After reading more, I really can't help but confirm my initial suspicion that the guy was basically wrong about everything. Communalism might be good in practice, but only to the extent that it is basically rebranded Ancom.
1 - Confederalism
Confederalism is essentially a modified version of the program of the Paris Commune and 'Soviet Democracy' that is the system in the soviet union prior to Stalin restricting it to Communist Party only candidates. Whilst one might say that this is preferable to the Stalinist one party system, it is still not ideal. This point of hierarchical layers of councils was BTFO by WPC in his critique of the system of Soviet Democracy as leading to the very one party state that it did. Furthermore it is outdated, as e-democracy techniques mean we can have (in first world countries at least, and increasingly in the third world) direct democracy on a national scale. Any time you have elections, it invariably leads to the people being elected being of a higher social class than the people electing them, which is why Aristotle describes any system with elections as an Aristocracy, not a democracy. Let's not forget the utilitarian argument behind democracy: when more people are involved in making a decision, the average decision tends to be better than one. This obviously has some exceptions with regards to expert fields like science, however, it generally works. So involving the maximum amount of people that is practical is a good thing. Imagine applying confederalism to America. This amount of devolution already applies in the US's school system and we can see the results with creationism and global warming denialism being taught in right-leaning parts of the country.Neo athenian direct (e)democracy on a national (or eventually, global) scale, is a much better and more modern solution.
2 – Environmentalism
Bookchins pronouncements on environmental issues are suprisingly vague given the emphasis communalists give the ecological question.
Most of his pronouncements seems to boil down handwaving about how decentralization will fix it. This is pretty naive, since decentraliztion is not what fixes ecological problems but rather the cause of it. You can't have rational environmental policy without central planning, or at least, central regulation. Without access to the bird's eye view of the economy that central planners have, how can one reliably reduce carbon emissions for example? In a planned economy if people vote on reducing the production of carbon emitting fuels by 2% this year, for example, its possible to mathmatically (using linear programming) to work this out into the central plan. This is exactly the type of thing which is impossible if economic, and by extension, environmental policy is devolved to decentralized communities. Only regulation by some central council which tries to fix things post hoc. This is why planning is a much better solution to environmental problems than 'regulation'.
Communalism is BS
Other urls found in this thread:
startpage.com
youtube.com
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
nautil.us
libcom.org
twitter.com
3 – Economics
Again, seems a bit handwavy. Bascially his solution is the community council or w/e will decide what when and where things are produced. I don't want to have to wait for a council to meet to get shoelaces, the only good thing about markets is that they are indeed reponsive to consumer demand, and to replace it you need something just as, or close to the responsiveness to consumer demand. Otherwise, we're back to breadlines.
4 – Philosophical problems
This is actually the worst Bookchin rejects historical materialism and the agency of the working class as the driver of social change. This is completely wrong, and it also leads to disturbing conclusions. Take:
These sorts of class collaborationist and vague notions of unity would make a fascist blush. By divorcing his society from a study of the regularities of history that class analysis provides Bookchin really is no better than the utopian socialists.
In conclusion, even though his critcisms of lifestylism and identity politics are valid, Bookchin himself is, ironically, for me, the epitome of the know-nothing 'literary intellectual', a quality he shares with the postmodernists, although at least Zizek is funny and doesn't take himself too seriously.
There's something that is really abrasive about reading this man, he really rubs me the wrong way, tbh he smells like more of a libertarian in socialists clothing than a 'libertarian socialist'. Even people ostensibly to the right of him such as mutualists seem a lot more cogent and better reasoned. What's so annoying is that this was a man whose ideas read like a watered down postmodern collage of various strains of left wing thought, is that he manages to come off as smarmy and self assured while making incredibly vapid prounouncements about things like historical materialism using basically not arguments ("Marx was convincing, but he was still wrong, no examples from history needed"). It's not as though he's wrong, because alot of his proscriptions are so non-specific and non-rigorous I'm not sure they can even be argued against. Basically, Bookchin was the Dunning-Kruger of leftism, who mistook his recycled ideology for something original, while injecting quite a bit of what the Marxists would call 'Bourgeois ideology", or spooked burger contrarianism, into it. One doesn't need to be tankie to appreciate this point. None of the deep philsophical insights of western Marxist intellectuals like Althusser, Dauve, etc. Or the deep foreign policy knowledge of Chomsky. The classical anarchists like Kropotkin based their ideas on science (biology, in the case of mutual aid), and its this tradition we should return to.
Just read Anarchy after Leftism.
What books on communalism have you actually read, OP?
Bookchinites BTFO
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It is very similar to many people's interpretation of ancom but Bookchin wanted an ideology free of the cringiness and anti-intellectualism associated with anarchism.
Point 1:
Not sure where you have heard this argument but it is not convincing. Why do you think this?
Decisions that need to be made on a national scale will be through the confederation. Bookchin acknowledges that issues such as war and distribution of essential resources (e.g. oil) must be done in some large scale. This is why communities should organize themselves into a confederation in the first place.
Let me give you an example of how confederacy would work:
- Communities A, B and C decide on a common set of rights and regulations for their area and confederate.
- Community A has a problem with their buses running late. Instead of having decisions made on a massive scale, community A will decide how to use their resources and labour autonomously of what B and C think since it is of no concern to them.
An example of this I can think of is the city of Toronto. Toronto is not a series of communities but one monolith of a giant city. Communities in the urban and downtown area agree that public transit needs to be expanded. However, transit projects are routinely cancelled because of the votes from people in the suburbs who do not want to pay for it, despite the issue not affecting them, the result is everyone who is affected by the lack of transportation have no autonomy and get shafted for no good reason. On top of that the state is hierarchical, even cities do not have autonomy and the city gets shafted by lack of provincial budget.
- Continuing, if there is an oil shortage in the confederacy, it will not be dealt with on a local level, but rather on a confederate level because it is a crisis to all.
Point 3:
This is a very Zizek-like argument and is useless nitpicking. I could argue against central planning by saying "Well I don't want to come home and realise the local dispensary has no fucking toothpaste because the central bureau's algorithms decided to switch to sesame seed farming! Looks like it's 1989 all over again!"
What I would imagine is that you go to a meeting (If you want. Bookchin emphasizes that while communalism is democratic, not everyone will give a shit and that's okay), they describe the state of productions, you get a sheet and vote on what you think is the best way to handle the situation. This could be handled in a rational manner, with planners advertising what they think is best for the community using statistics and such.
By Allah's name delete this.
Not to mention, if you want central planning in your community and central planning in your confederation go ahead. Just don't tread on democracy and autonomy of the municipalities.
See this:
youtube.com
And read attached:
What did he mean by this
There was some research article (can't find it atm, but ill get back to you) where people had to guess the weight of a cow for example. When they did it with farmers they guessed it within a few pounds. Even when they did it with non-farmers, the peoples average decision ended up being close to the actual weight of the cow within 5 pounds even though it was comprised of people that didn't have any agricultural experience. This is actually pretty convincing as its also used in computer science, for example ensemble methods in machine learning:
en.wikipedia.org
is very commonly used, for averaging together the results of the various constituent algorithms produces a superior result than the individual algorithms would. "The whole is better than the sum of the parts" whether you agree with it or not, you are essentially using the technological implications of this insight every day.
So they have to pay for it, but it 'doesn't effect them'??? It does affect them because they have to pay to build it! And I'm guessing the inner city doesn't have the resources to build it by themselves.
You could make that argument but it would be stupid because its wrong. The algorithm wouldn't allocate resources away from toothpaste unless demand had shifted away from that because people had stopped buying it. The whole point of the algorithm is to adjust supply to meet demand like a market does. The only difference between these participatory schemes and the computerized version is that one is way faster. Zizek was right btw
direct democracy applies to public services, etc. As for articles of private consumption: labour vouchers, SON.
Democracy is when the majority rules, autonomy is when you get to ignore the majority and do what you want. Therefore regional autonomy is antithetical to democracy.
So instead of people who live in the same region getting together to talk to each other and decide things, instead we'll use a vague appeal to "algorithms" and internet shitpost voting to run things. Hmm yes very good.
Why not get a whole country to do that or the whole world? its even better.
It's not vague
en.wikipedia.org
'shitpost' voting? Weak, e-voting is already used under our current system and it would be utilized even more. Ever done a mail-in ballot? imagine if you could do that from your phone, instantly. Way more efficient than traditional voting where u have to line up for like 5 hours at a polling place
but bookchin's communalism is anarcho communism
op said:
ok
This is pretty meme tier considering that what your suggesting is government by constant consensus which is untenable
Not OP, but that's quite the straw man! E-democracy doesn't mean "referendums on everything", although in its most basic and useless form it does. Let me give you some food for thought:
nautil.us
Do I mean that we should accept Fuller's idea uncritically? No. I don't think it would be a feasible form of governance at all, although like how several hundred people were asked to judge by eyesight how much a cow weighed and the average of their answers came within ~5 pounds, it could have specific applications in making quantitative decisions such as with broad regulations on what the productive planning system mandates. We can do much more than simple referenda with the Internet, and do it securely by integrating tools like PGP into our democratic applications. Voting is actually a downright awful system when there is no face-to-face discussion and the issue is qualitative. Besides, we must aim to abolish politics as a whole and make a direct transition to universal production for use in all fields. On a separate note, I'm starting to think that the extension of the market to politics (as proposed by some lolberts in league with the crueler tech lords like Thiel who are idolized by accelerationists) might be a prerequisite for real change.
That being said, however, where regional autonomy does not conflict with the scientifically-planned operation of the whole system, it should be allowed.
Moreover, it needs to be the rule and not the exception that the system handles the technicalities and specifics of implementing broad mandates without input. People can't handle all-day democracy, and it wouldn't work. Do you realize how completely destructive democracy for everything (as proposed in Parecon and negotiated coordination) would be? Stop it with the fetishism of participation. What matters is that the people have control over their own lives, and this is impossible if, by the nature of the system, there are so many decisions that they cannot take part in what they deem to be important. The antithesis to the state-as-control is not the control of many people over few but the universal satisfaction of self control as best reached through fluid organization and a variety of useful negotiatory tools. In Somalia's traditional legal system of the Xeer courts, there is no state because this is a reality alongside communistic production. Once again, do not adopt the system but rather its design principles.
And he came up with ancom but called something else.
Not sure where you have heard this argument but it is not convincing. Why do you think this?
Condorcet's jury theorem is a simple mathematical argument for that: Take a question with two answer option, one is right. Suppose a random person picks the correct answer with over 50 % probability (not a far-fetched assumption). If you ask a group of random people (each person having the over 50 % probability of being right), the probability that the majority response is correct increases with group size and gets closer and closer to 100 %.
Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin) had a look at the list of guesses from such a competition. People have done similar things with similar results. I vaguely recall a Swiss (I guess) study with the result that both geometric mean and median gave more accurate results than taking the arithmetic mean.
You can't convicingly argue for decentralizing by being sarcastic all the time. It isn't a magical solution that is always better than centralized decisions. Ending racial segregation at US schools was done by the federal government shitting on the rights of individual states.
Majority-decisions are not the same as consensus.
You don't need to literally poll every person on every question, you can take a sample.
Did you even read my post?
Took a sample.
If you would read my post, then you would know why that's a bad idea.
you're going to only take a sample of this post too, aren't you?
I couldn't access the article, it gives me a muh-cookies message. After getting rid of the class distinctions, I don't think people will tend to disagree much, so I don't think local/individual autonomy is important.
Class collaborationist? Jesus. It's terms like that that Bookchin railed against in "Listen, Marxist!" He was right in saying that Marxists put FAR too much emphasis on the working class. They practically fetishize workers. What Bookchin said was that class consciousness, class struggle, historical materialism, etc. don't matter and don't apply to our world as it is today. What matters is that cutting across class lines is an internal contradiction of state capitalism today that the majority of people feel: alienation brought about what IS versus what COULD BE. Liberatory technology, technology to eliminate the majority of necessary human toil, something the 19th century leftist movements could only dream of, is realizable today. The fact that people see this utopian possibility but also see that their daily lives are so far removed from that, will be what drives the great mass of people to revolution. Basically, leave the 19th century thinking and terminology where it belongs, in the past, and embrace Marx's message of futurism. Let the dead bury the dead, what we need is a theory that looks to the future.
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Gee, I wonder who could be behind this post.
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Your extreme asspain isn't a legitimate argument against anything m8
t. never read bookchin. libcom.org
I'm amazed at how butt hurt one person can be at a writer he's barely even read. Reminds me of burgers constantly complaining about marxism despite never reading Marx
You can do that through a confederation and without sacrificing a localities right to self determination. I don't see why an american should be able to make a choice regarding how somebody in china must live.
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But again, what exactly do they want to determine? Natural resources? we live in a global economic system where the gold in the computer you're using is from dutch suriname, the rare earth metals are from congo, it was designed in the US and manufactured in China, south korea, and germany.
Yeah I hate Bookchin because hes anti class struggle which means hes pro collaborating with porky. He is a fucking liberals, those tankies who wanted to gulag him were fucking right, I'm just sad they didn't. Just like his modern day followers are useful idiots for imperialism, Bookchin was a closet crypofascist shill who thought sucking porkys dick was great
Read the actual essay m8 instead of just picking a comment and treating it as gospel truth
I dunno, like the day to day operations of their own locality?
Yet more evidence that you've never actually read the man and are making huge leaps of judgment merely because he doesn't treat the proletariat as a sacred cow. Bookchin is against hierarchy and domination in all it's form which includes class, and his view of how to abolish class isn't all that different from other libertarian socialists, including some leftcoms.
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Intersectionality theory in practice is limited to being nothing more then a multitude of atomized micro-nationalist groups. There's nothing really intersectional about it. Contrast this with a program of Dual Power in places like Rojava.
This thread is not worthy of serious discussion.
You at least have to admire the fits of autistic rage that he envokes in some people. mostly tankies
I'm what way, pray tell
*evokes
Yep, I once thought that maybe "Listen Marxists" was to harsh and only criticised the worst movements and not really the theory but the more I see people sperging out about him after not reading and making their silly accusations of class collaboration, muh imperialism,cointelpro ect. I start to understand why it was written.
Because you're literally saying abandon the class struggle in favor of suspiciously idpolish drivel. If thats the case why not just stop being socialist and throw up our hands and toss 70+ years of realpolitik and all three volumes of capital out the window. Hell might as well join the venus project or go work on FALC as those are at least more interesting than Bookchins vapid feels over reals whinging
for example
What the literal fuck? 'self formative'? 'mutualistic'? if only Sokal had taken time to BTFO Bookchin the middle east would be a much better place
Ironically, I was neutral to Bookchin, but actually after reading "Listen Marxists", I decided he was full of shit.
He doesnt abadon class struggle he just puts it in a different arena. Not the workplace but the municipality.
Its a polemic crtique of contemporary ML groups. But judging by the daily idiocy coming from them here not much has changed.
Maybe you should read it again and watch the video where he sucks american right-libertarians dicks at that conference, Bookchin actually did advocate class collaboration.
Bookchin's ecology is hardly scientific. He was still right about Marxists though.
Coming up next, have you judged Cannibals unfairly? I suggestion you read Jeffrey Dahmer's "Listen, Prosecutor"
Whatever fuckwit
ITT a bunch of cryptofascist imperialist shills defending their icon. fuck your ethnic cleansing little shits and their pesudoporky idol. Unruhe unironically said nothing wrong
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Nice contrarianism.
I think this debate has really reached its limit. I think I've made up my mind and no im not a tankie, tbh Even though I will support rojava and communalism in practice as it is basically ancom, I still think Bookchin was pretty weak theoretically. Frankly, its hard to even read him when he uses phrases like this guy quoted:
That sort of stuff truly is mind numbing and vapid, I'm not sure we should look to someone so obviously scientifically illiterate when there are much better classical anarchists like Kropotkin.
Perfect example why Bookchin was right about "marxists".
Bookchin was right to think they wanted to gulag him because they actually should of, as he was a pseudo porky. His ideology frankly is meme tier and on the same level of Asserism. His disciples are currently ethnically cleansing arabs in the middle east, although im sure youll deny that. Just admit it, you don't actually want socialism or workers control of the means of production.
That quote would make perfect sense if you would have the slightest idea about the ecology debate at that time. Bookchin has it issues but he was completely right that Marx and Marxists have a weak conception of ecology and suffer because of that.
I agree that Marxists need to work on ecology/environmental issues more, however, that does not really create a need to discard literally all of marxism because of tankies.
Nigga you already made up your mind long before now, and this is without even actually understanding the most fundamental aspects of it.
Rojava is literally a case study of communalist theory you massive autist. Be my guess and contradict yourself by calling that idpol drivel that ignores class struggle
Bookchin never disagreed with his critique of the commodity form, and you would know that if you actually bothered to read anything by him except a polemic against sectarian idpol maotists from the 60s. Stay mad, though. It makes it easier to be smug
All of my keks. Google Murray bookchin m8.
It won't last forever. Once isis falls you really think Assad and even the Turks are gonna let them keep their land? Which is a good thing btw since their doing ethnic cleansing to establish their kurdish ethnostate.
Sorry its one of the few works of his i could find on the marxists.org internet archive. Maybe ill read some more of this stuff if i can find it
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"""""""socialist"""""""""
fixed that for you
Wow talk about a 180. You bipolar or something? You keep contradicting yourself m8
Pure lifestylism
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It's funny how quickly Marxists will abandon all reason and jump to using the same fallacious arguments that are used against them when it comes to revolutions they are disapprove of
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Bookchin heavily builds on Marx and does not disregard him at all.
The ethnic cleansing accusation is pure bullshit. You're literally parroting Turkish propaganda. It stems from an Amnesty International report about the YPG levelling ~100 homes a few years ago. Both Amnesty and the UN have stated it was not a case of ethnic cleansing.
No he fucking does not. Bookchin is an anti-Marxist, anti-communist dunce.
Holy shit this post is so retarded I don't even know where to start
Yeah, you know, except for the complete absence of local control that would lead to the politics of a community being dictated by people literally on the other side of the country, because the more voters the better, right? Not to mention any minority, say bosnians in Yugoslavia 2.0, would be dominated by the majority, and according to your 'argument' it would be completely ok for the majority to vote for the genocide of the minority. In order to have any fair democracy, you have to have local control and local politics. How are you gonna make people care about their community and about politics if everything is just gonna be decided by an arbitrary number of people pressing a button on an app.
You can have organised planning on a large scale without giving complete control to a central authority. That's the whole fucking point of the layers of organisation
That's a stupid fucking argument and you should know better. You can literally use a similar argument against central planning. Again you're acting as if a communalist society would be incapable of planning on a larger scale, which is patently false
Fam, that's literally a dialectic. In fact, it's the marxist dialectic. He's basically saying that the class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will be solved by the elimination of class society and having the people be part of one united "citizenry". This isn't surprising coming from since he used to be a marxist.
As for the rest, fuck off you pseudo-intellectualist faggot.
Bookchin hated hippies famalam. It's sarcastic
They literally have a constitution which defends private property.
Tankie alert guys, we've got a fucking tankie here. Please, tell us how the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism-Assadism will lead the workers to revolution.
they define individual private property i.e. the means of production can be used by one person as the only private property to be defended. Most marxists and people here would just refer to it as personal property. Also that (which is still totally within the marxian understanding of socialism) is only about 5% of their economy. 75% is collectivized and owned and run by worker councils and the remaining ~20% is public and directed by the executive councils or whatever the hell they call them.
He's anti-Marx insofar as Marx became increasingly dogmatic and "scientific" in his old age. Bookchin disagrees with that and his authoritarian tendencies. Bookchin agrees with Marx when he said that we should let the dead bury the dead and create a theory rooted in the future, not the past. Bookchin likes Marx when he critiques capitalism, and when he talks about the ideal form that society should take. To say he's simply anti-Marx is not nuanced. Also, while he claimed the title Communalist, this was mostly a critique of what he saw as Lifestylist Anarchists; Anarchists that claim an ideological position but do nothing politically to create their ideal society. He was pretty much an ancom. As such, I'd hardly say he was anti-communist. Anti-tankie? Yeah. Fuck them.
Bookchin cast aside the Anarchist label because of perceived lifestylism in the Anarchist movement. In that part of "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" he was talking about how the youth, with their profound disrespect for authority and societal conventions, will lead the way towards a new society, as they feel more keenly than any other group the internal contradiction of state capitalism; the contradiction between what is and what could be with the potential of liberatory technology.
Marx became increasingly right about everything, whereas Bookchin disagreed, seeing the value of being wrong about everything. Hence he invented communalism.
Yeah but they use the wrong words so they fail my purity test.
I mean, I've never known of a trustworthy person who's gone to Libertarian party conference…
Maybe a few cleaners. Or arsonists.
The Marxist dialectic demands National-"Sozialismus" in einem Dorf?
for fucks sake read some bookchin atleast? The whole ideology centers around reviving direct face to face democracy to develop new politics. To make having relevant different opnions and discussions possible again, instead of depolitising society and making all of society into one huge body to be commanded by statecraft.
Turkroach detected.