>Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
The typical pop Marxist denounces any form of observable incremental improvement as "reformism" which will supposedly pacify the workers and thereby delay the necessary revolution. From a Marxist perspective, things are going wrong when capitalism works better than what their book says and things are getting worse, when capitalism becomes less bad.
Needless to say, once the revolution does happen, they won't go back on their word and think "Okay now that the old system is gone, maybe we should look at the old (reformist) ideas and run a thousand small scientific experiments to see what actually works."
Because they are ideological purists rather than systemic engineers, they reject the very concept of trial and error. They genuinely believe they already know what's correct and what's wrong. They demand the utopia promised in the text immediately and with a 100% guarantee of success while simultaneously denying any way of actually getting there.
The modern term for this is accelerationism: allow things to get worse or even make them get worse to force the Big Change that we "really need."
Usually that big change makes things worse, unfortunately, because magic does not happen. The underlying faith behind accelerationism is that if everything breaks the good change is what will happen and not something else, but that's not backed up by history or honestly logic. Why would things get better after a crash and not worse? Why wouldn't worse forces (criminals, totalitarians) use the crash as an opportunity to take power?
It's found across the political spectrum and is IMO incredibly toxic. The accelerationist is wishing for other people to suffer so their preferred ideology can triumph after the great calamity, which is incredibly self-centered and callous. If you really think about it, it's pretty evil to hope for suffering in the name of realizing some mental image you have of how the world ought to work.
The typical pop Marxist denounces any form of observable incremental improvement as "reformism" which will supposedly pacify the workers and thereby delay the necessary revolution. From a Marxist perspective, things are going wrong when capitalism works better than what their book says and things are getting worse, when capitalism becomes less bad.
Needless to say, once the revolution does happen, they won't go back on their word and think "Okay now that the old system is gone, maybe we should look at the old (reformist) ideas and run a thousand small scientific experiments to see what actually works."
Because they are ideological purists rather than systemic engineers, they reject the very concept of trial and error. They genuinely believe they already know what's correct and what's wrong. They demand the utopia promised in the text immediately and with a 100% guarantee of success while simultaneously denying any way of actually getting there.