I would love it if people would forget these silly “material conditions” sometimes.
I think exploring your own vision of a better world is really healthy and hearing and discussing others’ ideals is educational.
Yes, the world is ass and our pathways to FALGSC are basically nonexistent. I’m not saying people should be living in LaLa Land, but even with the way things are I just think it would be nice to hear people’s aspirations!
So what’s your unrealistic, niche, but admirable ideal?
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Having ideals and aspirations is not what “idealism” means in the Marxist sense even remotely. Marx, if you didn’t notice, openly touted his aspirations for the liberation of mankind.
Yes, the world is ass and our pathways to FALGSC are basically nonexistent.
I think this is much more an idealist analysis than a materialist one. Material conditions demonstrate the empire is weakening and the most powerful country on earth is now a Marxist DOTP that is making technological, ecological, and economic progress in a way that is literally unprecedented in human history.
Okay you can have a little material analysis as a treat.
CW: NOT IDEAL!
I think climate change is going to wreck the planet in such a way that the future of civilization on the level we are currently experiencing may not be possible. Socialism is the only path forward, I agree, I’m just a little concerned the billionaires and imperialists are going to ruin any chance we have if they haven’t already.
the billionaires and imperialists are going to ruin any chance we have
I think climate change is going to wreck the planet in such a way that the future of civilization on the level we are currently experiencing may not be possible
Humans are pretty resilient and climate change impacts can be mitigated with enough work. We’re very much just at the stage of “we’ve done nothing and we’re out of ideas”.
As long as we don’t drill the Arctic for fossil fuels, but China has basically saved the planet with the cost effectiveness of renewables in the long run.
China has basically saved the planet with the cost effectiveness of renewables in the long run
Wow someone should let the climate scientists know!
Lemme actually respond to your question though, because I do like to imagine what our global post-revolutionary future might look like.
Thinking about what would happen in the (former) USA, the socialist future would come about through some combination of an expansion of worker organizing, militant black nationalism, anti-imperialist consciousness, and imperial decay producing declining material conditions. However it comes about, the worker’s government here would need to aggressively go about righting the wrongs of its capitalist predecessor. I see that state gradually shifting to a federation of self-determining nations. By honoring all the US’s broken treaties with native nations, you’d carry out an enormous and comprehensive land-back program. Update the old understanding of the Black Belt thesis to reflect current population distribution of the internally colonized Black nation and create geographically secured areas of Black self-determination. Aztlan would also form a nation within this confederation, comprising roughly what is now West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and SoCal (native nations would receive “first dibs” on land back over Aztlan). Puerto Rico and Hawaii receive full self-determination as well.
I see an enormous program of environmental rehabilitation and rewilding taking place across the entire country. Huge tracts of mismanaged farmland would be converted to a combination of fully wild spaces and regenerative agriculture, managed by small ecological labor communities built out of rural industrial and railroad towns. This would also be a key part of desuburbinization. The last 30 or 40 years of suburban development in particular have been extremely low-density and ecologically destructive. Some suburban cores - the ones that represent previously indepedent small towns swallowed up by sprawling metro areas - would be reoriented in the same way as the rural towns mentioned above. But the distributed, stretched out housing would largely be eliminated, and people would be relocated to denser areas, whether major urban centers or small towns. In these towns, the core industry would be active management of “natural” spaces (nature vs humanity is an artificial distinction that must be destroyed btw). The vast majority of people would work on creating sustainable spaces for human interaction with the non-human world, restoring floral and faunal sovereignty, and building food systems rooted in their specific geographic and climatic context (heavily drawing on indigenous foodways paired with advanced monitoring and automation technology). You would see towns operating similarly all around major bodies of water - rivers, lakes, the ocean. You can create a massive employment program in the “nature industry” that varies from building trails, managing the creation of new old growth forest, tracking ecological conditions, restoring coral reefs, operating fish nurseries for population restoration, and more.
Industry would scale up dramatically in some ways and down in others. China is currently pursuing a hyper-automation of their industries in service of building an enormous industrial capacity that can far exceed the education and labor of their massive working class. The US should pursue the same, so that relatively small numbers of industrial workers can produce enormous output in clean energy, infrastructure, housing, etc. Lighter industries, on the other hand, would be shifted to smaller scale co-operative production distributed across the country and focused on production-for-use in their local area, with sensible implementation of lower-level automation. Each of these changes would lead to lighter working hours, eliminate overproduction, and dismantle the commodity economy.
I agree, but I also think that the climate will calm down eventually, even if it takes thousands of years, and there will still be people. It’s cold comfort for us, but there have been recognizably human people on Earth for four hundred thousand years. We’ll keep going, in some way or another.
I want to live in a community again. With communal spaces and kitches that people actually use. I would just love to go back to the era I still remember well when in the Soviet style housing here all the kids played together outside and when it was time for dinner your caregiver would just come into the window and call for you to come eat. Or if you needed your caregivers you could just loudly yell: “*name, come to the window, it’s *name!”
Neigbours called you in for a glass of juice. We were everyones kids. There was a live-in janitor family that was a part of the community in every building. In the winter nobody slipped in the yard, because it was taken care of. There was community playgrounds, saunas, laundrys. There was a cellar in these buildings so you could preserve food for the winter even in a city, my grandparents always had potatoes (precious), strawberry jam and all sorts of pickles and berry juices. They really made money last like that and lived a very good life despite being working glass with four kids and a million grandkids.
I think it’s very sad that this is now an idealist dream, but I dream anyway.
AES is less anti-utopian than some people think
Engels’s book on utopian socialism is very admiring of the Utopian Socialists
The USSR implemented Utopian things like communal apartments.
Utopians and Scientific Socialists should be friends, a different sort of left unity from
They should be friends but they can’t because being utopian usually means rejecting any necessary evils that are required in making that utopia a reality. For example, how lovely would it be that we could just convince the bourgeoisie that enough is enough and they will peacefully hand over the power to the workers, but it’s common sense how that won’t happen.
The distinction line between them comes down to the question: “Is it better to fail while seeking perfection or to succeed while compromising with objective reality?”
I think it’s instructive to look at what China has achieved with the GDP per capita of a poor country.
I think there’s always a path to falgsc bc as long as people live the ideas underlying socialism and marxism will continue to be discovered. Marxism differs from most ideologies in that it’s based on the observation of economic systems. Wherever, whenever those systems exist people will presumably make the same observations that marx did, whether it’s on earth a thousand years from now or on some distant planet whose people we will never meet. Even if every one of us alive today were to be killed and every copy of Kapital burned people in the future who never dreamed of our existence would re-discover marxist critique of capital using their own wit and skills and the battle would continue until it is won. As long as there are people in the universe we can never truly be defeated.
My idealist comment that made me want to post this: https://hexbear.net/comment/5538289
I think our entire approach to education and training is just fundamentally flawed from the ground up, like so many other systems in place.
The education system should be tailored to identify each person’s passions, talents, and aptitudes from a much earlier age. I know peoples’ preferences change but by the time you enter high school, you are old enough to start specializing for your future imo.
While kids still have access to the resources public education provides and the time to take advantage of them, we should be giving them every opportunity to explore everything they can learn and focus on learning what they like. And I definitely don’t just mean ‘practical’ or ‘utilitarian’ skills. Some kid is an amazing painter? Let them triple the amount of art classes if they don’t want to take a foreign language and math. Mathematician? Writer? Chemist? Same goes.
I understand a well rounded education is important so people can have a broader view of the world and understand the work other people do, but what we’re doing now is wasting so much potential.
Super idealist I know, but how did we make a society where the kids are an afterthought?
like a couple others have said, this isn’t “idealist” at all in the Marxist sense of the word ie. opposite to materialist. coming up with utopian visions of how to transform aspects of society is a crucial preliminary part of any revolutionary project! marx did it a whole bunch!
Andrewism has a couple great videos on schooling which I highly recommend anyone reading this check out.
I agree with other commenters that this is not idealist in the Marxist sense. Additionally, there are already educational systems like that, at least in Europe that I am familiar with. Kids can choose subjects to specialise in pretty early on.
how did we make a society where the kids are an afterthought?
IMO, it’s honestly a lot worse than an “afterthought”- hence why Marx called for the abolishment of the bourgeois “family.”
Capitalism inevitably commodifies everything- (and children, humans in general, etc. have been commodified long before capitalism developed IMO, though not on anywhere remotely comparable in scale).
Look up the “baby farms” of Victorian England, or the history of child labor (which is now making a comeback in the US), and the incredibly twisted history and current reality of international adoption networks, etc (and the corruption within the foster care system, institutional and by fosters as well).
Honestly as someone who feels strongly about it from personal experiences- the treatment of “parental rights” and a lot of the narratives around it are blatantly rejecting children’s equal rights in favor of seeing them as property…
IMO: the children weren’t an afterthought, not under capitalism. The system we live in has many, many people for whom they are not “afterthoughts” but rather how they make their wealth.
Reject Marxism, embrace 40k Ork ideology, force ideas into matter
40k Orks, fervent followers of Ignus Nilsen’s theory of infra-materialism 
True believers!
I want to make the Bazinga’s dreams come true, but Communist and not a white nationalist techno-dystopia and by China, because that will make them utterly miserable, until they realise they’re truly happy, at which point they will be even more miserable. The Noosphere is almost by definition communist and I’m tired of tolerating people who think it isn’t
What if cyberpunkerinos…
But it’s Afrofuturism so it’s actually fun and interesting and cishet white dudebros are not the main characters or focus.
I’ve been watching some of the AI Bazingas because I hate myself and all happiness, and one thing is just how fucking openly Fascist they’ve become. Most of it is white Fascism but some is a weird Hindutva strain that is even more virulently anti-China.
Sometimes they have interviews with merely deeply problematic old transhumanists like Ben Goertzel and they’re taken aback with the level of fash spilling out.
Now obviously this is all a grift, but Some Highlights.
“America must remain culturally dominant and dictate the terms of technology to other countries, including allies.”
“We must use international orgs like the UN to make sure only the USA has military with AI”
“New reproductive and in person education should be limited to the rich.”
“People should be scanned for “Cultural compatibility” before being allowed longevity treatments (this is definitely not a social credit system our thing is different”
“I’m really concerned about meaning under AI, because struggle is the reason for existence and I, the Ubermensch, have determined that that struggle be in such a way to maintain the supremacy of CIs whites like myself” “I think most people derive meaning from the pleasure of creation and social interaction with those they love” “No! only the Triumph of the individual will can give life purpose, that’s why I have no friends!”
I want them all gulaged but realistically half of them will be in jail for fraud in 5 years so…
I’ve been watching some of the AI Bazingas because I hate myself and all happiness, and one thing is just how fucking openly Fascist they’ve become.
I’ve seen that myself, in its early days, both around bazingas chatting it up at my old local bookstore back in CA and in ChatGPT-related communities.
The rapid vulgar reductionism against “meat puppets/meat computers” was there all along, as was the desire to have a more perfect slave (let’s face it, the desire for a theoretical “friendly” artificial person that is sapient but also unconditionally loving and obedient is high-tech slavery). Hating living beings and wishing them to be “obsolete” (especially in a “those feeemales will be sorry when this chatbot replaces them!” way) apparently made them believe that their treat printers were that much closer to ascension, and they saw the increasing precarity and consequent suffering of people hurt by the technology as deserving it as part of a nerd revenge fantasy of some sort.
Basically, this.
Or more recently… this.
Sometimes they have interviews with merely deeply problematic old transhumanists like Ben Goertzel
Then you have “wants to warn about the poison cake but also eat it too” quacks like Big Yud and his forum buddy “Roko” that lament that they could have saved the world from “unfriendly” treat printers (they bought into the hype labeling of LLMs as “AI” and just ran with it) but there just aren’t enough geniuses like themselves to do so.
What really annoys me is that none of these things really print all that many treats. To the extent they work they threaten to take away the parts of work you like while also making the product worse.
I remember when the big promise was that machines would do the repetitive grueling manual labor and people would be more free to make art and express themselves.
AND LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENING INSTEAD.
Idk… You asking for optimism of the will, along with pessimism of the mind?
Honestly, the people in this post telling me I can’t use the word idealist outside of a Marxist connotation are exactly what I’m talking about.
One idea that I find fascinating is that of the library economy. Srsly wrong has a great series on it.
