Comment on This is gold
Juice@midwest.social 1 week agoI mean…what? Marx didn’t mention state control? Marx analysed state control in several contexts. He said that communist society was “stateless” so yes he did mention state control under communism in the manifesto. He analysed the “bourgeois” state, and hownit compared with
The Marxist formulation of the state is that it is a historical/social mechanism to manage class antagonisms. The state in a capitalist country is a capitalist state, which functions to keep the capitalists in power and divide/repress the workers, so the workers can be exploited by the capitalists. So, according to Marx, the state does in fact have to be seized by a mass worker party, smashed, and then replaced with a worker’s state.
This would be a transitional stage before communism. Some people call it “socialism.” This definitely had been tried, with different kinds of successes and failures in different places at different times.
This is all extremely abstract, and dependent on the time and place where it is “tried”. If you “tried communism,” as in creating a stateless, classless, moneyless society, according to Marx, it would definitely fail. That is not how theory of change works under Marxism, kind of how you describe “evolve naturally with neighbour working with neighbour and community working with community.” Except according to Marx, this change doesn’t come about by people working together, although that will undoubtably be a huge part of it, and such an important part of it I can’t fault you for it.
But what will bring about socialism, the transitional phase where the workers have control of a “state,” and use it to suppress the capitalists ability to exploit workers for their own profits, will be working together to smash capitalism, liberate as many people as possible – more people every day from oppressive conditions, institute new forms of real democracy and cinsent, and defend this revolution from anyone who tries to take power from the masses for themselves. That practical activity is communism. So communism can he tried in our society, in that Marxism isn’t just a theory but a theory in practice.
But trying to force a capitalist society into a fully communist society will always fail. And any attempts to do so, even in the name of Marxism, are not Marxist. Marxism rejects prefigurative politics. In fact I don’t really think of Marxism as a way of predicting the future, but rather, as a way of seeing what is actually happening in our society so we can take action to change it.
slickgoat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
He mentioned state control as a criticism of the capitalist system, not advocating for a communist replacement like-for-like. He well understood the lessons of 1789 and the failings of replacing the crown with a new kind of exploitation.
Much of the concepts you list are the academic explanations for Marxism, but a lot of that have been thrust upon his theories and not what he actually wrote about. You can argue that many of them, including state control, are natural extensions of his writing, but nothing Marx wrote about, or very little, describes what happened in either China, the USSR or satellite regimes. In that sense, there is no such thing Marxism.
Juice@midwest.social 1 week ago
It sounds like you are saying something like “Marx wouldn’t have condoned the USSR/China”. I don’t see any possible way of litigating this, as it is so abstract and moralistic that it can’t really be handled by Marx’s methods. As for my taking an “academic” view, everything I said is directly supported by the works of Marx, I can pull quotes if you like, but pulling my Marxism card is a pretty lame maneuver. I’m not an academic. I learned Marxism through study of Marx and secondary sources, and real application of his ideas. You will have to work very hard to prove that I am misunderstanding Marx. On these topics we are discussing: I do not misunderstand, I have receipts, and I don’t appreciate the implication.
If you want to criticize the USSR and China feel free to do so. Marx wrote extensively on the Obschina and the possibility of peasant communes to develop into socialism without going through a Capitalist phase. The revolutions in Russia and China were just, theoretically sound, and inevitable. The necessity of a proletarian and/or peasant revolution in both countries is underscored by how utterly bourgeois revolutions failed in their own time to actually overthrow their kings and emperors. All of them degenerated back into imperial relations.
Did the USSR and China also degenerate into top-down bourgeois relations? Absolutely, you’ll get no argument from me. But Marx’s theories were successful when they allowed revolutionaries to understand and act upon real conditions in order to overthrow the old order. I am familiar with the histories and criticisms, and are able to discuss them beyond just abstractly waving toward some (one might call) authoritarian “regime.” Stalinist rejection of Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution”, or the idea that if you start a revolution, you fucking finish it, bore out in predictable ways.
But if Trotsky had seized power instead of Stalin I doubt things would have changed much. These revolutions were thrust upon the revolutionaries, if you had asked Lenin in 1916 when a revolution would occur in Russia, he might have said “not for 50 years” and then advocated for a bourgeois revolution. The Bolsheviks had deep roots among the proletariat and peasants, but the proletariat was critically underdeveloped, the revolution as a “truly Marxist” one never stood a chance. That has nothing to do with Marx or the way his theories were applied or misapplied. It has to do with the exact conditions of those countries during their revolutions, and the difficult decades that followed. In order to understand those conditions, a thorough understanding of Marx is extremely helpful. but even then, there is still immense ground for disagreement. So much so that it hardly seems practical to litigate.
I’m happy to provide direct Marx quotes to support everything I said in my first comment, I have them saved on my phone and reference them frequently. I would be more than happy to share them. The works I would cite would be the Manifesto, Critique of the Gotha Program, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and my personal favorite, The German ideology. Incidentally, TGI has a great quote that I believe defends your position:
I don’t really disagree with you on some level, but it feels like you’re trying to discredit me in order to make a point that you aren’t making an explicit case for, so excuse me if I’m grasping a bit. I would appreciate specifics in order to continue, so we aren’t just “talking past” one another.
slickgoat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I actually deeply admire your post, which is nuanced in the extreme. There is not much I can disagree in a general sense. My knowledge about Marxism comes primarily through the study of European revolutions at University level and it annoys me to see stupid memes simplify complex historical factors based upon immature current day biases.
I would beg to differ on Stalin’s attitude towards Trotsky that it was not focused upon his political ideology so much as Trotsky’s initial popularity and his potential as a rival. Trotsky was just as powerful an intellectual figure after exile as he was in Moscow. The threat need be eliminated.
The last point I might make is that we are both talking nonsense to a large extent. What historical figures choose to borrow or steal from others in order to realise some political goal is anybody’s guess. They can dip in and out of political theory at will. In this way both God and the Devil are able to quote scripture because the text contains all the justification that suits each according to their political needs.