'Transitional Society' is not a Marxian Concept

[Brotto Rühle]

It's quite amazing when we look at the Leninist factions duke it out over who has the correct theory, who would have extended the revolution, what could have been done differently, etc. Anyone can understand, as Vlad himself did, that Russia was fucked without a successful revolution in Germany, and hence the rest of the world. Though, one thing they seem to agree on, is that there is some sort of "transitional society" existing between capitalism and communism. A mystical, unforeseen mode of production, a new society, that Marx was too simple to think about. :rolleyes:

What did Marx actually say? Marx said that a political transition, also known as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, would take place to oversee the transformation of capitalism into communism. What are the repercussions of such a statement? Those would have to be an understanding that a process occurs in which capitalist property relations are attacked and destroyed bit by bit, until the world revolution occurs to oversee the total abolition of these relations. The capitalist mode of production, minus in many cases the exploitation of the workers by the bourgeoisie, still exists in this society. The socialist mode has yet to be achieved, is unable to be achieved. Call it a transitional society if you will, but you have to come up with something better than the usual Trotskyist drivel.

[drunken-radicalism]

could you explain the nature of this debate? I've never heard of anything like this, nor any such consensus. What are these people saying will happen/exist?

[Geiseric]

What do you call it when a workers state has the monopoly on foreign trade? Or when the farmland and factories are publicly owned? Of course internationally there are still capitalists who need to be struggled with, but this is why marxism is an internationalist concept.

[BIXX]

What do you call it when a workers state has the monopoly on foreign trade? Or when the farmland and factories are publicly owned? Of course internationally there are still capitalists who need to be struggled with, but this is why marxism is an internationalist concept.

While I am not a Marxist, and am not well versed in Marx, I do not believe he was arguing against the idea that Marxism is an internationalist concept. I think he was saying that the transitional society was not conceived of by Marx.

I believe that the statement made by the OP is incorrect, however I am not quite well enough versed Marx to be sure.

[Brotto Rühle]

@Geiseric A "workers state [that] has a monopoly on foreign trade" is just that. It still exists within the fact of the global capitalist system and marketplace, and has to function in such a way to survive in it, until such a time as the revolution becomes global, and capital can be abolished in totality. Generalized commodity production, wage labour, money, etc.

@drunken-radicalism The nature of the debate focuses on what was the class nature of the USSR, and other "socialist" nations that have existed, or still exist. The Trotskyist takes the notion that these "degenerated/deformed Workers' States" exist outside of the capitalist mode of production, but not within the realm of the socialist mode of production. That they constitute a new, "transitional" society/mode of production. The argument ignores Marx's analysis of capital as a global phenomenon, his description of the dictatorship of the proletarian as a Political transition period alone, and ignores what, indeed, makes a state a "workers' state". It's rather unsurprising that Trotskyists, who I have even had agree that the USSR had a bourgeois state form, continue to believe that the USSR under Stalin, Khrushchev, etc. was some sort of "workers' state", deformed/degenerated or otherwise.

@EchoShock Of course I'm not arguing against the internationalist conception of Marxism, it's the very essence of it all. You are quite right that Marx did not conceive the notion of a "transitional society", not because he "missed something", but because he didn't believe there would be one, because there won't and wasn't a "transitional society".

Karl Marx, in his critique of the Gotha Programme:


The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'.

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

[Sotionov]

It's quite amazing when we look at the Leninist factions duke it out over who has the correct theoryCorrect Marxist theory? I'd say that none of the Leninists have it, it's the Kautskyists that have it (if there even exists some Kautskyist organization). It's clear when you look at this:

Engels, The Principles of Communism:

— 14 —
What will this new social order have to be like?

Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.

— 17 —
Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?

No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

— 18 —
What will be the course of this revolution?

Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake.

[Zukunftsmusik]

Correct Marxist theory? I'd say that none of the Leninists have it, it's the Kautskyists that have it (if there even exists some Kautskyist organization). It's clear when you look at this:

Hell no, and the fact that "Kautskyists" agree on many of these points speaks for itself. The measures sketched out by Engels here have clearly been debunked by the course of history itself - and even Marx/Engels acknowledged this. The "course of the revolution" listed here are quite similar to the "ten planks of communism" in the manifesto, strategic measures which Marx/Engels abandoned after the Paris Commune of 1871 - "the proletariat cannot take hold of the bourgeois state apparatus as it is and wield it for its own purposes" etc.

You can't take a certain Marxist in a certain time period and think that it's the Great Marxism Once and for All. That way you paint a picture of Marxism as static ideology - which unfortunately it is, for many people - not a revolutionary theory, which it should be.

[Sotionov]

"the proletariat cannot take hold of the bourgeois state apparatus as it is and wield it for its own purposes" etc.
And yet a year later, at the Hague Congress, he talkes about the workers capturing power by peaceful means in democtatic countries. Obviously, in this quote from the Civil War in France he talkes about the undemocratic state. This is confirmed also four years later in his last political work, Critique of the Gotha Program, in which he criticizes many things, but doesn't say anything against parliamentary action, just the oppossite, he mentiones democratic states, "converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it", and the "tranformation that the state will undergo in a communist society". The Critique of the Gotha Program gave birth to the Erfurt Program, which Engels supported, and commenting on it excplicitly said "If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat". It is therefore perfectly clear that Marx and Engels did not abandon their position about participation in the election and gradual revolution. Meaning- Kautsky was a marxist, Lenin was a revisionst. http://forum.krstarica.com/images/smilies/naughty.gif

[Hit The North]

It is therefore perfectly clear that Marx and Engels did not abandon their position about participation in the election and gradual revolution. Meaning- Kautsky was a marxist, Lenin was a revisionst. http://forum.krstarica.com/images/smilies/naughty.gif

I think this is possibly true, that Lenin is the revisionist here, but it only goes to prove that in spite of this genius or that, history is the greatest teacher we have. Global capitalism abounds with democratic republics and has done so for generations. But the working class is still the slave to the capitalist. Why? Because it is the relations of production which need overturning, not the form of political rule.

If Marx and Engels, or even Kautsky, were alive today, they would have to considerably revise their own theories about the democratic republic.

[Zukunftsmusik]

okay, since I apparently wasn't clear enough: Marxism isn't Marx and Engels anno 1840-something. Marxism isn't Marx and Engels. Marxism isn't static.

Also, the point I made about Marx/Engels changing their view on these gradual measures/"ten planks" etc: If you had read a little closer, you could see that they broke with these measures after the Paris Commune in 1871, so your point about "Engels said the same one year later" is kinda irrelevant there.

[Sotionov]

Global capitalism abounds with democratic republics and has done so for generations. But the working class is still the slave to the capitalist. Why? Because it is the relations of production which need overturning, not the form of political rule. If you can't get people to vote for change of the mode of production, you're less likely to get them to fight, bleed and die for such a change. It's not about replacing the political fight by violent fight, but about raising class consciousness until the majority supports changing the mode of poduction into one without exploitation.


okay, since I apparently wasn't clear enough: Marxism isn't Marx and Engels anno 1840-something. Marxism isn't Marx and Engels. Marxism isn't staticIf you don't follow the ideas of Marx, then you're not a Marxist, you're a Marxist revisionist.


you could see that they broke with these measures after the Paris Commune in 1871, so your point about "Engels said the same one year later" is kinda irrelevant there.He wrote in 1895 that the "immediate tasks of the Party" are "slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity". The more you find out what Marx and Engels really thought, it only becomes more and more clear that Lenin was a revisionist, and that Kautsky was a Marxist.

[Zukunftsmusik]

If you can't get people to vote for change of the mode of production, you're less likely to get them to fight, bleed and die for such a change.

It's more like the other way around.


It's not about replacing the political fight by violent fight, but about raising class consciousness until the majority supports changing the mode of poduction into one without exploitation.

You don't magically raise class consciousness through voting for this or that party or program. Class consciousness isn't something you can achieve by voting or listening to living or dead popes of Marxism, it comes from the struggle itself.

And lol at your "politics=parliamentarism". I honestly don't understand your politics - how you can claim to be an impossibilist is beyond me.


He wrote in 1895 that the "immediate tasks of the Party" are "slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity". The more you find out what Marx and Engels really thought, it only becomes more and more clear that Lenin was a revisionist, and that Kautsky was a Marxist.

yes, because obviously Marxism is a static set of ideas put forth by Marx, without taking into consideration the course of history since then, and how the course of history proved Marx wrong on many points. You're obviously right, Marxism has nothing to do about critically analysing society and history, and everything about worshipping the works of dead generations that no longer fit with reality. [/sarcasm so thick it doesn't even drip]

[Sotionov]

It's more like the other way around.
The people don't want to vote for socialism, but want to violently fight for it ineasted?


You don't magically raise class consciousness through voting for this or that party or program.
Who said that class consciounsess through voting? Class consciousness is raised by educating. Educate, agitate, organize.


it comes from the struggle itself.
So, by shooting at the police and army one realizes what exploitation is, and what does is mean to abolish it? Obviously, in order to establish a society without oppression and exploitation after a fight, the ones fighting have to know what oppression and exploitation are and want to abolish them- before the fighting. Othervise any struggle will just end up with just another class society.

[Hit The North]

If you can't get people to vote for change of the mode of production, you're less likely to get them to fight, bleed and die for such a change. It's not about replacing the political fight by violent fight, but about raising class consciousness until the majority supports changing the mode of poduction into one without exploitation.


How's this working out for you impossibilists who have been sticking to this tactic for over one hundred years? An objective review would indicate that you are going backwards! In the real world, workers will have to fight and bleed before they are given the option of changing the mode of production!


He wrote in 1895 that the "immediate tasks of the Party" are "slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity". The more you find out what Marx and Engels really thought, it only becomes more and more clear that Lenin was a revisionist, and that Kautsky was a Marxist.


Yes, but these are tactical questions. Was there a possibility of heading a proletarian revolution in the Germany of 1895? Do you think Engels would have suggested to the Bolsheviks in 1917 that in the face of the workers organising themselves as a power in the soviets and the Russian state crumbling, when thousands of Russian soldiers were killing their officers and abandoning the front line to return home, that the ""immediate tasks of the Party" are "slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity"?

Give Engels the credit of at least not being a prophet who's words are set in stone.

[Sotionov]

How's this working out for you impossibilists who have been sticking to this tactic for over one hundred years? An objective review would indicate that you are going backwards!
You are mistaking us with Leninists, who established state-capitalisms and suppressed genuine socialists, and destroyed the world-wide socialist movement for decades, and still continue destroying it by spreading their reactionary lies that using the state to make capitalism more like feudalism is "socialism".


Do you think Engels would have suggested to the Bolsheviks in 1917 that in the face of the workers organising themselves as a power in the soviets and the Russian state crumbling, when thousands of Russian soldiers were killing their officers and abandoning the front line to return home, that the ""immediate tasks of the Party" are "slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity"?
Engels: "What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution".

[Zukunftsmusik]

You are mistaking us with Leninists, who established state-capitalisms and suppressed genuine socialists, and destroyed the world-wide socialist movement for decades, and still continue destroying it by spreading their reactionary lies that using the state to make capitalism more like feudalism is "socialism".

:rolleyes:

Okay, can we drop this bullshit and discuss the theme in the OP now?

[Sotionov]

Truth isn't bullshit, oppressio and exploitation are bullshit.

Here's an interesting article:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1970/lenin-v-marx-state

[Hit The North]

Engels: "What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution".

Is that the sound of the door hitting you on the ass on your way out?:lol:

[Fakeblock]

If you don't follow the ideas of Marx, then you're not a Marxist, you're a Marxist revisionist.

Marx had different, contradictory ideas at different points in his life, so following all of them would be nonsensical. You misunderstand both the concepts of Marxism and revisionism

[Sotionov]

Marx had different, contradictory ideas at different points in his life
Not about parliamentary action.

[Queen Mab]

The Critique of the Gotha Program gave birth to the Erfurt Program, which Engels supported, and commenting on it excplicitly said "If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat". It is therefore perfectly clear that Marx and Engels did not abandon their position about participation in the election and gradual revolution. Meaning- Kautsky was a marxist, Lenin was a revisionst.

Let's look at the quote in context, shall we?


If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. It would be inconceivable for our best people to become ministers under an emperor, as Miquel. It would seem that from a legal point of view it is inadvisable to include the demand for a republic directly in the programme, although this was possible even under Louis Phillippe in France, and is now in Italy. But the fact that in Germany it is not permitted to advance even a republican party programme openly, proves how totally mistaken is the belief that a republic, and not only a republic, but also communist society, can be established in a cosy, peaceful way.

Seems a pretty decisive rejection of the idea that socialists can come to power only via peaceful means.

I think you are confusing 21st century liberal terminology (democracy = representative bourgeois government) with the actual terminology as Engels used it (a government of the people, whether or not it was elected indirectly by a general electorate).

[Darius]

How's this working out for you impossibilists who have been sticking to this tactic for over one hundred years? An objective review would indicate that you are going backwards! In the real world, workers will have to fight and bleed before they are given the option of changing the mode of production!

This kind of false radicalism leads nowhere. Marx, Engels and also other Marxists like Kautsky, emphasized importance both of reform and revolution. Reformism, gradualism is essential prerequisite for the socialist revolution. There can be no real systematic socialist change without a massive consciousness, substantial reforms, and conquest of political power and state institutions. If there's a political opportunity to gain political power through relatively peaceful means,(like in most western countries) then why bother preaching bloody wars and carnage? Better spend more time in educating people about your political line, their place in capitalism, and coming up with serious reforms which can endanger current status quo of capitalism.

Of course there still exist whole continents today, where peaceful solutions are just impossible, so yes, in their circumstances the violent way is unfortunately the only way. As always coin has two sides, only acknowledging the existance of both, we can truly see the whole picture.

[Hit The North]

This kind of false radicalism leads nowhere. Marx, Engels and also other Marxists like Kautsky, emphasized importance both of reform and revolution. Reformism, gradualism is essential prerequisite for the socialist revolution. There can be no real systematic socialist change without a massive consciousness, substantial reforms, and conquest of political power and state institutions. If there's a political opportunity to gain political power through relatively peaceful means,(like in most western countries) then why bother preaching bloody wars and carnage? Better spend more time in educating people about your political line, their place in capitalism, and coming up with serious reforms which can endanger current status quo of capitalism.


The class struggle is not "false radicalism", it is what happens inevitably under capitalism. Neither have I disavowed the struggle for reforms - but that is what it is: a struggle. They need to be campaigned for, struggled for, as the capitalist state will not concede anything it is not under pressure to concede. And who is "preaching bloody wars and carnage"? Not me. But where, in history, have we seen a ruling class surrender its power simply because the majority of the ruled thought it was a good idea?


Of course there still exist whole continents today, where peaceful solutions are just impossible, so yes, in their circumstances the violent way is unfortunately the only way. I'd suggest this is so on every continent. Or do you think that the bourgeoisies of the USA or EU would give up without a struggle?

Btw, if your intention was to defend the Impossibilists then I wouldn't bother as they oppose the struggle for reform.

[Sotionov]

Seems a pretty decisive rejection of the idea that socialists can come to power only via peaceful means.
Which I didn't say that Marx said, if you would to read first before responding to something, maybe you'd avoid the strawman fallacy. Marx and Engels said that the revolution can be peaceful in democratic republics, and I represented their view as such- as it is. That being said, they also advocated participation in the election even in countries that weren't democratic, making it clear that haven't abandoned the position that Engels expresed in the Principles of Communism- that the first task of the revolution is to establish a democratic republic, and they have both consistently held the view the form of the DotP is that of a democratic republic, applying a set of transitional reforms, as expressed in the Manifesto, Principles of Communism and the Erfurt Program. Having in mind all that, it is clear that among the thinkers calling themselves Marxists, Kautsky's position is the only one in accord with the actual views of Marx and Engels.

[Fakeblock]

Not about parliamentary action.

I don't really care. Marxism is more than just what Marx thought about different stuff.

[D-A-C]

I don't know what the hell the OP is trying to say, so forgive me if I am wrong:

But isn't it pretty much standard course ... i.e. Marxism 101 ... that Socialism is by its very nature a unique transitional society between Capitalism and Communism?

Socialism is transitional because it assumes that the Proletariat have assumed control of a Capitalist state and are proceeding to dismantle it step by step in order to achieve the successful transition to Communism.

Therefore, by its very nature, Socialism is transitional because once the entirety of Capitalism has been abolished all across the globe, and no longer exists in any form, then we will have by default arrived at Communism and have new goals and challenges to face and overcome.

Like I said, I am unsure what the OP is asking, but I am also pretty sure that as a matter of course it is accepted that Socialism is a middle way transitional stage that contains elements of the former Capitalist State which was overthrown and Socialist elements that are by there very nature designed to transistion the state into a Communist one?

That's why I have always felt strongly that Communist Party is a better term, because who the hell stops at socialism? Socialism is a stepping stone to reach Communism, not an end in itself.

Of course I could be entirely wrong on the subject, but that is what I thought I had read on the subject anyway.

[Fakeblock]

I think OP is saying that there is no such thing as "socialism" as a transitional mode of production and that Marx only mentioned the political transition, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Personally, I would say that when people see socialism as a stage between communism and capitalism they make an attempt to put the societies into neat categories that ignore the constantly changing nature of society. I think that the transition to communism can neither be described as definitively capitalist nor socialist, but rather as both the dying of capitalism and the "birth" of communism. That is, as capitalist social and political relations die out, they're continuously being replaced by new, more advanced ones that further accelerate the dying of the old. Kind of like a cancerous tumor if you will.

I guess you could describe this as socialism, but that doesn't really matter.

[Tim Redd]

Class consciousness is raised by educating. Educate, agitate, organize.And also via struggle. Though struggle without education, agitation and organizing fizzles out or goes in the wrong direction.


Obviously, in order to establish a society without oppression and exploitation after a fight, the ones fighting have to know what oppression and exploitation are and want to abolish them- before the fighting. Othervise any struggle will just end up with just another class society.I think Lenin showed in his works Revolution of 1905 (name off?) and What is to be Done?, that class consciousness grew through struggle but importantly also as a result of the presence of education, agitation, propaganda and organization (mass and party).

[Tim Redd]

I think OP is saying that there is no such thing as "socialism" as a transitional mode of production and that Marx only mentioned the political transition, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Personally, I would say that when people see socialism as a stage between communism and capitalism they make an attempt to put the societies into neat categories...I guess you could describe this as socialism, but that doesn't really matter. To me the difference between communism which is classless and socialism which is not is a categorical distinction well worth making.

[Tim Redd]

Therefore, by its very nature, Socialism is transitional because once the entirety of Capitalism has been abolished all across the globe, and no longer exists in any form, then we will have by default arrived at Communism and have new goals and challenges to face and overcome.Abolition of global capitalism is one key criteria for the realization of communism, however per Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme, the abolition of classes is another.

[Brotto Rühle]

Abolition of global capitalism is one key criteria for the realization of communism, however per Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme, the abolition of classes is another.

Considering the abolition of capitalism will also abolish classes... that's a fairly redundant statement.

[Brotto Rühle]

I don't know what the hell the OP is trying to say, so forgive me if I am wrong:

But isn't it pretty much standard course ... i.e. Marxism 101 ... that Socialism is by its very nature a unique transitional society between Capitalism and Communism? You are forgiven for being wrong.

Nobody, aside from Stalinists and Maoists, claim that "socialism" is a separate society from both capitalism and communism.

For Marx, socialism and communism were interchangeable terms. For Vladimir Lenin, Socialism referred to the first stage of communist society... of communist society....communist society....communist.


Socialism is transitional because it assumes that the Proletariat have assumed control of a Capitalist state and are proceeding to dismantle it step by step in order to achieve the successful transition to Communism.

Wrong again. You are thinking of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is just the expression of proletarian class rule, not via the capitalist state, but via smashing the capitalist state and instituting a proletarian state.


Therefore, by its very nature, Socialism is transitional because once the entirety of Capitalism has been abolished all across the globe, and no longer exists in any form, then we will have by default arrived at Communism and have new goals and challenges to face and overcome.Again, you confuse DOTP with socialism.


Like I said, I am unsure what the OP is asking, but I am also pretty sure that as a matter of course it is accepted that Socialism is a middle way transitional stage that contains elements of the former Capitalist State which was overthrown and Socialist elements that are by there very nature designed to transistion the state into a Communist one?

Nope.


That's why I have always felt strongly that Communist Party is a better term, because who the hell stops at socialism? Socialism is a stepping stone to reach Communism, not an end in itself.Socialism = Communism. It is, in Lenin's eyes, just the first phase of communism... but is communism, nonetheless.


Of course I could be entirely wrong on the subject, but that is what I thought I had read on the subject anyway.

You probably read Stalin or Mao.

[Old Bolshie]

It is therefore perfectly clear that Marx and Engels did not abandon their position about participation in the election and gradual revolution. Meaning- Kautsky was a marxist, Lenin was a revisionst. http://forum.krstarica.com/images/smilies/naughty.gif


He wrote in 1895 that the "immediate tasks of the Party" are "slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity". The more you find out what Marx and Engels really thought, it only becomes more and more clear that Lenin was a revisionist, and that Kautsky was a Marxist.


Not about parliamentary action.

I didn't know Lenin was against parliamentary activity. Let's see:

"it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before - the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism "politically obsolete". To ignore this experience, while at the same time claiming affiliation to the Communist International, which must work out its tactics internationally (not as narrow or exclusively national tactics, but as international tactics), means committing a gross error and actually abandoning internationalism in deed, while recognising it in word."

"We Bolsheviks participated in the most counterrevolutionary parliaments, and experience has shown that this participation was not only useful but indispensable to the party of the revolutionary proletariat, after the first bourgeois revolution in Russia (1905), so as to pave the way for the second bourgeois revolution (February 1917), and then for the socialist revolution (October 1917)"

"It is because, in Western Europe, the backward masses of the workers and—to an even greater degree—of the small peasants are much more imbued with bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices than they were in Russia because of that, it is only from within such institutions as bourgeois parliaments that Communists can (and must) wage a long and persistent struggle, undaunted by any difficulties, to expose, dispel and overcome these prejudices."

"[T]he fact that most British workers still follow the lead of the British Kerenskys or Scheidemanns and have not yet had experience of a government composed of these people—an experience which was necessary in Russia and Germany so as to secure the mass transition of the workers to communism—undoubtedly indicates that the British Communists should participate in parliamentary action, that they should, from within parliament, help the masses of the workers see the results of a Henderson and Snowden government in practice, and that they should help the Hendersons and Snowdens defeat the united forces of Lloyd George and Churchill. To act otherwise would mean hampering the cause of the revolution, since revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone."

V.I.Lenin, "Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder".

I think this is enough to prove the falsehood of Lenin's hostility towards parliamentary activity.


and they have both consistently held the view the form of the DotP is that of a democratic republic, applying a set of transitional reforms, as expressed in the Manifesto, Principles of Communism and the Erfurt Program.

"However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto-Preface of the 1872 German Edition.

And Engels also said:

"Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."

F.Engels, 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune

I doubt very much that Marx and Engels were simply backing a set of transitional reforms specially those from the Manifesto. Your "gradual revolution" and "transitional reforms" resembles a lot Bernstein's reformist evolutionary socialism.

[Tim Redd]

Considering the abolition of capitalism will also abolish classes... that's a fairly redundant statement. And indeed I now realize that the person I was replying to and I are in major agreement that socialism is qualitatively distinct from communism. I wanted to make clear that even if all capitalist regimes have been overthrown, the abolition of classes itself, which the poster didn't mention directly, is a required part of the qualitative difference between socialism and communism.

[Sotionov]

I didn't know Lenin was against parliamentary activity. Let's see:
I think this is enough to prove the falsehood of Lenin's hostility towards parliamentary activity.Parliamentary activity for the purpose of "changing the views" of the workers by their dissapointment in parliamentary action, and the views of Marx- parliamentary action for the purpose of capturing power and using it to transform the existing state and society trough transitional reforms that are a part of the gradual revolution are two totally different views.


One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”Yes, that words from the '72 introduction to the manifesto were quoted a bunch of times by Bernstein as a proof that before capitalism can be replaced by socialism, a bunch of reforms are needed, being that the ready-made state isn't suitable. It is clear that his interpretation of these words far more correct that that of Lenin, knowing that Engels two decades after those words still supported "slow propaganda and parliamentery activity" as the tasks of tha party; and that Lenin's interpretation how the proletariat needs to "smash" the state is a false one, being that the view of Marx and Engels was that the bureaucratic-military machinery is what was needed to be smashed, and that after the capturing the political power by the party, as simply explained by Kautsky as establishing a people's milita instead of a standing army as one of the DotP trasnitional reforms. Lenin's revisionism is clearly explained in the article that I have already posted:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1970/lenin-v-marx-state


Your "gradual revolution" and "transitional reforms" resembles a lot Bernstein's reformist evolutionary socialism.Those are the views of Marx and Engels, which they held till the end of their lives, and that were expressed correctly by Kautsky (not so much by Bernstein).

[Brotto Rühle]

Correct Marxist theory? I'd say that none of the Leninists have it, it's the Kautskyists that have it (if there even exists some Kautskyist organization). It's clear when you look at this:

Engels, The Principles of Communism:

— 14 —
What will this new social order have to be like?

Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.

— 17 —
Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?

No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

— 18 —
What will be the course of this revolution?

Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake.


And indeed I now realize that the person I was replying to and I are in major agreement that socialism is qualitatively distinct from communism. I wanted to make clear that even if all capitalist regimes have been overthrown, the abolition of classes itself, which the poster didn't mention directly, is a required part of the qualitative difference between socialism and communism.

Wrong. Socialism, being the first stage of communist society, is classless. So watery gall... Karl Marx.

[Sotionov]

Yes, according to Marx, it's capitalism -> DotP/ transition -> almost-there-communism [accodring to contribution] -> full communism [according to need].

According to libertarian socialist thought it's capitalism -> revolution -> socialism (in which market, mutualist, collectivist and communist systems can exist, as long as there's not oppression and exploitation).

[Tim Cornelis]

Yes, according to Marx, it's capitalism -> DotP/ transition -> almost-there-communism [accodring to contribution] -> full communism [according to need].

Wrong, it's capitalism -> DOTP/transition -> communism. Communism has different stages of advancement (like capitalism), but there is no clear cut demarcation between the different stages. They would gradually transplant one another, and distribution according to contribution may apply for most products first, and distribution according to needs for some — and eventually the opposite would be true. This is already indicated by calling it "a higher phase" as opposed to "the highest phase". This indicates the different phases are not distinct, definite, phases. Both are 'fully' communist though.
Full communism is, by the way, an internet meme in leftist circles.


According to libertarian socialist thought it's capitalism -> revolution -> socialism (in which market, mutualist, collectivist and communist systems can exist, as long as there's not oppression and exploitation).

This is not universally accepted. Anarcho-communists and libertarian communists tend to reject this: they reject mutualism and markets in post-revolution society.

[Sotionov]

Anarcho-communists and libertarian communists tend to reject this: they reject mutualism and markets in post-revolution society. Then they're not "anarcho" and "libertarian" communists per se, but they are authoritarian 'communists' (Leninist etc are not authoritarian communists, they're capitalists). Malatesta, Kropotkin, etc and majority of anarchists were communists, but really "anarcho" and really "libertarian" communists, being they didn't want to impose communism on anyone, but thought that everyone should be free to do what they want and organize (or not organize) any way they want- as long as there's no exploitation and oppression. Being that they had the correct view of what exploitation is, they had no problem with mutualism and anarcho-individualism (or "simple commodity production" as marxists call it).

[Brotto Rühle]

Then they're not "anarcho" and "libertarian" communists per se, but they are authoritarian 'communists' (Leninist etc are not authoritarian communists, they're capitalists). Malatesta, Kropotkin, etc and majority of anarchists were communists, but really "anarcho" and really "libertarian" communists, being they didn't want to impose communism on anyone, but thought that everyone should be free to do what they want and organize (or not organize) any way they want- as long as there's no exploitation and oppression. Being that they had the correct view of what exploitation is, they had no problem with mutualism and anarcho-individualism (or "simple commodity production" as marxists call it).

Whoa, the stench of utopianism is just wofting everywhere. Have you ever read Karl Marx?

[Sotionov]

Yes I have, and to note, he (if autoritarian interpretation of his words is true) was basically a reactionary technological utopian, saying that people cannot be emancipated until technology reaches a degree high enough to make labor itself superfluous, which basically means- until then, class society is neccessary.

[Brotto Rühle]

Yes I have, and to note, he (if autoritarian interpretation of his words is true) was basically a reactionary technological utopian, saying that people cannot be emancipated until technology reaches a degree high enough to make labor itself superfluous, which basically means- until then, class society is neccessary.

Clearly you haven't read Marx. Let me ask, do you believe in the abolition of class?

[Sotionov]

Clearly you haven't. Yes, I advocate abolition of all classes, why?

[Old Bolshie]

Parliamentary activity for the purpose of "changing the views" of the workers by their dissapointment in parliamentary action, and the views of Marx- parliamentary action for the purpose of capturing power and using it to transform the existing state and society trough transitional reforms that are a part of the gradual revolution are two totally different views.

So, now Lenin isn't against parliamentary activity but he is for revolution while Marx and Engels are basically reformists pretty much in line with Bernstein's evolutionary socialism.

Perhaps you may want to know that it was Kautsky himself who called Bernstein a "revisionist" precisely because he was distorting Marxism for abandoning the notion of revolution.


Yes, that words from the '72 introduction to the manifesto were quoted a bunch of times by Bernstein as a proof that before capitalism can be replaced by socialism, a bunch of reforms are needed, being that the ready-made state isn't suitable.

So, you are really upholding Bernstein here.

Tell me something, the Paris Commune was achieved through a bunch of reforms?


It is clear that his interpretation of these words far more correct that that of Lenin, knowing that Engels two decades after those words still supported "slow propaganda and parliamentery activity" as the tasks of tha party;

Lenin also supported propaganda and parliamentary activity even weeks before the revolution as you can read in the first quote. That doesn't mean however that he abandoned his revolutionary aims. Pretty much like Engels.



and that Lenin's interpretation how the proletariat needs to "smash" the state is a false one, being that the view of Marx and Engels was that the bureaucratic-military machinery is what was needed to be smashed, and that after the capturing the political power by the party, as simply explained by Kautsky as establishing a people's milita instead of a standing army as one of the DotP trasnitional reforms. Lenin's revisionism is clearly explained in the article that I have already posted:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1970/lenin-v-marx-state


Marx and Engels said "ready-made state machinery" and not only the military aspect of it. Engels was very clear about this:

"Today things are different, and the word ["Social-Democrat"] may perhaps pass muster [mag passieren], inexact [unpassend, unsuitable] though it still is for a party whose economic programme is not merely socialist in general, but downright communist,and whose ultimate political aim is to overcome the whole state and, consequently, democracy as well."

F.Engels, "Vorwort zur Broschüre Internationales aus dem 'Volksstaat' (1871-1875)".


Those are the views of Marx and Engels, which they held till the end of their lives, and that were expressed correctly by Kautsky (not so much by Bernstein).

No, those are the reformist views of Bernstein and Kautsky which led to a tragic outcome when the SPD (which was supposed to lead the gradual revolution) supported an imperialistic war in 1914 and suppressed the proletarian revolution of 1919 even if those two later pronounced against such SPD stances.

Marx and Engels remained committed to the revolutionary process till the end of their lives.

[Tim Cornelis]

Then they're not "anarcho" and "libertarian" communists per se, but they are authoritarian 'communists' (Leninist etc are not authoritarian communists, they're capitalists). Malatesta, Kropotkin, etc and majority of anarchists were communists, but really "anarcho" and really "libertarian" communists, being they didn't want to impose communism on anyone, but thought that everyone should be free to do what they want and organize (or not organize) any way they want- as long as there's no exploitation and oppression. Being that they had the correct view of what exploitation is, they had no problem with mutualism and anarcho-individualism (or "simple commodity production" as marxists call it).

Again, simple commodity production has nothing to do with mutualism -- you're the only person alive that believes this. It's simply the simple exchange of commodities. Mass production and the complexity of contemporary market mechanisms are incompatible with simple commodity production. Simple commodity production existed in slave society, feudalism, merchant capitalism, mercantilism, and the time of proto-industrialisation. It has since been transplanted by industrial capitalism. (That is not to say it is completely absent of course.)

That said, you assume every anarchist by definition is an "anarchist without adjectives". Just because you believe something should not be forced on others, does not mean you support it. Most of the time when I was an anarcho-communist I still rejected mutualism. I did not want to see it implemented. I think most anarchists, and those on revleft may confirm this, reject and oppose mutualism. Their vision of a post-revolutionary society is communist society.

[Sotionov]

So, now Lenin isn't against parliamentary activity but he is for revolution while Marx and Engels are basically reformists pretty much in line with Bernstein's evolutionary socialism.
Lenin was for violent revolution, Marx and Engels were for gradual political revolution, as elaborated on by Kautsky.


Tell me something, the Paris Commune was achieved through a bunch of reforms?If seems that you better know what Marx and Engels meant them themselves, being that after writing the Civil War in France, and that new intro to Manifesto, Marx was still for parliementary action, and in 1880 wrote, toghether with Engles, a programme which talks about how "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation", and Engels in 1884 wrote how the "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes", and explained in 1895 in his Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France how universal suffrage is the weapon of the proletariat and the violent stuggle is outdated. It is obvious they have not abandoned their previous positions about political, gradual revolution in a democratic republic, in fact, they have expanded it because of the development of the military making it almost impossible for armed insurrection to succeed, as Engels noted in 1895, few months before his death.


Marx and Engels said "ready-made state machinery" and not only the military aspect of it. Engels was very clear about this:Lenin was very clear about his intention in this quote mining (if it's even a genuine quote), and his intentioned reinterpretation of Engels' views is clearly shown to be wrong by Marx' and Engels' programme of the 1880, and Engels' words in 1884 and 1895.


Marx and Engels remained committed to the revolutionary process till the end of their lives.Yes. For a gradual revolution in a democratic republic.


Again, simple commodity production has nothing to do with mutualism -- you're the only person alive that believes this.
Even if this were true, it's still appeal to numbers, a fallacy, and therefore doesn't prove me wrong.


Mass production and the complexity of contemporary market mechanisms are incompatible with simple commodity production.No reason for them to be imcopatible, being that commodity production can exist without exploitation with today's mass production, as proved by workers' cooperatives.


That said, you assume every anarchist by definition is an "anarchist without adjectives".Yes, I do. They make call themselves other names, e.g. like Kropotkin called himself an anarcho-communist, but if they disagree with what anarchists without adjectives point out, they're not really anarchists, but advocate some form of tyrrany of the majority, which no anarchist advocates, or he's not an anarchist.


Most of the time when I was an anarcho-communist I still rejected mutualism. I did not want to see it implemented.Which is ok as long as don't hold an erroneus view that mutualism is somehow exploitationary and should not be tolerated if someone organizes it. I myself advocate a Kropotkinist- communist- organization, and would participate in organizing one when capitalism is replaced with socialism, I just know what oppression and exploitation are, and I don't want to oppress people who don't exploit anyone (like anarcho-invidualists and mutualists).

[Brotto Rühle]

Clearly you haven't. Yes, I advocate abolition of all classes, why?

Then you are an authoritarian who wishes to force classlessness on the bourgeoisie.

[Sotionov]

Wanting to abolish authoritarianism is authoritarian an mush as 2-2=2 ,it's simply idiotical to argue it.

[Tim Cornelis]

Even if this were true, it's still appeal to numbers, a fallacy, and therefore doesn't prove me wrong.

It is true. You're the only one that interprets it as such. And it's not a fallacy, as you say "Marxists believe X" but when no Marxist believes X and it's only you that believes Marxists believe X, it's a valid retort. Had I said "only you think socialism is good" therefore socialism is wrong, you would be right to assert it's a fallacy.


No reason for them to be imcopatible, being that commodity production can exist without exploitation with today's mass production, as proved by workers' cooperatives.

Yes, commodity production is compatible with mutualism, in fact it cannot exist without it. However, simple commodity production is incompatible with the current level of productive technological progress.
It does not follow that when there are workers' cooperatives that all of a sudden the exchange of commodities falls back into simplicity.


Yes, I do. They make call themselves other names, e.g. like Kropotkin called himself an anarcho-communist, but if they disagree with what anarchists without adjectives point out, they're not really anarchists, but advocate some form of tyrrany of the majority, which no anarchist advocates, or he's not an anarchist.

This is nonsense. If I'm an anarcho-communist and argue against mutualism and insist that people should not adopt it, it's tyranny even though it relies entirely on the force of persuasion, not on the force of violence.


Which is ok as long as don't hold an erroneus view that mutualism is somehow exploitationary and should not be tolerated if someone organizes it. I myself advocate a Kropotkinist- communist- organization, and would participate in organizing one when capitalism is replaced with socialism, I just know what oppression and exploitation are, and I don't want to oppress people who don't exploit anyone (like anarcho-invidualists and mutualists).

In the same way "anarcho-"capitalism/nonarchism should be accepted as valid. After all it's voluntary, and is built on your notion of property rights (labour theory of property).

[Sotionov]

And it's not a fallacy, as you say "Marxists believe X" but when no Marxist believes X
Simple commodity production being non-capitalist market system is widely accepted by Marxists, being that it was explained to be such by Engels.


However, simple commodity production is incompatible with the current level of productive technological progress.
"Simple" in the marxist term "simple commodity production" doesn't refer to the technological development, but to workers owning their means of production, as recognized by Kautsky, Bukharin, Lenin, etc.


If I'm an anarcho-communist and argue against mutualism and insist that people should not adopt it, it's tyranny even though it relies entirely on the force of persuasion, not on the force of violence.
For shit's sake, I just said exactly the oppossite. If you're against it bt persuasion, you're an anarchist, if you think it exploitative (and it isn't) and are against by force, you're not an anarchist.


In the same way "anarcho-"capitalism/nonarchism should be accepted as valid.
Being that capitalism is both oppressive and exploitatory (even if it's not oppressive like in the David Ellerman version, it's still exploitatory), there is nothing wrong with abolishing it.


and is built on your notion of property rights (labour theory of property).
It is built on the violation of it labor theory of property as pointed out by pretty much every early socialist thinker.

[Old Bolshie]

Lenin was for violent revolution, Marx and Engels were for gradual political revolution, as elaborated on by Kautsky.


Yes. For a gradual revolution in a democratic republic.Are you sure about that?

"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either that anti-authoritarians don't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction."

F. Engels, On Authority.

It seems that Engels was much advocator of violence and terror in a revolution as Lenin.


If seems that you better know what Marx and Engels meant them themselves, being that after writing the Civil War in France, and that new intro to Manifesto, Marx was still for parliementary action, and in 1880 wrote, toghether with Engles, a programme which talks about how "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation", and Engels in 1884 wrote how the "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes", and explained in 1895 in his Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France how universal suffrage is the weapon of the proletariat and the violent stuggle is outdated. It is obvious they have not abandoned their previous positions about political, gradual revolution in a democratic republic, in fact, they have expanded it because of the development of the military making it almost impossible for armed insurrection to succeed, as Engels noted in 1895, few months before his death.Your entire argumentation is based upon a lie. Engels never claimed such things although Bernstein tried to make appear like he did so. The preface which you are referring to was mutilated by the SPD reformists because some of Engels ideas expressed in the text were "too revolutionary". Kautsky during his polemic with Bernstein acknowledge the situation:

“THE FAULT FOR THIS DOES NOT LIE WITH ENGELS, BUT WITH GERMAN FRIENDS WHO COMPELLED THE OMISSION OF THE CONCLUSION AS TOO REVOLUTIONARY”

“Bernstein has possession of the manuscripts left by our Master. If he should be able to find the manuscript of the Preface WITH THE SUPPRESSED CONCLUSION (“mit dem gestrichenen Schlusse”), then I call upon him to publish this conclusion which Englels left out ONLY OUT OF CONSIDERATION FOR EXTERIOR CIRCUMSTANCES AND NOT THROUGH INNER CONVICTION. This will clearly show how little basis Bernstein has to cite Engels in his support.”

K. Kautsky, Bernstein and die Dialektik. Die Neue Zeit, XVII

Engels himself wrote about the mutilation of the text:

“My text has suffered somewhat because of the scruples of our Berlin friends, due to timidity over the anti-Socialist laws, which under the circumstances I had to consider.”

Letter of Engels to Kautsky, March 25th, 1895

“X. has played me a dirty trick. He has taken from my Preface to Marx’s articles on France, 1848-50, everything that he considered useful for the defence of tactics of peacefulness at any price and avoidance of violence, which he is for some time now loving to preach, especially at the present moment when exceptional laws are being prepared in Berlin; whereas I recommend such tactics purely and solely for present-day Germany, and then only with essential reservations. In France, Belgium, Italy and Austria, these tactics, taken as a whole, cannot be followed, and in Germany they can become inapplicable to-morrow”.

(italics in the original) Engels to Lafargue, April 3rd, 1895

Here is one of the passages omitted from Engels preface and which completely destroys the argument that Engels considered violent struggle and armed insurrection outdated:

“Does this mean that in the future the street struggle has no role to play? Not at all. It only means that the conditions since 1848 are far more unfavourable for the insurrectionaries, far more favourable for the military. Accordingly, a street struggle can only be victorious, if this unfavourable nature of the situation is compensated for by other factors. Therefore it will more seldom come in the beginning of a great revolution than in its later developments, and must be undertaken with greater forces. These, however, will then probably, as in the great French Revolution, on September 4th and on October 31st in Paris, prefer the method of open attack to the passive barricade tactics.”



Lenin was very clear about his intention in this quote mining (if it's even a genuine quote), and his intentioned reinterpretation of Engels' views is clearly shown to be wrong by Marx' and Engels' programme of the 1880, and Engels' words in 1884 and 1895.
I don't see how it can be reinterpreted when Engels explicitly says "ultimate political aim is to overcome the whole state" and not only one part of it.

If someone distorted and reinterpreted Engels for its own purposes was Bernstein and the other reformists of SPD as you can check above.

[Anti-White]

Have you autistic wonders got your plastic dinosaurs all lined up in neat rows?

[Tower of Bebel]

And yet a year later, at the Hague Congress, he talkes about the workers capturing power by peaceful means in democtatic countries. Obviously, in this quote from the Civil War in France he talkes about the undemocratic state. This is confirmed also four years later in his last political work, Critique of the Gotha Program, in which he criticizes many things, but doesn't say anything against parliamentary action, just the oppossite, he mentiones democratic states, "converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it", and the "tranformation that the state will undergo in a communist society". The Critique of the Gotha Program gave birth to the Erfurt Program, which Engels supported, and commenting on it excplicitly said "If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat". It is therefore perfectly clear that Marx and Engels did not abandon their position about participation in the election and gradual revolution. Meaning- Kautsky was a marxist, Lenin was a revisionst. http://forum.krstarica.com/images/smilies/naughty.gif

I think this is possibly true, that Lenin is the revisionist here, but it only goes to prove that in spite of this genius or that, history is the greatest teacher we have. Global capitalism abounds with democratic republics and has done so for generations. But the working class is still the slave to the capitalist. Why? Because it is the relations of production which need overturning, not the form of political rule.

If Marx and Engels, or even Kautsky, were alive today, they would have to considerably revise their own theories about the democratic republic.
Hi, I just would like to point out that the democratic republic was and remains an unclear concept.

This is Lenin in one and the same article (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm):

The objective conditions of this “experiment” were that the republic in France had become an established fact and was in no grave danger; that the working class had every opportunity of developing an independent class political organisation but did not take full advantage of this opportunity, partly because it was influenced by the parliamentary humbug of its leaders; that in actual practice, history was already objectively posing before the working class the tasks of the socialist revolution

It should be said again, to avoid possible misunderstanding, that by the republic we understand not only and not so much a form of government as the sum-total of democratic changes envisaged in our minimum programme.

This argument is based on a misconception; it confounds the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution, the struggle for the republic (including our entire minimum programme) with the struggle for socialism.

[Sotionov]

Your entire argumentation is based upon a lie.
This is precisely the description of your position. It is clear from the Programme of Marx three year before his death in which he talkes about "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation".


I don't see how it can be reinterpreted when Engels explicitly says "ultimate political aim is to overcome the whole state" and not only one part of it.Being that he himself said how "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes".

Having in mind such public views they have been forwarding consistently their entire political life, I am not even sure that the sentances that bolsheviks pull out from obscure sources that support them but are contradictory with what Marx and Engels advocated, are at all genuine quotes. It's somewhat similar to the gnostic concept of "secret knowledge" that masters keep secret from people, but divulge to their "true students", which is a plain tactic of manipulation and deliberate fraudulent misrepresentation of the real views of the ones that originally espoused them.

[Old Bolshie]

This is precisely the description of your position. It is clear from the Programme of Marx three year before his death in which he talkes about "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation".

And yet one year after Marx's death Engels was saying:

"Universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state."

F. Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.


Being that he himself said how "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes".

I don't see any contradiction between the two statements.


Having in mind such public views they have been forwarding consistently their entire political life, I am not even sure that the sentances that bolsheviks pull out from obscure sources that support them but are contradictory with what Marx and Engels advocated, are at all genuine quotes. It's somewhat similar to the gnostic concept of "secret knowledge" that masters keep secret from people, but divulge to their "true students", which is a plain tactic of manipulation and deliberate fraudulent misrepresentation of the real views of the ones that originally espoused them.

If Engels accused someone of playing dirty tricks with his texts it weren't the Bolsheviks but precisely the ones you are defending here. You can always check the sources of those quotes if you have doubts about it.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Have you autistic wonders got your plastic dinosaurs all lined up in neat rows?

Umm what? :confused:

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Have you autistic wonders got your plastic dinosaurs all lined up in neat rows?
Nice user name. I can feel your class-conscious camaraderie radiating from here.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Yes I have, and to note, he (if autoritarian interpretation of his words is true) was basically a reactionary technological utopian, saying that people cannot be emancipated until technology reaches a degree high enough to make labor itself superfluous, which basically means- until then, class society is neccessary.
The proper term for such a philosophical outlook is "positivism". Unless you're trying to play the "more-prolier/academic-than-thou" card by stringing a bunch of five-dollar words together.

[Tim Redd]

Wrong. Socialism, being the first stage of communist society, is classless. So watery gall... Karl Marx. Apparently you are happy to speak about what Marx believed without even a modicum of actually reading him. Then to be nasty about it just proves your ignorant immaturity.

[Tim Redd]

Have you autistic wonders got your plastic dinosaurs all lined up in neat rows? Your id's imputation that others in this thread or on revleft generally are anti white racists perfectly matches your ridiculous anti-intellectualism.

[Tim Redd]

Yes I have, and to note, he (if autoritarian interpretation of his words is true) was basically a reactionary technological utopian, saying that people cannot be emancipated until technology reaches a degree high enough to make labor itself superfluous, which basically means- until then, class society is neccessary. You would have quite a ripost if that is what Engels said. He never said anything about labor having to be superfluous to qualify for communism but rather that communism requires an abundance of goods among other things including the abolition of classes. And on these Engels is correct imo.

[Tim Redd]

Hi, I just would like to point out that the democratic republic was and remains an unclear concept.

This is Lenin in one and the same article (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm): What's unclear about that article? It's clear to me that Lenin is advocating that in some contexts a revolutionary people's democratic regime is called for that is preliminary to a socialist one. The key to such a move is that the proletariat be organized as an independent political force led by a proletarian vanguard party.

[Hit The North]

Hi, I just would like to point out that the democratic republic was and remains an unclear concept.

This is Lenin in one and the same article (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm):

Quite often these political concepts are inherently unclear, so I take your point.

But this is an article written by Lenin in 1905, so Lenin was dealing with concepts within an orthodox Kautskyian framework, still talking about a separation between establishing a democratic republic (as the overthrowing of Czarism) and the future struggle for socialism, but this surely wasn't his position in 1917. The promise of soviet power made the concept of a democratic republic an antiquated redundancy.

As I said, history is the best teacher.

[Sotionov]

I don't see any contradiction between the two statements.
Leninist line that the state must be abolished and a new one built is in clear contradiction to the view of Marx, Engels and Kautsky that the current state, if it has universal suffrage, can be peacefully taken over, and made more democratic (in the manner of the Paris Commune) in the proces of a gradual socialistic revolution.

[Brotto Rühle]

Leninist line that the state must be abolished and a new one built is in clear contradiction to the view of Marx, Engels and Kautsky that the current state, if it has universal suffrage, can be peacefully taken over, and made more democratic (in the manner of the Paris Commune) in the proces of a gradual socialistic revolution.

You keep saying this and keep getting refuted. Are you really this stubborn?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Leninist line that the state must be abolished and a new one built is in clear contradiction to the view of Marx, Engels and Kautsky that the current state, if it has universal suffrage, can be peacefully taken over, and made more democratic (in the manner of the Paris Commune) in the proces of a gradual socialistic revolution.Except Marx and Engels explicitly revised their views BECAUSE of the Paris Commune to argue the exact opposite of what you are saying here.

Marx went through and explained how the Paris Commune was not the old state but a different animal based on armed workers, mass meetings, and the specific and unusual circumstances of a city where worker solidarity was unopposed because the elietes ran away and the remaining bourgoise had no choice but to follow the lead of the new authority.

Anyway there was nothing peaceful about the Paris commune! The elietes had largely left the city because of a siege - corruption and price-gouging made the small capitalists totally exposed and unpopular and it was only because the officials were more scared of the (working class dominated) National Guard that little direct force was necissary in the initial stage. But then the elietes came back to crush the city with all the violence at its disposal... implying that no ruling class is going to give it's property and power to the workers and the population generally without a fight.

[Sotionov]

Except Marx and Engels explicitly revised their views BECAUSE of the Paris Commune to argue the exact opposite of what you are saying here.
That is simply not true, Marx wrote in a programme about "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation" nine years AFTER the Paris Commune, and Engels wrote about how "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes" thirteen years AFTER the Paris Commune.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

That is simply not true, Marx wrote in a programme about "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation" nine years AFTER the Paris Commune, and Engels wrote about how "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes" thirteen years AFTER the Paris Commune.
In which article (or programme, whatever) did he say this? Please provide a link to what you're citing so that we may see it for ourselves. Your opponents are not going to do your own research, you know.

[Sotionov]

Marx wrote the Civil War in France in 1871, and with Engels the new introduction to the Communist Manifesto in 1872. In 1880 Marx wrote the Preamble of the Programme of the French Workers's Party, which I will quote here in it's entierty:



Considering,

That the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race;

That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production;

That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them


The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;
The collective form the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society;

Considering,

That this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat - organized in a distinct political party;

That a such an organization must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal including universal suffrage which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation;

The French socialist workers, in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production, have decided, as a means of organization and struggle, to enter the elections with the following immediate demands:The immediate demands were writen by Marx and Guesde, toghether with Engels and Lafargue, and they include decentralization of state, abolition of the standing army, reduction of work hours, minimum wage, and similar laws protecting the workers. Marx died less then three years later, without abandoning his views that proletariat can and should get power trough elections and conduct a gradual revolution, except maybe only in his heart, which we cannot know, or in from of some "true student" trough which this changed views of Marx then got out and influenced the formation of bolshevism, for which there is also no proof.


Also, it is interesting what happened when the Programme was drafted, and how a famous Marx' remark came into being and why.

"After the programme was agreed, however, a clash arose between Marx and his French supporters arose over the purpose of the minimum section. Whereas Marx saw this as a practical means of agitation around demands that were achievable within the framework of capitalism, Guesde took a very different view: “Discounting the possibility of obtaining these reforms from the bourgeoisie, Guesde regarded them not as a practical programme of struggle, but simply ... as bait with which to lure the workers from Radicalism.” The rejection of these reforms would, Guesde believed, “free the proletariat of its last reformist illusions and convince it of the impossibility of avoiding a workers ’89.” Accusing Guesde and Lafargue of “revolutionary phrase-mongering” and of denying the value of reformist struggles, Marx made his famous remark that, if their politics represented Marxism, “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”)."


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm

It is thus obvious that when Marx wrote that "One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” he wasn't talking about elections and and a gradual revolution. He was just reiterating what he wrote in 1871 in a letter to Kugelmann, that it is the "bureaucratic-military machine" that needs to be destroyed, as Engels said- "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes", a position that was upheld by the true marxist- Kautsky, in is his calls for abolition of the standing army, decentralization of the state and other mechanisms of making the state more democratic (in the manner of the Paris Commune) as a part of a gradual socialist revolution.

[Old Bolshie]

Leninist line that the state must be abolished and a new one built is in clear contradiction to the view of Marx, Engels and Kautsky that the current state, if it has universal suffrage, can be peacefully taken over, and made more democratic (in the manner of the Paris Commune) in the proces of a gradual socialistic revolution.

The contradiction was not between one Lenin's statement and another of Engels but rather between two statements of Engels and as I said there is nothing contradictory between the two.

[Jimmie Higgins]

That is simply not true, Marx wrote in a programme about "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation" nine years AFTER the Paris Commune, and Engels wrote about how "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes" thirteen years AFTER the Paris Commune.

All this presupposes a kind of duel power... The victorious proletariat can't use the existing state but must create new means of governance and that's what Marx saw in the commune.

The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.
While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage by hierarchical investiture.12

Your arguments about using reforms are true, but your interpretation of them are off. Lenin also argued that workers in parliamentary countries should use their legal rights to advance their cause when possible. These are tactical decisions for a worker's movement, but you see to interpret them as iron dictates and then fetishize them as the means to socialism. But I think the means to socialism... And I think Marx thought this... Is the working class and their power, not transforming existing state institutions through reform.

Kaputsky was a Marxist and insightful and well worth reading. Marxism is also not a closed book. But I think on the question of gradual reforms, history has shown that (as Lenin said) the anarchists are correct when it comes to the capitalist state, it must be smashed. Allende, the Spanish revolution, and other examples show that the capitalist state can not exist along with any meaningful level of worker's power.

We should use the rights we have, we should maybe even intervene in parlements when it serves our interests, we should fight for reforms, but I think all of this needs to be in the service of trying to build independent working class power, not building working class power through the state. It would be like arguing that we could reform police to defend strikes.

[Old Bolshie]

The immediate demands were writen by Marx and Guesde, toghether with Engels and Lafargue, and they include decentralization of state, abolition of the standing army, reduction of work hours, minimum wage, and similar laws protecting the workers. Marx died less then three years later, without abandoning his views that proletariat can and should get power trough elections and conduct a gradual revolution, except maybe only in his heart, which we cannot know, or in from of some "true student" trough which this changed views of Marx then got out and influenced the formation of bolshevism, for which there is also no proof.


Also, it is interesting what happened when the Programme was drafted, and how a famous Marx' remark came into being and why.

"After the programme was agreed, however, a clash arose between Marx and his French supporters arose over the purpose of the minimum section. Whereas Marx saw this as a practical means of agitation around demands that were achievable within the framework of capitalism, Guesde took a very different view: “Discounting the possibility of obtaining these reforms from the bourgeoisie, Guesde regarded them not as a practical programme of struggle, but simply ... as bait with which to lure the workers from Radicalism.” The rejection of these reforms would, Guesde believed, “free the proletariat of its last reformist illusions and convince it of the impossibility of avoiding a workers ’89.” Accusing Guesde and Lafargue of “revolutionary phrase-mongering” and of denying the value of reformist struggles, Marx made his famous remark that, if their politics represented Marxism, “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”)."


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm

"It would be absolutely wrong to believe that immediate struggle for socialist revolution implies that we can, or should, abandon the fight for reforms. Not at all."

V.I.Lenin, Principles involved in the War issue.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

All this presupposes a kind of duel power... The victorious proletariat can't use the existing state but must create new means of governance and that's what Marx saw in the commune.


Your arguments about using reforms are true, but your interpretation of them are off. Lenin also argued that workers in parliamentary countries should use their legal rights to advance their cause when possible. These are tactical decisions for a worker's movement, but you see to interpret them as iron dictates and then fetishize them as the means to socialism. But I think the means to socialism... And I think Marx thought this... Is the working class and their power, not transforming existing state institutions through reform.

Kaputsky was a Marxist and insightful and well worth reading. Marxism is also not a closed book. But I think on the question of gradual reforms, history has shown that (as Lenin said) the anarchists are correct when it comes to the capitalist state, it must be smashed. Allende, the Spanish revolution, and other examples show that the capitalist state can not exist along with any meaningful level of worker's power.

We should use the rights we have, we should maybe even intervene in parlements when it serves our interests, we should fight for reforms, but I think all of this needs to be in the service of trying to build independent working class power, not building working class power through the state. It would be like arguing that we could reform police to defend strikes.
This is not to mention that at the time the program was written, Marxism was very little known amongst the French workers. And while the French workers may have been willing to fight, the political landscape was dominated by reformist parties including the Blanquists, the Possibilists, etc. In opposition to the these parties, Marx and Guesde drafted a series of not mere reforms, but transitional reforms using the language of their opponents, in the interest of raising socialist class consciousness [among the workers]. Until this was done, revolutionary conditions could only be quite unfavorable. That Guesde later opposed the program only showed that he had no patience for the issue of consciousness. Guesde advocated something very close to an immediate uprising, which would have been a disastrous outcome for a French worker's party that was only just starting out, and did not even have a regular newpaper until the late 1870s. In my opinion, this context makes Engels' and Marx's reproach of "impatience" and "revolutionary phrase-mongering" quite understandable. What became of Guesde at the end of his political career due to this difference in method? Well, he died as a state bureaucrat. Marx and Lenin, on the other hand, died as revolutionary communists.

[Sotionov]

All this presupposes a kind of duel power... The victorious proletariat can't use the existing state but must create new means of governance.
No, Marx and Engels, as I have shown by their quotes, were actually for reforming the present state so that it can be used to institute socialism, they were not for establishing some sort of "dual power", except maybe in states that there wasn't any universal suffrage, but they did't elaborate on that, I would find it safe to suppose that in the states without universal suffrage, they thought that firstly a bourgeois democratic revolution should happen, and then after that a socialistic one (which would be political and gradual).

[Geiseric]

That is simply not true, Marx wrote in a programme about "universal suffrage which will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation" nine years AFTER the Paris Commune, and Engels wrote about how "victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes" thirteen years AFTER the Paris Commune.

Lol so according to you universal suffrage is a bad thing? You might want to get off your armchair and look what people worldwide are struggling for, and ask yourself how can those things come to fruition without universal suffrage. Do you think Soviets should have universal suffrage?

[Geiseric]

No, Marx and Engels, as I have shown by their quotes, were actually for reforming the present state so that it can be used to institute socialism, they were not for establishing some sort of "dual power", except maybe in states that there wasn't any universal suffrage, but they did't elaborate on that, I would find it safe to suppose that in the states without universal suffrage, they thought that firstly a bourgeois democratic revolution should happen, and then after that a socialistic one (which would be political and gradual).

They said that a bourgeois revolution is necessary for creating an advanced proletariat, however that is different from saying a bourgeois revolution is necessary for a country with an underdeveloped proletariat such as Russia needs a bourgeois republic in order to overthrow capitalism.

[Sotionov]

What became of Guesde at the end of his political career due to this difference in method? Well, he died as a state bureaucrat. Marx and Lenin, on the other hand, died as revolutionary communists.
Guesde was a state bureaucrat and Lenin wasn't? Are you serious? He was the father of state bureaucracy unimaginable until then. "To oppose bureaucracy to democracy is to contrast the organizational principle of revolutionary Social Democracy to the methods of opportunistic organization", where he calls any opposition to central committee's authority "opportunism" is ludicrous, being that only where there is no democracy but there exists some central authority, only there can opportinism exist.


Lol so according to you universal suffrage is a bad thing?
What? Are you sane? Who said that?

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Guesde was a state bureaucrat and Lenin wasn't? Are you serious? He was the father of state bureaucracy unimaginable until then. "To oppose bureaucracy to democracy is to contrast the organizational principle of revolutionary Social Democracy to the methods of opportunistic organization", where he calls any opposition to central committee's authority "opportunism" is ludicrous, being that only where there is no democracy but there exists some central authority, only there can opportinism exist.


What? Are you sane? Who said that?

Yet another hasty generalization on your part, coupled with weak analogies. You assume that since Lenin and Guesde both worked in their respective states that automatically means that they are bureaucrats. I speak, of course of "bureaucrat" in the sense of "An administrator concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people's needs", not merely that they were state officials. I would also point out that their situations were vastly different (given that there is evidence of Lenin's opposition to bureaucratization up until his death), but then that would merely be feeding into your misdirection tactic. I'd like you to focus upon the body of my argument, which calls out your utter ignorance of the historical context of Marx's actions and words, and furthermore reveals your argument method to be entirely based on quote-mining.

[Sotionov]

given that there is evidence of Lenin's opposition to bureaucratization up until his deathYeah, he was a real anarchist.


utter ignorance of the historical context of Marx's actions and words, and furthermore reveals your argument method to be entirely based on quote-mining.
You have here perfectly described the Leninsit position.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Yeah, he was a real anarchist.
I suppose at this point, Lenin can be whatever you want him to be. Using your method of analyzing political actions isolated from their career as a whole, one could easily "prove" that Bismarck was a socialist or that Castro was a Trotskyist. You're going to have to do better than this. I won't hold my breath, though.


You have here perfectly described the Leninsit position.
How? Quote-mining is exactly what you've been doing the whole time. I have not. Try again. I'm beginning to think that you secretly enjoy revealing yourself to be a total fool.

[Sotionov]

No, no such thing can be done, unless someone whould want to look like a idiot, e.g. like if someone would say that the ideologue of bureaucratic collectivism was oppossed to bureaucracy.

I have provided clear quotes that explain the views of Engels and Marx which they practiced troughout their live by writing programs for parties that participate in elections, those programs containing reforms as a part of gradual revolution. It is beyond obvious that Leninism is revision of Marxism, and it is those that deny such facts that reveal themselves as total fools.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

No, no such thing can be done, unless someone whould want to look like a idiot, e.g. like if someone would say that the ideologue of bureaucratic collectivism was oppossed to bureaucracy.
Yet another transparent effort to dodge the main topic on your part, now that your case is in shambles. Bureaucratic collectivism? So now we're bringing Max Schachtman and Bruno Rizzi into this? Please....

I have provided clear quotes that explain the views of Engels and Marx which they practiced troughout their live by writing programs for parties that participate in elections, those programs containing reforms as a part of gradual revolution.
No, you didn't. What you provided is evidence that Marx and Engels supported "reform" in a specific way, according to the situation that they were given, for the purpose of engendering a class-conscious working class. I have already given my reasons why I think this to be the case. To say that this episode characterizes their whole career as supporting a "gradual revolution" (which is a jarring contradiction in terms and indicative of your shaky grasp of philosophical issues) is not to correctly appraise their legacy but to bury it. Reforms were not an end in themselves for Marx and Engels, but only the beginning.


It is beyond obvious that Leninism is revision of Marxism, and it is those that deny such facts that reveal themselves as total fools.
Yeah, the tired claim of "revisionism" is cute and all, but what "facts" have you proven that support your case? The answer is "beyond obvious" from my view: Zilch. It's clear who the "revisionist" is here, and it isn't I.

[Sotionov]

Bureaucratic collectivism?
Or state-capitalism. Or state-feudalism or state-slavery, as it was pretty much like them, too, in certain times. It certainly wan't anything near socialism or moving in the direction of socialism, in fact, it was in the opposite direction.


No, you didn't. What you provided is evidence that Marx and Engels supported "reform" in a specific way, according to the situation that they were given, for the purpose of engendering a class-conscious working class.
No, this is a lie. Marx and Engels advocated reforms in order to transform the existing state so that the proletariat can use (to expropriate the capitalists). As I have already noted, it was Guesde's view that reforms have no value except for bringing workers to support the party and that conduct a revolution, and Marx commeted of that view that if that's marxist, then he is no marxist.


It's clear who the "revisionist" is here, and it isn't I.
If you are a leninist, you are a revivionist of marxism. In order not to be one, you would have to be a Kautskyist.

[Jimmie Higgins]

If you are a leninist, you are a revivionist of marxism. In order not to be one, you would have to be a Kautskyist.marx was a revisionist, kautsky was a revisionist, Lenin was a revisionist. Revolutionary ideas alwas need to be considered and revised if necessary.

You are arguing for dogmatism. You are using appeals to authority (based on interpretations no less) to argue for what you see is the "pure" Marxism. This kind of thinking should be rejected, theory is only as value able as it is useful and relates to actual existing conditions.

Socialism through capturing the state and gradualism (which unlike trying to use the state as a tactic was not a Marx or Engels strategy as far as I know and I think only developed as the German socialist movement grew and became successful at winning concessions) have been tried out in history and shown to not be effective for working class movements. The state needs to be smashed and replaced with a democracy of workers which might in some ways cover the same ground as a capitalist state but, by virtue of the size and diversity of the new ruling group in society, would need to also function in totally different ways. The old military needs to be smashed or else we end up with a pinochette or worse. The capitalists need to be prevented from organizing opposition, etc.

Gradualism assumes a static view of both class forces and class consciousness. You can win reforms, but every second they exist in a capitalist state, the capitalists will be trying to figure out how to undermine that or go around it or build up a reactionary opposition to try and overthrow the reform. Also because workers are a large and diverse group and because the realities of daily life in capitalism give a level of superficial trust hipness to capitalist ideologies (like they argue you need to study hard to get a decent job... On the surface, that's kinda true, but it's false from a larger understanding of class and the system) class consciousness doesn't just flow in one direction. So if gradual reforms by socialist ministers and congress people slow, then people will become disillusioned and think will I gotta get mine if I'm going to make rent.

So while organizing efforts to win reforms by workers, building up a class political culture, maybe even having oppositional figures in political elections and offices, can be valuable, IMO, their vale isn't in creating socialism their value can only be in helping workers organize themselves better and more independently... For their swift smashing of the capitalist state and replacing it with structures built around their own power.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Or state-capitalism. Or state-feudalism or state-slavery, as it was pretty much like them, too, in certain times. It certainly wan't anything near socialism or moving in the direction of socialism, in fact, it was in the opposite direction.
Whichever term you meant, it still has no immediate relevance to Marx and Guesde's draft program except for you to display your venom towards Lenin's corpse.

Sad. Your grudge doesn't sound any less silly when I explain it, either.


No, this is a lie. Marx and Engels advocated reforms in order to transform the existing state so that the proletariat can use (to expropriate the capitalists). As I have already noted, it was Guesde's view that reforms have no value except for bringing workers to support the party and that conduct a revolution, and Marx commeted of that view that if that's marxist, then he is no marxist.
The problem here is that you counterpose Marx's and Guesde's "positions" as if it could only ever be a black-and-white choice of tactics. Marx and Engels took issue with Guesde because, as I said before, the latter was far too impatient; Guesde was advocating for a near immediate uprising of a worker's party that had barely left the womb. Again, it didn't have a wide membership and only started its regular newspaper. If this uprising had failed, all that had been worked for would have been wiped out or co-opted by the other bourgeois parties. Guesde's method erred in completely discounting class-consciousness. This was, for Marx, the real problem; you cannot complete a construction job if your tools haven't been sharpened. Furthermore, Marx had no opposition to uprisings or revolution in general. Reforms were a tactic towards that end, not the end itself. Marx had issues with "gradualism" going back to Darwin's account in Origin of the Species.

I am basically repeating myself at this point. Either you deal directly with the issue of consciousness that I have raised, or I will accuse you of arguing in bad faith.


If you are a leninist, you are a revivionist of marxism. In order not to be one, you would have to be a Kautskyist.
Have you considered the possibility that Kautsky is the revisionist here? For that matter, has it ever popped into your thick head that the "revisionist" epithet does nothing to really explain or clarify political and philosophical differences? I love how you don't really bother to explain why Kautskyism is the continuation of Marx. Though, I suppose I should look at it as a limited victory. At this rate, you may be compelled to actually explain your position beyond mere repetition of the assurance that you're right.

But enough. The accusation of "revisionism" is a tired meme that needs to be left in the dustbin of the early twentieth century, where it belongs.

EDIT: I changed some words, shortened a few sentences, but the essence of the post is entirely intact. Of course, I doubt that will stop Sotionov from his practice of cherry-picking objectionable quotes in isolation of the main issue involved.

[Sotionov]

You are arguing for dogmatism.
I'm arguing that only correct Marxist is Kautskyism. Marx and Engels both wrote about economics and politics form more then fourthy years, and during that time held pretty consitent views. From the Principles of Communism in the 1847 to the French program in the 1880 they consistently advocated proletarian party participating in the elections with the goal of capturing the state, conducting a bunch of reforms and gradually abolishing private property.


The state needs to be smashed and replaced with a democracy of workers which might in some ways cover the same ground as a capitalist state but
Sure, but if it's the Leninist saying this, it can also be said that it was tried and not only showed not to be effective, but failed miserably by producting state-capitalism that was more oppressive and exploitative then maket-capitalism.


The old military needs to be smashed or else we end up with a pinochette or worse.
The main request of Marx, Engels and Kautsky about transforming the existing state so that the proletariat can use it to abolish capitalism is the abolition of standing army, and it's replacement with a people's militia.


Have you considered the possibility that Kautsky is the revisionist here?
After knowing what Marx and Engels wrote and then what Kautsky wrote, only an intellectually dishonest person can consider that a possiblity.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

After knowing what Marx and Engels wrote and then what Kautsky wrote, only an intellectually dishonest person can consider that a possiblity.
You're the only one here that deserves the title of intellectual dishonesty. You have not only failed to make your case, but you have consistently ignored the main arguments that I have put forth to you, while blathering on about how Kautskyism is the number one true Marxism (TM) for super-duper-reals!

Henceforth, I now consider you to be a troll. Every post that you make in this thread that does not actually respond to what I have said to you will only serve to underline this.

[Old Bolshie]

Sure, but if it's the Leninist saying this, it can also be said that it was tried and not only showed not to be effective, but failed miserably by producting state-capitalism that was more oppressive and exploitative then maket-capitalism.


Actually it was never tried and Lenin himself recognized it:

"There is no doubt that that measure should have been delayed until we could say, that we vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the state apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and Tsarist hotchpotch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been "busy" most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine."

V.I Lenin, Works, vol. 36, page 605.

[Tim Redd]

The Critique of the Gotha Program gave birth to the Erfurt Program, which Engels supported, and commenting on it excplicitly said "If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat". It is therefore perfectly clear that Marx and Engels did not abandon their position about participation in the election and gradual revolution. Meaning- Kautsky was a marxist, Lenin was a revisionst.

Democratic republic is not synonymous with elections and gradual revolution. Socialism the transitional form to communism is a democratic republic insofar as the masses are fully and sincerely engaged by the vanguard party to discuss, debate and participate in formulating policy. Certainly in all of this the masses vote in various elections, but that is only one aspect of democratic practices in a genuine socialist society.

[Remus Bleys]

Leninist factions
*sighs*
This is simply not fair. And you know it.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

*sighs*
This is simply not fair. And you know it.

Subvert and Destroy's whole argument against the transitional society is built on a ridiculous premise - "Marx said something, therefore people who say otherwise are silly." If Marx disagreed with something you're thinking, that's not something to lightly brush aside. On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves into thinking Marx was some kind of unquestionable prophet who indicated precisely what a revolution would look like. Critical, radical thought cannot be based on appeal to some long dead authority alone. Save that for people's prayer sessions. It's this kind of naive antirevisionism where any divergence from an original theorist is seen as dangerous, counterrevolutionary or reactionary.

[Tim Redd]

Subvert and Destroy's whole argument against the transitional society is built on a ridiculous premise - "Marx said something, therefore people who say otherwise are silly."And actually Marx wrote in "Marx to Weydemeyer In New York" that his key unique contribution to socialist theory was that the class struggle would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat which would be a transition society to communism with the abolition of classes. That is one of the main statements where many Marxists get our notion of socialism and that it's purpose is to abolish classes and eliminate the political state to usher in communism.

[Geiseric]

There's something called the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which also is known as a "workers state," which is in between capitalism and socialism. This thread is pretty rediculous. What do you expect to happen? World revolution in the same day? Otherwise there would by necessity be a workers state.

[Brotto Rühle]

Subvert and Destroy's whole argument against the transitional society is built on a ridiculous premise - "Marx said something, therefore people who say otherwise are silly." If Marx disagreed with something you're thinking, that's not something to lightly brush aside. On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves into thinking Marx was some kind of unquestionable prophet who indicated precisely what a revolution would look like. Critical, radical thought cannot be based on appeal to some long dead authority alone. Save that for people's prayer sessions. It's this kind of naive antirevisionism where any divergence from an original theorist is seen as dangerous, counterrevolutionary or reactionary.I agree with Marx's critique of political economy, therefore I am a dogmatic Marxist who thinks everything he says is correct and cannot be wrong... okay. I am not against the idea that a "transition" or "transformation" takes place, but against the notion that this means a new society, a new mode of production in between capitalism and socialism.

Try an actual argument against my positions besides "Look, he agrees with Marx!".


And actually somewhere Marx wrote (I think "Preface to a Critique of Political Economy") that his key unique contribution to socialist theory was that the class struggle would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat which would be a transition society to communism with the abolition of classes. That is one of the main statements where many Marxists get our notion of socialism and that it's purpose is to abolish classes and eliminate the political state to usher in communism.

Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat as a POLITICAL transition between the bourgeois state and statelessness, yes. Though, I challenge you to provide anything by Marx about a new mode of production.


There's something called the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which also is known as a "workers state," which is in between capitalism and socialism. This thread is pretty rediculous. What do you expect to happen? World revolution in the same day? Otherwise there would by necessity be a workers state.

This is based on the flawed notion that the economic is determined by the political. Your premise is that the minute the bourgeoisie no longer hold a juridical claim over the means of production, capitalism ceases to exist. This is wrong, in terms of Marx (god forbid I agree with him! How dogmatic of me!). Do you believe that coops are outside of the relations of capitalist production? Of value production?

[Five Year Plan]

Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat as a POLITICAL transition between the bourgeois state and statelessness, yes. Though, I challenge you to provide anything by Marx about a new mode of production.

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, which you describe as PURELY POLITICAL. Well, what did Marx have to say about it? That it "corresponded" to "the revolutionary transformation" of capitalism into communism.

Why would the dictatorship correspond to the period "between capitalist and communist society," when one is being transformed into the other, if the dictatorship of the proletariat did not have the economic function of presiding over that very transformation?

[Tim Redd]

There's something called the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which also is known as a "workers state," which is in between capitalism and socialism. This thread is pretty rediculous. What do you expect to happen? World revolution in the same day? Otherwise there would by necessity be a workers state.Actually the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism and that stands between capitalism and communism. The whole purpose of socialism is for revolutionary mass, class struggle to eliminate classes and once that is done worldwide the world will be communist where the political state will be no more.

[reb]

Subvert and Destroy's whole argument against the transitional society is built on a ridiculous premise - "Marx said something, therefore people who say otherwise are silly." If Marx disagreed with something you're thinking, that's not something to lightly brush aside. On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves into thinking Marx was some kind of unquestionable prophet who indicated precisely what a revolution would look like. Critical, radical thought cannot be based on appeal to some long dead authority alone. Save that for people's prayer sessions. It's this kind of naive antirevisionism where any divergence from an original theorist is seen as dangerous, counterrevolutionary or reactionary.

This is pretty ignorant. The whole idea of a "transitional society", as a development to the marxian understanding of revolution, came about as a response of the failed revolution in Russia. I don't think about half of the members of this forum, and I'm being generous here, could give a half ass marxian answer to the failure of the soviet union and in what ways that ideology used to enforce state power and capitalist relations because they're doing exactly of what you asking. Either we accept that yes, the soviet union was this thing called a "transitional society" and then try to formulate that using marxian methods resulting in a hugely distorted and corpulent ideology, or we return to good old fashioned marxian socialism and ask ourselves is this "transitional society" even a valid idea within the marxian framework.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Actually the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism and that stands between capitalism and communism. The whole purpose of socialism is for revolutionary mass, class struggle to eliminate classes and once that is done worldwide the world will be communist where the political state will be no more.
Socialism is not the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism is communism, albeit only the first stage of communism. Still, it is classless and stateless, but not yet the final stage of communism.

If socialism were synonymous with the proletarian dictatorship, why did Stalin only claim that the USSR was socialist long after 1917? Did he think that Russia wasn't a workers' state after the October Revolution?

[Czy]

Marx's works are not hagiologist in nature (boom, used a word I thought I'd never use!). Such a conception of Marxism is in fact very un-Marxist. The entire idea of Marxism is a compass to analyze society and capitalism, not a blueprint for a future society, not a crystal ball, and definitely not some sort of dogmatic, unimpeachable bible.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I agree with Marx's critique of political economy, therefore I am a dogmatic Marxist who thinks everything he says is correct and cannot be wrong... okay. I am not against the idea that a "transition" or "transformation" takes place, but against the notion that this means a new society, a new mode of production in between capitalism and socialism.

Try an actual argument against my positions besides "Look, he agrees with Marx!".


I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong - just that the argument provided for it doesn't compel me. I don't think an exegesis of Marx alone (and one that makes scant references to the reasons he gives in his theory) can answer these very substantial questions is all:


A mystical, unforeseen mode of production, a new society, that Marx was too simple to think about. :rolleyes:

What did Marx actually say? Marx said that a political transition, also known as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, would take place to oversee the transformation of capitalism into communism. What are the repercussions of such a statement? Those would have to be an understanding that a process occurs in which capitalist property relations are attacked and destroyed bit by bit, until the world revolution occurs to oversee the total abolition of these relations. The capitalist mode of production, minus in many cases the exploitation of the workers by the bourgeoisie, still exists in this society. The socialist mode has yet to be achieved, is unable to be achieved. Call it a transitional society if you will, but you have to come up with something better than the usual Trotskyist drivel.

I don't know if I disagree with your conclusion, and I imagine everyone on this forum has appealed to intellectual authority before, but I'd like to see the meat of Marx's argument as well as more evidence to back it up and not just an appeal to his position on the subject, especially if you're going to attack Trots for their "drivel".


This is pretty ignorant. The whole idea of a "transitional society", as a development to the marxian understanding of revolution, came about as a response of the failed revolution in Russia. I don't think about half of the members of this forum, and I'm being generous here, could give a half ass marxian answer to the failure of the soviet union and in what ways that ideology used to enforce state power and capitalist relations because they're doing exactly of what you asking. Either we accept that yes, the soviet union was this thing called a "transitional society" and then try to formulate that using marxian methods resulting in a hugely distorted and corpulent ideology, or we return to good old fashioned marxian socialism and ask ourselves is this "transitional society" even a valid idea within the marxian framework.

Again, I don't oppose the point S&D is trying to make, just that an exegesis of Marx alone can't answer these questions. Perhaps the Marxist framework can be modified? Perhaps it was only valid in the 19th century and not today? Perhaps Marx made a mistake? He certainly seems to have changed his views on certain issues over his life. He certainly didn't have empirical evidence of how a society might transition from a capitalist to a socialist society. It was all theoretical, hypothetical reasoning that was done prior to experience, and I think Marx was aware of the fact that his framework had very real limitations in that respect.

At the very least we need to look at more of his reasons for supporting this point of view to make any kinds of conclusive claims, and even then we face the very real empirical problem. Perhaps our own theory simply doesn't have room for whatever kinds of economic institutions the proletariat would need to set up to preserve its rule, grow the economy and create the conditions for socialism?


There's something called the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which also is known as a "workers state," which is in between capitalism and socialism. This thread is pretty rediculous. What do you expect to happen? World revolution in the same day? Otherwise there would by necessity be a workers state.


Except Subvert and Destroy is not saying that there isn't a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", he is just saying that the DotP is a type of Capitalism ruled by the Proletariat and not its own economic system. It is a form of Capitalism as it still has Capital, it is still based on relations of economic exchange, and it is fundamentally not "socialist". Thus, SD is saying, "Socialism" still needs more than just a few nationalizations and creations of working class "Soviets". It's a very different point than you think he's making.

I hope I'm not mischaracterizing his view but that's how I understand it.

[Brotto Rühle]

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, which you describe as PURELY POLITICAL. Well, what did Marx have to say about it? That it "corresponded" to "the revolutionary transformation" of capitalism into communism.Yes! A transformation...not a new mode of production. Dark to light, not dark to something that is neither to light.


Why would the dictatorship correspond to the period "between capitalist and communist society," when one is being transformed into the other, if the dictatorship of the proletariat did not have the economic function of presiding over that very transformation?Here's the exact quote:

"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." - Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Chapter 4

A transformation is not a transitional stage/mode of production.

[Five Year Plan]

Yes! A transformation...not a new mode of production. Dark to light, not dark to something that is neither to light.

Here's the exact quote:

"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." - Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Chapter 4

A transformation is not a transitional stage/mode of production.

The problem with what you're saying here is that you're implying that the people you're arguing against are saying that a transitional society is a "new mode of production." They aren't. They are saying exactly what Marx says the quote: that the society is "between capitalist and communist society," being neither fully capitalism nor socialism, which is the total negation of class processes altogether.

This brings us back to the initial point I was making before you kicked into talking point mode. The dictatorship of the proletariat corresponds to the transitional period when society is transforming from fully capitalist to socialist precisely because the dictatorship of the proletariat is performing the transformation. The dictatorship is not "just" political; it is integral the economic transformation of capitalist society, starting from the moment when the dictatorship assumes state power through ousting the dictatorship of capital. You keep talking about "base" and "superstructure" as though they are concretely made up of discrete and mutually exclusive phenomena. They aren't.

[Tim Redd]

There's something called the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which also is known as a "workers state," which is in between capitalism and socialism. This thread is pretty rediculous. What do you expect to happen? World revolution in the same day? Otherwise there would by necessity be a workers state.

I agree with you that a socialist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is required immediately after the seizure of power and for some time after as a transition. However, you ignore the term communism and that Marx identified that as the form of society to which dictatorship of the proletariat leads. Marx mentioned this as his unique contribution to socialist theory in "Marx to Weydemeyer In New York" (Marx's letter to Weydemeyer) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...s/52_03_05.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm).

[Tim Redd]

The problem with what you're saying here is that you're implying that the people you're arguing against are saying that a transitional society is a "new mode of production." They aren't. They are saying exactly what Marx says the quote: that the society is "between capitalist and communist society," being neither fully capitalism nor socialism, which is the total negation of class processes altogether.

By definition from Marx it is only communism where classes have been abolished. Socialism which is the transition between capitalism and communism still has classes and class processes. The point of socialism is to carry on a process to abolish classes and lead to communism with no classes.

To me socialism is a new mode of production. Under capitalism the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie own/control the means of production. With socialism, the socialists (engaging the masses) control the mode of production for the benefit of all classes except for the bourgeoisie. With communism where classes are abolished the socialists no longer control the means of production. Given this difference of socialism from both capitalism and communism, I tend to see socialism as a new and unique form of the means of production.

Edit: I now disavow that socialism is a new mode of production. See #126.

[Remus Bleys]

By definition from Marx it is only communism where classes have been abolished. Socialism which is the transition between capitalism and communism still has classes and class processes. The point of socialism is to carry on a process to abolish classes and lead to communism with no classes. Do you have a source for any of this?
And by definition, socialism is the abolition of classes, ie also classes.


To me socialism is a new mode of production. Under capitalism the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie own/control the means of production. With socialism, the socialists (engaging the masses) control the mode of production for the benefit of all classes except the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie. With communism where classes are abolished the socialists no longer control the means of production. Given this difference of socialism from both capitalism and communism, I tend to see socialsim as a new and unique form of the means of production.
Why?
Also, source for this?
Also what

[Thirsty Crow]

With socialism, the socialists (engaging the masses) control the mode of production for the benefit of all classes except the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie.
This is fundamentally confused.
Within the Marxist framework, it's mere nonsense to speak of a class controlling the means of production for the benefit of all classes - the point is to determine the basis for the existence of the ruling class, the way it organizes its rule and most importantly how it organizes the exploitation of the laboring class.
This general postulate follows from the examination of the histories of class societies - and the fundamental characteristic which they have historically shared in common is precisely class distinction in controlling and producing the surplus.

Apart from that, it is entirely unclear which social function, which class is represented by these "socialists" and for the benefit of which classes they do so - and how.

[Five Year Plan]

By definition from Marx it is only communism where classes have been abolished. Socialism which is the transition between capitalism and communism still has classes and class processes. The point of socialism is to carry on a process to abolish classes and lead to communism with no classes.

This is incorrect. Marx used the words socialism and communism interchangeably to describe a classless society. It was Lenin who tied the word socialism to what Marx called the lower phase of communism. Neither of them entertained the idea of the existence of classes under socialism or communism. If you can find a place where they did, I would certainly like to see it.


To me socialism is a new mode of production. Under capitalism the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie own/control the means of production. With socialism, the socialists (engaging the masses) control the mode of production for the benefit of all classes except the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie. With communism where classes are abolished the socialists no longer control the means of production. Given this difference of socialism from both capitalism and communism, I tend to see socialsim as a new and unique form of the means of production.

The notion that socialism is a different mode of production than communism is your own theory, not Marx's and not Lenin's.

[Tim Redd]

Do you have a source for any of this?
And by definition, socialism is the abolition of classes, ie also classes.

Why?
Also, source for this?
Also what

Socialism (the lower stage of communism) is the struggle to revolutionize society and that includes further socializing social relations and the elimination of classes so that the higher stage of communism that doesn't have classes can be reached. How can one expect classes, outmoded social relations and individualistic ideology among the masses and the socialist revolutionaries to be eliminated the day after revolution?

Also more on why socialism (lower communism) aka the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary comes from Marx in 2 places:

1) "Civil War in France" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/class-sf/ch03.htm):

"the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary Socialism, around Communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations."

2) "Marx to Weydemeyer In New York" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm):

"I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat;[1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm#n1) 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."

[Tim Cornelis]

Socialism (the lower stage of communism) is the struggle to revolutionize society and that includes further socializing social relations and the elimination of classes so that the higher stage of communism that doesn't have classes can be reached.

No it's not, that's the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A lower phase of communism is already a classless, moneyless society based on the free association of equals, cooperative labour, and distribution according to contribution using labour vouchers (these days, labour credits).


How can one expect classes, outmoded social relations and individualistic ideology among the masses and the socialist revolutionaries to be eliminated the day after revolution?

Because that's what the dictatorship of the proletariat does. Its very function is to smash class society. Once class society is smashed, we will enter what Marx called a low phase of communism, gradually moving toward a higher phase (according to Marx).

Capitalism -> DOTP -> lower phase -> higher phase


Also more on why socialism (lower communism) aka the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary comes from Marx himself in his correspondence, "Marx to Weydemeyer In New York":

"I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat;[1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm#n1) 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."

"Marx to Weydemeyer In New York"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm

What's written does not correspond to what you claim it says. It's a discussion of class dynamics and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nowhere does it mention that the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism or a lower phase of communism, that is solely your interpretation, and an interpretation contrary to Marx' own writings. I'm not saying that we need to follow Marx to the letter, but backing your own interpretation of Marxism by quoting Marx and then superimposing your interpretation is circular and wrong.

EDIT:


1) "Civil War in France" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/class-sf/ch03.htm):


"the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary Socialism, around Communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations."

The first sentence treats "revolutionary socialism" and "communism" as synonyms. The second sentence refers back to it by saying "this socialism", in other words "this revolutionary socialism, this communism". By that logic, communism is the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, should we replace "this socialism" with "communism" the sentence still works because communism is the movement for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of the proletariat is itself not communism.

EDIT II:


Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Critique of the Gotha Program.

So it's capitalism -> DOTP -> communism (including lower, middle, higher, super-higher advanced stages, whatever).

[Tim Redd]

This is incorrect. Marx used the words socialism and communism interchangeably to describe a classless society. It was Lenin who tied the word socialism to what Marx called the lower phase of communism. Neither of them entertained the idea of the existence of classes under socialism or communism. If you can find a place where they did, I would certainly like to see it.

"This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally..." from Marx "Class Struggle in France".

If the dictatorship of the proletariat is a *class* dictatorship (as Marx states) then socialism is a society and mode of production with classes.


The notion that socialism is a different mode of production than communism is your own theory, not Marx's and not Lenin's.

Above Marx states that socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a "transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally". A society where classes are abolished is communism.

Further if classes don't exist that is clearly a different socio-economic formation and mode of production from one where there do exist, as they exist in socialism as Marx states (since it is a class dictatorship of the proletariat).

[Five Year Plan]

"This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally..." from Marx "Class Struggle in France".

If the dictatorship of the proletariat is a *class* dictatorship (as Marx just said) in a transition to the abolition of class distinctions generally and the abolition of class distinctions generally is communism, then socialism is a society and mode of production with classes.



Apparently not. It is clearly Marx's idea as well.

Now let's see what Marx actually wrote there:


While this utopian, doctrinaire Socialism, which subordinates the total movement to one of its stages, which puts in place of common social production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in fantasy does away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its requirements by small conjurers' tricks or great sentimentality, while this doctrinaire Socialism, which at bottom only idealizes present society, takes a picture of it without shadows, and wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of present society; while the proletariat surrenders this Socialism to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another — the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary Socialism, around Communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.Clearly Marx is discussing "Socialism" as a movement, counterposing its "doctrinaire" and "utopian" variant to its revolutionary variant. He then goes on to say what this revolutionary socialist movement ("Socialism") represents: a revolutionary struggle to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, as opposed to "idealizing present society." This dictatorship, to quote him directly, is "the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally." What is a society in which all class distinctions have been abolished? Socialism.

The transit point to something is not the same as that something, comrade.

[Thirsty Crow]

Apparently not. It is clearly Marx's idea as well.
Of course it's not since the notion of the mode of production is crucial for Marx and nowhere is it thrown around like a catch phrase, but rather employed rigorously.
Speaking of which, I'm not aware of any clear identification of socialism as a separate mode of production, both from communism and capitalism, in Marx's works. Can you point out any such passage?
The quote from correspondence is miles away from any such huge, important theoretical assessment.
As for the quote from the Civil War in France, it's clear that the excerpt doesn't even begin to discuss the discrete, separate mode of production that is supposedly "socialism" - it doesn't even employ the concept of the mode of production for fuck's sake.

[Tim Redd]

Capitalism -> DOTP -> lower phase -> higher phase

So it's capitalism -> DOTP -> communism (including lower, middle, higher, super-higher advanced stages, whatever).

Except that nowhere in Marx or Engels do I read about lower and higher phases of communism. I only read (as I quote above) about capitalism-->dop (with classes)-->communism (without classes).

No lower and upper communism as separate modes of production. If you find those terms or anything like that in Marx and Engel's, please quote.

[Five Year Plan]

Of course it's not since the notion of the mode of production is crucial for Marx and nowhere is it thrown around like a catch phrase, but rather employed rigorously.
Speaking of which, I'm not aware of any clear identification of socialism as a separate mode of production, both from communism and capitalism, in Marx's works. Can you point out any such passage?
The quote from correspondence is miles away from any such huge, important theoretical assessment.
As for the quote from the Civil War in France, it's clear that the excerpt doesn't even begin to discuss the discrete, separate mode of production that is supposedly "socialism" - it doesn't even employ the concept of the mode of production for fuck's sake.


You are actually giving his attempts at argument too much credit. All this Tim Redd fellow has managed to do is to show where Marx says something about socialism, then says something else about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Tim Redd then deviates from the text completely in order to equate the two, something Marx doesn't do in any of the texts he quotes from, in order to claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism.

So in the end, all we're left with is Tim Redd arguing that the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism because Tim Redd says it is, backed by quotes that give the appearance of textual support, but which actually do nothing besides show Marx saying things about a dictatorship of the proletariat, and saying more things about "classless society" (socialism).

[Thirsty Crow]

Except that nowhere in Marx or Engels do I read about lower and higher phases of communism. I only read (as I quote above) about capitalism-->dop (with classes)-->communism (without classes).

No lower and upper communism (both of which are classless). If you find those terms or anything like that in Marx and Engel's, please quote.
Critique of the Gotha Programme.

And by the way, this is something quite different - inserting the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat in between capitalism and communism - than what you started out with.

[Thirsty Crow]

You are actually giving his attempts at argument too much credit.
Possibly.


...backed by quotes that give the appearance of textual support
Actually, I don't know about that.

From the quoted letter:


3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
(emphasis mine)

How could this be squared with the idea that this transition represents a separate mode of production is, to say the least, not very clear. One would be tempted to say that the passage actually says something completely the opposite.

[Five Year Plan]

Except that nowhere in Marx or Engels do I read about lower and higher phases of communism. I only read (as I quote above) about capitalism-->dop (with classes)-->communism (without classes).

No lower and upper communism (both of which are classless). If you find those terms or anything like that in Marx and Engel's, please quote

Try reading the first section of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program:


"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"What's odd is that you managed to mangle a perfectly straightforward but somewhat obscure quote from the Civil Wars in France. This tells me you got the quote, plus your interpretation from it, from some secondary source. I'd really suggest you reconsider your reliance upon that secondary source, because their interpretive abilities are poor.

[Five Year Plan]

How could this be squared with the idea that this transition represents a separate mode of production is, to say the least, not very clear. One would be tempted to say that the passage actually says something completely the opposite.

Well that's actually my point. Tim Redd is making a claim, saying he has textual support for it, then presents textual excerpts that say no such thing. The example you cited was a good illustration of this technique. Tim Redd cites Marx saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat represents a transition to communism, then somehow interprets that to say that socialism is a distinct mode of production from communism. It baffles the mind.

[Tim Redd]

1) "Civil War in France" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/class-sf/ch03.htm):


The first sentence treats "revolutionary socialism" and "communism" as synonyms. The second sentence refers back to it by saying "this socialism", in other words "this revolutionary socialism, this communism".

Point taken.

And I don't have a problem with what you say about communism evolving as long as you are not saying that the evolution involves changes in the mode of production, as long as you are not saying that the d.o.p. is classless and as long as you are not saying that communism (the mode of production) has classes.

[Tim Redd]

Try reading the first section of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program:

What's odd is that you managed to mangle a perfectly straightforward but somewhat obscure quote from the Civil Wars in France. This tells me you got the quote, plus your interpretation from it, from some secondary source. I'd really suggest you reconsider your reliance upon that secondary source, because their interpretive abilities are poor.

How do you justify such high handed prejudice? All you had to do was search the words in the the quote I provided to see that there was no mangling or reliance on some 2nd party. Uncomfortable as you might find it - it's a *direct* quote.

[Five Year Plan]

How do you justify such high handed prejudice? If you were the scholar you think you are, you would have simply clicked on the link and seen that there was no mangling or reliance on some 2nd party.

It's a *direct* quote. Geez.

Your direct quote doesn't say what you claim it does. That is a problem of yours, not a prejudice of mine.

You've claimed that Marx considered socialism to be a distinct mode of production from communism, yet the only quotes you've been able to provide have shown no such thing. In fact, one quote contained Marx using the two terms interchangeably (h/t Tim Cornelis).

You've claimed that Marx considered the dictatorship of the proletariat to be socialism, yet the only quotes you've been able to provide have shown no such thing. In fact, one quote you provided included Marx distinguishing between the dictatorship of the proletariat, a transition point on the way to a classless society, and the classless society itself.

You've asked where Marx talked about different phases of communism, and I promptly provided you with quotes where Marx discusses these distinct phases as a certain level of material abundance is achieved after all class distinctions and processes (including the dictatorship charged with overcoming them) have disappeared.

[Tim Cornelis]

Except that nowhere in Marx or Engels do I read about lower and higher phases of communism. I only read (as I quote above) about capitalism-->dop (with classes)-->communism (without classes).

No lower and upper communism as separate modes of production. If you find those terms or anything like that in Marx and Engel's, please quote.

Because the first and upper, lower, or middle, or advanced, or immature phase or stage of communism are not separate modes of production. That's the whole point.


In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!


these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

I think it's significant though that some/many Marxists have fetishised these comments and now speak of the first-phase of communism and the higher-phase of communism, as if clear cut demarcated and distinct societies. I think Marx' comments are far more nuanced than that. The first phase of communism is the initial developments of communist society as it emerges from capitalism, and can hence be called "the". But a higher stage of communism is not clearly defined, hence "a". It's 'a more advanced' stage of development, but not a distinct society. The differences are gradual and incremental, rather than abrupt and distinguishable.

They are not two distinct modes of production, they are the same mode of production and variations thereof.

[Tim Redd]

Tim Redd cites Marx saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat represents a transition to communism, then somehow interprets that to say that socialism is a distinct mode of production from communism. It baffles the mind.

Sure the dictatorship of the proletariat is a distinct mode of production from communism. If as Marx says it is a "*class* dictatorship of the proletariat" and as we all know communism is classless then *obviously* they are *distinct* modes of production.

They are distinct if we are to have any understanding of mode of production that makes any sense. We understand from Marx and other political economists that the relations of production are the other major component of the mode of production along with the forces of production. If that is case then certainly the existence of classes during the dictatorship of the proletariat as Marx states means that the mode of production during the dictatorship of the proletariat is *distinct* (as in 180 degrees different) from classless communism. That doesn't mean the proletariat is exploited overall, because it is the proletariat that holds political dictatorship.

[Five Year Plan]

Sure the dictatorship of the proletariat is a distinct mode of production from communism. If as Marx says it is a "*class* dictatorship of the proletariat" and as we all know communism is classless then *obviously* they are *distinct* modes of production.

They are distinct if we are to have any understanding of mode of production that makes any sense. We understand from Marx and other political economists that the relations of production are the other major component of the mode of production along with the forces of production. If that is case then certainly the existence of classes during the dictatorship of the proletariat as Marx states means that the mode of production during the dictatorship of the proletariat is *distinct* (as in 180 degrees different) from classless communism. That doesn't mean the proletariat is exploited overall, because it is the proletariat that holds political dictatorship.

Marx and Engels describe the dictatorship of the proletariat as a political form appropriate for the working class to hash out its own emancipation through the overcoming of value relations and the full supression of all residual capitalist class processes and social relations. This means that it is a political regime that has the economic function of transitioning from one mode of production, capitalism, to another, communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat itself is not a "mode of production."

[Tim Redd]

Because the first and upper, lower, or middle, or advanced, or immature phase or stage of communism are not separate modes of production. That's the whole point.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

They are not two distinct modes of production, they are the same mode of production and variations thereof.

Yes Marx in what you quote distinguishes a higher communism from other stages, or phases. However undoubtedly and many places Marx and Engels refer to the dictatorship of the proletariat as the requisite transition form between capitalism and either classless or communist society. The fact they refer to the dictatorship of a class, the proletariat, and that Marx calls it one place the "class dictatorship of the proletariat" makes it clear to me that the transition is a class society and that it is a different mode of production from communism which is a classless society (per my above recent post).

[Tim Redd]

The dictatorship of the proletariat itself is not a "mode of production."

True and here I back off my earlier contention that dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily means the existence of classes, or is a distinct mode of production. I'll agree with, aufheben that it should primarily be approached as a political phenomenon. Overall it is a revolutionary political effort to transition from capitalism to the realization of communism. Related to this, I'm clear that the a term like the "socialist stage" signifies not a mode of production or mix of modes of production, but rather is simply synonymous with the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a political phenomenon.

However I continue to maintain that the dictatorship of the proletariat is often associated with class modes of production, especially when it is initially established and that typically it confronts the key task among others of abolishing classes.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has had in the past, and will more often than not before socialist revolution is common worldwide have, the capitalist mode of production with classes operating within it. The dictatorship of the proletariat has so far when it existed in Russia and China contained class based commodity production as well as socialist revolutionary based production, where the means of production are owned and controlled by society as whole, excluding the bourgeoisie. A key effort, despite the poor eventual outcome, of the Russian and Chinese transition societies was to abolish commodity production and bring about the full realization of classless communist production. Of course capitalism was restored in Russia at the least after Stalin died if not before and in China when Mao died.

It's likely that the day after the seizure of power commodity based production will still be carried out by most small and medium sized firms. However, the proletariat will immediately seize large and especially monopoly firms. Down the road I can see where even after the small and medium sized firms have been converted to full social ownership, capitalism may still exist in other countries, or the society will not be fully revolutionized in terms of people's outlook, or in terms of relations amongst the people (racism, sexism, etc.) and therefore require the continued existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In that case there will be a single mode of production with no classes, but the political dictatorship of the proletariat will still be in place. Once whichever of the outstanding issues I listed are resolved the proletariat can then abolish the political state, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the society will be fully communist - not only no classes in the mode of production, but no political state either.

However my point remains that the dictatorship of the proletariat can and and likely will, for a while in most revolutions before revolution sweeps the world, contain capitalist relations of production and thus classes within them when they are initially created.

---
"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm)

[Five Year Plan]

True and here I back off my earlier contention that dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily means the existence of classes, or is a distinct mode of production.

I think you are correct to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat means the existence of classes, which is precisely why it dies out when the communist mode of production is achieved (either in its lower, socialist form, or in its higher form). It is only necessary for as long as capitalist class processes continue to exist either domestically or internationally, which means that socialism has not been attained.

[Tim Redd]

I think you are correct to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat means the existence of classes, which is precisely why it dies out when the communist mode of production is achieved (either in its lower, socialist form, or in its higher form).

We seem to be switching the different respective positions we each held earlier. Earlier you stressed the political character of the dop and I made it hinge on the existence of classes. Now I stress its political character and you on the other hand are now agreeing with my former position that the dop mainly hinged mainly upon whether or not classes exist in the mode of production. For the reasons I gave in my last post above, I now disavow that. To me the dop is mainly about carrying out the mission of the political transition between capitalism and communism and I gave 2 cases in may last above post where classes may not exist in the mode of production, but the dop is still required.


It is only necessary for as long as capitalist class processes continue to exist either domestically or internationally, which means that socialism has not been attained.The existence of classes covers the first 2 cases for which I said the dop should continue to exist, but not the 3rd and 4th cases. It is very possible that even though classes do not exist domestically or internationally, that the society is still not fully revolutionized in terms of people's outlook, or in terms of relations amongst the people (racism, sexism, etc.) and therefore the continued existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat is required. It's quite possible to have no classes in the economic sphere, in the mode of production, and still have these 2 things exist in the the society.

What kind of communism would that be to have these things occurring? No, they must be resolved and the society fully revolutionized and that is why the dop would still be required until they are eliminated. Their elimination would require an ongoing cultural or other kind of politco-social revolution, led by the vanguard proletarian political force with it fully engaging and mobilizing the masses in the revolution as well.

My position looks at the dop mainly from an overall political view and doesn't base the state of the revolution on a mechanistic economic view as would be the case by making the continued existence of the dop hinge soley upon whether or not classes exist in the mode of production.

Marx and Engels always placed politics in command when considering an issue - including when considering issues that have to do with economics.

---
"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm)

[Tim Redd]

From Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme - Chapter 1

"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

Here Marx defines a higher phase of communist society with the absence of various bad phenomena from capitalism. Marx mentions various defects in the "first phase of communism". It seems the only way to get rid of defects existing in the "first phase of communism" is via the dictatorship of the proletariat (dotp) as a transition. That is why I posit that the "first phase of communism" as synonymous with the dotp.

And this first phase of communism with the dotp, I have no trouble calling the socialist phase. However the main thing is establishing that the first phase of communism as it has just emerged from capitalism will exist and it will exist with the dotp to move society to the higher phase of communism.

[Nihilism]

Trying to read through this whole thread. The amount of Dogmatism among some Leftists is very disconcerting.

Can we think critically about issues without falling back on "Marx said this so it must be true"? Kind of reminds me of "The Bible says this so it must be true"

Marx this, Lenin that, Stalin hit me with a wiffle ball bat.

Can we not take any good idea and expand on it? Can we not reject any idea outright without thinking about it critically because it disagrees with Marx or Lenin?

[Die Neue Zeit]

No it's not, that's the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A lower phase of communism is already a classless, moneyless society based on the free association of equals, cooperative labour, and distribution according to contribution using labour vouchers (these days, labour credits).


Marx this, Lenin that, Stalin hit me with a wiffle ball bat.

Can we not take any good idea and expand on it? Can we not reject any idea outright without thinking about it critically because it disagrees with Marx or Lenin?

For all this debate here, I'm very tempted to say that the left should advocate grabbing and redefining to some extent the Brezhnev-era term "developed socialism."

I think a more useful question for debate is this:

Does the working class need "developed socialism" (based on orthodox Marxist frameworks of "socialism" in the Second International era) before entering the lower phase of the communist mode of production (based on "Late Marx")?

Note to mods: Why isn't this thread merged with the Theory thread poll on the same subject?