Cool videos and picts and an interesting comment. But of course we are all living in the period between so-called “primitive communism” and a sci-fi utopia which may never be realized. I’m all for progress and science, but I’m not ready to follow idiot idealists who talk about imposing by force a “dictatorship of the proletariat” led by a non-existing “vanguard party” which utter dreamers and likely useless wanna-be bureaucrats conveniently expect somehow to create and lead.
In fact the very proletariat / working classes that Marx thought would be able to gain enough “class consciousness” to organize itself against capitalism … has failed time and again to do so. It is shrinking in size and social weight too, and shows no sign of becoming or wanting to become an internationalist force for socialism or “communism” in the future.
I certainly agree it might be “lovely” if humanity survives and gets to a stage of super abundance and technological prowess where all fundamentail human material needs (and even “wants”) are satisfied, and force is rarely needed. But such a world, if it ever exists, may also turn out to be a distopia. Sci-fi gives us many examples of what such “high tech future distopias” may look like.
Thoughtful social writers as diverse as the “democratic socialist” George Orwell (“1984”) and the earlier Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”) imagined different future distopias quite as likely as anything Marx ever imagined.
You're more likely to have that dystopia under capitalists than socialists. Do you believe the wealthy elite or rich capitalist employer class cares about the working class or your needs? They're now constantly talking about a UBI i.e. Universal Basic Income, which is essentially capitalism on life-support. The world these powerful capitalists are creating is one where most people are unemployed and worthless, essentially reduced to serfs at best. Techno-feudalism/slavery.
The "you're just a utopian ideologue/idiot" argument was created by capitalists to dissuade people from imagining anything better than the system that created and ensures the wealth and power of the ruling elite. If technology permits extreme efficiency and automation in production, then there's no need for private for-profit enterprises or the employer-employee relationship. Production can become completely socialized and democratized. Capitalists hate the prospect of that happening so they shit on everything that is socialist and do everything to brainwash their employees (exploitees) to serve the interests of their employers (exploiters). The exploitative relationship between employers and their employees is unnecessary.
Your pessimistic, if not cynical anti-utopian argument is similar to the one used by monarchists against Republicans. Their claim is that human nature requires monarchy and an aristocracy or the peasants will destroy everything. God created kings and kingdoms (the divine right of kings) whereas democracy is "mob rule" and demonic. Capitalists and their brainwashed, working-class minions, resort to the same rhetoric. Capitalism reflects human nature, it's biblical, and it's the best human beings could ever hope for, there's no other way to organize production, hence we need capitalism FOREVER TILL THE END OF TIME.
Then of course we add the ideological gaslighting and demonization of socialists and socialism by capitalists, who disingenuously point to the failures of socialists, without pointing to anything positive or any accomplishments or successes of socialism. Everything is supposedly dark and bleak. These capitalist apologists ignore the fact that socialists who identify their economies as Marxist are constantly threatened by very powerful, well-established capitalist powers, with economic embargoes and war. They're encircled, invaded, and sanctioned, hence those socialist flowers trying to grow in a field of capitalist weeds, grow thorns, and sometimes may even become poisonous, in order to avoid being strangled to death.
Capitalist death toll arguments against socialists are the epidemy of hypocrisy or let's say the pot calling the kettle black. When one factors in all of the innocent deaths from capitalist colonialism and imperialism, not to speak of simply the profit motive that refuses to develop a cure for a disease because such a treatment or vaccine isn't "commercially viable", you're in the hundreds of millions of deaths, at the very least. Capitalists and their brainwashed, working-class apologists, don't have the moral high ground upon which to stand and point their crooked feculent fingers at communists. We're all standing on a mountain of rotting corpses, so let's not resort to such RICH arguments.
The capitalist mercantile class and Republicans, didn't defeat monarchism or replace chattel slavery and feudalism, overnight or even in one century. It wasn't one battle or swoop of the sword, it was a long, arduous, painful, bloody process, that led to the industrial age. The material, technological and social conditions had to be present for the mercantile classes, to become industrialists, replacing the previous ruling class. It took centuries and many defeats before the Republicans replaced the monarchists, so why continue emphasizing the failures of the working class, in their effort to establish a socialized, democratized, non-profit system of production?
This is my last paragraph. It should be noted that socialism is alive and well in many European countries and around the world. Socialist principles are being applied in many industrialized, modern countries, that although don't identify themselves as Marxist or even socialist, are in principle and practice socialist. Countries in a world where the United States, the capitalist empire exists, can't just come out of the closet without placing themselves in a very precarious position, in danger of getting on the American ruling elite's crosshairs. No nation wants that shit.
