Greetings from a non international socialist.

Hello, My name is... not important. You can call me disenfranchised because that is what I am. Most on the left would dislike my political positions and the same applies to people on the right. The left calls me a "fascist" and a "Nazi" however I am neither. The right calls me a "communist" however, that doesn't exactly describe my political position either. Although I do admire Marx, I disagree with his internationalist tendencies.

Basically, here is my political world view.

1. I believe in worker ownership of the means of production through a mutualist system built around worker owned cooperatives which are democratically run.

2. I consider myself a nationalist in the democratic and civic sense. I believe that all decisions made by the government should be made through mandatory referendums. However unlike most socialists, I am by no means an internationalist. All decisions should be made on a local level. Nations should be able to assert their own sovereignty and enforce their own border laws.

3. With regards to social issues, I generally believe that people should be allowed to do as they wish so long as they are not harming others. However, like all laws, social laws should be voted on by the local community. Decisions, generally should be made on the local level. With cities maintaining a certain level of local sovereignty over their own affairs. This includes social decisions.

4. These cities should exist within a confederation. The confederation itself should have minimal power over the decisions of cities. Except as provided within the confederate (confederate in the governmental sense, not the historical CSA) constitution.

5. Private property should be regulated. One should only own as much property as they can personally work and use. From each according to his ability to each according to his need.

6. Private business based upon wage labor should be illegal as defined within the confederate constitution. However, cooperative enterprise is to be encouraged. Business is also allowed, so long as exploitative hiring practices are not present. Basically if someone wants to run a business, they can do it on their own in the form of a one person cooperative. They may NOT steal the product of their workers' labor. They may NOT use wage labor to advance their own economic interests at the expense of their workers.

7. Every able-bodied citizen is required to be a member of their local militia and must complete at least one year of service. Arms are provided to the citizens who are militia members. After their term of service is over, they may keep their arms. People not capable of joining the militia also have the right to bear arms as provided within the confederate constitution.

8. The confederacy should have tight control over it's borders to prevent an influx of cheap labor which would flood the market and increase job competition. Immigrants who are allowed to enter the nation should required to learn the national language and submit to a background check.

Some might call me a socialist. Some might call me something different.
I would consider myself a democrat (not as in the American democratic party but one who truly believes in democracy) in the philosophical sense.
I would also consider myself a market socialist, and a nationalist.

It's too bad the term "national socialist" has been forever tainted by the likes of Hitler. I do not share his views on race or authoritarianism, however, to correctly describe my political views, one might call me a "national democratic socialist". With that said, I do not generally use that terminology for the reasons I just mentioned.

 

Given that looks like a pic of Tito as your avatar might you be in favour of his policies?

I don't find much to disagree with in your list of points.

 

I like the fact that his country was based upon market-socialism and I like the fact that he instilled a sense of national pride in his people. He stood up the Stalin and was smart enough to exploit the tenuous relationship between the United States and USSR to his advantage. These are things I can respect.
My only real disagreement with Tito is the fact that he was a dictator. Although, in my mind, that's forgivable because he was merely a man of his time.

Thanks, sounds good. I look forward to talking and debating with everyone.

 

Heya, welcome. Those are some interesting views you've got there; I look forward to reading your posts!

I'm a Marxist, so of course I have some issues with the whole nationalism thing, but I'd just like to ask: what makes you think that nation-states would still exist in a socialist society? The nation-state as it is today, as a distinct, defined, legal entity, only clearly arose when capitalism did in the 19th century. It's one of the ways in which a mainly bourgeois-dominated globe is organised to fit bourgeois class interests, and doubles as a convenient political tool. With the emergence of a new mode of production, a new form of geopolitical organisation is likely to emerge too; and seeing as proletarian liberation is predicated upon the realisation of proletarian class interests, and the proletariat is a global, united class rather than being split into competing national subsets, it seems likely that socialist geopolitical organisation will take the form of "a global republic of labour."

Market socialism also seems pretty oxymoronic to me. Socialism necessitates the end of exploitation, and even if there is some kind of legislation preventing employer-employee relationships (which probably won't prevent them from arising given certain conditions), the existence of a market means that the M-C-M' cycle and therefore profit must exist. And profit can only be derived from exploited labour-power. Thus exploitation of labour will emerge, and with it a de facto ruling class with preferential access to the profits, much like the de facto bourgeois of the Soviet Union.

 

Welcome to the forum. Out of curiosity where has your recommended approach worked so far? Go ahead a list all the countries.

 

Well, it can be pointed out that Nationalism and Marxism are not necessarily absolutely mutually exclusive, although if you look at the views held by either side it very much seems that way. They are both ideologies, and people within either respective frame of thought can usually only see things through one lens, so they are very critical against anything that does not conform. I hope that answers your question.
But yes, I would agree there usually tends to be a vicious animosity between members of both sides.

 

OP, what advantage do you get from structuring the world in this way? OP, who would be disadvantaged in a world like the one you describe?

Those are the two questions to ask anyone who wants the world to be other than how it is.

 

Welcome aboard Disenfranchised.

I suppose you could have called yourself a liberal, but you chose to call yourself a nationalist socialist instead, correct ? No difference between the two.

Back during America's "Progressive Era" most progressives were national socialist like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodward Wilson.

Todays progressives in America are mostly internationalist socialist, Marxist, Trotskyites, Maoist and other radical leftist hiding behind the progressive label.

 

Welcome on board!

 

You're confusing socialism with communism. Even Marx said that socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and communism. A socialist state can exist, a communist state cannot exist.

Your premise regarding a "global republic of labor" basically sounds like full world communism. Which I don't believe would last, unless you established some sort of world dictatorship.
Assuming that communities have democratic control over their own affairs, lets say that community X wants to establish it's own collective border. How would you stop them considering the fact that communism is stateless? Would you be in your right to undermine their local democratic decisions to fit your own ideological narrative? This is one of the problems I have with international communism. I like some of it's theoretical ideas and I'd probably even support a world communist revolution, mainly because I feel that individual communities would maintain their own sovereignty in any such event. Some of them might even decide to rally behind a local banner, backed up by local socialist militia's. Some might decide to break off from their local federation and essentially become city states. I could easily see this occurring.

I disagree. There's nothing wrong with making a profit as long the business itself is cooperatively owned. If there is no private employer to exploit the surplus value of his employees labor there is no exploitation. I don't see how a democratically controlled, worker owned cooperative can in any way be exploitative. Not to mention, the workers themselves will feel more motivated to put more into their work because the more successful the cooperative is within the market. The more money there is to distribute among the workers who are all part owners of that particular cooperative.

Of course there would be laws prohibiting private business based on wage labor as well.

 

I can hear the condescension in your question. With that said, Yugoslavia did a pretty good job, despite the fact that they weren't democratic. Their people had a higher standard of living than the soviet union. Not to mention, capitalism hasn't exactly worked too well either. As a matter of fact I'd call it an abysmal failure considering the fact that history has demonstrated that it's built on a series of financial booms and busts.

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I wouldn't call Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt socialists. If they were they would have collectivized the means of production.
Liberals are essentially capitalists, which isn't in any way compatible with socialism.

 

Having a higher standard of living than the Soviets is hardly a ringing endorsement! In addition to that Yugoslavia had the highest unemployment in Europe. Oh and there's that pesky problem of it being a dictatorship.

So you've listed one country and picked a despotic regime that was an economic train wreck. Not a great track record to say the least.

 

To call Yugoslavia an "economic train wreck" is a massive stretch. Not to mention, it doesn't matter anyway. Nationalist democratic socialism as I have described it has never been tried by any nation. All nations that have attempted socialism have mostly attempted it in it's Marxist form. You can't assume something wouldn't work if it's never even been attempted.
Capitalism on the other hand has been attempted and it's proven to be an abysmal failure. Of course you probably don't think modern capitalism is real capitalism, do you? The fact of the matter is, capitalism =/= markets. Capitalism = exploitation of the working class through wage labor in the interests of making a profit and that is exactly what we have.

 

So your example of Yugoslavia was more than a bit misleading in that it isn't an example of what you're suggesting is a good system. So of the hundreds of countries with thousands of different systems throughout history not one has tried what you propose.

You can't assume it will work if it's not been successful even once.

Maybe you should describe what it is you're suggesting in a bit more detail. Without a model to look at people won't know what it looks like in detail. What I'd be interested in is this: if a free populace elected leaders would those leaders on behalf of their electorate implement your system?

 

One of the most inspiring posts that I have seen on this forum.

 

Well except for the somewhat dictatorial elements:
-Private property should be regulated. One should only own as much property as they can personally work and use
-Every able-bodied citizen is required to be a member of their local militia and must complete at least one year of service.
-The confederacy should have tight control over it's borders to prevent an influx of cheap labor which would flood the market and increase job competition. Immigrants who are allowed to enter the nation should required to learn the national language

Right off the bat this Utopian paradise is subjugating citizens. They would lose freedoms they currently enjoy in existing democracies, particularly property rights and freedom of speech. Those impositions on freedoms would be met with resistance and protest which would result in the usual method of remediation - secret police, extrajudicial killings and gulags.

I love it when people decide they can tell others how to live.

 

It works really well in the Basque region of Spain. Co-operative owned enterprises held unemployment down to 14% while the rest of Spain was in the 30% range. Debt for the Basque region is 12% while it is 90% for the rest of the country.

http://www.democraticunion.eu/2014/05/economic-exception-basque-country/

So yes, the OP sounds like he/she will add some great new opinions to this forum.

Welcome Disenfranchised.

 

Cooperatives exist almost everywhere and I think they work well. But the article as it describes the region bears no resemblance to the dictatorial system the OP is proposing. The people can own property, own businesses, medium and large businesses exist. As it's part of the EU there is freedom of mobility.

What would happen to the region if the borders were suddenly closed, most private property was seized, all companies were abolished? I suspect it would look a lot more like East Germany than Spain.

 

I wasn't asking any questions; I'm not sure where you got that from. I was commenting (and this comment was far from being a central point of my post) that since I'm a Marxist, one can anticipate my disagreement with nationalism. Obviously people can make whatever claims they want while calling themselves Marxist, but it's impossible to be a consistent Marxist - or, I would argue, a consistent advocate of workers' liberation - while being a nationalist. The working class is global, but unlike the capitalist class, it isn't divided into national subsets which compete with one another for profit. All of its members have the same set of class interests: that is, overthrowing the system which thrives on their alienation and oppression and seizing state power in order to eventually achieve a stateless, classless society. Therefore, it is possible to support bourgeois/capitalist class interests while supporting national borders and the bourgeois construct that is the modern nation-state, it is not possible to support the liberation of a global, unified class (the workers) while advocating the preservation of structures which will be rendered unnecessary by the emancipation of the global proletariat and transition to a post-capitalist mode of production.

 

Marx, Engels and the First International used the terms interchangeably. The distinction emerged during the Second International (and was possibly pioneered by Kautsky, who, despite having some valuable ideas on party organisation, has a track record of distortions of Marxism) and was popularised by Lenin. Socialism comes from socialisation of the means of production, which means that class doesn't exist since everyone has the same relationship to the means of production, which means that the state - an organ of class rule - can't exist. If any difference at all exists between the two terms when applied to society (as opposed to the socialist and communist movements) it is that socialism is an economic term whereas communism refers to the society within which a socialist economic system exists.

There would in fact be a world dictatorship - of the proletariat. Socialism in one country is a proven failure, and so the d.o.t.p. would have to spread pretty fast, eventually encompassing the whole world, before the state can "wither away."

This is why centralisation is the way to go (daaamn, I feel so Bolshevik right now :. I'm not quite sure how anarcho-communists would respond to this, but in the typical Marxist view of full communism, or the d.o.t.p. for that matter, society is not made up of autonomous communities but of a global network planning everything together: globalisation to the extreme. The autonomous community idea seems pretty regressive in my opinion, and reminiscent of "primitive communist" society. It seems much more likely that in a future society, as productive forces develop and increase in capacity and grow more and more global and even extraterrestrial, we will need to organise over bigger, not smaller, areas. So society will probably have to be divided into administrative regions or whatever, but these regions will be bound together by more central organisation so that no region is so autonomous as to be detrimental to another, but the freedom of every inhabitant of every region is maximised.

A market physically cannot exist without exploitation. The market is based off the M-C-M' cycle, and what makes M -> M' is surplus value derived from exploited labour for which workers are not paid (that is, if you agree with the LTV, but why would you be a socialist if not?). So what you're proposing is that the workers manage their own exploitation: that the immates manage their own death camp. This kind of self-managed exploitation is unsustainable without some kind of a ruling class arising which has access to the aforementioned "M'." And pretty contradictory, too. The only way to end exploitation is to plan economic activity, in a scientific manner.

Just a little note on Yugoslavia: I feel quite "connected" to that region since I speak the language and know several people from there, and from what I know, the autogestion scheme was basically a ruse. Managers were in practice appointed by the state bureaucracy, and there were capitalist production relations just like in every other country which attempted socialism using ridiculous Stalinist policies.

 

Thanks. I really appreciate that.

How is any of that dictatorial? Was it dictatorial to outlaw slavery after the civil war? You'd probably say that it was.
The fact of the matter that it is morally wrong to exploit someone elses labor so that you may make a profit. People don't work for a company because they want to. They do it because they need money to survive. To exploit that need is a form of coercion. Not to mention, you haven't even tried disputing any of the problems I've pointed out related to capitalism.

 

I understand the definition of socialism as related to labor and the means of production. I've not heard of Marx using the terms interchangeably. Even, so, it wouldn't matter to me because I'm not technically a Marxist, even though I think Marx had some good ideas even if his ideas related to internationalism were not so good.

Not to mention, prove to me that a state which is democratically controlled by the workers is an "organ of class rule". Unless of course you mean the proletarian class.

A class dictatorship is not the same thing as a literal dictatorship. Earlier you said that the state, is an "organ of class rule". Is it run by the bourgeois or is it run by the proletariat? You can't have it both ways.

Except you are wrong. Communism is defined as stateless. Anarcho-Communists and your typical Marxists (also obviously communists) have the same goal, they just have different means of achieving that goal.

So you're talking about a global state. That is not communism.

Except workers cannot exploit themselves. Only the bourgeois can exploit the workers. Exploitation only occurs if a few individuals are benefiting from the labor of the many. In the case of cooperatives, the many are benefiting from their own labor. Not to mention, what you're proposing is really just state capitalism. The bourgeois owners of industry would just be replaced by bureaucrats. What I'm proposing is actual worker ownership over the means of production.

Yugoslavia was by no means perfect, hell it could have been better had Tito completely collectivized the smaller businesses through a subsidized cooperative system. Although, they still did a much better job than the Soviet Union which just ended up creating another ruling class of party elites.

 

The concepts I listed are dictatorial - you are telling people how they are going to live, what they can own, how they can earn a living, what language they can speak. This is control freak on a monumental scale.

It is ridiculous to compare your suggested subjugation of an entire populace to freeing people. They are polar opposites.

I do the job I do for the company I work for because I want to. I could go into business for myself but I earn a good living, like the people I work with and do meaningful work. Many people on the forum would be in the same position. You have no business telling people a) they don't like their job and b) you'll decide how they earn a living.

Capitalism isn't perfect but it is far and away preferable to the totalitarian regime you've cooked up.

 

Except for the fact that I also proposed democratic referendums on everything else.

No it isn't. If someone is only working because they have to pay off a debt (much like an indentured servant) or because they have the choice between selling their labor or starving. That is slavery, no two ways about it.

Good for you. Excuse my terminology but in the old days they would have called someone with your thought process a house negro. I'm not even saying this as an insult. I'm saying it to illustrate a point. Just because someone loves their servitude it doesn't mean that said servitude is moral.
Not to mention, what I'm proposing is workplace democracy. What you're proposing is workplace totalitarianism. I find your proposal to be unethical.

Except capitalism is the totalitarian regime. It's a system of slavery built upon coercion and exploitation.