Length of the transition

[Lanky Wanker]

8bPzL-mhaWM

2:05 - Thousands of years? Sounds like some serious reformism to me. And why would society have to undergo a "complete values change"? We're not trying to indoctrinate people with the idea, and revolution won't happen without an understanding of the society we should move towards building in the first place. So yeah, I've heard people give a number of different answers in regards to the length of the transition, but what do you think?

[commieathighnoon]

8bPzL-mhaWM

2:05 - Thousands of years? Sounds like some serious reformism to me. And why would society have to undergo a "complete values change"? We're not trying to indoctrinate people with the idea, and revolution won't happen without an understanding of the society we should move towards building in the first place. So yeah, I've heard people give a number of different answers in regards to the length of the transition, but what do you think?

Engels suggested a generation. "Work" will have to be abolished, or reorganized until "work" as a separate category of life dissipates, nationhood, discipline in interpersonal relations, etc.

[pax et aequalitas]

How about no transition?

And really? Thousands of years...? To change values? REALLY?!?!

[Ostrinski]

We don't know how long a transitional period will last, or what form it will take. I wish people would stop asking this bullshit as if we can somehow read the future.

[Lanky Wanker]

We don't know how long a transitional period will last, or what form it will take. I wish people would stop asking this bullshit as if we can somehow read the future.

Well obviously we don't know; I wasn't asking for a 3 years, 7 months, 2 weeks and 5 days sort of answer. We can probably agree that a transition of 500 years is a bit extreme, and a transition of one day is a bit silly also.

[blake 3:17]

I don't think a thousand years is unrealistic.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Perhaps a thousand years to full Communism, but I would hope that we could achieve socialism in a hundred years or so.

[Blake's Baby]

Perhaps a thousand years to full Communism, but I would hope that we could achieve socialism in a hundred years or so.

Most of the rest of us don't understand what you think the distinction is here.

I'm hoping we can reach the higher stage of communism in the next 40 years. I'd love to be around to see it. Some of us (not me, but some of us) think the lower stage of communism has been rendered unecessary by advancements in production over the last 100 years - full communism is possible now and the only thing that is preventing it is the lack of a revolutionary process. In theory that implies full communism is possible, starting from now, in less than a year (given a relatively short revolutionary phase).

[Tim Cornelis]

How about no transition?

And really? Thousands of years...? To change values? REALLY?!?!

No transition = retaining the status quo.

A social revolution in of itself is a transition. You won't be able to achieve pure communism in one hour.

[robbo203]

How about no transition?


Totally agree.

Sorry to slaughter a sacred cow of some on the Left but, seriously, Marx must have been having an off day when he dreamt up this dotty idea of transition between capitalism and communism. You can have a transition within capitalism and you can have a transtion within communism but you cannot logically have a transition between capitalism and communism.

Anymore than you can be a little bit pregnant....

Its one thing or the other.

[robbo203]

No transition = retaining the status quo.

A social revolution in of itself is a transition. You won't be able to achieve pure communism in one hour.

Ah - just spotted your post, Goti, after posting mine. So a quick response is in order.

Provided you mean a "transition" within capitalism entailing a build up of mass communist consciousness among the working class over a period of time (which may well have all sorts of ramifications for the kind of society we currently live in) then, yes, I would agree with you. To be able to reach the point at which communism becomes feasible takes time - possibly quite a long time

But once that point has been reached and the attempt is made to institute communism there can be no such a thing as a "transition" period during which this attempt is made. The idea is just absurd. You either have a class society or you have a classless society. There is nothing in between

One could theoretically envisage a transition between, say, a feudal society and a capitalist society during which different sets of socio-economic relationships coexist within an unstable environment. But this kind of scenario is simply not possible in the case of a communist revolution.

Common ownership of the means of prpduction is logically incompatible with any form of private property whereas different forms of private property are not necessarily incomptable with each other in the sense that they can theoretically coexist and indeed have done so after a fashion

[Decolonize The Left]

To add on robbo203's great post above, a transition could be conceived of as the act of communizing present-day society. So instead of thinking of a 'transition' as the time between the collapse of capitalism and the global establishment of proletarian economic dominance, think of it as the spread of communization - that is, the spread of class consciousness and the acting on this.

- August

[Rafiq]

No one can guess. As long as it needs to be, I suppose.

[Conscript]

As long as it takes to simplify the labor process and achieve reasonable abundance so we can allow free access and dissolve the division of labor. Rhetoric aside, we don't really know how long it would take because as a general rule, for now, communists are not involved in managing production. Such things can be calculated, but not with what we have now.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Socialism=From each according to her/his ability, to each according to his work; hopefully we could get there within a hundred years or so.

Full Communism=A classless society where the state has been completely replaced by voluntary associations and where the mode of production is "from each according to her/his ability, to each according to her/his needs', enforced totally on the honor system. This stage of society may take hundreds of years to achieve, perhaps even as one poster suggested a thousand years. One way to think about this time frame is that Communism will be such a beautiful society that even if we don't live to see it come to fruition, struggling for Communism is nonetheless the most noble of human endeavors.

[Marvin the Marxian]

I tend to agree with Robbo. The transition period means the period of transition to socialism. Once socialism is attained, there's no more transition. What's left after that is to continue developing the productive forces until there's general material abundance.

I expect the transition to socialism to take years to decades, and the attainment of general abundance to take decades to centuries.

[Q]

The transition will take this long:

[=============================================]

No, really.

But seriously: We're already in a transition, so to speak. Every historical phase has a period of development, a period of equilibrium and a period of decline. In the last period we saw in feudalism, we already saw forms of capitalism coming up from within the old society. Likewise, in this period of capitalist decline (that has been going on for a century now), we've been in the era of revolutions and counterrevolutions. For now, the working class is on a historic "ebb", but this will change and he class-collective will eventually be rebuilt. Lastly, economically, capitalism has never been more socialized and interdependent than now. The primary thing keeping it alive as it is, is the state apparatus defending private property and this is the primary institution holding back further social development.

So, the working class has to form itself as a class, with its own political agenda, and seize political power. This act will in itself end capitalism as it stands right now and the declining phase of it can finally continue. But this won't be immediately be done and for a time there would still be a remaining, but dieing, class society as the petit-bourgeoisie and middle strata still have some room and hold on society. They can only be assimilated into the working class, part by part. As soon as this process is completed, we end up with a classless society, where the "state" has fully collapsed into society itself and as such ceases to be a state.

How long is this going to take? I doubt much longer than a few years in most developed countries. Why? First of all for material factors. Second of all, due to a cultural and mentality change that will start with building the working class-collectivity and will radically jump forward in the revolution itself (all revolutions in the 20th century brought forth radical cultural movements, there is no reason to assume this will be any different in the future). Third, for the developing countries, the "west" can just send in a fuckload of development aid. But the process to communism will probably take a while longer in these parts of the world.

[Ostrinski]

Good point Q. Factories first started popping up in the 1200's and 1300's in Italy but the bourgeoisie didn't come to power in France until the later 18th century. Things take time.

[sanpal]

First of all, I'd like to say that it is unfruitful to endeavour to determine or fix any time or length of transition period, such "oracle-ism" looks a bit funny. Seems, Marx and Engels never did it. If revlefters here aim to agitate the working class they could get opposite result. A worker who has the family, the children, parents wishes to have food, education for children, pension for parents, etc. NOW BUT NOT in thousand years or fifty years. So he/she needs not in a LENGTH of the transition period but in a SCIENTIFIC ("scientific" means workable and not utopian) MODEL of the transition period. Further discussion in this thread shows traditional collision of opposite tendencies which leads this agitation to zero.

[robbo203]

I tend to agree with Robbo. The transition period means the period of transition to socialism. Once socialism is attained, there's no more transition. What's left after that is to continue developing the productive forces until there's general material abundance.

I expect the transition to socialism to take years to decades, and the attainment of general abundance to take decades to centuries.

I think it is important to recognise that while we have a transition to socialism - I dont differentiate between socialism and communism unlike some - we are still living inside a capitalist society. We are in this transition NOW. It may indeed take years but the changeover from capitalism to socialism once it happens - if it happens - can only logically be an instantanenous for the reasons I outlined earler.

On the question of "developing the productive forces until there's general material abundance" we need to be careful here. What is "material abundance"? Abundance in relation to what? If we are talking about what are termed "basic needs" in UNspeak, I would contend that we have long had the potential to produce an abundance. Its just that this is a potential that cannot be realised under capitalism because the system itself is not directly geared to meeting human needs. It will therefore necessitate a socialist revolution to unlock that potential.


How do we know such a potential exists? By inference from the facts around us. Above all, from the massive - and growing - structural wastage built into capitalism . We know that, conservatively speaking, at least half of the jobs that are done in a capitalist economytoday serve no useful purpose from the standpoint of meeting human needs; they simply exist to keep the wheels of commerce turning, to oil the machinery of the money system. They would all disappear come socialism and at a stroke this would at least double the amount of resources and human labour for socially useful production.

There are other aspects of capitalist wastage that point to the productive potential available to a future socialist society. Have a look at this site which touches on such matters

http://andycox1953.webs.com/database2.htm

The point is that to effect a socialist revolution you need the mass understanding and desire for a socialist society. If the empirical fact of scarcity seemingly imprisons people within a competitive pro-capitallist mind set, the key to unlocking their minds is to encourage them to imagine how society could be differently organised and how this could enable needs to be met.

This is why the "vision thing" is an inecapable aspect of socialist propaganda. Without holding up the ideal of alternative society, it is not apparent how scarcity could be overcome and, if that is the case, there is no compelling argument for saying that we can ever escape this capitalist treadmill. The change from capitalism to socialism can never come about mechanically such via the former just collapsing or implodiung (which is unlikely anyway); it has to be mediated and propelled forward by ideas - by a vision of an alternative and before anyone starts saying this is just idealism let me remind them as Castoriadis did in his little work History as creation that there can be nothing more idealist than the teleological idea that capitalism will mysteriously deliver socialism wiuthout human consciousness being creative involved.

Capitalism generates scarcity and scarcity reproduces capitalism in other words . We cannot wait for capitalism to realise the material abundance that makes socialism possible. We might just as well wait till hell freezes over. It competitive dynamic necessitates what I call a scarcity mind set that keeps people chained to system

The only way to break this vicious circle is to see this whole matter from the perspective of a socialist alternative. Only from such a perspective can one really begin to see that scarcity is an unneccesary impositition on our lives and by implication so too is capitalism.

[Blake's Baby]

Socialism=From each according to her/his ability, to each according to his work; hopefully we could get there within a hundred years or so...

No no no no no no no no no....

I fundamenatlly disagree with this whole idea and think it's based on two important misconceptions:

1 - 'socialism' as a society is the same as 'communism'; what you are distinguishing between is the 'lower phase of communism' and the 'higher phase of communism'. Socialism is not a synonym for the former - otherwise those Soviet writers in the 1970s wouldn't have had to criticise Engles for his terms, because Engels would have known how Lenin and Stalin were going to use terms;
2 - the idea of 'to each according to his work' is not a 'socialist slogan' in that it is a slogan pertaining to socialism but a slogan pertaining to people calling themselves socialists, as opposed to 'to each according to his need' which is a 'communist slogan' ie a slogan pertaining to people calling themselves communists.

It is not a slogan for a (future-)historical period; it is the slogan of a past, discredited movement; Marx mentions it in order to critique the utopians.





Full Communism=A classless society where the state has been completely replaced by voluntary associations and where the mode of production is "from each according to her/his ability, to each according to her/his needs', enforced totally on the honor system. This stage of society may take hundreds of years to achieve, perhaps even as one poster suggested a thousand years. One way to think about this time frame is that Communism will be such a beautiful society that even if we don't live to see it come to fruition, struggling for Communism is nonetheless the most noble of human endeavors.

Oh good monkeys, it's not The Republic of Heaven, it's not a metaphysical ideal. It's a real possibility.

After the suppression of capitalism (ie, the dictatorship of the proletariat) comes a situation (short I hope) when socialism has been established, in that all production is for human needs, but, perhaps, not all socially-defined needs can be met; in this period free-access communism (ie everyone taking what is needed) may not be possible, so there will have to be some formal social control on consumption - this is the lower phase of communism. I'd advocate rationing personally for the stuff in short supply.

But there really are people who think this stage will be so short that they don't even factor it into their thinking. At most, and I'm quite pessimistic, I think it's take some years to establish full communism. Not decades; years. Some people think months. And yet some people are arguing centuries? A millennium? No. That's not communism, it's not materialist analysis, that's religion, and a revealed eschatological messianic religion too. Marx isn't the prophet of a future deliverance, if we just suffer on Earth for a thousand years to make us pure, and not was he an auger poking in the entrails of chickens. He was a social scientist extrapolating laws of history and social development from studying material conditions. They relate to real history, real social developments. They exist as potentials right now.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Totally agree.

Sorry to slaughter a sacred cow of some on the Left but, seriously, Marx must have been having an off day when he dreamt up this dotty idea of transition between capitalism and communism. You can have a transition within capitalism and you can have a transtion within communism but you cannot logically have a transition between capitalism and communism.

Anymore than you can be a little bit pregnant....

Its one thing or the other.

Did society go from classlessness to defined classes in a process of development, a transition? Or did class divisions appear from no where one day?

Assuming that the vast majority of workers have developed revolutionary consciousness and a revolution happens and the old state destroyed, just having socialist consciousness does not physically make society run on a socialist basis. That means that for some time workers will have to materially reorganize society from the bottom up (i.e. on a socialist basis). The way work is handled (obviously) as well as community development and people creating the services they need will all need to be cooperatively and democratically managed - this coordination more necessary at first but increasingly less so as new ways of doing things are more regular and perfected.

It will probably also be the case that some small shop owners as well as some skilled professionals and bureaucrats will retain their positions out of necessity. If this is the case then workers will have to ensure that working class and not petty-bourgeois interests have hegemony in society. Workers would probably pretty easily reorganize things so that increased access to education as well as new ways of handling specialized positions to de-class petty bourgeois professional occupations.

To say that Marx was having an off-day is kind of strange since his whole conception of materialist socialism was that it is in the interests of the working class to do away with classes and so to achieve a classless society, first workers must rule society; expropriate the expropriators, in other words assert their class interests over the rest of society.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

The quicker, the better. I don't think we can say now exactly how long, though, and it's kind of putting the cart before the horse.

[robbo203]

Did society go from classlessness to defined classes in a process of development, a transition? Or did class divisions appear from no where one day?

Interesting question. However, I dont think we are talking about a kind of mirror image situation here. You cannot infer from the way classes appeared , how they might eventually disappear becuase the context is quite different. In particular, we are talking about a large scale global society in which the whole business of producing wealth has become thoroughly socialised and interconnected.

My guess is that class relations developed originally out of intergroup conflict - notably in the form of warfare and the transformation of captured populations into slaves. This did not always happen. Sometimes captured populations would be simply assimilated But at some point in the development of tribal societies this must have changed and you begin to see a process of class differentiation at work



Assuming that the vast majority of workers have developed revolutionary consciousness and a revolution happens and the old state destroyed, just having socialist consciousness does not physically make society run on a socialist basis. That means that for some time workers will have to materially reorganize society from the bottom up (i.e. on a socialist basis). The way work is handled (obviously) as well as community development and people creating the services they need will all need to be cooperatively and democratically managed - this coordination more necessary at first but increasingly less so as new ways of doing things are more regular and perfected.

Yes but what has this got to do with the idea of a transition between capitalism and socialism/communism? You might want to construe this as a transitional phase within socialism and I have no problem with that but that's not what we are talking about



It will probably also be the case that some small shop owners as well as some skilled professionals and bureaucrats will retain their positions out of necessity. If this is the case then workers will have to ensure that working class and not petty-bourgeois interests have hegemony in society. Workers would probably pretty easily reorganize things so that increased access to education as well as new ways of handling specialized positions to de-class petty bourgeois professional occupations.

No, with respect, here is where your whole argument clearly falls apart at the seams. It the working class exist then obviously you still have capitalism. You haven't gone beyond capitalism. Indeed the notion that you still have small shop owners meaning you have a buying and selling system simply confirms this.

If you have a capitalism then the suggestion that you can somehow arrange things so that "working class and not petty-bourgeois interests have hegemony" in such a society, is a completely futile and vain hope. A slave society cannot be run in the interests of the slaves. A capitalist society - and this is what you are describing - cannot be run in the interests of the workers. Necessarily, the interests of capital will prevail over the interests of wage labouyr




To say that Marx was having an off-day is kind of strange since his whole conception of materialist socialism was that it is in the interests of the working class to do away with classes and so to achieve a classless society, first workers must rule society; expropriate the expropriators, in other words assert their class interests over the rest of society.


Oh I am not questioning Marx's claim that it is in the interest of the working class to do away with classes. What I am questioning is the dotty idea that workers must rule society over some indetminate period of time. "Expropriate the expropriators" by all means but dont dilly dally about doing this. Dont allow the exporopriaters to continute to expropriate by allowing the exploted class - the workers - to continue to exist and therefore to be exploited.

In other words once the workers take power they should abolish themseves as a class immediately Anything less than that will mean permitting themselves to continue to exist as an exploited class. How can that possibly be an example of "asserting their class interests" Their class interests can only mean getting rid of themselves as an exploited class and class society in general

Ironically Marx said something along the same lines - from The Holy Family:

"When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property"

[blake 3:17]

But there really are people who think this stage will be so short that they don't even factor it into their thinking. At most, and I'm quite pessimistic, I think it's take some years to establish full communism. Not decades; years. Some people think months. And yet some people are arguing centuries? A millennium? No. That's not communism, it's not materialist analysis, that's religion, and a revealed eschatological messianic religion too. Marx isn't the prophet of a future deliverance, if we just suffer on Earth for a thousand years to make us pure, and not was he an auger poking in the entrails of chickens. He was a social scientist extrapolating laws of history and social development from studying material conditions. They relate to real history, real social developments. They exist as potentials right now.

My suggesting a thousand years I'd think as the opposite of eschatology or messianism.

I'm completely hostile to any idea that socialism is a teleological necessity. Barbarism, war, ecocide are more likely than socialism. I do think socialism is a possibility, but will need a long long time to ever happen.

The idea that all the workers in the world will suddenly line up against the capitalists is an absurd one. One of the real paradoxes of capitalism is that as it develops, stratification within the exploited classes increases as the world market brings us together in unexpected ways.

Sorry for the (relative) pessimism.

[Blake's Baby]

My suggesting a thousand years I'd think as the opposite of eschatology or messianism.

I'm completely hostile to any idea that socialism is a teleological necessity. Barbarism, war, ecocide are more likely than socialism. I do think socialism is a possibility, but will need a long long time to ever happen.

The idea that all the workers in the world will suddenly line up against the capitalists is an absurd one. One of the real paradoxes of capitalism is that as it develops, stratification within the exploited classes increases as the world market brings us together in unexpected ways.

Sorry for the (relative) pessimism.

No-one's claiming that the workers will suddenly line up against the caitalists, the fact that you think that anyone is saying that demonstrates that you've confused two things (which as you quite rightly say are not teleological necessities, they may never happen, but if they were to happen there would be two components):

1 - the revolutionary process in which capitalism is overthrown, which may be short or long, but hasn't started, so we at present don't know how long we may have to wait for the revolution to start, let alone end;
2 - the process of re-organising production to be able to fulfill human needs.

The first process may take years or decades to start, and it may also take years or decades to finish; the second process could take months or years or centuries. You're worrying about the first part of the first process - 'workers lining up against capitalists' - but we're trying to get to grips with the second process. And that's easier to argue about in some ways because we know what the productive capacity of capitalism is now, we have some ideas about to re-organisae production, and we don't have much idea about what might (or might not) help the working class develop its combativity in the next few years.

Sure, the economic crisis will provoke a lot of people into questioning the system (and there are a bazillion wrong answers from 'outsourcing to China' to 'cheap immigrant labour' to 'Jewish Banking Lizard Templars ate my job' out there to distract people); the international situation (or local situation depending on where you are) whether that's Gulf War III or anywhere else; the catastrophic results of capitalism on the environment; the breakdown of society that we see around us every day... all of it provokes some people into questioning the system, but it leads a lot of people into irrationalism - nationalism, religion, conspiracy theory, escapism in various forms. Consciousness is hard to measure. We're not soothsayers. It's somewhat unpredictable.

So... is Marxism teleological full stop? No, and the reason I'm saying your conception is religious is because it replaces what-we-do-now with a vague concept of what might be, it removes any human agency from the process. Marx made predictions based on his study of society, economics, social development. How can you possibly believe that they're valid, but not for now, they'll be valid in 1,000 years? If Marx was clever enough to be able to work the laws of social motion for 1,000 years into the future, why was he not clever enough to work out what was going on in his own society?

You've replaced 'socialism' with 'neverneverland'. This is Bernstein again - 'the movement is everything, the goal is nothing'. It's a religious vision of communism that denies the goal by endlessly deferring it.

[Marvin the Marxian]

Did society go from classlessness to defined classes in a process of development, a transition? Or did class divisions appear from no where one day?

Assuming that the vast majority of workers have developed revolutionary consciousness and a revolution happens and the old state destroyed, just having socialist consciousness does not physically make society run on a socialist basis. That means that for some time workers will have to materially reorganize society from the bottom up (i.e. on a socialist basis). The way work is handled (obviously) as well as community development and people creating the services they need will all need to be cooperatively and democratically managed - this coordination more necessary at first but increasingly less so as new ways of doing things are more regular and perfected.

I agree that just having socialist consciousness doesn't make society run on a socialist basis. But I don't think a political revolution is needed for workers to materially reorganize society from the bottom up. That kind of revolution would be a revolution of the material base. It would involve mass expropriation of the means of production from capitalist exploiters. Developing mass socialist consciousness in the working class is a necessary predecessor to that.


It will probably also be the case that some small shop owners as well as some skilled professionals and bureaucrats will retain their positions out of necessity. If this is the case then workers will have to ensure that working class and not petty-bourgeois interests have hegemony in society. Workers would probably pretty easily reorganize things so that increased access to education as well as new ways of handling specialized positions to de-class petty bourgeois professional occupations.

Sure, but the small shop owners should not be allowed to operate as exploiters, such as employing wage labor. The professionals and bureaucrats would have to operate in a purely advisory role. I think this may have been what Lenin had in mind with the "bourgeois specialists" in post-revolutionary Russia.


To say that Marx was having an off-day is kind of strange since his whole conception of materialist socialism was that it is in the interests of the working class to do away with classes and so to achieve a classless society, first workers must rule society; expropriate the expropriators, in other words assert their class interests over the rest of society.

Indeed, and by so doing, the working class also eliminates itself as a class. If the means of production are owned and operated by the whole people, then there's no class left to exploit.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

I really have to wonder about some of these people that talk about "a millennium of transition" or whatever, but I've heard even worse. Someone at a meeting for 'a communist journal' recently suggested something like 1,000+ years of disorder -- in which things would be much worse than they are now under capitalism! -- before we could move toward communism.

[blake 3:17]

Thanks, BB.

I do think we're agreeing on some things. Or maybe not... I'm not at all stuck on a thousand years -- more like a really really long time.


1 - the revolutionary process in which capitalism is overthrown, which may be short or long, but hasn't started, so we at present don't know how long we may have to wait for the revolution to start, let alone end;
2 - the process of re-organising production to be able to fulfill human needs.

The first process may take years or decades to start, and it may also take years or decades to finish; the second process could take months or years or centuries. You're worrying about the first part of the first process - 'workers lining up against capitalists' - but we're trying to get to grips with the second process. And that's easier to argue about in some ways because we know what the productive capacity of capitalism is now, we have some ideas about to re-organisae production, and we don't have much idea about what might (or might not) help the working class develop its combativity in the next few years.

I don't these as so clearly distinct -- and that in past social revolutions these have been combined in various, and the affect of these on struggles on different geographical levels is extremely varied.


So... is Marxism teleological full stop? No, and the reason I'm saying your conception is religious is because it replaces what-we-do-now with a vague concept of what might be, it removes any human agency from the process. Marx made predictions based on his study of society, economics, social development. How can you possibly believe that they're valid, but not for now, they'll be valid in 1,000 years? If Marx was clever enough to be able to work the laws of social motion for 1,000 years into the future, why was he not clever enough to work out what was going on in his own society?

Hmm? If that's what I implied, it's not what I meant. Marxism is extremely useful for understanding certain sets of capitalist social relations, and pointing to ways in which those social relations can be challenged. Much of what Marx actually wrote became truer years or decades after he wrote it.

Within the classical Marxist tradition there are some very serious limits. There are a whole series of issues which didn't emerge until after the Second World War and trying to match Orthodox Marxism to any and all just doesn't work.


You've replaced 'socialism' with 'neverneverland'. This is Bernstein again - 'the movement is everything, the goal is nothing'. It's a religious vision of communism that denies the goal by endlessly deferring it.

I don't think you should reduce this issue or Bernstein to that simple maxim. Have you read Nettl's biography of Luxemburg?

[Blake's Baby]

...
Within the classical Marxist tradition there are some very serious limits. There are a whole series of issues which didn't emerge until after the Second World War and trying to match Orthodox Marxism to any and all just doesn't work...

Obviously, I disagree.

(Orthodox Marxism, as slightly elaborated by Rosa, Lenin and Trotsky, anyway.)


...
I don't think you should reduce this issue or Bernstein to that simple maxim. Have you read Nettl's biography of Luxemburg?

No, I haven't. I presume there's some relevance that I don't know about.

Should I reduce it to that maxim? It seems to me that you're endlessly deferring 'socialism' into the distant future. That removes the necessity for people to struggle for it in the here-and-now. If it may (or may not) be 1,000 years (or whatever really long time), then... we're not even doing this for our children, we're doing it for the possibility of our children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children. Possibly.

I believe we're doing for people who are alive now. I want my kids to see socialism, sure, but I want to see socialism too. Hell, I want my parents to see socialism, and they've not really got long left. Claiming that soicialism is a far-off event rather a real possibility incipient in capitalism is turning it from a political project into a prophetic dream. It's a religious yearning not a guide to action.

[Rooster]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here but... aren't all societies in transition? If so, then what makes them different from the transition from one to the other? If it takes a couple thousand years then why isn't that reformism? I dunno but it seems like there's a certain word here beginning with "r" that's missing. Also, how is the long transitional phase different from utopianism?

[blake 3:17]

Obviously, I disagree.

Marx was right about everything?


I believe we're doing for people who are alive now.

I suppose I really don't "get" Left Communism.


No, I haven't. I presume there's some relevance that I don't know about.

In Nettl's bio of Luxemburg, there's an excellent history of how the Reform or Revolution? got pushed by the party bureaucracy. It's a bit more complicated than that.



If it takes a couple thousand years then why isn't that reformism?

I just looked and saw you're an Impossibilist. Sorry to get sectarian, but I find it a bit fruitless to debate any of this with sectarian spontaneists.

Edited to add: Apparently I didn't understand some principles of Left Communism. I am completely unconvinced by the theory, but will have to agree to disagree.

[Die Neue Zeit]

To answer the OP briefly, it depends on the directional measures implemented and the political will to implement them to their fullest extent.

[Drosophila]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here but... aren't all societies in transition? If so, then what makes them different from the transition from one to the other? If it takes a couple thousand years then why isn't that reformism? I dunno but it seems like there's a certain word here beginning with "r" that's missing. Also, how is the long transitional phase different from utopianism?

Reformism is using the current system of government to achieve communism.

[Blake's Baby]

Marx was right about everything? ...

There are things Marx never even thought of. New conditions arise. But I'm unconvinced that any fundamantals of capitalism have changed in the last 100 years. In my view, most attempts to 'update' Marx lead to abandoning class politics.

[Comrade Jandar]

It all comes down to semantics and when you believe the transitory stage actually begins. For me, the social revolution is the transition.

[Blake's Baby]

It all comes down to semantics and when you believe the transitory stage actually begins. For me, the social revolution is the transition.

I'm not sure that it's totally a semantic discussion here. I certainly agree that the revolutionary process is a transition. But if you don't agree there's going to be a period where we've overthrown capitalism, but haven't yet managed to re-organise production to fulfill all needs, that's more than a semantic distinction.

[blake 3:17]

There are things Marx never even thought of. New conditions arise. But I'm unconvinced that any fundamantals of capitalism have changed in the last 100 years. In my view, most attempts to 'update' Marx lead to abandoning class politics.

I don' think that's necessarily the case. There have been some working on different intellectual projects which remain fairly Orthodox. Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital and Mandel's Later Capitalism update Marx's main theses relatively concretely. From a sort of Left Com perspective, I'd recommend Guy Debord and his theory of The Spectacle.

Voices against oppression are important to dialogue with, whether or not they're Marxist or otherwise. Dave Roediger has written much amazing stuff on the historical materialism of Race in specific forms.

For me the most important critique/dialogue needs to be on ecological issues. Marx had his slightly Green moments, but I think they've been exaggerated. Marxist thought of nature as resource, while acknowledging its limits and finiteness. Neither he or Lenin ever really considered global ecological problems-- what if the main object of dispute becomes water or air? The capitalist wrecking ball knows no limits.

Edited to add:
For me, the social revolution is the transition.

I would see social revolution as a starting point to initiate a transition. It would be worth looking at the key experiences of social revolutions of the past and how they worked.

[Blake's Baby]

I don' think that's necessarily the case. There have been some working on different intellectual projects which remain fairly Orthodox. Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital and Mandel's Later Capitalism update Marx's main theses relatively concretely. From a sort of Left Com perspective, I'd recommend Guy Debord and his theory of The Spectacle...

Most of us I think who come to Left Communism would already have been through Situationism, probably. Been in it, done it, critiqued it, came out the other side wiser and more alert. Mandel...? I don't think so. I know he's not a totally orthodox Trotskyist but, really?


...Voices against oppression are important to dialogue with, whether or not they're Marxist or otherwise...

I agree. I could quip that's it's the voices for oppression, Marxist or otherwise, that I have no time for.



... Dave Roediger has written much amazing stuff on the historical materialism of Race in specific forms.

For me the most important critique/dialogue needs to be on ecological issues. Marx had his slightly Green moments, but I think they've been exaggerated. Marxist thought of nature as resource, while acknowledging its limits and finiteness. Neither he or Lenin ever really considered global ecological problems-- what if the main object of dispute becomes water or air? The capitalist wrecking ball knows no limits...

I think you vastly underestimate Marx. Start with the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. And you fail to mention either Trotsky or Luxemburg, both of whom have a lot to say about concerns that would now be considered part of 'environmentalism'. Lenin? I have no idea. I don't remember anything Lenin wrote about the environment. But it doesn't matter. Lenin isn't a god, he isn't even a guide. He was an activist and a writer and what he did and wrote should be judged for what it is not necessarily for what it isn't. Does that make sense? He wrote about the decay of capitalism, organisation, class consciousness, the process of revolution... he didn't write about a lot of things and listing all of them would take a long time. What he wrote, and what he did, contains both positive and negative lessons. But not all lessons that ever need to be learned.

[arilando]

Socialism=From each according to her/his ability, to each according to his work; hopefully we could get there within a hundred years or so.

Full Communism=A classless society where the state has been completely replaced by voluntary associations and where the mode of production is "from each according to her/his ability, to each according to her/his needs', enforced totally on the honor system. This stage of society may take hundreds of years to achieve, perhaps even as one poster suggested a thousand years. One way to think about this time frame is that Communism will be such a beautiful society that even if we don't live to see it come to fruition, struggling for Communism is nonetheless the most noble of human endeavors.
lol. The means of production could easility be completely automated within a decade or two, which would allow communism to become possible.

[Rooster]

Reformism is using the current system of government to achieve communism.

Wut? I know. What are you trying to tell me here? The point I'm making is that if this "transition" period takes upwards to a 1,000 years then in what way can you even call that revolutionary? Surely it would make more sense to call it evolutionary. It would then in essence be reformist in nature.

[Conscript]

lol. The means of production could easility be completely automated within a decade or two, which would allow communism to become possible.

Perpetual motion is impossible, try again. Achieving communism will be done by making labor more efficient, not getting rid of it altogether.

[Deicide]

Communism in 20 years!

[Grenzer]

Perpetual motion is impossible, try again.

It seems that the Hegelians among us may disagree..

[sanpal]

Communism in 20 years!


One day I've heard it, in 1960-th, from Khruschov :lol:

[TrotskistMarx]

I think that the strongest impediment for a transition in the whole world toward socialism is the extreme power of the capitalist TV, capitalist newspapers, capitalist movies, capitalist art and general capitalist mentality and thinking. And even with the internet and alternative news sources, the socialist news sources and socialist media and movies is just too weak compared with the capitalist general media (TV, newspapers, books, movies etc)


.



Perhaps a thousand years to full Communism, but I would hope that we could achieve socialism in a hundred years or so.

[NorwegianCommunist]

1:14
State capitalism is Fascism.
I have heard the USSR was state capitalist, was it also fascist?

[Blake's Baby]

You are a Norwegian.

Edvard Greig was a Norwegian.

Are you Edvard Grieg?

Answer: No, more than one thing can be included in the category 'Norwegian'.

Equally, more than one thing can be included in the category 'state capitalist'. Fascism was capitalism with a very large and interventionist state sector. The USSR was capitalism with a state sector so large that it was effectively the entire economy. They were both state capitalism.

[NorwegianCommunist]

Is fascism a type of state capitalism...?

[Alf]

Yes, fascism is a form of state capitalism, one expression of a universal tendency of capitalism in decline. The USA is also a very good example of it.

On the transition period: agree with Blake Baby's insistence on communism as the conscious movement not the abstract goal. Maybe I would have more concerns about the difficulties it will encounter before and after the destruction of the bourgeois state -much of it the result of the fact that capitalism has survived despite a hundred years of decay, but also because communism is the struggle against all the 'muck of ages' that humanity has carried within itself for millennia, and which in turn has been made all the muckier by capitalism outstaying its welcome.

Also agree that there is no intermediate mode of production called socialism. If there's a transition period it's because it's an unstable period characterised by a constant conflict between emerging communism and the stubborn resistance put up by all many remnants of the old world of capital (even after the definitive overthrow of the bourgeoisie).

Also agree that the aim of production in this phase is not to "develop the productive forces", unless by productive forces we mean human creativity for its own end. The obstacles to abundance (in the sense of the distribution of the fundamental necessities for all accompanied by a drastic reduction in the working day) are basically social, not technical, and have been for a long time.

[A Marxist Historian]

Wut? I know. What are you trying to tell me here? The point I'm making is that if this "transition" period takes upwards to a 1,000 years then in what way can you even call that revolutionary? Surely it would make more sense to call it evolutionary. It would then in essence be reformist in nature.

A thousand years does sound a bit excessive, even I am not that pessimistic.

My guess is that the transition from capitalism to socialism under a worldwide workers state won't take more than a generation or two, certainly less than a hundred years.

The transition to a full blown communist societiy will probably be harder. "To each according to his need" means a total end to any sort of scarcity of anything. That's a tough proposition! That will require not just total transformation of human attitudes and psychology, hard enough in itself, but something even harder, namely utterly vast advances in science and labor productivity.

But probably no more than a couple centuries at most.

-M.H.-