Tomorrow's History, Today!
Tomorrow's History, Today!
Articulating a socialism with American characteristics for the 21st century
In charting a course towards a more participatory society that ensures all citizens receive a fair share of its economic prosperity, the people of the United States of America ought to adopt a “socialism with American characteristics” attuned to our unique cultural and historical context: for the sake of discussion, let’s call it Libertarian Communism.
Rooted in the principles of individual liberty, community autonomy, and direct democratic governance, this vision of Libertarian Communism seeks to forge a society where citizens collectively own and manage the means of production. For that reason, I proposed earlier this month establishing a hypothetical U.S. national oil company (NOC) to contrast domestic energy policies under socialism against the free-market proposals of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Indeed, NOCs are common in many socialist economies: prominent examples include Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), with mixed-economy NOCs of BRICS+ members also exemplified in Gazprom, Saudi Aramco, and the National Iranian Oil Company. These allow the government to play a significant role in the management and control of key industries, and to exercise direct control over the extraction, production, and sale of its nation’s oil and natural-gas resources.
“But, isn’t that un-American?”
Of course not! What could be more American than plundering the Earth? (Besides, maybe, what Superman once stood for.)
Radio Free Pizza addicts might remember (somewhere in their euphoric hazes, anyway) that I expressed an affinity for a contemporary category of underground political ideologies called “patriotic socialism” or “MAGA Communism” for what I estimate as a wise choice of audience for their rhetoric. As evidence, I submit John Russell’s reporting from a MAGA rally for More Perfect Union in August of last year:
Russell’s interviews during his visit demonstrates the interest (which may surprise some centrist liberals) that MAGA supporters have in the economic conditions facing the working class. Here, their key concerns include inflation, stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, and corporate monopolies crowding out small businesses. In addition to support Trump, the rally attendees express their dislike for establishment politicians, and a feeling of being politically “homeless”, given the outsized political influence of Big Finance. While some interviewed maintain their defense of capitalism for the sake of the individual liberty that one discovers under freedom of commerce, attendees nonetheless criticize “crony capitalism” and the outsized influence of Wall Street donors and massive corporations on policymaking. While some participants note how media coverage focuses on divisive cultural issues which distracts from shared economic problems (as we discussed last year), others still see values issues as important even if MAGA conservatives and radical socialists agree on problems like inflation. Nonetheless, it’s on these issues that people seem to reach agreements across ideological divides.
The month after Russell’s visit to a MAGA rally, political comedian Walter Masterson uploaded a video to TikTok capturing his conversation with a supporter of the anti-communist MAGA movement, in which the two reached an unexpected agreement on principles reminiscent of Marxist ideology:
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Masterson initiated their discussion by suggesting the dismantling of big banks, a sentiment echoed by the MAGA supporter. They also concurred on the need to curb the influence of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and landlords, discussing collective ownership and seizing the means of production. As an example, the MAGA supporter cited a local company, Liberty Pump, where employees owned a portion of the means of production through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)—like one we featured last year—and expressed approval of the compensation scheme.
In a presumptuously generous reading, one might go so far as to say that their dialogue showcases an unwitting predilection of MAGA conservatives for mutualist economics. (With the same generosity, we might even say that Ronald Reagan revealed similar sympathies in 1987.) But even if we’re being tight-fisted, both Russell’s and Masterson’s interviews show clearly the concerns that Trump voters have about U.S. economic policy, and theirs is a message with which even revolutionary socialists can find some common ground. That, I suppose, explains why Jimmy Dore reported the unexpected delight of seeing a MAGA supporter and a Marxist unexpectedly “hugging it out” at one of his live events on 17 March this year.
Putting a finer point on my standing with “patriotic socialism” or “MAGA Communism,” at this time I’d throw my weight behind the Center for Political Innovation (CPI) as the cutting-edge of domestic anti-imperialism in the U.S. (Maybe there are others who could fit the bill, but I still need to look into it: writing these dispatches often leaves me with little time to spend on such a search, even if conducting it were a priority. You come first!)
Regarding the first term, Politsturm reported in February of last year that its associated luminaries include Caleb Maupin, Jackson Hinkle, Peter Coffin, and Adam “Haz al-Din” Tahir. (To the same list we might add Fox Green of Space Commune.) Despite the historical portrayal of socialism as unpatriotic in the U.S., these commentators seek to combine socialist ideals with American patriotism. (In fact, it seems to me that Tahir’s Infrared deserves credit for coining the term “MAGA Communism,” though I haven’t verified that.) But Politsturm’s author argues that this trend is incompatible with Marxism-Leninism because “patriotic socialism” fails to recognize the class nature of the state, and so ends up defending capitalist interests. Therefore, Politsturm concludes that such a movement functions as a marketing campaign for reactionary forces, misleading workers and diverting their efforts into unproductive activities.
I’m unconvinced: though I’ve said before (at ~14:57 in the linked clip) that I’ve never been “patriotic,” I believe it’s possible to feel proud of one’s community and to support one’s neighbors without confusing them for the state. Accordingly, organizing workers into a political bloc on the basis of such pride and neighborly goodwill hardly seems counterproductive.
After all, it’s hard enough to build solidarity: though others with leftist political leanings might criticize the patriotic socialists as a single bloc, the figures whom Politsturm named above have their own disagreements, with some MAGA Communists now calling their counterparts “PatSocDems” for their supposed infidelity to the revolutionary cause, and with the aforementioned Coffin characterizing the MAGA Communists’ supporters as a fandom.
I try to stay out of it. (Not hard in the slightest.) Still, that same Coffin—whom one of last year’s slices cited for his commendable insights into culture and identity under capitalism—offered a strong argument at the start of the year (at ~2:29–2:42 and ~5:42–8:11) for rejecting “MAGA Communism” as a brand:
All of the MAGA Communists will say, “The revolutionary potential in America is in the MAGA, therefore we have to figure out how to talk to those people.” You’re not completely wrong […] The underlying idea of wanting to bring the proletariat—which often supports MAGA, often is in industrial jobs: trucking, farming, etc.—wanting to bring those people class consciousness is a good idea. But I’ll tell you that that is the least productive brand ever […] My point is that MAGA is an extreme partisan brand that pisses people off. Just like “communism”—and I’m not saying the kind of communism I’m pushing, but—just the word “communism,” the brand “communism,” it does the same thing: people hate “communism” in the same way they hate MAGA, because in their eyes it’s an extreme political brand. So it’s two very extreme political brands that both have extremely large hate-followings and tiny, tiny slices of people that will tolerate both of those. In other words, it’s a real “I’m very unique” brand, to be a MAGA Communist. And rather than creating similarity, MAGA Communism does the exact same thing that LGBTQ does […] it draws lines, it draws separation, it draws comparison. Rather than form one coherent thing, it instead takes multiple things and just acts like they’re one thing. It’s actually a very individualist way of looking at things.
I think Coffin makes a compelling point. But I’ve gotta keep this reactionary grift going somehow, right? Because it’s just been so lucrative for me—and the embedded individualism just fits too well with my affection for Nietzsche—I’m gonna call my pyramid scheme, “Libertarian Communism.” (Make sure to like and subscribe!)
Jokes aside, I’ll keep using the term, because I find it useful in the following regard: “libertarian” ameliorates the authoritarianism for which many Americans interpret “communism” as a synonym (as covered previously), while also implying support for inalienable civil rights that I, as one of the country’s native citizens, perceive as fundamentally “American.” Anyway, I’d hope that affirming such an apparently paradoxical ideology at least surprises people long enough to hear me out.
In fact, I’ve had pretty good luck with it. Most Americans today see the need for the U.S. to develop a new political direction, because I doubt many would disagree that their country’s trajectory has been trending downward. That seems like the perspective, for example, of the U.S.’s Boogaloo Bois, as discussed in a January dispatch, or that observed among the American public in “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies”, a 2018 political science paper covered in The New York Times which has 40% of Americans polled concurring either that, “When it comes to our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, ‘Just let them all burn,’” or that, “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.” (As for who would disagree that the U.S. is on a downtrend, I’m really only aware of David Pakman.) Historian Peter Turchin certainly wouldn’t disagree: in fact, he’d say the U.S. is now in a disintegrative phase.
I encountered Turchin’s work through Keegan Kjeldsen’s The Nietzsche Podcast, which our last dispatch featured prominently. His overview of Turchin’s cliodynamics—the rising and falling of civilizations according to predictable, mathematical patterns driven by demographic and economic factors like population growth, wealth inequality, elite overproduction, and labor supply—shows how the destabilizing inequality and elite overproduction characteristic of ancient Rome, which pushed the empire out of its successful integrative phase (when conflict along the cultural divides of Turchin’s “meta-ethnic frontiers” drove state growth) and drove it toward disintegration and collapse.
Last month, I mentioned the same elite overproduction as one of the detrimental results of the capitalist economic mode in particular that Kjeldsen noted in his examination of Nietzsche’s political commitments. No surprise, then, that Turchin sees parallels in American history and predicts continued discord until the U.S. reaches a nadir in the next few decades, after which society may reintegrate.
Turchin described all this himself while talking to Aaron Bastani on Novara Media’s Downstream last June. In their conversation, Turchin elaborates that this elite overproduction—an excess of wealthy aspirants competing for limited power, producing internal competition and dysfunction that drive a civilization toward crisis—works in tandem with popular immiseration: that is, with stagnant or declining real wages and living standards while wealth concentrates among the so-called elite. Here and elsewhere, Turchin describes this concentration as an effect of what he calls the “wealth pump” disproportionately distributing economic benefits, leading to increased social inequality and instability, while identifying this wealth pump’s mechanisms in the exploitation of labor, policies favoring capital over the working class, and regressive taxation.
For context on the first of those mechanisms, I’d suggest the speech of Caleb Maupin captured (at ~25:14–30:54) in the Summit Against Hypocrisy 2023 documentary released by CPI last year, in which he lays out how the capitalist economic mode immiserates its working class.
Here, Maupin capably describes how the capitalist mode of production extracts surplus economic value from the labor of the working class to the benefit of the bourgeoisie:
If you’re a factory owner […] you are going to need […] the manufacturing materials. So that’ll be A […] and you're probably going to need to transport the product to where it’s sold, that’s B […] You’re also going to have to pay your labor costs. Labor costs are represented by C […] Then, when consumers purchase the product, they’re going to pay a final price, and that final price is D. However, there’s a problem with that[:] the capitalist can’t change how much A costs; he can’t change how much B costs. So, the profit of the capitalist can only be extracted from the value put into it by the worker. And this is the basis of Marxism: the understanding of surplus value […] So, C, the labor value, is divided: you have C1—which is what the worker actually gets paid—and then you have C2, which is the profit that the capitalist makes. And it all adds up to D, which is the final cost of the product.
Now the way people in the United States who talk about Marxism generally talk about this is they say, “Well, this is unfair.” They say the worker is not getting paid the full value of his labor. But they’re missing one of the most important points […] Then people argue, “Well, what about the employer? He put up the money. Doesn’t he deserve that?” That’s all a distraction, because the important thing to understand is this: C1 is always going to be less than D. The wages paid out to the worker are never enough to buy back the product that he produces. There is always more products created than there are wages paid out to the worker. And this is the built-in problem of capitalism: the problem of overproduction.
The simple equation that Maupin presents (A+B+[C1+C2]=D) supplies the economic explanation for why the capitalist mode of production generates periodic crises, due to the overproduction and tendency of the rate of profit to fall with which it’s part-and-parcel—leading in the political sphere (as our last dispatch observed) to fascist regimes. “It’s a problem,” Maupin notes (at ~28:48–28:56), “acknowledged by most capitalist economists: John Maynard Keynes said the problem was ‘underconsumption’ rather than overproduction, but he was pointing to the same problem.”
Returning to Turchin, now freshly armed with an economic understanding of how the exploitation of labor leads eventually to crisis, we still need to account for the other mechanisms of his theory’s wealth pump: those that stem from the favor of the political establishment shown to capital over the working class, such as regressive tax plans that relieve the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Fortunately, however, we’ve previously covered the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act as of example of the like, under which 95% of the included tax benefits enriched those with a household income of $200,000 or more per year.
Policies such as these, I maintain, act to further the popular immiseration and the concentration of wealth that Turchin sees together exacerbating social tensions and contributing to periods of societal unrest and upheaval. Within the cliodynamic framework, economic inequalities shape the trajectories of societies, and determine their susceptibility to what political instability results from the elite overproduction described above. These factors, Turchin argues, are currently driving the U.S. on a disintegrative trajectory similar to that which peaked in the 1860s: remember what happened in the U.S. back then?
You don’t need to worry too much though, so long as you can keep yourself focused on the long term. Turchin has worked to develop a theory of a civilization’s integrative and disintegrative phases with mathematical dynamics to predict social instability using models measuring elite oversupply, inequality, demographics bulges, etc. These factors make crisis trajectories somewhat predictable, but outcomes also depend on human agency and prosocial coordination. Accordingly, he offers cliodynamics as the foundation for a science quantifying cultural evolution to which people can refer for navigating historical transitions, promoting nonviolent competition and (he hopes) preventing recurring cycles of dysfunction. In his aforementioned conversation on Downstream, Turchin advocates for more workplace democracy and egalitarian policies—in Europe’s case, to recover rights of workers lost since the 1960s; and in the U.S., to restore the correlation between wages and productivity, with the former having stagnated against the latter since the 1970s—to balance the gains of workers and employers to stabilize society. But he cautions that traditional social-democratic solutions would be insufficient, and that the U.S. must develop political adaptations suited to its modern conditions.
Elsewhere, the historian (speaking in another conversation also filmed last June) provides his further cliodynamic analysis with more specific contemporary material conditions. Here, Turchin explains that popular immiseration—resulting from policies favoring employers over workers that increasingly redirect economic gains from labor to elites—inevitably reduces tax revenues, while a simultaneous elite overproduction—with their own numbers swelling beyond available high-status positions for which they compete, producing social tensions—eventually paralyzes governance institutions, leading to the decline of the fiscal health and popular legitimacy of government. Accordingly, the state deteriorate, signaling a coming crisis. Though he argues that contemporary policies currently fail to address the core factors driving societies toward collapse, countries can still avoid the worst scenarios through organized efforts to prevent the transfer of wealth away from the lower classes.
From all this, I think it’s safe to propose that Turchin identifies popular immiseration amid rising wealth inequality (over the lifespan of an empire) as the core cause of the fiscal crisis in the U.S. government today, and argues for greater workplace democracy and egalitarian economic policies to prevent popular immiseration and reduce wealth inequality—though he cautions that we would find traditional solutions insufficient.
…So, he’s saying the U.S. should try something more radical: maybe something like Libertarian Communism, right?
Then I think it’s past time we hash that out. Let’s start with the country’s origins, find the seed that serves our purposes, and follow the through-line forward from there. To that end, I’ll cite Daniel Natal, who explained last November in his appearance on Geopolitics & Empire (at ~23:55–29:59 in the linked clip) how a corrupt merger of state and corporate power centered around the massive British East India Company fomented the American Revolution after the British government bailed the Company out after a rogue trader caused its near-collapse in a debt-induced banking crisis in 1772. The UK accomplished this bailout to preserve the investments of the British elite with funds raised through oppressive taxes on the colonies sparked colonial fury against this corrupt merger of state and corporate power even two years before the Boston Tea Party. In addition, that corporate bailout (history’s first) led to the creation of central banks as lenders of last resort as we’re familiar with them today. As Natal tells us (at ~28:57–29:13), “These [central bank] institutions that we still have to this day [...] result [from] the British East India Company [...] using the nation-state [to] take money from the productive workers and then transfer it to themselves.”
(Amusingly, you can see [at ~29:29] an inserted clip of the aforementioned RFK Jr. saying the same as Natal about the American Revolution standing against the bailout of the British East India Company.)
Natal adds further details to this deeper layer of the American origin-story in a January appearance on Deep Dives with Monica Perez (at ~57:59–58:38):
Okay, so federalism […] that was imposed from England, right? So Alexander Hamilton and all these agents from the Bank of England: like, Hamilton immediately wanted to impose—not only write a new constitution where they create a new monarch figure (which they called the president) that didn’t appear in the Articles of Confederation, but he also wanted a central bank. And so he creates the first Bank of the United States, 80% of whose stock was owned by the Bank of England. So basically […] that new constitution allowed them to get an economic foothold over what had been the American Republic. So the American Republic ended [at the same time as] the Articles of Confederation.
As Natal tells us, the imposition of a central bank serving foreign imperial finance allowed external economic influence, marking the spiritual end of the original American Republic established under the Articles of Confederation.
Taking money from the productive workers and transferring it to the so-called elites: I’ll tell you what, that doesn’t sound to me anything like what “America” should be. So, for the purposes of articulating Libertarian Communism, that gives us a shorthand for our origin-story: first and foremost, the U.S. stands against the transfer of wealth out of the hands of the people just to accumulate in private coffers. Accordingly, socialism with American characteristics must work to counteract that popular immiseration.
On the whole, Natal provides an insightful analysis into contemporary debates over corporate vs. state control (with the former favored in the West and the latter in the East) fail to address the real problem of unaccountable power, and gives us good reason to conclude that, in both cases, a technocratic elite—whether from private industry or emerging from state enterprise—presides over a neo-feudal slave system.
(Many longtime readers may suspect that I don’t see these contrasting systems as entirely incompatible, given the command that central banks exert over the economies of capitalist republics in their efforts to engineer business cycles and to manage the crisis of imperialism while continuing the process of popular immiseration, though unpacking this hypothetical compatibility will need to wait for a future dispatch.)
Given that the U.S. represents the capital order’s imperial core, I imagine that political changes here might go some way to addressing that global dilemma: so, having identified the country’s spiritual origins, let’s charge ahead and unpack some attributes of a socialism with American characteristics.
As I described it at the top—since, as one of the country’s natives, these seem like expressions of “the American spirit”—my own Libertarian Communism finds its foundations in individual liberty, community autonomy, and direct democratic governance. Should it take hold as a national ideology, American citizens would collectively own, manage, and profit from the country’s natural resources (think along the lines of “AmericaNOC” and add similar entities for other resources like water utilities) and state enterprises would operate the means of production for commodities essential to life in an industrial society.
I believe it’s important to note that these state enterprises wouldn’t provide essential commodities to the exclusion of privately-operated competitors. Instead, a Libertarian Communist regime in the U.S. would govern an economy like that which developed following the reforms introduced to the People’s Republic of China by Deng Xiaoping after 1978, under whom the country moved away from a centrally planned economy towards a more market-oriented system: a “socialism with Chinese characteristics”— befitting a civilization-state capable of providing “an overarching framework for social and political life” (traces of which framework, it seems to me, outlast each deteriorating state in the civilization’s chain)—that aimed to integrate market mechanisms into their socialist political system.
But, since Americans might find the comparison more palatable—and, more importantly, because “domestic reconstruction” seems like it should already be a priority on the national agenda, let alone under any regime to come—let’s call it a social market economy, similar to that which Ludwig Erhard advocated as the Minister of Economics and later as Chancellor of West Germany in the 1950s–’60s: an economic model that retains the efficiency of a market-driven system (in which private enterprises play a crucial role as engines of innovation, competition, and economic growth) while state enterprises in strategic sectors ensure that the public’s essential needs remain met—and which, under Libertarian Communism, prevent monopolistic practices like those that develop under capitalism.
In a social market economy, the relationship between public and private enterprises is characterized by a cooperative dynamic, where both sectors coexist and complement each other. While private enterprises drive market competition and efficiency, public enterprises act as safeguards to ensure universal access to essential services, to mitigate market failures, and to promote social cohesion. The social market economy thus represents a nuanced fusion of market forces and public intervention, seeking to reconcile industrial dynamism with economic justice.
Returning again to the attributes of socialism with American characteristics, let’s discuss community autonomy and direct democratic governance. For me, the former proceeds from the observation that, from time to time in American history, people have made a stink about something called “state’s rights.” Coming from an anarchist background, the concept of states having rights still doesn’t make any sense to me—at least not under anything like a natural law—but the spirit of it seems to be something like, “People who live far away can’t tell you what to do,” and to me that sounds like “community autonomy.”
Here, I can honor my anarchist roots and draw on the work of Peter Kropotkin, a prominent anarchist thinker who advocated for a decentralized society of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. Under such a system, communities would operate on principles of direct democracy that distribute power horizontally, allowing residents to actively participate in decision-making processes that affect their lives. Enterprises within these communities would be owned and managed collectively by the workers, who—as Kropotkin would have it—collectively determining production methods, distribution, and other key aspects of their work. This, I think, should meet the standard of the more radical reforms for which Turchin seems to call above—and also with the proposals covered in previous slices from Radio Free Pizza.
Here it’s worth noting that Kropotkin’s vision for a federation of autonomous communities and enterprises bears a passing resemblance to the Bolivarian socialism of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, which seeks to address historical inequalities, empower marginalized communities, and promote a form of governance characterized by direct citizen engagement, while drawing inspiration from the liberator Simón Bolívar’s vision for a united and sovereign Latin America.
That direct citizen engagement emphasizes grassroots political participation via popular votes and referendums in a participative democracy model. I’m not familiar (yet?) with the specific mechanisms for community self-governance that Kropotkin might advocate; however, the essence of direct democracy aligns well with the principles of active citizen participation and communal decision-making. For the sake of hemispheric solidarity, therefore, our Libertarian Communism will take Bolivarian socialism as the inspiration for its participatory democracy initiatives.
(These autonomous communities might even bear some resemblance to the citizens’ assemblies that were the namesake of the Soviet Union: grassroots institutions for local governance and decision-making, before their role shrank over time due to the centralized governance of the USSR.)
Central to Bolivarian socialism is the emphasis on national sovereignty and economic independence—which our “AmericaNOC” certainly complements. Accordingly, a Libertarian Communist regime in the U.S. would endeavor to rebuild the country’s domestic manufacturing base (the loss which so many analysts have long lamented) with a market sector of worker-/employee-owned enterprises as a pragmatic response to economic challenges, aligning with socialist principles of economic self-sufficiency and worker ownership while democratizing economic power.
The Bolivarian socialism of Venezuela combines socialist ideals with elements of participatory democracy, challenging traditional power structures and advocating for a more inclusive and equitable society: one, that is, which prevents popular immiseration. Our Libertarian Communism could work toward the same by promoting employee-ownership plans in the enterprises of its social market economy’s private sector.
Silly as “Libertarian Communism” may sound, the project that we’ve undertaken today of developing a socialism with American characteristics means participating explicitly in a historical dialectic, the implicit activity of which manifests as contemporary phenomena like the aforementioned Boogaloo Bois and the “need for chaos” observed among the American population in 2018. With that in mind, we could say that today we’re attempting to channel our future’s historians—though I’ve offered little to persuade anyone that the U.S. will certainly become Libertarian Communist. Anyone reading this who thinks the country will adopt any socialism at all most likely thinks so because of Karl Marx’s contention that capitalism inherently carries within itself the seeds of its own transformation into socialism.
Alright, I don’t want to paint you all with too broad of a brush: maybe a few think so because Biden’s in the White House, or because the People’s Republic of China already bought us out. I don’t think either of those mean the U.S. has become socialist, but regardless, it was for their sake that I spent so much time with Turchin’s cliodynamics without ever once turning to Marx.
Whatever your instinct, contemplating the lessons of history—with particular attention here on the roots of the American Revolution in Natal’s analysis—promises at least to inspire us as to how we might meet the present-day demand for economic and political transformation. To that end, I offer Libertarian Communism as a synthesis of diverse ideas tailored to the unique cultural and historical context of the U.S. and which—due to the appearance of that synthesis in the genealogy of ongoing dialectics now negotiating the country’s future—functions both as a thought experiment charting potential pathways toward a more equitable and participatory society, and as a call-to-action that we today search them out.
The vision we’ve discussed here embraces the model of the social market economy, following after the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping in China and the principles advocated by Ludwig Erhard in post-World War II West Germany, and advocates for worker-owned enterprises in its market sector. A Libertarian Communist regime might favor these enterprises with more advantageous tax rates than the private peers competing with them in the market, though most likely doing so as only one policy in a broader agenda (in the spirit of the U.S.’s origins in resistance against the merging of state and corporate power) to ensure that the country’s wealth remains in the hands of its people: to fight popular immiseration not by impoverishing the rich, but by enriching the workers.
Honoring both our nation’s historic interest in local governance and our Latin American neighbors, the proposed Libertarian Communism incorporates elements of Bolivarian socialism: particularly its emphasis on participatory democracy, but also the significance it places upon economic independence. Toward the latter, Libertarian Communist regime would manage domestic policy and capital deployments to rebuild the manufacturing base for consumer durables (primarily under employee-owned enterprises) and for other products needed to maintain the country’s economic self-sufficiency and to fulfill its citizens’ material needs. In addition, establishing joint-stock state enterprises like the hypothesized “AmericaNOC” would help to ensure the equitable distribution of the economic gains to be had from the country’s vast natural resources while supplying the aforementioned domestic manufacturing base that produces consumer necessities.
But the inspirations that a Libertarian Communist regime in the U.S. draws from its neighbors shouldn’t overshadow those that it discovers at home. While we’ve already identified the country’s spiritual roots in an opposition to the transfer of wealth from the people to corporate entities, it would do us well to acknowledge the deep commitment in its national mythology to individual liberty. To whatever extent the U.S. might style itself a civilization-state—which, as noted above, China seems to constitute—depends in my view on how well its national narratives of liberty, equality, and justice can form a cohesive cultural foundation for its society and ideological foundation for its democratic institutions that in any way matches the country’s obvious political and economic condition at present.
Of course, I suspect that persuading many citizens that “socialism with American characteristics” would likely require that the population expand its sense inalienable rights and civil liberties that the country’s national mythology has so long held sacred. This would mean defining economic rights to prevent popular immiseration and, therefore, to address the working class’s increasingly precarious household finances, now under further threat (as we covered last September) due to the accelerating automatization of industry.
In keeping with its concern for the median wealth of American households, a Libertarian Communism regime would surely maintain the existing regime of private property for households while promoting a social market economy of employee-owned firms at its manufacturing base. This balance reflects the imperative to learn from the phenomenal increase in Chinese purchasing-power parity since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping; more importantly, however, it honors the cultural narrative in the U.S. of “the American Dream”—a faith in the average citizen’s ability to leverage personal excellence into an upward mobility that the country’s democratic institutions make possible. Libertarian Communism, therefore, would aim to make that dream real for every one of its citizens.
Doubtless the embedded duopoly of the U.S.’s current capitalist republic would resist such proposals outright. (Just think of the unearned gains they’d miss without insider trading!) Though the Libertarian Communist position—following from Peter Turchin’s observation above that popular immiseration leads to declining tax receipts—would hold that enriching the country’s working-class households therefore represents good fiscal policy. That, of course, would demand that the U.S. eliminate the corruption of its oligarchs and imperialist political parties. This, I contend, would constitute a positive step towards addressing issues of inequality and of elite overproduction. Here, anti-corruption measures intersect (if only tangentially) with economic policy.
Indeed, following the standard governance model of the nation-state, our Libertarian Communist regime might well need to operate as a one-party dictatorship. For an explanation why that would be, let’s turn to another conversation between Garland Nixon and Joti Brar of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)—featured in a dispatch at the start of this month—in which the latter tells us (at ~16:07–18:20) the reason:
In Marxism, there’s an understanding that every state is a dictatorship, because a state machine by its very nature is a machinery for the holding-down of one class by another. That’s how you get social peace: social peace comes about because one class is successfully holding down the other, and it’s not breaking out into open conflict all the time. In a class society, you have to have a state machine to hold the class antagonisms in check and hold down the oppressed class. So, in a slave-owning society, there was a state machinery to make sure the slaves stayed in their place. In the feudal society, there was a state machinery to make sure the serfs stayed in their place.
Easy enough to understand, right? Not actually a whole lot to dispute about that, at least on the first gloss. We could problematize it a little by introducing distinct types of historic and contemporary alternative polities in which we could find a contrast to the modern nation-state—for example, a federation of autonomous communities like that for which Kropotkin might advocate—but for our purposes today, that’s just splitting hairs. (I suspect that those distinctions between these governance models may arise due to cultural variations in class structures, but I see no reason to debate which represents a more righteous oppressor.) Moving on, Brar explains how capitalist republics perform the same function as slave and feudal societies in enforcing class hierarchies:
Now, in a capitalist society, we have a state machinery to make sure the working class stays in its place. And, in a state, you have a dictatorship of one class over another. The question therefore is, “Which class is having the dictatorship?” So, [under capitalism], we have a dictatorship of capital over the workers. We also have democracy for the capitalists: they get to debate and vote and have input into decisions. Although even there, what we find is the more that monopoly develops, the more that a smaller and smaller and smaller section of the ruling class—the owners of the biggest monopoly corporations, these days it’s like hedge funds isn’t it, that are just so huge that they’ve got a controlling stake in so much—not just of the national economy but of the world economy—that there’s [only] a tiny handful of people who really are, between themselves, having a say. It’s democracy for them [while] increasing numbers, even of small bourgeois [citizens], find themselves outraged by how outside of the decision-making process they are.
Therefore, the obvious answer to the increasingly undemocratic circumstances we find under imperialism is to establish a one-party dictatorship of the proletariat. (Hey, check it out! Someone who just described himself as having anarchist roots, and here I am airing a defense of the state. I’ll bet Kropotkin’s rolling in his grave.) Now, I know a lot of Americans won’t like the sound of that: the best I can do about it is to call it the Leisure Party of the USA (Libertarian Communist).
Because who’s gonna say no to Leisure?
Still, I can only hope, for the people’s sake, that they’ll understand the need for radical changes to both the policies of their government and its structure: otherwise, I fear, it may descend so far along its disintegrative trajectory that it won’t endure long enough to make any believable claim to its a status as a civilization-state—which should underscore the present need for the U.S. to define and adopt a socialism with American characteristics.
…Er, wait, no: to adopt Libertarian Communism! That’s why you should subscribe to my newsletter. How else will you know what political beliefs to adopt? (Remember: vote for Leisure!)