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Communism is the only path forward (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by SaltyAmerican@lemmy.world to c/latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world

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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Okay, thank you for sharing your views. I think I see where you are getting confused in your understanding of Marx, and why you see Marxism-Leninism as a departure despite it being a continuation of Marxism to the era of imperialism. The core problems I see are as follows:

Marx did not argue against administration, nor against vanguards, nor against the state. Communism is not flat and horizontal, it's a fully collectivized system of production and distribution, which Marx saw as necessarily requiring administrative labor. Engels referred to the stateless government as the "administration of things." Class is abolished when production and distribution is fully collectivized, and when class is abolished so too is the basis for the state. What remains is administration necessary for running society at scale.
The vanguard is not a "bureaucratic class," it is an organized subsection of the most politically advanced of the proletariat. Classes are not hierarchies, but relations to production and distribution. Just as teachers and principals are both proletarian, so are government workers.
Marx criticized the Paris Commune harshly for not establishing state power, and refusing to march on the banks. The Paris Commune did not go far enough. While it was admirable as one of the first real proletarian revolutions, it was a failure for not smashing the former state power and replacing it with a worker state.
The treatment of publicly owned and run industry as essentially the same as private is absolutely anti-Marxist. Private industry is run for accumulation and profit, and operates in commodity and capital valorization circuits. Public industry is not beholden to the profit motive, and government officials were not paid in profits, but wages. This is why socialist administrators do not see the same ballooning wealth as capitalists.

Managers are objectively not an elevated class, assuming they have the same relations to ownership of the means of production, in Marxist analysis. You don't need to read Capital for this, Marx's Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy makes Marx's position explicit:

Marx responding to Bakunin

Will the entire proletariat perhaps stand at the head of the government?

In a trade union, for example, does the whole union form its executive committee? Will all division of labour in the factory, and the various functions that correspond to this, cease? And in Bakunin’s constitution, will all ‘from bottom to top’ be ‘at the top’? Then there will certainly be no one ‘at the bottom.’ Will all members of the commune simultaneously manage the interests of its territory? Then there will be no distinction between commune and territory.

The Germans number around forty million. Will for example all forty million be member of the government?

Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.

The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed.

If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is after all himself and no other.

Then there will be no government and no state, but if there is a state, there will be both governors and slaves.

i.e. only if class rule has disappeared, and there is no state in the present political sense.

This dilemma is simply solved in the Marxists’ theory. By people’s government they understand (i.e. Bakunin) the government of the people by means of a small number of leaders, chosen (elected) by the people.

Asine! This is democratic twaddle, political drivel. Election is a political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination, 3) election has nothing of its present political character.

The universal suffrage of the whole people…

Such a thing as the whole people in today’s sense is a chimera…

…in the election of people’s representatives and rulers of the state — that is the last word of the Marxists, as also of the democratic school — [is] a lie, behind which is concealed the despotism of the governing minority, and only the more dangerously in so far as it appears as expression of the so-called people’s will.

With collective ownership the so-called people’s will vanishes, to make way for the real will of the cooperative.

So the result is: guidance of the great majority of the people by a privileged minority. But this minority, say the Marxists…

Where?

…will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers…

As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he becomes a municipal councillor…

…and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.

If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.

These confusions on your part are why you see socialist production organized by the working classes collectively as in contradiction with itself. Management and administration are socially necessary, and were always understood to be a part of communism. The anarchists disagreed with Marx and Engels, and so were kicked out of the first international (itself a proto-vanguard) along with Bakunin. You may disagree with Marx and Engels, but this does not make Lenin's continuation of Marxism a betrayal of it.

I believe that those are really the key problems here. You are reading Marx to have been an anarchist, and are therefore seeing applied Marxism as a betrayal of "Marx the anarchist," the version of Marx you believe to be authentic but which does not exist.

[–] dan@literature.cafe 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think you're responding to an argument I didn't actually make.

I never claimed that administration, coordination, or delegation are incompatible with communism. Every complex society requires administration. The question is how administrative power is organized, who exercises it, and how accountable it is. There is a fundamental difference between delegates who are directly accountable, recallable, and subordinate to workers' assemblies, and a centralized party-state whose decisions flow downward.

I also agree that Marx was not an anarchist. My argument isn't that Marx secretly agreed with Bakunin. It's that Marx's project centered on the self-emancipation of the working class, and there are multiple traditions that claim to continue that project. Marxism-Leninism is one of them, but it is not the only one.

Where we fundamentally disagree is over the meaning of social ownership. You treat state ownership under a party-state as equivalent to collective ownership. I don't. Nor do many other Marxists, including council communists, left communists, and libertarian Marxists. This is a long-standing debate within the socialist movement, not simply a misunderstanding of Marx.

Regarding the Paris Commune, Marx certainly criticized specific strategic mistakes, such as failing to act decisively against Versailles. But he also celebrated the Commune because it broke the existing bureaucratic-military state rather than simply taking it over. That is precisely why he described it as "the political form at last discovered" for working-class emancipation. The lesson isn't simply "build a stronger state"; it's that the old state apparatus cannot be used as an instrument of emancipation.

Finally, theory cannot be separated from historical practice. If the vanguard is merely an organized section of the working class, then why did Marxist-Leninist states consistently suppress independent workers' councils, autonomous unions, opposition socialist parties, and grassroots initiatives whenever they conflicted with the party? That historical pattern deserves explanation. It cannot simply be dismissed by saying that administrators are still proletarians in an abstract sense.

So my disagreement isn't based on reading Marx as an anarchist. It's based on the belief that the self-emancipation of the working class requires institutions in which workers exercise power directly, rather than through a party that claims to permanently embody their interests. That's a debate within the socialist tradition itself, not a rejection of Marx.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

I don't believe I misread you, I think you're entirely mistaken about Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and how socialist states actually function. For example, this comment here:

There is a fundamental difference between delegates who are directly accountable, recallable, and subordinate to workers’ assemblies, and a centralized party-state whose decisions flow downward.

These are not incompatible, and in fact, all of this existed simultaneously in the USSR. The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference. Recall elections, workers assemblies, and bottom-up accountability all are tools used to keep the central government accountable.

The political party is merely the formalized and organized subsection of the working class that is politically advanced. Their role is to bring up the working classes to their level. This is employed by Marx, and is also employed by every communist party. To reject itself as a potential vanguard is to limit action to a glorified book club.

As for the lessons of the Paris Commune, indeed, the old state apparatus is not sufficient. Instead, it must be smashed and replaced. After all, Engels said we ought to blame them for not exerting their power even more than they did, and failing to codify a worker-state. The Paris Commune was incredibly progressive, but it ultimately failed for very good reasons, reasons which Marx used to advance his theory of the state further.

As for why socialist states ban opposition, this speaks for itself. Historical practice shows that opposition parties are the main mechanisms by which counterrevolution can occur, and we have many lessons from the 20th century showing how allowing factionalism and organized opposition can be leveraged by imperialist powers into color revolt. The quest for communism is one that breaks down liberal ideas that endless infighting is a sign of political strength, and instead pushes for unity. Disunity is leveraged against the rest, putting proletariat against proletariat.

In conclusion, your argument against political parties bows to sponteneity, in the quest for a "pure" revolution that will not and cannot manifest. Without organizing, and making use of all your best tools available, without creating a disciplined, educated, and dedicated force for revolution, you are merely stacking the odds in the favor of the capitalists and disarming yourself. It's no coincidence that left-communists, council communists, and the like have never seen popularity outside of the west, and have never actually taken power anywhere. They are consistently on the backfoot due to relying on sloganeering in place of sound dialectical materialist analysis.

And even then, the majority of left-communists and so forth still acknowledge Lenin, to the point that Bordiga claimed to be "more Leninist than Lenin."