Many thanks for your notes. Indeed, you are right to point out that for much of human history, before it ever even began to be recorded, various forms of communism were all that ever existed. That is, up until concepts like private property/ownership, power, and the division of labor came into being and divided people into a hierarchy of classes. Marx himself writes about this in The German Ideology, in which he offers a new way to study history, namely historical materialism, by flipping Hegelian Idealism on its head. This work, as Louis Althusser argues, represents a major “epistemological break” in Marx’s thinking and marks the beginning of Marx’s mature work. You are right to point out Marx’s late notebooks on peasant communism in pre-revoluionary Russia to put pressure on my claim (based on Marx’s early work) that industrialization is necessary for a socialist revolution to truly succeed. But in those notebooks, he mainly uses the contemporaneous peasant commune in Rusia as an example of an existing society grounded in cooperative labor and collective ownership. This commune, he believes, is the type of society should be used as the starting point and scaled up after the revolution. But importantly, he also says that this should be done with the use of “modern machinery,” or industrialization in other words. And this is likely due to the fact that the population of the commune is minuscule (as were the populations of humans for most of history). Only through industrialization, wherein the relations of production are nonhierachical and the means of production are collectively shared, can the basic needs of humanity on a planetary scale today be achieved.

I also fully agree with your critique of technocratic socialism (that Marx himself was critical of in the 18th Brumaire) and neoliberal, imperial globalization. Indeed, climate change will not be solved with a technocratic solution, because technocrats and so-called experts caused this problem in the first place and benefit from it the most. I have a piece I’m working that is a critique of technocrats and experts in which I draw on Heidegger, Canguilhem, and Foucault. You may also want to check out a piece I wrote on Medium recently called “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”