Won't fight you here at all. In total agreement--except that Marxism never explained to anybody how to run a country and lead it to socialism, with only your party, a party that even ostensibly only represented 10% of the populatoin (the workers). That's not science, and it's not Marxist. It's Blanquist, self-serving, sociopathic bullshit.
Why would an anti-democratic regime teach Marxism and call itself Marxist? What is it about Marxism that appeals so much to anti-democratic rulers? I have written my answer to this question at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no . You disagree with my answer apparently. But what's YOUR answer?
Likewise, why do you think no Marxist organization criticized the attack on white working class people (for the crime of being white) that leftists carried out in the Boston area and which I discuss in the 6th paragraph of my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/all-leftists-are-the-problem ?
Something is going on here. What do you think it is?
This is pure nominalism, John. It sounds like the narcissistic view of the trans-arrogant, that you should be jailed for using a pronoun they don't want you to use.
If somebody wants to call themselves a Marxist, without any evidence provided that he or she wants to create a multiparty, pluralistic socialist regime, why the hell should I honor their self-appellation, if I don't believe it?
What appeals to these totalitarians is the sterling shining example of the BLANQUISM that Lenin put into practice, IN THE NAME of Marxism, but which had nothing to do with it.
You need to see all of this in the CONTEXT of global struggle struggle. The rise of Blanquist regimes, instead of Marxist ones--a lot of the blame has to do with the fact that they emerged at the "weakest link" of imperialism, where there were many more problems, and not much experience, for the working class, of democratic norms.
So it is incumbent upon us, as intellectuals, to GRASP this, and promote, not a vicious, ANTI-intellectual MCCARTHYITE campaign against Marxism itself. But instead, campaign to revive the democratic CORE of Marxism, and insist that socialists grasp, comprehend, and IMPLEMENT IT.
Agreed here: "So it is incumbent upon us, as intellectuals, to GRASP this, and promote, not a vicious, ANTI-intellectual MCCARTHYITE campaign against Marxism itself. But instead, campaign to revive the democratic CORE of Marxism, and insist that socialists grasp, comprehend, and IMPLEMENT IT." Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! Good point about the parallel with the pronoun tyranny! Note my comment above as well.
What is the “democratic core” of Marxism, by which I mean that which is valuable and unique to Marxism? Thus I don’t mean any of the great ideas that were around long before Karl Marx was born such as the fact of class conflict and other ideas I discuss at https://www.pdrboston.org/marx-didn-t-invent-these-great-idea
What about the uniquely Marxist idea that capitalism is progressive despite being brutal, and Marx’s letter to a newspaper explaining that although brutal, British imperialism in India was necessary for there to be a good future in India? His letter is at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm.
This is why the Communist Party of China is perfectly consistent with Marxism in promoting capitalism there, where it also requires all levels of its education system to teach Marxism.
Just to start, it was mostly Marxists, along with others on the left, like the IWW who did major work organizing the working class into effective unions in early 20th century. It was they who mobilized against fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain along with the populations of governments that actually did as well. Again, John abandon your rigid "either/or" and acknowledge,but critically, the influence of Marxist ideology AND practice. Note that the 2nd generation of Marxist-led government have avoided the ultra-"left" (right in results) practice of turning on the very colleagues that made revolutionary practice possible: Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia as notables. They ASPIRE to a locally acceptable form of socialism without killing off dissidents.
Three years earlier, artisan Schapper, obviously under the influence of Marx and Engels, sang a very different, democratic, social republican tune. He had wrote the following passage in 1847 for the one and only issue of the CL’s Kommunist journal: [Our goal is]
a democratic State wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas…. We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. . . . We have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced … that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.iv ,
Thomas's Newsletter (your linked article you asked me to read) says that Marx correctly argued (against Blanqui) that the proletariat, when it was a minority, should allow peasant and petit bourgeois parties to participate with the proletariat in the government.
Marx also wrote in Das Kapital ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm ) that Adam Smith was right in describing the proletariat with these words: "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become," which provides the basis for a Marxist party to act in the name of the proletariat without letting actual flesh-and-blood proletarians have the real say. This is the source of the anti-democratic nature of Marxism.
"There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before."
Then he concludes:
"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution."
This Marxist notion that people cannot create an egalitarian society until a capitalist anti-egalitarian society has first developed the means of production sufficiently (and that, as noted above in Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program" ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm ), "only then" in "a higher phase of communist society" can "society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!") is simply not true. People created an egalitarian society in the relatively economically undeveloped Spain of 1936 (read about it at https://www.pdrboston.org/egalitarianism-outproduces-capitali ) and also did it way back in 300 AD as one can read about at https://www.pdrboston.org/equality-in-ad-300-mexiconew-page .
It is this false "first one has to use capitalism to develop the means of production and only then can one have 'from each according to ability, to each according to need' socialism" notion that legitimizes the anti-democratic practice of the Bolsheviks over the workers (led by Trotsky, by the way) and also the anti-democratic practice of the Communist Party of China in promoting big capitalism that treats the workers like dirt (as I discuss at https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/xi-jinpings-and-joe-bidens-good-cop?r=1iggn).
Just because Marx disagreed with Blanqui does not take away from the anti-democratic nature of his ideas.
I'm not as familiar with Adam Smith's work as I am familiar with Marx's. But again, you are committing the sophistry of begging the question: assuming what you have yet to conclude. The sentiment involved with this quote, MAY be used, by Blanquist minided revolutionaries like Lenin, to justify creating a one party state. But it might not. Those armed with a DIALECTICAL point of view, like Marx and Engels, might instead say that this "stupidity" is only the condition of the proletariat NOW. It is not a condition locked in stone, for all time. And in fact this was one of the critiques Marx made of Hegel's view of the proletariat. Hegel's solution for the problem posed to society by the rise of the proletariat, was to send them out to the colonies--like Australia for England! For Hegel, the proletariat would always and forever be too stupid, to atomized, to disorganized, to ever become aspirant as a universal, rational class (Hegel reserved that honor, ridiculously, to the Prussian bureaucracy--as did Lenin, for which he was faulted by Luxemburg in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution.). The PROCESS by which the proletariat becomes revolutionary--as it moves from be a class purely in itself, to a class for itself--is a process that raises their intelligence, their organization, their understanding of themselves and their condition within present capitalist society, and thus, as Marx and Engels wrote, they will be equipped to make their own revolution--with the help, of course, of those intellectuals from the middle class, who correctly see their self-interest and their duty as helping to lead the working class revolution.
THAT is the conception Marx and Engels held of the proletariat. Not this nonsense you are imposing on them, out of your anti-Marxist, biased ideology.
You write, "Those armed with a DIALECTICAL point of view, like Marx and Engels, might instead say that this "stupidity" is only the condition of the proletariat NOW. It is not a condition locked in stone, for all time." You illustrate the problem with Marxism in your own words here, by saying that Marxists might view working class people as stupid now even if not tomorrow. But they are NOT stupid now. And the notion that they are stupid now is the basis for saying they should not have the real say in society now, which is why Marxist regimes are so anti-democratic.
"One has to use capitalism..." is a false articulation of Marx's theory. We socialists are not using capitalism. We don't control capitalism. We are merely pointing out that no mode of production, including socialism, can arise except on the basis of the development of the means of production sufficiently necessary for its rise.
It is quite ironic that your analysis, that no such development is necessary as the basis for socialism, was offered by the artisan and Communist League member Karl Schapper in 1850. This is the same member who once, it is believed, authored the KOMMUNIST article of 1847 that I wrote of earlier--calling, in the name of the CL, for a multiparty, pluralist, democratic social republic--giving voice to the "have-nots"--as opposed to the Blanquist-Leninist ideal (if you can call it that) of barracks socialism brought about by a one party state. But by 1850, responding in demoralized fashion to the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions, Schapper along with the other artisans reverted back to their previous Blanquism. Based on this same anti-historical materialist, anti-Marxist view, Schapper now called for an immediate proletarian revolution in backward Germany, without any regard to its backward condition. And if the peasant majority opposes this, or has other ideas than a purely proletarian (minority) program, "we'll just cut off a few heads" [as in the Great French Revolution, a la Madame Guillotine!]. This is all in Richard N. Hunt's wonderful work of scholarship, a 2 volume set (get both!), THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS.
One need not accept every detail of Marx or other luminaries as "set-in-stone" scripture, but to take from them what has stood the test of time and let other things go. One of these assertions was the metaphysical concept of "victory being "inevitable."
I'm not accepting every detail of Marx as set in stone. I merely reject this particular, grotesque mischaracterization of his and Engels' political views.
Once again, you change the subject. I asked you to engage with the passage from THE KOMMUNIST, 1847, calling for a democratic social republic, and attacks the very "barracks socialism" instituted later, falsely in the name of Marxism, by the Bolsheviks. All you are doing here, INSTEAD, is to pull more quotes out of context, and make more dubious interpretations and questionable assertions, on that basis.
No point in continuing this discussion, because you are acting like a wily E. Coyote--a scoundrel. At your age? Please. Stop hanging onto your bias. Think, for a change.
"No point in continuing this discussion, because you are acting like a wily E. Coyote--a scoundrel. At your age? Please. Stop hanging onto your bias. Think, for a change.
Muting this thread. " Be careful Thomas, it is words like this that have alienated many people in the past. Do not insult!
Stunning account ! I was aware of much of this under Stalin, but not that it happened under Lenin. It reminds me a lot of what I learned recently about "The Great Leap Forward" in China in the late 50s into early 60s in China. I regard Lenin's as likely the greatest political theoretician but if indeed these horrendous practices came from his edicts, I am deeply disappointed.
Dear Jon, we need to appreciate his strengths, which were considerable, as one of the greatest communist political theoreticians of our movement, while recognizing he had his failings as well. Otherwise we get caught up in hero worship, whitewash the totalitarian errors, and become an easy for target for anti-communist propaganda by the bourgeoisie. They are served--not us--in the process.
An idea I have been developing in a new substack article (perhaps published 9-30-24), is that such hero worship, along with unthinking adherence to communist orthodoxy in general, is fertile ground for a Party's Founder Leader to stifle any and all disagreement with him, and implement his effective tyranny, undermining democratic centralism. More, perhaps, to come, if a certain, at this point unnamed, Party Leader Founder does not mend his tyrannical ways, by 9-30-24.
I concur, follow truth wherever it goes, even if painful. Not hero worship but critical appraisal. Appreciate what is valuable and let go of that which is not.
If he does mend his ways, I'll still publish the article--if I do dare to say so myself, there's some valuable stuff here!--but I'll expunge all reference, at least direct reference, to him.
Won't fight you here at all. In total agreement--except that Marxism never explained to anybody how to run a country and lead it to socialism, with only your party, a party that even ostensibly only represented 10% of the populatoin (the workers). That's not science, and it's not Marxist. It's Blanquist, self-serving, sociopathic bullshit.
Why do you think that so many oppressive regimes call themselves Marxist? The Communist Party of China teaches Marxism at all levels of the education system, while it treats the have-nots like dirt (as I discuss at https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/xi-jinpings-and-joe-bidens-good-cop?r=1iggn ).
Why would an anti-democratic regime teach Marxism and call itself Marxist? What is it about Marxism that appeals so much to anti-democratic rulers? I have written my answer to this question at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no . You disagree with my answer apparently. But what's YOUR answer?
Likewise, why do you think no Marxist organization criticized the attack on white working class people (for the crime of being white) that leftists carried out in the Boston area and which I discuss in the 6th paragraph of my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/all-leftists-are-the-problem ?
Something is going on here. What do you think it is?
This is pure nominalism, John. It sounds like the narcissistic view of the trans-arrogant, that you should be jailed for using a pronoun they don't want you to use.
If somebody wants to call themselves a Marxist, without any evidence provided that he or she wants to create a multiparty, pluralistic socialist regime, why the hell should I honor their self-appellation, if I don't believe it?
What appeals to these totalitarians is the sterling shining example of the BLANQUISM that Lenin put into practice, IN THE NAME of Marxism, but which had nothing to do with it.
You need to see all of this in the CONTEXT of global struggle struggle. The rise of Blanquist regimes, instead of Marxist ones--a lot of the blame has to do with the fact that they emerged at the "weakest link" of imperialism, where there were many more problems, and not much experience, for the working class, of democratic norms.
So it is incumbent upon us, as intellectuals, to GRASP this, and promote, not a vicious, ANTI-intellectual MCCARTHYITE campaign against Marxism itself. But instead, campaign to revive the democratic CORE of Marxism, and insist that socialists grasp, comprehend, and IMPLEMENT IT.
Agreed here: "So it is incumbent upon us, as intellectuals, to GRASP this, and promote, not a vicious, ANTI-intellectual MCCARTHYITE campaign against Marxism itself. But instead, campaign to revive the democratic CORE of Marxism, and insist that socialists grasp, comprehend, and IMPLEMENT IT." Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! Good point about the parallel with the pronoun tyranny! Note my comment above as well.
What is the “democratic core” of Marxism, by which I mean that which is valuable and unique to Marxism? Thus I don’t mean any of the great ideas that were around long before Karl Marx was born such as the fact of class conflict and other ideas I discuss at https://www.pdrboston.org/marx-didn-t-invent-these-great-idea
What about the uniquely Marxist idea that capitalism is progressive despite being brutal, and Marx’s letter to a newspaper explaining that although brutal, British imperialism in India was necessary for there to be a good future in India? His letter is at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm.
This is why the Communist Party of China is perfectly consistent with Marxism in promoting capitalism there, where it also requires all levels of its education system to teach Marxism.
Just to start, it was mostly Marxists, along with others on the left, like the IWW who did major work organizing the working class into effective unions in early 20th century. It was they who mobilized against fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain along with the populations of governments that actually did as well. Again, John abandon your rigid "either/or" and acknowledge,but critically, the influence of Marxist ideology AND practice. Note that the 2nd generation of Marxist-led government have avoided the ultra-"left" (right in results) practice of turning on the very colleagues that made revolutionary practice possible: Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia as notables. They ASPIRE to a locally acceptable form of socialism without killing off dissidents.
How do YOU account for the following? This is from my article, Was the Bolshevik Regime and Its Policies Marxist--or Blanquist? at https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/was-the-bolshevik-regime-and-its
Three years earlier, artisan Schapper, obviously under the influence of Marx and Engels, sang a very different, democratic, social republican tune. He had wrote the following passage in 1847 for the one and only issue of the CL’s Kommunist journal: [Our goal is]
a democratic State wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas…. We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. . . . We have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced … that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.iv ,
Thomas's Newsletter (your linked article you asked me to read) says that Marx correctly argued (against Blanqui) that the proletariat, when it was a minority, should allow peasant and petit bourgeois parties to participate with the proletariat in the government.
Marx also wrote in Das Kapital ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm ) that Adam Smith was right in describing the proletariat with these words: "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become," which provides the basis for a Marxist party to act in the name of the proletariat without letting actual flesh-and-blood proletarians have the real say. This is the source of the anti-democratic nature of Marxism.
Marx also wrote in 1853 ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm ) in a letter to a newspaper the following:
"There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before."
Then he concludes:
"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution."
This Marxist notion that people cannot create an egalitarian society until a capitalist anti-egalitarian society has first developed the means of production sufficiently (and that, as noted above in Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program" ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm ), "only then" in "a higher phase of communist society" can "society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!") is simply not true. People created an egalitarian society in the relatively economically undeveloped Spain of 1936 (read about it at https://www.pdrboston.org/egalitarianism-outproduces-capitali ) and also did it way back in 300 AD as one can read about at https://www.pdrboston.org/equality-in-ad-300-mexiconew-page .
It is this false "first one has to use capitalism to develop the means of production and only then can one have 'from each according to ability, to each according to need' socialism" notion that legitimizes the anti-democratic practice of the Bolsheviks over the workers (led by Trotsky, by the way) and also the anti-democratic practice of the Communist Party of China in promoting big capitalism that treats the workers like dirt (as I discuss at https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/xi-jinpings-and-joe-bidens-good-cop?r=1iggn).
Just because Marx disagreed with Blanqui does not take away from the anti-democratic nature of his ideas.
I'm not as familiar with Adam Smith's work as I am familiar with Marx's. But again, you are committing the sophistry of begging the question: assuming what you have yet to conclude. The sentiment involved with this quote, MAY be used, by Blanquist minided revolutionaries like Lenin, to justify creating a one party state. But it might not. Those armed with a DIALECTICAL point of view, like Marx and Engels, might instead say that this "stupidity" is only the condition of the proletariat NOW. It is not a condition locked in stone, for all time. And in fact this was one of the critiques Marx made of Hegel's view of the proletariat. Hegel's solution for the problem posed to society by the rise of the proletariat, was to send them out to the colonies--like Australia for England! For Hegel, the proletariat would always and forever be too stupid, to atomized, to disorganized, to ever become aspirant as a universal, rational class (Hegel reserved that honor, ridiculously, to the Prussian bureaucracy--as did Lenin, for which he was faulted by Luxemburg in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution.). The PROCESS by which the proletariat becomes revolutionary--as it moves from be a class purely in itself, to a class for itself--is a process that raises their intelligence, their organization, their understanding of themselves and their condition within present capitalist society, and thus, as Marx and Engels wrote, they will be equipped to make their own revolution--with the help, of course, of those intellectuals from the middle class, who correctly see their self-interest and their duty as helping to lead the working class revolution.
THAT is the conception Marx and Engels held of the proletariat. Not this nonsense you are imposing on them, out of your anti-Marxist, biased ideology.
Try to be just a bit more charitable, John!
You write, "Those armed with a DIALECTICAL point of view, like Marx and Engels, might instead say that this "stupidity" is only the condition of the proletariat NOW. It is not a condition locked in stone, for all time." You illustrate the problem with Marxism in your own words here, by saying that Marxists might view working class people as stupid now even if not tomorrow. But they are NOT stupid now. And the notion that they are stupid now is the basis for saying they should not have the real say in society now, which is why Marxist regimes are so anti-democratic.
"One has to use capitalism..." is a false articulation of Marx's theory. We socialists are not using capitalism. We don't control capitalism. We are merely pointing out that no mode of production, including socialism, can arise except on the basis of the development of the means of production sufficiently necessary for its rise.
It is quite ironic that your analysis, that no such development is necessary as the basis for socialism, was offered by the artisan and Communist League member Karl Schapper in 1850. This is the same member who once, it is believed, authored the KOMMUNIST article of 1847 that I wrote of earlier--calling, in the name of the CL, for a multiparty, pluralist, democratic social republic--giving voice to the "have-nots"--as opposed to the Blanquist-Leninist ideal (if you can call it that) of barracks socialism brought about by a one party state. But by 1850, responding in demoralized fashion to the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions, Schapper along with the other artisans reverted back to their previous Blanquism. Based on this same anti-historical materialist, anti-Marxist view, Schapper now called for an immediate proletarian revolution in backward Germany, without any regard to its backward condition. And if the peasant majority opposes this, or has other ideas than a purely proletarian (minority) program, "we'll just cut off a few heads" [as in the Great French Revolution, a la Madame Guillotine!]. This is all in Richard N. Hunt's wonderful work of scholarship, a 2 volume set (get both!), THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS.
One need not accept every detail of Marx or other luminaries as "set-in-stone" scripture, but to take from them what has stood the test of time and let other things go. One of these assertions was the metaphysical concept of "victory being "inevitable."
I'm not accepting every detail of Marx as set in stone. I merely reject this particular, grotesque mischaracterization of his and Engels' political views.
Once again, you change the subject. I asked you to engage with the passage from THE KOMMUNIST, 1847, calling for a democratic social republic, and attacks the very "barracks socialism" instituted later, falsely in the name of Marxism, by the Bolsheviks. All you are doing here, INSTEAD, is to pull more quotes out of context, and make more dubious interpretations and questionable assertions, on that basis.
No point in continuing this discussion, because you are acting like a wily E. Coyote--a scoundrel. At your age? Please. Stop hanging onto your bias. Think, for a change.
Muting this thread.
"No point in continuing this discussion, because you are acting like a wily E. Coyote--a scoundrel. At your age? Please. Stop hanging onto your bias. Think, for a change.
Muting this thread. " Be careful Thomas, it is words like this that have alienated many people in the past. Do not insult!
Stunning account ! I was aware of much of this under Stalin, but not that it happened under Lenin. It reminds me a lot of what I learned recently about "The Great Leap Forward" in China in the late 50s into early 60s in China. I regard Lenin's as likely the greatest political theoretician but if indeed these horrendous practices came from his edicts, I am deeply disappointed.
Dear Jon, we need to appreciate his strengths, which were considerable, as one of the greatest communist political theoreticians of our movement, while recognizing he had his failings as well. Otherwise we get caught up in hero worship, whitewash the totalitarian errors, and become an easy for target for anti-communist propaganda by the bourgeoisie. They are served--not us--in the process.
An idea I have been developing in a new substack article (perhaps published 9-30-24), is that such hero worship, along with unthinking adherence to communist orthodoxy in general, is fertile ground for a Party's Founder Leader to stifle any and all disagreement with him, and implement his effective tyranny, undermining democratic centralism. More, perhaps, to come, if a certain, at this point unnamed, Party Leader Founder does not mend his tyrannical ways, by 9-30-24.
I concur, follow truth wherever it goes, even if painful. Not hero worship but critical appraisal. Appreciate what is valuable and let go of that which is not.
If he does mend his ways, I'll still publish the article--if I do dare to say so myself, there's some valuable stuff here!--but I'll expunge all reference, at least direct reference, to him.