non-Marxist socialism

[ZombieGrits]

Aside from the utopian socialists and social-democrats, are/were there any real socialist currents out there besides Marxism and its ideological offspring? This is of course excluding anarchist socialist currents that want to skip the socialist historical period and skip straight to stateless communism, since they obviously aren't Marxists

[Dermezel]

There are many non-Marxist socialists. Remember what is convincing about Marxism is the scientific evidence underlying the theoretical economic positions, primarily that of the centralization of capital. Without the centralization of capital being real, and proven to be an economic phenomenon there is no social-ethical basis for establishing socialism/democratic socialism over some weird libertarian re-distribution/laissez faire scheme.

It is only because capital tends to centralize, and will necessarily do so under capitalism (barring some sort of calamity) that you need democratic control of the means of production. Otherwise, say wealth, as a matter of economic law, just spread out- then you could just enforce existing property rights and all would work out well.

Also I do not know what you mean by "real" socialist currents, every socialist current will claim to be a real one.

[A.J.]

Aside from the utopian socialists and social-democrats, are/were there any real socialist currents out there besides Marxism and its ideological offspring? This is of course excluding anarchist socialist currents that want to skip the socialist historical period and skip straight to stateless communism, since they obviously aren't Marxists

All non-Marxist socialisms are by definition "utopian"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm

[Dermezel]

All non-Marxist socialisms are by definition "utopian"


I don't know, it doesn't say that from what I read, but that's irrelevant. The fact is whether you "define" your opponent as Utopian or not is a subjective matter.

The objective matter is whether or not the law of centralization is established by scientific evidence. That's what makes socialism justified. Without centralization of capital automatically occurring, you may as well be libertarian as socialist. Whatever your strategy is at that point is a different matter. Likewise, whether or not you accept Marx's science, or have a good strategy for achieving socialism is another matter.

[Dave B]

The ‘militarisation of labour’, ‘disciplined armies, ‘governmental fetishism’ and ‘democratic fetishism’



J. V. Stalin ANARCHISM or SOCIALISM?





Listen to Mr. Kropotkin:

"We Anarchists have pronounced final sentence upon dictatorship. . . . We know that every dictatorship, no matter how honest its intentions, will lead to the death of the revolution. We know . . . that the idea of dictatorship is nothing more or less than the pernicious product of governmental fetishism which . . . has always striven to perpetuate slavery" (see Kropotkin, The Speeches of a Rebel, p. 131). The Social-Democrats not only recognise revolutionary dictatorship, they also "advocate dictatorship over the proletariat. . . . The workers are of interest to them only in so far as they are a disciplined army under their control. . .



http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html (http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html)

V. I. Lenin Once Again On The Trade Unions, The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin




The decisions on the militarisation of labour, etc., are incontestable, and there is no need for me at all to withdraw any of my jibes at the references to democracy by those who challenged these decisions. What does follow is that we shall be extending democracy in the workers’ organisations, without turning it into a fetish;


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jan/25.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jan/25.htm)


..

[Red Commissar]

Syndicalism could be seen as one form of obtaining socialism that was not Marxist.

[syndicat]

"Utopian socialism" isn't the same as non-Marxist socialism. The "utopians" of the early 1800s advocated appealing to "all the people" and especially advocated appealing, on moral grounds or grounds of humanity, to wealthy philanthropists. Sort of like the present-day non-profit sector in the USA. Class struggle socialism, on the other hand, recognizes that (1) any dominating class will not give up its power and privilege voluntarily, (2) there is a fundamental cleavage of interests between the mass of immediate producers and the classes that dominate and exploit them.

The libertarian socialists or mass struggle oriented social anarchists who first came together in the First International, associated with Bakunin and others, also agreed with points (1) and (2) above. Their difference with Marx was over strategy.

Official Marxism has historically been partyist. Marx and Engels advocated a mass worker political party to "win the struggle for democracy" and this led to a long tradition of emphasis on some sort of socialist political party gaining control of some sort of state as the means to bring about socialism.

Mass struggle oriented social anarchism has generally advocated a syndicalist or mass social movement strategy as the alternative to Marxism's partyism. But this is not "utopian" but is rooted in the class struggle and an objective understanding of capitalism, agreeing with points (1) and (2) above. The mass social movement or syndicalist strategy envisions the state being replaced, not by a "workers state" run by a party, but by organs of democratic popular power created by the mass working class based social movement organizations, especially the worker mass organizations.

[Dermezel]

"Utopian socialism" isn't the same as non-Marxist socialism. The "utopians" of the early 1800s advocated appealing to "all the people" and especially advocated appealing, on moral grounds or grounds of humanity, to wealthy philanthropists. Sort of like the present-day non-profit sector in the USA. Class struggle socialism, on the other hand, recognizes that (1) any dominating class will not give up its power and privilege voluntarily, (2) there is a fundamental cleavage of interests between the mass of immediate producers and the classes that dominate and exploit them.

The libertarian socialists or mass struggle oriented social anarchists who first came together in the First International, associated with Bakunin and others, also agreed with points (1) and (2) above. Their difference with Marx was over strategy.

Official Marxism has historically been partyist. Marx and Engels advocated a mass worker political party to "win the struggle for democracy" and this led to a long tradition of emphasis on some sort of socialist political party gaining control of some sort of state as the means to bring about socialism.

Mass struggle oriented social anarchism has generally advocated a syndicalist or mass social movement strategy as the alternative to Marxism's partyism. But this is not "utopian" but is rooted in the class struggle and an objective understanding of capitalism, agreeing with points (1) and (2) above. The mass social movement or syndicalist strategy envisions the state being replaced, not by a "workers state" run by a party, but by organs of democratic popular power created by the mass working class based social movement organizations, especially the worker mass organizations.

The problem is none of these recognize the centralization of capital that naturally occurs within capitalist systems, perhaps large scale systems in general.

This tendency for centralization has tons of empirical data backing it:


The richest 1% of adults owned 40% of the world’s total assets in the year 2000. The richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of total assets. The bottom half of the world adult population owned 1% of global wealth. (Source: World Institute for Development Economics Research, The World Distribution of Household Wealth, 2006).

"There were an estimated 7.7 million millionaires in the world at the end of 2003, half a million more than at the end of 2002, as stock markets and economic growth picked up and the rich took more risks with their cash.These wealthy individuals saw their riches increase by 7.7 percent to $28.8 trillion in 2003, recovering to levels seen before the global recession took hold in 2001, according to a survey on Tuesday from U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch and technology consultancy Capgemini. And the rich are set to get richer, with their wealth forecast to grow by seven percent a year and to exceed $40.7 trillion by 2008, the survey predicted... The survey also highlighted a small, but fast-growing global group of 70,000 super rich individuals with more than $30 million in financial assets. It found that this group was growing at a faster pace than those in the $1 million-plus bracket." (World's richest worth $29 trillion in 2003; Survey: Wealthy now back at level before dot-com bust. MSNBC.com, June 15, 2004,)

Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, New York Times, June 26, 2003

In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. (Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ).

In 1998 the top 1 percent of the population owned 38 percent of the wealth, the top 5 percent owned over 60 percent (source: www.inequality.org/fatcsfr.html).

The top ten percent of the U.S. population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. (Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5).

One percent of the U.S. population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. (Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: HarperBusiness, 1993).

The top one percent of U.S. households owned 42 percent of all stock in 1997...
The top ten percent of households owned 82 percent of all stock-market wealth...
Only 27 percent of households held more than $10,000 in stock in 1997...
57 percent of Americans didn't own any stock at all...
The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent....
Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.
Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined...
Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President's Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We've gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn't seen since the teens and 1920s.’" (Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999).

The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. (Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 10 cool .

When he was worth $40 billion, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was worth more than the bottom 110 million Americans (the bottom 40 percent of the population). By 1998, Gates was worth $59 billion; a year later, he was worth $85 billion. Gates is twice as wealthy as the second richest American, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (worth $40 billion). (Source: open letter from Ralph Nader (December 199 cool , citing Edward Wolff of New York University, whose calculations included home equity, pensions and mutual funds, but excluded personal cars, based on Gates' then-current net worth of $40 billion).

In 1995, 358 billionaires were worth $760 billion, the same as the poorest 20 percent of the world’s people. (Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 83).

For the last century capital has been centralizing and accumulating. Even if you 100% hate Marx and hate socialism you cannot deny this fact.

Just like Natural Selection, I hate natural selection, but I cannot it exists in nature.

Now the question is whether you believe we should just let nature takes it's course, or whether there should be conscious social intervention to alleviate any problems that can be created by this tendency of capital.

The only practical plan, that does not include genocide against most of the human population, is to socialize the means of production i.e. put it under democratic control.

[ZombieGrits]

It's certainly necessary to consider anarchism more generally, as anarchism only gained a communist current decades after its establishment as a defined political philosophy.

By my (admittedly, very basic) understanding of anarchism, it was individualist-anarchists who cropped up first, followed by colectivist-anarchists who split away from the early socialist movement. Is this correct?

[Agnapostate]

By my (admittedly, very basic) understanding of anarchism, it was individualist-anarchists who cropped up first, followed by colectivist-anarchists who split away from the early socialist movement. Is this correct?

Individualist anarchists cropped up in the U.S., and were effectively the equivalent of the mutualists in Europe, and I'd also classify them as individualists because of their shared market socialism (consider Kevin Carson's work (http://mutualist.blogspot.com/) on the matter, for example). Anarchism's aversion to centralized hierarchies meant that it never and could never develop a strain of thought that advocated centrally planned socialism, but anarchist collectivism was the main competitor of Marxism in the early socialist movement (and anarchist communism later developed out of anarchist collectivism). I wouldn't say that they broke away because that would be an inaccurate monopolization of socialism by Marxists.

[syndicat]

By my (admittedly, very basic) understanding of anarchism, it was individualist-anarchists who cropped up first, followed by colectivist-anarchists who split away from the early socialist movement. Is this correct?

The modern anarchist movement originated with the libertarian socialist tendency in the first international. There was no anarchism as a political movement prior to that. Bakunin and the others in the libertarian socialist tendency in the first international were not individualists. They opposed the Proudhonists.

Proudhon was an individualist. Altho he influenced the anarchism & syndicalism that emerged in the 1860s -- mainly his concepts of workers self-management & federalism, he was an opponent of mass social anarchism because he was opposed to their emphasis on unionism and mass/class struggle. Also, Proudhon's mutualism is a form of market socialism. By the early 1900s most mass/class struggle social anarchists were opposed to market socialism. They did in fact advocate a socially planned economy. But it was to be planned from below.

The best available history of social anarchism is the recent book "Black Flame".

[syndicat]

I think the discussion by Dermezel and Christoferkoch should be split into a separate thread. It is not relevant to the theme of this thread, which is non-Marxist socialism.

irrespective of what type of party Lenin advocated, Marxism is partyist, that is, its strategy for creating socialism is a political party running a state.

[ZombieGrits]

Jesus H. Christ, people, fight your petty little theoretical-war in private messages

I thought this was interesting:
(I can't post links yet, just go to wikipedia and search for "yellow socialism")

[Bilan]

Aside from the utopian socialists and social-democrats, are/were there any real socialist currents out there besides Marxism and its ideological offspring? This is of course excluding anarchist socialist currents that want to skip the socialist historical period and skip straight to stateless communism, since they obviously aren't Marxists

That is a fundamentally inaccurate characterisation of anarchism. Anarchism doesn't want to "skip" anything.
Now, what do you mean you want a non-marxist marxist party?
Je ne comprend pas!

[ZombieGrits]

That is a fundamentally inaccurate characterisation of anarchism. Anarchism doesn't want to "skip" anything.
Now, what do you mean you want a non-marxist marxist party?
Je ne comprend pas!

Well I don't mean ALL anarchists, only anarcho-communists/socialists. And the only thing I mean by "skip" is that they don't subscribe to the ultra-othodox Marxists' fixation on "unchangeable" stages of history, i.e. they don't want the "dictatorship of proletariat" but an immediate shift to stateless communism.

And I didn't say anything about a non-Marxist Marxist party, I mean non-Marxist (and non-Lenin/Mao/Trotsky/whatever-ist, that descend from Marxism) political ideologies that could still be classified as socialist or communist.

[Communist]

I moved all the off-topic posts to a new thread in Learning.
Stick to the thread topic or start a new one please.
Thanks.

[Revolutionary Pseudonym]

It depends how strictly someone has to follow Marx to be called a Marxist to, for example some people seem to miss big bits off his teachings and are still called Marxists and there are some who miss relitively minor points and arnt considered Marxist.
There are a few groups of Non-Marxist Socialism, mainly those that see Socialism as the goal as opposed to a phase into communism.

[syndicat]

There are a few groups of Non-Marxist Socialism, mainly those that see Socialism as the goal as opposed to a phase into communism.

Marx never proposed any distinction between socialism and communism. The idea of "socialism" as some society that transitions to "communism" was a Leninist innovation. Marx spoke of earlier and later phases of communism. That's because when communism is created, it still, as Marx said, "bears the birth marks" of its origin. But communism is a new, classless mode of production, and thus has a different logic of development than capitalism.

[Revolutionary Pseudonym]

Marx never proposed any distinction between socialism and communism. The idea of "socialism" as some society that transitions to "communism" was a Leninist innovation. Marx spoke of earlier and later phases of communism.

That is what I meant, after all isn't the ML view on Socialism the most genearally accepted interpretation of Marxs phases of Communism?

[ZeroNowhere]

That is what I meant, after all isn't the ML view on Socialism the most genearally accepted interpretation of Marxs phases of Communism?It's not an interpretation of anything, generally.

[syndicat]

after all isn't the ML view on Socialism the most genearally accepted interpretation of Marxs phases of Communism?

the ML view was concocted to provide cover for the bureaucratic class mode of production created under ML party rule. but a bureaucratic class dominated mode of production is not any form of communism as Marx conceived of it. as to your question, Generally accepted by who? if you mean the average person, to the extent they have any idea of a distinction between socialism and communism, they identify the latter with the ML regimes and the former with social-democratic capitalism.