Serious question, and see it rather as a thought experiment than mere pessimism. If you knew for certain that humanity will not establish socialism and instead there is going to be a worldwide collapse in the coming decades what would you do? How would you live your life?
I believe humanity will establish socialism and it will lead to collapse because the aims of society have now become too monstrous. The concept of a socialism that is not this has been aggressively destroyed in every way imaginable. There is only managerialism and the want to boss others around, to project authority and insist "this is socialism".
Marx was the beginning of the downfall, doing everything humanly possible to short-circuit the concept of socialism, which was a very simple one. It was also a concept that really had no place for the poor even at the best of times. The only argument for socialism is that the condition of the poor could be a question at all, where before the regular culls of humanity were believed to be inevitable and, to nearly every political writer, desirable for their own sake. Socialism was the first idea that could question why we are doing that here and now, and suggested that there would be a solution where no one has to be killed or tortured or humiliated, since the real solution to this situation has always been simple if not trivial. In the past, political and economic society amounted to little more than fiefdoms competing for position, and not one of these fiefdoms could establish an empire for very long or expect that empire to be peaceful. The question of world peace and goodwill was a complete non-sequitur before the 18th century for a variety of reasons.
People laugh at the very idea today, but "weirdos who are into world federalism" was the natural base for socialist movements. It was always a middle class movement at its core, and the condition of the poor was only considered because how a society treats its poor and downtrodden says obvious things about its middle class and what motivates that middle class. If you had a theory from the poor for their own sake and their own program, it would not look like anything that was allowed to exist with any currency. The only time that was even a remote possibility is basically now, and then only for those of the poor with an internet connection and a lot of time. Who can really think about a different world? Basically, only a beggar with an unusual drive to learn and the biggest heart and soul you can imagine. It is almost axiomatic by the ethics of this society that such a person does not exist. Everyone else is beholden to the drive to kick down someone, anyone, lest they themselves be kicked down. Only the beggar is somewhat immune to this for a simple reason; he does not work, does not operate under any contract, and wants so little from the world that visions of empire and obscene self-interest offer him little. The beggar's experience is that if he has something for himself, it will just be taken away and he has no way to defend anything. Only when there is sufficient security for all is the beggar's self-interest satisfied, and this is not true of every other order of humanity, whose security was premised on making sure the lowest class stays the lowest class. Eventually, the drive to oppress cannibalizes the whole society because nothing in the world would tell it no, whatever the philosophical justification for this drive. Those in the valid orders, even those who were highly ranked in it, are excised, as the society turns into nothing but a machine for extortion, cruelty, and sacrifice. Everyone in every order of society is disciplined not by a class or a particular institution as we would expect, but by the drive to oppress alone. The institutions of such a society where this prevail can only resemble the base urge. Socialism at a basic level sought to intervene so that this wouldn't happen, for the obvious reason that a world of endless struggle has an obvious outcome that a child can foresee. In comes Marx to proclaim "all is struggle" and tell people there can be nothing but this, who proceeded to instigate and disrupt the very real efforts of the socialists, all of whom had very limited aims and expectations given how they saw the world up to that point.
Amazingly, all of the things you needed to establish a workable socialism were prevalent by the turn of the 20th century, and it was the opinion of a great many educated men that some version of socialism was inevitable. The condition of eugenism and managerialism is a type of socialism, but it is a type devoted to the essential act that socialism sought to prevent. In every respect, the eugenic order is a socialist one with socialist aims. It's just that the society in question is wholly alien to ours, just as Marx described it; and now it can only be an alien to be avoided at all costs. Nowhere among their own do the eugenists play this game in the way it is done to every worker. Even the very practice of going to a job to apply and submit to an HR rigamarole is intolerable and designed to be. The only reason that exists is for eugenic sorting of the population, rather than any merit or productive outcome it guaranteed. The truth is that most jobs are so de-skilled that they could be done by basically any warm body, and the necessary learning to know how to do the job can be done very quickly, or through a training course that most people capable of reading can complete. The drive to do these jobs, or the insight to do them well, is not so easily taught, but at a basic level, none of the filtering of the workforce is necessary, to the point where vast numbers of people are thrown out of work. It would make far more sense to invent productive aims that no one would have any great problem with, create make-work that is inoffensive to society, or simply pay all members of society a basic income in return for them agreeing with any of this. The entire reason you have this structural unemployment is for eugenic purposes, and they took extra steps to constrain the workforce and then limit any activity outside of the contract that anyone could do. All of this was portrayed as "socialism" and then 100 years later people ask why the masses hate socialism so much.
>>2496463There isn't an "authentic" socialism, but whatever Marx was aiming for had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with a power grab. The speed with which Marxist socialism turned inward on itself tells that this was very much not the answer, and the first generation of the USSR knew this thing did not work and did not adequately explain history.
The early socialists like Saint-Simon establish the overall base of the socialist camp, however small it was at first; and this socialism is not for beggars, but for a middle class. Every version of socialism is. My point about the beggars are that they are the only ones desperate enough to believe that anything like socialism could ever work out or include them, because socialism was the first idea to acknowledge that their class existed and had anything like human dignity. It's easily forgotten that for all of human history, the idea that the lowest class shouldn't be tortured and killed on sight is a novelty. If human history is to be nothing but culls, a lowest class is an inevitable conclusion, however that class is defined. So what does Marx do? Insist that after the revolution, you can't acknowledge that there remain social classes, and invent a hokum theory of "class analysis" to detract from what social class has always been understood to mean. And this ultimately is the origin of so much stupidity regarding what liberalism was. The ideologue claims liberalism was hypocritical in claiming it abolished social class, but liberals never claimed they did abolish social class or that any such thing was possible. From the outset, liberals maintained legal social distinctions of every sort. The only contention of the liberal is that these social classes didn't originate from Nature or received knowledge from on high, but were the result of a history that could be understood and reproduced; that is, that there was a reason why social classes existed besides "because they do". In practice, the liberals acknowledged there were social distinctions that were effectively fundamental, but those groups were already excluded from political society and usually deemed beneath the law and any human dignity in the first place. The liberal could only envision that their enemies were somehow insane or stupid, rather than acknowledging the evil. To acknowledge the evil too frankly would make clear that the liberal power-sharing agreement within the political class had nothing to keep it together. The republic would have been rejected totally before it could exist, and some form of despotism would have appeared natural, without any pretense that there was going to be a "republic" with any meaning. It also would have meant that the economic imperatives proposed had nothing to keep them together, and people would ask an obvious question: why are we granting to money issued by hostile institutions any of this power over our lives, and would we not be better if we simply rejected this and granted to the people a share of wealth without any strings attached and regulated production for use, without any intermediary of "value" or self-righteous moral justification? There is a lot of danger in following these proposals to their conclusion, and of course someone can easily reject the argument that the people, any of the people, deserve anything good at all. The liberals are not ignorant of any of this. It figured greatly into their considerations of what to do next, since they were quite familiar with despotism and could foresee how a republic goes wrong. After all, the French Revolution went to hell very quickly and wound up being a dictatorship during the really revolutionary part that had to happen for the country to be saved.