Seeking a left identity (a thread).

With the pandemic on, Ive been reading a lot of socialist, communist, and anarchist theory lately trying to figure out where I fit in and what I believe. So I thought I would open up a discussion. You should retweet this.

I would love some commentary, particularly from communists. I’ll start off by saying that Marx was 100% correct in his critique. We are in late stage capitalism. His identifiers for the downfall of capitalism are all present and becoming openly prevalent.

However, his instruction for what communism is supposed to be, I find lacking. Also, I have identified a hole in communism that I cannot find an answer for, and it is that we are not just locked in a class struggle, workers vs elites/lower classes vs upper crust. 3/

We are also locked in a struggle against increasing irrelevance, and this doesn’t just affect the lower/middle class. Marx had no way to predict automation at the scale we have now. A workers revolution in an age where we need less workers just doesn’t address this.

So I cannot call myself a communist. I don’t see a way for workers of the world to unite when we will continue to need less and less workers every year. If we have to start making up jobs to equalize the rhetoric, it’s not an answer.

In the case of socialism, I believe it is the immediate answer. Many industries simply need to be nationalized and regulated by democratic procedure, like our airlines. But it also doesn’t address an increasingly irrelevant workforce. Nevertheless, it is a step in the process

Ok...from here, I’m on shakier ground, but I believe anarchy is the actual endgame. Socialism is a step toward pruning some of the obviously dead parts of capitalism away, anarchy as the end state. Cashless society where purchasing is no longer a necessity, decentralized

power structures made irrelevant due to the end of scarcity brought on by automation and artificial intelligence. These are not science fiction concepts at all. The reusable rocket is a reality, I have spent a good piece of a career in industrial automation seeing the worker

Become less and less relevant. It isn’t just coming, it is here now, and it will shake up jobs even among the educated. Many coders will be irrelevant in 20 years. Truck drivers in ten years. Even doctors! The technology to replace the radiologist is being developed now.

Access to the resources of the rest of the solar system will happen in some of your lifetimes. If you’re 20 now, you may be able to live to be 100 years old in perfectly good health (if we can extract healing from capitalism.) The common 100 year old human has already been born

A resource based economy drawn up with anarchy in mind seems to be what fits for me if I imagine myself in the future. In the 1920s, I would undoubtedly call myself a communist when workers actually held all of the power. But the worker has been studied, improved upon, and is

Being made irrelevant by advances in technology. I’m not trying to bash communism, because I could be wrong, but remove the worker principles, and I don’t know how much strength communism has.