Authoritarian socialism

[RedStaredRevolution]

alright i know theres a lot of people on this forum who believe that after the revolution a goverment should be set up that will surpress the bourgeoisie and free speech and any opposition at all towards the new goverment. however if you really want the state to wither away how is putting a new goverment in power that has even more control then the last one going to make it go away?

im not trying to attack anyones ideas, i just dont understand this and wish to be enlightened.

thanks comrades

[OneBrickOneVoice]

what are you saying??? that the proletariat aren't suppressed under the capitalist-imperialist system??? Are you saying that strong fundamental opposition isn't crushed??? Tell that to Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers. A state is always a state: It is a mechanism for suppressing a class. That is Marx & Engels 101. However under socialism the masses have the means of production, social relations, and the political power, not the bourgeiosie. This will allow for far greater freedom, economically and will encourage people to critically and scientifically deal with their society

[Demogorgon]

In the Soviet Union, the working class did not take control of the means of production or the state i the long run, the party did. It was party beureacrats who replaced the bourgoisie, not the workers and that was the route of a lot of it's problems.

At any rate people talk about various authoritarian post revolutionary measures (which strikes me as getting a bit ahead of ourselves, cookshops of the future?) and I want to shake my head at times? The thing a lot of people forget is that it is fundamentally in the interests iof the working class to create a classless society and to do that it is very important that you don't accidentally propell a new class into power, and if you try to hard to suppress the bourgoisie that is what will happen.

After a true revolution (of whatever type) the bourgoisie will be broken, all their previous power taken away and they will be little threat. Indeed very quickly they will assimilate in with te workers and there will be classless society. If you start suppressing free speach, it will be dissident workers that are harmed as a result.

[RedStaredRevolution]

im not saying capitalism doesnt oppress the working class (because i know they do), im saying that after the revolution if they do oppress the bourgeoisie then theyre being no better then the bourgeoisie were when they were in power. im not in favor of giving any class power over the other but rather to give everyone equal power in goverment so the people are represented fairly. like Demogorgon said, if you take away basic freedoms then you end up hurting not only the bourgeoisie but the working class as well.

[Chocobo]

a goverment should be set up that will surpress the bourgeoisie and free speech and any opposition at all towards the new goverment
Its called the Dictatorship of the Proletariat


however if you really want the state to wither away how is putting a new goverment in power that has even more control then the last one going to make it go away?
The state that is going to wither away is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state that is being smashed is the bourgeoisie. What is making the state wither away is that class's are in constant withering as well during this period, where all are a part of the proletariat, including whatever types of bureacracy still exist since they are subject to recall, workmans wage, and plain equal.
Mainly, were dealing with creating democracy for the majority which in turn will lead, through class conciousness and an active role in the structure of society, to a classless society, where the armed proletariat will no more need arms, where universal unity is solidified.
Once the majoirty takes power, the proletariat, then the state will lose meaning over time and eventually wither away.

[RedStaredRevolution]

where all are a part of the proletariat
if the proletariat is in power and everyone is part of the proletariat then what bourgeoisie is the goverment supposed to surpress?



Mainly, were dealing with creating democracy for the majority which in turn will lead, through class conciousness and an active role in the structure of society, to a classless society
if the dictatorship of the proletariat is a literal dictatorship then what do you mean by "creating a democracy"?

thanks for trying to help me understand it :D

[Chocobo]

if the proletariat is in power and everyone is part of the proletariat then what bourgeoisie is the goverment supposed to surpress?
Though the proletariat would have claimed power bourgeois interests would still exist. This is the period referred to Marx as "Lower Phase" Communism, where slowly, but surely, these interests are being removed.


if the dictatorship of the proletariat is a literal dictatorship then what do you mean by "creating a democracy"?
Because with the majority in power democracy would exist for them. The dictatorship is the same as the one today, exceptnow the majority have power and not the minority.

[RedStaredRevolution]

oh ok, thanks Balthier for clearing that up ^_^

[Q]

Originally posted by [email protected] 23, 2007 08:22 pm
alright i know theres a lot of people on this forum who believe that after the revolution a goverment should be set up that will surpress the bourgeoisie and free speech and any opposition at all towards the new goverment. however if you really want the state to wither away how is putting a new goverment in power that has even more control then the last one going to make it go away?

im not trying to attack anyones ideas, i just dont understand this and wish to be enlightened.

thanks comrades
A workers state is not a state in the bourgeois sense. It's a government consisting of soviets that interlink with eachother regionally, nationally and internationally when needed or deemed logical. It's a direct democracy. It only has the function of a state in this that it is used to surpress the capitalist class that is now out of power and to prevent it from gaining it back. When the capitalist class is gone as a class, the surpressing role of the workers state also ceases to exist and therefor the state in its marxist definition.

Does this mean that free speech or any political party should be oppressed aswell? I think free speech should always be allowed, same with other parties (besides fascists). The reason why the bolsheviks put a ban on each party after the revolution was because each party raised arms against the soviets and the bolsheviks and played a counterrevolutionary role. But this was first and foremost meant as a temporary measure. That this measure was later used by the bureaucratic degeneration to put a permanent ban on all parties and later even on different opinions and thought was nice for the bureaucrats, but this was not the original intention of the bolsheviks. Given this knowledge, I would not anymore plead for banning political parties, even if they raised arms and even it was meant temporarily. But I can certainly understand why the bolsheviks did it.

More info and a full analysis on the degeneration of the revolution can be read in Trotsky's book Revolution Betrayed (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/).

[Whitten]

We recognise the need for revolution to overthrough the bourgeois, then we recognise the state (defined by Marx as the instrument by which one class oppresses the others) must exist in order for that to occur. We could deal with hypothetical scenarios such as "What if everyone is proletariaian and there are no bourgeois or symphasisers left over trying to fight agaijnst us" but that would be pointless as its not the way things work in reality, we have to deal with how we get there. Hence the proletariat must smash the Bourgeois state, install a state of their own to suppress the bourgeois and continue the revolution through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

For teh record "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't mean a "dictatorship" as most people think of it today, it means the rule of the working class over all others.

The workers' state with wither away once the Bourgeois have been ultimatly defeated, and not a moment sooner, and we wouldn't want it to either as if the proletariat relinquish their dictatorship while the bourgeois still exist they only grant the bourgeois the freedom to reinstall their own dictatorship.

[syndicat]

I find this idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" rather vague and prone to different interpretations. Given the failures of socialism in the 20th century, I don't think we can afford that unclarity.

Clearly enough, the working class can't liberate itself from subordination to, and thus exploitation by, a dominating class unless it dismantles the existing state -- its characteristic management hierarchies and hierarchical armed bodies -- and builds its own governance structure based on mass participatory democracy, as well as its direct worker management of all the industries, and builds its own armed force that answers to the mass democratic institutions of the working class, such as regional congresses of delegates, workplace assemblies, etc. The reason for the initial exclusion of the managerial, small business and investor classes from direct participation in the governance structures would be that these classes have a stake in the preservation of the existing system of exploitation and oppression. As they are integrated into the working class, they acquire the same rights as other workers do.

O-collective writes:
The reason why the bolsheviks put a ban on each party after the revolution was because each party raised arms against the soviets and the bolsheviks and played a counterrevolutionary role. But this was first and foremost meant as a temporary measure.

This is actually not the case. The Right SRs and Right Mensheviks did begin an uprising in central Russia in June 1918. And after the Bolsheviks imposed a harsh state grain monopoly on the peasantry, and a divide and conquer strategy in the villages, setting peasant against peasant, that did provoke a Left SR uprising.

However, the Left Mensheviks -- the majority of the party -- expelled the Right Mensheviks over this issue and always opposed armed struggle against the Bolshevik government, and pursued a democratic opposition strategy of organizing in the workplaces, organizing elections of worker delegates, participating in the unions and soviets. But they were surpressed nonetheless. The same is true of the Russian anarcho-syndicalists. They denounced those anarcho-communists who engaged in small group expropriation tactics or armed actions. Like the Left Mensheviks, they pursued a democratic opposition strategy of organizing in the workplaces, factory committees, unions and soviets. But they were also suppressed violently (imprisoned, killed). According to Israel Getzler's book on Kronstadt, the Cheka's suppression of the Union of Maximalists -- a libertarian socialist group -- was based on frame up, accusing them of an armed revolt that didn't happen, it was rather a case of the Cheka infiltrating and using an agent provocateur.

Moreover, in the spring of 1918 when the Bolsheviks lost the soviet elections in 19 of 22 cities in European Russia, they refused to leave office. They either refused to abide by the election results, or used armed power to abolish the soviet and rule thru a Military Revolutionary Committee. These things are discussed by Sam Farber in "Before Stalinism" and by Vladimir Brovkin in "The Mensheviks After October."

The emergence of a new managerial ruling class in the Soviet Union really has its origins in the very early practices and orientation of the Bolsheviks. As Sam Farber points out, Russian Marxism -- Mensheviks and Bolsheviks both -- had no commitment to participatory democracy. They conceived of "proletarian power" as the workers merely electing leaders to run things and make the decisions for them, not the workers making the decisions. That's why the local soviets, mostly set up by the Mensheviks in early 1917, were structured in a topdown way, with power concentrated into the hands of the executive committee, which was controlled by party leaders of the professional class. The plenary sessions were just talking shops, rarely making the decisions. The executive committees tended to treat them like rubber stamps. This is discussed in Pete Rachlef's "Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution": http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/raclef.htm

Moreover, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks set up a central planning appartus, Vesenkha, with people appointed from above, to craft plans for the whole national economy. In the mid-1920s this became Gosplan, the central planning bureaucracy. At that time the Regional Soviet of Factory Committees in St. Petersburg had proposed a national congress of factory committees, to plan the economy from the bottom up, but that was blocked by the Bolsheviks.

The central planners were naturally going to want their plans to be enforced. This would tend to lead to setting up managerial hierarchies over the workers. Already in the spring of 1918 Trotsky was beating the drum for one-man managers appointed from above. At a council of the regional planning bodies in 1918, Lenin was outraged when a committee proposed that a majority of the regional planning councils should be elected by the workers. He demanded -- and got -- agreement that it should never be more than one third. (This is described in Maurice Brinton's "The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control".)

So we see here the beginnings of a stratum of professionals and managers who will exercise effective power over the working class. This is the beginning of a new dominating class.

The idea of a party capturing or creating a state and then implementing its program top-down thru a state hierarchy is a recipe for this kind of new admnistrative class beginning to entrench itself.

And once a dominating elite gets set up, no dominating class will ever give up power voluntarily. If they have "socialist" ideas, what will happen is they'll just tend to re-interpret "socialism" to rationalize an elite running things, as happened in the USSR.