48hr general strike greece kicks off; demo's, riots, occupations

[A Marxist Historian]

I've been accused by plenty of liberals of being a Stalinist, but have never been accused by a person advocating five year plans of being one.

The idea was stolen from Trotsky by Stalin. In itself, a fine idea, problem being that Stalin's five year plans were crap.

Forgive me if I think that mimicking the failed methods of the past - especially the controlling of production by bureaucratic oligarchs, who never had, and never can lead the working class beyond value production is a complete and tragic waste of time.

Alright, let me try to summarize what you've said. You seem to think I stand by some kind of guerrilla factions virtually representing the working class, forcing them to accept "collectivization," rather than the working class acting as a class for itself to seize the productive forces of society, that social revolution will lead to starvation, the working class will be impoverished when they seize control of the productive forces of society, that creating a political commons is a fantasy, that an immediate break with value production isn't what we need, but you seem to imply that the seizure of the capitalist state or the nationalization of industry is what is needed right now, simply because "workers may be ready for that" but not for socialist production?

If the workers smash the capitalist state and set up their own, like in Russia in 1917, then they have control of the productive forces, seems to me. Just like in the USSR.

Trouble was that Stalin and his bureaucratic oligarchs took over after a few years, which the Left Opposition fought against.

I'm not totally sure what you mean by a "break with value production," and frankly I don't think you know what you mean either. It's just an abstract bookish fantasy of yours, no connection with real life.

For a socialist society, you need to abolish all class distinctions, and, at bare minimum, you need the entire population of the planet with decent living standards. We're far, far away from that. In fact, even in the imperialist centers you have people homeless and eating out of garbage dumps these days.

Briefly, some Bolsheviks had similar fantasies at the peak of War Communism, and you had a recrudescence of that at the height of Stalin's first Five Year Plan, with delusions about how it would create instant socialism and instant prosperity, until the famine brought everybody down to earth.

And now, with the capitalists ravaging the planet with wars and industrial collapse, with entire cities like Detroit and New Orleans turning into wasteland, to say nothing of what's going on in the Third World, with ecological catastrophe impending, you think we could establish instant socialism tomorrow? You're crazy.

No, they shouldn't allow any of that. They should have a social revolution to stop that from happening. The only way to break with capitalism is to halt value production and instead produce for use. There is no other way.

That can only be done on a world scale, as the capitalist market dominates the world. Doing it in some little corner or other of the world inevitably would fail. Stalin had his huge state apparatus to try to make it work, so he and his successors could limp along propping that up for a few generations. You guys don't believe in "bureaucratic authority," so you would be instant failures.

By the way, if you actually took a look at those five year plans you sneer at, they were always based on "material balances," i.e. production for use, not value production. In fact, that was one of the problems with them. Not practical in a world capitalist market, where an isolated noncapitalist state has to have production run on a basis of a combination, as Trotsky put it, of "workers democracy, planning and the market."

Stalinists figured out that they needed the market element in there to make it work, so you get "market socialism" during the degenerative process. Somehow, the democracy part never appealed to them...

So, in my atomistic little opinion, I think our class, anywhere, everywhere, should carry out an immediate and indefinite strike, during which the overwhelming majority of our class should enter a political commons which only we can create as a class, to decide what and how we're going to produce for use among ourselves.

If they're up for overthrowing the government and not the state and all existing social conditions they'll soon come to discover that that isn't enough. Even if they can't individually articulate their unrest, they'll know that nothing has really changed. Like in Egypt. Hopefully this will help them to discover the truth. That what we need is a social revolution, right now.

That is what we need. Yes, overthrow the bourgeois state. We need a new ruling class, the working class. Which can decide how to transform social conditions. "Overthrowing" social conditions doesn't even make sense grammatically, it is a sign of your confusion.

As for your pipe dream of an immediate, universal strike, and then "entry into a political commons," whatever the hell that is, sounds like an Internet fantasy, if that somehow happened, the capitalist state would smash it.

You can't overthrow capitalism "with folded hands," like in the old IWW fantasy. You need an armed revolution led by a vanguard party that knows what to do and how to do it.

-M.H.-

[Dunk]

If the workers smash the capitalist state and set up their own, like in Russia in 1917, then they have control of the productive forces, seems to me. Just like in the USSR.

Then you're seriously mistaken.

A tiny minority representing the interests of and controlling the productive forces of society on behalf of the working class (or so was their fantasy) is not the common control of the productive forces of society. Without common control and production for use, the logical conclusion of social democracy is the nationalization of industry but not a break with production for the sake of value, because a break with it can't happen without common control and production for use.

I'm not totally sure what you mean by a "break with value production," and frankly I don't think you know what you mean either. It's just an abstract bookish fantasy of yours, no connection with real life.

Value production is production for the sake of production, the production of value for the sake of value, and not for the sake of people. You want the defining hallmark of capitalism - it isn't wage labor, it isn't even a market economy, it's the external world of value which seeks to reproduce itself seemingly independent of the will of human beings. It's why we live in a world where corporations are people, and we're just an expendable pool of equipment for them to reproduce themselves. That's not a bookish fantasy, it's indispensable to understanding how we can get beyond capitalism, something which no five year plan, however finely tuned, under bureaucratic oligarchs could ever hope to accomplish.

For a socialist society, you need to abolish all class distinctions, and, at bare minimum, you need the entire population of the planet with decent living standards. We're far, far away from that. In fact, even in the imperialist centers you have people homeless and eating out of garbage dumps these days.

As I read the above, it seems you're suggesting a redistribution of commodities, whether food, housing, etc to equalize living standards among people is part and parcel to abolishing class society. It's not. The socialist mode of production is what can enable a stateless and classless society to exist. One person having a few extra personal possessions versus the next person has no bearing on their social relations. Seizing the productive forces of society for common control and use is about access. Yes, it can lead to all of these wonderful things like the abolition of poverty, of homelessness. But making sure that everyone has the same number of radios and televisions isn't the same as making sure everyone has equal access and control over production.

Why production for use? What's so important about the common control of the productive forces of society by the producers themselves - why can't they be controlled by the enlightened, professional revolutionaries on behalf of the stupid laboring masses?

Common control enables production for use. Production for use does not allow for the extraction of a surplus. Common control ensures that what is needed to be produced actually does get produced, since the single class of producers is conveniently also the single class of consumers.

You seem to have this idea that communism is something achieved incrementally, generationally, bit by bit by the organizational vanguard which gloriously leads the people they rule to their liberation through their elite control of the productive forces of society - even long, long after the revolution. It's not. Hasn't been, and never will be established by an organizational vanguard, virtually representing the interests of the working class. It can only be achieved by the working class. This is your critical error which leads you to think that the methods of the catastrophic failures of social democratic praxis should be repeated.

It's not instantaneous, it's not a single rapturous event, but it's certainly not an incremental, generational process. The revolution itself isn't just an uprising in the streets. It's not hundreds of thousands of people burning parliament to the ground, or filling it to the brim with people wearing hammer and sickle lapels. It's people taking common control of production, and this taking of control spreading worldwide until the process of capital accumulation is abolished.

You're crazy...Doing it in some little corner or other of the world inevitably would fail...You need an armed revolution led by a vanguard party that knows what to do and how to do it.

-M.H.-

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now? Also, what I think is crazy is what I've bolded.

[A Marxist Historian]

Then you're seriously mistaken.

A tiny minority representing the interests of and controlling the productive forces of society on behalf of the working class (or so was their fantasy) is not the common control of the productive forces of society. Without common control and production for use, the logical conclusion of social democracy is the nationalization of industry but not a break with production for the sake of value, because a break with it can't happen without common control and production for use.

Hm? production for use as opposed to profit for capitalists was the fundamental nature of the Soviet economy, even under Stalin. Unlike social-democratic nationalizations as with say steel in England, which profited the bankrupt steel capitalists in England enormously.

Now, with a privileged bureaucracy running production instead of the working class, things often went very badly. But trying to claim that soviet planning and production was about profit instead of use is just plain silly.

Value production is production for the sake of production, the production of value for the sake of value, and not for the sake of people. You want the defining hallmark of capitalism - it isn't wage labor, it isn't even a market economy, it's the external world of value which seeks to reproduce itself seemingly independent of the will of human beings. It's why we live in a world where corporations are people, and we're just an expendable pool of equipment for them to reproduce themselves. That's not a bookish fantasy, it's indispensable to understanding how we can get beyond capitalism, something which no five year plan, however finely tuned, under bureaucratic oligarchs could ever hope to accomplish.

So when the Soviets mined coal or built a railroad or made steel, this was for "value"? To make a profit? That's absurd. To make a profit they'd have to sell it to somebody after all. No, it was for use, for things the Soviet people needed. Such as tanks to hold off Hitler, and ICBMs to hold off America, for example. As well of course as housing, subways, hospitals, universities, etc. etc., all those things that were free in the USSR and cost an arm and a leg in capitalist societies.

Of course the bureaucrats creamed their cut off the top, but that is simply a corruption of the system, not evidence that the system was capitalist.

As I read the above, it seems you're suggesting a redistribution of commodities, whether food, housing, etc to equalize living standards among people is part and parcel to abolishing class society. It's not. The socialist mode of production is what can enable a stateless and classless society to exist. One person having a few extra personal possessions versus the next person has no bearing on their social relations. Seizing the productive forces of society for common control and use is about access. Yes, it can lead to all of these wonderful things like the abolition of poverty, of homelessness. But making sure that everyone has the same number of radios and televisions isn't the same as making sure everyone has equal access and control over production.

Actually you have it backwards, distribution is exactly where the Stalinist system fell down, with the bureaucrats definitely having more of the good things in life than the rank and file workers. But the basic mode of production, as opposed to distribution, was socialist, production for use not for profit. Which doesn't mean that the USSR was "socialist," as you can't build socialism, a classless society, in one country, just can't be done.

Of course the working class had no direct control over the production process, but that is a secondary consideration. There was no private ownership, and ownership is fundamentally more important than control, whether you are talking about a whole society, or about a capitalist corporation for that matter.

Why production for use? What's so important about the common control of the productive forces of society by the producers themselves - why can't they be controlled by the enlightened, professional revolutionaries on behalf of the stupid laboring masses?

Actually, I'm all for control by the working masses, as that works better. No tiny group of bureaucrats, no matter how enlightened, can foresee every detail of the economy. And so was Lenin, and so was Trotsky. Even Stalin was all in favor of that, in rhetoric. The practical reality on the ground being totally different of course. You need both centralized planning and democratic input at every level from the working people. And economic plans need to be submitted to workers councils, discussed, debated and voted on, as they were under Lenin, not imposed from the top as under Stalin.

If you want details as to exactly how the Trotskyists advocated control by the working masses, the Platform of the Left Opposition has been posted in the Learning section.

Common control enables production for use. Production for use does not allow for the extraction of a surplus. Common control ensures that what is needed to be produced actually does get produced, since the single class of producers is conveniently also the single class of consumers.

Does not allow for a surplus? Without a surplus, just how could you build a subway or an airport or in fact anything other than immediate consumer goods? That's absurd.

In a capitalist system, the surplus goes into the hands of the capitalists, who either consume it or reinvest it into production so that they can get more surplus value in the future.

With the working class in charge, the social surplus is used by the working class to improve things.

You seem to have this idea that communism is something achieved incrementally, generationally, bit by bit by the organizational vanguard which gloriously leads the people they rule to their liberation through their elite control of the productive forces of society - even long, long after the revolution. It's not. Hasn't been, and never will be established by an organizational vanguard, virtually representing the interests of the working class. It can only be achieved by the working class. This is your critical error which leads you to think that the methods of the catastrophic failures of social democratic praxis should be repeated.

To create a communist society, you have to have material abundance, so that we really can have "to each according to his need." Try to institute that the day after the revolution and the economy would collapse and people would probably be starving a few weeks after the warehouses were cleaned out.

Abolishing capitalism would break the chains on production the profit system imposes, and make possible the huge increase in the productivity of labor that a communist society would require. Believing that could be done instantaneously is just a fantasy.

In capitalist society, some workers have advanced consciousness, oppose racism, imperialism, etc. etc.--and some do not. So the most conscious workers, together with committed socialist intellectuals, need to organize themselves into a vanguard party, or we'd just get some sort of "Archie Bunker" socialism, white, male, European dominated. In fact that's pretty much Brezhnevism come to think of it.

How long will it take for the whole working class to attain a uniform high level of consciousness, so that a separate vanguard party becomes unnecessary? Well, of course consciousness changes by leaps and bounds during a revolution, but it can change back too as people get tired and burnt-out. So we'll see.

Right now you have a lot more workers in America supporting the Tea Party than any kind of socialism. So yes, you need a vanguard party of the working class.

It's not instantaneous, it's not a single rapturous event, but it's certainly not an incremental, generational process. The revolution itself isn't just an uprising in the streets. It's not hundreds of thousands of people burning parliament to the ground, or filling it to the brim with people wearing hammer and sickle lapels. It's people taking common control of production, and this taking of control spreading worldwide until the process of capital accumulation is abolished.

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now? Also, what I think is crazy is what I've bolded.

Workers taking control over their particular shops and factories is not the revolution. The revolution is when homelessness, unemployment, racism, imperialist wars, colonialism, and all the other horrible results of capitalism can be abolished, because the workers have smashed the capitalist state and created their own workers state to run things. Who decides what widget gets produced next week is just far, far less important than that.

And wouldn't necessarily help one bit with the more important issues, as Yugoslavia, where workers really did pretty much have day-to-day control over production at their particular factories, illustrated.

Universal workers control just meant different factories competing with each other, giving rise quickly to national and ethnic rivalries, and we all know what happened next.

-M.H.-

[Dunk]

Hm? production for use as opposed to profit for capitalists was the fundamental nature of the Soviet economy, even under Stalin. Unlike social-democratic nationalizations as with say steel in England, which profited the bankrupt steel capitalists in England enormously.

Now, with a privileged bureaucracy running production instead of the working class, things often went very badly. But trying to claim that soviet planning and production was about profit instead of use is just plain silly...
Of course the bureaucrats creamed their cut off the top, but that is simply a corruption of the system, not evidence that the system was capitalist.

Even in the initial years of the fSU, didn't Lenin himself describe the Soviet economy as state-monopoly capitalist? As in, the entire economy operated as a single firm, extracting a surplus from the workers.

I don't think you can describe what was done as production for use, advocate an organizational vanguard to literally control nationalized industry instead of common control, and then acknowledge the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats - which can only exist at all if a surplus is extracted. This is inconsistent.

But the basic mode of production, as opposed to distribution, was socialist, production for use not for profit. Which doesn't mean that the USSR was "socialist," as you can't build socialism, a classless society, in one country, just can't be done.

This is contradictory. You're saying the mode of production in the fSU was socialist, and at the same time say you can't have socialism in one country.

Of course the working class had no direct control over the production process, but that is a secondary consideration. There was no private ownership, and ownership is fundamentally more important than control, whether you are talking about a whole society, or about a capitalist corporation for that matter.

How can a person own something, if some privileged bureaucracy with secret police at their disposal never allows you to exert control over production? Not only that, those privileged bureaucrats outlaw unions - and not based on revolutionary justifications, they outlawed them because of what an enormous contradiction and embarrassment it is for your working class to realize they need to form unions against the party bosses.

Control is the action which realizes ownership.

Actually, I'm all for control by the working masses, as that works better. No tiny group of bureaucrats, no matter how enlightened, can foresee every detail of the economy. And so was Lenin, and so was Trotsky. Even Stalin was all in favor of that, in rhetoric. The practical reality on the ground being totally different of course.

This is just more inconsistency. If you're for common control and production for use, you can't also be for the nationalization of industry and the rule of a bureaucratic oligarchy. One doesn't lead to the other, one enables communism to exist, and one leads right back to capitalism, as has been demonstrated by it's historical failure.

Does not allow for a surplus? Without a surplus, just how could you build a subway or an airport or in fact anything other than immediate consumer goods? That's absurd.

So you think a financial system is inextricable from socialist production? I don't think so. I don't think capital is creative, I think it's labor that's creative.

In capitalist society, some workers have advanced consciousness, oppose racism, imperialism, etc. etc.--and some do not. So the most conscious workers, together with committed socialist intellectuals, need to organize themselves into a vanguard party, or we'd just get some sort of "Archie Bunker" socialism, white, male, European dominated. In fact that's pretty much Brezhnevism come to think of it.

How long will it take for the whole working class to attain a uniform high level of consciousness, so that a separate vanguard party becomes unnecessary? Well, of course consciousness changes by leaps and bounds during a revolution, but it can change back too as people get tired and burnt-out. So we'll see.

If the revolution occurs, it's certain that some local leaders will emerge. But let's be clear about this; a guerrilla faction or a tiny organizational "vanguard" is not the working class. The class must act for itself to establish socialist production. Socialist production requires common ownership and production for use. Common ownership can only be realized through common control. Common control can only be enabled by a democratic process. Without socialist production, communism is impossible.

Right now you have a lot more workers in America supporting the Tea Party than any kind of socialism. So yes, you need a vanguard party of the working class.

What parts of your response I subtracted, I think I've essentially responded to above.

If the working class isn't sufficiently conscious to act for itself, there will be no socialist production or communist society until it does.

At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes.

[A Marxist Historian]

Even in the initial years of the fSU, didn't Lenin himself describe the Soviet economy as state-monopoly capitalist? As in, the entire economy operated as a single firm, extracting a surplus from the workers.

No, he did no such thing. An urban myth spread by the Cliffites. When he talked about "state capitalism," he meant favoritism by the workers state to private capitalists, kulaks, NEPmen, foreign investors. He always referred to the state sector of the mixed Soviet economy of the NEP period as the "socialist sector."

We've gone over this many times in other threads.

I don't think you can describe what was done as production for use, advocate an organizational vanguard to literally control nationalized industry instead of common control, and then acknowledge the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats - which can only exist at all if a surplus is extracted. This is inconsistent.

Indeed, and this is what the Stalinists did, while of course claiming otherwise. Though the bureaucrats weren't a ruling class, they were just bureaucrats. Just like corporate managers, or trade union bureaucrats, aren't classes, they are employees of classes, though often very bossy ones, as any union member or ignored stockholder can tell you.

When and where did Lenin or Trotsky advocate control of industry by some organized vanguard instead of common control? In practice, given the collapse of Soviet industry and the Soviet working class itself, due to famine and civil war, this is more or less of what happened, but was never what the Bolsheviks wanted to happen.

This is contradictory. You're saying the mode of production in the fSU was socialist, and at the same time say you can't have socialism in one country.

Socialism means more than just abolishing private capitalism. It means complete abolition of classes and class distinctions. And it means providing a better life for the people than under any sort of capitalism, or what's the point?

The USSR was never able to do either. Certainly in Lenin's time it couldn't even conceivably come close, as 90% of the population were peasants, petty or not so petty capitalists. And, as we all know, Stalin's notion of compulsory collectivization didn't work too well, now did it?

But, in the state sector, the mode of production was of the socialist type, not the capitalist type. And the state sector never covered the whole of the economy. In particular, down on the farm, Stalin's collective farms were mostly cooperatives, formally speaking, as opposed to state ownership. Cooperatives drawing a profit from their production, after heavy deductions for the benefit of the workers and their state, and distributing the profits among the members of the collective, theoretically at least on an equal basis.

Therefore, a form of capitalism.

How can a person own something, if some privileged bureaucracy with secret police at their disposal never allows you to exert control over production? Not only that, those privileged bureaucrats outlaw unions - and not based on revolutionary justifications, they outlawed them because of what an enormous contradiction and embarrassment it is for your working class to realize they need to form unions against the party bosses.

Where did you hear that one? Unions were never outlawed, and continued to exist throughout the entire history of the USSR. Granted, they were extremely bureaucratic and authoritarian with their members, but that's not exactly a new story now is it?

How can a capitalist own something if the secret police are running everything? Well, you had lots of lots of private capitalism in Nazi Germany, and the German capitalists were extremely content with Hitler.

Or are you talking about workers "owning something"? Well, if workers "own" the factories they work in, then they are petty capitalists, competing with other workers who own other factories, just like in Yugoslavia.

In a socialist society, ownership is in the hands of the society as a whole, not particular individuals. If it is in the hands of particular individuals, then you have a form of capitalism not socialism.

Control is the action which realizes ownership.

No it isn't, as any stockholder can explain to you. The stockholders own companies, not the managers they employ. And as long as the stock prices are going up and the dividends are rolling in, no stockholder really gives a damn how the company is being run.

This is just more inconsistency. If you're for common control and production for use, you can't also be for the nationalization of industry and the rule of a bureaucratic oligarchy. One doesn't lead to the other, one enables communism to exist, and one leads right back to capitalism, as has been demonstrated by it's historical failure.

Yes indeed, Stalinism has been demonstrated by history to be a failure, and only here on Revleft or elsewhere on the Internet do you really have people who don't realize this.

This does not mean at all that the original ideas of the Russian Revolution were a failure. And a blood line was drawn between Stalin and Stalinism and Lenin and Leninism by the blood purges of the 1930s, where Stalin managed to kill off just about all the original revolutionaries of 1917 except for himself and his personal clique of old friends.

Where you picked up the idea that Trotskyists were in favor of the rule of a Stalinist-type bureaucracy I don't know.

So you think a financial system is inextricable from socialist production? I don't think so. I don't think capital is creative, I think it's labor that's creative.

A mystifying statement to me, that I suppose would be clearer except for the way Revleft works, knocking out previous comments in the hread unless you hunt for them.

Anyway, in the process of constructing a socialist system, which I think is likely to be pretty lengthy, financial accounting methods will be necessary. Once you have created a socialist system, money will be abolished, and you'll still need accounting, but that will be much more accounting of labor time and physical product than anything "financial."

If the revolution occurs, it's certain that some local leaders will emerge. But let's be clear about this; a guerrilla faction or a tiny organizational "vanguard" is not the working class. The class must act for itself to establish socialist production. Socialist production requires common ownership and production for use. Common ownership can only be realized through common control. Common control can only be enabled by a democratic process. Without socialist production, communism is impossible.

What parts of your response I subtracted, I think I've essentially responded to above.

If the working class isn't sufficiently conscious to act for itself, there will be no socialist production or communist society until it does.

We're having something of a dialouge of the deaf here, as I actually agree with the above statements, sort of anyway. A vanguard party of the workers has to be a mass party, hundreds of thousands, millions of members in a big country like the USSR or USA, to be really that, and has to be recognized by the rest of the workers, not just the backward ones but also all those workers who just plain aren't interested in politics or any issues outside their immediate family lives, or who think they have better things to do than running anything, as the vanguard.

Me, after the Revolution, if I live that long, the last thing I'd want to do is run anything. Let those who are good at it and have the talent for it do it, as long as you have a democratic process to replace them if need be.

Actual creation of a socialist society can only be done by the working class as a whole. Which is exactly why the USSR had so many economic problems.

Things only went well economically during periods when, for one reason or another, workers had a high opinion of the regime. When they felt dissatisfied, production would fall off, quality control would go to hell, etc. etc.

Unlike in a capitalist system, where workers have to work hard and well not to lose their jobs, to get promotions, etc. With zero unemployment and all sorts of rights on the job that workers in a capitalist country don't have, that just didn't work in the USSR, which is why so many bureaucrats finally decided capitalism is better and went first with Gorbachev then with Yeltsin.

In the Brezhnev years, you had the famous joke, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The sign of a disintegrating bureaucratic pseudo-socialist system.

You take that attitude in America, if you don't have savings or stockholdings or something, you end up homeless.

-M.H.-

[Dunk]

M.H.,

I've been thinking for a bit on our discussion and how to break this dialogue of the deaf. I think I've come up with something succinct.

I think one of the important points you've been trying to make to me is that the point of the revolution isn't to simply change the relations of production, but it's to abolish class society, and with it all forms of bourgeois oppression.

Point taken. I understand and I fully acknowledge that liberation is more important than the mode of production, that a revolution without these effects isn't a revolution at all, and is ultimately pointless.

I think the primary point I am trying to leave you with, is that without a transformation in the relations of production, liberation cannot follow. That while there will probably be what could be described as a transitional state in the sense of a dictatorship of the proletariat, that there is no transitional period (transitional in the sense of relations of production which are distinct from both capitalist society and communist society) between capitalist society and communism. That there is no "socialist" or "nationalized" period in between, that the mode of production we must replace capitalism with is itself and can only be achieved by the transformation of the relations of production, from which liberation from bourgeois forms of oppression can follow.

As a side note, I've called this mode of production the socialist mode of production, I'm unsure whether this is appropriate or confusing for some people here.

Anyway, I appreciate the discussion. Thanks.

[A Marxist Historian]

M.H.,

I've been thinking for a bit on our discussion and how to break this dialogue of the deaf. I think I've come up with something succinct.

I think one of the important points you've been trying to make to me is that the point of the revolution isn't to simply change the relations of production, but it's to abolish class society, and with it all forms of bourgeois oppression.

Point taken. I understand and I fully acknowledge that liberation is more important than the mode of production, that a revolution without these effects isn't a revolution at all, and is ultimately pointless.

I think the primary point I am trying to leave you with, is that without a transformation in the relations of production, liberation cannot follow. That while there will probably be what could be described as a transitional state in the sense of a dictatorship of the proletariat, that there is no transitional period (transitional in the sense of relations of production which are distinct from both capitalist society and communist society) between capitalist society and communism. That there is no "socialist" or "nationalized" period in between, that the mode of production we must replace capitalism with is itself and can only be achieved by the transformation of the relations of production, from which liberation from bourgeois forms of oppression can follow.

As a side note, I've called this mode of production the socialist mode of production, I'm unsure whether this is appropriate or confusing for some people here.

Anyway, I appreciate the discussion. Thanks.

Well, this may be a good note to leave this on, as in the last analysis I agree with you. Without a transformation in the relations of production, sooner or later "all the old crap will come back." Which is a quote from Marx by the way, though I forget where.

I just don't think that it can be done right away by waving a magic wand, the day after the Revolution.

And revolution is not some gradual process, it's an historic event, when one class overthrows another, that can be precisely dated, and in the aftermath of which the revolutionaries have to decide what to do next.

So I don't think there is some sort of special "transitional mode of production." Rather, you have a society leaving the capitalist mode and, hopefully at least, heading towards a socialist mode, betwixt and between, with elements of both at the same time.

I realize you find that highly unconvincing, but hopefully at least I know where you're coming from and vice versa.

-M.H.-

[La Guaneña]

This thread has derailed into an interesting discussion, and a very civilized one, by the way.