Good post, made me think.
Authoritarianism
Charles Parker
Ryder Russell
God I fucking miss posts like these.
Landon Morales
Good good shit.
I've been thinking a lot recently about State & Revolution and the problem of bureaucracy in relation to this. If we're taking Hegel as the liberal-ontologist, laying out exactly how liberal society operates and views itself (without its relation to capitalism, of course) to its very core, then it proceeds that bureaucracy stems from, relies on, and in fact reinforces the division between civil society and the state apparatus. Marx & Engels pretty explicitly say that it's the former that needs to overcome and subsume the latter. But the question, which nowadays is of course among the questions, is how do we go about articulating a highly specialized and competent administrative network of people to execute and maintain agreed upon protocols and mandates (updating/observing housing codes, making sure the sewer system works, keeping track of what plane is going where, where and how [x] was built, keeping infrastructure maintained, etc) without a state structure that merely mimics or else just shallowly reforms liberal systems? It's difficult to think of a bureaucracy that doesn't in some way just reintroduce Technocratic sentiment back into society at large.
Jeremiah Baker
Delegating the bureaucracy to AI?
Xavier Martinez
Not really a realistic option. Even if it were, replacing a bureaucracy with a mostly autonomous AI maintained or whatever by a small class of technically skilled administrators doesn't sound like all too different.
David Murphy
Deep down I'm a full on statist/nationalize everything, but then I look at history and see how thoroughly state institutions can be infiltrated by revisionist parasites and I start having second thoughts. I mean look at China. Look back at the USSR. I truly believe nations that big can never and should never have a strong state because when you get into the scales of hundreds of millions of people you aren't going to have control over anything. Regions will basically be self-autonomous with occasional input from the federal level.
In an ideal situation, meaning a country not too large of 1~30 million people at most, I'd be 100% statist.
Oliver Hughes
directors aren't shareholders retard. corporations would just hire more CEOs
Adam Martin
Benjamin Foster
Thanks guys.
I do wonder though to what extent civil society and the state apparatus can be seperated. Of course there's utility in suspending this question since either way we're either asking for no state apparatus or a state apparatus that behaves in tandem with the interests of civil society instead of self propagation, but this seems to bring us back to the question of what to define as a state. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the standard Marxist definition for state is just the social instruments of the ruling class? So that the proletarian state is an intetmediary meant to abolish all states through the abolition of classes? This does seem a bit limited to me since regardless of whether or not wage-labor and private property are abolished there's still an entire administrative and logistical structure necessary for anything to function, which implies certain heirarchies and boundaries even if they are (hopefully) only pragmatic formalities freely adjustable depending on needs of the people involved. But my point is it seems counterintuitive or semantical to not refer to this apparatus of civil society as a state, though I definitely see the use in insisting on the fundamental differences of the state and emphasizing its distance from the bourgeois nation-state, possibly by drawing attention to how different the basic assumptions of feudal societies, theocratic kingdoms, etc are from what we now associate as a state, and how no one really disputes that those older forms were states.
As to what this actual reinvention would look like I have no idea, lol. I dont know if AI is the answer, I think that is potentially very dangerous considering that might mean concretizing our own ideological assumptions about the horizons of possibility in an unprecedented way. I admit I dont know much about it at all though, this might just be kneejerk luddite thinking.
My instinct is to propose something like this user is talking about , with a well defined and enforced seperation of powers. Some sort of dual or triple power between unions/syndicates/soviets/communes, a central branch and maybe a third broader one that just includes citizens at large that may not be represented by the unions/communes in particular. And of course a heavily automated production and distribution system that uses current technology to its full potential and tries to develop it further. Maybe this is what people mean by AI, but I usually understand the suggestion as AI determining the best mode of social organization and prescribing steps to get there, which sounds extremely dangerous to me.
Jose Ross
We just have draws every year, like in ancient Greece. Every member of society gets his turn sooner or later.