this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I believe it is extremly important why socialism has failed until now. The key part of this is imho the structure of the Communist parties, which tried to push these systems throu. By being to down hierachical systems striving for power, they were and are easy to corrupt by power hungry individuals, which turns them into full blown dictatroships after they have won the revolution.
That is also true for a lot of democratic revolutions of dictators. They overthrow them, but lack the social system in the back to support a proper democracy. So you end up with a coup after the first problems of the new government.
To me the logical solution is to set up alternative systems of the kind I want to see, within the current system. This gives two big advantgaes. First of all it is able to test the ideas. If it fails to work with people, who actually activly want to be part of it, it is extremly likely to not work with millions of people after a revolution. Secondly it creates an organization, which can be used as a blue print after the revolution by either being scaled up or copied. There are a lot of systems or parts of systems, which are actually working pretty well today. We do have a lot of really well working prefiguration, which can be used to show people how things work.
Basicly I do not care about a system being pure socialism or capitalism or whatever. I have no problem with mixing parts of different politcal philosophies together to create a better working system. In fact I believe it is neceassary as the world has different regions and cultures requiring and pushing for different solutions for local problems. Obviously learning from each other is a good idea. So I do not have a problem with just replacing parts of the current system more slowly or taking smaller victories. We have a lot of solutions to lower growth to push for other values then money. Things like workers protection, unions, enviromental laws, carbon taxes and so forth all will slow down growth. If enough of them are brought together they will even shrink the economy. That might end up with a system very much like socialism and parts of it are going to need revolutions or at least violence against the current system to be brought throu.
In other words I do not believe the world is black and white, but grey. What I want is a better world and I will take it, even if it is not perfect.
Socialism isn't about creating a purist socialist system, but by creating an entirely new way of doing life outside the bounds of classes, the state, money, etc. It seems that you're arguing for prefiguritve politics, in building the new world in the shell of the old. This is admirable and prefigurative politics will always have its place in the socialist tradition with prominent projects like the Zapatistas and Rojava as prefiguring socialism. But we cannot mystify or veil projects as "socialism." Yes they are socialist in tendency and are building toward socialism, but while capitalism exists, its logic encapsulates everything. A new mode of production can emerge from prefigurative seeds. Capitalism itself emerged from and was prefigured by early commodity systems in the ancient and medieval world. It's quite possible that socialism itself can emerge and be prefigured by seeds today like with mutual aid, but we cannot confuse these seeds as the socialist mode of production itself.