The scientific-philosophical foundations of twenty-first-century socialism

Abstract

The essay first analyses the relationship between the time–space–motion paradigm of modern science, dialectical materialism, and Lenin's famous treatise about ‘The three sources, and three components of Marxism’. The bicentennial evolution of anti-capitalist struggle and theory shows that four evolutionary stages can be distinguished within that evolution and that its logic leads towards twenty-first-century socialism. The following parts are dedicated to the analysis of the interactions and impacts of the objective social advance towards increasing complexity in human social organization, the impact of modern science paradigms on Lenin's three components of Marxism and the implications of these paradigms for Lenin's dialectics and the evolution model of revolution–evolution, the conceptualization of certain topics in the field of political economy, and the cybernetic obsolescence of the market and the impact on class struggle and political democracy. A system theory approach is then used to debate the question, if the bourgeois system is in its terminal phase. Finally, we briefly outline the configuration of the mode of production of twenty-first-century socialism.

Keywords:

• scientific-philosophical foundations of twenty-first-century socialism
• dialectical materialism and modern science
• cybernetic obsolescence of market economy
• mode of production of twenty-first-century socialism
• cybernetics and democracy

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank our friend Paul Cockshott from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Glasgow, for his most valuable input into this essay.

Notes

¹The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command. Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities (Smith 1958, 31).

²The British scientist Richard Dawkins (1989) used the concept ‘meme’ in order to introduce evolutionary principles in the understanding of the transfer and inheritance of cultural phenomena.