Transition from capitalism to socialism? [Archive]

ckaihatsu

1st January 2014, 17:07

Liberalism and Utopia - the similarities

I would say it is an impossible transition to make in one lifetime, and it is more than likely something which will need to be cultivated for generations to come.

True socialism is something of a Utopian pipe-dream.

Sorry to hear of your breezy dismissiveness here -- I'd like to note that there's nothing wrong with desiring improvements for human society, no matter what the era....

There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/

It assumes that all human beings will be content to be at an equal level. The nature of man is to envy, and we demonize that aspect due to our western culture, but envy is natural, else we would not feel it.

What you do with that envy is where morality should come into play.

You're confusing the socialist position with that of a soft-left *moralism*.

Or, more simply, you're mixing different *scales* here -- as political people we're not revolutionaries for the sake of dictating *lifestyles* (including moralism), but rather to address the *broadest scale* of societal operations, particularly how labor and production is organized (or not).

Also, if a single nation were to be entirely socialist, it would likely suffer due to dependence on foreign trade.

Agreed -- if socialism is confined to only a single area then it will be *isolated*, by definition, in the remaining sea of capitalist social relations. Capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive, so socialism has to *replace* capitalism entirely.

When an economy relies heavily on commodity based goods (such as oil) in order to create a stable or flourishing economic system, that nation is dependent upon the other for a vital infrastructure commodity.

Now we've entered into the grey areas where borders matter and state authority comes into play. Now we have to decide who gets gasoline and who doesn't. Meaning the idea of personal gas powered vehicles is impossible.

Yup -- I agree with the empirical case you've presented in this portion. Hegemonic interests, as over energy policy, will prevail under capitalism due to snowballing profits and turf, displacing other viable alternatives for all those concerned.

Currently, there is no chance to see an economic system like America or modern China become truly socialist or truly communist. There is simply too much dependence upon a very, very limited vital good.

So long as an economic system requires copious amounts of a specific and limited infrastructural commodity, there will be property, borders and statism.

I'm pleased to inform you that you're incorrect on this -- you're basically touting a technological determinism, when it's *not* the case that the world is being blindly led by its technological development. If this *were* the case I think we'd have suffered nuclear armageddon decades ago.

Furthermore, the collective needs of a society change over time. Proper representative government exists to address the needs of the people who make up said government.

This *is* liberalism...(!)

Basically, my case is there will never be true economic freedom when economic systems are dependent upon a limited commodity to function.

Is / should the goal be *economic* freedom -- for the intangible, mechanistic *economy*, or is it finally time to take this shit off of 'autopilot' and have a workers-controlled *political society* that can *consciously* control its own energy usage, etc. -- (!)

Hope I didn't ramble over much!

No prob -- thanks for contributing.

[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

http://s6.postimage.org/zbpxjshkd/1_History_Macro_Micro_Precision.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/zbpxjshkd/)

Hit The North

1st January 2014, 17:25

The nature of man is to envy, and we demonize that aspect due to our western culture, but envy is natural, else we would not feel it.

What you do with that envy is where morality should come into play.

Except that envy is a more or less rational response to living in a competitive social hierarchy. A non-hierarchical society based on cooperation would rid the human condition of the need for envy. Our material relations are not determined by our human nature; our human nature is determined by our material relations. To suggest otherwise is to indulge in the bourgeois ritualisation and reification of capitalist social relations, imagining them to be eternal to the human condition. From this point of view, all revolutionary change toward non-hierarchical cooperative society would be either impossible or undesirable.

To partly answer the OP, the break between capitalism and socialism is likely to be an abrupt matter because capitalism develops and universalizes all social connections and intercourse, as Marx predicted in the Communist Manifesto, and brings all nations under a common law of development.

reb

1st January 2014, 19:42

There is no transitional economy in between capitalism and communism. Communism is the result of the deconstruction of capitalism.

sanpal

5th January 2014, 22:14

There is no transitional economy in between capitalism and communism. Communism is the result of the deconstruction of capitalism.

I believe you forgot to finish your phrase and to add a slogan "by one stroke", "from night to day". If you don't agree with this you have to recognize any period of time from the end of capitalism and to beginning of communism
(decade, or a year, or a month, or a week). Then you have to introduce an economy of this transition period (the mode of production which is not capitalist nor communist). What it would be?
If you will not do it, if you will not solve economic question, after one or two days you get economic collapse, panic among population, buying up by the population all types of goods, gold, etc.

reb

5th January 2014, 22:23

I believe you forgot to finish your phrase and to add a slogan "by one stroke", "from night to day". If you don't agree with this you have to recognize any period of time from the end of capitalism and to beginning of communism
(decade, or a year, or a month, or a week). Then you have to introduce an economy of this transition period (the mode of production which is not capitalist nor communist). What it would be?
If you will not do it, if you will not solve economic question, after one or two days you get economic collapse, panic among population, buying up by the population all types of goods, gold, etc.

Describe to me what you think this transitional economy consist of.

sanpal

6th January 2014, 08:56

Describe to me what you think this transitional economy consist of.

Firstly it is impossible to cancel money, to abolish monetary economy by one stroke, by decree. I mean it is impossible because of:
1) need to prevent economic collapse and emergence of the black market;
2) existence of the different classes apart from class of the proletariat, i.e. lumpen prol, petty and average bourgeoisie (upper bourgeoisie and finance oligarchy have to be subjected to expropriation)
3) nationalisation of private property of average bourgeoisie and "communisation" of petty bourgeoisie have to be done "step by step" (it would need a time). All aforesaid means functioning of commodity-money economy, a capitalist mode of production, but under control of the power of the proletariat (DotP).

Secondly it is impossible to create and develop communist economy (moneyless planned economy) "by one stroke", it will need a time, it will be organized on the basis of the private and state ownership nationalized from private-capitalist sector of economy. So sector with new moneyless planned economy, using ""communist mode of production" has to be organized during the same transitional period, not just before "the beginning of communism" but just after "the end of capitalism" i.e. just after the Proletarian revolution and establishment of DotP.

Resume: this transitional economy will consist of two economic sectors simultaneously - one sector would be commodity-money economy i.e. capitalist sector of economy (they include state capitalist and average and petty bourgeois) and another sector would be moneyless planned economy i.e. communist sector of economy. Competition between these two dialectically opposite economic sectors during the transitional period would be led to increasing in the won sector (i hope it would be communist sector) and simultaneous reduction of the lost sector of economy (i hope it would be capitalist and state-capitalist sector) what would be led to "withering away of the State".

robbo203

6th January 2014, 11:02

Firstly it is impossible to cancel money, to abolish monetary economy by one stroke, by decree. I mean it is impossible because of:
1) need to prevent economic collapse and emergence of the black market;
2) existence of the different classes apart from class of the proletariat, i.e. lumpen prol, petty and average bourgeoisie (upper bourgeoisie and finance oligarchy have to be subjected to expropriation)
3) nationalisation of private property of average bourgeoisie and "communisation" of petty bourgeoisie have to be done "step by step" (it would need a time). All aforesaid means functioning of commodity-money economy, a capitalist mode of production, but under control of the power of the proletariat (DotP).

Secondly it is impossible to create and develop communist economy (moneyless planned economy) "by one stroke", it will need a time, it will be organized on the basis of the private and state ownership nationalized from private-capitalist sector of economy. So sector with new moneyless planned economy, using ""communist mode of production" has to be organized during the same transitional period, not just before "the beginning of communism" but just after "the end of capitalism" i.e. just after the Proletarian revolution and establishment of DotP.

Resume: this transitional economy will consist of two economic sectors simultaneously - one sector would be commodity-money economy i.e. capitalist sector of economy (they include state capitalist and average and petty bourgeois) and another sector would be moneyless planned economy i.e. communist sector of economy. Competition between these two dialectically opposite economic sectors during the transitional period would be led to increasing in the won sector (i hope it would be communist sector) and simultaneous reduction of the lost sector of economy (i hope it would be capitalist and state-capitalist sector) what would be led to "withering away of the State".

Sanpal, I believe the argument you are offering here is a fundamentally flawed one. Exactly the opposite is true. It is literally impossible for communism (or for that matter the abolition of money) NOT to be introduced in "one stroke". This, in fact, was the point behind Marx's comment in the German Ideology:

Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism

What you are describing above is not a "transitional economy" but, on the face of it, two separate economies. Moreover it is unclear what you mean by a "communist sector". The free provision of public goods such as healthcare and education has no necessary connection with communism at all and, in fact, the welfare state was pioneered, not by Social Democrats, but by arch conservative like Otto von Bismarck and Winston Churchill. The latter became convinced of the need for state welfare in healthcare provision after the appalling losses due to iill health of British army recruits during the Boer War. The British welfare state, for instance, was introduced first and foremost because the capitalist class saw it as a more efficient way of managing welfare and because it would lead to higher productivity. This is amply borne out by the commentry in the famous Beveridge Report of 1942 which set out detailed proposals for a post-war welfare state

So called free public goods - what we associated with the "social wage" - are made available to workers only at a cost in terms of reduction of their net or real wage. If such goods were not provided on a free basis, what would tend to happen is that the real wages of workers would rise to compensate for the loss of the social wage. What you gain on the one hand you lose on the other. This is exactly what the labour theory of value allows us to see. The social wage and the money wage are the two basic components of the workers standard of living and stand in inverse relationship to each other. The more one contributes to your strandard of living the less does the other but the standard of living itself is determined ultimately by the cost of producing and reproducing one's labour power under prevailing conditions. In other words what we have here is a zero sum game

There is no such thing as a free lunch under capitalism and there are clear limits to how far the social wage can subsititute for the money wage. Sometime in the late 20th century those limits were reached and since then under the rubric of "neoliberal austerity", we have seen a retrenchment of public spending and cuts in the social wage. We have also seen developments such the emergence of an internal market in the NHS and greater emphasis on financial accountability

The implications of this are fatal for your whole theory of the way forward. There is absolutely no way that the free provision of public goods is going to indefinitely expand at the expense of what you call the capitalist sector, so where does that leave your argument? You cant just "phase out" money one dollar at a time or one rouble at a time. It has to be done across the board and at a stroke. The very nature of the beast necessitates this

Your objections to this are weak. You talk about the need to avoid collapse and chaos. But communism presupposes the great majority of people want and understand communism. The uncertainities that you allude imply a situation in which people by and large do not understand what communism is about and are not united to put it into effect.

Communism does not do away with the means of production. Those means will be taken over and used in an informed way by people who know what kind of society it is they have set up. They will continue doing many of the same things they now do under capitalism in terms of producing goods and services except there will be no money involved. Money is not some kind of bulwark against impending social chaos and, to suggest that, is to imply workers would not know in advance what needs to be done in the sphere of production which is ridiculous. The workers already today operate the whole machinery of production from top to bottom

Your whole argument is thus based on a completely false premiss.

Firstly your concept of a transitional economy is a spurious one and you might just as well say we already have such a "transitional economy" today since the decommodification of certain public goods already exists alongside what you call the capitalist sector.

And secondly since there are clear limits to how far you can decommodify goods and services under capitalism (which have to be paid for out of taxes on profits as Marx showed) you do not actually explain how you are propose to get rid of this substantial capitalist sector. Hoping that it might eventually shrivel to the point at which it becomes insignificant reveals a miusunderstanding of how capitalism actually operates and it is to ignore the fact that, far from contracting, the commodity relationship has a tendency to penetrate further and deeper into our lives than ever before

Comrade #138672

6th January 2014, 11:08

robbo203

6th January 2014, 12:11

I would say that it is necessary to quickly develop the means of production to the highest possible level, which is needed in order to abolish the law of value. Once the law of value is abolished, you have communism. No value = no profit = no capitalism.

No - like Sanpal's argument above - this is misconceived. The means of production are already developed to a very high level and to an extent that can amply sustain and underpin a fully functioning communist economy. We dont strictly speaking need any further development of the means of production to make communism possible - such a potiential has long existed

It is not the shortcomings, or the underdeveloped nature, of the technological apparatius of production that stands in the way of meeting our needs; it is the social relations of production under capitalism that is the problem. Capitalism is not directly motivated the drive to meet human needs but rather by the desire to realise monetary profit out of market sales out of which capital is then accumulated . The satisfaction of human needs is purely incidental to the profit motive, That is why a very large and ever growing proportion of the work we do under capitalism has nothing to do with the satisfaction of real human needs but is all about satisfying the systemic needs of capitalism itself and "oiling the wheels of commerce". The entire financial apparatus is a case in point but there are numerous others examples

We should be wary of offering technical fixes when the real problem lies with the capitalist social relations of production. The law of value is not going to mechanically disappear with the growth of technology since capitalism is more than capable of ensuring the maintenance of artificial scarcity

Comrade #138672

6th January 2014, 12:47

No - like Sanpal's argument above - this is misconceived. The means of production are already developed to a very high level and to an extent that can amply sustain and underpin a fully functioning communist economy. We dont strictly speaking need any further development of the means of production to make communism possible - such a potiential has long existedYou mean unrestricted free access? You are right that the means of production are already highly developed, but this is not the same as communism, since the law of value still applies.

It is not the shortcomings, or the underdeveloped nature, of the technological apparatius of production that stands in the way of meeting our needs; it is the social relations of production under capitalism that is the problem.The latter restricts the former.

Capitalism is not directly motivated the drive to meet human needs but rather by the desire to realise monetary profit out of market sales out of which capital is then accumulated . The satisfaction of human needs is purely incidental to the profit motive, That is why a very large and ever growing proportion of the work we do under capitalism has nothing to do with the satisfaction of real human needs but is all about satisfying the systemic needs of capitalism itself and "oiling the wheels of commerce". The entire financial apparatus is a case in point but there are numerous others examplesYes, this is what prevents capitalism from completely abolishing the law of value on its own, even though it cannot help but move in that direction.

We should be wary of offering technical fixes when the real problem lies with the capitalist social relations of production. The law of value is not going to mechanically disappear with the growth of technology since capitalism is more than capable of ensuring the maintenance of artificial scarcityI agree with that. Only a proletarian revolution can destroy the old capitalist social relations and replace them with socialist social relations. This allows us to abolish the law of value in the first place, but I do not think that this can happen at one stroke. When the law of value is finally abolished, counter-revolution becomes impossible and the death of capitalism is then sealed.

Geiseric

6th January 2014, 19:31

There is no mode of production (economy) between capitalism and socialism. When capitalism is done away with, then there is communism.

Not necessarily. They got rid of capitalism during the Russian revolution and there was a period of wars against the revolution that made a society of abundance impossible. Communist and Soviet led Russia was certainly not communism due to material conditions imposed by the international and internal reaction. Regardless the Soviet planned economy was completely different then the model of a market led economy which is what most of the world is currently. For example private ownership was illegal in the fSU. Bureaucrats could not place themselves in a position of real ownership because of the gains made by the working class. There was a contradiction which places the Stalinists against the still revolutionary working class.

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 19:33

Not necessarily. They got rid of capitalism during the Russian revolution and there was a period of wars against the revolution that made a society of abundance impossible. Communist and Soviet led Russia was certainly not communism due to material conditions imposed by the international and internal reaction. Regardless the Soviet planned economy was completely different then the model of a market led economy which is what most of the world is currently. For example private ownership was illegal in the fSU. Bureaucrats could not place themselves in a position of real ownership because of the gains made by the working class. There was a contradiction which places the Stalinists against the still revolutionary working class.
so when lenin was talking about the progressive nature of state capitalism, that was when capitalism was destroyed?

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 19:50

so when lenin was talking about the progressive nature of state capitalism, that was when capitalism was destroyed?

Capitalism was destroyed years earlier, actually, before proletarian state capitalism was implemented.

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 19:51

Capitalism was destroyed years earlier, actually, before proletarian state capitalism was implemented.
So they destroyed it and then.... brought it back?

Per Levy

6th January 2014, 20:02

Capitalism was destroyed years earlier, actually, before proletarian state capitalism was implemented.

lets just ignore that in that theory capitalism can just vanish and appear again at a whim and lets focus on what exactly was proletarian about the SU state capitalism?

was it the exploitation of the proles? was it that the proles had no say in anything and were just used by the state as the state saw fit?

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:04

So they destroyed it and then.... brought it back?

No. The NEP was not a counterrevolution.

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:12

No. The NEP was not a counterrevolution.
So then they didn't destroy capitalism?
This is really confused.
Also I never called the NEP counterrevolution. Not sure why you are putting words in my mouth, perhaps to ignore my question.

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:17

lets just ignore that in that theory capitalism can just vanish and appear again at a whim and lets focus on what exactly was proletarian about the SU state capitalism?

was it the exploitation of the proles? was it that the proles had no say in anything and were just used by the state as the state saw fit?

The state capitalism of the Bolsheviks after the implementation of the NEP was not a counterrevolution from the proletarian dictatorship back to capitalism. If anyone thinks this is what someone thinks Lenin and the Bolsheviks did by implementing the NEP, then one has seriously misunderstood what they thought/did and what the NEP was. While it increased the capitalistic elements of Russia (inherent in all workers' states), it was in no way a counterrevolution (which would be required to overturn the dictatorship of the proletariat).

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:19

The state capitalism of the Bolsheviks after the implementation of the NEP was not a counterrevolution from the proletarian dictatorship back to capitalism. If anyone thinks this is what someone thinks Lenin and the Bolsheviks did by implementing the NEP, then one has seriously misunderstood what they thought/did and what the NEP was. While it increased the capitalistic elements of Russia (inherent in all workers' states), it was in no way a counterrevolution (which would be required to overturn the dictatorship of the proletariat).
who is arguing counterrevolution?
the NEP was objectively capitalism. This is a fact. If you disagree with this, you understand neither marxism nor leninism.
The position you are holding is literally "Capitalism was destroyed then brought back but it wasn't because the NEP was not counterrevolution"

Answer the goddamn question.

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:21

So then they didn't destroy capitalism?
This is really confused.
Also I never called the NEP counterrevolution. Not sure why you are putting words in my mouth, perhaps to ignore my question.

You said, as a question, then they brought capitalism back. The reason this is untrue is, for one, the NEP was not a counterrevolution. This is hardly ignoring you. In fact, I'd consider it the exact opposite.

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:24

You said, as a question, then they brought capitalism back. The reason this is untrue is, for one, the NEP was not a counterrevolution. This is hardly ignoring you. In fact, I'd consider it the exact opposite.
So the NEP was not capitalist?
Here are the possible options
1) Capitalism was destroyed and the NEP wasn't capitalist
2) Capitalism was destroyed and the NEP was capitalist
3) Capitalism wasn't destroyed
1 is absurd, 2 is means that Capitalism was destroyed and then brought back.

Five Year Plan

6th January 2014, 20:24

who is arguing counterrevolution?
the NEP was objectively capitalism. This is a fact. If you disagree with this, you understand neither marxism nor leninism.
The position you are holding is literally "Capitalism was destroyed then brought back but it wasn't because the NEP was not counterrevolution"

Answer the goddamn question.

I think you're missing the point. The NEP permitted private capitals to continue to exist, alongside the statified sector, which was not capital in the fullest sense of the word, since it was under the control of a workers' state and not a capitalist ruling class personifying the laws of motion of capital. It was, as Blake's Baby has described it in another thread, a "mitigated form capitalism," mitigated by the fact that it was under the control of an institution embodying the revolutionary agency of the working class.

The process of transforming to full socialism, and eliminating even this mitigated form of capitalism, would have entailed increasingly eliminating hierarchy and introducing full rank-and-file participation, thereby reducing and eventually eliminating competition, in planning decisions, while simultaneously absorbing the remaining private capitals.

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:25

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:27

Lenin did not consider proletarian state capitalism to be capitalism, actually. It was merely the workers' state regulating and controlling the remaining private capital of the country. To think he meant that he thought he literally reimplemented capitalism, and therefore pursued a counterrevolution overthrowing the proletarian state he helped create, is crazy.
So this post is literally saying "it wasn't capitalism, he just called it that, there was no capitalism, they were managing capitalism"
also great man of history
also, you are seriously saying that this state-capitalism wasn't capitalism?

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:27

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:30

1 is actually the most correct. To think Lenin meant capitalism, as in the system he just helped overthrow, is mental. This is like when people think Lenin literally.meant he and the working class never overthrew the bourgeois, Czarist state. State capitalism, like that well-known quote, is constantly took out of context.
you are going to make my head blow up. the nep wasn't capitalist? seriously? im not even condemning the NEP, it was objectively capitalist.
What about the NEP was not capitalism?

Five Year Plan

6th January 2014, 20:31

So the NEP was not capitalist?
Here are the possible options
1) Capitalism was destroyed and the NEP wasn't capitalist
2) Capitalism was destroyed and the NEP was capitalist
3) Capitalism wasn't destroyed
1 is absurd, 2 is means that Capitalism was destroyed and then brought back.

These options presuppose we clarify what we talk about when we say "capitalism." Do we mean value relations? Do we mean commodity production? Do we mean the full subjection of a working class to the blind and anarchic laws of value embodied in a definite ruling class with the political power to impose the instutitional arrangements necessary to give those laws full reign?

At one level, "capitalism," in the sense of capitalist class processes like hierarchically organized value production to which some people are subjected, continues to exist until the moment before full socialism is achieved. In a fuller sense, capitalism as a mode of production is destroyed when the political-institutional arrangements necessary for it laws of motion to be realized are destroyed. The different aspects of capital, and value, are ignored when you just talk about "capitalism" as a one-dimensional thing. And it completely misses the nature of the tensions and contradictions that would exist in any society where the working-class has just seized political power and is trying to lead an international transition to socialism.

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:34

These options presuppose we clarify what we talk about when we say "capitalism." Do we mean value relations? Do we mean commodity production? Do we mean the full subjection of a working class to the blind and anarchic laws of value embodied in a definite ruling class with the political power to impose the instutitional arrangements necessary to give those laws full reign?

At one level, "capitalism," in the sense of capitalist class processes like hierarchically organized value production to which some people are subjected, continues to exist until the moment before full socialism is achieved. In a fuller sense, capitalism as a mode of production is destroyed when the political-institutional arrangements necessary for it laws of motion to be realized are destroyed. The different aspects of capital, and value, are ignored when you just talk about "capitalism" as a one-dimensional thing. And it completely misses the nature of the tensions and contradictions that would exist in any society where the working-class has just seized political power and is trying to lead an international transition to socialism.
so what about the NEP wasn't capitalist then?

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:38

So this post is literally saying "it wasn't capitalism, he just called it that, there was no capitalism, they were managing capitalism"
also, you are seriously saying that this state-capitalism wasn't capitalism?Lenin himself didn't believe proletarian state capitalism was capitalism in this sense. If he did, he would have to have believed the NEP was a counterrevolution overthrowing the workers' state. So yes, I am saying that. Why he called it that could either be founded in his works, or for a brief summary, in another lovely poster's post above.

also great man of history No. I used it in the sentence, "To think he meant that he thought he literally reimplemented capitalism," which is what I am arguing against. Unless you can argue I think he himself reimplemented capitalism, this point is unnecessary.

Five Year Plan

6th January 2014, 20:39

so what about the NEP wasn't capitalist then?

The fact that the vast majority of the economy was under the control of a state that was, at that time, not a capitalist state. Its property was therefore not capital in the fullest sense of the word, since it was under the control of a workers' state and not a capitalist ruling class personifying the laws of motion of capital.

If you are going to say that the state industry was capitalist at that time, you would have to argue that workers were the capitalists, and were using their state to extract surplus value from themselves.

Either that or you slip into the idea that you can have an exploitative mode of production, complete with definite laws of motion and development, without an exploiting class through whose power those laws (and their contradictions) play out.

Or you can reject both options, and say that the Soviet state at the time was a capitalist state, because it managed its property in ways that had the stamp of capitalist processes like value calculations and hierarchical commodity production. But then you're left with a definition of workers' state that means that a workers' state can only exist once value and commodities have been abolished. In which case you don't get a worker' state until socialism, when there are no more workers.

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:40

you are going to make my head blow up. Good.

the nep wasn't capitalist? seriously? im not even condemning the NEP, it was objectively capitalist. What about the NEP was not capitalism?An above user already explained it in more detail than I have (which I have already done very briefly I think).

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:42

Lenin himself didn't believe proletarian state capitalism was capitalism in this sense.
there you go again "lenin himself"
also back that claim up
what do you mean proletarian state capitalism wasn't capitalism? how was it different?

If he did, he would have to have believed the NEP was a counterrevolution overthrowing the workers' state
really, how? capitalism needed to develop in order to establish socialism.

So yes, I am saying that. Why he called it that could either be founded in his works, or for a brief summary, in another lovely poster's post above.
except you are wrong. you honestly think that the NEP wasn't capitalism. How wasn't it capitalist? You havent demonstrated this, you wrongly state that lenin did.

No. I used it in the sentence, "To think he meant that he thought he literally reimplemented capitalism," which is what I am arguing against. Unless you can argue I think he himself reimplemented capitalism, this point is unnecessary.
Nah, you kinda are saying this. "He helped create it" "he didn't re implement it"
also my position, and lenins, was that capitalism wasn't destroyed in the first place.

Sperm-Doll Setsuna

6th January 2014, 20:45

The fact that the vast majority of the economy was under the control of a state that was, at that time, not a capitalist state.

Classic trot silliness. As unbearable as it is irrational. And yes, capitalism cannot cease to exist until socialism, workers state or whatever.

Five Year Plan

6th January 2014, 20:49

Classic trot silliness. As unbearable as it is irrational. And yes, capitalism cannot cease to exist until socialism, workers state or whatever.

You think it's irrational for me to state that workers' controlling property means that the production ensuing from that property can't be capitalist. I guess the "rational" alternative makes more sense, and that we should think of workers in that scenario as the capitalists (in addition to being the workers).

And, no, if you read what I wrote, I don't say that state control automatically equates to workers' control.

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 20:59

The fact that the vast majority of the economy was under the control of a state that was, at that time, not a capitalist state. Its property was therefore not capital in the fullest sense of the word, since it was under the control of a workers' state and not a capitalist ruling class personifying the laws of motion of capital.

If you are going to say that the state industry was capitalist at that time, you would have to argue that workers were the capitalists, and were using their state to extract surplus value from themselves.

Either that or you slip into the idea that you can have an exploitative mode of production, complete with definite laws of motion and development, without an exploiting class through whose power those laws (and their contradictions) play out.

Or you can reject both options, and say that the Soviet state at the time was a capitalist state, because it managed its property in ways that had the stamp of capitalist processes like value calculations and hierarchical commodity production. But then you're left with a definition of workers' state that means that a workers' state can only exist once value and commodities have been abolished. In which case you don't get a worker' state until socialism, when there are no more workers.
Jesus. I kind of expected better.
Capitalism doesn't stop being capitalism because it has new leaders. The workers don't become capitalists, they are proletarian, even though they still manage capital, because they are attacking capitalism at its very core. This is the "economics" of the proletarian dictatorship, worker-managed capitalism that it destroyed wherever and whenever possible. However, the bourgeois as a class still exist as a class worldwide, and thus capitalism cannot be destroyed everywhere, as im sure you agree, socialism in one country does not exist.
the thing that governs these laws is organic relations caused by capital itself. Proletarian interests are in contradiction to managing capitalism, but they are forced to, for various reasons.
However, Russia itself still had to industrialize, it still needed capitalist development, the only thing that could curb this necessity of capitalism was the german revolution, which had failed.
I would say capitalism in Russia was never destroed, on the contrary, it was pursued.

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 20:59

there you go again "lenin himself"
also back that claim up
what do you mean proletarian state capitalism wasn't capitalism? how was it different?

Lenin talks about state capitalism working in a workers' state against private capitalism. If it was capitalism in the traditional sense, he would have had to overthrow the workers' state back to capitalism. And, again, another use has explained it clearly.

really, how? capitalism needed to develop in order to establish socialism.

If he believed that capitalism needed to develop first, he would never have dared advocate for a proletarian revolution (the overthrowing of capitalism) when he supposedly knew that capitalism had to be developed fully before proletarian revolution.

except you are wrong. you honestly think that the NEP wasn't capitalism. How wasn't it capitalist? You havent demonstrated this, you wrongly state that lenin did.

You have yet to prove he believed it was a return to capitalism in the traditional sense of the term, which any Marxist and Leninist knows would require counterrevolution in the USSR and the overthrow of the its workers' dictatorship.

Nah, you kinda are saying this. "He helped create it" "he didn't re implement it"
also my position, and lenins, was that capitalism wasn't destroyed in the first place.He did help create it, actually, as did many others. And it is true that he didn't reimplement capitalism. You must think he did if that's an untrue statement.

He believed Russia was a workers' state, a dictorship of the proletariat, not capitalism/a bourgeois or Czarist state (which is a quote so commonly taken out of context to "prove" this non-sense that he believed there was no proletarian revolution/state in Russia).

EDIT: *looks at above post* Oh dear.

sanpal

6th January 2014, 21:02

Sanpal, I believe the argument you are offering here is a fundamentally flawed one. Exactly the opposite is true. It is literally impossible for communism (or for that matter the abolition of money) NOT to be introduced in "one stroke". This, in fact, was the point behind Marx's comment in the German Ideology:

Describe pls your scenario how the abolition of money / establishing of communist relations would be introduced, for example, on January 10 2 *** years simultaneously for 7 billions inhabitants of the planet Earth or even for group of developed countries? How monetary economy which was working on January 9 would be not working on January 10? What further? Are you sure that 100% of humans(including capitalists and petty bourgeoisie) have a need or will have a need in communism? If they won't what to do with them? To Mars? To Gulag?

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 21:08

you seriously need to read more lenin. this is tedium.
Lenin talks about state capitalism working in a workers' state against private capitalism. If it was capitalism in the traditional sense, he would have had to overthrow the workers' state back to capitalism. And, again, another use has explained it clearly.

Firstly, we must examine the nature of the transition from capitalism to socialism that gives us the right and the grounds to call our country a Socialist Republic of Soviets.
Secondly, we must expose the error of those who fail to see the petty-bourgeois economic conditions and the petty-bourgeois element as the principal enemy of socialism in our country.
Thirdly, we must fully understand the economic implications of the distinction between the Soviet state and the bourgeois state.
Let us examine these three points.
No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Soviet Socialist Republic implies the determination of the Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the existing economic system is recognised as a socialist order.
But what does the word “transition” mean? Does it not mean, as applied to an economy, that the present system contains elements, particles, fragments of both capitalism and socialism? Everyone will admit that it does. But not all who admit this take the trouble to consider what elements actually constitute the various socio-economic structures that exist in Russia at the present time. And this is the crux of the question.
Let us enumerate these elements:
(1)patriarchal, i.e., to a considerable extent natural, peasant farming;
(2)small commodity production (this includcs the majority of those peasants who sell their grain);
(3)private capitalism;
(4)state capitalism;
(5)socialism.
Russia is so vast and so varied that all these different types of socio-economic structures are intermingled. This is what constitutes the specific feature of the situation.
The question arises: What elements predominate? Clearly, in a small-peasant country, the petty-bourgeois element predominates and it must predominate, for the great majority—those working the land—are small commodity producers. The shell of state capitalism (grain monopoly, state-controlled entrepreneurs and traders, bourgeois co-operators) is pierced now in one place, now in another by profiteers, the chief object of profiteering being grain.
It is in this field that the main struggle is being waged. Between what elements is this struggle being waged if we are to speak in terms of economic categories such as “state capitalism”? Between the fourth and fifth in the order in which I have just enumerated them? Of course not. It is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against state capitalism and socialism.

If he believed that capitalism needed to develop first, he would never have dared advocate for a proletarian revolution (the overthrowing of capitalism) when he supposedly knew that capitalism had to be developed fully before proletarian revolution.

[QUOTE=Lenin] In the first place economically state capitalism is immeasurably superior to our present economic system.
In the second place there is nothing terrible in it for the Soviet power, for the Soviet state is a state in which the power of the workers and thc poor is assured. . . .
To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content—a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).

While the revolution in Germany is still slow in “coming forth”, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, without hesitating to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism. If there are anarchists and Left Soeialist-Revolutionaries (I recall offhand the speeches of Karelin and Ghe at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee) who indulge in Karelin-like reflections and say that it is unbecoming for us revolutionaries to “take lessons” from German imperialism, there is only one thing we can say in reply: the revolution that took these people seriously would perish irrevocably (and deservedly).

You have yet to prove he believed it was a return to capitalism in the traditional sense of the term, which any Marxist and Leninist knows would require counterrevolution in the USSR and the overthrow of the its workers' dictatorship.THERE WAS NO RETURN!

He did help create it, actually, as did many others. And it is true that he didn't reimplement capitalism. You must think he did if that's an untrue statement.
No I don't think capitalism was destroyed.

He believed Russia was a workers' state, a dictorship of the proletariat, not capitalism/a bourgeois or Czarist state (which is a quote so commonly taken out of context to "prove" this non-sense that he believed there was no proletarian revolution/state in Russia).whats your point?
where the fuck did I argue against this?\
http://www.sinistra.net/lib/pro/whyrusnsoc.html
(http://www.sinistra.net/lib/pro/whyrusnsoc.html)

EDIT: *looks at above post* Oh dear. oh you are one to talk.

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 21:20

I will always read more Lenin when I can. Since I must go do school work now, you should have plenty of time in which you should probably reread what you copy and pasted for me to read before thinking it contradicts what I am arguing. This a piece I first read when I was first trying to understand Lenin's state capitalism, and in fact I had it up when I was making a few points of my just a bit ago when I was using the computer.

Also, as I read there, he clearly states that Soviet Russia is transitional, not capitalist. Just to point out for you. :)

Five Year Plan

6th January 2014, 21:23

Jesus. I kind of expected better. Capitalism doesn't stop being capitalism because it has new leaders.

That wasn't the nature of my argument. The way the leadership of the Soviet state in the NEP period was structured vis-a-vis the state ownership of property precluded the transformation of the state officials into a capitalist class. This is because the way the leadership was structured vis-a-vis property was the result of the working class placing those officials into power on the basis of a revolutionary anti-capitalist program.

The workers don't become capitalists, they are proletarian, even though they still manage capital, because they are attacking capitalism at its very core. This is the "economics" of the proletarian dictatorship, worker-managed capitalism that it destroyed wherever and whenever possible. However, the bourgeois as a class still exist as a class worldwide, and thus capitalism cannot be destroyed everywhere, as im sure you agree, socialism in one country does not exist.Unless you think that the workers "managing capital" results in the exact same type of economy, the same mode of production, as capitalists "managing capital," I fail to see how you can just slap the label "capitalist" on both as though they are the same thing.

I'm not a big fan of the Trotsky quote about how workers who can't defend previous gains can't expect to fight for new ones, but here the quote is appropriate. If you cram what you call "worker-managed capitalism" (what I call attenuated capitalism) into the same category as capitalism under the control of a ruling capitalist class, you are basically erasing a working-class gain (the elimination of the capitalists' control over capital) in its pursuit to eliminate all vestiges of capital, and are unable to provide even basic orientation to workers struggling to overcome capitalism.

the thing that governs these laws is organic relations caused by capital itself. Proletarian interests are in contradiction to managing capitalism, but they are forced to, for various reasons.Whereas capitalists' interests are in accordance with managing capital, and pass laws to defend capital, use their state to shore it up, and do everything to defend capital. That's why workers' "owning" property through their state (what you call "workers managing capital") presents a different type of economy. The very fact that the workers OWN the property represents a blow against the capitalist laws of motion. Workers will use that control to resist attempts to drive down workers' wages to a bare minimum, will be able to scrap outdated technologies and shift resources to new technologies without worrying that the premature cheapening of their machinery might benefit competitors, and most important of all, be able to use their political supremacy to introduce greater and greater democratic planning into the state sector. In other words, the workers having control over the property is a blow against the law of value, not just its simple continuation.

However, Russia itself still had to industrialize, it still needed capitalist development, the only thing that could curb this necessity of capitalism was the german revolution, which had failed.
I would say capitalism in Russia was never destroed, on the contrary, it was pursued.Only if you slap the capitalist label on dramatically different economic phenomena, then pat yourself on the back for the most facile of over-simplifications.

I encourage you to read what Marx had to write here (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm) about guilds, which also contained elements of "capital" but were by no means "capitalist."

The most enlightening section for you would be this:

On the other side, the worker himself is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour; it has no interest for him as such, but only in as much as it is in fact labour and, as such, a use value for capital. It is therefore his economic character that he is the carrier of labour as such—i.e. of labour as use value for capital; he is a worker, in opposition to the capitalist. This is not the character of the craftsmen and guild-members etc., whose economic character lies precisely in the specificity of their labour and in their relation to a specific master, etc. This economic relation—the character which capitalist and worker have as the extremes of a single relation of production—therefore develops more purely and adequately in proportion as labour loses all the characteristics of art; as its particular skill becomes something more and more abstract and irrelevant, and as it becomes more and more a purely abstract activity, a purely mechanical activity, hence indifferent to its particular form; a merely formal activity, or, what is the same, a merely material [stofflich] activity, activity pure and simple, regardless of its form.What Marx is talking about there is the increasing of abstraction of labor, and the corollary abstraction of the relationship between the control of property and the purpose to which it is put to use. A capitalist, by virtue of belonging to the capitalist class, is systematically pressured to treat his property abstractly. If you have no ruling class that embodies this alienation, you don't have the full mode of production because you don't have the full relationship between capital and labor. You have formally capitalist processes taking place within a different framework.

Also see this quote:

Of course, socialists sometimes say, we need capital, but not the capitalist. [7] (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/f293-330.htm#7) Then capital appears as a pure thing, not as a relation of production which, reflected in itself, is precisely the capitalist. I may well separate capital from a given individual capitalist, and it can be transferred to another. But, in losing capital, he loses the quality of being a capitalist. Thus capital is indeed separable from an individual capitalist, but not from the capitalist, who, as such, confronts the worker. Thus also the individual worker can cease to be the being-for-itself [Fürsichsein] of labour; he may inherit or steal money etc. But then he ceases to be a worker. As a worker he is nothing more than labour in its being- for-itself. (This to be further developed later.)

robbo203

6th January 2014, 22:04

I think you're missing the point. The NEP permitted private capitals to continue to exist, alongside the statified sector, which was not capital in the fullest sense of the word, since it was under the control of a workers' state and not a capitalist ruling class personifying the laws of motion of capital. It was, as Blake's Baby has described it in another thread, a "mitigated form capitalism," mitigated by the fact that it was under the control of an institution embodying the revolutionary agency of the working class.

The process of transforming to full socialism, and eliminating even this mitigated form of capitalism, would have entailed increasingly eliminating hierarchy and introducing full rank-and-file participation, thereby reducing and eventually eliminating competition, in planning decisions, while simultaneously absorbing the remaining private capitals.

I think you have to make a distinction between the personnel operating the state machine and the nature of the state machine itself. Most politicans managing the capitalist state are not capitalists but that in no way alters the fact that state in question is a capitalist state

The same applies to the question of revolution. I think Marx's comment below could very well be applied to the Bolshevik Revolution. It achieved finally what earlier attempts had failed to achieve in breaking finally with lingering forms of precapitalist society and clearing away the obstacles to the full development of Russian capitalism under the Soviet system

If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeosie, that will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1794, so long as in the course of history, in its movement, the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule ("Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality", 1847 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm).

The state that emerged from the Bolshevik revolution was not a so called "workers state" (and oxymoron in my view) but a new form of capitalist state - a state capitalist state in which a state capitalist class consolidated and ruhtlessly centralised both economic and political power for itself. Even Lenin agreed that the state was not one operated by the working class as a whole (and even if it was it would not make it any the less a capitalist state) . In 1920 we find him saying this:

But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. The whole is like an arrangement of cogwheels....It is Trotsky who is in “ideological confusion”, because in this key question of the trade unions’ role, from the standpoint of transition from capitalism to communism, he has lost sight of the fact that we have here a complex arrangement of cogwheels which cannot be a simple one; for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organisation. It cannot work without a number of “transmission belts” running from the vanguard to the mass of the advanced class, and from the latter to the mass of the working people. In Russia, this mass is a peasant one. There is no such mass anywhere else, but even in the most advanced countries there is a non-proletarian, or a not entirely proletarian, mass. That is in itself enough to produce ideological confusion. But it’s no use Trotsky’s pinning it on others. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm)

In fact, of course, Lenin's vanguard turned out to be the material out of which the new state capitalist class was forged. It was this class that controlled and therefore effectively owned the means of prpduction on a collective class basis rather than as a private individuals while the mass of the population were alienated from the means of production and differed in no fundamental respect from the working class in any other capitalist country

You are also mistaken in thinking that the statified sector was not capital in the fullest sense of the word. State capital is fully capital. As Engels pointed out

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 the 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 relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)

Five Year Plan

6th January 2014, 22:14

I think you have to make a distinction between the personnel operating the state machine and the nature of the state machine itself. Most politicans managing the capitalist state are not capitalists but that in no way alters the fact that state in question is a capitalist state

The same applies to the question of revolution. I think Marx's comment below could very well be applied to the Bolshevik Revolution. It achieved finally what earlier attempts had failed to achieve in breaking finally with lingering forms of precapitalist society and clearing away the obstacles to the full development of Russian capitalism under the Soviet system

If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeosie, that will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1794, so long as in the course of history, in its movement, the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule ("Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality", 1847 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm).

The state that emerged from the Bolshevik revolution was not a so called "workers state" (and oxymoron in my view) but a new form of capitalist state - a state capitalist state in which a state capitalist class consolidated and ruhtlessly centralised both economic and political power for itself. Even Lenin agreed that the state was not one operated by the working class as a whole (and even if it was it would not make it any the less a capitalist state) . In 1920 we find him saying this:

But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. The whole is like an arrangement of cogwheels....It is Trotsky who is in “ideological confusion”, because in this key question of the trade unions’ role, from the standpoint of transition from capitalism to communism, he has lost sight of the fact that we have here a complex arrangement of cogwheels which cannot be a simple one; for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organisation. It cannot work without a number of “transmission belts” running from the vanguard to the mass of the advanced class, and from the latter to the mass of the working people. In Russia, this mass is a peasant one. There is no such mass anywhere else, but even in the most advanced countries there is a non-proletarian, or a not entirely proletarian, mass. That is in itself enough to produce ideological confusion. But it’s no use Trotsky’s pinning it on others. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm)

In fact, of course, Lenin's vanguard turned out to be the material out of which the new state capitalist class was forged. It was this class that controlled and therefore effectively owned the means of prpduction on a collective class basis rather than as a private individuals while the mass of the population were alienated from the means of production and differed in no fundamental respect from the working class in any other capitalist country

You are also mistaken in thinking that the statified sector was not capital in the fullest sense of the word. State capital is fully capital. As Engels pointed out

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 the 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 relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)

Why do you and Remus keep referring to the workers' state acquiring ownership of property as "just a personnel change"? The entire apparatus for controlling property, and the logic underlying that apparatus, were different. Remus himself unknowingly acknowledges this when he talks about workers' interests being antagonistic to capital. It's not just a matter of firing one capitalist and digging up a lucky worker to take his or her place.

I have addressed that thoroughly abused Engels quote in at least two separate threads. You'll find how off base your usage of it is here: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2687699&postcount=180

robbo203

6th January 2014, 22:28

Only if you slap the capitalist label on dramatically different economic phenomena, then pat yourself on the back for the most facile of over-simplifications.

Dramatically diffrent economic phenomena? Perhaps the one who is engaging in facile over simplications is your good self:

Here's somethingf that might be of interest to you - Andrew Kliman on "The Incoherence of “Transitional Society” as a Marxian Concept"

http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/category/alternatives-to-capital

"Everyone is entitled to define socialism however he or she wishes––including Karl Marx. The notion that socialism equals state planning, ownership, and control was alien to Marx’s conception of socialism. More precisely, it was alien to his conception of what he called communist society, both its initial phase and its higher phase.

Let me first address the issue of state ownership and control.

Of course, Marx called for the abolition of private property. But what makes property private, in his view, is not individual ownership, but the separation of the direct producers, workers, from the property they produce. Thus, in the German Ideology, he and Frederick Engels noted that “ancient communal and State ownership … is still accompanied by slavery,” and they referred to the communal ownership of slaves as “communal private property” (emphasis added).

In volume 2 of Capital, Marx wrote, “The social capital is equal to the sum of the individual capitals (including … state capital, in so far as governments employ productive wage-labour in mines, railways, etc. and function as industrial capitalists.” Similarly, in his notes on Adolph Wagner’s critique of Capital, Marx wrote that “[w]here the state itself is a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines, forests, etc., its product is a ‘commodity’ and hence possesses the specific character of every other commodity.”

Most importantly, in volume 1 of Capital, he implicitly addressed the issue of what would happen if the state’s role as capitalist producer expanded to such a point that it completely crowded out other capitalists. He argued that the tendency toward monopoly, the process of centralization of capitals, “would reach its extreme limit … [i]n a given society … only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.” As Raya Dunayevskaya noted, Marx’s text implies that such a society “would remain capitalist[;] … this extreme development would in no way change the law of motion of that society.” Engels thus seems to have been stating Marx’s view as well as his own when he wrote, in Anti-Dühring,

“state ownership … does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. … The more [of them the state takes over], 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.”

Five Year Plan

6th January 2014, 22:39

Dramatically diffrent economic phenomena? Perhaps the one who is engaging in facile over simplications is your good self:

Here's somethingf that might be of interest to you - Andrew Kliman on "The Incoherence of “Transitional Society” as a Marxian Concept"

http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/category/alternatives-to-capital

"Everyone is entitled to define socialism however he or she wishes––including Karl Marx. The notion that socialism equals state planning, ownership, and control was alien to Marx’s conception of socialism. More precisely, it was alien to his conception of what he called communist society, both its initial phase and its higher phase.

I agree with what Kliman writes here. Centralized state control over the economy, where the direct producers are dispossessed of equal power with one another to plan, is not "socialism." Since we are discussing a workers' state leading a transition to socialism, not socialism proper, this is not relevant at all to the debate we've been having. It might, however, be relevant in critiquing people who mistake a dictatorship of the proletariat with socialism.

Let me first address the issue of state ownership and control.

Of course, Marx called for the abolition of private property. But what makes property private, in his view, is not individual ownership, but the separation of the direct producers, workers, from the property they produce. Thus, in the German Ideology, he and Frederick Engels noted that “ancient communal and State ownership … is still accompanied by slavery,” and they referred to the communal ownership of slaves as “communal private property” (emphasis added).Correct, and once again completely irrelevant to my argument. I didn't say that a workers' state comes to power, which then signals the beginning of socialism. I said that the workers' state taking power destroys the full capital-labor relationship, since it represents the workers taking control over capital. In control of capital, workers don't just become new capitalists and begin to use capital in all the same ways that the class they overthrew did. If that happened, the revolution would not have been a workers' revolution at all. Workers use their control over capital to eliminate, over a period of time, its remaining characteristics as capital, specifically its quality as a repository of value and hierarchical control. You would point to both characteristics of an economy of a workers' state as proof that the workers' state is still controlled by capitalists. I would counter with what I said above: according to that definition, a state cannot be a workers' state until socialism is achieved through the destruction of value, commodity production, and all class processes. But then you have no classes (since what you have is socialism), so what you're basically doing is defining the workers' state out of any plausible realm of existence. And if you define a workers' state transitioning the economy from capitalism to socialism out of existence, you are left with the utopian instantaneous leap from full capitalism to full socialism.

In volume 2 of Capital, Marx wrote, “The social capital is equal to the sum of the individual capitals (including … state capital, in so far as governments employ productive wage-labour in mines, railways, etc. and function as industrial capitalists.” Similarly, in his notes on Adolph Wagner’s critique of Capital, Marx wrote that “[w]here the state itself is a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines, forests, etc., its product is a ‘commodity’ and hence possesses the specific character of every other commodity.”I never claimed that the state cannot be constitutive of a capitalist class, so pointing out that Marx agreed that it could is hardly an argument against me. I have argued against your claim that the existence of a state controlling the means of production necessarily means the existence of the capitalist mode of production in its fullest sense.

Most importantly, in volume 1 of Capital, he implicitly addressed the issue of what would happen if the state’s role as capitalist producer expanded to such a point that it completely crowded out other capitalists. He argued that the tendency toward monopoly, the process of centralization of capitals, “would reach its extreme limit … [I]n a given society … only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.” As Raya Dunayevskaya noted, Marx’s text implies that such a society “would remain capitalist[;] … this extreme development would in no way change the law of motion of that society.” Engels thus seems to have been stating Marx’s view as well as his own when he wrote, in Anti-Dühring,

“state ownership … does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. … The more [of them the state takes over], 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.”
I pasted the link to the post where I thoroughly rebutted this interpretation of the Engels quote. I notice that you didn't respond to anything I wrote in it, and just repeated yourself. Disappointing. Read the post, and see where Engels repeatedly talks about workers' forming their own state and nationalizing property under that state destroys capitalism, even though socialism has yet to be achieved. It contradicts the facile equation you're making between capitalism's vestiges and building blocks with capitalism as a mode of production.

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 23:27

robbo203

6th January 2014, 23:36

Why do you and Remus keep referring to the workers' state acquiring ownership of property as "just a personnel change"? The entire apparatus for controlling property, and the logic underlying that apparatus, were different. Remus himself unknowingly acknowledges this when he talks about workers' interests being antagonistic to capital. It's not just a matter of firing one capitalist and digging up a lucky worker to take his or her place.

I have addressed that thoroughly abused Engels quote in at least two separate threads. You'll find how off base your usage of it is here: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2687699&postcount=180

You misunderstand where I am coming from....

Firstly, I dont accept even very idea of a "workers state" to start with! I think it is an utterly incoherent oxymoron. An exploited class cannot possibly operate a system of exploitation in its own interest when its own interests lies in ending its explotiation and therefore its very existence as a class rather than in maintaining that existence. The so called workers state maintains the existence of this class and hence its exploitation and in so doing proves itself to be, in fact, an "anti worker state" -in short, a capitalist state. A "workers state" is thus just another form of capitalist state which hides behind the phetotic of socialist emancipation to sugar pill the same old message of business as usual - one class exploiting the other

The absurdity of the protagonists of workers states is no better exposed when they are asked to explain how an exploited working class can possibly exist without the other side of the coin likewise existing - an exploiting capitalist class. So the workers state must, by definition, condone the existence of a capitalist class, permit it to continue exploiting the working class and yet pretend to itself that as a state its has the interests of the workers at heart. It would be laughable if were not so tragic that any worker could fall this utter nonsense.

Secondly I dont deny that there is a difference between the way the capitalist class was recruited in the Soviet Union compared with what wasor is the case in the West. But this is of secondary importance compared with whether or not a capitalist class existed in the first place The Trotskyist tradition in particular places heavy emphasis on the legalistic arrangement which allows for private de jure onwership of capital, the absence of which it claims, proves that cannot be a capitalist class. All that this proves is the utterly idealistic and non-materialist standpint of those who hold such a view.

Whether or not a capitalist class exists can only be settled by looking at the social relations of production existing on the ground and not by the legalistic arrangements that define the rights of individuals. The fact that you and I can legally own capital in the West does not explain why a capitalist class exist in the West which is a sociological fact which cannot be reduced to universal legalistic rights.

Ownership in fact means exactly the same thing as ultimate control. If you ultimately control something you own it and vice versa. The means of production , the allocation of resources and the disposal of the economic surplus under soviet capitalism were all ultimately controlled - and therefore owned - by a tiny section of the population . This was a soviet state capitalist class. They exercised de facto ownership not through individual de jure ownership of capital but collectively through their stanglehold on the state machine. This de facto class ownership of the means of production afforded them a sumptuous lifestyle and opportnities utterly remote from anything that ordinary Russian workers experienced. Researchers like Morrison , using data from the 1970s, found that countries like Poland and the Soviet Union had relatively high levels of income inequality, registering gini coefficients of 0.31 in both cases, which put them on a par with Canada (0.30) and the USA (0.34) ( http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/eps70.pdf)

Of course you can argue that there was a hierarchy of control in soviet society (as in fact there is also in the West) but that does not invalidate the argument that ultimate control (and hence ownership) lay with a tiny class of extremely powerful and privieeged individuals. It might also be pointed out that many workers in the West own capital but that doesnt make them capitalists. The key is how much capital you have that makes you a capitalist - the "transformation of quantity into quality" to coin an expression.

And so it is with control. Ultimate control of the means of prpduction is what marked off the society capitalist class - the red bourgeoisie - from the Russian workers

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 23:46

That wasn't the nature of my argument. The way the leadership of the Soviet state in the NEP period was structured vis-a-vis the state ownership of property precluded the transformation of the state officials into a capitalist class. This is because the way the leadership was structured vis-a-vis property was the result of the working class placing those officials into power on the basis of a revolutionary anti-capitalist program.

we are not really disagreeing here.

unless you think that the workers "managing capital" results in the exact same type of economy, the same mode of production, as capitalists "managing capital," I fail to see how you can just slap the label "capitalist" on both as though they are the same thing.
Worker coops are still capitalists. It is only a transistion when the workers are destroying capitalism.

I'm not a big fan of the Trotsky quote about how workers who can't defend previous gains can't expect to fight for new ones, but here the quote is appropriate. If you cram what you call "worker-managed capitalism" (what I call attenuated capitalism) into the same category as capitalism under the control of a ruling capitalist class, you are basically erasing a working-class gain (the elimination of the capitalists' control over capital) in its pursuit to eliminate all vestiges of capital, and are unable to provide even basic orientation to workers struggling to overcome capitalism.again are coops anticapitalist? You seem to think so. It is only through capitalisms destruction that it is transitory.

as capitalists' interests are in accordance with managing capital, and pass laws to defend capital, use their state to shore it up, and do everything to defend capital.
Correct

hat's why workers' "owning" property through their state (what you call "workers managing capital") presents a different type of economy. T this is only applicable when capitalism is being actively attacked.

e very fact that the workers OWN the property represents a blow against the capitalist laws of motion. Workers will use that control to resist attempts to drive down workers' wages to a bare minimum, will be able to scrap outdated technologies and shift resources to new technologies without worrying that the premature cheapening of their machinery might benefit competitors, and again this is only applicable when capitalism is being attaxked. Do you think mutualism is anti capitalism?
most important of all, be able to use their political supremacy to introduce greater and greater democratic planning into the state sector.lol
In other words, the workers having control over the property is a blow against the law of value, not just its simple continuation.
gotcha. Coops are anti capitalist

[WUOTE]Only if you slap the capitalist label on dramatically different economic phenomena, then pat yourself on the back for the most facile of over-simplifications.[/QUOTE]
I gave link a link to sinistra. I suggest you read it.
I encourage you to read what Marx had to write here (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm) about guilds, which also contained elements of "capital" but were by no means "capitalist."

The most enlightening section for you would be this:

What Marx is talking about there is the increasing of abstraction of labor, and the corollary abstraction of the relationship between the control of property and the purpose to which it is put to use. A capitalist, by virtue of belonging to the capitalist class, is systematically pressured to treat his property abstractly. If you have no ruling class that embodies this alienation, you don't have the full mode of production because you don't have the full relationship between capital and labor. You have formally capitalist processes taking place within a different framework.

Also see this quote:you got this way of speaking to me like im an idiot. Dont do that.
nor does any of this contradict what I am saying

Remus Bleys

6th January 2014, 23:47

robbo203

6th January 2014, 23:53

I pasted the link to the post where I thoroughly rebutted this interpretation of the Engels quote. I notice that you didn't respond to anything I wrote in it, and just repeated yourself. Disappointing. Read the post, and see where Engels repeatedly talks about workers' forming their own state and nationalizing property under that state destroys capitalism, even though socialism has yet to be achieved. It contradicts the facile equation you're making between capitalism's vestiges and building blocks with capitalism as a mode of production.

No you didnt rebut anything. Actually what you did was to rather effectiively shoot yourself in the foot with this quote from Engels

"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."

What Engels is saying here is that it is only in a formal sense that means of production are turned into state property becuase it is the working class that has just captured the state. But what he then goes on to say - or clearly imply - is that this state property disappears just as soon as its constituted as legal fiction by virtue of the proletiariat sezing political power and abolishing the state as state.

If you have no state you cannot logically have "state property", can you? More to the point you cannot have such a thing as a "workers state" either which , as Ive said before, is an oxymoron and a logical absurdity

Fourth Internationalist

6th January 2014, 23:54

I fail to see how lenin contradicts what I am saying. Also I regard russia as a transistiom from pre capitalism to capitalism.The man's whose works you copied and pasted here to support your argument disagrees. He states in the passages you posted that it is transitional between capitalism and socialism, not "pre-capitalism" and capitalism.

Five Year Plan

7th January 2014, 00:13

Worker coops are still capitalists. It is only a transistion when the workers are destroying capitalism. again are coops anticapitalist? You seem to think so. It is only through capitalisms destruction that it is transitory.

again this is only applicable when capitalism is being attaxked. Do you think mutualism is anti capitalism? lol
gotcha. Coops are anti capitalist

Control over industry by a workers' state is not the same as a series of co-ops who are privately owning property, so I am not sure why you keep bringing co-ops into this. By definition co-ops still exist in a legal-institutional framework for the stabilization and cultivation of value relations and capital in the sense that Marx describes it, with participants in the co-op best thought of as petty bourgeois...until competition between the co-ops results in the full crystallization of a capitalist ruling class, in the same way that competition within the petty bourgeoisie leads to the bourgeoisie proper. A workers' state, insofar as the configuration of power within the state continues to enshrine the revolutionary agency of workers, does not exist within such a legal-institutional framework. Similar processes are taking place, but the power dynamics that structure those processes, that gives those processes their actual logic of development, is entirely different.

you got this way of speaking to me like im an idiot. Dont do that.
nor does any of this contradict what I am sayingIt does contradict what you are saying, which is why I told you to read it. Marx clearly says that capitalism requires a group of people--a class--whose dominant logic of economic behavior consists of accumulating capital. If you don't have that, you don't have capitalism. You might have wage labor, or you might have commodity production, or you might wage-based exploitation. But you do not have capitalism as a mode of production. If you have a workers' state in control of property, you don't have capitalism as a mode of production because you no longer have production decisions dominated by the logic of capital. They are instead dominated by the workers collective revolutionary agency, as concretely realized by the trustees of the revolution propelled by the workers. Now, it's true that such a state has to cope with value relations, and performs class functions, but the framework of the state is not geared toward pursuing those processes on a long-term basis, or as its primary goal. This is why a counter-revolution would need to occur in order for a capitalist ruling class to be restored.

Your taking umbrage at perceived slights is just an inappropriate way for you to try to shift the focus away from the content of that excerpt. If you think the quote doesn't contradict what you are saying, I think you should explain how.

robbo203

7th January 2014, 00:28

Describe pls your scenario how the abolition of money / establishing of communist relations would be introduced, for example, on January 10 2 *** years simultaneously for 7 billions inhabitants of the planet Earth or even for group of developed countries? How monetary economy which was working on January 9 would be not working on January 10? What further? Are you sure that 100% of humans(including capitalists and petty bourgeoisie) have a need or will have a need in communism? If they won't what to do with them? To Mars? To Gulag?

Sorry I missed your post here amongst the flurry of other posts...

No I dont subscribe to the literal notion of the simltaneous abolition of money/capitalism of the 7 billion inhabitants of planet earth but I do believe that the establishment of a communist society has to be undertaken democratically and consciously by a significant majority of the working who know what communism entails and desire it as an objective. While I think the idea of literally simultaneously abolishing capitalism all over the world is a silly idea which some people make a fetish of, I have no doubt that communist consciousness would tend to grow relatively evenly and in lockstep throughout the world for many reasons - not least because of the development and spread of modern means of communication - and that any lags will be shortlived

My argument (which you have not really addressed) is that capitalism does not allow for the progressive decommodification of prpduction to the extent that you appear to hope for and that there is actually no such thing as a free lunch under capitalism. The gains in the social wage that workers achieve is bought at the cost of a reduction in their money wage as the labour theory of value deonstrates.

That in itself points to the need for conscious political action even if it does not rule out other approaches as well

Geiseric

7th January 2014, 00:35

The NEP which the Bolsheviks created gave peasants the power to sell their grain while providing a yearly quotient to be distributed. It was in place when there was famines in order to motivate farmers to work. It was supposed to be ended when food production was at pre war levels, however the stalinists manipulated the situation to enhance their own power. It was not state capitalism because the Bolsheviks didn't profit off of any of this. Profit was impossible because they didn't own anything.

Five Year Plan

7th January 2014, 00:36

No you didnt rebut anything. Actually what you did was to rather effectiively shoot yourself in the foot with this quote from Engels

"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."

What Engels is saying here is that it is only in a formal sense that means of production are turned into state property becuase it is the working class that has just captured the state. But what he then goes on to say - or clearly imply - is that this state property disappears just as soon as its constituted as legal fiction by virtue of the proletiariat sezing political power and abolishing the state as state.

If you have no state you cannot logically have "state property", can you? More to the point you cannot have such a thing as a "workers state" either which , as Ive said before, is an oxymoron and a logical absurdity

This is a novel interpretation of Engels, robbo203. If you are arguing that Engels believes that the proletariat abolishes the state as soon as they seize power (and that therefore the means of production under their disposal cannot be thought of as "state property"), then what is all this talk from Engels that the state withers away "in proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes"? Or, as he also says in Anti-Duhring, "State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away."

How is it possible for the state to wither away under workers' control as they eliminate "anarchy in social production," if the state, by your interpretation of Engels, no longer exists the moment they seize power? Good luck squaring this little contradiction.

As I said in the post I linked, I think it's clear that when Engels mentions "abolishing the state as state," he is actually corroborating my argument here. He is talking about how class processes continue to exist in a way that means that socialism isn't realized, but that classes in the fullest alienated sense, like the full capitalist mode of production or the state in the fullest alienated sense, have been abolished. And what remains is the full elimination of capitalist processes through continued international and domestic struggle. Only when that struggle is completely successful does the state wither away entirely.

robbo203

7th January 2014, 00:47

. If you have a workers' state in control of property, you don't have capitalism as a mode of production because you no longer have production decisions dominated by the logic of capital. .

But again and again and again you are missing the point - you can't have such a thing as a "workers' state in control of property". It doesnt make any sense! Cant you see this?

The working class is the exploited class in capitalism which is alienated from the means of production. Therefore whoever it is who runs this workers state of yours it cannot be the working class. Why? Because BY DEFINITION the working class does not control property but is alienated from property and BY DEFINITION the working class is dominated by the logic of capital through which the working class is exploited

Call it whatever you want - I suggest, "labour goivernment" - but it certainly ain't a "workers state". Such a thing is no more possible than fairies at the bottom of the garden, frankly....

Five Year Plan

7th January 2014, 00:49

But again and again and again you are missing the point - you can't have such a thing as a "workers' state in control of property". It doesnt make any sense! Cant you see this?

The working class is the exploited class in capitalism which is alienated from the means of production. Therefore whoever it is who runs this workers state of yours it cannot be the working class. Why? Because BY DEFINITION the working class does not control property but is alienated from property and BY DEFINITION the working class is dominated by the logic of capital through which the working class is exploited

Call it whatever you want - I suggest, "labour goivernment" - but it certainly ain't a "workers state". Such a thing is no more possible than fairies at the bottom of the garden, frankly....

I asked you a specific question, robbo. Instead of answering it, you just restated your earlier position.

robbo203

7th January 2014, 01:12

As I said in the post I linked, I think it's clear that when Engels mentions "abolishing the state as state," he is actually corroborating my argument here. He is talking about how class processes continue to exist in a way that means that socialism isn't realized, but that classes in the fullest alienated sense, like the full capitalist mode of production or the state in the fullest alienated sense, have been abolished..

But he is not saying that in this instance , is he? He is not saying the "class process" continues to exist. He is saying quite clearly that the proletariat by seizing power abolishes itself as proletariat Without a proletariat in existence the "class process" cannot exist, can it?

Now it is quite true that in other contexts Engels speaks of the state withering away rather than being abolished. I agree that this is a contradiction but it is not for me to square the circle. Im not honour bound to slavishly adhere to everything Engels said. Where he talks of the state "withering away" I think he is being illogical just as you are with your talk of a workers state.

But I think in this particular instance, whether he meant it or not, what Engels is saying supports my view of the state and by implication therefore the absurdity of the whole idea of a workers state

Five Year Plan

7th January 2014, 02:35

But he is not saying that in this instance , is he? He is not saying the "class process" continues to exist. He is saying quite clearly that the proletariat by seizing power abolishes itself as proletariat Without a proletariat in existence the "class process" cannot exist, can it?

Now it is quite true that in other contexts Engels speaks of the state withering away rather than being abolished. I agree that this is a contradiction but it is not for me to square the circle. Im not honour bound to slavishly adhere to everything Engels said. Where he talks of the state "withering away" I think he is being illogical just as you are with your talk of a workers state.

But I think in this particular instance, whether he meant it or not, what Engels is saying supports my view of the state and by implication therefore the absurdity of the whole idea of a workers state

Engels talks about the proletariat immediately abolishing the state when they seize power, then in the same paragraph, talks about how the state continues to exist afterward and only withers away as "the present anarchy in social production" is overcome.

You can't explain this contradiction, and want to cherry pick half of what Engels is saying, and ignore the other half, while pretending to use Engels to support your point about no states existing after the proletariat seizes power.

If you actually tried to understand what Engels is saying, instead of just plucking quotes out of context, and assigning your own tendentious meaning to them, you'd see that Engels assigns a very specific meaning to the "state" whose abolition he connects to workers seizing power. He defines it as "an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production."

Obviously, workers are not an exploiting class, and once in power have no other class that they can "forcibly keep ... in conditions of oppression." So in that sense, the workers seizing power eliminates the state. Yet Engels then goes on to talk about the "state" that exists after workers seize power "withering away."

This usage of state is not accidental and is corroborated by everything else Engels ever wrote about the workers and their revolutionary state, of which this is only one example: "But after the victory of the Proletariat, the only organisation the victorious working class finds readymade for use, is that of the State. It may require adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at such a moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious working class can exert its newly conquered power, keep down its capitalist enemies and carry out that economical revolution of society, without which the whole victory must end in a defeat and in a massacre of the working class like that after the Paris Commune." (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/dersoz2.htm)

Why does Engels call this a state also? Well, it's because he's working with a different, more general meaning of the word that encompass not apparatuses used by exploiting class to continuously reproduce the exploitation of their victims. Instead, he uses it to refer to what he called in The Origin of the Family, "a public power which no longer [does not] directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force." He goes on: "This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes." On this more general understanding, a state is a coercive apparatus used to accomplish a forcible unifying of society under an authority of only a particular group of people in that society, because not the entire group is on board with the economic processes (whether you want to call them "class processes" or not).

So when workers seize power, not everybody, not even every worker, is going to be on board with that. Some will protest, plot, strike back because they disagree with the economic goals and activities of the revolutionary workers. They will engage in these counter-revolutionary activities a week, a month, a year after the workers have seized power. These are the people that make necessary a "special, public power" resting, like all public authority does, on the control the ruling authority has over the means of production.

Similarly, when Engels talks about the working class "abolishing itself as a class and all class antagonisms," he does not mean that workers will have achieved socialism the second they seize political power. He is employing "class" in the same way that he also talks about the "abolished" state. He is using it to refer to the entity in a particular context, a context in which the thing enjoys an alienated existence independent of the will of any group in society. Once a revolution occurs, and the workers seize power, classes will no longer enjoy the dominant position enshrined in the essence of the state. The processes by which classes operated before the revolution will continue for some time to operate, until anarchy in social production can be overcome, but the context will have changed so that these processes no longer function for the blind and perpetual self-reproduction of economic divisions.

Rather, for the first time in history, workers will have contained these antagonisms and processes so that they can be subordinated to the needs and goals of the first truly universal class as it proceeds to lead a transition to socialism.

robbo203

7th January 2014, 09:32

Engels talks about the proletariat immediately abolishing the state when they seize power, then in the same paragraph, talks about how the state continues to exist afterward and only withers away as "the present anarchy in social production" is overcome.

You can't explain this contradiction, and want to cherry pick half of what Engels is saying, and ignore the other half, while pretending to use Engels to support your point about no states existing after the proletariat seizes power.

No you misunderstand. I dont need to explain the contradiction. The contradiction is not mine. Its Engels'! And you can hardly deny that there is a contradiction there and that Engels seems to be veering between two different positions. No amount of wriggling will show otherwise

So he says on the one hand that the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" and one the other "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." I prefer the first position, the second leads to all sorts of nonsensical conclusions (more anon)

And yes I am perfectly entitled to cherrypick quotes that express well what I am trying to say. Everyone does. You do as well. I dont need Engels' authority to support the arguments I make and if I find what Engels says in one context contradicts what he says elsewhere then I will say so. The arguments I offer stand on their own two feet with or without Engels' blessing

In case you were not aware I have consistently and repeatedly said on this forum that I oppose Marx and Engels' concept of the dictatorshop of the proletariat as an incoherent aberration. It is no skin off my nose to say so

Your attempt to explain away that nonsense on stilts that is the so called "workers state" is the height of obscurantism - dialectics gettings its knickers in a twist. Whether or not the state will continue to exist after the capture of political power by the working class is another question but what is certain is the working class will not exist. An exploited class cannot capture power in order it continue or prolong its exploitation. That capture will mean bringing to an end - IMMEDIATELY - its exploitation . Period. So there can be no such thing as workers state. This is the point that you have persisitently dodged. Whatever else this state may be it cannot be a workers state - becuase there cannot be an exploited working class in whose name the state is constituted. The moment the workers take over, they disappear as a class. Anything short of this leads you into the kind of conceptual muddle you seem to labour under and your made-up sociologese -"class process" - will not help you one bit in that regard.

I think Engels does seem to accept that the the working class will disappear the moment they capture the state but takes a contradictory poisition on wherther the state will disappear at the same time. So for example he says
The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, This seems to make the act of seizing political power synchronous with the abolition of class society. But as I say whether or not that is Engels position it is the only position that makes any sense.

Engels' further argument that the state will not be abolished but will whither away is confused and here he is indeed using the state in a special sense of being for the first time representative of the whole society not just a ruling class. Here's the relevant quote

The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away.

Engels confusion - and yours - is to automaticaly associate the need to repress certain anti-social individuals who may or may not cause problems once a socialist society is established with the actions of a state. But the act of repressing anti social individuals is no more necessarily the actions of a state than is the administration of things. Classless stateless society have also employed means of repression aganinst anti social members of thier own societies. Represseion is not absolutely exclusively the province of class based statist societies, you know.

Engels - and you - are trying to have your Marxist cake and eat it. You cannot, on the one hand. say the state iis quintessentally an instrument of class oppression and then pretend to yourself that the state can somehow come forward as "the representative of the whole of society". Something that comes forwrda as "representaive of the whole of society" is no longer a state in Marxist terms

Geiseric

7th January 2014, 17:20

This thread is ridiculous, its clear that half of revleft has never read about the Russian revolution, which is the only successful workers revolution to date. Collectivization and 5 year plans weren't meant to be used like they were by the counter revolution, which is why they barely worked for a long time with a mass of dead people. The Soviet state had a legacy of barbarism both inside of Russia as well as the greater that is world imperialism. That is why they couldn't abolish the state as in the army and Cheka, at first to fight the white movement.
Lenin and trotsky planned an offensive against the bureaucracy which grew as a result of the war, however once Lenin started it with a speech in 1920 he fell ill while Kamenev and zinoviev, by that point influential politicians, sided with Stalin in what was called the "triumvrate." This made any struggle impossible until the left opposition was formed.

Brotto RÃ¼hle

7th January 2014, 17:40

This thread is ridiculous, its clear that half of revleft has never read about the Russian revolution,It's clear that half of the Trots haven't read about the Russian revolution besides Trotsky's book.

which is the only successful workers revolution to date
Really? Where was the success? The working class was never consolidated as the ruling class, any remnants of council power was eliminated in the early 20s.

The Soviet state had a legacy of barbarism both inside of Russia as well as the greater that is world imperialism. That is why they couldn't abolish the state as in the army and Cheka, at first to fight the white movement.They wouldn't be able to abolish the state anyways. That requires world revolution. Either way, what happens to the state, the form it takes is up to the class, not Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Lenin and trotsky planned an offensive against the bureaucracy which grew as a result of the war, however once Lenin started it with a speech in 1920 he fell ill while Kamenev and zinoviev, by that point influential politicians, sided with Stalin in what was called the "triumvrate." This made any struggle impossible until the left opposition was formed.Why is there never talk of the working class from you Trots? It's never about the class, it's always about Lenin and Trotsky or the Bolsheviks doing this and that. It's quite telling.

Five Year Plan

7th January 2014, 18:46

No you misunderstand. I dont need to explain the contradiction. The contradiction is not mine. Its Engels'! And you can hardly deny that there is a contradiction there and that Engels seems to be veering between two different positions. No amount of wriggling will show otherwise

So he says on the one hand that the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" and one the other "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." I prefer the first position, the second leads to all sorts of nonsensical conclusions (more anon)

And yes I am perfectly entitled to cherrypick quotes that express well what I am trying to say. Everyone does. You do as well. I dont need Engels' authority to support the arguments I make and if I find what Engels says in one context contradicts what he says elsewhere then I will say so. The arguments I offer stand on their own two feet with or without Engels' blessing

It's not an issue of what Engels saying in one context contradicting what he says in another. The contradiction is in the exact same paragraph of the exact same work. The context is the same. So we are left with two options. One option is that Engels wrote something, then two sentences later, wrote something that was a direct contradiction to what he had just written earlier in the same paragraph, but that Engels was so hopelessly confused and stupid that he didn't realize what he had done. Or option two is that there is no contradiction, and that the apparent contradiction consists of Engels using the same word in two different ways. You would have us choose option one, which doesn't bode well for your estimation of Engels, despite the fact that you have chosen to introduce his writings as a basis of authority for your argument. Talk about a contradiction.

In case you were not aware I have consistently and repeatedly said on this forum that I oppose Marx and Engels' concept of the dictatorshop of the proletariat as an incoherent aberration. It is no skin off my nose to say so

Then stop pretending that your Engels quote suggests that Engels held your position, when by your own admission here, he did not. It makes you look dishonest and desperate.

Your attempt to explain away that nonsense on stilts that is the so called "workers state" is the height of obscurantism - dialectics gettings its knickers in a twist. Whether or not the state will continue to exist after the capture of political power by the working class is another question but what is certain is the working class will not exist. An exploited class cannot capture power in order it continue or prolong its exploitation. That capture will mean bringing to an end - IMMEDIATELY - its exploitation . Period. So there can be no such thing as workers state. This is the point that you have persisitently dodged. Whatever else this state may be it cannot be a workers state - becuase there cannot be an exploited working class in whose name the state is constituted. The moment the workers take over, they disappear as a class. Anything short of this leads you into the kind of conceptual muddle you seem to labour under and your made-up sociologese -"class process" - will not help you one bit in that regard.

I am not interested in getting to a semantics debate with you. Engels was clearly that anarchy will still reign in production for some time after the workers had seized political power. I agree with him, not least of all because workers will not seize power everywhere all at once, which means that whatever economic planning process takes place in a society where workers have just seized power is bound to be determined by reified relations with the outside world, not seamless egalitarian democratic planning to meet only truly human needs.

So the question of whether "classes" exist in that society is largely an semantic and academic one, and why you get so bent out of shape about it is a mystery to me. I have made clear that insofar as the processes that generate and issue from a formally institutionalized class position still exist, "class" still does exist. But since class or exploitation is no longer institutionally inscribed in the state apparatus or its laws of property, "class" does not exist in the same way it does under a exploitative class society. Anymore than than the waged form of labor that exists under workers' political authority is the same as waged form of labor that exists under bourgeois rule. This, ultimately, is the point that I think Engels is getting at, and which is important.

All of this also happens to be lost in your (and others') mad rush to make stark black and white declarations about whether capitalism does or does not exist, whether class does or does not exist.

Echoing my earlier comments. These stark dichotomies flatten out the multiple dimensions of all these phenomena in a way that makes overcoming them seem like an instantaneous moment rather than a process that occurs through time (and proletarian struggle).

Engels confusion - and yours - is to automaticaly associate the need to repress certain anti-social individuals who may or may not cause problems once a socialist society is established with the actions of a state. But the act of repressing anti social individuals is no more necessarily the actions of a state than is the administration of things. Classless stateless society have also employed means of repression aganinst anti social members of thier own societies. Represseion is not absolutely exclusively the province of class based statist societies, you know.

I think you misunderstand Engels if you just conflate his understanding of state in a general sense with "repression." There will be acts of repression carried out under communism after all. As the quote I provided in my previous post demonstrates, he associates states with a need for some segment of society to use coercion to bring other parts of society in line with its wishes, in relation to political divisions that have issued from alienated property/production relations. The vestiges of these divisions will continue to exist the week after a revolution, with some workers still buying into the ideology conditioned by bourgeois society. This is why a state will also need to exist.

Engels - and you - are trying to have your Marxist cake and eat it. You cannot, on the one hand. say the state iis quintessentally an instrument of class oppression and then pretend to yourself that the state can somehow come forward as "the representative of the whole of society". Something that comes forwrda as "representaive of the whole of society" is no longer a state in Marxist terms

It makes sense if you begin to understand that the purpose of the workers using their state to oppress the bourgeois classes is not to permanently hold them into subjection, but to bring them into an egalitarian relationship with everybody else.

robbo203

8th January 2014, 06:36

Then stop pretending that your Engels quote suggests that Engels held your position, when by your own admission here, he did not. It makes you look dishonest and desperate.

I suggest you read again what I said viz.:

So he says on the one hand that the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" and one the other "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." I prefer the first position, the second leads to all sorts of nonsensical conclusions

Its the bit where he says the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" that agrees with my position , not the bit where he says "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." Comprende?

I am aware, thank you very much, that Engels is using the term "state" in two different senses and I took the trouble to explain what these were. When he talks of the state coming forward as the "representative of the whole of society" he is departing from - or contradicts - the classic Marxist position which sees the state as essentially a class instrument. As I explained, I think Engels is very muddled here - as are you. This state as "representative of the whole of society" operates in a society in which there are supposedly no classes since as Engels himself remarks, the first act of this state is the "taking possession of the means of production in the name of society" If society now owns the means of production then there are obviously no classes - and therefore no working class and therefore also, no so-called "workers state" - yet, according to Engels, this state does not immediately disappear after class ownership has disappeared but, rather "withers away" Or as he puts it State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself..

I have no idea what Engels means by "state interference" in an essentially classless society becoming increasingly superfluous but whatever it is that is doing the "interfering", it is not a state. Not if you wish to retain the Marxian usage of the state as a class instrument. If such interference is to quell anti-social behaviour intended to disrupt the new society then, as I explained before, acephalous or stateless societies have their own methods of controlling anti social behaviour. Controlling anti social behaviour does not necessarily signify the existence of a state, does it?

I am not interested in getting to a semantics debate with you. Engels was clearly that anarchy will still reign in production for some time after the workers had seized political power. I agree with him, not least of all because workers will not seize power everywhere all at once, which means that whatever economic planning process takes place in a society where workers have just seized power is bound to be determined by reified relations with the outside world, not seamless egalitarian democratic planning to meet only truly human needs.

Well now youve opened up a can of worms - haven't you? - with your reference to anarchy of production. If you are implying by that that socialism/communism will mean society-wide central planning then Im afraid you are on to a very sticky wicket indeed. There is no way such a thing is possible in any large scale modern society and, of necessity, production has to allow for an element of feedback and spontaneous adjustment - that is where the overall pattern of production is not (cannot be) planned but "anarchically" arrived at. Some of Engels comments seem to hint at such a proposal - like his reference to a "single plan" - but if society wide planning is what he is literally suggesting then he could not have been more wrong. It is a ridiculous idea and moreover one that is totally incompatible with the very nature of a communist soiciety. But this I guess is for another thread.

The other point you make about relations with the outside seems reasonable enough and I have my own views on the matter of how lags in the establishment if communist society across the globe can be effectively dealt with, which will no doubt differ markedly from yours, but again that is probably better left to another thread

So the question of whether "classes" exist in that society is largely an semantic and academic one, and why you get so bent out of shape about it is a mystery to me. I have made clear that insofar as the processes that generate and issue from a formally institutionalized class position still exist, "class" still does exist. But since class or exploitation is no longer institutionally inscribed in the state apparatus or its laws of property, "class" does not exist in the same way it does under a exploitative class society. Anymore than than the waged form of labor that exists under workers' political authority is the same as waged form of labor that exists under bourgeois rule. This, ultimately, is the point that I think Engels is getting at, and which is important.

You know, I read this paragraph several times and I still havent got the foggiest notion what on earth you are talking about. Do you mind speaking in plain English or is that too much to ask? The issue seems to me to be pretty simple. If there is no more exploitation then there can be no more classes in the Marxian sense since classes in that sense are only meaningful in terms of the phenomenon of economic exploitation. You are welcome to invent a new definition of class that has no connection with the process of exploitation but dont pretend that this new definition of yours has anything to do with a Marxian definition of class.

You claim that wage labour under a so called workers' political authority will be different from wage labour under bourgeois rule. Really? How so? The whole point of the Marxian analysis of wage labour is that it necessarily implies the alienation of workers from the means of production and, consequently, the necessity for workers to sell their labour power for a wage to the class that owns and controls these means. As Marx put it, wage labour presupposes capital and therefore capitalism and, as we know , there is only one way in which capitalism can be administered and that is, first and foremost, in the interests of capital. Your so called "workers' political authority" will be no different in substance from a regime based on bourgeois rule. In fact it will be a form of bourgeois rule in which a new class of economic parasites will exploit the working class in the name of the working class

All of this also happens to be lost in your (and others') mad rush to make stark black and white declarations about whether capitalism does or does not exist, whether class does or does not exist.

Echoing my earlier comments. These stark dichotomies flatten out the multiple dimensions of all these phenomena in a way that makes overcoming them seem like an instantaneous moment rather than a process that occurs through time (and proletarian struggle).

Maybe these "stark dichotomies" do ...ahem .. "flatten out the multiple dimensions of all these phenomena" but they do at least have the virtue of clarity which, lets be frank here, is not your stong suite. "Waffle" would be an understatement in your case. That aside, I would have thought it was highly important to know whether classes exist or not in the schema you put forward. There are significant implications that flow from that.

If the so called workers state means the working class (in the Marxian sense) continuing to exist what you would in effect be asking us to believe is that this working class, having captured political power as the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority (Communist Manifesto) would then allow itself to continue being exploited by a capitalist class by virtue of maintaining its own existence as the exploited class in capitalism (which is what is implied in the idea of a so called "workers state"). This is simply not credible.

I think you misunderstand Engels if you just conflate his understanding of state in a general sense with "repression." There will be acts of repression carried out under communism after all. As the quote I provided in my previous post demonstrates, he associates states with a need for some segment of society to use coercion to bring other parts of society in line with its wishes, in relation to political divisions that have issued from alienated property/production relations. The vestiges of these divisions will continue to exist the week after a revolution, with some workers still buying into the ideology conditioned by bourgeois society. This is why a state will also need to exist.
.

Oh come now. What a specious load of twaddle. Some "segment of society" using coercion against some others means nothing more than the existence of classes and there is no argument that a state needs to exist where classes exists. But we are talking about a state of affairs where supposedly classes no longer exist where, to quote Engels again, the state has taken "possession of the means of production in the name of society" and has presumably transformed those means into the common prioperty of all. What possible pretext can there be then for the state to continue to exist after that? None at all

You vaguely refer to "political divisions" in a wishy washy sort of way which you claim will that have issued from "alienated property/production relations" - even those alienated relations will presumbly no longer exist when the means of production are common property. You then qualify your statement saying it is the "vestiges" of these divisions that will "continue to exist the week after a revolution, with some workers still buying into the ideology conditioned by bourgeois society." This is why you say a state will also need to exist. But, once again, this is no good reason whatosever for saying that the state in the Marxian sesne will need to exist at all. If such"vestiges" give rise to anti-social disruptive behaviour - and I cannot see any other reason why you even want to mention "political divisions" other than that it gives rise to such consequences - then such anti social behaviour will be dealt with in ways that stateless spociety have ususally dealt with them. A state being an instrument of class rule is simply not needed nor even possible in such a situation

It makes sense if you begin to understand that the purpose of the workers using their state to oppress the bourgeois classes is not to permanently hold them into subjection, but to bring them into an egalitarian relationship with everybody else.

The workers will never have "their state". Nor should they ever want one. The very idea is toxic to the workers movement and this why the establishment of so called "proletarian states" have always and everywhere ended up in massive exploitatively, brutally authoritarian, state capitalist dictatorships riddled with corruption and pervaded by aura of utter cynicism. If we dont learn the lessons of history we are doomed to repeat it. You apparently want to ignore those lessons , bury your head in sand and pretend to yourself that these things never happened. But they are direct consequnece of a dogmatic attachment to the failed ideas you espouse here.

The whole point of capturing the state is get rid of it forthwith by getting of a society that necessitates a state. The very moment that such a thing as a workers state comes into being, we will know for certain that the workers cause has been lost. The vanguard will have substituted itself for the working class and will have stepped into the shoes vacated by the old ruling class. The workers state can never ever be anything more than a capitalist state administered by a ruling class pretending to have the interests of the workers at heart.

robbo203

8th January 2014, 06:37

Then stop pretending that your Engels quote suggests that Engels held your position, when by your own admission here, he did not. It makes you look dishonest and desperate.

I suggest you read again what I said viz.:

So he says on the one hand that the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" and one the other "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." I prefer the first position, the second leads to all sorts of nonsensical conclusions

Its the bit where he says the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" that agrees with my position , not the bit where he says "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." Comprende?

I am aware, thank you very much, that Engels is using the term "state" in two different senses and I took the trouble to explain what these were. When he talks of the state coming forward as the "representative of the whole of society" he is departing from - or contradicts - the classic Marxist position which sees the state as essentially a class instrument. As I explained, I think Engels is very muddled here - as are you. This state as "representative of the whole of society" operates in a society in which there are supposedly no classes since as Engels himself remarks, the first act of this state is the "taking possession of the means of production in the name of society" If society now owns the means of production then there are obviously no classes - and therefore no working class and therefore also, no so-called "workers state" - yet, according to Engels, this state does not immediately disappear after class ownership has disappeared but, rather "withers away" Or as he puts it State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself..

I have no idea what Engels means by "state interference" in an essentially classless society becoming increasingly superfluous but whatever it is that is doing the "interfering", it is not a state. Not if you wish to retain the Marxian usage of the state as a class instrument. If such interference is to quell anti-social behaviour intended to disrupt the new society then, as I explained before, acephalous or stateless societies have their own methods of controlling anti social behaviour. Controlling anti social behaviour does not necessarily signify the existence of a state, does it?

I am not interested in getting to a semantics debate with you. Engels was clearly that anarchy will still reign in production for some time after the workers had seized political power. I agree with him, not least of all because workers will not seize power everywhere all at once, which means that whatever economic planning process takes place in a society where workers have just seized power is bound to be determined by reified relations with the outside world, not seamless egalitarian democratic planning to meet only truly human needs.

Well now youve opened up a can of worms - haven't you? - with your reference to anarchy of production. If you are implying by that that socialism/communism will mean society-wide central planning then Im afraid you are on to a very sticky wicket indeed. There is no way such a thing is possible in any large scale modern society and, of necessity, production has to allow for an element of feedback and spontaneous adjustment - that is where the overall pattern of production is not (cannot be) planned but "anarchically" arrived at. Some of Engels comments seem to hint at such a proposal - like his reference to a "single plan" - but if society wide planning is what he is literally suggesting then he could not have been more wrong. It is a ridiculous idea and moreover one that is totally incompatible with the very nature of a communist soiciety. But this I guess is for another thread.

The other point you make about relations with the outside seems reasonable enough and I have my own views on the matter of how lags in the establishment if communist society across the globe can be effectively dealt with, which will no doubt differ markedly from yours, but again that is probably better left to another thread

So the question of whether "classes" exist in that society is largely an semantic and academic one, and why you get so bent out of shape about it is a mystery to me. I have made clear that insofar as the processes that generate and issue from a formally institutionalized class position still exist, "class" still does exist. But since class or exploitation is no longer institutionally inscribed in the state apparatus or its laws of property, "class" does not exist in the same way it does under a exploitative class society. Anymore than than the waged form of labor that exists under workers' political authority is the same as waged form of labor that exists under bourgeois rule. This, ultimately, is the point that I think Engels is getting at, and which is important.

You know, I read this paragraph several times and I still havent got the foggiest notion what on earth you are talking about. Do you mind speaking in plain English or is that too much to ask? The issue seems to me to be pretty simple. If there is no more exploitation then there can be no more classes in the Marxian sense since classes in that sense are only meaningful in terms of the phenomenon of economic exploitation. You are welcome to invent a new definition of class that has no connection with the process of exploitation but dont pretend that this new definition of yours has anything to do with a Marxian definition of class.

You claim that wage labour under a so called workers' political authority will be different from wage labour under bourgeois rule. Really? How so? The whole point of the Marxian analysis of wage labour is that it necessarily implies the alienation of workers from the means of production and, consequently, the necessity for workers to sell their labour power for a wage to the class that owns and controls these means. As Marx put it, wage labour presupposes capital and therefore capitalism and, as we know , there is only one way in which capitalism can be administered and that is, first and foremost, in the interests of capital. Your so called "workers' political authority" will be no different in substance from a regime based on bourgeois rule. In fact it will be a form of bourgeois rule in which a new class of economic parasites will exploit the working class in the name of the working class

All of this also happens to be lost in your (and others') mad rush to make stark black and white declarations about whether capitalism does or does not exist, whether class does or does not exist.

Echoing my earlier comments. These stark dichotomies flatten out the multiple dimensions of all these phenomena in a way that makes overcoming them seem like an instantaneous moment rather than a process that occurs through time (and proletarian struggle).

Maybe these "stark dichotomies" do ...ahem .. "flatten out the multiple dimensions of all these phenomena" but they do at least have the virtue of clarity which, lets be frank here, is not your stong suite. "Waffle" would be an understatement in your case. That aside, I would have thought it was highly important to know whether classes exist or not in the schema you put forward. There are significant implications that flow from that.

If the so called workers state means the working class (in the Marxian sense) continuing to exist what you would in effect be asking us to believe is that this working class, having captured political power as the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority (Communist Manifesto) would then allow itself to continue being exploited by a capitalist class by virtue of maintaining its own existence as the exploited class in capitalism (which is what is implied in the idea of a so called "workers state"). This is simply not credible.

I think you misunderstand Engels if you just conflate his understanding of state in a general sense with "repression." There will be acts of repression carried out under communism after all. As the quote I provided in my previous post demonstrates, he associates states with a need for some segment of society to use coercion to bring other parts of society in line with its wishes, in relation to political divisions that have issued from alienated property/production relations. The vestiges of these divisions will continue to exist the week after a revolution, with some workers still buying into the ideology conditioned by bourgeois society. This is why a state will also need to exist.
.

Oh come now. What a specious load of twaddle. Some "segment of society" using coercion against some others means nothing more than the existence of classes and there is no argument that a state needs to exist where classes exists. But we are talking about a state of affairs where, supposedly, classes no longer exist, where, to quote Engels again, the state has taken "possession of the means of production in the name of society" and has presumably transformed those means into the common prioperty of all. What possible pretext can there be then for the state to continue to exist after that? None at all

You vaguely refer to "political divisions" in a wishy washy sort of way which you claim will that have issued from "alienated property/production relations" - even those alienated relations will presumbly no longer exist when the means of production are common property. You then qualify your statement saying it is the "vestiges" of these divisions that will "continue to exist the week after a revolution, with some workers still buying into the ideology conditioned by bourgeois society." This is why you say a state will also need to exist. But, once again, this is no good reason whatosever for saying that the state in the Marxian sense will need to exist at all. If such"vestiges" give rise to anti-social disruptive behaviour - and I cannot see any other reason why you even want to mention "political divisions" other than that it purportedly gives rise to such consequences - then such anti social behaviour will be dealt with in ways that stateless spociety have usually dealt with them. A state being an instrument of class rule is simply not needed nor even possible in such a situation

It makes sense if you begin to understand that the purpose of the workers using their state to oppress the bourgeois classes is not to permanently hold them into subjection, but to bring them into an egalitarian relationship with everybody else.

The workers will never have "their state". Nor should they ever want one. The very idea is toxic to the workers movement and this why the establishment of so called "proletarian states" have always and everywhere ended up in massive exploitatively, brutally authoritarian, state capitalist dictatorships riddled with corruption and pervaded by an aura of utter cynicism. If we dont learn the lessons of history we are doomed to repeat them. You apparently want to ignore those lessons , bury your head in sand and pretend to yourself that these things never happened. But they are the direct consequnece of a dogmatic attachment to the failed ideas you espouse here.

The whole point of capturing the state is get rid of it forthwith by getting of a society that necessitates a state. The very moment that such a thing as a workers state comes into being, we will know for certain that the workers cause has been lost. The vanguard will have substituted itself for the working class and will have stepped into the shoes vacated by the old ruling class. The workers state can never ever be anything more than a capitalist state administered by a ruling class pretending to have the interests of the workers at heart.

Bostana

8th January 2014, 08:14

This is really entertaining
http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/2837510/michael-jackson-eating-popcorn-o.gif

Five Year Plan

8th January 2014, 17:26

I suggest you read again what I said viz.:

So he says on the one hand that the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" and one the other "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." I prefer the first position, the second leads to all sorts of nonsensical conclusions

Its the bit where he says the proletariat "abolishes also the state as state" that agrees with my position , not the bit where he says "The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away." Comprende?

We've been down this road before just one post ago, robbo, and you keep repeating yourself rather than responding to the substance of my posts. You presenting a comment taken out of the context of the rest of the paragraph dishonestly makes it appear that Engels is presenting an idea you agree with. When a reader sees Engels two sentences later talking about the state not disappearing with one stroke, but instead "withering away," it is obvious that when Engels talks about "abolishing the state as state," he clearly means something VERY different than what you are presenting him as meaning. And to pretend otherwise is dishonest. Comprende?

I am aware, thank you very much, that Engels is using the term "state" in two different senses and I took the trouble to explain what these were. When he talks of the state coming forward as the "representative of the whole of society" he is departing from - or contradicts - the classic Marxist position which sees the state as essentially a class instrument.He is not contradicting the second definition of the state at all. To repeat for the third time, Engels' broader definition of the state characterizes it as a coercive apparatus utilized by some segment of society forcibly to bring other parts of society in line with its wishes, in relation to political divisions that have issued from alienated property/production relations. The vestiges of these capital-borne divisions will continue to exist the week after a revolution, with some workers still buying into the ideology conditioned by bourgeois society. This is why a state will also need to exist.

The whole point Engels is making in the paragraph we've been discussing over and over again, and which you still don't seem to understand, is that the working class, in power, using its state, does not have a system of exploitation that it has an interest in propping up in perpetuity, or an exploited class it has an interested in oppressing in perpetuity. It is in that sense that the state is "representative of the whole of society": It represents the interests and will of a class struggling to unite all of society rather than to keep it permanently divided in some system of exploitation. The state is therefore no longer an alien force with an "external" condition of existence, no longer a state "as a state."

As I explained, I think Engels is very muddled here - as are you. This state as "representative of the whole of society" operates in a society in which there are supposedly no classes since as Engels himself remarks, the first act of this state is the "taking possession of the means of production in the name of society" If society now owns the means of production then there are obviously no classes - and therefore no working class and therefore also, no so-called "workers state" - yet, according to Engels, this state does not immediately disappear after class ownership has disappeared but, rather "withers away" Or as he puts it State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself..And as I have explained before, there is no "muddle" here when you understand that Engels talks of abolishing "classes" and "class antagonisms" in the same way that he is talking about the immediately abolished state. He is referring to a very distinct form of existence of these things being abolished. The alienated state is abolished. Classes with an external existence in a system of alienated property relations are abolished. All you've done in response to this argument I've made is just characterize it as muddled and repeat your highly simplistic argument that if Engels claims that state and classes will be immediately abolished, then there can be no workers or states following the seizure of power. But this just presupposes your shallow interpretation of that quote which I have thoroughly and repeatedly rebutted, and to which you have yet to offer a substantial response.

I have no idea what Engels means by "state interference" in an essentially classless society becoming increasingly superfluous but whatever it is that is doing the "interfering", it is not a state. Not if you wish to retain the Marxian usage of the state as a class instrument. If such interference is to quell anti-social behaviour intended to disrupt the new society then, as I explained before, acephalous or stateless societies have their own methods of controlling anti social behaviour. Controlling anti social behaviour does not necessarily signify the existence of a state, does it?Why are you implying that I am conflating the need to control anti-social behavior with the existence of the state? Are you even reading my posts? I was clear that Engels' understanding of state, either in its narrow or its broader senses, is more specific than just "repression." I understand that I said this at the bottom of my post, and you might be responding piece by piece so that you haven't read that part yet, but at least have the decency to edit this shit out once you've reached the end.

Well now youve opened up a can of worms - haven't you? - with your reference to anarchy of production. If you are implying by that that socialism/communism will mean society-wide central planning then Im afraid you are on to a very sticky wicket indeed. There is no way such a thing is possible in any large scale modern society and, of necessity, production has to allow for an element of feedback and spontaneous adjustment - that is where the overall pattern of production is not (cannot be) planned but "anarchically" arrived at.I am not implying that "anarchy in production" will exist in socialism/communism. I have said that socialism is not achieved until workers have taken power and have struggled against value and economic anarchy on a global level. What this means it that workers will seize power in one country, then another, abolishing "the state as a state" and "classes" in those societies, but still be subject to greater or lesser degrees to the law of value. Why? Because those societies will still be internally divided after a revolution, and at any rate, those societies will be subject to military pressure and economic competition by remaining capitalist societies.

Your problem is that you think Engels talking about the workers' seizing power, and thereby eliminating "the state as a state" and "classes," means that socialism begins the second after the workers take power, and that therefore all antagonisms in social production must therefore disappear after that second as well. You might not even be aware of it, but your position basically implies that socialism is possible in one country, that it begins the second workers seize political power. Not even the Stalinists go that far in their version of socialism in one country.

The other point you make about relations with the outside seems reasonable enough and I have my own views on the matter of how lags in the establishment if communist society across the globe can be effectively dealt with, which will no doubt differ markedly from yours, but again that is probably better left to another threadIf you are raising issues about Engels' comment that anarchy will still, for some period of time, continue to reign in a society where workers have seized power, then I think you very much should address how international trade, economic competition, and military pressure (and internal attempts at subversion) fit into your vision of a perfectly planned egalitarian (socialist) society.

You know, I read this paragraph several times and I still havent got the foggiest notion what on earth you are talking about. Do you mind speaking in plain English or is that too much to ask? The issue seems to me to be pretty simple. If there is no more exploitation then there can be no more classes in the Marxian sense since classes in that sense are only meaningful in terms of the phenomenon of economic exploitation. You are welcome to invent a new definition of class that has no connection with the process of exploitation but dont pretend that this new definition of yours has anything to do with a Marxian definition of class.Who is inventing a definition of class that has no connection with the process of exploitation? You are failing to make basic definitional distinctions here. Class is defined as a particular kind of relationship of exploitation, so not all relationships of exploitation indicate the existence of a class. Economic exploitation, as opposed to other kinds of exploitation, can be defined as illegitimately compelling somebody to labor on behalf of another (usually the person doing the compelling, who extracts the proceeds of that labor). And I can think of all kinds of examples of where this can happen in real life, resulting in economic exploitation of one person by another, but at the same time not resulting in a class in the sense that Marxists use the term. A secretary blackmailing her male coworker into mowing her lawn once a week for a few months, or receiving pay-outs from him in the form of homemade baked goods a few times, is engaging in a form of economic exploitation, but not one that suddenly makes her a member of a new exploiting class. You collapsing all these things together into a flat landscape, which is in keeping with your one dimensional understanding of capitalism, shows just how far removed your thinking is from the Marxist method.

You claim that wage labour under a so called workers' political authority will be different from wage labour under bourgeois rule. Really? How so? The whole point of the Marxian analysis of wage labour is that it necessarily implies the alienation of workers from the means of production and, consequently, the necessity for workers to sell their labour power for a wage to the class that owns and controls these means. As Marx put it, wage labour presupposes capital and therefore capitalism and, as we know , there is only one way in which capitalism can be administered and that is, first and foremost, in the interests of capital. Your so called "workers' political authority" will be no different in substance from a regime based on bourgeois rule. In fact it will be a form of bourgeois rule in which a new class of economic parasites will exploit the working class in the name of the working classAll your responses here are variations on the same issue you're having: your inability to understand that similar processes taking place in different contexts must be understood differently. In other words, to use hocus-pocus dialectical language that will confuse you and may even haunt you in your sleep, you're failing to re-introduce piecemeal abstractions back into the concrete totality you are analyzing. This means you aren't able to really understand the nature of those piecemeal abstractions.

An internationally isolated workers' "public authority" (I will refrain from calling it state, lest I raise your blood pressure) struggling to spread the revolution abroad and in the midst of domestic turmoil with counter-revolutionary elements will feel pressures to accumulate economically in order to remain on par with international developments in the forces of production, and most importantly to build up its military defenses. This pressure will be realized in paying laborers the minimum amount, and only the minimum amount, necessary to reproduce those laborers. It's the same process that occurs between capitalists and labor, except under a workers' public authority, the context will change the meaning and nature of this activity. Rather than being done for the sake of reproducing itself as an exploiting class, the act of buying and sell producers' labor power (once more, I won't upset you by calling them "workers") will be undertaken by representatives of the producers who were propelled into power by a revolutionary proletariat. This buying and sell of labor power still, by and large, has the form of a commodity, of course, because the entire population isn't directly determining what a socially necessary minimum is -- there is still a labor market, because anarchy rather than egalitarian planning is still predominant in society. Confused about this "anarchy"? See my comments on it earlier in the post.

Maybe these "stark dichotomies" do ...ahem .. "flatten out the multiple dimensions of all these phenomena" but they do at least have the virtue of clarity which, lets be frank here, is not your stong suite. "Waffle" would be an understatement in your case. That aside, I would have thought it was highly important to know whether classes exist or not in the schema you put forward. There are significant implications that flow from that.There is no royal road to science, comrade. The kind of clarity you seek is a faux clarity, one that comes at the cost of muddying waters, ignoring important distinctions, and providing the theoretical understanding necessary to clarify the important issues that will confront revolutionaries as they struggle for an egalitarian society.

Oh come now. What a specious load of twaddle. Some "segment of society" using coercion against some others means nothing more than the existence of classes and there is no argument that a state needs to exist where classes exists.Oh, so you mean that workers who have seized power and use a coercive apparatus to suppress counter-revolutionaries, while simultaneously struggling against the existing anarchy in production, are still really a working class, and are still really wielding a state? Guess what: that was my position the entire time and the one you are arguing against. Why are you pointing out that my position implies this in a way that makes it seem like I am contradicting myself?

But, once again, this is no good reason whatosever for saying that the state in the Marxian sense will need to exist at all.Let's play your semantics game. A state in the Marxist sense is the coercive apparatus used by a ruling exploiting class to maintain power. When workers seize power, such a thing will no longer exist. Ergo there are no states. Happy?

Now there will be a lot of people who are pissed off, whose property was taken, who are racist assholes, who will consort with foreign capitalist powers and struggle, perhaps collectively and in arms, to overthrow the new "public authority." What do we all the apparatus used to suppress this?

The fact that these elements will continue to exist in society, and that the society will be forced to compete and trade and defend itself militarily in a hostile international context, means that there will continue to be anarchy in production. Why? Because Producers' Paradise doesn't control whether the USA attacks, or whether Spain invented a new missile technology that Producers' Paradise needs to defend against by building a newer defense technology. Neither does it control the invention of new productive techniques in steel manufacture that Producers' Paradise might need to purchase, but will purchase at a loss if it does not continue to streamline and innovate in its own economy. These impetuses for economic decision-making are not, and cannot be, democratically determined by Producers' Paradise or the people who live in. This is the continuing source of the anarchy, and why socialism cannot exist in a single country. The resulting lack of planlessness translates, by default, into economic bureaucracy and hierarchy in planning. Not necessarily a bureaucratic hierarchy that has risen to the level of a class (anymore than the secretary extortionist who loved baked goods becomes a member of a new ruling class, rather than remain a working-class secretary, through her temporary and petty blackmail scheme).

Now what do you call this public authority that wields violence to protect public authority against people wanting to restore private property? What do you call this apparatus that has hierarchical control over production decisions, and buys and sells labor from the wider population? Well, we can play your little semantic game and call it anything you want. But it will have to exist, and according to my understanding (and Engels', too), this entity will still be a state.

robbo203

9th January 2014, 08:43

We've been down this road before just one post ago, robbo, and you keep repeating yourself rather than responding to the substance of my posts. You presenting a comment taken out of the context of the rest of the paragraph dishonestly makes it appear that Engels is presenting an idea you agree with. When a reader sees Engels two sentences later talking about the state not disappearing with one stroke, but instead "withering away," it is obvious that when Engels talks about "abolishing the state as state," he clearly means something VERY different than what you are presenting him as meaning. And to pretend otherwise is dishonest. Comprende?

He is not contradicting the second definition of the state at all. To repeat for the third time, Engels' broader definition of the state characterizes it as a coercive apparatus utilized by some segment of society forcibly to bring other parts of society in line with its wishes, in relation to political divisions that have issued from alienated property/production relations. The vestiges of these capital-borne divisions will continue to exist the week after a revolution, with some workers still buying into the ideology conditioned by bourgeois society. This is why a state will also need to exist.

The whole point Engels is making in the paragraph we've been discussing over and over again, and which you still don't seem to understand, is that the working class, in power, using its state, does not have a system of exploitation that it has an interest in propping up in perpetuity, or an exploited class it has an interested in oppressing in perpetuity. It is in that sense that the state is "representative of the whole of society": It represents the interests and will of a class struggling to unite all of society rather than to keep it permanently divided in some system of exploitation. The state is therefore no longer an alien force with an "external" condition of existence, no longer a state "as a state."

Sigh. It is not me who shows a lack of understanding here but you. I know very well that Engels was using the term "state" in the context of it "withering away" in a quite different sense and it is precisely that sense that I was criticising Engels for . So cut out the crap about me "dishonestly makes it appear that Engels is presenting an idea you agree with" OK?

The central issue which you stil havent got your head around is glaringly obvious in your statement thus:

the working class, in power, using its state, does not have a system of exploitation that it has an interest in propping up in perpetuity, or an exploited class it has an interested in oppressing in perpetuity.

Now, its quite simple really . Do you or do you not agree that the working class signifies the exploited class in capitalism? If yes then it is is obvious that it is not a working class in power if you no longer have in place a system of class exploitation. The working class would have disappeared along with the capitalist class and consequently the idea of a workers state is a complete nonsense.

If on the other hand the working class does still exist then you are asking us to believe that this class having captured power continues to allow a capitalist class to exploit it - by defintion. Which is equally complete nonsense

I leave you to choose which of these nonsensical conclusions you prefer

And as I have explained before, there is no "muddle" here when you understand that Engels talks of abolishing "classes" and "class antagonisms" in the same way that he is talking about the immediately abolished state. He is referring to a very distinct form of existence of these things being abolished. The alienated state is abolished. Classes with an external existence in a system of alienated property relations are abolished. All you've done in response to this argument I've made is just characterize it as muddled and repeat your highly simplistic argument that if Engels claims that state and classes will be immediately abolished, then there can be no workers or states following the seizure of power. But this just presupposes your shallow interpretation of that quote which I have thoroughly and repeatedly rebutted, and to which you have yet to offer a substantial response.

Amusing. Truth is you would like to think have "thoroughly and repeatedly rebutted" me as a pretext for yet again dodging the central issue Ive outlined above
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Why are you implying that I am conflating the need to control anti-social behavior with the existence of the state? Are you even reading my posts? I was clear that Engels' understanding of state, either in its narrow or its broader senses, is more specific than just "repression." I understand that I said this at the bottom of my post, and you might be responding piece by piece so that you haven't read that part yet, but at least have the decency to edit this shit out once you've reached the end.

Well you said it yourself: Engels' broader definition of the state characterizes it as a coercive apparatus utilized by some segment of society forcibly to bring other parts of society in line with its wishes, In other words, resistance to the wishes of this so called state which is, in Engels words, the representative of the whole of society, is anti-social
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I am not implying that "anarchy in production" will exist in socialism/communism. I have said that socialism is not achieved until workers have taken power and have struggled against value and economic anarchy on a global level. What this means it that workers will seize power in one country, then another, abolishing "the state as a state" and "classes" in those societies, but still be subject to greater or lesser degrees to the law of value. Why? Because those societies will still be internally divided after a revolution, and at any rate, those societies will be subject to military pressure and economic competition by remaining capitalist societies.

No you've completely missed the point about my commment on anarchy of production. Im saying that in all large scale societies - including socialism/ communism - anarchy of production is unavoidable in the sense that the overall pattern of production cannot be consciously arrived at in apriori terms. There has to be some kind of feedback mechanism in place, some spontaneous adjustment of the different parts of the production system to each other. This is unavoidable

Your problem is that you think Engels talking about the workers' seizing power, and thereby eliminating "the state as a state" and "classes," means that socialism begins the second after the workers take power, and that therefore all antagonisms in social production must therefore disappear after that second as well. You might not even be aware of it, but your position basically implies that socialism is possible in one country, that it begins the second workers seize political power. Not even the Stalinists go that far in their version of socialism in one country.

I am aware of what you are trying to say here but I reject the idea that what I am saying bears comparsion to the stalinist idea of socialism in one country (Stalin's "socialism" was still a class-based statist or state capitalist society anyway) Not the least reason for my saying so is that I reject all vanguardist theories of socialist revolution and contend that socialism can be brought about from the bottom up by a conscious socialist majority who want and understand socialism. On no account should workers even attempt to capture power before this condition has been reached becuase it will end in massive failure and disappointment. Of necessity this mass movement will be a global movement and so any lags between different parts of the world becoming socialist will be pretty shortlived

If you are raising issues about Engels' comment that anarchy will still, for some period of time, continue to reign in a society where workers have seized power, then I think you very much should address how international trade, economic competition, and military pressure (and internal attempts at subversion) fit into your vision of a perfectly planned egalitarian (socialist) society.

I have already addressed these various issues in earlier exchanges with the Left communist Blakes Baby. I think by the time socialism is on the cards anywhere in the world it will not be far behind everywhere else. This implies a totally transformed social and political global environment which would make it infintely more difficult for the residual capitalist states to counter the spatial growth of an expanding socialist society outside

Who is inventing a definition of class that has no connection with the process of exploitation? You are failing to make basic definitional distinctions here. Class is defined as a particular kind of relationship of exploitation, so not all relationships of exploitation indicate the existence of a class. Economic exploitation, as opposed to other kinds of exploitation, can be defined as illegitimately compelling somebody to labor on behalf of another (usually the person doing the compelling, who extracts the proceeds of that labor). And I can think of all kinds of examples of where this can happen in real life, resulting in economic exploitation of one person by another, but at the same time not resulting in a class in the sense that Marxists use the term. A secretary blackmailing her male coworker into mowing her lawn once a week for a few months, or receiving pay-outs from him in the form of homemade baked goods a few times, is engaging in a form of economic exploitation, but not one that suddenly makes her a member of a new exploiting class. You collapsing all these things together into a flat landscape, which is in keeping with your one dimensional understanding of capitalism, shows just how far removed your thinking is from the Marxist method.

I thought it would have been pretty obvious in the context of this discussion that we are talking about a system of economic exploitation not individual cases of secretaries blackmailing their co-workers into mowing their lawn!

All your responses here are variations on the same issue you're having: your inability to understand that similar processes taking place in different contexts must be understood differently. In other words, to use hocus-pocus dialectical language that will confuse you and may even haunt you in your sleep, you're failing to re-introduce piecemeal abstractions back into the concrete totality you are analyzing. This means you aren't able to really understand the nature of those piecemeal abstractions.

If you can kindly descend from cloud cuickooland and explain what you mean by all this in simple concrete terms of what I actually said then I might better understand the point that you are trying to get at . Till then I remain perplexed

An internationally isolated workers' "public authority" (I will refrain from calling it state, lest I raise your blood pressure) struggling to spread the revolution abroad and in the midst of domestic turmoil with counter-revolutionary elements will feel pressures to accumulate economically in order to remain on par with international developments in the forces of production, and most importantly to build up its military defenses. This pressure will be realized in paying laborers the minimum amount, and only the minimum amount, necessary to reproduce those laborers. It's the same process that occurs between capitalists and labor, except under a workers' public authority, the context will change the meaning and nature of this activity. Rather than being done for the sake of reproducing itself as an exploiting class, the act of buying and sell producers' labor power (once more, I won't upset you by calling them "workers") will be undertaken by representatives of the producers who were propelled into power by a revolutionary proletariat. This buying and sell of labor power still, by and large, has the form of a commodity, of course, because the entire population isn't directly determining what a socially necessary minimum is -- there is still a labor market, because anarchy rather than egalitarian planning is still predominant in society. Confused about this "anarchy"? See my comments on it earlier in the post.

This is sheer idealism. You think that by changing the name of your public authority to a "workers state" this will change the underlying economic set up? You wont upset me by calling this a state or calling the exploited class who are paid wages by their employers , workers becuase that is what they are! It would be more honest if you called a spade a spade and admitted that what you are describing is a functioning capitalist society

Oh, so you mean that workers who have seized power and use a coercive apparatus to suppress counter-revolutionaries, while simultaneously struggling against the existing anarchy in production, are still really a working class, and are still really wielding a state? Guess what: that was my position the entire time and the one you are arguing against. Why are you pointing out that my position implies this in a way that makes it seem like I am contradicting myself?

Er no . Im saying the exact opposite. i.e. the workers having seized power necessarily cease to be working class. Im gobsmacked that you havent apparently twigged this yet

Let's play your semantics game.

Oh I love how some people accuse others of playing "semantic games" but never themselves. Guess what? We all play these games. You as well - or havent you read hour own posts lately? Lets not be hypocritical OK?

A state in the Marxist sense is the coercive apparatus used by a ruling exploiting class to maintain power. When workers seize power, such a thing will no longer exist. Ergo there are no states. Happy?

Perfectly. Its a pity you arent as well with this way of looking at things.

Now there will be a lot of people who are pissed off, whose property was taken, who are racist assholes, who will consort with foreign capitalist powers and struggle, perhaps collectively and in arms, to overthrow the new "public authority." What do we all the apparatus used to suppress this?

The fact that these elements will continue to exist in society, and that the society will be forced to compete and trade and defend itself militarily in a hostile international context, means that there will continue to be anarchy in production. Why? Because Producers' Paradise doesn't control whether the USA attacks, or whether Spain invented a new missile technology that Producers' Paradise needs to defend against by building a newer defense technology. Neither does it control the invention of new productive techniques in steel manufacture that Producers' Paradise might need to purchase, but will purchase at a loss if it does not continue to streamline and innovate in its own economy. These impetuses for economic decision-making are not, and cannot be, democratically determined by Producers' Paradise or the people who live in. This is the continuing source of the anarchy, and why socialism cannot exist in a single country. The resulting lack of planlessness translates, by default, into economic bureaucracy and hierarchy in planning. Not necessarily a bureaucratic hierarchy that has risen to the level of a class (anymore than the secretary extortionist who loved baked goods becomes a member of a new ruling class, rather than remain a working-class secretary, through her temporary and petty blackmail scheme).

Can you come to the point please instead of rambling?

Now what do you call this public authority that wields violence to protect public authority against people wanting to restore private property? What do you call this apparatus that has hierarchical control over production decisions, and buys and sells labor from the wider population? Well, we can play your little semantic game and call it anything you want. But it will have to exist, and according to my understanding (and Engels', too), this entity will still be a state.

OK you have finally arrive at the point. Well first off - yes of course this is a state becuase quite clearly classes exist in it . The public authority (aka the new ruling class) you admit has "hierachical control of over prpdiuction decisions" and labour power will still be a commodity. So there will still be generalised wage labour and consequently worker alienation from the means of production . In other words we have a fully functioning capitalist state and I wouldnt disagree with you for one moment that this is a state.

The real question which you have avoided hitherto is - what happens when the working class abolishes its own existence as an exploited class. Do you consider that a state is possible in those circumstances? You talked earlier of Engel having two defintions of the state. I think that is correct. He has the marxist idea of the state as nothing more than a class tool which will disappear with the class society and he had a liberal defintion of the state as "representative of the whole of society" and is characterised by holding the monpoly of coersive force. This two psotions are not compatible and that is why I criticised Engels in the context of his remarks about the withering away of the state. In that context I think he was employing the liberal definition of the state which is precisely what I think you have been doing as well

means

Five Year Plan

9th January 2014, 17:42

Sigh. It is not me who shows a lack of understanding here but you. I know very well that Engels was using the term "state" in the context of it "withering away" in a quite different sense and it is precisely that sense that I was criticising Engels for . So cut out the crap about me "dishonestly makes it appear that Engels is presenting an idea you agree with" OK?

The central issue which you stil havent got your head around is glaringly obvious in your statement thus:

the working class, in power, using its state, does not have a system of exploitation that it has an interest in propping up in perpetuity, or an exploited class it has an interested in oppressing in perpetuity.

Now, its quite simple really . Do you or do you not agree that the working class signifies the exploited class in capitalism? If yes then it is is obvious that it is not a working class in power if you no longer have in place a system of class exploitation. The working class would have disappeared along with the capitalist class and consequently the idea of a workers state is a complete nonsense.

If on the other hand the working class does still exist then you are asking us to believe that this class having captured power continues to allow a capitalist class to exploit it - by defintion. Which is equally complete nonsense

I leave you to choose which of these nonsensical conclusions you prefer

Amusing. Truth is you would like to think have "thoroughly and repeatedly rebutted" me as a pretext for yet again dodging the central issue Ive outlined above
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Well you said it yourself: Engels' broader definition of the state characterizes it as a coercive apparatus utilized by some segment of society forcibly to bring other parts of society in line with its wishes, In other words, resistance to the wishes of this so called state which is, in Engels words, the representative of the whole of society, is anti-social
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No you've completely missed the point about my commment on anarchy of production. Im saying that in all large scale societies - including socialism/ communism - anarchy of production is unavoidable in the sense that the overall pattern of production cannot be consciously arrived at in apriori terms. There has to be some kind of feedback mechanism in place, some spontaneous adjustment of the different parts of the production system to each other. This is unavoidable

I am aware of what you are trying to say here but I reject the idea that what I am saying bears comparsion to the stalinist idea of socialism in one country (Stalin's "socialism" was still a class-based statist or state capitalist society anyway) Not the least reason for my saying so is that I reject all vanguardist theories of socialist revolution and contend that socialism can be brought about from the bottom up by a conscious socialist majority who want and understand socialism. On no account should workers even attempt to capture power before this condition has been reached becuase it will end in massive failure and disappointment. Of necessity this mass movement will be a global movement and so any lags between different parts of the world becoming socialist will be pretty shortlived

I have already addressed these various issues in earlier exchanges with the Left communist Blakes Baby. I think by the time socialism is on the cards anywhere in the world it will not be far behind everywhere else. This implies a totally transformed social and political global environment which would make it infintely more difficult for the residual capitalist states to counter the spatial growth of an expanding socialist society outside

I thought it would have been pretty obvious in the context of this discussion that we are talking about a system of economic exploitation not individual cases of secretaries blackmailing their co-workers into mowing their lawn!

If you can kindly descend from cloud cuickooland and explain what you mean by all this in simple concrete terms of what I actually said then I might better understand the point that you are trying to get at . Till then I remain perplexed

This is sheer idealism. You think that by changing the name of your public authority to a "workers state" this will change the underlying economic set up? You wont upset me by calling this a state or calling the exploited class who are paid wages by their employers , workers becuase that is what they are! It would be more honest if you called a spade a spade and admitted that what you are describing is a functioning capitalist society

Er no . Im saying the exact opposite. i.e. the workers having seized power necessarily cease to be working class. Im gobsmacked that you havent apparently twigged this yet

Oh I love how some people accuse others of playing "semantic games" but never themselves. Guess what? We all play these games. You as well - or havent you read hour own posts lately? Lets not be hypocritical OK?

Perfectly. Its a pity you arent as well with this way of looking at things.

Can you come to the point please instead of rambling?

OK you have finally arrive at the point. Well first off - yes of course this is a state becuase quite clearly classes exist in it . The public authority (aka the new ruling class) you admit has "hierachical control of over prpdiuction decisions" and labour power will still be a commodity. So there will still be generalised wage labour and consequently worker alienation from the means of production . In other words we have a fully functioning capitalist state and I wouldnt disagree with you for one moment that this is a state.

The real question which you have avoided hitherto is - what happens when the working class abolishes its own existence as an exploited class. Do you consider that a state is possible in those circumstances? You talked earlier of Engel having two defintions of the state. I think that is correct. He has the marxist idea of the state as nothing more than a class tool which will disappear with the class society and he had a liberal defintion of the state as "representative of the whole of society" and is characterised by holding the monpoly of coersive force. This two psotions are not compatible and that is why I criticised Engels in the context of his remarks about the withering away of the state. In that context I think he was employing the liberal definition of the state which is precisely what I think you have been doing as well means

Robbo, I think I have squeezed about as much blood from this stone as I am prepared to attempt. I will just restate my main points, none of which you've seriously engaged.

First, I want to clarify something on the semantic front that you have a hard time comprehending. Engels' wider sense of the word state is not just a coercive apparatus to suppress anti-social behavior. It's not just a coercive apparatus used by one part of the population against another part. I must have repeated this three or four times already, but I will repeat once more in hopes that at some point you'll actually understand: the differentia specifica of the state is that it is a tool for coercion by one segment of society against another segment, on the basis of divisions that have arisen from the existence of alienated property and production relations.

You keep glossing over that last part. After the socialist revolution has occurred, there will no longer be an exploiting class. But there will be people wanting to overthrow the new economic arrangement and reinstate capitalism. This is a drive that won't just spontaneously emerge from nowhere. It will be a remaining cultural dimension of the the alienated property relations that had previously existed. And suppressing it, as well as meeting the demands of international military and economic competition in a capitalist world, will require that a society just revolutionized by workers adopt something that can be called a state, precisely because the process of suppression and competing internationally will prevent the state's economic dimension from implementing fully egalitarian and inclusive local planning of a fully socialist nature. I hope you can see that this is different than the use of coercion to quarantine violent people from the rest of population under communism, and why we wouldn't call that coercive apparatus a state.

Second, you keep lapsing back into this pointless semantic game of "do we call it a state or do we not call it a state." The important point is precisely what you stupidly called my "rambling." After a workers' revolution, the demands of the newly emergent public authority will require, due to domestic and international struggle, an economic system that by definition cannot be systematically planned in an egalitarian way. As with Engels' definition of state, you want to gloss over this important point by playing loose with definitions and claiming that there will always be anarchy in production. Now, it is true that production will never occur with such precision that every spoonful of every meal will be planned out exactly in advance. There will always be some waste, some divergence between what is calculated in advance and used subsequently. But that is not the anarchy that Engels and I are talking about. We are talking about anarchy that has risen to the level where it systematically affects the "planning" process itself enough that there still exists, to greater or lesser degrees, hierarchy and degrees of exclusion between the planners and the larger population. That form of anarchy, in which bureaucratic decision making represents the inability of the whole of the population to plan collectively and equally at that juncture in time, and which is synonymous with the continuation of the law of value in however attenuated a form, is different than feedback adjustments that will obviously occur in any socialist or communist society.

But this difference is lost on you, because to you "anarchy" is "anarchy." You are content to slap labels on things that are decidedly different, and function in entirely different contexts, and pretend that they are the same. This leads me to my third and final point. You claim that any planning hierarchy in workers' public authority signifies the existence of a "fully functioning capitalist state." So in your estimation, a society that is transitioning to socialism, and has begun to introduce mass planning, but continues to have some (perhaps small) percentage of economic activities resulting from institutionalized bureaucratic decision-making, by definition has a state that in terms of class content is indistinguishable from the current bourgeois state that presides over Great Britain. Both are, in your view, "fully functioning capitalist states."

Why indistinguishable? Well, because you've concocted this abstraction called hierarchy, and if there's even a little bit of it, you think there exists class exploitation. And if there exists class exploitation, there must exist an exploiting class in control of a state, etc. What we see here is you making a bad abstraction, by violently removing and never reintroducing a phenomenon from its totality, then using that bad abstraction as a foundation for piling on other bad abstractions.

I have repeatedly tried to correct you on this kind of one-dimensional thinking, as in my example of the extortionist secretary from my last post, and how she can exploit people economically in a way that does not lead to her being assigned a distinct class position on the basis of that exploitation. Yet you ignore this example by saying "we aren't talking about it." Actually, yes, we are talking about it, because it's a concrete example of how you have to have some analytical separation between economic exploitation and class (what I call "class" and "class processes"), lest you be unable to make any sense of either. Yet you don't want to do this, and just want to declare the distinction invalid without offering anything besides a silly semantic argument about how the term "class processes" has the word "class" in it and therefore must necessitate the existence of classes. All of this is a specific example of how problematic your methodology is. Marxists arrive at definitions on the basis of how an entity functions, which means that definitions can only be arrived at when viewing an entity in the context of a totality within which it functions.

In contrast, what we're basically left with from you is a series of bad semantic arguments that you defend by ignoring concrete examples, and by proposing definitions that don't look at how entities actually function because your definitions look at only one narrow feature of very different entities so that you can equate those different entities on the basis of that abstract similarity. To make matters worse, you arrive at your initial definitions a priori on the basis of wishful thinking about what you'd like to see happen, which of course has a striking resemblance to all workers rising up in unison, smashing the bourgeoisie, and implementing full communism by the next day. What you are doing is the most blatant example of idealism I've encountered for some time.