One of the most common things that comes up in internet politics is the question behind what constitutes a perfect system or ideology. While many of the more simple-minded among us cling to absolutist ideologies like capitalism and communism, thinking that the unbridled implementation of these ideologies’ basic principles is what would we lead us into a new golden age, most people understand that things can’t ever be perfect. While we can talk about the cliche problems that arise from imperfect lifeforms with biological drives that run counter to the interests of society trying to design perfect societies, what matters here is that as material and technological conditions evolve, what’s perfect continually changes. What would’ve been perfect decades ago wouldn’t work now and probably will function even worse in the future moving forward, as new evolutions in technology and material conditions occur that shift society towards different modes of production. The chief ideological struggle that humanity faces is not a matter of who wins but a matter of what works over the course of time, and as we’ve seen over the past millennia, what winds up working is often a matter of what provides the best mix of stability and benefits for the bourgeois leadership. Across time and space, from ideology to ideology, if a system’s principles and structure do not benefit the ruling caste initially, the leadership will simply rearrange the system to benefit themselves through either legislation or coups. At DMSG, we call this problem “bourgeois societal determinism,” in which the rulers of society always take on the functions and privileges afforded to bourgeois in prior regimes anyways, with different ideologies phasing in and out as different groups from different backgrounds try to supplant the system in order to become the rulers themselves. So, ascribing the notion of “perfect” to any pre-existing system is faulty in our eyes, as taking cues from what has been proven to “work” already is more a matter of what won out rather than what was right to begin with. At the end of the day, building up an idea of what a perfect system is based on what system worked best for American slave owners that hated paying taxes or what system worked best for Bolshevik trust fund babies who murdered their more popular but less militant political opponents is insane no matter how you break it down. What should be stated here, as we move forward in the article, is that when people defend these systems, for the most part they defend them because they believe these systems offer them the best chance at living comfortable lives that allow them to do what they want. Moving on from the problem with sourcing our idea of “perfect” from the past, we’ll get into the issue with uncovering what organizational setups lead to “perfect” anyways and how we can go about honestly building better systems, rather than just rebranding or justifying proletarian exploitation as everyone seems so inclined to do.
Delving into the question of how to identify what is “perfect,” it should be noted that because hindsight is 20/20, the majority of the time what seems perfect is based on conceptions of a world that is already fading into history. If one were to even focus on solving the problems of the present-day world with a newfangled ideology, by the time it was instituted through democratic or revolutionary means, the problems it had sought to solve would already have been buried under new ones that accumulated in the time since that ideology was founded. When we look at how long it took for Lenin or Hitler or Mao or Washington and Co. to truly make their mark on the world, decades had been spent working on political campaigns, and many of the new challenges they faced weren’t the challenges they campaigned on or even conceived of prior to their victories. While I’ve written about it in one of the trillion prior articles on this website, the problem with revising established ideologies in order to meet the challenge of taking on new problems is that it upsets the established bourgeois’ positions in these systems, leading to petty factionalism where the infighting poses a larger threat to these regimes’ long-term sustainability than the actual problems themselves. In such arrangements, where the newly appointed bourgeois have already insulated themselves from the problems they campaigned on solving, the task of taking on new problems that they hold no previous obligations for solving becomes an unnecessary burden on them. This falls in line with Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, in which any given organization over time becomes co-opted by those that serve the interests of the organization, rather than serve the purposes that the organization was founded to deliver. While we can talk about how societies could be built around accountability and a level of equality that prevents our rulers from being insulated from the average man’s problems, it is worth noting that the self-described Marxists of the 20th century in every country that they took power in did not do any of that. Due to Marxism’s principles and foundations being so antithetical to the totalitarian dystopian hellscapes its followers spawned, eventually we just have to drop the pretenses that any other ideology would yield different results in regards to preventing a bourgeois leadership caste from forming by principles and promises alone. So, if the problems that most of these ideologies seek to solve are already antiquated by the time these movements cement themselves in the seats of political power, while the organizations spawned by these ideologies focus on serving out their own interests rather than continuing to solve the problems that they were meant to solve, the question for you probably becomes: “well, what the fuck do we do instead?”
The answer to that is in acknowledging the inescapable hierarchies that permeate our existence, and rather than dismissing their existence as Marxists do once they take over or justifying their existence once capitalists take over, we need to look at how to create incentive systems for the rulers of society that promote actions that benefit the majority. While DMSG has gone back and forth on whether or not inner parties should consist of theocratic monks or technocratic optimates that get paid highly based on performance scores and public opinion, the fact of the matter is that a mixture of both is probably the best for everyone. In any ideological group that cements itself, over time elements of orthodoxy arise in these organizations, where people that would have made pilgrimages to Mecca or converted Native Americans to Christianity in the past find spiritual purpose in advocating for what the ideology espouses. Similarly, in any ideological group that cements itself, over time elements of revisionism arise in these organizations, where people that would have been sociopathic executives in corporate America or soulless apparatchiks in Soviet Russia emerge, attracted to these positions of power by the potential for wealth and control that they offer. While it is fair to say that there’s plenty of deviant monks and there’s plenty of compassionate executives, the fact of the matter is that by acknowledging these two different groups of people, who are motivated so differently and who arise in every society, if we can build a system that plays off peoples’ strengths and weaknesses, we can yield much better results for the working class. In an inner party based around the promotion of dialectical materialism and the promotion of the proletarians’ class interests, where the conservative elements are penniless monks that continually check the power of the performance-score incentivized technocrats, we’re a lot more likely to see the creation of a society that gives socialists what they want. When the ruling bourgeois exist under the thumb of jealous zealots who receive none of the monetary rewards for their work, we’re a lot more likely to see the leaders live in fear of the society that they govern. When the Outer Party is composed entirely of proletarian militiamen, who can stage revolutions at any point that the government inconveniences them, we actually can create a dynamic in which the people’s will is articulated by the best and brightest of us in the Inner Party. While this alternative to traditional government setups, outlined in Surplus Statism, may not seem perfect to you, its the best that we’ve come up with over the last several years of thinking on this matter and I think it grapples with and attempts to solve problems that no other group has really even acknowledged.
While maybe attempting to create anything perfect is faulty by nature, the pursuit of perfection is part of what leads us to continually innovate and demand more from our societies. We will perhaps never understand the totality of our economies and the social conditions that emerge from the material conditions in our societies, and we may always be forced to use incomplete information to build simplified models to tackle too-complex problems, BUT as long as the outputs are good enough, then that is fine. What is perfect really boils down to what sustains society, keeps the working class up to date and on our toes, and what allows our civilization to keep advancing towards post-scarcity. While post-scarcity might be impossible to achieve within the next several centuries, the fact of the matter is that when we get to that point in society’s material surplus, we will not only liberate ourselves from scarcity but also from the tendency towards tyranny that bourgeois castes typically come to rely on in societies in order to maintain their power. While even post-scarcity communism may come with unforeseen problems, the fact of the matter is that it can liberate us from so many problems that arise from power dynamics and infighting over resources that even if we aren’t spiritually fulfilled by the absence of scarcity, we will be liberated from the material incentives for any tyrannies to arise ever again in our society. While that may not be perfect by our standards at that point in time, for us at DMSG, that is good enough.
