Please Explain something for me!

[Comrades Unite!]

Hi,I'm getting slightly confused about planks 5 and 6 in the Communist Manifesto(K.Marx F.Engels)at the end of C.2.
Can you go into detail because its frustrating me attempting to find out what he means by ''Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly'' and ''Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State''

Also when he talks about confiscating the properties of Rebels and Emigrants where does the property go?What happens to it?

Please help me out with this I can't find a good explanation for this(All I can find is shit about America being compared to the ten planks of Communism)

Thanks!!!

[kashkin]

The state is referring to is a worker's state, after workers have taken control of the state and the means of production, them being held in common ownership. By centralising credit, bamks, capital, transport, communication, etc, he means that workers would take control of them and decide how to use them to benefit workers and society.

Any land confiscated would again be taken into common ownership, from there workers would decide how to use those resources.

[marl]

Kashkin, you're incorrect. These planks were goals for developed, western countries.

[jookyle]

As for the first one, we're basically talking about a centrally owned bank. No more private banks, just the central bank of the state. The monopoly refers to the idea that the monetary system is being run by the state and not separate private banks,corporations, etc. This is for transitional purposes, however, as Marx clearly states the state itself will no longer be needed. This is merely an aspect of transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually communism(Using the Marx idea of socialism being the lower form of communism to come after capitalism)

As far as property, capital, etc. being expropriated would be for the purposes of redistribution, collective/communal ownership, etc.

[Ocean Seal]

Hi,I'm getting slightly confused about planks 5 and 6 in the Communist Manifesto(K.Marx F.Engels)at the end of C.2.
Can you go into detail because its frustrating me attempting to find out what he means by ''Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly'' and ''Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State''

Also when he talks about confiscating the properties of Rebels and Emigrants where does the property go?What happens to it?

Please help me out with this I can't find a good explanation for this(All I can find is shit about America being compared to the ten planks of Communism)

Thanks!!!
Marx rescinded planks 5 and 6 soon after writing the Communist Manifesto. Don't worry too much about it especially the centralization of credit. Also the property of emigrants becomes property of the workers state.

[Blake's Baby]

Hi,I'm getting slightly confused about planks 5 and 6 in the Communist Manifesto(K.Marx F.Engels)at the end of C.2.
Can you go into detail because its frustrating me attempting to find out what he means by ''Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly'' and ''Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State''

Also when he talks about confiscating the properties of Rebels and Emigrants where does the property go?What happens to it?

Please help me out with this I can't find a good explanation for this(All I can find is shit about America being compared to the ten planks of Communism)

Thanks!!!

The whole of the 'ten planks' was written in 1847 as a series of immediate demands for the European economies when they were emerging as capaitalist economies still breaking away from feudalism. They have been completely out of date since approximately 1890. Even before that various aspects of them were out of date in many countries. Engels was writing in the 1870s that they were for the most part out of date, and had that section been written 30 years later it would have been written very differently. Many countries had introduced something like the 'ten planks' by the 1930s in order to stabilise capitalism.

They're completely irrelevant to understanding communism. They're like a map to a place that existed 160 years ago but has now been completely altered. If you have a copy of the Manifesto with some of the Introductions to the various translations, reading them will help explain how Marx and Engels' thought about different parts of the Manifesto changed over the years.

Don't worry about the inability of right-wingers to handle the 'ten planks', as most 'Right Libertarians' and 'Anarcho-Capitalists' and whatnot think it is still 1847 and all they have to do is go and chase away some Injuns (who aren't even using the land anyway) and set up a homestead somewhere, while reading 'Walden', they have a notion that our ideas haven't developed at all in the last 160 years either.

Understanding the ten planks isn't necessary except as a curiosity of the history of the workers' movement. They have no practical application in the modern world.

[jookyle]

This explanation from Engel might explain things in a bit more detail.


“The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation. But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free people's state', both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists' demand that the state be abolished overnight."--Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring

However, Lenin in The State and the Revolution makes the point clear that Engles talks about two states. The first state is the bourgeoisie state, which is to be abolished. What the state then becomes is a proletarian state(some times called the semi-state), which after some time will in itself whither away. If it's done it's job right of course.