This thread excellently illustrates this observation of Lenin’s:
“Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of ‘pernicious sect.’ And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no ‘impartial’ social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage slavery, where Marxism has declared relentless war on wage slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as silly and naive as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages should be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.”
The hostility toward Marxism has little or nothing to do with the actual propositions of Marxism, and everything to do with bourgeois ideology which washes peoples’ brains day-in, day-out, from cradle to grave. This is illustrated by the fact that not a single poster in this thread so far has taken the OP seriously; not a single poster has so far even addressed the main idea put forward, namely, “In every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange and the social organization necessarily following from it form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch…” This is what all of Marxism is built on. At bottom, it is the economic relations that determine what a society looks like in its main outlines. From this it follows that in order to make any serious revolutionary change, the economic relations must be changed. Everything else follows from this.
Rashak Mani → The problem with any attempt at Communism or Socialism is that once power is taken… instead of having X or Y class… now you have a new Bureaucrat or Political class. Any class once in power will attempt to remains there. Using the same “we are all in this together”.
Lenin’s greatest work is State and Revolution. Here is described the Marxist theory of the state, an organization of violence, a special repressive force for the oppression of one class by another. All states have a class character, no state is neutral because the state is the product of irreconcilable class antagonisms. Therefore, the state cannot be eliminated without first eliminating classes. The way to achieve this is for the class which can only act to eliminate class divisions to take state power. This class is the proletariat, the working class. The raison d’etre of Marxists is uniting the working class to take state power, so that the working class is the ruling class. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marxists, though, don’t try to evolve out of their heads some ideal society, but look to the actual class forces at play in the world. Of particular importance for the development of Marxist theory was the Paris Commune of 1871, which, according to Marx, at long last offered the solution to the riddle of how the working class can be the ruling class. Lenin details these lessons in State and Revolution, and presents conditions for the working class to maintain political power:
“In order to destroy the state, it is necessary to convert the functions of public service into such simple operations of control and accounting as are within the reach of the vast majority of the population, and ultimately, of every single individual. And, in order to do away completely with careerism it must be made impossible for an ‘honorable,’ though unsalaried, post in the public service to be used as a springboard to a highly profitable post in the banks or joint-stock companies, as happens constantly in all the freest capitalist countries.”
The necessary pre-conditions for this are:
(1) abolition of the standing army and police, to be replaced by the whole armed people,
(2) all officials to be elected and subject to recall at any time, and
(3) no official to recieve a wage higher than that of a skilled worker.
The organizational structure of the working class as the ruling class was “discovered” in 1905 in Russia, namely workers councils, or “soviets.” In every proletarian revolution soviets have sprung up, and are the natural repository of state power by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
adaher -> THe crux of the Communist problem has always been about what to do with the 10% of the population that absolutely cannot go along with the program. In most nations, the method of dealing with that 10% is to kill them. Communism can never be moral in a nation state, only as a voluntary social compact where 100% agree to it.
Marxists have never held that the entire population is going to go along–some portion will have to be coerced. As I stated above, every state is a special repressive force for the oppression of one class by another. We call for the expropriation of the bourgeois and landlords, for the nationalization of the means of production, without compensation. The bourgeoisie will, of course, not go along with this willingly, so they will have to be suppressed. State power must pass into the hands of the proletariat in order to totally crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie. We are not pacifists. We believe in the right of self-defense and in the right to take up arms against your oppressors. But we are not bloodthirsty either. We abhor violence, but as long as classes exist there is going to be violence. It is not true, though, that the method involves excessive violence. The October Revolution took a grand total of 10 lives on all sides in Petrograd, when the working class took power. The real violence came with the counter-revolution, as the blood-soaked imperialists launched an assault on the infant state. This cost millions of lives.
qts -> I don’t agree with Engel’s thesis at all. He neglects that people struggle on their own behalf against everyone else - though some surplus time may be spent struggling for others.
This does not contradict what Marx and Engels wrote. Self-interest is not contrary to class interest. Indeed, the reason Marxists look to the working class is that the working class has an objective class interest in overthrowing imperialism. It is the only force with both the social power and the interest to do so.
Stoneburg -> Calling Marxism a religion is a cheap shot at best and ignorant at worst. It’s a philosophy.
Marxism is not a philosophy. Marxism does not set itself up as an alternative to traditional philosophy, but denies the traditional separation of the subject from nature and society. There is no valid, separate theory of knowledge. At the level of individual cognition, a theory of knowledge is derived from biological and psychological scientific investigation. At the level of social consciousness, a theory of knowledge is a constituent part of an understanding of historically concrete social relations.
dal_timgar -> The means of production and consumption is going to be a function of the current technology.
Is this a quote from Marx?
laigle -> Marx was a typical utopian philosopher of the period.
Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific gives a concise history of socialism as it arose with the utopians, and finally was put on a scientific basis by Marx. Marxists criticize the utopians for simply trying to evolve an ideal society out of their heads. But, as Marx remarked, the law is only as high as the mode of production. It is only by raising the productive level of society to the highest degree that socialism can be built. When there is scarcity, only misery can be shared.
xtisme -> The problem with your definition of ‘proletariat’ vs ‘bourgeoisie’ is that in most modern socialist/capitalist states (read the US, Japan, most of the European powers, South Korea, etc etc) the line between the two tend to blur.
Completely false. Proletarians are those who are compelled to continuously sell their labor power in order to live. Whether a worker owns some stocks or not is irrelevant to her position in relation to the means of production. Capitalists are those who own the means of production, the big bosses, who don’t have to sell their labor power, but emply others. These are the vultures that we want to expropriate and suppress. These are not the only classes in society, but they are the only classes that can act independently, and that have clear class interests with regard to property.
RickJay -> The notion that the U.S. granted women the right to vote because of the Soviet Union is absolutely preposterous
Actually, it is quite correct. It was only the “fear of god” instilled in the hearts of the capitalists that finally prompted them to give women the right to vote. The USSR was the first major state to grant full political equality to women. The U.S. jumped on the bandwagon so as not to lose too many propaganda points. Women didn’t gain the right to vote in France, Italy or Japan until after 1944. In addition, whereas the right to vote in capitalist countries is mostly cosmetic, women had actual political equality in the USSR, not just a token right to vote every few years on which member of the ruling class is going to rob and oppress the people.
pervert -> The essential problem with marxism is that economic activity is not as much of a “struggle” as the philosophy would like. The “means of production” are not a set of static resources.
In the interest of fair play, I will answer this ridiculous straw man. Marxism is based on the science of logic called dialectics, which can briefly summarized as “everything changes.” Nothing is static for a Marxist, least of all the means of production. Upon taking state power, the proletariat must re-organize the productive powers and vastly expand them. One of the lessons learned from the USSR is that a planned, collectivized economy is far superior, in terms of productive output, to capitalism.
GoHeels -> You Marxists were responsible for famine, misery, totalitarianism, state-sponsored murder, environmental disaster, mass poverty, repression, lies, and gulags in the 20th century.
The exact opposite is the case.
Soup_du_Jour -> Second is your response to my claim that proletarian revolutions in Russia and China haven’t defeated oppression is to say that they really didn’t count, as the revolutions weren’t global.
I didn’t say they “didn’t count.” I said that the reason the Russian Revolution degenerated, and the reason it eventually collapsed, was that the revolution was not extended to any of the advanced capitalist states. Socialism cannot be built in isolation, but requires the combined effort of several advanced states. This is why the Bolsheviks spent so much energy setting up the Communist International (Comintern), to distill the lessons of October in order to create revolutionary parties around the world that could lead the workers to victory. They understood that without an international revolution, they were doomed.
There are many problems with Marxism. Not least of which is that it stifles individual creativity upon the altar of sameness.
Do you pull this bourgeois rubbish right off the CNN website? Marxists seek to expand the capacity of people to develop themselves creatively. This can only be done when the means of production are in the hands of the laborers.
Why do Cubans flood into the United States if Cuba is such a “worker’s paradise?” Why did the Soviet Union have to build a wall to keep East Germans inside East Berlin? Why do people repeatedly choose capitalism over Marxism, when given the option?
They don’t. The DDR was not part of the USSR. They don’t.
**foolsguinea -> Modern republican societies already profess the underlying principles (of human rights, & equality under the law) which can give flower to the enfranchisement of the working man. **
They proclaim it, but this is an illusion. The reality is that capitalist states represent the rule of the capitalist class, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Elections are always only cosmetic. In the real institutions of power–the schools, military, police, corporations–there is no democracy whatsoever. At best, bourgeois democracy means deciding between which member of the capitalist class will administer the state, but the governments in capitalist states are nothing but a committee for managing the affairs of the entire bourgeoisie. The idea that working people can gain political power without first overthrowing the repressive mechanism of the state is reactionary utopianism.
**John Mace -> Where has Marxism been implemented for the longest amount of time and how do rate its success?
Is Marxism possible w/o a one-party state (ie, has it ever been implemented w/o also implemneting a one-party system)?**
Like I said above, Marxism is not a type of society or government, but a theory and a practice. Socialism, capitalism and communism are social systems, Marxism is not.
Socialism is not possible within a one-party state. We are for the class rule of the working class. We are for democracy–workers democracy. Democracy, as long as classes exist, can only be class democracy, democracy for a particular ruling class. Workers democracy is the only way a socialist society can be built. We are for a regime based on workers councils (soviets) which include the whole of the working people, but which exclude those who do no work or who hire labor. Soviets must encompass not only the industrial workers, but soldiers, foreign laborers, technicians, farm workers, the mass of office workers, and must have advisory roles for students, intellectuals and pensioners. Workers democracy means passionate political debate among the parties in workers councils over all the urgent political and economic problems and the alternative programs put forward for solving them. It means free and open discussion and, when the issues are serious, it means vituperative and if necessary factional struggle. Anything less than the democracy of freely elected workers councils is fake.
We fight to mobilize the international, multi-racial working class to fight for its interests as a class for the taking of power, for new October Revolutions.
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