Re: Thoughts on capitalism, community, and pederasty

I am finding your contributions somewhat opaque of late, which is no doubt down to me rather than to you. I don't get Laclau at all. "insistence on the working class as the necessary agent of social change" Well, the basic divide is one of wealth ownership, so, yes, I do conceive this as (broadly) the haves versus the have-nots. But whether such a politics will be successful is another question. Currently, a large portion of the working class are attracted to the far right. This is against their objective material interests, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily come to recognise that fact. This is precisely why I don't have Marx's confidence in the "inevitability" of the overthrow of capitalism. Indeed, if I were to lay bets right now, I think I might predict that fascism will take over everywhere and lead to total ecological collapse by the end of the century. But if I were sure of this, I suppose I wouldn't care much about politics at all. The truth, however, is that I hold that the outcome of human history is still unknown. Until we stand at the end of history we cannot know whether there is any ground for optimism or pessimism. Sometimes I think one way; sometimes the other. Until the outcome is known, the rational position is perhaps Gramsci's "pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will". And I shall just add this: if there's hope, it lies in the young. When I think about how the young are rejecting the gospel of neoliberal capitalism and ecological destruction, that gives me hope. "a planned economy independent of market mechanisms as a necessary definition of socialism" Where did I insist on such a definition? Social ownership, yes, and surely without some form of social or collective ownership we're not dealing with socialism, but it is possible to combine social ownership with market mechanisms, as in David Miller's Market, State and Community. A decentralised socialism is possible, and indeed might be preferable from an ecosocialist standpoint. But I would certainly hold that such things as land and resources, utilities and services essential to human dignity (housing, health care, etc) should be in public ownership. I don't know about "Marxist orthodoxy", whatever that means. I doubt whether Marx would be in favour of "Marxist orthodoxy". Surely were he around today he would adapt his theory to fact, as any good scientist does. Just as Darwinism is an immortal science even though a great deal has been added to it (such as Mendelian hereditary theory), so Marxism is an immortal science of social dynamics even though we know far more than Marx could possibly have known from his standpoint in the nineteenth century. For example, Marx always assumed that human labour was an essential factor of production; capital needs labour. But with the AI revolution this looks increasingly shaky. What happens when our tech overlords look out from their citadels over a world that contains all these surplus humans for which they have no need in order to maintain their miraculous powers? For this reason alone, the new technology must become socially owned, and not left to "the market". I don't know if any of the above answers any of your questions.