I would like to get a perspective on these passages from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Preferably I would like for the M-Ls, Leftcoms, and remaining AnComs here to have a friendly debate about what Engels meant by this, but any perspective interests me. If this thread does become a debate please try to keep it as civil as possible because I am legitimately interested in different takes on what Engels is saying here:
Engels and the State
Oliver Foster
Ian Rodriguez
good call engels, breaking it down in layman's language
Dylan Reed
Well, he fucked up at one part. If you have State property instead of workers' control of the industries, then you do have a new class - it is the one that are handled the power to manage all of said property - the bureaucrats.
But there is of course another problem if you go in the way of workers' ownership, which is what the experimented with in Yugoslavia. There you had a sort of a market and the companies after 1953, and especially after 1965 an 1974 grew more and more independent and that is where the directors of the firms became powerful - the technocrats. You see, on paper, workers had the control and the power, but in practice, workers were cut off from the "running" of the company ,from the information, from the numbers so they mostly always voted for whatever the management decided.
Also, it turned out, that when workers have control of companies, they start becoming egoistic and want to use the surplus for higher wages instead of employing new workers - hence how unemployment and rise of inequality. came to be in Yugoslavia (not counting Kosovo and such, there were far greater troubles there). But keep in mind that Yugoslav inequality was far less than anything in the capitalist world.
Tyler Barnes
I love your innocence, user. I really do.
Anyways, what I gathered from these passages is that he's saying state ownership of the means of production within a capitalist framework aren't a good solution for the proletariat. As in, say, when SocDems ask for the state to control shit but they haven't abolished capitalism.
However, he's not arguing against the proletariat seizing state power to seize the means of production for themselves.
Juan Ortiz
Anything specific? It sounds pretty straight forward to me.
Austin Baker
I guess my main question is how Leftcoms and ancoms can reconcile this bit when both are Marxists yet are opposed to Leninism yet Lenin's theories about the State, at least as stated in the State and Revolution and Imperialism appear to be a natural progression of what Marx and Engels were already stating in the foundational works, as this user stated
I myself have been pretty comfortable calling myself a Marxist-Leninist for about a year and its largely due to the fact that when I first became interested in Leftism I saw in Lenin and at least partially in the USSR a genuine attempt to recognize in real life the theoretical attitude Marx and Engels formulated.
But Leftcoms and ancoms have told me ever since to "go back" and read more closely and think more about what Marx and Engels said and to be honest I hadn't read anything by them for quite a long time. I was expecting on a re-reading to find a line closer to "libertarian" Marxists but instead keep feeling more vindicated that Leninism is the correct line to follow so I'm confused as to what Leftcoms/AnComs are talking about
Dylan Moore
To be fair, your influence from Lenin could probably affect how you read Marx and Engels.
Jordan Thompson
Leftcoms generally emphasise Marx' The Class Struggles in France in which he emphasises the difference between the bourgeois and the proletarian state. Especially his description of the bourgeois state gives off some anti-statist vibes. However Lenin's State and Revolution is mostly based on that text, too, so it's a question of interpretation. In the end this is pointless since it doesn't matter what Marx believed, but what's adequate for the present material conditions.
Lincoln Ross
But this is is precisely what Marx and Engels and then Lenin said
Lincoln Wilson
Marx's idea of the revolution:
1. Marx recognized that over time capital becomes larger and increasingly centralized.
2. This makes it both possible and necessary for the state to intervene by attempting to direct and stabilize the economy.
3. At this point we have the possibility of workers, now organized by capital, seizing the means of production (now conveniently centralized) and the state (now acting almost as the mediator between industries.)
See pic related.
The above is important to understand because it describes the situation in which a real workers' revolution is possible: developed capitalism and a sophisticated state apparatus. The development of capitalism is supposed to lay the foundation for a new socialist society - but the birth of this society will require a political revolution so that the tools created by the old ruling class are now the tools of the workers themselves.
So the question is, what did Engels mean?
Lenin, in State and Revolution, offers some very good arguments:
"As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution “abolishing” the bourgeois state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois state does not “wither away”, but is “abolished” by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian state or semi-state."
marxists.org
But what does the proletarian "state" look like? Engels gives an answer here:
"Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states – the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts – administrative, judicial, and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers."
[…]
"Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
marxists.org
Long story short: the new proletarian state abolishes the old bourgeois state, demobilizes the standing army, strips the police of their privileges, pays government officials an ordinary wage, and replaces state-authority with a radical workers' democracy.
Juan Gray
Lenin understood correctly what Marx & Engels had meant in terms of the revolutionary process. The problem wasn't his understanding but the material conditions the Communists faced in the Russian Empire.
Lenin says here,
Our opponents told us repeatedly that we were rash in undertaking to implant socialism in an insufficiently cultured country. But they were misled by our having started from the opposite end to that prescribed by theory (the theory of pedants of all kinds), because in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, that very cultural revolution which nevertheless now confronts us.
…
This cultural revolution would now suffice to make our country a completely socialist country; but it presents immense difficulties of a purely cultural (for we are illiterate) and material character (for to be cultured we must achieve a certain development of the material means of production, we must have a certain material base).
marxists.org
So Lenin's plan proceeded in a different order than Engels imagined:
1. Seize control of the bourgeois state. Convert it into a new proletarian state.
2. Nationalize the major industries.
3. Develop & centralize production to lay the groundwork for socialism.
4. Raise the cultural level (literacy, political participation) to prepare workers for administration.
5. Merge these elements together to create socialism.
Lenin's plan was not completed. Even during his lifetime the Soviet state was largely a holdover from Tsarist times. Lenin says,
Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch—to reorganize our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, in which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganize it.
marxists.org
With the exception of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, our state apparatus is to a considerable extent a survival of the past and has undergone hardly any serious change. It has only been slightly touched up on the surface, but in all other respects it is a most typical relic of our old state machine.
marxists.org
On the social question, Lenin says:
But it will take a whole historical epoch to get the entire population into the work of the cooperatives through NEP. At best we can achieve this in one or two decades. Nevertheless, it will be a distinct historical epoch, and without this historical epoch, without universal literacy, without a proper degree of efficiency, without training the population sufficiently to acquire the habit of book reading, and without the material basis for this, without a certain sufficiency to safeguard against, say, bad harvests, famine, etc.—without this we shall not achieve our object.
marxists.org
Easton Martinez
What would you say to the idea that this was the aim of the great purges? IIRC there's a book by J. Arch Getty in which he argues that the great purges were a means of centralising power in Moscow in order to be able to start the radical transformation of the Russian economy.
Asher Turner
I guess the problem with that idea is that
1. Getty (in his later work) says there is no evidence for a real plan in the purges. There were often zig-zags in individual cases.
2. The radical transformation of the economy was already happening before the big purges were underway.
3. Many of the more prominent victims of the purges were themselves Old Bolsheviks (some of them members of the original Bolshevik faction with Lenin.) If the purges were meant to reorganize the state by removing its holdovers from the Tsarist bureaucracy - why purge Communists?
Carson Hernandez
Potential hot take: purges are things that "just happen" and should be expected in revolutions.
Xavier Collins
But not 20+ years after revolution
Camden Long
Maybe to secure the revolution, but then we have to ask "when is a revolution truly 'secure' if ever?"
Chase Cooper
I absolutely understand everything you are saying and agree with most of it. So my new question is, why do Leftcoms disagree so much with Leninism post-Lenin if you will? I see a lot of Leftcoms who are fine with Lenin and his theory but think that literally everything that happened after him was just plain and simple corruption. Why be okay with analyzing the compromises the Russian Communist Party made during Lenin's lifetime but not Stalin's?
To be sure plenty of corruption and compromise entered into Bolshevism but not particularly until after the death of Stalin and not significantly until during and after the Brehznev era. So why is it that Lenin is tolerated among Leftcoms to some extent yet everything else about the Soviet Union and its economy and states influenced by it such as Cuba are so relentlessly criticized
Alexander Anderson
*analyzing them within the context of material/historical conditions
Noah Collins
not exactly
it's not even that purging is bad, it just depends on who you're purging
Cooper Reyes
Well I'd say when you've beaten 18 armies and secured the territory and you're wielding military and state political power that you've won. Of course there are still traitors and counters in the country, but not in 1934-5-6-7-8. Most of them were already dealt with under Lenin.
Of course mixing the interests of the revolutionary party with the interests of the state was a major mistake which made it unable for revolutions to go like dominoes. In 1920 ⛏️rotsky was right, the revolution can be secure when it happens everywhere in Europe.
Tyler Watson
When you turn communism into a religious dogma and you purge people that want to explore and develop historical materialism further, then you've been doing too much purging.
Jason Ortiz
The functionality of State is a great topic, I want to contribute a bit more from a later perspective, what Mao said about Soviet Union.
In Mao's work from 1976, he said(paraphrase): Soviet Union essentially build a property ownership owned by bureaucratic class. (The Yugoslav critic, Djilas, in his the New Class had a similar explaination.) Production is essentially managed by a bureaucratic system, the socialism countries' market is still functioning under "G-W-P-W-G" capitalism logic. So essentially, real-existed socialist countries is a capitalism state without capitalism class, because, to quote Mao's terms, the equal right is still bourgeoisie right (Mao's source is from Marx's critique of gotha programme). So that, even in a socialism state, class struggle is still not over. In Mao's China, it was actually fully possible for capitalista to take back power, since the market is still there, it is contained as a socialist state, mostly because of the existence of dictatorship of proletarian. If the political environment changed (like it did changed), it is vefy easy for capitalists to come back. The exact word Mao used was "continue revolution under the dictatorship of proletarian"
Lincoln Price
Have you ever worked in a start-up? It felt even worse, yeah it's physically better since you're not shot.
Blake Moore
I have not and would probably not be capable of it.
Austin Richardson
My take on this: Mao made great point. However, practically, people can't live in an emergency state forever, one day the energy will burn out. I do agree with Zizek's take, a new type of bureaucratic system needs to be set up, to break with the bourgeois right which generates inequality.
Blake Young
It's not that complicated, even the Greeks figured it out. Everyone in the community is obliged to serve at some point in his life. A lottery pick each time would do.
Jason Richardson
I'd like to advocate for a emerging political theory called anarcho-engelism it's basically Engels but without the autism on the anarchists and liberating.
Ryder Gomez
Lenin made mistakes. The leftcoms (really, a collection of various groups) criticizes Lenin for all kinds of reasons. Bordiga was in agreement with Lenin on general matters of theory and organization except he disagreed with the ban on factions and the attempts by Comintern to transform the international communist movement into an instrument of Moscow. There were other issues, too. All of this started under Lenin's leadership and became far worse after his death.
The party under Lenin took many "tactical measures" with the explanation that they were needed due to certain conditions. When those conditions passed, new measures could be tried. So there was an understanding of the separation between theory and practice, and that the theory hasn't changed - only what needed to be done in a given circumstance. In the post-Lenin period theory was used to justify practice. This opportunism came to dominate the international communist movement after Lenin's death.
Internal debate became equated with "factionalism." Bordiga believed that factions and disagreements were a symptom and not the disease. These problems needed to be addressed through debate and discussion instead of simply decreeing "no more factions." After Lenin's death the party simply issued orders and expected people to comply. There was no more debate. Many problems happened because party leadership was not interested in and did not listen to criticism from below.
And these are only the general issues with the post-Lenin period. The actual theory of Marxism suffered greatly due to the opportunism and revisionism during this time. In his final writings Lenin said that creating the conditions for socialism would require at best one or two decades. What happened? Well, at the party congress in 1934 Stalin revised Lenin's own theory by claiming that socialism had practically been achieved. But that's another story.
Elijah Barnes
This is what happened in the Soviet Union and 60 million people were either starved or put to death. It wasn't an error, though. It was planned, by jewish supremacists, who basically took over the country after the Russian Revolution, which they started and fomented. People say that Communism doesn't work because of human nature. The truth is that it doesn't work, because of jewish nature.
Bentley Baker
Do you think you're saying anything a thousand Zig Forumsyps havn't said here before?