The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist_ Futures_ver_x10z1FNL_10z1xa_2_10_22

The question of power haunts all attempts at producing just states. The US looked good on paper but by our day it is a strange case, capitalist dementia. It is clear that a socialist democracy could be a real first, but the path to that is treacherous and something in the Marx canon made the transition fail. We can try to blame Stalin, or then Lenin, but in the end Marx/Engels are responsible. After an immense amount of theory they balked at producing concrete systems. We have simply bypassed Marx/Engels, beyond an historical intro, our 'core heroic saga. But Marx created a dogmatic religion, and its true believers are almost totally fixated and beyond thinking about what they are doing. Although Capital, an incomplete work, has great symbolic value in that saga, it might be better to set it aside and produce something reasonable. Take a close look, noone in the Marx sphere knows what they are talking about. We need simple recipes of action, not theories.

I doubt that even our DMNC models are any more than sketches, open to the same charge. But we can indicate a way to resolve the issues of economics and markets, transitions to democracy in the context of expropriation, creating a Commons, etc... The question of power suffers tension, because a revolutionary cadre must become superfluous and yield power to a Congress (we have eliminated the Senate). Will they do that? We have suggested the Roman Republic's consuls: we can grant power to a group in that manner for a limited duration. And that must be stated in advance with a pre-constitution that regulates a revolutionary transition with its own rules, observers, marshalls, etc..
But the transition would create a post-revolutionary cadre next to a democratic core. We can simply declare that cadre a guardian sector for the Commons and demand an austere style with a prohibition on owning property, checks and balances and a strict style beyond corruption. Armies, although not adequate for this, show that it is possible to create neutral reserve agents. So in principle, the issue of a guardian sector can be resolved.

But Murphy's law lurks. In any case the history of bolshevism is grotesque here and Lenin after the civil war became a creature of his secret police. The idea that revolutionary bolsheviks could create a socialism seems naive now. And a Congress must be constructed that is beyond all corruption of external agents. A liberal system could reach halfway to socialism if it could stick to the laws it has on the books and create a robust welfare system. But steps in that directions have always failed, apart from cases like Sweden.
And the result must survive degrowth: our new version has some comments on that. A guardian sector next to a presidential/Congress. Tibet had a no growth economy of meditating monks. Nota bene. In our model you could end up in a Zen monastery, better watch out.