then.

Next on my list of concerns is blind faith and trust. I didn’t develop anarchic tendencies because I listened to a single punk song and decided that a national identity was horseshit. I developed them because I have always been someone who questions authority, and questions authority when it demands a quality out of the public without much justification, or because “it said so.” I personally put a lot of appreciation on Stirner’s work, in that I have a lot of skepticism for the same state power that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism can emphasize lots of time. I don’t think that, in a society where self-interest hasn’t been abolished (because you can’t make a Decree on Consciousness), where individuals and social groups are so often self-interested and not yet abolished, that we can put our blind faith and trust in a group of “resolute” individuals in the name of “the greater good.” How far, again, can self-criticism, the mass line, and criticism in general go in “freedom of debate” when unity in action can often erase these rights?

Moreover, how far can we go? How justified is revolutionary terror? Who or what defines what a wrecker or a roader is? If the answer is attacking bureaucracy, then why have one in the first place? If it is to do without, can we call ourselves Marxist-Leninists? When it comes down to the purges and the Cultural Revolution, I feel like these questions can go unanswered.

And please, tell me what YOU think. What you, honest to god, think about these innate contradictions about Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and how to resolve them.

It feels like irrespective of which Democrat runs or how shitty the other Republican in question is, Ohio just keeps electing Republicans. Hell, arguably one of their best elected leaders, Sherrod Brown, got voted out. Democrats *have* had the perception of being even less appealing to rural, suburban, and blue collar workers, but even then, like damn. Brown had the Teamsters, UAW, all that shit and still lost. Hell, even in shitty years for the GOP nationally where Trump was amazingly unpopular in Ohio, people like DeWine prevailed. What the hell happened?

Personally, mine has been

Favorite:

- Tom Steyer, California gubernatorial election

- Dan Osborn, U.S. Senate election in Nebraska

- James Talarico, U.S. Senate election in Texas

Least Favorite:

- Haley Stevens, U.S. Senate election in Michigan

- Xavier Becerra, California gubernatorial election

- Eric Swalwell, California gubernatorial election

- Vivek Ramaswamy, Ohio gubernatorial election

- Xavier Becerra, California gubernatorial election

- Becerra Xavier, gubernatorial California election

what about you guys?

I really don’t want to be negative on here again. Are there any resources out there that can help me through questioning, or at the very least help me answer some questions? I understand this isn’t the best place to go for help, because you’re all people with your own lives and there‘s enough bullshit and negativity as is, and I’m done trying to make that other people’s problem. Im 16 and have zero access to therapy, so I wanna know if there’s any other place where I can seek help. Even if it’s online, that’s more than welcome. Thank you all so much and have a great rest of your day <3

edit: I should also add I’ve tried reading the GD bible online and journaling and all that but it just seems to do little in terms of accepting that i might have dysphoria or anything. just looking for some help

Personally, I find it odd how many socialist states have resorted to market-based policies as some sort of hybrid that largely departs from the old trend of command economies. What it seems to reveal, however, is an incentive to improve the material conditions of a national economy given some pretty understandable issues within a given system. The command economy has, after all, faced widespread criticism regarding a history of starvation, often times to the detriment of all socialists or Marxists irrespective of tendency. In this sense I’ve started to conclude the following;

1. Public, or state owned and managed property, is not innately socialist. There is a surprisingly strong and common tendency among historical examples of state enterprise that has often rebuilt the social relations seen in private ownership, including efforts to thwart decentralization or digitization efforts. I dislike the monopoly on economic power the Gosplan possessed, largely due to the nature of economic planning and the material imbalances thereof; why have all the power with chronic shortage to show for it? Conversely, there seems to be a tendency to label state property as though it is owned by the whole of society in light of the dictatorship of the proletariat; political conditions notwithstanding, would it thereby be logical to call such a form of property common property, and if so, why wasn’t it regarded as such?
2. State enterprise and centralized economic planning lacks the wherewithal to manage a complex and modernized economy in a manner that promotes a sustainable microeconomic condition. The same economic plans that helped build the factories largely accredited with defeating the Nazis were the same ones that, largely as a result of treating production as a flat trend, using overly quantitative material quotas and balances, and a lack of bureaucratic response towards weather conditions and localized resistance until necessary intervention from the central government, helped contribute to one of the largest and most tragic famines in Ukraine, the Volga Region, Kazakhstan, and parts of Siberia. In due time, this same economic system proved to struggle with the modernized economy it had helped create, with many a nation (Poland, Hungary, even the USSR in 1965) resorting to bourgeois investment and market elements to relieve many of the pressures their consumers faced; the 1989 crisis and the turmoil beyond should be indicative of a failure to adequately address these pressures, and it seems to be a consistent trend towards market elements, quite contradictory to socialism, against decentralization, that pushes forth either revisionism or economic pressure, perhaps even collapse.

What I am pushing forward as an alternative is, in many ways, the localization, federalization, and broader reorganization of the socialist economy into one much more adequately responsive to the demands of the everyday individual using the following:

- Mutual banks and credit unions, meaning democratized credit and financial services that can help with the investment, credit, and mechanization aspects of an economy.

- Localized collectives using economic inputs in one specific area or location to meet demands, while still federating or amalgamating on larger scales.

- Organizing by craft, trade, and industry to ensure some degree of specialization and improved organization.

- A large, scaled economic federation of some sorts can use input-output planning to develop a cohesive and flexible economic plan using these localized plans, essentially ensuring that local conditions and different elements of the economy are adequately accounted for.

It’s a rather rudimentary theory, but the initial concept still remains. I like how, in the past, collectives have improved on productivity and morale and think that what it can improve is scaling, credit, efficiency, and mechanization. I don’t think that centralized economic planning adequately supplies the necessary consumer goods a local economy demands given the complexity of an economy and the struggle of one centralized unit to plan variables throughout a given society, and I think this autonomous production system could become a great way of building socialism without either resorting to capitalism or having a lot of the material issues socialism has faced.

Happy to hear any thoughts or suggestions!

Personally, I find it odd how many socialist states have resorted to market-based policies as some sort of hybrid that largely departs from the old trend of command economies. What it seems to reveal, however, is an incentive to improve the material conditions of a national economy given some pretty understandable issues within a given system. The command economy has, after all, faced widespread criticism regarding a history of starvation, often times to the detriment of all socialists or Marxists irrespective of tendency. In this sense I’ve started to conclude the following;

1. Public, or state owned and managed property, is not innately socialist. There is a surprisingly strong and common tendency among historical examples of state enterprise that has often rebuilt the social relations seen in private ownership, including efforts to thwart decentralization or digitization efforts. I dislike the monopoly on economic power the Gosplan possessed, largely due to the nature of economic planning and the material imbalances thereof; why have all the power with chronic shortage to show for it? Conversely, there seems to be a tendency to label state property as though it is owned by the whole of society in light of the dictatorship of the proletariat; political conditions notwithstanding, would it thereby be logical to call such a form of property common property, and if so, why wasn’t it regarded as such?
2. State enterprise and centralized economic planning lacks the wherewithal to manage a complex and modernized economy in a manner that promotes a sustainable microeconomic condition. The same economic plans that helped build the factories largely accredited with defeating the Nazis were the same ones that, largely as a result of treating production as a flat trend, using overly quantitative material quotas and balances, and a lack of bureaucratic response towards weather conditions and localized resistance until necessary intervention from the central government, helped contribute to one of the largest and most tragic famines in Ukraine, the Volga Region, Kazakhstan, and parts of Siberia. In due time, this same economic system proved to struggle with the modernized economy it had helped create, with many a nation (Poland, Hungary, even the USSR in 1965) resorting to bourgeois investment and market elements to relieve many of the pressures their consumers faced; the 1989 crisis and the turmoil beyond should be indicative of a failure to adequately address these pressures, and it seems to be a consistent trend towards market elements, quite contradictory to socialism, against decentralization, that pushes forth either revisionism or economic pressure, perhaps even collapse.

What I am pushing forward as an alternative is, in many ways, the localization, federalization, and broader reorganization of the socialist economy into one much more adequately responsive to the demands of the everyday individual using the following:

- Mutual banks and credit unions, meaning democratized credit and financial services that can help with the investment, credit, and mechanization aspects of an economy.

- Localized collectives using economic inputs in one specific area or location to meet demands, while still federating or amalgamating on larger scales.

- Organizing by craft, trade, and industry to ensure some degree of specialization and improved organization.

- A large, scaled economic federation of some sorts can use input-output planning to develop a cohesive and flexible economic plan using these localized plans, essentially ensuring that local conditions and different elements of the economy are adequately accounted for.

It’s a rather rudimentary theory, but the initial concept still remains. I like how, in the past, collectives have improved on productivity and morale and think that what it can improve is scaling, credit, efficiency, and mechanization. I don’t think that centralized economic planning adequately supplies the necessary consumer goods a local economy demands given the complexity of an economy and the struggle of one centralized unit to plan variables throughout a given society, and I think this autonomous production system could become a great way of building socialism without either resorting to capitalism or having a lot of the material issues socialism has faced.

Happy to hear any thoughts or suggestions!

im dual-enrolled in a trades math course at a nearby junior college where I currently have an A, finished Algebra 1 with a B+ my freshman year, am taking Physics this coming school year, and want to get into a Circuity and/or AV Club at my school. I want to leave California and find work at a place like Local 5 or Local 292, but I hear that they’re competitive as hell. Are there any jobs, gigs, or projects I should be focuses on to improve my chances of getting accepted?

Personally I see a lot of the criticisms of socialism as a challenge instead of a “see, bring in the Pizza Huts” argument by anti-socialists. I feel like a lot of what’s missing from socialist theories is something that can withstand criticism from, say, the Austrian School of Economics or something. Especially in this day and age when we’re finding how poorly a centralized economy can function in day to day management (even with benefits in national development), what we believe in might need a bit more refinement. Personally I like working with the critiques from Hayek and Alec Nove and seeing how we can improve