Why did Marx think Socialism could be achieved through peaceful, electoral means?

Your little pic has no relevance to the debate ITT at all.

And yet I'm the one quoting passages here.

So you think that a guy who advocates for the working class to be armed at all times no matter what thinks "democratic" transition is the only way to socialism?

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I've made this point already. The passage about guns was written on the eve of 1848, when Marx was being part of the assemblies of Prussia, which means, again, he was advocating revolution and insurgency in a semi-feudal, militaristic ARISTOCRACY. Try to find an equivalent passage about England or the United States or some other democracy, you imbecile.

cant be arsed too look it up but it was more along the line that it'd be "favorable" if it could be done democratically and the capitalists be "paid out"
at the same time it was pointed out that it wasn't a very likely thing
you do the studying, since you are so sincere in it i'm sure you'll find it

Stalin-chan, I'm pretty sure somebody mentioned you're German before.
I assume you read Marx in the original? How does that compare with anglo translations, anything you noted?

no, not really, except i think german is more precise, but i don't really know how to explain that
if you speak a second language you'll probably notice that it's sometimes hard to really convey an intention of rhetoric just by translating the text, but i don't think it's all that much of an issue, marxist literature is rather precise

...

What purpose does this discussion serve? If Marx had been the lukewarm socdem you paint him as then he would have been wrong and that's it.

Most arguments against "lukewarm socdems" are just appeals to authority in nature, and that authority is Marx. If they're all basically misreading him or adopting to a strawman of Marx, that's significant.

And it's fine if they decide he was wrong, as long as they don't call themselves Marxists.

Yeah I know what you mean, English is my second language as well. I've been thinking of learning German since a lot of krautbooks are available in my country, but I kind of hate it tbh. I'd like to read dudes like Kant and Hegel besides Marx as well but aesthetically it's always put me off. Seems like learning languages is so much easier as a child, I got English 70% from shitloads of vidya

yeah, uh
you said something on an issue
guess you are interested in it
so uh uhm uuuuh
how about you actually read up on it and dont act like a retard

Yeah, uhh, an exchange of information usually happens when both saids say things and back them up with sources and facts. You don't uuhhh say something and leave to the other person to find evidence of it.

And besides, even if that quote exist, the OP is still valid. That basically means peaceful, democratic transition of class power is still possible, just somewhat expensive. You have a bad argument and no support for it.

just read the translations, there is no happiness in studying german
it's a really ugly language

sides* I mean

as i said
i really dont give enough of a shit to do the homework for you, illiterate faggot little dumbass bitch ass nigga

And not for yourself either, apparently.

if you were so confident in your "throughout studying" you wouldn't sperg out over someone telling you to check your sources and read up again
as i told you before, your shit is so retarded, i dont even care enough to look it up for you
and since you are so sincere in your studying
and you are, right?
you'll find it yourself
faggot.

You're dumb and misinformed, and that's why you're a Stalinist. Now go act on your claims of "indifference" to this thread and leave it.

yeah, sure thing, illiterate triggered faggot.
guess marx and engels were wrong about their own theory after all, good thing you set over 100 years of working class movement straight with your reading comprehension and throughout and sincere research.

this thread will go down in history
revolutionism BTFO guys
he got us

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionism_(Marxism)
It's nothing new and rather well critiqued already

Nope, they're very consistent. You're just wrong about your interpretation of it all this time lmao.

Yeah, I don't have to, because you're wrong about this too. The Second International parties all took part of elections, often due to Engels' influence on the subject, Lenin defended electoral participation in the Dumas, etc. The history of working class movements is the history of unionism and electoral politics, until Stalin decided he needed a faster way and decided every country was ready for an insurgency. I guess I don't have to tell you how that worked out.

This but unironically.

Revisionism was how Bernstein's position was described, it has more to do with the ethical imperative of Socialism, the removal of class struggle from the evolution towards Socialism, and the revision of the "breakdown theory" (which the Revisionists were right about). It has nothing to do with the electoral path towards Socialism, which is something Kautsky, who attacked them on this controversy and popularized the label "Revisionism", also believed in.

this was only ever briefly the case during the so called 'third period' policy and was swiftly abandoned when they realised how it isolated the communist parties from the working class and switched to explicitly non-radical tactics of working with libs and socdems in united fronts. Overwhelmingly ML parties have been unwilling to take power by force which is in part why so many times they let a revolutionary situation pass and were genocided by american-backed despots. Stalin and MLs in general have historically been reticent and not 'adventurist' advocates of insurgency and its silly to accuse them of it.

Lmao, nice historical overview there.
Supporting reforms while having a clear communist goal in mind is entirely different from today's succdems who don't even pretend to be socialist

Marx supported reforms as a path towards Socialism, let me quote again:

I'm still waiting for someone to prove I'm wrong with passages and facts instead of just saying "no, that's not right because it doesn't feel right to me"

In Stalin's own lifetime the only period where he did not advocate suicidal adventurist revolutions was back in the mid-20s when Trotsky was the one doing that.

Marx was simply pointing out that power can change hands without drawing blood. You still need a threat of violence backing your words, the ruling class will only relinquish their power when the only alternative is death.

I've already addressed this dialectical relationship above, quoting this passage:

yeah, was to be expected tbh
why is everything you ever said a response to being triggered?

Holy shit you're still here? Imagine getting BTFO so much that you have to spergpost this hard. Sad!

projecting much?

This is literally false. Did the late 30s and 40s not happen to you?

I've addressed all points made against the OP very well. I'm the only person so far who has in fact quoted Marx, and quoted correctly. Act as childish as you want, that's expected of you people, but good lord, one would expect that a group of people who dedicate their lives to an ideology to have a more solid understanding of it, and be able to debunk my claims with ease.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but in the 30s we have the example of Germany and Spain, and in the 40s Stalin was obviously preoccupied with the war its outcomes, and pushed Communist power in as many different setting as he could, but a different logic dictated his actions then.

In Spain the comintern line was explicitly 'be as un-communist as possible' so as not to scare Britain and France into Hitler and Mussolini's arms with a communist state in spain. Hell the Comintern was also abolished entirely and loudly at that to make sure bourgeois liberals knew they could deal with the soviets just like with another country and not some rogue revolutionary state.After the war too, If the allies had agreed Germany would have quite likely been a unified bourgeois democracy.

wow it's like you're deliberately cherry-picking one part of the speech or something

t. marx

Not the user you're replying but, but here:
He suggests only that it might be possible in specific conditions for a worker's movement to gain power peacefully through democratic means, but elsewhere wrote that if workers did take power they would need to abolish the bourgeois state entirely to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.
He says exactly this in his book on The Civil War in France,
"But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

The above text was aimed at an international audience, not only a German one or at countries lacking parliamentary institutions, see:
"Written by Karl Marx as an address to the General Council of the International, with the aim of distributing to workers of all countries a clear understanding of the character and world-wide significance of the heroic struggle of the Communards and their historical experience to learn from. The book was widely circulated by 1872 it was translated into several languages and published throughout Europe and the United States."
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/intro.htm

This is completely wrong. Again, look at his writings on the Paris Commune. Marx provides concrete examples in which the working class dissolved much of the state apparatus and replaced it with institutions like the National Guard and turned the police into "revocable agents of the Commune." Marx says that the Commune broke with "modern state power", not the state power of aristocracy and feudalism. It was dissolving the apparatus of the modern bourgeois state and replacing it with a new communal state.

1. The modern bourgeois state is far more advanced the the state apparatus possessed by the bourgeoisie in the 19th century.
2. Marx would probably be very pessimistic about contemporary parliamentary and democratic movements simply going by their track record.

Don't call people imbeciles you lying fuck.

Stalin, if anything, toned down the political agitation and organizing that Communist parties engaged in. He deliberately avoided helping insurgencies and revolutions at varying times because it would have been bad for the USSR's geopolitics. For example, post-war Greece.

This.

That passage LITERALLY SUPPORTS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING THE WHOLE THREAD. The continent = autocracies like Germany, France, and Russia. Our political institutions today are like that of American and England in 19th century. Have you skipped high school history, son?

"In specific conditions" means, literally, in every single country where democracy and universal suffrage were operating: " The carrying of Universal Suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honored with that name on the Continent. Its inevitable result, here, is the political supremacy of the working class."

The Paris Commune happened during NAPOLEONIC FRANCE, an autocratic, aristocratic state. I don't know how often I have to make this argument here, but for Marx bourgeois, liberal, democracies means: peaceful reform. Autocratic, militaristic aristocracies mean: Revolution. You are all taking his writings REGARDING THOSE AUTOCRACIES out of context and turning them into generalisations, when in fact every single thing he wrote about transfer of class power in democracies is centered on electoral and union work. From a passage I've already quoted here, regarding France:

You're trying to make ahistorical, inconditional generalizations from his writings about Bonapartist France.

Any Marxist knows that we can't talk about "state power" as an ahistorical abstraction, only as a superstructural entity that relates to its material foundations. So when he talks about the Paris Commune breaking from state power, he doesn't have to specificy which one because it's implicit. Besides, for Marx, the Paris Commune was not an example of transfer of power for the proletariat, it had its limitations:

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_22.htm

That's ironically the classic "Marx didn't live to se [X]" that is used by revisionists. And I doubt he'd be pessimistic, given that he lived to see far bigger examples of anti-democratic repression than the 20th century was able to provide.

Suck my dick, midwit.

Since historical materialism is hard for you all to grasp, let me simplify everything with a request (that I have already made, and was left unanswered): find an example of Marx advocating revolution over reform in one of the liberal democracies of the 19th century (England, the U.S., etc) and I'll shut up for good. Don't come here with his writings on Russia or Bonapartist France or other semi-feudal autocracy that haven't existed for over a hundred years.

Btw, speaking of France, this is what Engels advocated for it after it reinstated elections following Bonaparte's fall:

Then you are ignorant. Democracy in the 19th century involved explicit property requirements, not implicit like now. One man, one vote only really made a breakthrough in most of the West after WWI (from fear of all the demobilized soldiers), and of course women could not vote at all until even later. The US was a bit earliest, except for the whole negro business.

At the time Marx wrote that, France was a liberal democracy

The Paris Commune happened during the same war that lead to Bonaparte's downfall, they were concomitant events. When Marx talks about the Commune, he's talking about France with the background of the Bonapartist state.

It wasn't Napoleon's army that suppressed the Commune, but the Republic's. It was the Republic that refused to release Blanqui, even as the Commune held hostages. Ot was the same republic that denied Blanqui his MP status when he was elected. Liberal democracies, even though they may seem open to ideas, are fundementally slaves to the bourgeoisie.

Stop being an idiot, the republic was a few months old, just out of war, and the Commune happened 4 years before it had its first Constitution. It was still a repressive, militarized state in transition. What it turned after that is a different question, as Marx and Engels themselves acknowledge it.

Because unlike most people who post here, he wasn't a mentally ill sociopath and understood that there was a better way.

That's the honest answer, but this place is a ☭TANKIE☭ echo chamber, filled with violent retards little better than Zig Forumsyps.

First of all, the election that made Blanqui deputy was in 1879, years after the establishment of the Republic. Other than that, your argument sounds like producing excuses for liberals. If they were truly commited to their values, they would have negotiated with the communards onstead of brutally murdering them. Also, I would like to ask: why do you think that a peaceful "revolution" is possible?

Whatever. What you're arguing is besides the point, and that's because it's obvious that you're just hastily reading Wikipedia articles trying to come up with something relevant to say here. The point is that France in 1871 could not be described as a functional democracy, and later, with whatever repressions it may had, was enough for Marx and Engel to see potential in its democratic institutions, as per

You're trying to make this about how good those liberal republics were as liberal republics, even though this is not something I talked about, and as if England and American knew no repression as well. Point is, even under these restrictions Marx and Engels advocated peaceful agitation.

Read Lenin
So in other words, the nonexistence of a militarism and a bureaucracy against the working class allows for socialism to be achieved through electoral means. However, that does not exist in the modern day. Today, revolution is the only option.

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That's … Lenin's opinion and not really at all related to what is said in the OP.

He's falsifying history here. Especially for the US, it was exactly the civil war which ended before 1870 that forced a great expansion of the bureaucratic state and army. Similarly, Britain had a huge bureaucracy by that time, to oversee the colonial empire if nothing else.

Sorry, that was a shitty reply because I've been arguing here the whole afternoon and I'm trying to be laconic so I can focus on other things as well.

Problem with what Lenin said is that his reasoning is wrong. The existence of a military and a bureaucracy are not the obstacles per se for Marx, it's the military and the bureaucracy as an outwards reflection of non-bourgeois, non-democratic, aristocratic rule. Where democratic institutions and bourgeois foundations exist, the State can be as opressive, militaristic and bureaucratic as it wants, and for them the path of the working class through the democratic institutions remain the best one.

My proof is simply this: Germany. Bismarck introduced universal suffrage in 1866, and after that Marx and Engels steadily grew used to parliaments as the main tools of the working class, even though it was as militarized and as bureaucratic as you can get. This is what Marx wrote the year after:

They grew more and more "reformistic" with the years, even though repression, such as the anti-Socialist laws, grew.

Lenin is obviously just grasping at straws and deliberately misreading Marx so he can persuade Germany to follow though with the revolution he deemed essential for the survival of Russia's own, but the facts, at least when it comes to appeal to Marx's authority, are with Kautsky.

Good thread OP

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While we're criticizing overly simplistic Leninist orthodoxy, what does Zig Forums think of Poulantzas? I haven't read anything by him but from the little I know about his work, it seems like he had the right idea.

It's been a while since I read it, but it's worth noting that even Lenin criticized the view that participation in bourgeois democracy is always useless or outdated in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

I'll do some amateur psychoanalysis here and say that the reason tiny ML organizations in western countries insist that participation in elections is useless opportunism and armed insurrection is the only way to go is so that they can feel better about not having any power and not having any popular support, so that they can comfortably retreat into their study circles and discuss all the great big things that will happen after the revolution. They're obviously not going to get guns and try to take state power, so dumbing down Marx' (and to some extent Lenin's) views on reform vs. revolution serves as an ideological justification for why it's ok that they never accomplish anything and why it's ok that nobody actually likes them.

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Agreed, It was Her turn after all.

epic

This analysis seems correct, so long as there is a functioning party of the working class with democratic means available to it.

It isn't so much bourgeois democracy he placed his faith in but rather the working class to change class rule. Lenin's reading was mistaken in , I think, but your own reading is mistaken in attributing his willingness to use a certain means with his belief under all circumstances in those means.

The user I was replying to said, "sounds like his faith is placed entirely on democratic means". If he thought that in some countries a revolution could be brought about by (peaceful) democratic methods and in others only violent methods, then he clearly didn't place his entire faith on democratic means, did he?

France under the Second Empire was not an aristocratic state. The aristocracy had already been overthrown in the previous century.
Marx wrote,
"The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hinderances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France."

France during the time of the Paris Commune was a modern state but under the rule of, basically, a dictator. The aristocracy and feudal relations - as a material base of society - had long been overthrown. Marx writes of the Second Empire, "Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions…" He is describing a modern country in which the bourgeoisie has attained hegemony, even if they now lack direct parliamentary control and must submit themselves to the rule of a dictator.

Engels, in the postcript to this same work, wrote,
"Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society, as can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally also in the democratic republic."
Engels later comments,
"This shattering of the former state power and its replacement by a new and really democratic state is described in detail in the third section of The Civil War."

It's clear based on the context here that Engels is saying that even political success in a so-called democratic republic is just the prelude to abolishing bourgeois democracy entirely and abolishing the bourgeois state.

In Anti-Duehring Engels wrote,
"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit."

Back in the post-script to Marx's Civil War in France, Engels writes,
"In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap."

My point is bringing up all these quotes is that:
1. France at this point was not an aristocratic feudal society like you said.
2. Even if France had been a democratic-republic analogous to the United States or the U.K., it still would have been seen by Marx & Engels as a repressive apparatus constructed by the bourgeoisie in order to maintain their rule. The first act of a successful workers movement in a democratic republic would have been to attempt to abolish the bourgeois republic and its state apparatus.

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Continued…

…even in liberal democracies of the West, the political establishment is notoriously corrupt and insular. They do not allow anyone into office who won't represent their interest. They will rig votes and shut candidates out of primaries before challengers can even enter an election. The developments of the past century have solidified bourgeois class rule within the democratic-republic to an unprecedented degree especially considering that the state apparatus and its powers of surveillance, policing, and repression have grown a hundred-fold.

Not really. I've provided context for everything I've quoted.

But he did specify which is my entire point!

1. In that letter Marx says the majority of the Commune wasn't socialist, which is true.
2. This has nothing to do with whether or not they transferred power to the workers, which they largely did.
Engels, in the postcript to Marx's Civil War in France, wrote:
"Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."

Marx did not live to see the birth of the modern police state and its repressive apparatus. You are saying that the 19th century liberal democracies = 20th century liberal democracies, and it's not true.

Nice moving the goalposts, faggot.

Wow, another cherry-picked quote and a lie. Engels here was discussing politics in Germany and contrasting it with France and America. He wasn't advocating for any specific program in France, since he says that "one could conceive that the old society could peacefully grow into the new but he didn't say this was certain or even likely. You are presenting this quote here as if Engels is discussing politics in France and advocating a certain program, which he wasn't at all. In other instances, as I've shown above, he is as ruthlessly critical of democratic republics as he is of absolutist monarchies with the key difference that in a democratic republic there at least exists a possibility'' for peaceful transition.
The actual source for this quote is Engels' critique of the Erfurt Program, here:
marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm

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First of all, it was Engels who wrote that, not Marx.
Second of all, he wrote that passage in 1867 over ten years before Bismarck's Anti-Socialist laws were passed.
Third, in the aforementioned critique of the Erfurt Program (1891), Engels stated:
"One can conceive that the old society may develop peacefully into the new one in countries where the representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, where, if one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way: in democratic republics such as France and the U.S.A., in monarchies such as Britain, where the imminent abdication of the dynasty in return for financial compensation is discussed in the press daily and where this dynasty is powerless against the people. But in Germany where the government is almost omnipotent and the Reichstag and all other representative bodies have no real power, to advocate such a thing in Germany, when, moreover, there is no need to do so, means removing the fig-leaf from absolutism and becoming oneself a screen for its nakedness."

This is the opposite of what Engels was saying about Germany in 1891. Engels stated that it was pointless (and simply opportunistic) to argue for peaceful reform in a society where the elected representatives did not even have real power.

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That's too long a post with way too much wrong/already addressed information for me to bother replying to it. Anyway, all you have to do is read what I've already said again and again here.

Universal Emancipation necessarily leading to socialism =/= socialism being voted in via bourgeois election