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Barbara MacLean and Bruce Lerro are co-founders and organizers for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Follow them on Facebook and Twitter. http://planningbeyondcapitalism.org/ socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org OpEdNews Member for 500 week(s) and 0 day(s) 111 Articles, 0 Quick Links, 45 Comments, 0 Diaries, 0 Polls
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Saturday, February 21, 2026An Alliance of Socialists and Conservatives Against Liberal Centrism: Not Such Strange Fellows After All Not all conservatives are neocons or reactionaries. The New Right in Europe is against capitalism globalization imperialism & Russia-phobia. This New Right argues the real enemy is liberal centrism and insists that the division of political spectrum into right vs left benefits liberal centrists. Socialists need to separate themselves from leftism. It's liberal centrists who are terrified of socialists & conservatives uniting. 
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Thursday, February 19, 2026Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative Part II In thick democracy discussion matters more than voting. Thick democracy citizens do not give up their power to representatives but decide on matters directly in workers' councils, neighborhood assemblies & municipal gatherings. Conflicts are resolved neither by representative bodies nor by a conforming consensus but instead by informed active and convivial citizens. 
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Friday, February 6, 2026Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative Part I In the US the terms "liberal" "democracy" & "capitalism" are all mushed together for political propaganda purposes. Bruce Lerro's article challenges this propaganda by pointing out that these words have very different histories. He points out that thick participatory democracy is both a necessary and possible alternative. 
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Friday, January 16, 2026My Dream for BRICS and its Critics With the recent kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro it seems like a golden opportunity for BRICS to step up to the plate. But skeptics say this won't happen because BRICS is an economic not a political organization. Many Marxists say BRICS can be no alternative to the West because the countries in BRICS are too diverse politically to unite. Is it naive to hope that BRICS can overcome these real criticisms?
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Sunday, November 30, 2025Ages in Turmoil: The Rise and Fall of States in and out of Yankeedom Many historians have argued that the history of civilizations runs in cycles. Asimov's famous character Hari Seldon in The Foundation series claimed to have discovered the laws of history in mathematics. But up to the emergence of Peter Turchin's "Cliodynamics", historians could not apply mathematics to their studies. So what does the Turchin have to say about the rise and fall of states including Yankeedom?
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Saturday, November 15, 2025The Ritual Roots of Animism, Drama and Sports: The Work of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists Capitalist societies are known for hollow rituals. No wonder drama sculpture and sports are perceived of as 4 separate activities. But Jane Harrison argued that animism drama & sports were once rooted in ritual & stylized reproductions of hunting planting & warring--collective activities. Harrison writes that the animism of tribal societies was much more deeply grounded in animism than Olympian polytheism. 
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Tuesday, October 7, 2025Seeds of Catholic Totalitarian Rule Against Pagans: Making the Stalin Boogeyman Look Puny Stalin tops them all when it comes to accusations of totalitarianism. Yet there is an elephant in the room. For over 2K years the Catholic Church has striven to embody totalitarianism against pagans and heretics long before the word totalitarian became used in the 20th century. The church's heartless, fanatical & obsessive attacks in Middle Age Europe included its smashing of images, destruction of temples and burning trees. 
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Monday, September 29, 2025How I've Learned to be a Social Socialist: Thriving by not Minding My Own Business When I first learned about socialism I expected people to be outgoing, sensitive to each other, kind & loving. If capitalism teaches us to be scheming, competitive & cut-throat, it would make sense that socialists should be the opposite. Instead I found socialists in the US crabby, withdrawn & lacking in the ability to pull people together. I try to embody how I think socialists should really be-convivial, joyful & fun. 
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Friday, August 15, 2025Dancing With The Devil: Is It Possible to Evaluate Stalin Dialectically? "How can you like Putin? He is a dictator who has been in power for 20 years. Venezuela is a failed country run by drug cartels. There is no democracy." Also, Gaddafi: "He dresses like a king & wants to control all the African gold. He murders his own people." These are loaded vice words concocted by the CIA in the early 1950s. This article will do an in-depth analysis of perhaps the biggest boogey man in the world, Stalin. 
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Tuesday, July 15, 2025Matriarchy, Witchery and the Great Goddess: A Neopagan Marxist Analysis and Synthesis Roughly 130 years Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State. In it he relied on the theories of matriarchies. More recent Marxists have upgraded Engels' theory but they don't include feminist spirituality and Neopaganism over the last 50 years. My article sympathetically criticizes both Engels and feminist spirituality without throwing the baby out with the bath water. See for yourself. 
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Saturday, June 28, 2025Magical Theatricality in the Ice Age Caves: Why it Should Matter to Socialists What was really going on in the Ice Age caves inhabited by Cro-Magnons? John Pfeiffer and David Lewis Williams argue that the entire cave was a magical theatrical performance involving music, mask-making, sculpture and dance designed to create an ordeal for an initiation rite of passage. Hold tight! 
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Friday, June 13, 2025Jean Piaget vs Lev Vygotsky: Communist Criticisms of Genetic Epistemology How important are small groups to a child's individual development? Piaget says they are inconsequential while Vygotsky says they are vital. Piaget says that cognitive development ends before 20 years of age. How can it be that for the next 50 years there is no cognitive development? Are all of Piaget's' stages of development universal or do they vary with social class and the type of society? 
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Tuesday, June 3, 2025Building Bridges Between Vygotsky and Marx One hundred years ago the Marxian psychologist Vygotsky wrote a famous paper "Crisis in Psychology" in which he rejected both the mechanist materialism of behaviorism and the idealism of introspection for constructing a new dialectical Marxist psychology. Just as Marx discovered the cell of capitalism in commodity production, Vygotsky wanted to find the cell for psychology. What could it be? 
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Saturday, May 10, 2025Beyond Socialist Purity: From Beatific Otherworldliness to Messy Transitions The world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand the rising in the East of the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other in the West a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? There is no room for either purism or enmeshment. 
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Saturday, April 5, 2025Militant Neo-Pagans Neither Forgive Nor Forget: Why Neo-Pagans Should be Anti-Christian and Anti-Capitalist Paganism (whether animism or polytheism) has been treated horribly by Christianity in the desecration of images, temples, librarians or the killing of witches. But how do Neopagans react? This article throws down the gauntlet & says we should have no reconciliation w/Christianity. I also attack capitalist idolatry, reification & exploitation of nature and society. We should dance on the graves of capitalists. 
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Friday, March 21, 2025Part II of Neoliberal Micro-Psychology vs Communist Macro-Psychology: From Flatland to Spaceland Here is a slow-motion study of how psychological propaganda works. Lev Vygotsky was a communist psychologist who did his work in the Soviet Union almost 100 years ago. What happens when his books and projects are imported into the capitalist West? Capitalism, social class, alienation are eliminated from the discussion. In its place is a social contract, romantic self. 
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Tuesday, March 11, 2025Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology: From Flatland to Spaceland Part I When I was in graduate school in psychology I asked my social psychology teacher whom I suspected of being a marxist "Why don't psychologists ever talk about capitalism? Why don't they talk about social class, exploitation and the alienation of labor?" She said to me, "have you ever heard of Vygotsky?" My ship had come in. 
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Friday, February 7, 2025Take Your Clothes Off and Keep Your Mouth Shut: My Twelve Years in a Union as a Fine Arts Model What do you imagine the life of an artist's model is like? Like any working-class job you do better with a union. But how hard is it to sit in one place? It's very difficult without a limber body & knowledge of your physical limitations. My work with teachers made me a better artist, allowed me time to read, write & provided me with a good income as I made a transition to college teaching. I loved this work. 
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Monday, January 27, 2025What is a Working Class Hero? Years ago John Lennon claimed that a working class hero is something to be. Many people see Luigi as a working class hero. Tina Turner, herself working class, told us we don't need another hero. In this article we show they are all wrong. The life of socialist revolutionary Elizabeth Gurley Flynn takes us higher, deeper & broader into working class heroes. 
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Friday, January 3, 2025Towards a Neopagan Process Thealogy: How it Can Enrich Communism The revolutions in physics at the end of the 19th century had powerful implications for Western philosophy. The rise of complexity theory 75 yrs later added to the crisis. Process philosophy provided a framework for this new science. Continued rumblings in theology produced process "theology". Then the radical women's movement attempted to paganize process theology. Can communists ignore this? We don't think so. |
