Not Soviet
In this special-episode we explore some of the political roots behind all of this - which are a lot older than you might expect!
I’ve had some great questions recently about some of the episodes here - particularly ‘A deadly addiction’ and ‘Why imagine a world beyond money?’. Some of these questions have pushed me to focus on the apparent politics - which I’ll admit I’ve been trying to avoid, because to me it’s actually just a ‘red herring’, a disruptive distraction from the issues that we really need to tackle. (What I’m more interested in is not ‘political’ in the usual sense, but much more pragmatic - such as those described in the ‘On the polder’ episode.)
But yes, I acknowledge that politics-in-the-usual-sense does matter to a fair few people - and in some cases brings up some definitely-valid concerns, too. So in this special episode we’ll take a quick look at the background behind all of this.
It may come as a surprise that none of this is about ‘left’ or ‘right’, capitalist or communist, or anything like that. And no, it’s not Soviet, either. Instead, it’s kind of sideways-on to all of those - and its roots are much, much older than all of those, too.
The need for this special-episode arose when I was sent a question by one of the readers here who’d been born and brought up on the Soviet side of the then ‘Iron Curtain’ across Europe, and had escaped that culture only later. He liked the themes that we’d been exploring here, he said, but was worried that parts of it looked way too close to that kind of communist model, of which he’d had all too much first-hand experience of what can and does go wrong in that kind of model. So yes, we do need to address that - because what we’re describing is actually not like that at all.
And what’s really important in this is that his experiences back then there can really help us all design ways to avoid those kinds of problems in future. Remember that this isn't just a theoretical exercise: in essence, we are in a global-scale 'on the polder’ situation - we must find a way to work together, and soon, or else we're all going under water, either metaphorically, literally or both.
The whole thing here is strictly about pragmatics, not grandiose political-theory. And, as our reader knew from first-hand experience, communism might look like a great idea in theory, but communism-in-practice - particularly soviet-style communism - has, uh, shown a few problems, shall we say?
As an aside, there were quite a few social-based communities that were set up in England at around that same time, in the 1920s-1930s, though we would probably describe them more as Digger-style communard rather than Marxist-style communist. Interestingly, most of those communities that survived more than a year or two slowly transformed into mainstream monastic-style religious-communities, which do seem to work well but won't scale much beyond village-level numbers (typically the Dunbar Number, around 150). And they also require a particular type of spiritual/social worldview that most people won't or can't hold.
So no, neither of those approaches will work sustainably at the scale we're talking about here, in the millions, and then onward to the billions. Yet if nothing else, both of those models can help us as lessons here - even if, in the soviet case, again more as examples of what not to do...
To me, the root for pretty much all of this is the huge bottom-up social-rethink happening in England before, during and immediately after the English Civil War - basically the first half of the 1600s, with the 'masterless men', the Diggers, the Levellers and so on. Christopher Hill's 'The World Turned Upside Down' provides a good guide to all of the philosophical, social and practical turmoil of that period:
Probably the main document that comes out out of that activity is 'An Agreement of the People' (full-text). All of it gets suppressed, of course, first by King Charles I and his aristocrats struggling to maintain their last hold on the old feudalism, and then by Oliver Cromwell and the other Grandees (the oligarchs, in present-day terms) installing their own new form of wage-slavery instead. Everyone else lost out, of course, as the ordinary people always do whenever possessionism and the like is allowed to be the base for the respective ‘economics’.
Yet the Agreement doesn’t disappear altogether: various parts of it do resurface over the centuries, sometimes in some surprising places. For example, we can see its influence in the 1689 English 'Bill of Rights', the 1787 US Constitution, and in Marx’s das Kapital in 1867. And a core part of the soviet revolution had its practical origins basis in exactly the same type of event as 'An Agreement of the People': a conference between 'the people' and the Army - the latter being the first time that this happens for 270 years!
So yes, both US capitalism and Marx-style communism are literally branches from the same root. And in both cases we can see which bits get missed or dropped.
In the US, it becomes reframed into a charter for slave-owning oligarchs, possessionist, money-based, hierarchical, and built on 'rights' without responsibilities - all of the themes that we now know don't work in the longer term.
And all of those errors are retained in soviet-style communism:
-- it's still possessionist - the only change is that 'the owner' is now the state, rather than the previous oligarchs;
-- it's still money-based - which leaves it wide-open to reinstatement or recreation of an oligarchy;
-- it's still hierarchical, in this case centred around 'the party' - which again leaves it wide open to recreation of its own variant of oligarchy;
-- it's likewise still based on 'rights' without responsibilities - which is why your fridge takes a decade to arrive, but also why 'party members' get priority over everyone else.
And in none of these frameworks - US-capitalist, soviet-communist, or whatever - do we see any checks or mitigations against rampant paediarchy, or against the all-too-common Stalin-style covert-crybaby tyrants who arise whenever that mistake is not addressed. Oops...
We won't survive those mistakes much longer. If we're to have any chance of long-term survival - not just as individuals, but as a species, or even a liveable planet - then all of those have to go. No possessionism; no money-system; no enforced hierarchies (no more 'some are more equal than others'); no responsibility-free 'rights'; no space for paediarchies to arise. No exceptions, anywhere - because if we allow any of those to continue, in any form at all, we're dead. It really is as stark as that.
So yes, whatever ‘politics’ might arise out of all of this pragmatic themes that we’re tackling here, it is - and needs to be - fundamentally different from almost all of what currently passes as ‘politics’ in the present day. If we’re to survive, we will need to rethink it all from scratch.
Oh, and one other question that we were asked to address: would 'rule by AI' (computer-based artificial intelligence) be better than present-day politics? Well, it might be possible, I suppose - but given the current state of AI, I do have my doubts. Perhaps take a look at some of the later stories in Asimov's 'I, Robot' series - particularly the final story 'The Evitable Conflict'. Sure, there are some interesting ideas there - but they do all seem to depend on his ‘Three Laws of Robotics’, which we’re, uh, nowhere near achieving yet. So yes, it could be better: but it could also follow the ‘Terminator’ path, and be a whole lot worse… Are you willing to take that risk?
Anyway, best leave it at that for now: we’ll be back to the regular Small Changes episodes at the usual time next week.