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an expression of socialism; it is rather an expression of a sad historical truth: that peoples conditioned by centuries of tyranny (e.g., the Russians and Chinese) find it difficult to rise above tyranny despite their best intentions.
(It is an aside, but most of us have been so methodically robbed of our own history that we profoundly misunderstand liberty and how it comes about. In the Orient, there is no such concept at all, while in the West it is entirely a pagan survival: folk memories of 50 blessed centuries before the advent of patriarchy and Abrahamic religion -- orally preserved traditions of pre-Christian British and Germanic tribal democracies, lore such as that of the Tuatha de Danaan {"Children of the Goddess Danu"} grafted onto principles written down by the Greeks just as these principles were vanishing from the world seemingly forever {and probably recorded for precisely that reason}; notions viciously suppressed by the Church as "heresy" but rediscovered because there is in fact one force so powerful it cannot be gainsaid; notions resurrected and nurtured and renewed by inputs themselves provided by expansions of the quest for liberty: for example the articles of the Iroquois Confederacy as a foundation for such documents as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and finally the United States Constitution itself, out of which -- in turn -- comes the liberation of minorities and ultimately, at long last {and 3600 years after the sack of Knossos}, the liberation of women again. Thus liberty is a verb as well as a noun, and never a static state: by definition not only the results of struggle against oppression, but -- precisely as Sartre and Camus noted -- the very struggle itself.)
Returning to the topic of socialism, the embryonic eco-socialism of the Counterculture, especially in the avowedly communal Back-to-the-Land Movement, was deeply focused on avoiding the contradictions inherent in the Soviet and Chinese models of socialism and was instinctively groping toward development of a construct -- practical as well as theoretical -- in which these contradictions would be resolved. Albeit in a low-profiled way, I was very much part of this process, "low-profiled" because of my (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to strike a working balance between my heart's commitment to the Counterculture and its "revolution in consciousness" versus my stomach's commitment to regular meals: the superficial conformity essential if one was to earn a living even at the lowest levels of corporate journalism. Indeed the greater of my two unfinished books -- both destroyed forever in a ruinous fire -- would have devoted at least one chapter to exploring the specifically political (and therefore economic) implications of Countercultural values. These implications -- chief among them the enormous potential of a socialist society absolved from the tyrannical inertia of the Soviet and Chinese models -- were in fact the very reason the Counterculture was so relentlessly attacked by the oligarchy: not only the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Operation COINTELPRO (which mainly targeted the anti-Vietnam-War Movement), but the Central Intelligence Agency's far more malevolent and cunning Operation CHAOS, which destroyed not merely the alternative press but the entire embryonic Countercultural infrastructure. Thus, thanks to the CIA, the analyses that might have healed the wounds inflicted on socialism by the Soviet and Chinese disasters -- disasters not symptomatic of flaws in socialism but rather the tendency of long-tyrannized peoples to lapse back into tyranny -- these curative analyses were never written.
Had they been written, the emphasis would no doubt have been on refining the very model by which the Counterculture mistakenly believed it could have supplanted the corporate state: this was the creation of local and eventually regional People's Coalitions that, theoretically, would have literally made the corporate state obsolete. In the parlance of the era, "the capitalist system is irrelevant; we are building the New World here, outside the capitalist system and beyond reach of its corruption; when today's corporate overlords and their politicians die, the capitalist system will die with them, and our coalitions will take its place." Such naivete, to be sure, but terrifying to the establishment nevertheless. For this is precisely how the Soviet system was born in 1905 Russia out of the political ferment that followed the Russo-Japanese War; "soviet" is a Russian term for a coalition of workers. And when the Czarist oligarchy collapsed, the Soviets did indeed take over -- only to be defeated by opposition so savage it made the inertia of tyranny inescapable. From the perspective of the oligarchy, the magnitude of the threat is thus undeniable; had a system of People's Coalitions existed in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast at the time of Katrina, it would have become the sole functioning government in the aftermath: another incarnation of the deservedly legendary Petrograd Soviet, in its chaotic libertarian-socialist zeal one of the truly magnificent expressions of human yearning.
Building on the basic models of the agricultural commune and the infrastructure of communal enterprise that often sprang up in nearby towns to support these communes -- today's elitist food co-ops are a sadly paradoxical remnant of that tragically optimistic and egalitarian era -- it is theoretically possible to construct a socialism from the ground up that not only serves the people but provides adequate outlet for entrepreneurial impulses and thereby preserves, within the context of public ownership, the greatest possible opportunity for individual initiative. The decisive difference, of course, is in the contrasting goals of capitalism versus socialism: in the former, the fulfillment of selfish and self-centered greed; in the latter, the fulfillment of self in the context of greater service to humanity. Imagine in this context a structure that begins with each commune or individual enterprise, which then elects representatives to local Peoples Coalitions, which in turn elects representatives to area-wide People's Coalitions, which itself elects representatives to state-level People's Coalitions, which elects representatives to regional People's Coalitions, which in turn sends its delegates to the National People's Coalition. Set this atop the existing system of constitutional governance -- city, county, state, federal -- and you have a democratic structure such as Jefferson could only dream of; apply it to economic governance and you have a nation-wide socialist economy forever rescued from the fatal problems of centralization. Combine the economic humanitarianism of socialism with the scientific principles of environmentalism -- "eco-socialism" as it is increasingly known -- and you have solved the problem Marx himself identified but could not solve because the underlying knowledge, so succinctly summarized by Epton, Margulis and Lovelock in the Gaea Hypothesis (1974), had not yet been discovered -- or, more accurately, recovered from the graves into which its earlier versions were genocidally flung, whether at Knossos, Ynys Mon or Wounded Knee.
Moreover -- that is, if the nation's wealth is to be divided so the apocalyptic impact of the forthcoming shortages is equally apportioned (as justice demands) -- there is no alternative. The choice is between socialism (in which everyone is guaranteed the necessities of life and therefore granted maximum potential to thrive) versus oligarchy (in which the ruling class lives in obscene opulence while all the rest of us starve).
In a democratic society, the relevance of Marx is mostly limited to his articulation of the historical truth of class struggle. Under tyranny, the relevance of Marx becomes a thousand times greater -- and from the perspective of the board-room a thousand times more fearful. Ironically, it is occupants of that board-room -- the plutocrats who control the DemoPublican parties and therefore the government -- who will determine which relevance Marx is accorded, not only here the the U.S., but everywhere the global oligarchy has offered its pitch ("Step Right Up") and begun the seductive process of enslavement.
I would add only that these are not games we play; do not even for an instant doubt what is at stake.
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