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this has nothing to do with any vision of socialism. or communism. this is a version of the existing order. it's capitalism rewritten with a period of compulsory labor and very early retirement built into the picture. but one of the underlying ideas--that the capitalist mode of production is based on an unbelievable squandering of human potentials simply by virtue of how work is organized and understood---that i agree with.
the problem here as i see it is that there's nothing about organization in it, nothing about direct-democratic controls, nothing about how to do this you would have to transform education--which i think absolutely should happen. there's nothing about the nature or organization of the revolutionary movement that would be required to bring these changes about---there's nothing about any of the questions to do with how to get to this place, what this place would in fact look like, how this space would regulate itself---and if you think there's no need for collective self-regulation, you're kidding yourself. it's all in how that would work. and if you are in any way serious, you have to take the process of getting to this place seriously---after world war 2, there was aa region of revolutionary marxism that was built around direct democracy as the meaning of socialism. you should read some of that--socialisme ou barbarie, c.l.r. james. for both, the question of self-organization is central. for both the revolutionary movement was a kind of extended experiment in fashioning alternative social relations and forms of self-organization. revolutionary theory was about indicating spaces and situations in the context of which working people assumed control over production, raised questions about the nature and meaning of hierarchy, about the relation between an alternate possible social configuration and social subject who are fashioned in the image of this social configuration--capitalism--and how you might move from repeating the assumptions of the latter into thinking something beyond it, not only as a utopian vision, but at the level of actual practices.
what the op outlines is athenian democracy without the democracy part. what it outlines is effectively a rotating slavery system (the compulsory service period) with an amorphous aristocracy supported by the deskilled, rigidly organized work of successive generations of people. what the op leans on is a logic of fraternity hazing--you endure the hazing so you can be a brother later and watch the hazing of others. but what i think the op is really talking about is some kind of monarchy in the context of which a state machinery that you cannot necessarily see maintains functionalities while the happy peasants frolic about.
at the same time, i think that the ending of capitalist social relations could open onto a period of creativity the likes of which we have never seen. we differ on how we think we might get there, what there looks like, how it would operate, who would have power--this is key---people should have power, but not in the way they think they do in the states, which is a context in which, like the happy peasants in the libertarian monarchy above, we get to wander about powerless telling ourselves by way of official ideological decree that we already have power when everything around and about us demonstrates that the opposite is in fact the case. for people to have power means that people have to exercise it. if they revert to being isolated happy frolicking peasants, there will still be power and it will still be exercised, but not by you.
it's the same old shit repackaged.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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