Why is "Socialism In One Country" impossible?

[argeiphontes]

Why is SIOC impossible? Wasn't this just a convenient excuse on Lenin's part to justify Bolshevik totalitarianism and lack of moving forward?

[Red_Banner]

Because even if you could achieve socialism in one country, it would constantly be under attack by reactionaries.

It isn't feasible.

Don't you have Lenin confused with Stalin?

[argeiphontes]

Actually, I think I have Lenin confused with Trotsky. From this article (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/guardian/pt03.htm) it seems Lenin only claimed that "final" victory is impossible.

That makes it worse, actually, because in that case, Lenin believed he had or was about to achieve socialism. Seems he had a different definition than I do.

edit: And I don't see how Russia's situation can be generalized into a nonempirical axiom that something is "impossible."

[Blake's Baby]

Because socialism is a classless communal society without states or borders.

So having that in one place doesn't make sense, because if it's 'in one country' it has states and borders, and because of differential access to property (inside and out) it also has classes even if everything is collectivised internally. For the same reason it isn't 'communal' as non-members of the community don't get a share.

Socialism in one country is impossible, because socialism by definition is global.

[argeiphontes]

That's basically what I thought, it's only impossible by that definition. I'll take my non-global socialism in one country now, thanks. ;)

Note that it's a convenient definition for the Soviet Union, and an excuse for inaction for the rest of us. It makes the goal impossible in any reasonable time. We can all go home now and support reformist trade unions. ;)

[Blake's Baby]

I have no idea what you're talking about. If you agree that the Soviet Union wasn't socialism 'by that definition', what was it?

[argeiphontes]

What I meant was, the definition of socialism you posted includes the world-revolution part. So, by definition it has to be international.

Whereas, I think socialism/communism is just a socioeconomic system, that can be implemented on any level where it's empirically feasible. It's just an empirical question to me whether or not SIOC is possible or not.

edit: The SU was a state-capitalist dictatorship IMO.

[Geiseric]

The soviet union had a planned economy which acted kinda like a bubble where profiting wasn't the priority in an ocean of capitalism, which is what made the industrialization possible since the state was in ownership of the entire economy. It wasn't capitalist since the investments made mostly into heavy industry wouldn't of been possible to profit off of, seeing as they were only made in the first place during the 5 year plan which had to form collective farms utilizing modern technology.

But as we see from the collapse of the fSU which in large part was due to the IMF, SioC isn't possible. Especially in a country like Russia which was still struggling with things like literacy and chronic food shortages.

[argeiphontes]

But as we see from the collapse of the fSU which in large part was due to the IMF, SioC isn't possible.


That's one historical example. Whether the SU was communist or capitalist, that's not the only influence there was on its survival. Therefore, to conclude from that one example that SIOC is impossible is a fallacy. If somebody took that logic to its full extent, they could conclude that socialism was impossible, because it had never been achieved anywhere except for brief periods of time (even if 80 yrs). Which I believe is clearly wrong.

I'm not interested in the SU per se, only why socialism in one country isn't possible. What's the mechanism at work that makes it impossible? If it's just something people at the time (Lenin, Trotsky, whoever) asserted, and people are basing their opinions just on that, then it's an appeal to authority and not a real reason. This is what I think is happening.

(Blake's Baby is appealing to the definition of socialism, about which I disagree, but if I did agree it would be a real reason. (I think ;) )

edit: If the IMF is going to make SIOC impossible, then that's just a conjecture about the future which may or may not be true. Why would a socialist country be appealing to the IMF in the first place?

[Blake's Baby]

Well, if you define socialism the way I define 'non-socialism' (actually a form of capitalism), then sure, 'capitalist experiments in one country are possible'.

[Tim Cornelis]

I would say that socialism in one country is not impossible, but improbable. This, I should remark, is a hypothesis based on observations, but I can't exactly verify it. I would describe this hypothesis as follows:

Capital imposes its logic and dynamics unto all its relations. Since no country or region can be self-sufficient it will need to maintain trade and exchange externally. The bigger these external relations through monetary-commodity exchange, the more likely that commercialisation follows. Twin Oaks, trying to apply socialism in one tiny community, is compelled to uphold commercial principles because of these external relations. Given that it is a tiny community it is completely usurped by commercialism. The same goes for Marinaleda or the Kibbutzim.The larger the territory, the less of a stranglehold capital may hold over it. Ultimately, to safeguard socialised production, commerce has to be eradicated globally though.

[argeiphontes]

I don't think it adds anything essential to socialism to say it has to be global. It only has to be global if there is some practical reason for that, which I don't see.

International interference can be struggled against like anything else. We're seeing this in Venezuela now, and it hasn't really crashed whatever system they think they're imposing. The biggest problem for them is domestic control of striking capitalists who are causing artificial shortages. They're thinking of expropriating them for this, which could be a solution. Those are empirical problems though.

I don't think there'd be much international interference if the United States became socialist. The power of its military and intelligence apparatus would mitigate anything like that, and there'd probably be great sighs of relief in Latin American and other places affected by US capitalist imperialism. In any case, the US isn't 1917 Russia.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

You can't just 'institute' an economic system. No economy hitherto has ever been closed. No country has ever been fully, and successfully, self-reliant. Even those that claim to be are subject to external, world market factors.

History has shown us that economic systems are not mere ideology; rather than a bit of social democracy in one country, some fascism in another country, and a bit of neoconservatism in one country, an economic system (i'm thinking of slavery and its associated modes, feudalism, capitalism, and a post-capitalist economic system) is far greater than that. The complexity involved in the terminal decay of one economic system and its subjugation by a new economic system is such that it cannot simply be 'instituted in one country'. When that happens, that country tends not to do so well, because it is in effect a new system surrounded by a world of capital. Much the same happened to the Italian city-states of the 11th century, an early experiment in capitalism and banking that in the end failed because the feudal nobility, around much of Europe, were easily strong enough to crush it. Similarly, the USSR in the 1910s and 1920s had no hope of overthrowing an entire economic system within the confines of their own economy - their somewhat under-developed, peasant-based economy had not even 'mastered' capitalism yet, what hope did they realistically have of actually defeating the forces of capital and instituting a system of socialism?

Socialism has to be global or it won't succeed. And by global, I don't necessarily mean that in the literal sense - but it needs to be big enough in scale that the working class forces pushing a socialist revolution are strong enough, worldwide, to defeat the forces of capital on a global scale.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I don't think there'd be much international interference if the United States became socialist. The power of its military and intelligence apparatus would mitigate anything like that, and there'd probably be great sighs of relief in Latin American and other places affected by US capitalist imperialism. In any case, the US isn't 1917 Russia.

China owns most of the US. If the US became socialist, you can sure as hell bet that the chinese would bomb the country back into the capitalist ages.

Edit: and given that the dollar is the world's reserve currency, I imagine that actually the interference would certainly be international in character! Don't be so naive!

[Thirsty Crow]

I would say that socialism in one country is not impossible, but improbable. This, I should remark, is a hypothesis based on observations, but I can't exactly verify it. I would describe this hypothesis as follows:

Capital imposes its logic and dynamics unto all its relations. Since no country or region can be self-sufficient it will need to maintain trade and exchange externally. The bigger these external relations through monetary-commodity exchange, the more likely that commercialisation follows. Twin Oaks, trying to apply socialism in one tiny community, is compelled to uphold commercial principles because of these external relations. Given that it is a tiny community it is completely usurped by commercialism. The same goes for Marinaleda or the Kibbutzim.The larger the territory, the less of a stranglehold capital may hold over it. Ultimately, to safeguard socialised production, commerce has to be eradicated globally though.There is also the political aspect to the forces which impose commodification you describe.

With looming pressure from the rest of the capitalist world, and the need for a comprehensive militarization, it is most likely that political forms would develop which would hamper grassroots initiative and ultimately class power - resulting in the formation of a hybrid capitalist class which doesn't base its rule on individual private property. That's not even to mention the improbability of the social and economic developments such as shortening the working day and comprehensive education campaigns which could develop as the measure of the abolition of division of labor into mental and manual (which is also a political division). Finally, I think that this isolation is also conducive to the development of nationalism as it would be necessary probably insofar as we are dealing with national competition here (and especially as the function of securing the bases for that militarization I mentioned).

[argeiphontes]

Since no country or region can be self-sufficient it will need to maintain trade and exchange externally.

I don't really believe that. (Not saying that world revolution is unhelpful, but I think that is even less likely than SIOC unless we're talking about some time in the "Star Trek future."

First of all, something on the scale of the US can be self-sufficient, though not Twin Oaks, there's a huge difference of scale. And of kind, too, because on the one hand it's just one coop, on the other hand you'd have a nationwide system of coordination among thousands of them, all with access to different resources that could be traded.

Second of all, I think some capitalists would "sell you the rope to hang them with", though some would go on strike of course, like in Venezuela. (Not saying V. is socialist, just that it's facing similar international pressure.)

[argeiphontes]

You can't just 'institute' an economic system.

I envision a transitional period that would include commerce (though with increasing coordination and nonmonetary trades) and could last several generations. I don't think of 'revolution' as one great Ragnarok between labor and capital.

[Thirsty Crow]

I don't really believe that. (Not saying that world revolution is unhelpful, but I think that is even less likely than SIOC unless we're talking about some time in the "Star Trek future."

First of all, something on the scale of the US can be self-sufficient, though not Twin Oaks, there's a huge difference of scale. And of kind, too, because on the one hand it's just one coop, on the other hand you'd have a nationwide system of coordination among thousands of them, all with access to different resources that could be traded.

Second of all, I think some capitalists would "sell you the rope to hang them with", though some would go on strike of course, like in Venezuela. (Not saying V. is socialist, just that it's facing similar international pressure.)
Self-sufficient in what way?

Are there massive reserves of natural resources? If not, then it's rationing (most probably viable as a bureaucratic measure imposed by a bourgeois state draped in the red flag) or severe cut down on the production of stuff that depends on the resources that are not available. Or the development of commodity production, which is the basis of capitalism.

Are there enough natural bases for food production? What would a necessary intensification of agricultural production do to the environment (necessary since this autarky scenarion actually calls for intensified agricultural production if it is not to engage in commodity production)? What about nutritional components which aren't immediately subject to production in the socialist US? Again, what of the necessity for commodity relations?

And finally, does this autarkic scenarion not presuppose a good probability for a withdrawal of the American working class from militant support for their brothers and sisters worldwide, since class struggle this way gets shifted to the level of national competition in a way - and continued trade with the rest of the capitalist world, and the rope that this provides capital with to hang around American workers' necks, would surely be the grounds for a kind of a peaceful co-existence doctrine in the US? But what of that need for militarization I mentioned, how would it co-exist with the simultaneous drive towards pacifying imperialism because of the need for trade?

Promoting autarky is actually a massive step back, I think.

[Tim Cornelis]

I don't really believe that. (Not saying that world revolution is unhelpful, but I think that is even less likely than SIOC unless we're talking about some time in the "Star Trek future."

First of all, something on the scale of the US can be self-sufficient, though not Twin Oaks, there's a huge difference of scale. And of kind, too, because on the one hand it's just one coop, on the other hand you'd have a nationwide system of coordination among thousands of them, all with access to different resources that could be traded.

Second of all, I think some capitalists would "sell you the rope to hang them with", though some would go on strike of course, like in Venezuela. (Not saying V. is socialist, just that it's facing similar international pressure.)

First, if you have trade between cooperatives or communities that's not socialistic. If you mean 'share' then your point stands. Nevertheless, the US can't be self-sufficient, even less countries like the Netherlands or Greece.

If you think that any country can be self-sufficient then I think you're seriously underestimating the complexity of contemporary commodity production.

Let's take one elementary commodity necessary for technology advanced economic and social conduct, a battery. A required raw material for batteries is lithium. Lithium is found in:

http://www.siteselection.com/theEnergyReport/2011/aug/images/LithiumMap.jpg

The US has lithium (though by no means all of the US, most hypothetical proto-socialist communities in the US would not possess it), but Greece and the Netherlands do not. They can't forgo on it, so they need exchange.

The US lacks plenty of other raw materials though. I just googled three random raw materials necessary or used in the manufacturing of electronics, bauxite, nickel, and chromium. The US possesses none of those raw materials.

[Entfremdung]

Because socialism is a classless communal society without states or borders.

So having that in one place doesn't make sense, because if it's 'in one country' it has states and borders, and because of differential access to property (inside and out) it also has classes even if everything is collectivised internally. For the same reason it isn't 'communal' as non-members of the community don't get a share.

Socialism in one country is impossible, because socialism by definition is global.

You're describing Communism, not Socialism.

[argeiphontes]

Are there massive reserves of natural resources?


My guess is that there's enough to go around. International division of labor is a capitalist or mercantilist phenomenon anyway. Some things that aren't produced domestically could be produced again. It's time to move beyond oil anyway, but Texas is full of the crap.



If not, then it's rationing (most probably viable as a bureaucratic measure imposed by a bourgeois state draped in the red flag) or severe cut down on the production of stuff that depends on the resources that are not available. Or the development of commodity production, which is the basis of capitalism.


I don't see how the development of commodity production saves the place from rationing or other shortages. Shortages are the lack of stuff, regardless whether the stuff has the nature of commodities or not.



And finally, does this autarkic scenarion not presuppose a good probability for a withdrawal of the American working class from militant support for their brothers and sisters worldwide, since class struggle this way gets shifted to the level of national competition in a way - and continued trade with the rest of the capitalist world, and the rope that this provides capital with to hang around American workers' necks, would surely be the grounds for a kind of a peaceful co-existence doctrine in the US?


Well, that's beyond the scope of my question because I'm not talking ethics, just possibilities.



Promoting autarky is actually a massive step back, I think.

It's realpolitik. :) It's one step closer to real possibility rather than a far-off dream, as I see it.

[Thirsty Crow]

It's realpolitik. :) It's one step closer to real possibility rather than a far-off dream, as I see it.
Only because you don't engage the points raised and quite frankly, dismiss some of those on ridiculous grounds (such as the one about alleged "ethics" - while it's not about that, but class politics).


My guess is that there's enough to go around.
Tim has shown this to be naively optimistic, and wildly inaccurate.


I don't see how the development of commodity production saves the place from rationing or other shortages. Shortages are the lack of stuff, regardless whether the stuff has the nature of commodities or not.Because distribution and consumption based on commodity production, ergo capital and wage labor, is the most probable way that would not include distribution by rationing (think "war communism" in Russia).

And finally, class politics and militant internationalism should be the realpolitik which is dreamed about by many here.

[argeiphontes]

@LinksRadical:

Huh? How is saying that we should join the struggle of our brothers and sisters abroad not an ethical mandate? Why should I care about the class politics of others unless I either beg the question I raised about SIOC, or conclude that there is an ethical mandate to do so? Since I don't accept the premise of SIOC, it's not necessary for me to care about other people's class politics. (Even though I do, because ethics is important to me personally.)

The real problem is that I don't agree with some people's visions of revolution or transition. You've set yourselves an impossible and unmaterialistic task and then become pessimistic about why everybody isn't jumping to fulfill it.



I envision a transitional period that would include commerce (though with increasing coordination and nonmonetary trades) and could last several generations. I don't think of 'revolution' as one great Ragnarok between labor and capital.


Why can't this transitional state be what's struggled for internationally, while having been started or finished in one country? Then you can still make lithium batteries while you wait for Bolivia to catch up, if you can't replace the technology overnight.

[argeiphontes]

Because distribution and consumption based on commodity production, ergo capital and wage labor, is the most probable way that would not include distribution by rationing (think "war communism" in Russia).

That's just rationing via high prices. It doesn't increase the amount of stuff available to ration.

[Thirsty Crow]

@LinksRadical:
Huh? How is saying that we should join the struggle of our brothers and sisters abroad not an ethical mandate?Go back and think about what Tim, and I, posted about autarky today and its perspectives. Pay extra attention to Tim's last post. Then you should be able to realize that this is not an ethical question.


The real problem is that I don't agree with some people's visions of revolution or transition. You've set yourselves an impossible and unmaterialistic task and then become pessimistic about why everybody isn't jumping to fulfill it.
You're confused.
Yeah, the task is enormous. But probably the only way forward if we don't wish to remain trapped in the cycle of revolution - creation of a development state based on capital - breakdown of said state. I think this needs to be broken from, and that worldwide revolution is the basis for a sustainable post-capitalist society, unlike those forms of political revolution plus modified capitalism.

As for what the hell you mean by "unmaterialistic", I don't know. You seem very confused about materialism when you use such notions in this way.

[argeiphontes]

As for what the hell you mean by "unmaterialistic", I don't know.

There's no basis for it. People operate on the basis of tangible, available, material alternatives, not grandiose schemes for world revolution. Therefore, action should take those positions into account. That's materialistic.

It's really easy to test--go to your neighborhood bar and start talking about the revolution. Then check your work against the Marcuse quote in my signature.

[Blake's Baby]

You're describing Communism, not Socialism.

The fact that Lenin doesn't know what 'socialism' means, and passed this deficiency on to his children, is not the issue. If you'd bothered to read the rest of the thread you'd have realised that the definition of 'socialism' is not the issue here.


Well, if you define socialism the way I define 'non-socialism' (actually a form of capitalism), then sure, 'capitalist experiments in one country are possible'.

So as long as socialism isn't socialism as I define it, then it is possible. But you my as well admit it's 'capitalism in one country' that Stalin was talking about.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Social Democracy - state welfare with capital investment and trade, money, and the existence of countries and classes, all presided over by the 'communist party' - is very much possible in one country.

But Socialism - that idea for an economic system we have that is a revolutionary break from capital, from the idea of the nation state, from the idea of the existence of classes and from the bondage of money and wage labour - that is absolutely not possible in one country. Resource limits mean trade becomes necessary. To trade with capitalist nations you need capital. The only way to maintain a stock of capital over time is to accumulate capital (since capital depreciates over time, you must accumulate a certain amount of capital just to keep the same stock of capital over time). How do you accumulate capital? Through surplus, which is accrued through profit-making activities, i.e. the exploitation of one class (us) by another class (the ruling bastards).

I don't know why this is so controversial? It seems quite a basic point to me, unless when you say 'socialism', you really mean 'social democracy'.

[argeiphontes]

I don't know why this is so controversial?

Apparently it's not. I sincerely regret posting this thread and I'll use better discretion in the future.

As for social democracy, it seems to me that that's only one model for what's possible, and it's not really a step toward communism, it's just reformist, so I would never support or work toward something like that. That's for Ralph Nader to fight for. ;)

Anyway, Peace Boss.

[Thirsty Crow]

There's no basis for it.Only in your imagination. Or lack of understanding.
The common basis is capital and its development - which subjects the national working classes to conditions which are the same in nature.

Another basis is the international work of communists and international contacts by workers' organizations, and ultimately international struggle (you can observe the historical example of the international revolutionary wave that swept over good parts of Europe close to the end of WW1).

Yet another basis is the recognition of the ultimate improbability of a sustainable communist society on a national level. We dealt with this, and you didn't respond. So take your time and think about it.

The fact that you are intimidated, and probably demoralized by open and honest statements of the enormity and difficulty of the task at hand, is quite another matter. Just don't assume that this is equal to a pragmatic, down-to-earth approach. It is in fact a distortion of any practical approach. That is, if your politics is in fact pro-revolutionary and communist, and not a version of the politics of modified capitalism.



People operate on the basis of tangible, available, material alternatives, not grandiose schemes for world revolution.If this presupposes that national politics, confined to one nation, are "tangible" and an "available, material alternative", then it is by no means clear why is it that you self-identify as revolutionary and not a social democrat or a kind of a reformist. But, of course, this immediatism is the exact opposite of a vision of the alternative grounded in a rigorous materialist understanding of how capital operates and what flows from this for the global working class.

And your use of the term "materialist" is highly idiosyncratic, one would say openly polemical - and wrong. Designed to discredit the opposing view, without noticing the distortion it actually does to the very concept of materialism.


It's really easy to test--go to your neighborhood bar and start talking about the revolution. Then check your work against the Marcuse quote in my signature.You're awfully confused.

Materialism, as in an analysis of the present configuration of social forces and its potential development, isn't tested by people talking about something in a bar. It is tested by facing theses with what the world is actually like.

What you really want to do here is again discredit the position you're arguing against - without bothering to engage it's very tangible and real points - by trying to make it sound unscientific. But here you're actually referring to the probability of success of a given propaganda position among the working class. Surely, this is shifting the goalpost, as I never said it is obvious, or apparent, that the understanding I promote will be easily translated into political attitudes and that the working class is just dying to uphold internationalist positions.

But guess what? It's a characteristic of bourgeois ideologues to approach matters of politics with this kind of stuff - will my propaganda actually pass and take hold, better make sure it does - in mind.

Honestly, the more we discuss things the more you come off, frankly, as an impatient kid who wishes to find shortcuts and easy solutions at all cost. Even at the cost of actually understanding the world. This is miles away from a productive attitude pro-revolutionaries ought to take.


Apparently it's not. I sincerely regret posting this thread and I'll use better discretion in the future.

And the defensive attitude. You'd do yourself a favor and drop it and actually engage the argument. And probably to stop thinking that when people develop a polemical attitude in an argument, it is your "revolutionary cred" at stake or some kind of a personal thing.

[Red_Banner]

The fact that Lenin doesn't know what 'socialism' means, and passed this deficiency on to his children, is not the issue. If you'd bothered to read the rest of the thread you'd have realised that the definition of 'socialism' is not the issue here.



So as long as socialism isn't socialism as I define it, then it is possible. But you my as well admit it's 'capitalism in one country' that Stalin was talking about.


Lenin didn't have any children. :)

[Sea]

The fact that Lenin doesn't know what 'socialism' means, and passed this deficiency on to his children, is not the issue. If you'd bothered to read the rest of the thread you'd have realised that the definition of 'socialism' is not the issue here.But Uncle Joe, who was one of Papa Lenin's kids, inherited this "deficient" definition. Therefore, by talking about socialism, you're talking about something different than what Uncle Joe was talking about when he talked about SOIC, which is, obviously, an absurd way to conduct an argument. Therefore I ask that you humor us Leninists for the time being.

Lenin, BTW, wasn't the first to use socialism to describe something more akin to the DOTP than communism. I'm not sure who started it all, but I think I remember reading something from Papa Engels where the term is used in this deficient manner. I could be wrong though.

[Thirsty Crow]

But Uncle Joe, who was one of Papa Lenin's kids, inherited this "deficient" definition. Therefore, by talking about socialism, you're talking about something different than what Uncle Joe was talking about when he talked about SOIC, which is, obviously, an absurd way to conduct an argument. Therefore I ask that you humor us Leninists for the time being.

Lenin, BTW, wasn't the first to use socialism to describe something more akin to the DOTP than communism. I'm not sure who started it all, but I think I remember reading something from Papa Engels where the term is used in this deficient manner. I could be wrong though.Papa Joe postulated the existence of the non-anatagonistic classes, and therefore the existence of a class society which is really and importantly classless.

Care to elaborate on this magical social development and equally magical terminological innovation?

[Q]

This is a good thread, a question worth asking and delving into.

I agree with Red Banner and others that make the point that socialism in one country would be quickly targeted by the international state pecking order. In my blogpost here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=18836) I described a highly likely scenario for a small to medium-sized country, but even large countries would be targeted.

The second reason was well pointed out by Tim Cornelis in his lithium example. The world's resources are very unequally divided. This is not only the case with minerals, but with many products. Such inequality would then force some kind of market mechanism for lack of a globally planned system.

The third reason, which is closely linked to the second and first, is that the division of labour is truly happening at a global scale. From this angle it would be positively harmful to call for the nationalisation of the biggest 100 companies (or whatever) in a national context, since it would often mean cutting up companies, that often work on a global scale, along national lines. This would immensely cripple them and possibly make them altogether useless.

Fourthly, and again linked to the previous three, the working class is increasingly becoming a global class. This process comes with all kinds of contradictions, like living in a national political context, but the process which is forced by the nature of capitalism is there. This might not be directly seen though as the working class, as a class in itself is a slave class under capitalism, apathetic and only occasionally militant. It is the task of communists to strive towards unity on a global level, by giving our class a political agenda: To emancipate itself, and thereby humanity, from the shackles of slavery.

So no, communists aren't internationalists just because of some arbitrary definition (safe for those who are ;) ), but because capitalism and material reality force us so.

[Thirsty Crow]

This might not be directly seen though as the working class, as a class in itself is a slave class under capitalism, apathetic and only occasionally militant.
Just this brief comment.
This view in my opinion is highly misleading. It assumes that open and escalating labor disputes and class struggle, I presume especially in the political arena (not necessarily electoral), is the only sign that there's something there to workers' thoughts, activity and lives apart from apathy. But I think that micro level resistance, the informal and ineffective forms of relating to management and capital are widespread.

[Art Vandelay]

Unless a country was able to successfully sustain itself in autarky (I'd like to see how long that would last without access to the natural resources necessary to create batteries), then socialism in one country is indeed impossible. Even if the revolution was able to successfully consolidate itself within the confines of the state (and the 20th century communist experience shows this is temporarily possible at best), it would be forced to engage in trade with other countries, thereby opening itself back up to the global capitalist market.

[Q]

Just this brief comment.
This view in my opinion is highly misleading. It assumes that open and escalating labor disputes and class struggle, I presume especially in the political arena (not necessarily electoral), is the only sign that there's something there to workers' thoughts, activity and lives apart from apathy. But I think that micro level resistance, the informal and ineffective forms of relating to management and capital are widespread.
This is true, although in the Netherlands apathy seems quite widespread, even on the micro level.

My point however is more that the working class doesn't act as a class, that is, on a social (and as such political) level. What we often see is how workers are militant in the context of the workers-boss relation. While commendable, in itself it is highly limited.

To explain the point, I'll give the Netherlands as an example: In the Netherlands the bourgeoisie choose for a model of class-collaboration, called the "Poldermodel" where the trade unions, bosses organisations and government form a tripartite deliberation. This model is quite different from the "confrontation model" seen in other countries, like the UK or France, where the government is quite more aggressive towards labour organisations.

The results are what count: Where in the UK for example you still have a conception of "working class", skewed as it might be, in the Netherlands there is simply no such conception. Not even at elections or anything. The "Poldermodel" has very effectively washed away any ideas that there is such a thing as class society. In the FNV (the biggest trade union federation) there is now also a long running debate going on about becoming something of a "service union", as a desperate attempt by the bureaucracy to survive in any form (its membership has been stagnant for decades now).

My point is this: Yes, worker-boss militancy will happen on the workfloor. But a universal conception of class is not so natural under capitalism. At least, not for the slaves...

[Thirsty Crow]

My point however is more that the working class doesn't act as a class, that is, on a social (and as such political) level. What we often see is how workers are militant in the context of the workers-boss relation. While commendable, in itself it is highly limited.

Believe me, I get it. This is true, unfortunately, for Croatia as well. Just that I don't think that this notion of apathy is quite accurate. More like, depression induced passivity. I dunno honestly, I'm rambling now.

[argeiphontes]

We dealt with this, and you didn't respond.

I got a little distracted. By you.



The fact that you are intimidated, and probably demoralized


if your politics is in fact pro-revolutionary and communist, and not a version of the politics of modified capitalism.


one would say openly polemical


It's a characteristic of bourgeois ideologues


it is your "revolutionary cred" at stake or some kind of a personal thing.Go for it, burn that straw man! The flames must be warm and reassuring. My flesh is unsinged.



an impatient kid who wishes to find shortcuts and easy solutions at all cost. Even at the cost of actually understanding the world. This is miles away from a productive attitude pro-revolutionaries ought to take.
When you've been keeping the faith for 18 years of your adult life, and have grown roots in the real world, then come back and tell me I'm a kid. Say what you want about Lenin, but as Althusser said, the value of Lenin was that he was willing to take responsibility for the practical aspects of revolution. We need more people willing to walk that tightrope.

[Thirsty Crow]

Go for it, burn that straw man! The flames must be warm and reassuring. My flesh is unsinged.Why the drama? Anyway, as you seem to have learned from this, dishonest and fallacious debating tactics and logic are hardly the stuff of a productive discussion. And do note that this fallacious way of trying to pass of what people here say as unscientific is most definitely a dishonest debating tactic. So excuse me for engaging in what creeps very close to that same thing.

Now, you need to decide what you want to discuss, what makes the development of socialism in one country improbable/impossible, or the propaganda and mobilization value of proletarian internationalism.


When you've been keeping the faith for 18 years of your adult life, and have grown roots in the real world, then come back and tell me I'm a kid.Well yeah, sorry if it came across as rude, but you do seem very impatient and eager for immediate results. This might be connected to a kind of a juvenile approach to class politics, but it isn't necessarily so.


Say what you want about Lenin, but as Althusser said, the value of Lenin was that he was willing to take responsibility for the practical aspects of revolution. We need more people willing to walk that tightrope.
Again, you need to clarify for yourself what is it that you want to discuss here. Practical aspects of a revolution or the larger question of socialism in one country? Immediate policies and practical tasks of communists and the revolutionary class or the historical experience and its theoretical generalizations?

And once more, internationalism is a vital practical aspect of social revolution. That's what people here argue.

[Entfremdung]

The fact that Lenin doesn't know what 'socialism' means, and passed this deficiency on to his children, is not the issue. If you'd bothered to read the rest of the thread you'd have realised that the definition of 'socialism' is not the issue here.

So as long as socialism isn't socialism as I define it, then it is possible. But you my as well admit it's 'capitalism in one country' that Stalin was talking about.

Your argument as to why "socialism in one country" is impossible was simply to state your definition of socialism. Yes, I did read the rest of the thread, thanks, but you made it an issue of the definition of 'socialism'. You say socialism is by definition global. It isn't, regardless of whether that is our desire. 'Socialism' can refer either to Marx's transitional stage or to other non-Marxist forms of Socialism which are neither Stalinist or Social democratic.

[Thirsty Crow]

'Socialism' can refer either to Marx's transitional stage or to other non-Marxist forms of Socialism which are neither Stalinist or Social democratic.

You can try make it refer to any transitional period, but you'd have to forgo any claim on continuity with Marx's own conception and use of the term.

On the other hand, if "socialism" is denoting this transitional period as a stable, intermediary mode of production between capitalism and communism, then it's much, much harder to claim continuity not only with Marx's terminological use but with the underlying methodological approach as well.

And in the end, "socialism" can also refer to a timid variant of social democracy, most often in political Americanspeak. What does this tell us, though? That terminological squabbles are worth nothing, that would be my guess.

(But yeah I agree completely that this terminological, essentially semantic argument "from definition" is definitely insufficient)

[Geiseric]

While there is pressure from imperialist countries for the revolution to be isolated, and as long as there is a bourgeois capable of militarily crushing the proletarian dictatorship, socialism is not possible because an organized military and a state apparatus would by dictionary definition, as in an armed body with the legitimate use of military power, be necessary. Until capitalism has been overthrown any territory the proletarian dictatorship rose up in will be threatened.

[Aleister Granger]

That's basically what I thought, it's only impossible by that definition. I'll take my non-global socialism in one country now, thanks. ;)

Note that it's a convenient definition for the Soviet Union, and an excuse for inaction for the rest of us. It makes the goal impossible in any reasonable time. We can all go home now and support reformist trade unions. ;)
We could just wait for automation to spread, watch capitalism collapse in on itself, grab our capitalism beating sticks, and go to town.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

The soviet union had a planned economy which acted kinda like a bubble where profiting wasn't the priority in an ocean of capitalism, which is what made the industrialization possible since the state was in ownership of the entire economy. It wasn't capitalist since the investments made mostly into heavy industry wouldn't of been possible to profit off of, seeing as they were only made in the first place during the 5 year plan which had to form collective farms utilizing modern technology.

Perhaps this might have been true at one point in the history of the USSR, however during the Kruschev era and beyond this was no longer the case. Brezhnev himself, despite being a "hardliner" declared that the soviet capitalists ought to “allocate each ruble to the place where we can be compensated by two, three and even ten rubles tomorrow ... All of us, from the central to local organizations, must learn the complex art of money making. That is nothing to be ashamed of.” (Brezhnev, On Basic Problems of the CPSU Economic Policy at the Present State). It's very difficult to define a society which openly continues the commodity form and operates on the basis of profit as anything other than capitalist.


But as we see from the collapse of the fSU which in large part was due to the IMF, SioC isn't possible. Especially in a country like Russia which was still struggling with things like literacy and chronic food shortages.
Although it is true that the early Soviet Union had food shortages, the Soviet Union had achieved near self sufficiency in matters of grain under the late Stalin era and under Khrushchev and on;y became dependent on foreign sources in its later years. The Soviet Union only imported grain during it's golden age to improve the consumption of meats and poultry, not due to a lack of grain. So I don't think it's reasonable to say that it was struggling with food shortages for a large portion of its history to the extent that the latter food shortages could be anything other than systemic failures. Likewise while the Soviet Union may have taken out loans from the IMF it's also important to note that they also were able to loan a large amount of rubbles and materials to their satellite states. In India alone the Soviet Union was able to extract a 582% profit from their loans to the Indian regime. So then it seems that there is little to blame the fall of the USSR on other than a faulty and inefficient way of managing capital.

[Art Vandelay]

Although it is true that the early Soviet Union had food shortages, the Soviet Union had achieved near self sufficiency in matters of grain under the late Stalin era and under Khrushchev and on;y became dependent on foreign sources in its later years.

You're just muddying the waters. Was the soviet union fully self sustainable, ie: achieved autarky? The answer is no, which means they were forced to trade with foreign nations, thus opening itself back up to the global capitalist market. Its as simple as that. The idea that a country can engage in global trade, while somehow not making themselves susceptible to the market, is completely false.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

You're just muddying the waters. Was the soviet union fully self sustainable, ie: achieved autarky? The answer is no, which means they were forced to trade with foreign nations, thus opening itself back up to the global capitalist market. Its as simple as that. The idea that a country can engage in global trade, while somehow not making themselves susceptible to the market, is completely false.

I said this because I have read sources before that claimed that the soviets did achieve grains self sufficiency but I couldn't cite them because I don't remember where I found that information. I did not however, bring that point up other than to point out how food shortages could be caused by anything other than the systemic flaws of the Soviet system. Nowhere did I claim that it achieved auturky in any sense more meaningful than the fact that the U.S has a degree of self sufficency if we change the meaning of what "self sufficiency" actually means. I don't see how you could have read that information from what I posted but perhaps it had something to do with the fact that tone is not displayed over the internet.

[Sea]

Papa Joe postulated the existence of [...] a class society which is really and importantly classless. Before I start blindly groveling in defense of Comrade Stalin, I'd like to know where you got this little tidbit from.

edit: I don't want you do make me read a book of left-communist folklore as your source so try to show me where such an idea exists in Stalin's own thought.

[Bolshevik Sickle]

Because socialism is a classless communal society without states or borders.

So having that in one place doesn't make sense, because if it's 'in one country' it has states and borders, and because of differential access to property (inside and out) it also has classes even if everything is collectivised internally. For the same reason it isn't 'communal' as non-members of the community don't get a share.

Socialism in one country is impossible, because socialism by definition is global.

Then does that mean Hitler's Germany was not Socialism in one Nation? Or did he just call himself socialist to attract the working class. I think the latter makes sense, Nazi Germany seemed anything but socialist .

[Sea]

Then does that mean Hitler's Germany was not Socialism in one Nation? Or did he just call himself socialist to attract the working class. I think the latter makes sense, Nazi Germany seemed anything but socialist .To suggest that Nazi Germany was socialist is the result of either a profound idiocy or a sympathy for fascism, and you are right in assuming that it wasn't.

Also keep in mind that the "country" in SOIC and the nation in fascist ethnonationalism are two very different things.

Socialism in One Country merely posits that the proletariat, after conquering the bourgeoisie in a given country (the country being no more defining than its borders) should begin to build socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat instead of sitting on their asses in non-capitalist non-socialist limbo until all the other countries have successful revolution too. Socialism in One Country is the strategy used by the proletariat of one country to leverage the power that they have won until the proletariat of other countries are able to do the same.

The "racial nation" in fascism and Naziism refers to something beyond and completely different from a country.

[Blake's Baby]

Your argument as to why "socialism in one country" is impossible was simply to state your definition of socialism. Yes, I did read the rest of the thread, thanks, but you made it an issue of the definition of 'socialism'. You say socialism is by definition global...

Yes.

If you define socialism differently, then of course it can potentially exist in one country. But you should, really, as I have already said, call it 'capitalist experiments in one country'.



... It isn't, regardless of whether that is our desire. 'Socialism' can refer either to Marx's transitional stage or to other non-Marxist forms of Socialism which are neither Stalinist or Social democratic.

Not really. You can use the term 'socialism' to refer to whatever you like. You can make a sandwhich and declare 'I have built socialism'; you can open an umbrella, and claim 'I have acheived socialism'; you can go to the opera, and say 'we have arrived in socialism'. None of these definitions have anything to do with Marx either, and none of them are 'socialism', a term which, to Marxists, has a pretty specific meaning.

I'd be very happy for you to show that by 'socialism' Marx ever meant a 'transitional stage'. Please, let me know where he did so, I'd be pleased to read it.

In the meantime, you can read the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Ch IV.

Here's the link to the text:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm

Here's the important bit:
"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."

No mention of 'socialism as a transitional stage' there.



Before I start blindly groveling in defense of Comrade Stalin, I'd like to know where you got this little tidbit from.

edit: I don't want you do make me read a book of left-communist folklore as your source so try to show me where such an idea exists in Stalin's own thought.

You, in a process of ellision, editted the reasoning behind it. Stalin proposed the notion of 'non-contending classes'. As such a thing is nonsense, as 'the history of all existing societies is the history of class struggle', the idea of non-contending classes is the idea of no classes at all. Stalin didn't say that the USSR was a classless society; he just claimed that what it was a society that was in effect classless, by having 'non-contending classes'.


Then does that mean Hitler's Germany was not Socialism in one Nation? Or did he just call himself socialist to attract the working class. I think the latter makes sense, Nazi Germany seemed anything but socialist .

I think it's very bold of you to compare Stalin to Hitler, and not something that I was going to do in this thread, but obviously I agree that Hitler wasn't more of a socialist than Stalin.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Why is SIOC impossible?Short answer: because capitalism is a global system, nations are just part of how it's organized politically.

I think it might be possible for certain regions with a decent mix of resources and existing industry to maybe have worker's political control and maintain for a while, but even this is unsustainable in the long run and can not lead to a classless stateless society because, if nothing else, needing to compete with capitalists militarily will mean permanent "special bodies of armed people" and a lot of resources and labor devoted to maintaining an industrial-level military.

Russia also had specific circumstances of what might now be called "underdevelopment". The economy wasn't nationally autonomous, it was connected to and formed by aspects of the old regime and international investments of capital. Without that capital, SiOC meant having to try and create a sort of primitive accumulation and build up surplus through exploitation.


Wasn't this just a convenient excuse on Lenin's part to justify Bolshevik totalitarianism and lack of moving forward?Looking at the history of the post-Revolution years, I don't see much convinience in this issue, more like a lot of floundering and throwing all sorts of different ideas towards how to deal with this larger objective problem of isololation and a small and precarious (but militant) working class.

Moving forward to what? Stalin seemed to think SiOC was possible and moved forward quite a bit (if forward means creating a modern industrial nation, not a society run and organized by the working class).

[Stalinist Speaker]

Because socialism is a classless communal society without states or borders.

So having that in one place doesn't make sense, because if it's 'in one country' it has states and borders, and because of differential access to property (inside and out) it also has classes even if everything is collectivised internally. For the same reason it isn't 'communal' as non-members of the community don't get a share.

Socialism in one country is impossible, because socialism by definition is global.

No socialism is the period between capitalism and communism, thats when the class society, borders, currency e.t.c is being dissolved. what you described was communism not socialism. communism in one country is impossible but socialism in one country is possible and works really well.

[reb]

Why is SIOC impossible? Wasn't this just a convenient excuse on Stalin's part to justify the capitalist nature of the USSR?

Fixed that for you. Socialism in one country is often justified as a change in theory, when it isn't being forced upon Marx and Engels, as a reaction to material conditions such as the failure of world revolution. What this actually means is that they have just shifted the goal posts and are now describing the capitalist development of the USSR as socialist. The idea to begin with it bunk in that the thing it is trying to describe is a capitalist state and it's relation to other capitalist states. This whole thing allows for a radical revision of Marx's ideas.

[reb]

No socialism is the period between capitalism and communism, thats when the class society, borders, currency e.t.c is being dissolved. what you described was communism not socialism. communism in one country is impossible but socialism in one country is possible and works really well.

Worked so well in fact that there are no longer any socialist countries with currencies, classes or borders.

[Stalinist Speaker]

Worked so well in fact that there are no longer any socialist countries with currencies, classes or borders.

yes but that is due to gorbatchev and deng xiao ping, and they have nothing to do with SOIC. cuba and DPRK still exist have a currency borders e.t.c you've also got Venezuela and others.

[reb]

yes but that is due to gorbatchev and deng xiao ping, and they have nothing to do with SOIC. cuba and DPRK still exist have a currency borders e.t.c you've also got Venezuela and others.

I was being sarcastic. These places were never not-capitalism and they weren't mostly because of the manifestations of capital that you listed. Funny how the whole emancipation of the proletariat, in your eyes, can continue or fall due to a handful of people. Socialism indeed.

[Blake's Baby]

No socialism is the period between capitalism and communism, thats when the class society, borders, currency e.t.c is being dissolved. what you described was communism not socialism. communism in one country is impossible but socialism in one country is possible and works really well.

Please demonstrate (let's see if a bit of 'socialist emulation' can get you to do it before entfremdung) where Marx ever refers to 'socialism' as being an intermediate stage between capitalist society and communist society.

[Stalinist Speaker]

Please demonstrate (let's see if a bit of 'socialist emulation' can get you to do it before entfremdung) where Marx ever refers to 'socialism' as being an intermediate stage between capitalist society and communist society.

i believe that this explains it (could be wrong)http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/WIST.html
Marx didn't say it he was just the founding father of the idea, it was people like lenin Mao e.t.c that said that, you cannot just dissolve the currency the state e.t.c just like that it takes a while and that is being done under socialism.

[Blake's Baby]

Right, so what you're saying is, Mao (after 1949) decided to re-interpret the term 'socialism' that Stalin had used in 1927, which he had picked up from Lenin (via Bukharin) and was itself a different usage from Marx's?

As I'm not a Maoist, nor a Stalinist, nor a Bukharinist, nor a Leninist, and for that matter (as far as we can tell) Mao wasn't a time-traveller, can you explain to me why I should care about a definition that was invented more than two decades after the events we're talking about?

[Stalinist Speaker]

Right, so what you're saying is, Mao (after 1949) decided to re-interpret the term 'socialism' that Stalin had used in 1927, which he had picked up from Lenin (via Bukharin) and was itself a different usage from Marx's?

As I'm not a Maoist, nor a Stalinist, nor a Bukharinist, nor a Leninist, and for that matter (as far as we can tell) Mao wasn't a time-traveller, can you explain to me why I should care about a definition that was invented more than two decades after the events we're talking about?

that is just a work by mao. as i said lenin and others did similar things before him

[Brotto Rühle]

Let's see what grand daddy Fred has to say:

" By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.

Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries – that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany.

It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace.

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range."

[Blake's Baby]

that is just a work by mao. as i said lenin and others did similar things before him

So; can you show where Marx (as I'm a Marxist, not a Leninist or a Stalinist) used 'socialism' to mean 'a transitional society between capitalism and communism' as you said?

And then could you explain why anyone who isn't a Leninist should care about Lenin's definitions?

[Thirsty Crow]

Before I start blindly groveling in defense of Comrade Stalin, I'd like to know where you got this little tidbit from.

edit: I don't want you do make me read a book of left-communist folklore as your source so try to show me where such an idea exists in Stalin's own thought.
Draft of the 1936 Constitution. As far as I'm aware this is the official position on what's Soviet socialism actually about.


So; can you show where Marx (as I'm a Marxist, not a Leninist or a Stalinist) used 'socialism' to mean 'a transitional society between capitalism and communism' as you said?

And then could you explain why anyone who isn't a Leninist should care about Lenin's definitions?
Honestly, this is all unimportant. Marx's use of words as well.

What matter is the underlying logic - why did not Marx envision a transitional mode of production. And whether he was right. And the implications flowing from this.

[Geiseric]

Draft of the 1936 Constitution. As far as I'm aware this is the official position on what's Soviet socialism actually about.


Honestly, this is all unimportant. Marx's use of words as well.

What matter is the underlying logic - why did not Marx envision a transitional mode of production. And whether he was right. And the implications flowing from this.

Typical ultra leftism, they did lay out things which were pre requesites for a proletarian dictatorship. It's in chapter 18 of principles of communism which i'll post here.


— 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. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces.

Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.

[Blake's Baby]

Yes, and I told you last week that the section of the Manifesto that is based on Ch 18 was repudiated in 1872 by Marx and Engels. They changed their minds. Why? New evidence and new reflection on that evidence. What new evidence? 1 - the advances capitalism had made on its own (the measures they put forward in 1848 were for the advancement of capitalism) and 2 - the experience of the Paris Commune, actually having the living experience of a proletarian revolution to evaluate.

[Geiseric]

Those demands weren't for the advancement of capitalism. I'd like to see a quote from you, wait a passage instead of a quote, that proves what you're saying. I've read all of the prefaces you've referred to.

[Tim Cornelis]

Typical ultra leftism, they did lay out things which were pre requesites for a proletarian dictatorship. It's in chapter 18 of principles of communism which i'll post here.


You have posted that quote many times now, each time it was refuted. But you still do it... Also, it does not pertain to what's being posed here.

The question is: What matter is the underlying logic - why did not Marx envision a transitional mode of production. And whether he was right. And the implications flowing from this.

You answer with something completely unrelated. No one is talking about the prerequisites for a proletarian dictatorship, but why Marx did not conceive of an intermediate mode of production between capitalism and communism, and whether this is accurate or not.

[Geiseric]

The proletarian dictatorship is obviously between capitalism and socialism, out of the necessity because the outside world which may not have a revolution at the same time.

[Remus Bleys]

The proletarian dictatorship is obviously between capitalism and socialism, out of the necessity because the outside world which may not have a revolution at the same time.
The proletarian dictatorship is objectively capitalism.
It may be worker managed capital, but it is still capital.

[Sea]

class struggle[/I]', the idea of non-contending classes is the idea of no classes at all. Stalin didn't say that the USSR was a classless society; he just claimed that what it was a society that was in effect classless, by having 'non-contending classes'.You parrot Marx in error. Class struggle in this sense was intended to mean the struggle between the oppressing and oppressed classes. This is all well and good in an introductory work like the Manifesto, but in real life things are more complicated than that -- there can be multiple oppressed classes that do not oppress one another. The fact that history is defined by class struggle doesn't contradict this. Because we define classes in relation to the means of production, the industrial proletariat and the not-yet-proletarianized peasantry in a country where the development of capitalism is incomplete (guess what country I'm thinking of) form an example of this. Stalin's rhetoric was all about the peasantry and the proletariat riding off into the socialist sunset together, remember? What would be absurd is if Stalin thought the remaining bourgeois elements and the workers were living in harmony and without contradiction. I assume he had the peasantry in mind as the "other class" though.


Draft of the 1936 Constitution. As far as I'm aware this is the official position on what's Soviet socialism actually about.
Oh coolio. A little later I'll read that and report back or whatever. Thanks for the info!

edit: Also y'all might want to keep in mind that I'm not trying to defend Stalin as a leader or anything. I don't know all that much about him so 'officially' I'm reserving judgement until I do.

[Geiseric]

The proletarian dictatorship is objectively capitalism.
It may be worker managed capital, but it is still capital.

How would it be "objectively capitalism" if the value of the surplus product is reinvested into public works, which yield no profit but have to be created out of necessity for the health of the workers who live inside of the proletarian dictatorship, instead of being re invested by a private capitalist to make a profit? Also what if all of the resources are rationed equally?

[Blake's Baby]

Engels dealt with all of this in 1880, as you know well. But for the benefit of those who don't, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Ch 3:

"But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

And before you say 'but that only applies to capitalist states' - the Soviet Union was a capitalist state unless you a) believe that socialism in one country is possible and b) ascribe to the notion 'socialism' the idea that it is some form of communism. So; did the Soviet Union reach communism, Geiseric? If it did, then you go beyond Stalin and Mao; if it didn't, you must accept that it stuck at capitalism - state-managed, monopoly capitalism.

[Geiseric]

And before you say 'but that only applies to capitalist states' - the Soviet Union was a capitalist state unless you a) believe that socialism in one country is possible and b) ascribe to the notion 'socialism' the idea that it is some form of communism. So; did the Soviet Union reach communism, Geiseric? If it did, then you go beyond Stalin and Mao; if it didn't, you must accept that it stuck at capitalism - state-managed, monopoly capitalism.

I believe that a proletarian dictatorship can establish itself in one country before it spreads via revolution to others. The conditions for a proletarian dictatorship are applicable in different places at different times. All of the things Marx and Engels laid out in their most famous works point out what the first steps a proletarian dictatorship, NOT A SOCIALIST SOCIETY, would take, were all done in the fSU. There is a difference between the DotP and Socialism. Marx laid this out as well numerous times.

So you're grasping at straws, I never claimed that the fSU was socialist, and you're perverting my argument, like left coms always do. However would a workers revolution actually end up with capitalism without a counter revolution which killed the workers who actually carried out the revolution? Or do you believe in the bourgeois idealism that states the evil bolsheviks were capable through their magical powers, to somehow became the new capitalists amidst a revolution, whose sons and daughters were on their very doorstep? Or do you think that Russians are stupid enough to exchange one autocracy for another without any major economic changes?

It doesn't take a fucking genius to know that a planned economy is different on many different levels from a market economy, and is incompatable with any kind of market system, especially the pre collectivization Russian market economy.

[Blake's Baby]

I believe that a proletarian dictatorship can establish itself in one country before it spreads via revolution to others...

You get absolutely no argument from me on that score. That's nearly what happened in Russia - except, it didn't spread, did it? And the 'proletarian dictatorship' became the party dictatorship.


...The conditions for a proletarian dictatorship are applicable in different places at different times. All of the things Marx and Engels laid out in their most famous works point out what the first steps a proletarian dictatorship, NOT A SOCIALIST SOCIETY, would take, were all done in the fSU. There is a difference between the DotP and Socialism. Marx laid this out as well numerous times...

I don't disagree that the proletarian dictatorship is not a socialist society. It is a capitalist society that is attempting to transition to a socialist society - which is only possible when the dotp is worldwide, which it wasn't. So it was stuck as a capitalist society.

I don't agree though that the dotp 'receipe' is universally applicable, and neither do Marx and Engels.


...So you're grasping at straws, I never claimed that the fSU was socialist, and you're perverting my argument, like left coms always do...

Grow up. We're agreeing with each other. You might not like it but you should stop being such cry-baby about it.

We agree that the dotp (whether Stalinism should be regarded as the dotp is a minor point at the moment) is not 'socialist' but capitalist society. All well and good.


... However would a workers revolution actually end up with capitalism without a counter revolution which killed the workers who actually carried out the revolution? ...

Like, actually happened, you mean?

If the revolution doesn't go forward it dies. It can't stand still, time doesn't stop. History is movement, there is either forward movement or reactionary movement. The revolution is like a balloon being blown up, if you don't keep up the pressure till it bursts, it fizzles out with a farty noise. In which, thousands of people are killed at Kronstadt, for example.


...Or do you believe in the bourgeois idealism that states the evil bolsheviks were capable through their magical powers, to somehow became the new capitalists amidst a revolution, whose sons and daughters were on their very doorstep? ...

Do you believe the fairy story that the Bolsheviks were able to preserve a half-made revolution is aspic like Sleeping Beauty? Or do you believe, contrary to what you said moments ago, that it was 'actually' socialism?

Capitalism makes capitalists, not the other way around. It's not abour 'will' or 'stupidity' it's about conditions and it's about actions.

One is no more able to overcome conditions through will than one is able to wish onesself to the moon.

Here's an experiment for you - try to abolish capitalism now. Go on, you think it's easy.


...Or do you think that Russians are stupid enough to exchange one autocracy for another without any major economic changes?...

Now you're just being insulting.


...

It doesn't take a fucking genius to know that a planned economy is different on many different levels from a market economy, and is incompatable with any kind of market system, especially the pre collectivization Russian market economy.

Oh right, so what makes it socialism is a godlike state direction... got ya. The American Libertarian definition of 'socialism'. I'm surprised you don't call it 'the Stalinist Gub'mint'.

[Q]

And before you say 'but that only applies to capitalist states' - the Soviet Union was a capitalist state unless you a) believe that socialism in one country is possible and b) ascribe to the notion 'socialism' the idea that it is some form of communism. So; did the Soviet Union reach communism, Geiseric? If it did, then you go beyond Stalin and Mao; if it didn't, you must accept that it stuck at capitalism - state-managed, monopoly capitalism.
I'm going for option c: It was neither (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=18835). Of course, linked reply was exactly answering a post of yours months ago, yet here you are, complaining how others remain "stuck" in the same line of argument.

[Tim Cornelis]

I'm going for option c: It was neither (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=18835). Of course, linked reply was exactly answering a post of yours months ago, yet here you are, complaining how others remain "stuck" in the same line of argument.


I'm not so sure comrade. Has there been universal commodity production, where capital could freely expand itself in the last few decades? I don't think so, besides perhaps for some sectors, such as the tourist sector.

If you're saying that there has been exploitation for surplus labour, then I would obviously agree. But such exploitation is a feature of any class society where a minority class rules over a majority. You can therefore at most argue that Cuba wasn't socialist, but that doesn't automatically make it capitalist.

Similar logical fallacies have been employed against the USSR to claim it was "state capitalist", which made no sense either.


This is exactly the fallacy I'm protesting to. Capitalism, as Marx describes at length in his Capital, is a pretty specific set of conditions. You can't just say "well, it wasn't socialism, so therefore it was capitalism".

Claiming such a fallacy to be "Marxist" doesn't make it Marxist. The 'paradigm' you might be referring to of social evolution from barbarism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism to socialism, which was popularised by the Second International, is at best a model of historical materialism, an expectation based on certain parameters. To treat it as gospel is taking the scientific method out of historical materialism.

So, what was the USSR (or Cuba for that matter?). I like to use an analogy that I read a while back on this: Biologists are well aware that mutations happen all the time in various (probably most) species. However, most of these mutations are not going to survive or not able to reproduce at all. To give such a mutation therefore a name is a waste of time. New names are only given when a mutation is durable, when in other words it results into a new (sub)species.

Likewise, Stalinism was a dead end. A mutation that had no future and could only collapse into another type of society. That society has been capitalism since capitalism is the hegemonic mode of production on the planet.

I hope this suffices (it probably won't, but meh).

So your argument amounts to that capital could not "freely expand itself" in Cuba or the Soviet Union. What do you mean by "freely expand", why did it not apply, and does this suggest that monopolies in, say, the UK are non-capitalist?

[Q]

So your argument amounts to that capital could not "freely expand itself" in Cuba or the Soviet Union. What do you mean by "freely expand", why did it not apply, and does this suggest that monopolies in, say, the UK are non-capitalist?
Why the USSR wasn't capitalism is explained at length in Capital. I have yet to see comrades who claim that there was capitalism in the USSR, how the USSR had commodity production, a universal equivalent or a logic to multiply capital via investment, to name but a few things that are pretty fundamental to the being of capitalism. This society simply had a completely different political-economy to it.

So, this reduces "state-capitalism" to mud slinging and that is my problem with it, especially in /theory.

[Brotto Rühle]

Why the USSR wasn't capitalism is explained at length in Capital. I have yet to see comrades who claim that there was capitalism in the USSR, how the USSR had commodity production, a universal equivalent or a logic to multiply capital via investment, to name but a few things that are pretty fundamental to the being of capitalism. This society simply had a completely different political-economy to it.

So, this reduces "state-capitalism" to mud slinging and that is my problem with it, especially in /theory.

Capital explains precisely why the USSR was capitalist. Do you know what a commodity, or commodity production is?

[Q]

Capital explains precisely why the USSR was capitalist. Do you know what a commodity, or commodity production is?
You're pulling me one, right? Chances are that you're not. Ugh.

Here's a comic for you (http://greatmomentsinleftism.blogspot.nl/2013/10/socialism-in-one-comic-strip.html), as you seem to think exactly like that. For those who actually want to learn about how the USSR worked (or rather, didn't), there is this helpful bit (https://vimeo.com/29505740).

[reb]

I seriously doubt that you have read Capital.

[Sea]

It's rather ambiguous who you're replying to when you don't quote someone.

[Tim Cornelis]

Why the USSR wasn't capitalism is explained at length in Capital. I have yet to see comrades who claim that there was capitalism in the USSR, how the USSR had commodity production, a universal equivalent or a logic to multiply capital via investment, to name but a few things that are pretty fundamental to the being of capitalism. This society simply had a completely different political-economy to it.

So, this reduces "state-capitalism" to mud slinging and that is my problem with it, especially in /theory.

I still don't know what you meant there with free expansion of capital. If this is a reference to the absence of market mechanisms, then I would argue that the competition of capitals need not be mediated through market mechanisms, and that this competition consists of singular capitals and their reciprocal interaction and confrontation. Socialist emulation and exchange between Soviet enterprises provided competition of capitals. Do you believe Engels to have been wrong in describing how a 'national capitalist' would form, a capitalism controlled by the state? Why do you think he conceived of its possibility?

"For competition of capitals to exist it is sufficient that there exist different, reciprocally independent, units of (commodity) production, based on wage labor exchanging their products, independently of the question of the legal title to ownership over the particular unit." (p. 46 The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience)

Soviet enterprises bought labour-power, deployed it to produce consumer goods which were subsequently sold, that is, were commodities. Means of production were bought and sold, exchanged in other words. Hence, the existence of generalised commodity production. I'm not familiar how means of production were allocated circa 1930. If someone could provide a source, that'd be much appreciated.

What do you mean by this, I'm not familiar with it:

a universal equivalent or a logic to multiply capital via investment

What other things are fundamental to capitalism the Soviet Union was lacking?

[Q]

I seriously doubt that you have read Capital.
Yes, it sometimes is quite frustrating to debate with people who haven't read their stuff before they go off claiming all kinds of things. We can only but patiently explain I suppose.


I still don't know what you meant there with free expansion of capital.
I did, you completely missed it. I will answer again below.


Soviet enterprises bought labour-power, deployed it to produce consumer goods which were subsequently sold, that is, were commodities. Means of production were bought and sold, exchanged in other words. Hence, the existence of generalised commodity production. I'm not familiar how means of production were allocated circa 1930. If someone could provide a source, that'd be much appreciated.Apart from a few isolated sectors, this was not at all the case. Hillel Ticktin has been making this point over and again for decades. I've referred to him in my previous post.


What do you mean by this, I'm not familiar with it:

a universal equivalent or a logic to multiply capital via investmentAnd here is the part I say "wow, you really don't know".

I refer to chapter chapter 3 part (d) in Capital for an explanation what the universal equivalent is. I refer to chapter 4 for general formula for capital. The latter in fact is a direct answer to your question regarding the expansion of capital. The word "free" I used refers to a social context: Under capitalism the whole point is to create as much freedom as possible for M-C-M' to occur, this was not the case in the USSR.


What other things are fundamental to capitalism the Soviet Union was lacking?Well, lacking a universal equivalent kinda excludes the possibility of commodity production, wage labour and other "irrelevant" stuff regarding defining capitalism.

[Thirsty Crow]

Typical ultra leftism, they did lay out things which were pre requesites for a proletarian dictatorship. It's in chapter 18 of principles of communism which i'll post here.



Typical idiocy? Or a bastardized form of Bordigist invariance?

That's of course not to even say that what you write here has nothing to do with what I was talking about - the issue of terminology use.

[Tim Cornelis]

I did, you completely missed it. I will answer again below.

I still missed it.


Apart from a few isolated sectors, this was not at all the case. Hillel Ticktin has been making this point over and again for decades. I've referred to him in my previous post.

But I'm debating you, if you could quote the relevant parts, that'd be much appreciated.


And here is the part I say "wow, you really don't know".

Maybe if you stop masturbating over your superior knowledge you can enlighten me. It seems you mistake ambiguity and speaking authoritatively for arguments.


I refer to chapter chapter 3 part (d) in Capital for an explanation what the universal equivalent is.

Could you explain it to me -- how it is supposedly absent and how it affects investment, and why this is fundamental to capitalism that is.


I refer to chapter 4 for general formula for capital. The latter in fact is a direct answer to your question regarding the expansion of capital. The word "free" I used refers to a social context: Under capitalism the whole point is to create as much freedom as possible for M-C-M' to occur, this was not the case in the USSR.

This tells me exactly nothing. What do you mean by "freedom" and why wasn't there freedom for M-C-M' to occur in the Soviet Union -- you don't explain, you simply state this wasn't the case. Is the maximum available freedom applied in the Netherlands for M-C-M' to occur, if so, how do you measure it, if not, what is the basis for claiming the Netherlands is capitalist?


Well, lacking a universal equivalent kinda excludes the possibility of commodity production, wage labour and other "irrelevant" stuff regarding defining capitalism.

Making blanket declarative statements without explanatory backing is not really convincing.

[reb]

I think the issue with some people in regards to the economic nature of the USSR might have more to do with their holding on to their social democratic conception of the party over any actual marxist understanding of capital.

[Brotto Rühle]

An understanding of capital, comes with the understanding that the political state of things is determined by the economic. Something I see is lacking among the posters here, including Q.

[AmilcarCabral]

Yeah that's what I thought, he is talking about the stage after the dictatorship of the working class, anarchist-communism. But socialism, the political stage after the collapse of capitalism in any country will still have a state.



You're describing Communism, not Socialism.

[Blake's Baby]

Why? For most of us, socialism and communism are synonyms. So, no, socialism doesn't have a state, nor is it a phase between capitalist society and communist society. Marx is pretty clear, he says that transition happens under 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'. Not 'socialism'.

[Comrade #138672]

You can't just 'institute' an economic system. No economy hitherto has ever been closed. No country has ever been fully, and successfully, self-reliant. Even those that claim to be are subject to external, world market factors.

History has shown us that economic systems are not mere ideology; rather than a bit of social democracy in one country, some fascism in another country, and a bit of neoconservatism in one country, an economic system (i'm thinking of slavery and its associated modes, feudalism, capitalism, and a post-capitalist economic system) is far greater than that. The complexity involved in the terminal decay of one economic system and its subjugation by a new economic system is such that it cannot simply be 'instituted in one country'. When that happens, that country tends not to do so well, because it is in effect a new system surrounded by a world of capital. Much the same happened to the Italian city-states of the 11th century, an early experiment in capitalism and banking that in the end failed because the feudal nobility, around much of Europe, were easily strong enough to crush it. Similarly, the USSR in the 1910s and 1920s had no hope of overthrowing an entire economic system within the confines of their own economy - their somewhat under-developed, peasant-based economy had not even 'mastered' capitalism yet, what hope did they realistically have of actually defeating the forces of capital and instituting a system of socialism?

Socialism has to be global or it won't succeed. And by global, I don't necessarily mean that in the literal sense - but it needs to be big enough in scale that the working class forces pushing a socialist revolution are strong enough, worldwide, to defeat the forces of capital on a global scale.(Emphasis added.)

Can you tell some more about this? Are there any more examples of failed bourgeois "revolutions"?

And where can I read more on this?

[RedMaterialist]

What is socialism? According to Marx "..."The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state..." The seizing of capital and centralization of the instruments of production in the hands of the state occur during the dictatorship of the proletariat.

What is the economic form of the proletarian dictatorship during this period? What is the economic form in which the means of production are concentrated in the hands of the state?

[RedMaterialist]

Socialism is not only possible in one state, it is absolutely necessary that socialism first develop in one state. Why? Because socialism is a precondition for the development of communism.

Whether socialism can exist in one country depends on what you believe is the relation between socialism and a country. To begin with there is really no such thing anymore as a "country." It has been subsumed into the notion of the republic, union, commonwealth, nation, state. So the question is can socialism exist in one state.

The left-communists appear to take a dogmatic view of the relation between socialism and the state. Socialism is the same thing as communism, and the workers' dictatorship/state must first disappear before socialism or communism can develop.

Since the state and socialism, in this view, are by definition irreconcilable opposites then obviously socialism cannot exist in one state. But, can socialism exist in one country, even assuming there is now such a concept as a country, after the dissolution of the state in that country? Can socialism, for example, exist in France after the dissolution of the French Workers' Dictatorship, even though France is still surrounded by capitalist states, the Federal Republic of Germany, the British Commonwealth, the United States of America, the Italian Republic, the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, etc.?

France, with no state structure, bureaucracy, banking, parliament, etc., will be surrounded by hostile capitalist states, it would be in exactly the same position as the communes of 1848 and 1871. How long could this country survive? It may have nuclear weapons and be able to deter a military attack, but how long could it survive a world economic embargo? Cuba has survived the U.S. blockade, but only, in my view, by maintaining itself as a state. If the Cuban state collapsed tomorrow (which I think will happen in the next 10 yrs or so, exactly as the Soviet Union collapsed), half of Miami would move to Havana.

Of course, if several states decided to form and maintain workers' dictatorships a large enough coalition could survive against, say Germany and the U.S., then you could have something like the United Socialist States of Europe.

The only historical examples we have of feudal/capitalist/asiatic/colonial states converting to something resembling a workers' dictatorship are Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and a few others. So far this history, in terms of left communism, doesn't say much about the transition from the workers' dictatorship to socialism in one country. In fact, the anti-Leninists and anti-Stalinists all claim that these worker dictatorships, were or are capitalist states.

If, however, socialism is the economic form of the workers state,..."The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state..." (as quoted by Lenin, in State and Revolution) then socialism in one country/state is not only possible, but absolutely necessary.

In other words...slavery>feudalism>capitalism, imperialism and colonialism>socialism>communism. I realize that Marx never talked about socialism being a transition to communism, but Lenin was suggesting it. And today, leaders of countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, talk about the victory of the socialist revolution. In this view communism would be the victory of world socialist states which would then see the collapse of the state.

[reb]

What I meant was, the definition of socialism you posted includes the world-revolution part. So, by definition it has to be international.

Whereas, I think socialism/communism is just a socioeconomic system, that can be implemented on any level where it's empirically feasible. It's just an empirical question to me whether or not SIOC is possible or not.

edit: The SU was a state-capitalist dictatorship IMO.

Well the problem is that socialism isn't just an economic system, it is the movement that abolishes the present state of things, ie capitalism and capitalist society. This one reason why socialism in one country is impossible because capitalism is a world system. A state has to function on the level of capitalism with other capitalists states and thus partake is doomed to be dominated by the law of value.

[reb]

Yeah that's what I thought, he is talking about the stage after the dictatorship of the working class, anarchist-communism. But socialism, the political stage after the collapse of capitalism in any country will still have a state.

Not according to Marx. The idea that the dotp is also the lowest phase of communism is a stalinist invention, an ideological frame work to justify it's state-capitalist nature.

[reb]

What is socialism? According to Marx "..."The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state..." The seizing of capital and centralization of the instruments of production in the hands of the state occur during the dictatorship of the proletariat.

What is the economic form of the proletarian dictatorship during this period? What is the economic form in which the means of production are concentrated in the hands of the state?

Marx nowhere calls this revolutionary political transition a socialist state and even less, a socialist mode of production.

[reb]

Socialism is not only possible in one state, it is absolutely necessary that socialism first develop in one state. Why? Because socialism is a precondition for the development of communism.

You clearly have no idea what Marx wrote about and rely on a handful of quotes. The pre-condition ton for communism is capitalism. Read a fucking book.

[RedMaterialist]

You clearly have no idea what Marx wrote about and rely on a handful of quotes. The pre-condition ton for communism is capitalism. Read a fucking book.

You're saying no economic system comes between capitalism and communism. But what is the economic system of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Marx appears to have said in the Gotha Programme that it was the lower phase of communism but you say the "lower phase of communism" is a Stalinist invention.

Has there ever been a political advance in the direction of socialism since 1871 in France or since 1925 in Russia before Stalin took over? Since you believe the Soviet, Chinese (maybe Mao was a socialist), Vietnamese, Cuban, and Venezuelan states were capitalist, then you must believe that the entire 20th century was a socialist failure.

I know you don't agree with the right wing when they say that socialism can't work because everywhere it has been tried it has failed.

[RedMaterialist]

Marx nowhere calls this revolutionary political transition a socialist state and even less, a socialist mode of production.

What mode of production exists in the dictatorship of the proletariat?

[Remus Bleys]

What mode of production exists in the dictatorship of the proletariat?

Clearly capitalism. Worker managed capitalism, but capitalism nevertheless.

[Blake's Baby]

You're saying no economic system comes between capitalism and communism. But what is the economic system of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Marx appears to have said in the Gotha Programme that it was the lower phase of communism but you say the "lower phase of communism" is a Stalinist invention...

Wrong on two counts.

Marx says that in the Critique:

"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."

So, no, the 'revolutionary transformation' happens before communist society (in its first phase or higher phase). The transformation isn't the 'lower' (first) phase.

It wasn't 'the lower phase of communism' that reb said was a Stalinist invention, it was conflating the 'revolutionary transformation' with the first phase of communism that is a 'Stalinist invention'.


...Has there ever been a political advance in the direction of socialism since 1871 in France or since 1925 in Russia before Stalin took over? Since you believe the Soviet, Chinese (maybe Mao was a socialist), Vietnamese, Cuban, and Venezuelan states were capitalist, then you must believe that the entire 20th century was a socialist failure...

Of course it was a failure, there has been no 'advance in the direction of socialism' since 1921 or thereabouts, because socialist society will be the creation of the working class, not some party bureaucrats. The revolution failed. If it had succeeded, we would be living in socialist society now. We're not, so it failed. That's how you can tell.


l...I know you don't agree with the right wing when they say that socialism can't work because everywhere it has been tried it has failed.

Non-sequiteur. It wasn't 'socialism' that failed, it was the revolution that failed. 'The revolution' does not equal 'socialism'. Socialist (or communist) society is what comes after a successful revolution. There was no successful revolution - there was an unsuccessful revolution - and therefore there was no socialism either.

Just because the last revolution failed to destroy capitalism doesn't mean the next revolution will also fail.

I'm rather hoping it won't fail. But there are no guarentees.

[reb]

You're saying no economic system comes between capitalism and communism. But what is the economic system of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Marx appears to have said in the Gotha Programme that it was the lower phase of communism but you say the "lower phase of communism" is a Stalinist invention.

No he doesn't. Have you even read it because you appear to be just be repeating stalinist dogma. The idea that socialism, as a distinct stage that includes classes and money and wages and commodity production and the law of value AND that it's the lowest stage of communism, is a stalinist invention to justify their capitalist state and social-democratic policies.


Has there ever been a political advance in the direction of socialism since 1871 in France or since 1925 in Russia before Stalin took over? Since you believe the Soviet, Chinese (maybe Mao was a socialist), Vietnamese, Cuban, and Venezuelan states were capitalist, then you must believe that the entire 20th century was a socialist failure.

Pretty sure capitalism hasn't been abolished yet.


I know you don't agree with the right wing when they say that socialism can't work because everywhere it has been tried it has failed.

Because saying that "socialism doesn't work" is a stupid batshit idea that turns socialism into a movement that abolishes capital into this stupid state-capitalist thing which ended up collapsing in on itself. It also didn't work because it did not abolish capitalism. All it did was turn communism into a moralistic, confused, reformist and social-democratic ideology where no one reads Marx now and just repeat old dogmas.

[reb]

Clearly capitalism. Worker managed capitalism, but capitalism nevertheless.

I wouldn't say that it was that simple. I think it would be better to say that as social-relations are going through a transformation so to is the mode of production from capitalism to communism. This is not to say that it is managed capital or this new thing called socialism. It is not a transition in other words, of socialist accumulation or of managed capital (because they are both the same).

[Blake's Baby]

I've called it 'attenuated capitalism' before, the point being that the working class is progressively destroying the bases of capitalism and generalising its own condition through integration into production as much as it can; but until the point where all property is collectivised - until the world revolution is 'won' in other words - the completion of the transition to socialist society is not possible.

[RedMaterialist]

Clearly capitalism. Worker managed capitalism, but capitalism nevertheless.

how do millions of workers manage the capitalism? I'm not just asking to be asking. I'm really trying to get to an understanding of the development of socialism.

[Brotto Rühle]

how do millions of workers manage the capitalism? I'm not just asking to be asking. I'm really trying to get to an understanding of the development of socialism.

The idea is that during such a time, through coops and preferably workers councils and factory committees.

[RedMaterialist]

I've called it 'attenuated capitalism' before, the point being that the working class is progressively destroying the bases of capitalism and generalising its own condition through integration into production as much as it can; but until the point where all property is collectivised - until the world revolution is 'won' in other words - the completion of the transition to socialist society is not possible.


But you don't believe this progressive destruction of the bases of capitalim has happened yet, even temporarily (except maybe 1917-1921)?

[Blake's Baby]

Pretty much.

The 'revolutionary transition' is a bridge, from here (and now; capitalist society) to there (the future; socialist society).

What the revolutionary proletariat started was a 'bridge' that never reached the other side; in other words, it wasn't a bridge, because a bridge by definition goes from here to there. Because the bridge was only partly built it only goes from here to here.

[RedMaterialist]

Pretty much.

The 'revolutionary transition' is a bridge, from here (and now; capitalist society) to there (the future; socialist society).

What the revolutionary proletariat started was a 'bridge' that never reached the other side; in other words, it wasn't a bridge, because a bridge by definition goes from here to there. Because the bridge was only partly built it only goes from here to here.

And that's because Stalin stopped the work on the bridge and forced the workers back to capitalism?

[Blake's Baby]

No, that's because the rest of the world working class never turned up with the rest of the bits to build the bridge.

What happened then was Trotsky ran round shouting 'hey! The rest of the bits will turn up soon!' while Stalin said 'don't worry, we're already on the other side'.

[RedMaterialist]

No, that's because the rest of the world working class never turned up with the rest of the bits to build the bridge.

What happened then was Trotsky ran round shouting 'hey! The rest of the bits will turn up soon!' while Stalin said 'don't worry, we're already on the other side'.

So Stalin was leading a country of 200 million people who, for about 30 yrs, were completely unaware that they were still living under capitalism and who believed, along with Stalin, that they were living in the socialist future?

[Art Vandelay]

So Stalin was leading a country of 200 million people who, for about 30 yrs, were completely unaware that they were still living under capitalism and who believed, along with Stalin, that they were living in the socialist future?

Yes that is the argument generally put forth by the state-capitalist theorists.

[Remus Bleys]

Yes that is the argument generally put forth by the state-capitalist theorists.
Substitute this with degenerated worker state theorists.
God you're thick.

What about workers who believe they are under a paradise now? And if you look at the rhetoric that was used to the make it seem like socialism, it clearly was capitalism. See "Democratic Consultation" alone.

[Anti-Traditional]

So Stalin was leading a country of 200 million people who, for about 30 yrs, were completely unaware that they were still living under capitalism and who believed, along with Stalin, that they were living in the socialist future?

I'd say that a few of the hundred thousands killed in the purge would probably question that.

[RevolucionarBG]

You can't just 'institute' an economic system. No economy hitherto has ever been closed. No country has ever been fully, and successfully, self-reliant. Even those that claim to be are subject to external, world market factors.

History has shown us that economic systems are not mere ideology; rather than a bit of social democracy in one country, some fascism in another country, and a bit of neoconservatism in one country, an economic system (i'm thinking of slavery and its associated modes, feudalism, capitalism, and a post-capitalist economic system) is far greater than that. The complexity involved in the terminal decay of one economic system and its subjugation by a new economic system is such that it cannot simply be 'instituted in one country'. When that happens, that country tends not to do so well, because it is in effect a new system surrounded by a world of capital. Much the same happened to the Italian city-states of the 11th century, an early experiment in capitalism and banking that in the end failed because the feudal nobility, around much of Europe, were easily strong enough to crush it. Similarly, the USSR in the 1910s and 1920s had no hope of overthrowing an entire economic system within the confines of their own economy - their somewhat under-developed, peasant-based economy had not even 'mastered' capitalism yet, what hope did they realistically have of actually defeating the forces of capital and instituting a system of socialism?

Socialism has to be global or it won't succeed. And by global, I don't necessarily mean that in the literal sense - but it needs to be big enough in scale that the working class forces pushing a socialist revolution are strong enough, worldwide, to defeat the forces of capital on a global scale.



You forgot to mention tooth fairy also. So you're saying, when party in my country takes power from the capitalist dictators, and install "Socialism", that isn't Socialims?! It's hard for me to understand...

Then why are there party for every country? Why we are all fighting, if, even if we overthrown the bourgeoisie, that isn't Socialism???
I can't find connection between the "strong enough Socialism worldwide" and fighting of the working class in my country.
How is it that when we actually put planned economy and state withouth chance of earning profit, that isn't Socialism in one country?
And you do understand that strenght of Neo-Fascist Nato, EU and USA won't be easily overpowered by fighting for Socialism in huge majority of Asia, African and South American countries. Those NATO member states will still be strong enough to fight them. And from that we conclude that we would need revolutions in Russia, China, India so that we could fight these states, and that wont' be so easily, and it makes every communist party's struggle in small countries insignificant...

After all this isn't 1917. or 1945. so that we could talk that way. Today even if there is a Socialism in Siera Leone, I would greet that with greatest honor and new hope for Communism.

And please, if you want to reply on my comment, don't use political correct ideas like: "Communism is worldwide, you can't try to create it in one coutry" "Marx didnt' had those ideas" "Stalin was reactionary bureacrat dictator" and things like that...

[RevolucionarBG]

I'd say that a few of the hundred thousands killed in the purge would probably question that.

... Source for those "killings"? I find it hard to believe in it when it's just a post on forum.

[Art Vandelay]

Substitute this with degenerated worker state theorists.

I'm not even sure what this means.


God you're thick.

There is no need to randomly insult me. I've only made one post in this thread, haven't even expressed an opinion, was just clarifying something for someone who seemed confused.


What about workers who believe they are under a paradise now? And if you look at the rhetoric that was used to the make it seem like socialism, it clearly was capitalism. See "Democratic Consultation" alone.


I'm not sure why you're spewing this stuff at me. I really haven't engaged in any polemics or expressed my opinion on the matter. I haven't even really been able to follow the debate all that well since it seems to have been dragged quite off topic.

[Remus Bleys]

I'm not even sure what this means.
If you take this quote:
So Stalin was leading a country of 200 million people who, for about 30 yrs, were completely unaware that they were still living under capitalism and who believed, along with Stalin, that they were living in the socialist future? and replace it with degenerated workers state
So Stalin was leading a country of 200 million people who, for about 30 yrs, were completely unaware that they were still living under a degenerated workers state and who believed, along with Stalin, that they were living in the socialist future? Then you come along and say:

Yes that is the argument generally put forth by the degenerated worker state theorists.
Do you see how silly that makes the dws theory sound? Do you see why that isn't really what the argument was?


There is no need to randomly insult me. I've only made one post in this thread, haven't even expressed an opinion, was just clarifying something for someone who seemed confused. Because if you make the argument seem so silly when in fact the same thing is able to be done to your theory of dws. In addition the argument is much deeper than that.

I'm not sure why you're spewing this stuff at me. I really haven't engaged in any polemics or expressed my opinion on the matter. I haven't even really been able to follow the debate all that well since it seems to have been dragged quite off topic.
Because the argument is not that they were convinced that they lived in socialism as socialists understand it, but that they lived in capitalism but called it capitalism. This has been done before, convincing worker's that its not really cruel mean capitalism they are living under.

[Art Vandelay]

Do you see how silly that makes the dws theory sound? Do you see why that isn't really what the argument was?

Show me where I said that was the totality of the analysis? You can't, because I didn't. Whatever you seem to have inferred from my comment is on you, but what I stated was factually accurate. The argument generally associated with the communist left, is that while the soviet 'ruling class' and the citizens of the USSR subjectively thought they were building a socialist society, objectively they were not. Nothing I said was false and there is no need to unnecessarily flame and call me 'thick.' It seemed as if a genuine question had been asked, so I responded.


Because if you make the argument seem so silly when in fact the same thing is able to be done to your theory of dws. In addition the argument is much deeper than that.

I highly doubt you can explain my conception of the 'dws' theory, but regardless I don't know what you inferred from my comment, but I wasn't attempting to make anything seem 'silly.'


Because the argument is not that they were convinced that they lived in socialism as socialists understand it, but that they lived in capitalism but called it capitalism. This has been done before, convincing worker's that its not really cruel mean capitalism they are living under

Then you don't know what you're talking about. To posit that this soviet 'ruling class' subjectively considered themselves doing anything but advancing the interests of the proletarian revolution, is a conspiracy theory rivalling 911 truth proportions.

[Geiseric]

Clearly capitalism. Worker managed capitalism, but capitalism nevertheless.

Wrong. By definition of a dictatorship of the proletariat, a collectively owned economy is present in a DotP. If there is no collectively owned economy, there is no DotP. It isn't the communists sitting in the old parliament building, running a bourgeois state, and keeping the surplus value in the hands of the capitalists. All of the property is publicly owned in a DotP.

A "workers state," as opposed to a "bourgeois state," is characterized by completely publicly owned property. Otherwise it is a capitalist state. The USSR had completely publicly owned property, so it was technically a workers state, since that property wouldn't be publicly owned if the revolution didn't happen. What was done with that property is what made Russia and China into DWS's, namely the propping up of the bureaucracy, who seized political, not economic power for themselves.

[Remus Bleys]

K 9mm. Ill concede that. I was particularly pissed that day and saw that post and intepretted it wrongly. I am sure that you've done tha at some point too.
However, where the fuck did I say the russian ruling class weren't advancing their own interests. Where the fuck did I even imply that?

[Art Vandelay]

K 9mm. Ill concede that. I was particularly pissed that day and saw that post and intepretted it wrongly. I am sure that you've done tha at some point too.

Oh for sure I have and even though I attempt to continually improve in that regard, I'm sure I still do. So no worries.


However, where the fuck did I say the russian ruling class weren't advancing their own interests. Where the fuck did I even imply that?

I never claimed you said that, what I claimed was:


To posit that this soviet 'ruling class' subjectively considered themselves doing anything but advancing the interests of the proletarian revolution, is a conspiracy theory rivalling 911 truth proportions.

Now, the impression I had gotten from your post, was that you were essentially arguing that Stalin and co tricked the masses so to speak, which implies some sort of conscious decision on their part to proclaim the USSR as socialist, while they went about consciously managing state-capitalism. I got that impression from this part in particular:


Because the argument is not that they were convinced that they lived in socialism as socialists understand it, but that they lived in capitalism but called it capitalism. This has been done before, convincing worker's that its not really cruel mean capitalism they are living under.

If that is indeed what you are arguing (and in no way am I suggesting you are stating that the soviet 'ruling class' was not acting in its own class interests), then you're simply wrong. Don't mistake this as apologism for the USSR, because that's not what this is. This topic has been raised before and I'll put forth the same argument I did back then, that such a line of thought is absurd; a conspiracy theory rivaling the best of them.

[Blake's Baby]

... To posit that this soviet 'ruling class' subjectively considered themselves doing anything but advancing the interests of the proletarian revolution, is a conspiracy theory rivalling 911 truth proportions.

I doubt anyone thinks that the ruling class of the Soviet Union was sitting around going 'hahaha, stupid proles, they don't realise we're really capitalists'. I'm sure you're right that what they thought they were doing was advancing, or at least defending, 'the gains of October'.

BUT (and it's a big but):

1 - 'the proletarian revolution' is not synonymous with 'the interests of the Russian state' (which is what they were actually advancing);
2 - 'state property' is not a gain for the working class, as Engels explained in 1880.

[Art Vandelay]

I doubt anyone thinks that the ruling class of the Soviet Union was sitting around going 'hahaha, stupid proles, they don't realise we're really capitalists'. I'm sure you're right that what they thought they were doing was advancing, or at least defending, 'the gains of October'.

Well that was the impression I got from the post and while I would like to think that no one holds that view, I've heard it expressed on here in the past. If I misinterpreted, then my bad, but you can never know on here though.


1 - 'the proletarian revolution' is not synonymous with 'the interests of the Russian state' (which is what they were actually advancing);

I suppose that depends on one issue in particular: did the USSR represent a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat? Because if it did, then the two are synonymous. As far as I'm aware most of the communist left supports the early years of the revolution, so they do consider a genuine dotp to have been established. When then did quantity change into quality? When did the dotp fundamentally change in character? Did it happen overnight? Was it a long and drawn out process? Did the state change into the possession of alien class imperceptibly? I've put forth this argument in the past and its one of the main reasons I support the theory of the DWS; to posit that a genuine dotp could have qualitatively changed into something else entirely, overnight, without the violent eruption of class antagonisms, is essentially a line of thought congruent with reformism in reverse.


2 - 'state property' is not a gain for the working class, as Engels explained in 1880.

I take a few issues with this, the first being that I don't see many other alternatives. The struggle for socialism will necessarily consist of a prolonged period of workers states engaged in active and coordinated struggle against class alien forces. During a period of civil war, as the Bolsheviks faced following October, the reliance on soviets as the primary vehicle for military and tactical decision making, becomes an impediment, it robs the revolution of its strength due to the fetishization of the tactic of decentralization. What exactly should a workers state, besieged by half the globe, look like to you, if it doesn't resemble in some way what the USSR resembled, post October?

On top of this, October established a Nationalized Planned Economy, which is necessarily one of the first tasks of a proletarian dictatorship and I do view it as a gain for the working class. While the true potential of the NPE was left unharnessed, it still represented a step towards socialism. The Russian Revolution represented the most radical break with traditional property relations that the world has ever seen. Capitalism doesn't simply continue to function normally, once the bourgeoisie loses control of the state superstructure; such an event has consequences which reverberate throughout the social superstructure, as well as, obviously, the economic base of society.

The problem with claiming that the mode of production under the dictatorship of the proletariat is capitalist, is it makes note of the fact that the state represents proletarian class interests, however still remains capitalist in nature. The problem is twofold, (1) capitalism cannot be wielded in the interests of the proletariat and here lies a contradiction in the narrative and (2) it fails to take into account that the state itself is an economic mechanism. The USSR bore the hallmarks of a society in transition. The USSR was in no proper sense of the term capitalist, if we are to take the capital Marx describes seriously, but rather had both elements of the beginning stages of the establishment of a socialist economy (NPE), as well as aspects of capitalism (commodity production, etc.). If the mode of production under the dictatorship of the proletariat is capitalist, then it isn't a dictatorship of the proletariat. There was no competing capital in the USSR; production was not geared towards profit; the relationship between the bureaucracy to the means of production was not the same as that of a capitalist; there was enough change in quantity in the USSR, to represent a change in quality to capitalism.

[Remus Bleys]

]
I suppose that depends on one issue in particular: did the USSR represent a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat? Because if it did, then the two are synonymous. As far as I'm aware most of the communist left supports the early years of the revolution, so they do consider a genuine dotp to have been established. When then did quantity change into quality? When did the dotp fundamentally change in character? Did it happen overnight? Was it a long and drawn out process? Did the state change into the possession of alien class imperceptibly? I've put forth this argument in the past and its one of the main reasons I support the theory of the DWS; to posit that a genuine dotp could have qualitatively changed into something else entirely, overnight, without the violent eruption of class antagonisms, is essentially a line of thought congruent with reformism in reverse.
The October Revolution was of a dual character, in that it needed to fulfill the jobs of both a Bourgeois and a Proletarian Revolution simultaneously.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is still objectively capitalism. The difference of course, in being that capitalism is being abolished, being taken away, actively attacked by the workers, any forms of them are abandoned for other relations. In this sense the dictatorship of the Proletariat is dying capitalism, its final form turned into something progressive as it is now actively destroying itself; however, it still suffers from the same issues regular capitalism does. The other difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and regular capitalism being that the proletariat holds political power.
Now, since the October Revolution was a dual revolution, it was forced to develop capitalism, in order to industrialize, destroy feudalism, etc. So, because it was creating capitalism, it really couldn't implement this castrated capitalism thoroughly (well, it did in some regards, but not to the same extent that a dictatorship of the proletariat would in an industrialized economy). So, all October was able to accomplish was Proletarian Political power.
However, capitalism was still under developed. The solution to fulfill capitalism's progressive period, the solution to making it a modern nation would be a massive amount of industrialization. Yes, this plan was successful, it did modernize Russia.
However, in order develop and industrialize Russia in such a short time, a huge bureaucracy had formed, who had resurrected the not completely destroyed Bourgeoisie, and had represented the interests of the capitalists that was being created by Russia's very own industrialization. This bureaucracy was a necessity for the industrialization of Russia, that had turned the political power over from the Vanguard (and thus proletariat) into the hands of the bureaucracy (and thus the Bourgeoisie). Since the only thing October was able to establish was the political power of the Proletariat, this transfer of political power had destroyed what was left of the Proletarian Dictatorship, and had turned it into capitalism and a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

[Dodo]

In a system of interconnectedness, you can not have a seperate coutnry within the framework of the world which is living a different stage. The relations with the old system will remain(within and outside), espcially if this is a coutnry we are talking about, because country means a state entity and borders.
Besides, we do even have a clear defition of what socialism is because it is not a static concept and there are no rules on how it should be. All we know is that the subtructure relations have to change.
As other members said, socialism itself is inherently international.

[Blake's Baby]

Oooooh, Remus, no I'm sorry I can't go along with that.

Vox, you have to know I utterly reject the notion of the 'dual revolution'. You know my position on this, we've debated it before I'm sure, in several places. The revolution in Russia was a proletarian revolution that failed. It wasn't a bourgeois revolution that succeeded.

But, no, the USSR didn't represent a gain for the proletariat - because the revolution failed.

When did 'quantity' change to 'quality'? Never: the question is rather more, when did the counter-revolution overwhelm the revolution? Certainly, by the time the Shanghai Commune was crushed (April 1927, while Mao sat and wrote agricultural reports for the KMT), the world revolution was dead. The last vaguely proletarian currents (the Trotskyists) were expelled from CPSU around the same time; the Bordigists had been purged from the CI; the German revolution was long over, Hungary and Bavaria had been crushed, the new Russian state had long shown itself as an oppressive (indeed murderous) government over the working class and it had started within a very few years to involve itself in secret negotiations with capitalists (Germany and Turkey), to involve itself in 'national liberation' movements in pursuit of its imperialist interests (eg the 'Conference of the Peoples of the East') and to trade on the world market.

When did the Dictatorship of the Proletariat cease in Russia? About, 1919. When was the world revolution lost? By 1922, I'd say. But there were further desperate and doomed moves by the working class as late as 1926-7.

It's impossible to separate entirely what happened in Russia from what happened outside of Russia; it was the world revolution after all; but it went furthest in Russia, which also meant that it degenerated in Russia before elsewhere.

Here's a v simple graphic anyway, which may make the point I'm trying to get at (about dynamics):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/<a href=http://s1274.photobucket.com/user/slothjabber/media/revolutiongraphic_zps7b654873.png.html target=_blank>[IMG]http://i1274.photobucket.com/albums/y436/slothjabber/revolutiongraphic_zps7b654873.pnghttp://i1274.photobucket.com/albums/y436/slothjabber/revolutiongraphic_zps7b654873.png

[Art Vandelay]

The October Revolution was of a dual character, in that it needed to fulfill the jobs of both a Bourgeois and a Proletarian Revolution simultaneously.

The October revolution was a proletarian revolution. It seems you are stating something similar to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. The premise is that in late developing nations (like Russia), the bourgeoisie is unable to develop the means of production, so the remaining tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution must be achieved by the proletariat, in conjunction with its revolution. Capitalism was already developing in Russia by 17' and the October Revolution (which was an example of 'permanent revolution'), was proletarian in nature.


The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is still objectively capitalism. The difference of course, in being that capitalism is being abolished, being taken away, actively attacked by the workers, any forms of them are abandoned for other relations. In this sense the dictatorship of the Proletariat is dying capitalism, its final form turned into something progressive as it is now actively destroying itself; however, it still suffers from the same issues regular capitalism does. The other difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and regular capitalism being that the proletariat holds political power.

Yes the dictatorship of the proletariat represents the transitional stage between capitalism and socialism. Since one of the premises of Marxist dialectics is that nothing is ever static, we know that a proletarian dictatorship must necessarily be moving forwards toward the total destruction of capital, or reverting back to it. But to simply call it 'capitalism' seems a bit flippant to me and raises a host of questions:

Does capitalism not need competing capital?

Can capitalism continue to function within the confines of a state, if the bourgeoisie lose control over the state apparatus?

Why doesn't the bureaucratic 'class' have the same relationship to the means of production as the bourgeoisie?

Does production not have to be geared towards profit, in capitalism?

Can capitalism be wielded in the interests of the proletariat?

Those are a few to start. I'm more then willing to listen to intelligent and reasoned answers to them. They're just points that I haven't seen addressed often, whenever I've seen them raised in the past.


Now, since the October Revolution was a dual revolution, it was forced to develop capitalism, in order to industrialize, destroy feudalism, etc. So, because it was creating capitalism, it really couldn't implement this castrated capitalism thoroughly (well, it did in some regards, but not to the same extent that a dictatorship of the proletariat would in an industrialized economy). So, all October was able to accomplish was Proletarian Political power.However, capitalism was still under developed. The solution to fulfill capitalism's progressive period, the solution to making it a modern nation would be a massive amount of industrialization. Yes, this plan was successful, it did modernize Russia.

Of course industrialization was needed, I don't see any other course of option the Bolsheviks could have taken. There is certainly a argument to be had about the manner in which industrialization took place, but that is somewhat off topic. I really don't see your point though, all of your argumentation seems to be based off your premise (USSR was state-capitalist), as opposed to supporting it.

Regardless I think its important to point out, that socialism in one country was never on the agenda. Lenin stressed the fact that without a revolution in Germany they were doomed, this was always a known fact. So all that was on the table for the USSR, after the seizure of state power, was to go about collectivization and industrialization, while offering whatever material support possible, to the coming world revolution. That is precisely what they went about doing.


However, in order develop and industrialize Russia in such a short time, a huge bureaucracy had formed, who had resurrected the not completely destroyed Bourgeoisie, and had represented the interests of the capitalists that was being created by Russia's very own industrialization. This bureaucracy was a necessity for the industrialization of Russia,

Claiming that the growth in bureaucracy stemmed purely from industrialization I think is a tad monolithic. While it certainly had alot to do with it, you also have to look at other factors, such as the civil war.


that had turned the political power over from the Vanguard (and thus proletariat) into the hands of the bureaucracy (and thus the Bourgeoisie).

No, I simply refuse to concede this point. I've raised the issue multiple times now, the relationship of the bureaucratic 'class' in the USSR, did not have the same relationship to the means of production as the bourgeoisie. How did capitalism continue to function without it? Can capitalism function without the bourgeoisie? Can other classes emerge from thin air, which while having a differing relationship to the means of production than the bourgeoisie, carry out the same functions? These are all questions which need to be answered, if one wants to even have a facade of their analysis stemming from Marxist dialectics.

[Blake's Baby]

Capitalism produces capitalists, not the other way around. If you have wage labour and commodity production, you have capitalism; and if you have capitalism, the class that controls society is a capitalist class. Doesn't matter if you call them something else, functionally they are capitalists.

[Remus Bleys]

The October revolution was a proletarian revolution. It seems you are stating something similar to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. The premise is that in late developing nations (like Russia), the bourgeoisie is unable to develop the means of production, so the remaining tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution must be achieved by the proletariat, in conjunction with its revolution. Capitalism was already developing in Russia by 17' and the October Revolution (which was an example of 'permanent revolution'), was proletarian in nature. Except I'm a bordigist, who uses bordiga's theories, and not trotsky. They sound similar, but they are different.



Those are a few to start. I'm more then willing to listen to intelligent and reasoned answers to them. They're just points that I haven't seen addressed often, whenever I've seen them raised in the past. I feel Blakes Baby has addressed this.




Of course industrialization was needed, I don't see any other course of option the Bolsheviks could have taken. There is certainly a argument to be had about the manner in which industrialization took place, but that is somewhat off topic. I really don't see your point though, all of your argumentation seems to be based off your premise (USSR was state-capitalist), as opposed to supporting it. Err, what? There were three routes to take:
1. Revolution spreads, industrialized nation helps industrialize Russia - this failed
2. Do not develop russia for the sake of the international communist movement - the reasons are obvious why this was not taken
3. Industrialize Russia by itself, and in the process loose the dictatorship of the proletariat.


Regardless I think its important to point out, that socialism in one country was never on the agenda. Lenin stressed the fact that without a revolution in Germany they were doomed, this was always a known fact. So all that was on the table for the USSR, after the seizure of state power, was to go about collectivization and industrialization, while offering whatever material support possible, to the coming world revolution. That is precisely what they went about doing. Do you think we are in disagreement here?




Claiming that the growth in bureaucracy stemmed purely from industrialization I think is a tad monolithic. While it certainly had alot to do with it, you also have to look at other factors, such as the civil war.
Okay. My point was the central factor was industrialization. This does not mean I would ignore the civil war.



No, I simply refuse to concede this point. I've raised the issue multiple times now, the relationship of the bureaucratic 'class' in the USSR, did not have the same relationship to the means of production as the bourgeoisie. How did capitalism continue to function without it? Can capitalism function without the bourgeoisie? Can other classes emerge from thin air, which while having a differing relationship to the means of production than the bourgeoisie, carry out the same functions? These are all questions which need to be answered, if one wants to even have a facade of their analysis stemming from Marxist dialectics.basically, all this tantrum comes from the bolded part added by me.
And I have addressed that:

that had turned the political power over from the Vanguard (and thus proletariat) into the hands of the bureaucracy (and thus the Bourgeoisie).
Sorry for not being clear enough. Just as the "Vanguard" represents the proletariat, the "bureaucracy" represents the bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy was not the be all end all. The state is not its own class, it represents a particular class. In this case, the state represented the Russian Bourgeoisie, and the Russian Bureaucracy managed the political affairs of the russian bourgeoisie.
Russian Capitalism was just that. Russian Capitalism.

[RedMaterialist]

Capitalism produces capitalists, not the other way around. If you have wage labour and commodity production, you have capitalism; and if you have capitalism, the class that controls society is a capitalist class. Doesn't matter if you call them something else, functionally they are capitalists.

Lenin became a capitalist in 1919.

[Five Year Plan]

Capitalism produces capitalists, not the other way around. If you have wage labour and commodity production, you have capitalism; and if you have capitalism, the class that controls society is a capitalist class. Doesn't matter if you call them something else, functionally they are capitalists.

According to this definition of capitalism, it existed in the Roman Empire, before apparently being destroyed with the empire's collapse, only to re-emerge again in Europe in the 16th century onward.

[Blake's Baby]

Lenin became a capitalist in 1919.

Pretty much. Do you think he became a proletarian?


According to this definition of capitalism, it existed in the Roman Empire, before apparently being destroyed with the empire's collapse...

Well, no, because 'capitalism' is a system; but yes, you had 'capitalists' and 'proletarians' in Ancient Rome, and Ancient Greece. They weren't the dominant form of expression of the economy though, so no you didn't have 'capitalism' as a totalising economic system. I suspect that for the last 2,500 years, there has been somebody somewhere paid to produce commodities.



... only to re-emerge again in Europe in the 16th century onward.

Much earlier than that, if it ever went away. The 'capitalisation' of farming in England can be seen from the mid-14th at the latest. It's not complete, but it's definitely started by then. The rise of towns in Flanders and the Rhineland from the 12th century onwards is linked to the creation of a rural (then urban) proletariat and an expansion of manufacture, so again early stirrings of capitalism.

But capitalism only becomes a generalised system in England and the Low Countries from the 16th century, yes; and in other parts of Europe, later (there may be earlier examples too; I'm not too knowledgeable about late-medieval Italy, for example).

[Five Year Plan]

Well, no, because 'capitalism' is a system; but yes, you had 'capitalists' and 'proletarians' in Ancient Rome, and Ancient Greece. They weren't the dominant form of expression of the economy though, so no you didn't have 'capitalism' as a totalising economic system. I suspect that for the last 2,500 years, there has been somebody somewhere paid to produce commodities.

Actually, no, there weren't capitalists in ancient Rome. There were not people who owned means of production, and collected their revenue and tailored their economic decisions on the basis of hiring wage laborers to produce commodities using those means of production. You had people who generated the bulk of their revenue through other forms of exploitation, and who occasionally hired out for wage workers to supplement their workforce and sometimes even produce commodities (you also see this under feudalism, by the way). You see guilds of commodity producers. And you also see merchant capitalists in Rome, but not a bourgeois or capitalist class.

This is important because of what you say earlier: capitalism can only be understood as a system. This is why I disagree with your list of context-independent empirical criteria: "If you have wage labour and commodity production, you have capitalism."

Capitalism requires a capitalist class, because without a capitalist class you do not have the key causal mechanism that gets wage labor, commodity production, and all the other things empirically associated with capitalism to cohere into a system with distinct laws of motion, into capitalism proper. This is the point Marx is making when he calls capitalism a system of "generalized commodity production," not just commodity production.

This doesn't mean that capitalists come first, with capitalism tailing behind at some later point, just as it doesn't mean that you have capitalism as a mode of production without capitalists. Both come into existence through one another.

[Blake's Baby]

But you did have commodity production in Ancient Rome (and Ancient Greece) and you had people who owned the means of productiuon who hired wage labourers to produce commodities. In other words, you had capitalists.

What you didn't have was generalised commodity production using wage labour; that's why Marx and I am right, and you're wrong. I refer to it as 'capitalist behaviour' as opposed to 'a capitalist system' (or, 'capitalism'). But, production of commodities through wage labour existed in the ancient world. Without it being generalised, it wasn't 'capitalism'.


...

Well, no, because 'capitalism' is a system; but yes, you had 'capitalists' and 'proletarians' in Ancient Rome, and Ancient Greece. They weren't the dominant form of expression of the economy though, so no you didn't have 'capitalism' as a totalising economic system. I suspect that for the last 2,500 years, there has been somebody somewhere paid to produce commodities...

That bolded bit is quite important, and in line with what Marx says.

Of course you can have capitalism without capitalists. If workers are paid to produce commodities it's capitalism, no matter if the means of production are owned by aristocrats, churches, guilds, joint-stock companies, banks or the state. Still capitalism.

But the fact is in the ancient world, and medieval Europe (and other places, of course) there was a capitalist class, a class who owned means of production and hired workers to produce commodities. Who do you think the burghers of the Middle Ages were?

[Five Year Plan]

But you did have commodity production in Ancient Rome (and Ancient Greece) and you had people who owned the means of productiuon who hired wage labourers to produce commodities. In other words, you had capitalists.

What you didn't have was generalised commodity production using wage labour; that's why Marx and I am right, and you're wrong. I refer to it as 'capitalist behaviour' as opposed to 'a capitalist system' (or, 'capitalism'). But, production of commodities through wage labour existed in the ancient world. Without it being generalised, it wasn't 'capitalism'.

You can't separate out generalized commodity production from the existence of a capitalist class. Slaveowners and feudal lords can (and did) hire people to produce goods that are then sold on commodity markets. This does not make the slaveowner or a feudal lord a capitalist. Why? Because the production decisions of the feudal lord and slave owner were not dictated by a system of generalized commodity production, by the logic of capital accumulation. Their decision to employ wage labor or produce commodities was based on the logic of an entire different mode of production. It was the same with the urban craftsmen who formed collegia opificum (guilds) in Roman antiquity.

They were not capitalists, and there were no capitalists in the ancient world. Indeed, I would like for you to point to a single passage where Marx or Engels, who did more than any other people in history in researching and writing about the origins of the capitalist mode of production, mention a non-merchant capitalist class in the ancient world. You won't find it, because the capitalist class only exists in the capitalist mode of production, and the capitalist mode of production can only exist when there is a capitalist class. Neither existed in classical antiquity.

It was only out of a system of generalized commodity exchange, facilitated by the destruction of the guilds, that people who depended upon selling commodities for their own reproduction came, through their inefficiency, to be separated from the means of production, or came to depend predominantly on the competitive employment of wage labor for their own reproduction, such that this logic structured their economic rationality. In the countryside this took place through the differentiation of the peasantry, with the less efficient producers of agricultural commodities being forced off their land as a result of not being able to compete on the agricultural market (which also, to reiterate, presupposes generalized commodity exchange).


Of course you can have capitalism without capitalists. If workers are paid to produce commodities it's capitalism, no matter if the means of production are owned by aristocrats, churches, guilds, joint-stock companies, banks or the state. Still capitalism.It makes as much sense to say that you can have a slave mode of production without a slaveholding class, or a feudal mode of production without feudal lords. In all of these cases, the exploiting class is a necessary embodiment of the logic of exploitation that gives direction to the laws of motion that characterize the rise and breakdown of their respective modes of production.

[Blake's Baby]

Do you think you can't have slavery in capitalism? Do you think that you can't have feudal lords in a capitalist system? Of course you can. Likewise you can have people who make their wealth through exploiting the wage labour of others (ie capitalists) in feudal or antique slave societies.

What you can also have is aristocrats and owning-class members who derive some of their income from the sale of commodities produced by wage-labour, in other words, the exploitation of proletarians, in pre-capitalist systems.

[Art Vandelay]

Vox, you have to know I utterly reject the notion of the 'dual revolution'. You know my position on this, we've debated it before I'm sure, in several places. The revolution in Russia was a proletarian revolution that failed. It wasn't a bourgeois revolution that succeeded.

Yeah I'm aware of your position on the matter, which was that a genuine dotp was established. The only poster I can remember spouting the nonsense of the RR being a successful bourgeois revolution, was Manic Impressive.


When did 'quantity' change to 'quality'? Never:

But this is of the utmost importance; indeed it is one of the most important conclusions which come from the Marxist method. That is how we view change after all. So you stated that you think a genuine dotp was established, so I don't think simply saying 'the dotp ceased around 1919,' is much of a line of argumentation. After all it needs to be a scientific and Marxist analysis, consistent with how Marxists view the state and class struggle. The state cannot simply change hands from the proletariat, to an alien class imperceptibly, without the violent expressions of class antagonisms (which, incidentally, is why I lean towards stating the purges in the 30's represented the reintegration of the ussr into the global capitalist system), such a argument is congruent with reformism in reverse.


the question is rather more, when did the counter-revolution overwhelm the revolution? Certainly, by the time the Shanghai Commune was crushed (April 1927, while Mao sat and wrote agricultural reports for the KMT), the world revolution was dead.

I think stating the world revolution to be dead, by as early as 27' is foolish (let alone 22'). What about 36' in Spain? What about the inter-imperialist WWII, which offered a situation which bore some resemblence, to the situation the Bolsehviks took advantage of in 17', ie: turn the imperialist war, into a civil war. At the very least Spain needs to be considered a revolutionary situation; one which the left pissed away.


and it had started within a very few years to involve itself in secret negotiations with capitalists (Germany and Turkey), to involve itself in 'national liberation' movements in pursuit of its imperialist interests (eg the 'Conference of the Peoples of the East') and to trade on the world market.

Of course it had to trade within the world market and yes Bolshevism supports the right to self determination.


the new Russian state had long shown itself as an oppressive (indeed murderous) government over the working class

A large issue I take with the analysis of many left-coms, is that it seems to be interlaced with an element of moralism. The factions were banned! The soviets were disbanded! The USSR was centralized and oppressive, as oppose to federated! Its all reflective of (a) moralism and (b) fetishizing form over content. The analysis of when the USSR ceased to be a proletarian dictatorship is not a moral judgement, but a scientific one. So I think pointing out a number of things which transpired and saying 'look at what happened, the USSR cannot be a dotp,' certainly lacks any level of nuance, or objectivity.

[Art Vandelay]

Except I'm a bordigist, who uses bordiga's theories, and not trotsky. They sound similar, but they are different.

I never said that you were a Trotskyist, or that you upheld Permanent Revolution, what I said was that what you were describing was similar to PR and that what you said was essentially a staple of PR theory; nothing I said was factually inaccurate.


Err, what? There were three routes to take:
1. Revolution spreads, industrialized nation helps industrialize Russia - this failed

Correct.


2. Do not develop russia for the sake of the international communist movement - the reasons are obvious why this was not taken

Yeah, you're right, the reasons are pretty obvious why this wasn't taken; which is also why I didn't include it as a potential course for the revolution to take, since no one seriously considered it.


3. Industrialize Russia by itself, and in the process loose the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Again I agree with this, but then then the obvious question arises: when were the final gains of the RR rolled back? When was the final degenerative nail, put into the coffin of the dotp? In other words, when did quantitative changes, spill over into a qualitative change, which effected the class nature of the dotp?


Okay. My point was the central factor was industrialization. This does not mean I would ignore the civil war.

Fair enough. You simply hadn't mentioned it, so I brought it up, for the sake of pointing out that if that was your line of argumentation (which I now know it is not), then it would be far too monolithic of an approach.


basically, all this tantrum comes from the bolded part added by me.

What tantrum?


And I have addressed that:

Hardly.


that had turned the political power over from the Vanguard (and thus proletariat) into the hands of the bureaucracy (and thus the Bourgeoisie).
Sorry for not being clear enough. Just as the "Vanguard" represents the proletariat, the "bureaucracy" represents the bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy was not the be all end all. The state is not its own class, it represents a particular class. In this case, the state represented the Russian Bourgeoisie, and the Russian Bureaucracy managed the political affairs of the russian bourgeoisie.

And this is a completely underwhelming and unconvincing analysis. I've raised some very important questions which need to be addressed and you either ignore them, or simply continue repeating 'it was capitalism, it was capitalism.' Which is fine, I'm just not going to waste anymore time discussing things with you, if that's the level of discourse you want to have.

[Five Year Plan]

Do you think you can't have slavery in capitalism? Do you think that you can't have feudal lords in a capitalist system? Of course you can. Likewise you can have people who make their wealth through exploiting the wage labour of others (ie capitalists) in feudal or antique slave societies.

What you can also have is aristocrats and owning-class members who derive some of their income from the sale of commodities produced by wage-labour, in other words, the exploitation of proletarians, in pre-capitalist systems.

Not only have I never disputed that you can have ruling classes "who derive some of their income from the sale of commodities produced by wage labor," I openly stated that this did happen. In fact, I was the first person to mention that this was the specific way that wage labor was employed in the ancient world. I then proceeded to explain why this is different than capitalism, and why those ruling classes did not thereby become capitalist classes. All you kept doing was repeating over and over again was that there was wage labor, as if that somehow meant that there was a capitalist class and a capitalist mode of production.

There is a difference between a form of exploitation, like wage labor, and a mode of production, which is when a form of exploitation dictates social reproduction through shaping the basis of the social-production decisions of the people within it.

You can have instances of slavery in a capitalist society (e.g., the domestic slave of a industrial capitalist in the antebellum North), just as you can have instances of wage labor under slavery. But when these forms of exploitation begin to develop and take root in concrete economic classes, and develop into actual modes of production by shaping the economic rationality of actual people, they come into conflict with one another. The fact that slavery as a mode of production is incompatible with the capitalism as a mode of production is one of the major causes of the eruption of the American Civil War.

[Remus Bleys]

I never said that you were a Trotskyist, or that you upheld Permanent Revolution, what I said was that what you were describing was similar to PR and that what you said was essentially a staple of PR theory; nothing I said was factually inaccurate.

Yeah, you're right, the reasons are pretty obvious why this wasn't taken; which is also why I didn't include it as a potential course for the revolution to take, since no one seriously considered it.
It's fucking difficult to talk to you. "basically, this just rips permanent revolution" or "yeah its pretty obvious idiot"
When what you said was " I don't see any other course of option the Bolsheviks could have taken." Then you're pretty dumb tbh. If you see no alternative, can't even entertain the notion.



Again I agree with this, but then then the obvious question arises: when were the final gains of the RR rolled back? When was the final degenerative nail, put into the coffin of the dotp? In other words, when did quantitative changes, spill over into a qualitative change, which effected the class nature of the dotp?
I'll get back to you on this, ive gotta go to class.



What tantrum?
"No one ever answers my questions even when someone did"



Hardly.:rolleyes:




And this is a completely underwhelming and unconvincing analysis. I've raised some very important questions which need to be addressed and you either ignore them, or simply continue repeating 'it was capitalism, it was capitalism.' Which is fine, I'm just not going to waste anymore time discussing things with you, if that's the level of discourse you want to have.It's pretty simple 9mm. The Russian state was one were the proletarian state was seized by the bourgeoisie. Capitalist states have been seized by nobles before, its not an impossible concept. Russia was building capitalism, so in turn, the bourgeois was formed by the massive industrialization that took the management of the state and of the economy out of the hands of the workers, and into the hands of the new forming bourgeoisie. This isn't a "new class."

lets look at your "interesting questions"


Can capitalism continue to function within the confines of a state, if the bourgeoisie lose control over the state apparatus?Of course it does. Capitalism is a global system, and thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat is capitalist.


Why doesn't the bureaucratic 'class' have the same relationship to the means of production as the bourgeoisie?
The reason I did not reply was actually this question (in addition to thinking blake covered this). Didn't i just say Russia was regular forming capitalism? Didn't i literally just saw that the bureaucracy was not a new class, and that it was simply the bourgeoisie?


Can capitalism be wielded in the interests of the proletariat?Of course not, worker managed capitalism is simply a necessity.

[Art Vandelay]

It's fucking difficult to talk to you. "basically, this just rips permanent revolution" or "yeah its pretty obvious idiot"
When what you said was " I don't see any other course of option the Bolsheviks could have taken." Then you're pretty dumb tbh. If you see no alternative, can't even entertain the notion.

I never called you an idiot, don't put words in my mouth. There was nothing antagonistic about what I said, yet again I was merely pointing out facts. You can call me dumb all you like and continue to flame, its just a strawman in place of an argument. I hope you realize your conduct is alot more reflective of you as a person, then any of your petty insults are of me.


I'll get back to you on this, ive gotta go to class.

Fair enough, I'm off to work regardless.


"No one ever answers my questions even when someone did"

I'm fairly certain that I haven't received a substantive answer to my questions. If I am mistaken, I'm more then willing to go back and re-read if someone is kind enough to point it out to me.


It's pretty simple 9mm. The Russian state was one were the proletarian state was seized by the bourgeoisie. Capitalist states have been seized by nobles before, its not an impossible concept. Russia was building capitalism, so in turn, the bourgeois was formed by the massive industrialization that took the management of the state and of the economy out of the hands of the workers, and into the hands of the new forming bourgeoisie. This isn't a "new class."

I can respond to this in more detail later tonight or tmro, so I'll come back and edit this part out. Obviously I don't consider this a very compelling analysis, but I just don't have the time to put forth a proper response at the moment.


lets look at your "interesting questions"

Why the quotation marks around 'interesting questions'? Attempting to attribute a comment to me, which I didn't make? Kinda like when you inferred I called you an idiot? Despite the fact that my posts have all been non-antagonistic, as opposed to your own.


You: Of course it does. Capitalism is a global system, and thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat is capitalist.

Me: Can capitalism be wielded in the interests of the proletariat?

You: Of course not, worker managed capitalism is simply a necessity.

Do you not see the contradiction? Do you not see the irony inherent in saying that the dotp is a form of capitalism which is moving towards the abolition of capital (ie: capitalism moving towards its own destruction, which is congruent with proletarian interests), and then follow it up and say that capitalism cannot be wielded in the interests of the proletariat? Talk about cognitive dissonance.

[Remus Bleys]

I never called you an idiot, don't put words in my mouth. There was nothing antagonistic about what I said, yet again I was merely pointing out facts. You can call me dumb all you like and continue to flame, its just a strawman in place of an argument. I hope you realize your conduct is alot more reflective of you as a person, then any of your petty insults are of me.

Everything you have said to me has been douchebagish, even to the point of berating me on my profile without giving me a chance to be able to reply do to your anon settings.
Every thread we have been in together your tone has been overly condenscending. Not being rude doesn't make you not an asshole. In fact, it would be better if you were just a blatant asshole.
And what does it eveal about me? It reveals every day I am surrounded by social democrats, so I take my anger out on internet social democrats. (I would say most trots are at best social demcrats, especially cwiers.)

I'm fairly certain that I haven't received a substantive answer to my questions. If I am mistaken, I'm more then willing to go back and re-read if someone is kind enough to point it out to me.


okay, well now your being obnoxiously passive aggressive because I answered this several times now.

I can respond to this in more detail later tonight or tmro, so I'll come back and edit this part out. Obviously I don't consider this a very compelling analysis, but I just don't have the time to put forth a proper response at the moment.


then oh wise 9mm, will you tell me the beauty of dws? Will you inform me of how the ussrs degeneration just so happened to be the same time trotskys loss of political power was solidified?



Why the quotation marks around 'interesting questions'? Attempting to attribute a comment to me, which I didn't make? Kinda like when you inferred I called you an idiot? Despite the fact that my posts have all been non-antagonistic, as opposed to your own.

Againh you seem to think by not name calling you aren't being a dick.
And let's be honest, you do think I'm an idiot. I don't care, I'm not going to use it against you or anything, in fact, id perfer it if you were more open about it.

But the real reason I put quotes around interesting is because they weren't interesting, . They were fairly simple questions with some ovvious answer that have been dealt with thread after thread on this subject. I'm not, how would you say it, "articulate" nough in economics to have a good discussion on that tbh. The ones I did answer should be obvious anyway.




Do you not see the contradiction? Do you not see the irony inherent in saying that the dotp is a form of capitalism which is moving towards the abolition of capital (ie: capitalism moving towards its own destruction, which is congruent with proletarian interests), and then follow it up and say that capitalism cannot be wielded in the interests of the proletariat? Talk about cognitive dissonance.the capitalism in the dotp isn't really "beneficial" for the working class as an end, which is how I interpretted the question. The dotp still has the problems of regular capitalism, and the part of the dotp that is beneficial to the workers is the fact it leads to the abolition of capitalism. The ultimate result of the dotp, which is its own destruction, is what is beneficial to the workers, not the dotp in and of itself.
Also, aren't you a dialectical magician who's all into contradictions?

[Brotto Rühle]

Wrong. By definition of a dictatorship of the proletariat, a collectively owned economy is present in a DotP. If there is no collectively owned economy, there is no DotP. It isn't the communists sitting in the old parliament building, running a bourgeois state, and keeping the surplus value in the hands of the capitalists. All of the property is publicly owned in a DotP.

A "workers state," as opposed to a "bourgeois state," is characterized by completely publicly owned property. Otherwise it is a capitalist state. The USSR had completely publicly owned property, so it was technically a workers state, since that property wouldn't be publicly owned if the revolution didn't happen. What was done with that property is what made Russia and China into DWS's, namely the propping up of the bureaucracy, who seized political, not economic power for themselves.If the proletariat is exploiting itself, as would be the case in a dotp regardless, it's still the capitalist mode of production.

Property was state owned, not publically owned

The economic state of things determines the political. Not vica versa

[Five Year Plan]

Everything you have said to me has been douchebagish, even to the point of berating me on my profile without giving me a chance to be able to reply do to your anon settings.
Every thread we have been in together your tone has been overly condenscending. Not being rude doesn't make you not an asshole. In fact, it would be better if you were just a blatant asshole.
And what does it eveal about me? It reveals every day I am surrounded by social democrats, so I take my anger out on internet social democrats. (I would say most trots are at best social demcrats, especially cwiers.)

okay, well now your being obnoxiously passive aggressive because I answered this several times now.
then oh wise 9mm, will you tell me the beauty of dws? Will you inform me of how the ussrs degeneration just so happened to be the same time trotskys loss of political power was solidified?


Againh you seem to think by not name calling you aren't being a dick.
And let's be honest, you do think I'm an idiot. I don't care, I'm not going to use it against you or anything, in fact, id perfer it if you were more open about it.

But the real reason I put quotes around interesting is because they weren't interesting, . They were fairly simple questions with some ovvious answer that have been dealt with thread after thread on this subject. I'm not, how would you say it, "articulate" nough in economics to have a good discussion on that tbh. The ones I did answer should be obvious anyway.
the capitalism in the dotp isn't really "beneficial" for the working class as an end, which is how I interpretted the question. The dotp still has the problems of regular capitalism, and the part of the dotp that is beneficial to the workers is the fact it leads to the abolition of capitalism. The ultimate result of the dotp, which is its own destruction, is what is beneficial to the workers, not the dotp in and of itself.
Also, aren't you a dialectical magician who's all into contradictions?

It's interesting how I'm not the only person who has been having issues with you, Remus, but apparently you think the problem is with everybody else (who disagrees with you too much politically), and not with you.

Blake's Baby and I have had pretty sharp disagreements in multiple threads the past few days, but do you see either of us calling each other names or tendency-baiting? No, because we are secure enough in our political convictions that we feel we can let our arguments speak for themselves, even as each of us thinks the other is wrong.

If you can't cut sharp polemical exchanges without telling people "you're pretty dumb" and calling their posts "tantrums," then you probably shouldn't be posting on these parts of the forum and should confine yourself to the non-political sections. A little courtesy for your fellow posters, even the evil Trotskyist ones, goes a long way.

[Remus Bleys]

K aufhben. Sending multiple pms bugging me and calling me out by name.
And I don't really tendency bait - I do to the same extent everyone else.
I'm just more frank about what I think of people, wgich has nothing to do with my politics.

[Bolshevik Sickle]

SIOC won't work well. It will just end up turning into a mixed economy like England or Canada.

[Remus Bleys]

SIOC won't work well. It will just end up turning into a mixed economy like England or Canada.
>SIOC won't work
>Marxist-Leninist as set tendency
Also, what is a mixed economy

[Art Vandelay]

Everything you have said to me has been douchebagish, even to the point of berating me on my profile without giving me a chance to be able to reply do to your anon settings.

What are you even talking about? I've never posted anything on your profile, let alone 'berated' you. As far as me being a 'douchebag' goes, alright, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I think the conversation stands for itself.


Every thread we have been in together your tone has been overly condenscending. Not being rude doesn't make you not an asshole. In fact, it would be better if you were just a blatant asshole.

Heh, well now I'm really going to seem like an asshole, but I don't really know you as a poster, at least can't recall any significant exchanges we've had. Anyways, as I said earlier, I'm certainly no model poster, when it comes to always being level headed, so I apologize for whatever comments I made, which you felt were antagonistic towards you.


And what does it eveal about me? It reveals every day I am surrounded by social democrats, so I take my anger out on internet social democrats. (I would say most trots are at best social demcrats, especially cwiers.)

Interesting. I find most left-coms to be moralistic and pretentious. See how easy that is? See how pointless it was? Now, as a matter of fact, I don't have any serious problems with left-coms, outside of revolutionary strategy and have some I consider friends, I generally try and not let political disagreements turn into personal ones.


then oh wise 9mm, will you tell me the beauty of dws? Will you inform me of how the ussrs degeneration just so happened to be the same time trotskys loss of political power was solidified?

Nah you've kinda spoiled any productive exchange that could have happened, by acting like a petulant child. I'll be more then willing to continue on the discourse with others though.


Againh you seem to think by not name calling you aren't being a dick.
And let's be honest, you do think I'm an idiot. I don't care, I'm not going to use it against you or anything, in fact, id perfer it if you were more open about it.

I really don't know enough about you to comment on your intelligence level, but feel free to continue on assuming these various things about me.


But the real reason I put quotes around interesting is because they weren't interesting, They were fairly simple questions with some ovvious answer that have been dealt with thread after thread on this subject. I'm not, how would you say it, "articulate" nough in economics to have a good discussion on that tbh. The ones I did answer should be obvious anyway.

So you passive aggressively made fun of my questions, then admit you aren't articulate enough to answer them, then say that your answers (to the ones you can answer) should be obvious to me?


Also, aren't you a dialectical magician who's all into contradictions?

Off topic much? But yes I'm a dialectical materialist, as all Marxists are. I've noticed that your level of rudeness tends to be inversely proportional to your ability to formulate a coherent political argument. Anyways, I've had enough of this exchange, so I'll wash my hands of the discourse.

[Remus Bleys]

What are you even talking about? I've never posted anything on your profile, let alone 'berated' you. As far as me being a 'douchebag' goes, alright, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I think the conversation stands for itself. Back when I had the dzerzhinsky avatar.




Nah you've kinda spoiled any productive exchange that could have happened, by acting like a petulant child. I'll be more then willing to continue on the discourse with others though.
Sure


I really don't know enough about you to comment on your intelligence level, but feel free to continue on assuming these various things about me.




So you passive aggressively made fun of my questions, then admit you aren't articulate enough to answer them, then say that your answers (to the ones you can answer) should be obvious to me?
The answers to the questions I had answered would be obvious. Such as "is the dotp capitalist?"
When I said articulate, I was talking about economics.


Off topic much? But yes I'm a dialectical materialist, as all Marxists are. I've noticed that your level of rudeness tends to be inversely proportional to your ability to formulate a coherent political argument. Anyways, I've had enough of this exchange, so I'll wash my hands of the discourse.
Fine. When I "debate" with you and your reply is simply "thats not sufficient" then the "discourse" is probably better not to have.

[Brotto Rühle]

Do you not see the irony inherent in saying that the dotp is a form of capitalism which is moving towards the abolition of capital (ie: capitalism moving towards its own destruction, which is congruent with proletarian interests), and then follow it up and say that capitalism cannot be wielded in the interests of the proletariat? Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Capitalism constantly moves toward its own destruction, regardless. You're completely strawmanning the argument. The DOTP is a necccesity and product of, you guessed it, the capitalist mode of production. It is a political thing, not an economic. Your point about workers "running it in their interests" is moot. Of course their running it in their interests, otherwise there would never come to be of the negation of the negation. Unless you think in their interests means running it to keep it as is.

[Art Vandelay]

Capitalism constantly moves toward its own destruction, regardless. You're completely strawmanning the argument. The DOTP is a necccesity and product of, you guessed it, the capitalist mode of production. It is a political thing, not an economic. Your point about workers "running it in their interests" is moot. Of course their running it in their interests, otherwise there would never come to be of the negation of the negation. Unless you think in their interests means running it to keep it as is.

I think if you go back and reread the context of my post, you'll find your argument is not with me. I was not the one who claimed that capitalism could not be wielded for proletarian interests, then in the next sentence claimed that the dotp was capitalist. In fact, I didn't really express my opinion on the matter, I was merely pointing out a fault in the line of thinking.

[reb]

Wrong. By definition of a dictatorship of the proletariat, a collectively owned economy is present in a DotP. If there is no collectively owned economy, there is no DotP. It isn't the communists sitting in the old parliament building, running a bourgeois state, and keeping the surplus value in the hands of the capitalists. All of the property is publicly owned in a DotP.

A "workers state," as opposed to a "bourgeois state," is characterized by completely publicly owned property. Otherwise it is a capitalist state. The USSR had completely publicly owned property, so it was technically a workers state, since that property wouldn't be publicly owned if the revolution didn't happen. What was done with that property is what made Russia and China into DWS's, namely the propping up of the bureaucracy, who seized political, not economic power for themselves.

I think this highlights perfectly the bourgeois nature of social-democracy. This user, as with many others, presents the dotp as a state, workers or socialist, it does not matter. It literally takes the "revolutionary" out of the the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and instead makes it into a perverse inversion of a regular bourgeois dictatorship. There is an introduction to the definition given which has no sources, of the dotp being the collective ownership of economy. This again furthers my previous point.

This user, as with many others, focus entirely on the political superstructral aspects of society, as if they define society, or rather, as if they dictate mode of production. The post here describes nothing of the revolutionary aspect of the the dotp or of any elimination of capital or value production. It is just hand waving to distract people from engaging in real struggles in favor of supporting their preferred bourgeois social-democratic party.

[Five Year Plan]

Capitalism constantly moves toward its own destruction, regardless. You're completely strawmanning the argument. The DOTP is a necccesity and product of, you guessed it, the capitalist mode of production. It is a political thing, not an economic. Your point about workers "running it in their interests" is moot. Of course their running it in their interests, otherwise there would never come to be of the negation of the negation. Unless you think in their interests means running it to keep it as is.

The DOTP is a necessary mechanism for overcoming capitalism, but capitalism doesn't necessarily create it. The fact that it is the mechanism for overcoming capitalism means that, contrary to what you claim, it is "economic" in terms of the functions it must perform. Marx was totally attuned to this, which is why he said in Critique of the Gotha Program: "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."

Why would the transition from capitalism to socialism "correspond" exactly to the DOTP? Purely coincidence? Or did Marx foresee the DOTP leading the transition from one society to the other? Doesn't this suggest that he thought the overcoming of capitalism requires human agency, conscious intervention on the part of workers acting through their state? I think he did, which is why I think it is nonsense to talk about the DOTP as non-economic or made "necessary" by capitalism (is the transformation of capitalism to socialism also the "necessary product" of capitalism?).

For a person who spends considerable time polemicizing on the issue of the transition from capitalism to socialism, you sure have strange views on the matter. Not just strange, but ones that are alien to what Marx said on the subject.

[RedMaterialist]

Is socialism in one country impossible? That depends on how you define socialism. According to many posters here socialism has never existed because the dictatorship of the proletariat has never been successful. The left communists here say that the Russian revolution created that dictatorship but it ended in 1919 when the capitalists took over in the Soviet Union.

Based on this kind of reasoning one cannot say that socialism has ever existed anywhere. However, this is not to say that socialism is not possible in one state, only that it has never yet appeared in one state.

Of course, the idea that Lenin and Stalin were capitalists is utterly stupid. But, an entire ideology, left communism, takes that idea seriously.

[Blake's Baby]

Obviously, because what we do is only a matter of will, isn't it? Nothing to do with conditions at all. Lenin and Stalin closed their eyes and held hands one day and wished ever so hard to be Socialist Supermen, able to overcome historical circumstances, and - PING! - the History Fairy made it happen.

An entire bourgeois ideology, Marxist-Leninism, takes that idea seriously.

[Five Year Plan]

Is socialism in one country impossible? That depends on how you define socialism. According to many posters here socialism has never existed because the dictatorship of the proletariat has never been successful. The left communists here say that the Russian revolution created that dictatorship but it ended in 1919 when the capitalists took over in the Soviet Union.

Based on this kind of reasoning one cannot say that socialism has ever existed anywhere. However, this is not to say that socialism is not possible in one state, only that it has never yet appeared in one state.

Of course, the idea that Lenin and Stalin were capitalists is utterly stupid. But, an entire ideology, left communism, takes that idea seriously.

If you define socialism the way that either Lenin or Marx did, as a classless society that had done away with value relations, you would have to accept the fact that a socialist society has never existed anywhere and cannot exist anywhere without first securing the international victory of the proletariat. Otherwise, whatever dictatorship workers establish in one society will still, to some extent, have to engage in class struggle internationally, which would require that planning decisions not be taken by collective need and decision-making, but by the requirements of competition and struggle on a global level.

You can easily accept what I just said in the last paragraph without buying into the bizarre position, conjured up inexplicably by some theoretically confused people in this thread, that Lenin and the Bolsheviks of the 1910s and 1920s (and, I am guessing, the workers who supported them and were members of the party?) were capitalists because the DotP is supposedly a capitalist state rather than what it actually is: a workers' state, a radically different form of state geared toward creating a radically different form of society as it struggles against extant capitalist relations.

[Blake's Baby]

And what is the economy of the 'workers' state', aufheben? Is it capitalist? Is it socialist? Or do you have to invent some new non-Marxist category for it?

[Five Year Plan]

And what is the economy of the 'workers' state', aufheben? Is it capitalist? Is it socialist? Or do you have to invent some new non-Marxist category for it?

I thought you would never ask. It is a society transitioning from capitalism to socialism. It is a society dominated by socialist property relations through the way the state, the possessor of most (if not all) of the means of production, is structured in relation to society, but where those property relations have not been fully realized in the concrete economic relations occurring throughout society.

What this means at a practical level is that you have planning structures in place, but due to the resistance of some parts of the working class, not to mention the bourgeoisie internationally, planning decisions are taken by a state (democratically supported by a class that is by and large revolutionary and supportive) that is issuing directives about what to produce and so on. But because full self-management hasn't set in, there is separation between the decisions made, as well as the purpose of those decisions, and what producers would collectively decide in a socialist society (which wouldn't revolve around exigencies of struggle, but instead around the meeting of people's needs in order that they might flourish as people and not just as "workers"). This separation means that value still functions to a greater or lesser degree in the economy, value being the regulator and planning mechanism that issues from producers' inability to control the economy democratically and collectively. What this means is that we're not dealing with a socialist society.

Is it capitalism? Well, if you think that capitalism is defined by just having some form of wage labor, as you seem to think it is according to our discussion in another thread, then I suppose it is capitalism. But then we have apparently had capitalism dating back to ancient Rome and through the Middle Ages, despite Marx's insistence that guilds were an impediment to capitalism rather than a form of it. You will find disagreement among those of us who understand that capitalism and its laws of motion require concrete classes of individuals who are the embodiment of capitalist property relations (who are driven by economic interests structured into the very system of laws and practices governing the economy). Without these given interests, you have no "laws" of motion and no capitalist mode of production. So no, you don't have a full-blown capitalist mode of production either, in my opinion, though you are still dealing with a society that is dominated by its practices and vestiges.

What I honestly don't understand is the position that a society either has to be fully capitalist or fully socialist, which is the only alternative a person is left with if they want to discount the possibility of a transitional economy mixing elements of the two, but where socialist property relations predominate.

Since I have been so kind as to give a detailed reply to your question, Blake, I would appreciate it if you would explain to me the process by which full-blown capitalism instantaneously morphs into full-blown socialism, thereby not requiring any kind of transitional process extending over a period of years corresponding to a dictatorship of the proletariat.

[Blake's Baby]

I thought you would never ask. It is a society transitioning from capitalism to socialism. It is a society dominated by socialist property relations through the way the state, the possessor of most (if not all) of the means of production, is structured in relation to society, but where those property relations have not been fully realized in the concrete economic relations occurring throughout society...

But in the Sovet Union it wasn't 'transitioning'. Littered about RevLeft are threads where I use the metaphor of a bridge. To be a succesful bridge (an analogy for 'transitioning' from one stable state to another) the bridge must be anchored at both ends. A bridge that begins on one bank but doesn't reach the other side is not 'a bridge' at all. It's not even 'a half bridge' or a 'deformed workers' bridge'. It doesn't do what it's intended to do.

Now... you'll have to make your definition of 'socialist property relations' much clearer because I literally cannot understand what you're saying here. You have to start I think from the realisation that to me, 'socialist property relations' is a phrase that cannot have any meaning as there are no 'property relations' in socialist society. There is no 'property' so there are no 'property relations'. So 'an unrealised oxymoron' isn't, in my view, a great debating tool. You'll have to find a different way of framing your argument.


...What this means at a practical level is that you have planning structures in place, but due to the resistance of some parts of the working class, not to mention the bourgeoisie internationally, planning decisions are taken by a state (democratically supported by a class that is by and large revolutionary and supportive) that is issuing directives about what to produce and so on. But because full self-management hasn't set in, there is separation between the decisions made, as well as the purpose of those decisions, and what producers would collectively decide in a socialist society (which wouldn't revolve around exigencies of struggle, but instead around the meeting of people's needs in order that they might flourish as people and not just as "workers"). This separation means that value still functions to a greater or lesser degree in the economy, value being the regulator and planning mechanism that issues from producers' inability to control the economy democratically and collectively. What this means is that we're not dealing with a socialist society...

Well, quite. we're dealing with the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat (so, it has classes in it) and we're also dealing with a state, so it definitely isn't socialist society. As you imply, fighting the world civil war is necessary, spreading the revolution is necessary, and there are hard decisions to be made between (for example) reducing hours of work to make workers' conditions of life better in the 'free' territories, and the necessity of producing for what can justifiably described as 'the war effort'.

The working class will need mechanisms for dealing with these questions, which cannot be sorted out at the level of the individual workplace. production will need to be organised and co-ordinated, people need to be fed, territory needs to be defended. Now, when a class (in this case the working class) imposes its will on a wider population, organises the framework for production and defends a terriotry, that to me is 'a state' even if in this case it is 'state of a new type' or a semi-state or whatever (because for the first time in history it will be the majority who control the state).

That state is not a stable entity: it's the transition not either of the banks, the working class is working towards the generalisation of its own condition, which is then the abolition of class, because something - 'people' in this case - cannot contain only one class (ie one division). Quantity becomes quality. When all are workers then there is no 'working class' as a separate class of workers.

Likewise, when all property is collective property, there is no 'property', because 'property' means 'that which someone has exclusive rights over'. When no-one has exclusive rights, there is no property. Quantity becomes quality. 99% of the property collectivised means property still exits. 100% of property collectivised means the abolition of property as a social form.


...Is it capitalism? Well, if you think that capitalism is defined by just having some form of wage labor, as you seem to think it is according to our discussion in another thread, then I suppose it is capitalism. But then we have apparently had capitalism dating back to ancient Rome and through the Middle Ages, despite Marx's insistence that guilds were an impediment to capitalism rather than a form of it...

You're forgetting (on purpose?) that I have said several times that capitalism is a system; that system is generalised wage labour and commodity production. Some wage labour for commodity production does not make the system capitalist. But to believe, as you seem to, that there was no borgeoisie and no proletariat and no capitalism before a Tuesday in 1630, and then everything was capitalist and everyone was either bourgeois or proletarian, because somehow magically there was an instantaneous translation from nothing to everything, is utterly ridiculous. How could the bourgeoisie stage 'the bourgeois revolutions' if there was no bourgeoisie? How could the bourgeoisie have come into existence if there was no capitalism to create them?

So; capitalism as 'economic behaviour inside a feudal system' must pre-date 'capitalism as a generalised sytem'. Quantity (2% capitalism >>>> 60% capitalism - or whatever exact proportions one wants to argue about) becomes quality.

I shall try to use the term 'the capitalist relation' to refer to commodity production through wage labour. This relationship, you have to admit, long predated capitalism as an economic system.


... You will find disagreement among those of us who understand that capitalism and its laws of motion require concrete classes of individuals who are the embodiment of capitalist property relations (who are driven by economic interests structured into the very system of laws and practices governing the economy). Without these given interests, you have no "laws" of motion and no capitalist mode of production. So no, you don't have a full-blown capitalist mode of production either, in my opinion, though you are still dealing with a society that is dominated by its practices and vestiges...

I have ferequently used the term 'attenuated capitalism' to describe the detruction of capitaism-as-a-system under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. It is the stage of capitalism being transformed into something else. But until it reaches 'something else' it retains characteristics of capitalism. If it never reaches something else (see the bridge analogy, or the Soviet Union) it never ceases to be capitalism.



..What I honestly don't understand is the position that a society either has to be fully capitalist or fully socialist, which is the only alternative a person is left with if they want to discount the possibility of a transitional economy mixing elements of the two, but where socialist property relations predominate...

Which has never happened (even if I pretend I know what you mean by 'socialist property relations', or pretend that you think that state control of the economy of the former Russian Empire is the same as the working class controlling the economy of the majority of the planet).

It has to be 'fully' capitalist or 'fully' socialist - in other words, 'capitalist' or 'socialist' - because there isn't anything else. Socialist society is the negation of capitalist society. A thing (capitalism) cannot be both abolished and not-abolished. You have to pick one. Until capitalism is abolished (which is the culmination of a process) it is not abolished. Until the process is complete, it is not complete. The process cannot be both 'complete' and 'not complete' simultaneously.


..Since I have been so kind as to give a detailed reply to your question, Blake, I would appreciate it if you would explain to me the process by which full-blown capitalism instantaneously morphs into full-blown socialism, thereby not requiring any kind of transitional process extending over a period of years corresponding to a dictatorship of the proletariat.

I would, if that were my position, but it isn't, so I see no need to explain to you where you got the straw from to stuff your strawman, nor how many pieces you've used.

[Five Year Plan]

But in the Sovet Union it wasn't 'transitioning'. Littered about RevLeft are threads where I use the metaphor of a bridge. To be a succesful bridge (an analogy for 'transitioning' from one stable state to another) the bridge must be anchored at both ends. A bridge that begins on one bank but doesn't reach the other side is not 'a bridge' at all. It's not even 'a half bridge' or a 'deformed workers' bridge'. It doesn't do what it's intended to do.

I don't know how useful your bridge metaphor is, but I can agree that either a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat overseeing a transition from capitalism to socialism is moving toward socialism, or it is is moving back toward capitalism in a way that makes it a degenerated workers' state. It is revolutionary, after all, and doesn't stand still, except for perhaps the briefest of moments. If it reverses in the direction of capitalism too decisively, you have counter-revolution, and the state is counter-revolutionized into a capitalist state again.


Now... you'll have to make your definition of 'socialist property relations' much clearer because I literally cannot understand what you're saying here. You have to start I think from the realisation that to me, 'socialist property relations' is a phrase that cannot have any meaning as there are no 'property relations' in socialist society. There is no 'property' so there are no 'property relations'. So 'an unrealised oxymoron' isn't, in my view, a great debating tool. You'll have to find a different way of framing your argument.I will be happy to explain this, since it seems to be a widely misunderstood concept. By property relations I do not mean just a property form, as in a nationalized property form or bourgeois property form. I mean it in the sense that I think Trotsky and, interestingly enough, Bob Brenner use the concept: to refer the politically and legally systematized rules of access to the means of production (and to the resultant product) governing the the social production decisions undertaken by people within that society, both surplus extractors and direct producers.

By this definition, I fail to see how you can say that there are no "property relations" in a socialist society. Certainly no private property relations, but there are socialist property relations, governing a socialist mode of production. One of the ways that socialist property relations will differ from those relations of the higher communist society, according to Marx, will be the system of remuneration based on labor contribution rather than need. "Property" in the sense of "property relations" does not refer to strictly private property, but instead to the means of production more broadly.

This definition also differs from relations of production. To take an example we discussed earlier, a production process structured around feudal rules and rationality, and underpinned by a feudal state with feudal laws, can very well include seasonal wage labor by a smallholding peasant. From the perspective of the individual wage-laboring peasant, this is a social-production relationship of value (but not of capital, since it doesn't produce capital). However, the social-property-relationship underpinning that production relationship, the systemic rules structuring the logic of hiring the peasant, is still a feudal one. Similarly, the lord for whom he works is still a feudal lord even if his specific relationship to the wage laboring peasant is a non-feudal (capitalist) form of exploitation.

This might seem like irrelevant nuance until we come back to the discussion of the society transitioning between capitalism and socialism. As I said in my previous post, it's not capitalism because the institutionalized logic of the rules governing how the state officials related to the direct producers vis-a-vis the means of production precludes a logic of capitalism and capitalist class interests due to the fact that those offices are internally structured around democratic political decision-making by revolutionary workers, and not by a hierarchical system of top-down dictatorship through which capitalist competition can be carried out. It was not until the 1930s that I think you saw something like the latter fully emerge, following what Trotsky correctly labeled a civil war. It is at that point that I think the rules of the game, and the class nature of the state, change back to capitalism.


The working class will need mechanisms for dealing with these questions, which cannot be sorted out at the level of the individual workplace. production will need to be organised and co-ordinated, people need to be fed, territory needs to be defended. Now, when a class (in this case the working class) imposes its will on a wider population, organises the framework for production and defends a terriotry, that to me is 'a state' even if in this case it is 'state of a new type' or a semi-state or whatever (because for the first time in history it will be the majority who control the state).Agreed.


That state is not a stable entity: it's the transition not either of the banks, the working class is working towards the generalisation of its own condition, which is then the abolition of class, because something - 'people' in this case - cannot contain only one class (ie one division). Quantity becomes quality. When all are workers then there is no 'working class' as a separate class of workers. Also agreed.


Likewise, when all property is collective property, there is no 'property', because 'property' means 'that which someone has exclusive rights over'. When no-one has exclusive rights, there is no property. Quantity becomes quality. 99% of the property collectivised means property still exits. 100% of property collectivised means the abolition of property as a social form.Well, there will be personal property with rules of access being governed by custom and collective common sense, but which will generally not require any coercive apparatuses to enforce. I will not just be able to waltz into a perfect stranger's home, grab her heirloom passed down through generations, and high-tail it back to my place. And if I did, I hope the larger community would intervene to stop me. Why? Because it is hers, not mine. Is that heirloom what you think Marx referred to when he spoke of abolition private property? I sure hope you don't. If so, you're being way too formalistic in your thinking again.


You're forgetting (on purpose?) that I have said several times that capitalism is a system; that system is generalised wage labour and commodity production. Some wage labour for commodity production does not make the system capitalist. But to believe, as you seem to, that there was no borgeoisie and no proletariat and no capitalism before a Tuesday in 1630, and then everything was capitalist and everyone was either bourgeois or proletarian, because somehow magically there was an instantaneous translation from nothing to everything, is utterly ridiculous. How could the bourgeoisie stage 'the bourgeois revolutions' if there was no bourgeoisie? How could the bourgeoisie have come into existence if there was no capitalism to create them?I have said that modes of production require require concrete classes of individuals who are the embodiment of the interests of property relations specific to those modes of production. I never said that the development of those classes or property relations isn't gradual, but there are turning points where quantitative development of some phenomenon or form of exploitation has a qualitative effect on the property relations in which they are being performed.


So; capitalism as 'economic behaviour inside a feudal system' must pre-date 'capitalism as a generalised sytem'. Quantity (2% capitalism >>>> 60% capitalism - or whatever exact proportions one wants to argue about) becomes quality.No, you are lapsing into "any commodity exchange involving labor power is capitalist in its logic." I explained why this was incorrect above. Capitalism as economic behavior requires generalized commodity production, because the sale of labor power must be the dominant structure that shapes how and why the wage-laborer goes about trying to reproduce himself. And conversely, the competitive drive for accumulation must structure the conditions a wage laborer confronts on the labor market, for his behavior to be "capitalist" in nature. These are the defining logics of capitalism, and we should view behavior that takes place under them differently from formally similar behaviors that took place under decidedly different conditions and for decidedly different purposes. Not doing so is a failure to think dialectically, and to understand how the parts constitutively relate to the whole and vice versa.


I shall try to use the term 'the capitalist relation' to refer to commodity production through wage labour. This relationship, you have to admit, long predated capitalism as an economic system.A value relation involving the sale of labor power is not necessarily a capitalist relation. See above.


I have ferequently used the term 'attenuated capitalism' to describe the detruction of capitaism-as-a-system under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. It is the stage of capitalism being transformed into something else. But until it reaches 'something else' it retains characteristics of capitalism. If it never reaches something else (see the bridge analogy, or the Soviet Union) it never ceases to be capitalism.Well, what you describe here is exactly what I would call a transitional society leading from capitalism to socialism. We agree that socialism as a mode of production, being a total negation of capitalism, is never reached until all traces of capitalism are extinguished in production processes, and socialist relations, which are gradually developing more and more, become universal. We just disagree on semantics, I suppose.


It has to be 'fully' capitalist or 'fully' socialist - in other words, 'capitalist' or 'socialist' - because there isn't anything else. Socialist society is the negation of capitalist society. A thing (capitalism) cannot be both abolished and not-abolished. You have to pick one. Until capitalism is abolished (which is the culmination of a process) it is not abolished. Until the process is complete, it is not complete. The process cannot be both 'complete' and 'not complete' simultaneously.You are contradicting yourself here. In the last paragraph you talked about attenuated capitalism, not full capitalism. If it's "full capitalism," just before the moment we get the total negation of capitalism, we're back to the problem of instantaneous transformation, the problem you claimed doesn't apply to your model.


I would, if that were my position, but it isn't, so I see no need to explain to you where you got the straw from to stuff your strawman, nor how many pieces you've used.You say it isn't, but your argument says it is.

[RedMaterialist]

A bridge is usually built from both sides of the river. If you have to build from one side then you can't just say you give up half-way through.

Will and conditions both apply: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Lenin, Stalin and the Soviets created their own version of socialism, but under circumstances already existing....Tsarism, international sabotage, famine, an invasion from a right-wing fanatic, etc.

[Five Year Plan]

A bridge is usually built from both sides of the river. If you have to build from one side then you can't just say you give up half-way through.

This is why I am not a big fan of the bridge analogy. I think a more apt metaphor would be building a new road into unsettled territory.

[Revoltorb]

A bridge is usually built from both sides of the river.

Unless there's nobody on the other side which, in this analogy, there isn't.

[Blake's Baby]

...

I have said that modes of production require require concrete classes of individuals who are the embodiment of the interests of property relations specific to those modes of production. I never said that the development of those classes or property relations isn't gradual, but there are turning points where quantitative development of some phenomenon or form of exploitation has a qualitative effect on the property relations in which they are being performed...

Only in the sense that when there is enough (qunatity) of the 'capitalist relation' inside feudalism 'the economic system' changes from a feudal system to a capitalist system (quality). That's the turning point - generalisation of 'the capitalist relation'.


...No, you are lapsing into "any commodity exchange involving labor power is capitalist in its logic." I explained why this was incorrect above...

No, you may have tried to explain it, but like the bridge metaphor, if your explanation doesn't work, it isn't an explanation, just as a bridge that doesn't work isn't a bridge.



... Capitalism as economic behavior requires generalized commodity production, because the sale of labor power must be the dominant structure that shapes how and why the wage-laborer goes about trying to reproduce himself...

No, absolutely not. Capitalism, as an economic system, is generalized commodity production, utilising wage labour. Capitalism 'as economic behaviour' is commodity production utilising wage labour (no 'generalisation' required).

Otherwise, there is no capitalism before capitalism, there is no bourgeoisie before the bourgeoisie, and something comes from nothing.

On the contrary, I'm going to insist that 'the capitalist relation' preceeds 'capitalism as a system', and it is the accummulation of 'the capitalist relation' that changes (quantity into quality) feudal society into capitalist society.


... And conversely, the competitive drive for accumulation must structure the conditions a wage laborer confronts on the labor market, for his behavior to be "capitalist" in nature. These are the defining logics of capitalism, and we should view behavior that takes place under them differently from formally similar behaviors that took place under decidedly different conditions and for decidedly different purposes...

No, not decidely different purposes. I'd like to see you demonstrate this.


...You are contradicting yourself here. In the last paragraph you talked about attenuated capitalism, not full capitalism. If it's "full capitalism," just before the moment we get the total negation of capitalism, we're back to the problem of instantaneous transformation, the problem you claimed doesn't apply to your model.

You say it isn't, but your argument says it is.

Well, it seems that I've failed to explain myself.

You used 'fully' capitalist and 'fully' socialist - implying things can be 'a bit' socialist which is a nonsense; you argue that feudalism can't be 'a bit' capitalist (when it's quite obvious it can, the bourgeoisie developed inside feudalism instead of, as you insist, creating itself out of nothing, with no economic basis for its sudden class domination), but capitalism can be 'a bit' socialist (which it can't, as the proletariat has no economic power of its own to build up in capitalism as it doesn't have another class to exploit, so it has no capacity to build an alternative economic power).

The break between capitalism and socialism is total; it is a radical overthrow of all existing conditions; it is not, as the break from feudal to capitalist society was, a transition between one class society to another, with the one gestating in the other.

[RedMaterialist]

The break between capitalism and socialism is total; it is a radical overthrow of all existing conditions; it is not, as the break from feudal to capitalist society was, a transition between one class society to another, with the one gestating in the other.

"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges."

That sounds like gestation to me.

[Blake's Baby]

Capitalism creates the proletariat, but the proletariat doesn't create socialism inside capitalism.

How do you think the proletariat can prepare its economic power while simultaneously being exploited by the bourgeoisie, redshifted?

[Five Year Plan]

Only in the sense that when there is enough (qunatity) of the 'capitalist relation' inside feudalism 'the economic system' changes from a feudal system to a capitalist system (quality). That's the turning point - generalisation of 'the capitalist relation'.

... Capitalism, as an economic system, is generalized commodity production, utilising wage labour. Capitalism 'as economic behaviour' is commodity production utilising wage labour (no 'generalisation' required).

Otherwise, there is no capitalism before capitalism, there is no bourgeoisie before the bourgeoisie, and something comes from nothing.

On the contrary, I'm going to insist that 'the capitalist relation' preceeds 'capitalism as a system', and it is the accummulation of 'the capitalist relation' that changes (quantity into quality) feudal society into capitalist society.


The generalization of "the capitalist relation" (or what I would call the capitalist form of exploitation, wage labor) creates capitalism proper by creating capitalists and creating a working class, groups of people whose self-reproduction is dictated by competitive accumulation. Capitalism doesn't exist the second somebody somewhere sells their labor power for a wage. If it did, poor peasants selling their labor power seasonally to a nearby lord means you have capitalism. You don't, because the selling of the labor is not used to generate capital for the feudal lord. It might be used to generate grain for his storehouse or even commodities that he will sell on an agricultural market to urban dwellers, but these are not necessarily capital, which is what wage laborers produce under capitalism.

These are not subtleties standing outside the wage labor relationship, Blake's Baby. They affect the nature of the wage labor relationship profoundly, introducing all the aspects of capitalism we've come to hate like deskilling, increased competition from unemployed workers supplanted by technological advancement, the prolongation of the workday to introduce more absolute surplus value, and most importantly of all a class struggle of workers against capitalists. If you don't understand these things, and how their introduction into the wage labor relationships profoundly changes those relationships, you really do need to go back to Marx's Capital and read it more carefully.

What's strange is you keep insisting that capitalism is a system of interrelated parts, yet you keep wanting to isolate one part of that system and point to it for proof of the entire system. Do you fail to see the problem with this? It's like you don't see that some of those parts can exist in other systems, too. And when they do, those parts are to be understood differently than when they exist under capitalism.


No, not decidely different purposes. I'd like to see you demonstrate this.You need for me to explain that wage labor hired on by a feudal lord isn't aimed at competitive accumulation necessary for self-reproduction, and that wage labor hired on by a capitalist is? That these purposes are different? Well, let's see. The basis of a feudal lord's power and self-reproduction is his control over the land backed by brute force, which he uses to keep serfs attached and paying rent to him in the form of either services or crops. He is able to maintain and reproduce his position of authority in perpetuity so long as that system of land tenure exists, and his overriding goal in everything he does, whether it be employ wage labor, trade commodities, or anything else, is to strengthen that backbone to his authority. For a capitalist, the logic driving his economic decision-making is not the control over land. It's the securing of commodity production and exchange by ensuring the widest possible supply of labor power for his industry, the biggest possible market for the commodities he produces, and so on.

Now, it's possible that feudal lords who feel that their way of life is under threat may opt to switch the basis of their agricultural operations from dependence on forcibly backed extraction of rent from serfs to production of agricultural commodities through wage labor. This is something akin to a bourgeois revolution from above. My point is that this transition entails a qualitative shift where the logic of the feudal lord no longer aligns primarily with protecting feudal relations, where those relations no longer serve as the basis of his strategies for self-reproduction.


Well, it seems that I've failed to explain myself.

You used 'fully' capitalist and 'fully' socialist - implying things can be 'a bit' socialist which is a nonsense; you argue that feudalism can't be 'a bit' capitalist (when it's quite obvious it can, the bourgeoisie developed inside feudalism instead of, as you insist, creating itself out of nothing, with no economic basis for its sudden class domination), but capitalism can be 'a bit' socialist (which it can't, as the proletariat has no economic power of its own to build up in capitalism as it doesn't have another class to exploit, so it has no capacity to build an alternative economic power).I've been very clear throughout that while socialist forms of production, production of goods and services occurring through democratic institutions established by the working class, can and do develop within the transitional society, a socialist mode of production proper is not achieved until every last vestige of commodity production and value relations are abolished. Socialist forms situated within an economic context where value, and institutionalized hierarchy in the planning process, still exist should be understood differently from socialist forms situated in the socialist mode of production. Just as capitalist forms situated in a context of the feudal mode of production are to be understood differently than capitalist forms that are situated within the capitalist mode of production.

Capitalism as a mode of production, of course, cannot be "a bit socialist" and doesn't allow for socialism to develop within itself. This is why workers must make their revolution before they can begin the process of introducing socialist relations into their society, precisely because the capitalist mode of production allows no rivals, and workers power doesn't spontaneously grow under capitalism.

Once they make this revolution, and eliminate bourgeois property by incorporating it into their state, capitalism as a fully realized system and mode of production is gone. You still have capitalist forms of exploitation and commodity production, and these push back in the direction of capitalism against workers, who themselves are pushing forward to socialism through introducing increasingly egalitarian economic relationships through their state. But these capitalist forms do not in themselves constitute the full capitalist mode of production, complete with all its laws of motion in effect.

Instead what you have is a transitional society where the tendencies inherent in commodity production continue to exist, constantly pushing back (as I said) against workers' power, but where workers use their state to oppose and overcome these tendencies.

[Blake's Baby]

The generalization of "the capitalist relation" (or what I would call the capitalist form of exploitation, wage labor) creates capitalism proper by creating capitalists and creating a working class, groups of people whose self-reproduction is dictated by competitive accumulation. Capitalism doesn't exist the second somebody somewhere sells their labor power for a wage. If it did, poor peasants selling their labor power seasonally to a nearby lord means you have capitalism. You don't, because the selling of the labor is not used to generate capital for the feudal lord. It might be used to generate grain for his storehouse or even commodities that he will sell on an agricultural market to urban dwellers, but these are not necessarily capital, which is what wage laborers produce under capitalism...

And yet, you're not differentiating here between 'the capitalist relation' and 'capitalism as a system'. I agree that 'capitalism as a system' doesn't exist the second someone sells their labour power for a wage. Capitalism as a system exists when the capitalist relation is generalised; and this is not just about feudal lords (or even rich peasants) employing a few part-time rural proletarians to help with the harvest; I'm talking about manufacturing utilising wage labour too, permanent 'workers' and owners of means of production like looms and potteries. This begins before capitalism (as a system) but it is, in itself, still the 'capitalist relation'; and it is from these capitalist seeds that capitalism proper, 'capitalism as a system' grows.


...
What's strange is you keep insisting that capitalism is a system of interrelated parts, yet you keep wanting to isolate one part of that system and point to it for proof of the entire system. Do you fail to see the problem with this? It's like you don't see that some of those parts can exist in other systems, too. And when they do, those parts are to be understood differently than when they exist under capitalism.

You need for me to explain that wage labor hired on by a feudal lord isn't aimed at competitive accumulation necessary for self-reproduction, and that wage labor hired on by a capitalist is? That these purposes are different? Well, let's see. The basis of a feudal lord's power and self-reproduction is his control over the land backed by brute force, which he uses to keep serfs attached and paying rent to him in the form of either services or crops. He is able to maintain and reproduce his position of authority in perpetuity so long as that system of land tenure exists, and his overriding goal in everything he does, whether it be employ wage labor, trade commodities, or anything else, is to strengthen that backbone to his authority. For a capitalist, the logic driving his economic decision-making is not the control over land. It's the securing of commodity production and exchange by ensuring the widest possible supply of labor power for his industry, the biggest possible market for the commodities he produces, and so on...

And for those who drove the expansion of capitalism, at a time when feudal relations still dominated? What was it then?


...
I've been very clear throughout that while socialist forms of production, production of goods and services occurring through democratic institutions established by the working class, can and do develop within the transitional society, a socialist mode of production proper is not achieved until every last vestige of commodity production and value relations are abolished...

Nah, you haven't.

I don't know what you think "socialist forms of production, production of goods and services occurring through democratic institutions established by the working class" are. Co-operatives?


...
Capitalism as a mode of production, of course, cannot be "a bit socialist" and doesn't allow for socialism to develop within itself. This is why workers must make their revolution before they can begin the process of introducing socialist relations into their society, precisely because the capitalist mode of production allows no rivals, and workers power doesn't spontaneously grow under capitalism...

Yes! I absolutely agree with this paragraph.


...... Once they make this revolution, and eliminate bourgeois property by incorporating it into their state, capitalism as a fully realized system and mode of production is gone. You still have capitalist forms of exploitation and commodity production, and these push back in the direction of capitalism against workers, who themselves are pushing forward to socialism through introducing increasingly egalitarian economic relationships through their state. But these capitalist forms do not in themselves constitute the full capitalist mode of production, complete with all its laws of motion in effect...

No, Engels explains why this is not the case in 1880...


......Instead what you have is a transitional society where the tendencies inherent in commodity production continue to exist, constantly pushing back (as I said) against workers' power, but where workers use their state to oppose and overcome these tendencies.

I disagree, because states are inherently conservative, the proletariat must be on guard against tendencies in the state to become a conservative force against the revolution; but anyway, this was not what happened in Russia - the state was the vehicle for the counter-revolution, not the bulwark against it. The Bolsheviks became the guardians and managers of Russian national capital, as Engels explained they would.

[Five Year Plan]

And yet, you're not differentiating here between 'the capitalist relation' and 'capitalism as a system'. I agree that 'capitalism as a system' doesn't exist the second someone sells their labour power for a wage. Capitalism as a system exists when the capitalist relation is generalised; and this is not just about feudal lords (or even rich peasants) employing a few part-time rural proletarians to help with the harvest; I'm talking about manufacturing utilising wage labour too, permanent 'workers' and owners of means of production like looms and potteries. This begins before capitalism (as a system) but it is, in itself, still the 'capitalist relation'; and it is from these capitalist seeds that capitalism proper, 'capitalism as a system' grows.

I am not confusing capitalist forms of exploitation with capitalism as a system at all. I can quote an exact post from a different thread where you do engage in this error. You're still making the error, but you've learned from my criticisms not to be so brash about it.

Manufacturing of mass commodities by industries through the employment of wage labor presupposes generalized commodity production. It doesn't happen before capitalism. It is capitalism. It seems you are making yet another bad theoretical mistake by conflating the capitalist mode of production with the class basis of the state presiding over society. You can have capitalism as a mode of production operating alongside feudalism within a society that is still dominated by the feudal mode of production and presided over by a feudal state.


And for those who drove the expansion of capitalism, at a time when feudal relations still dominated? What was it then?I explained this in the last paragraph. You are mangling all sorts of things in your responses to me, then, in a final breathtaking act of confusion, attributing the problems to me! Wage labor employed by a feudal lord doesn't entail capitalism, but cities in a feudal society might have an incipient bourgeoisie driving capitalist expansion, despite the fact that the society is still dominated by a feudal state with feudal laws, by feudalism.


I don't know what you think "socialist forms of production, production of goods and services occurring through democratic institutions established by the working class" are. Co-operatives? Co-operatives would be an example of it, yes. But there are other examples, like a workers' state producing commodities.


No, Engels explains why this is not the case in 1880... Really? Do you mind showing me where Engels says this? Is this the quote whose misinterpretation I corrected you on repeatedly a number of weeks ago, the one where you think that Engels is saying that the existence of any kind of "modern state" means the existence of a full-blown capitalist mode of production? I suspect it might be. I would just refer you to my replies in that thread.


I disagree, because states are inherently conservative, the proletariat must be on guard against tendencies in the state to become a conservative force against the revolution; but anyway, this was not what happened in Russia - the state was the vehicle for the counter-revolution, not the bulwark against it. The Bolsheviks became the guardians and managers of Russian national capital, as Engels explained they would.States are inherently conservative? This is an awfully sweeping statement that I see no Marxian basis for claiming. Especially since Marxists don't abstract the state out from the material processes, and balance of class forces, from which they emerge. I agree with you that a workers' state can, through counter-revolution, become a capitalist state again. But it's not because states have some inherent logic toward exploitation driving them. Class states do. A workers' state, one whose power is derived from workers' revolutionary agency, does not. This is where analyzing the state from a materialist basis helps out a lot.

[RedMaterialist]

Capitalism creates the proletariat, but the proletariat doesn't create socialism inside capitalism.

How do you think the proletariat can prepare its economic power while simultaneously being exploited by the bourgeoisie, redshifted?

It has to do what Marx said: Smash the old state, then suppress the bourgeoisie (which may take a while) and take over, by force the old economy, by workers and the public taking over factories, banks, steel companies, etc. That economy may retain the "birthmarks" of the old bourgeois economy, such as different pay for different work. When the transition from capitalism to socialism is complete then the economy will be based on "from each according..., etc."

It's not going to happen overnight. It took a million yrs for Australopithecus to evolve into Homo Sapiens.

[RedMaterialist]

I disagree, because states are inherently conservative,

States are inherently repressive, they exist for the sole purpose of suppressing and exploiting a particular class.

[Blake's Baby]

I am not confusing capitalist forms of exploitation with capitalism as a system at all. I can quote an exact post from a different thread where you do engage in this error. You're still making the error, but you've learned from my criticisms not to be so brash about it...

Go ahead, quote it.


... You can have capitalism as a mode of production operating alongside feudalism within a society that is still dominated by the feudal mode of production and presided over by a feudal state...

Yes, as I've been saying all along, and you've been denying all along.


... cities in a feudal society might have an incipient bourgeoisie driving capitalist expansion, despite the fact that the society is still dominated by a feudal state with feudal laws, by feudalism...

Yes, as I've been saying all along, and you've been denying all along.


... Co-operatives would be an example of it, yes. But there are other examples, like a workers' state producing commodities...

Please, read 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'.


...Really? Do you mind showing me where Engels says this? Is this the quote whose misinterpretation I corrected you on repeatedly a number of weeks ago, the one where you think that Engels is saying that the existence of any kind of "modern state" means the existence of a full-blown capitalist mode of production? I suspect it might be. I would just refer you to my replies in that thread...

Oh, you've read it, you just don't understand it.


...States are inherently conservative? This is an awfully sweeping statement that I see no Marxian basis for claiming. Especially since Marxists don't abstract the state out from the material processes, and balance of class forces, from which they emerge. I agree with you that a workers' state can, through counter-revolution, become a capitalist state again. But it's not because states have some inherent logic toward exploitation driving them. Class states do. A workers' state, one whose power is derived from workers' revolutionary agency, does not. This is where analyzing the state from a materialist basis helps out a lot.

A 'workers' state' (read the 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', please) is not a class state, do you think?

Care to explain why you think 'class state' is not a tautology?

I didn't say that states had 'logic towards exploitation' I said that the state-form is inherently conservative. As all states are 'class states' (because the state in the end is a product of class society), that conservatism is bound to manifest itself as a tendency to concretise a conservation of class relations, however. 'The state' itself doesn't have to exploit (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't) but it does tend to act as a conservator of the status quo (which includes exploitation).

[RedMaterialist]

A 'workers' state' (read the 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', please) is not a class state, do you think?

Care to explain why you think 'class state' is not a tautology?

.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a workers' state. It suppresses the left over capitalist classes. When that suppression ends that state withers away and dies.

[Brotto Rühle]

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a workers' state. It suppresses the left over capitalist classes. When that suppression ends that state withers away and dies.

The state "withers away" (phrase of Engels) means that, even at it's inception, the state is eroding. It finally dies/disappears when the mode of production becomes socialism, and thereby abolishing classes and the state. The economy of the DOTP is capitalist.

[RedMaterialist]

It finally erodes when the mode of production becomes socialism, and thereby abolishing classes and the state. The economy of the DOTP is capitalist.

How does the capitalist economy of the DOTP become a socialist economy?

[Blake's Baby]

It doesn't.

The economy of the world (ie capitalism) is destroyed, by destroying all property which means destroying the basis for classes and states (including the DotP), and socialist society follows it. Socialist society is what happens after capitalism. You don't morph one into the other.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I can't believe people still believe this 'state will wither away' rubbish.

Why the fuck would a state just wither away? How could it? A state is made up of people, and these people create a machinery - a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is bigger than the people who run it - as I said above, it's a machine. Further, as we know, the political class and associated bureaucracy who wield state power do so to serve the interests of the ruling class, whomever that may be at any given time.

Now, given the above, exactly how is it possible for all of these relations to just wither away? One thing we know as socialists is that social relationships don't just change through a process of luck or withering. They change because people, en masse, will them to change, as a manifestation of their own class and political consciousness.

Why would anybody who wields state power - any group, any bureaucracy, anybody who can get their hands on the tools of state power -, why would anybody in such a position simply allow such power to wither away? We have hundreds of years of evidence from the study of capitalist society that class societies do not work in such a way. The ruling class - whether it is made up of old white men preaching entrepreneurialism, old white men waving red flags, or a cross-section of society waving red, black or whatever flags - will always rule. They aren't just going to wither away.

It's bullshit.

[Brotto Rühle]

How does the capitalist economy of the DOTP become a socialist economy?The overthrow of the capitalist order worldwide, and the abolition of wage labour/value production, etc etc etc.

Something which cannot be done on a local/regional/national scale.

[Five Year Plan]

Go ahead, quote it.

Ok, here is the quote that originally provoked me to enter the discussion with you: "If you have wage labour and commodity production, you have capitalism." (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2685800&postcount=129) As I said, I am not the person confusing capitalist forms of exploitation with capitalism as a system at all. You are.


Yes, as I've been saying all along, and you've been denying all along.Yet another sign of your hopeless confusion. Where have I denied that you can have a feudal mode of production alongside a capitalist mode of production? I have repeatedly argued that a feudal lord, producing under feudal property relations, employing wage labor does not entail the capitalist mode of production. That's different than saying that a member of the bourgeoisie producing commodities by employing wage labor in a feudal society isn't a capitalist producing according to the capitalist mode of production alongside feudalism. Do you fail to understand this difference? I posit that if you do, this is another sign that you need to sharpen your grasp of Marxist economic theory.


Please, read 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'. Oh, you've read it, you just don't understand it.It seems we are at the point in the discussion where you realize your arguments are inadequate, and are just lazily falling back to making claims rather than arguments. I will go through the effort of recapitulating the brief exchange we had in the other thread to illustrate how your interpretation of Engels is completely wrong.

The quote you are referring to is where Engels claims: "But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

I explained that Engels here was referring to bourgeois forms of state when he mentioned that "the modern state ... is essentially a capitalist machine." This is clear from how he talks about nationalization of private industries being done for the purpose of maintaining "exploitation ... so palpable, that it must break down" because "no nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers." So Engels is talking about statification being conducted for the purpose of maintaining a class of capitalists through the state form.

In the same work we find your quote, Engels described how nationalization, along with the maintenance of a workers' form of modern state, did not mean that capitalism is maintained. He says just the opposite, describing the socialist revolution as nationalizing state property: "The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property."

He elaborates later in the same section: "The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production [that which might already have been under the power of a 'modern' bourgeois state], slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master — free."

Again, we see that nationalization is transformed from being a means of naked exploitation under a bourgeois state into no longer having the "character of capital."

This same process is explained in more detail in Anti-Duhring: "The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state."

In order for your interpretation to be plausible, Blake's Baby, and for us to believe that Engels believe that nationalization under a workers' state was just the continuation of capitalism, you would have to explain how capitalism can exist as a result of a process whereby the proletariat has "abolished itself as a proletariat" and "absolished all class distinctions and class antagonisms."

I think it's clear that Engels is talking about how class processes continue to exist in a way that mean that socialism isn't realized, but that classes in the fullest sense, like the full capitalist mode of production, has been abolished. And what remains is the full elimination of capitalist processes through continued international and domestic struggle.

I eagerly await your response on this, but you might also wish to consult the excellent brief summary Engels gives in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, about the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production, and its relationship to commodity exchange and wage labor which predated it.


A 'workers' state' (read the 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', please) is not a class state, do you think?This is just a semantic quibble. I hope it was clear from the context that what I meant was a class state under an exploiting class that has an interest in reproducing the state. No Marxist would deny that the DotP is a "class state" of the proletariat as the ruling class, but not a new exploiting class.


I didn't say that states had 'logic towards exploitation' I said that the state-form is inherently conservative. As all states are 'class states' (because the state in the end is a product of class society), that conservatism is bound to manifest itself as a tendency to concretise a conservation of class relations, however. 'The state' itself doesn't have to exploit (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't) but it does tend to act as a conservator of the status quo (which includes exploitation).I know what you said. The "logic toward exploitation" by states of an exploitative form was a comment I made, not you. What you said is anti-materialist at its very core, because it talks about states without any reference to how the state relates to class power. As I said before you derailed my point with semantic quibbling, a workers' "class state" does not have a magical inherent tendency toward reproducing state relations. This is why Engels, in the quote I referenced above, described the workers' state eliminating all remaining capitalist processes as giving the "socialized character [of the means of production] complete freedom to work itself out." The logic of withering away, not a logic of conservatism, is built into the workers' form of state. "Socialized production upon a predetermined plan" (socialist property relations) is what the state form enshrines. It is not guaranteed by that state form, which can only realize socialism as a mode of production through continued class struggle. But such planned production becomes "possible."

Somebody needs to brush up on his Marx and Engels, and that somebody certainly isn't me.

[Brotto Rühle]

Obviously you're quote mining from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific... maybe you should actually read it bud.

[Five Year Plan]

Obviously you're quote mining from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific... maybe you should actually read it bud.

I am puzzled by this accusation, and in view of how the debate between Blake and me has progressed, I don't think I'm being unfair in saying that it comes pretty close to trolling. My response included three or four interrelated quotes from Engels intended to provide depth and important contextual information for interpreting the single, isolated quote of Engels that Blake's Baby, in another thread, "quote mined" and presented out of context in a way that was highly misleading. Moreover, I think it's also pretty clear based on the arguments Blake's Baby and I have made about how to define capitalism in relation to wage labor, compared to what Engels writes in SU&S, that Blake's Baby is the least likely to have read the whole work.

Correction: pretty clear to a neutral observer who isn't looking to take baseless one-line cheap shots instead of engaging with the substance of my interpretation of what Engels wrote.

[Art Vandelay]

I am puzzled by this accusation, and in view of how the debate between Blake and me has progressed, I don't think I'm being unfair in saying that it comes pretty close to trolling.

Correction: pretty clear to a neutral observer who isn't looking to take baseless one-line cheap shots instead of engaging with the substance of my interpretation of what Engels wrote.

Its not 'close to trolling' it is trolling, something the user has been doing alot of lately; which is actually kinda sad, since he's more then capable of making substantive and knowledgeable posts, which would help improve the level of discourse on this forum, regardless of any political disagreements I may have with him.

[Q]

Obviously you're quote mining from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific... maybe you should actually read it bud.
Enjoy your infraction for trolling.

[RedMaterialist]

They aren't just going to wither away.



You're taking the machine analysis too far. The state is first and foremost a class structure used to suppress and exploit another class. Slavery used a slave state, feudalism used the feudal state to suppress the serfs, capitalism uses the bourgeois state to suppress the working class.

In each case one exploiting state evolved into a new one.

The proletariat state (DOP) also will suppress a class, the bourgeois class. But with this important difference, as explained by Marx in the CM. There will be no new suppressing and exploiting class after the proletariat has destroyed the bourgeois classes.

For the first time in history there will be no need for the suppressing structure (police, army, courts, religion, etc) of the state. When that stage is reached the state will begin to wither away and finally, die.

[Guerillero]

Hello,

I am new here. I think, Socialism in one country is definetly not possible because of several reasons. It is offended by its non-socialist neighbors, the population is often spoiled by the glamour of capitalist luxury articles, important economy will go away, if it should be maintained, or has to be prisoned and lifes are regarded too boring compared to complicated capitalistic lives. So the system is more occupied by preventing those things than to build up an own socialist system. The other reason is its reckless treat of nature, overrating the human system leads to damage to nature, so the system must be fitted to the current problems with the environment. My counter proposal would be between socialist and anarchist system regarding the fact that people only learn if problems get too great, so an anarchist system would give the people a higher self-responsibility not only leaning back, go to work and let politics do their thing, but take care of the whole community system which makes the idea of the nation obsolete.

[Fakeblock]

I can't believe people still believe this 'state will wither away' rubbish.

Why the fuck would a state just wither away? How could it? A state is made up of people, and these people create a machinery - a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is bigger than the people who run it - as I said above, it's a machine. Further, as we know, the political class and associated bureaucracy who wield state power do so to serve the interests of the ruling class, whomever that may be at any given time.

Now, given the above, exactly how is it possible for all of these relations to just wither away? One thing we know as socialists is that social relationships don't just change through a process of luck or withering. They change because people, en masse, will them to change, as a manifestation of their own class and political consciousness.

Why would anybody who wields state power - any group, any bureaucracy, anybody who can get their hands on the tools of state power -, why would anybody in such a position simply allow such power to wither away? We have hundreds of years of evidence from the study of capitalist society that class societies do not work in such a way. The ruling class - whether it is made up of old white men preaching entrepreneurialism, old white men waving red flags, or a cross-section of society waving red, black or whatever flags - will always rule. They aren't just going to wither away.

It's bullshit.

I think this is a misunderstanding of the argument, at least as put forth by Marx and Engels.

State power should be distinguished from the state apparatus. We see from historical experience that when the working class wields state power, it forms a state apparatus not at all similar to the bureaucratic and exclusive bourgeois state. It's not that these institutions, such as soviets or militias, formed by the proletariat in the struggle against capitalism will just disappear. However, once the capitalist classes have been assimilated into wider society, they will lose their prime function: suppression of one class by another. When they no longer serve this purpose they can no longer be called a state in the Marxist sense.

[Blake's Baby]

What is a state, Boss?

For some of us it's an expression of a class society. And when there are no more classes, how can those non-existent classes create (or even sustain) a state? Engels' metaphor of 'withering away' refers to a plant whose roots have been destroyed. When the concept of property is destroyed, there are no more classes; when there are no more classes there can be no state. The state 'withers away' because its material basis has been destroyed. To believe otherwise is to believe that the state can exist without any material basis, by an effort of will. Which is contrary to what most of us mean by a 'state', so you need to explain what you mean.

[Althusser]

These debates about whether "socialism in one country" is possible can only be a semantical waste of time. It all stems from what one defines socialism as. For a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, socialism is a transitional phase that has elements of the old (capitalism- wage form, bourgeois dictatorship, etc.) and elements of the future (communism- wage relation, proletarian politics in command, etc.). Socialism IS the Dictatorship of the Proletariat for Maoists. Socialism is a constant struggle against reaction.

[Art Vandelay]

These debates about whether "socialism in one country" is possible can only be a semantical waste of time. It all stems from what one defines socialism as. For a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, socialism is a transitional phase that has elements of the old (capitalism- wage form, bourgeois dictatorship, etc.) and elements of the future (communism- wage relation, proletarian politics in command, etc.). Socialism IS the Dictatorship of the Proletariat for Maoists. Socialism is a constant struggle against reaction.

This really isn't a persuasive argument. Is your position, honestly, that we should not critique 'existing socialism' (as it is referred to in the historical sense) due to the fact that maoism/marxism-Leninism (and the respective states those ideologies represented) were indeed socialist, by your definition? As if you should not be criticized on the basis that a proper conception of'socialism', relates to an adherence to dialectal materialism, ie: the marxist method. Cause that is not (in any descriptive sense of the term) an 'argument' and I can't think of any way of commenting on this, while not pointing out the utter absurdity of this line of argumentation. Your welcome to put forth that argument, but don't expect it to be considered as valid by anyone who takes Marx seriously.

[TheWannabeAnarchist]

Let me try and give the simplest explanation on the entire thread.

Play a game of Whack-A-Mole. The hammer is the world's elite, and the mole is proletarian revolution.

If only one mole pops up in one place, you can just whack it over and over again easily.

If multiple moles pop up all over the place, you're never going to be able to hit them all. You can hit one, but moments later another will pop back up right in its place.

So, "socialism in one country" is sort of like a broken arcade game!:laugh:

[Althusser]

This really isn't a persuasive argument. Is your position, honestly, that we should not critique 'existing socialism' (as it is referred to in the historical sense) due to the fact that maoism/marxism-Leninism (and the respective states those ideologies represented) were indeed socialist, by your definition? As if you should not be criticized on the basis that a proper conception of'socialism', relates to an adherence to dialectal materialism, ie: the marxist method. Cause that is not (in any descriptive sense of the term) an 'argument' and I can't think of any way of commenting on this, while not pointing out the utter absurdity of this line of argumentation. Your welcome to put forth that argument, but don't expect it to be considered as valid by anyone who takes Marx seriously.

Maoists don't consider China to be socialist since the coup in '76. They also acknowledge Soviet revisionism (and social-imperialism) stemming from problems of the Stalin era SU. To say that Maoists or MLs don't criticize the existing bureaucrat capitalist countries (w/ socialist rhetoric) is completely false. We criticize them whenever criticism is necessary and will acknowledge capitalist restoration and revisionism.


Let me try and give the simplest explanation on the entire thread.

Play a game of Whack-A-Mole. The hammer is the world's elite, and the mole is proletarian revolution.

If only one mole pops up in one place, you can just whack it over and over again easily.

If multiple moles pop up all over the place, you're never going to be able to hit them all. You can hit one, but moments later another will pop back up right in its place.

So, "socialism in one country" is sort of like a broken arcade game!:laugh:

There is this strange conception that Maoists and MLs don't want socialism to spread. It's as if Trotskyists, in an incredibly idealist fashion, think that by trying to build socialism in one country to build a base for the world revolution, you are betraying the revolution. They'll say things like, "but socialism can't exist in one country by it's very definition!" but don't you see how this argument is a merely semantical one? Opponents of fighting for socialist revolution in a nation are idealists plain and simple. They speak of some glorious simultaneous world revolution and worship at the alter of spontaneity. Have fun in the dustbin of history (or posting here on revleft) because the only forces in the world that are fighting for revolution are Maoists.