The Revolution Comes But What Then What Is....

[elmo sez]

The revolution comes and the capitalist state is overthrown , with idealistacally most of the infastructer etc intact but what then what is the first move ?

Democracy in the work place ? What ? :blink: What is the first step to building socialism?

[More Fire for the People]

The Paris Commune is widely considered the basis of where to start. Marx says this about the Commune:

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman's wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.

Having once got rid of the standing army and the police — the physical force elements of the old government — the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the "parson-power", by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.

The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. [Chapter 5, The Civil War in France]

Lenin simplifies this saying:
Destruction of state power is the aim set by all Socialists, including Marx above all. Genuine democracy, i.e., Liberty and equality, is unrealizable unless this aim is achieved. But it’s practical achievement as possible only through Soviet, or proletarian, democracy, for by enlisting the mass organizations of the working people in constant and unfailing participation in the administration of the state, it immediately begins to prepare the complete withering away of any state.

[KC]

It all really depends on the material conditions of the country this is taking place in and the immediate demands of the proletariat.

[EusebioScrib]

Your conception of revolution is wrong. We won't start buliding the new society after the "revolution" but will start before.

Two reasons for my saying this:

1. History. If we look at history, revolutions have taken this pattern of building the new society first. Look at the bourgeoisie. Capitalism began in the 14th or 15th centuries with the early merchant classes. Prominant example: the Medici of Florence. The whole Renissance was a struggle against Church Power. Capitalism existed within Feudalism until the final qualitative change. Marx had a quote, don't have it but I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about, that said something about the "new system inside the womb of the old."

2. What people want. If you ask most people they don't want to rise up and change things. Unfortunately, the working class doesn't think like that because we think we're powerless. What people seek is alternatives. They want to find ways to escape alienation and wage-labor. That is why the place to organize today is not the workplace where we feel helpless, but in the community where we are impowered.

Anyway...to get back to your question. As I've pointed out we will already have a base for the new society to blossom fully. So I guess the first step, after we all rebel, is the affirm this new society, which we have already started to build, and spread it so that it is supreme. We can't say now how this new society will look. Only those who are building it can say. We are building it, but we're not the culmination of it.

[EusebioScrib]

Your conception of revolution is wrong. We won't start buliding the new society after the "revolution" but will start before.

Two reasons for my saying this:

1. History. If we look at history, revolutions have taken this pattern of building the new society first. Look at the bourgeoisie. Capitalism began in the 14th or 15th centuries with the early merchant classes. Prominant example: the Medici of Florence. The whole Renissance was a struggle against Church Power. Capitalism existed within Feudalism until the final qualitative change. Marx had a quote, don't have it but I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about, that said something about the "new system inside the womb of the old."

2. What people want. If you ask most people they don't want to rise up and change things. Unfortunately, the working class doesn't think like that because we think we're powerless. What people seek is alternatives. They want to find ways to escape alienation and wage-labor. That is why the place to organize today is not the workplace where we feel helpless, but in the community where we are impowered.

Anyway...to get back to your question. As I've pointed out we will already have a base for the new society to blossom fully. So I guess the first step, after we all rebel, is the affirm this new society, which we have already started to build, and spread it so that it is supreme. We can't say now how this new society will look. Only those who are building it can say. We are building it, but we're not the culmination of it.

[EusebioScrib]

Your conception of revolution is wrong. We won't start buliding the new society after the "revolution" but will start before.

Two reasons for my saying this:

1. History. If we look at history, revolutions have taken this pattern of building the new society first. Look at the bourgeoisie. Capitalism began in the 14th or 15th centuries with the early merchant classes. Prominant example: the Medici of Florence. The whole Renissance was a struggle against Church Power. Capitalism existed within Feudalism until the final qualitative change. Marx had a quote, don't have it but I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about, that said something about the "new system inside the womb of the old."

2. What people want. If you ask most people they don't want to rise up and change things. Unfortunately, the working class doesn't think like that because we think we're powerless. What people seek is alternatives. They want to find ways to escape alienation and wage-labor. That is why the place to organize today is not the workplace where we feel helpless, but in the community where we are impowered.

Anyway...to get back to your question. As I've pointed out we will already have a base for the new society to blossom fully. So I guess the first step, after we all rebel, is the affirm this new society, which we have already started to build, and spread it so that it is supreme. We can't say now how this new society will look. Only those who are building it can say. We are building it, but we're not the culmination of it.