#just “yes and” life. become a trotskyist. why not

[milfbro]

ok so. do you like. commit to joining the trotskyists. how bad can that be for me.

I could take this as a "yes and" opportunity

[derstheviking]

Capitalism and Socialism

Marx’s 1875 formula: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, is the basis for scientific socialism. What is justified here, and why libertarian socialists must read Marx, is that the scientific foundation of a critique of political economy has already been developed, if not only exposed as a self-evident historical necessity of equality. Jean-Paul Sartre considers the materialist philosophy of Marx and Engels to be “unthinkable in the sense of an Unding, a thought which cannot stand the test of mere thought, since it is a naturalistic, pre-critical, pre-Kantian, pre-Hegelian metaphysic…the function of a Platonic ‘myth’ which helps proletarians to be revolutionaries.” When the Soviet Union adopted this maxim in their constitution as “to each according to his work” as following the customary wage payment system, instead of “to each according to his need”, Trotsky called it “this inwardly contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula”. However, in The Revolution Betrayed he seems to defend the concept of “to each according to his work” saying that the economy of Russia cannot directly transition to communism, but must pass through a transitionary stage in the development of the productive forces. In Marxian economics, the relations of production must complement the level of the development of the productive forces, so as to say that in the level of economic development of advanced capitalism (e.g. United States, Europe), the productive forces become fully developed and the revolution can only take one form. Those Stalinists that say “he who does not work, neither shall he eat”, is from a libertarian standpoint against the right of refusal to work. As a libertarian socialist, I fully believe that labor should be voluntary and that most people would in practice work, with a minority using their refusal to work right, people should be given to along Marx’s formula “to each according to need” and all organizational or work-based relations should be voluntary, such as certain examples of anarchist federalism or confederalism. Moreover, I do think that the workers’ council is the indispensable condition for political hegemony by the proletariat, so people would be highly politically involved as a basic condition of their existence, and would as so work if able (“from each according to his ability”) - does this federalism based on Soviet democracy contradict Marx’s formula, exposing Marx as an authoritarian? The goal of Marxism is to create the situation in which the maximum amount of liberty is given to the population - but the situation with liberty and freedom is complex and not seen in any way similar to right-libertarians who says that private property ownership is a right (we see property as theft). Property ownership is not a liberty in the state of nature and instead is a form of exploitation and coercion, the masses of people here in the United States are just starting to become aware of this very fact. But with a society based on Soviet democracy as I discussed, the amount of participation and power that the individual would have over his or her surroundings would constitute decisions being made on a local level, with also the existence of proletarian hegemony - which can turn into post-hegemony, and can exist in the form of counter-hegemony as well (i.e. dual power). Maybe not obvious, is the fact that Gramsci attributed the continuation of hegemony to be in the control of the intellectuals in society, similar to Althusser’s later idea of ideology as the reproduction of the means of production, but it is important to note the role of discourse in the formation of political identities. I am not going to argue that proletarian hegemony cannot manifest itself in party rule, because it can, such as China or the Soviet Union, but the early Soviet Union when there were still trade unions and workers’ councils is what we should be able to find as common ground between Leninists and libertarian Marxists as the ideal for society. So we are not opposed to ‘the Leninist freedom’ (yes, but for whom? to do what?) but rather want to ground our basic conception of freedom in left-wing libertarianism.

What presents itself as the main subject of disagreement between anarchists and Marxists is the transitionary state period from capitalism to communism. This may depend on how one defines a State, which functions one assigns it, etc. The anarchists recognize that a stateless administrative role must be fulfilled, while Marxists argue for a transitionary State socialist period after capitalism. For anarchists, we must make the immediate transition to direct democracy, and while Marxists support all forms of direct democracy, the transition to a post-scarcity way of life requires the intermediate dictatorship of the proletariat partially for the technological acceleration of the means of production. From an economic point of view, all forms of anarchism historically are forms of socialism (i.e. worker ownership of the means of production), and therefore no State bureaucracy exists under anarchism. However, Marxists view anarchism as a utopian and futile struggle, which only in certain historical situations such as Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, can direct democracy be achieved out of capitalism. To speak of the Stalinist Soviet Union’s initial support and subsequent appropriation of the Spanish Revolution, the Trotskyist/libertarian Marxist P.O.U.M. militia fully supported the anarcho-syndicalist direct democracy, despite anti-Trotskyist propaganda coming from the Soviet Union declaring them as traitors.

There exists an exaggerated metaphor in contradiction to the theory of permanent revolution, that as a tribal society could not transform into a capitalist society, neither can a feudal society transform into a socialist society. In theory, this argument is considered a form of “stagism”. There exists two distinct historical situations in which stagism can be applied. First, the existence of a bourgeois-democratic republic created through a bourgeois-democratic revolution. And second, a Workers’ State that oversees a gradual transition through capitalism. Capitalism within a transition through stagism is characterized by the acceptance of bourgeois property and the concentration of capital. It is meant to develop a democratic culture and achieve rapid urbanization and industrialization. Besides the anti-revisionism of the Maoist regime, Mao thought that due to the historical conditions of China at the time, that the model that he expected would overtake bourgeois liberal democracy worldwide, the dictatorship of the proletariat, needed to be adapted to the historical conditions of China and called his theory of the bloc of four social classes (proletariat, peasants, petty-bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie) New Democracy. He said that every specific historical situation around the world had its own unique path to democracy, and New Democracy set up a temporary alliance with the bourgeoisie (while land redistribution was still occurring), so as to combat Japanese imperialism, and win over more popular support for the Communist Party. China is an example of the latter, a workers’ State that oversees capitalist development.

Lenin in his 1917 ’The State and Revolution’ clarifies the role of revolution and the withering away of the state in Marxist theory: “As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here about the proletarian 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.” Marx stated, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Therefore, the new proletarian state must be “built from the ashes” of the bourgeois state that was abolished during the course of the socialist revolution - into a new form of organization.

As materialists, in the words of Marx and Engels, “In the social production of their existence, humans inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

This passage from the 1846 ‘The German Ideology’ by Marx and Engels is a basic statement in favor of materialism, to see consciousness as created by the socioeconomic conditions of existence around us, rather than our consciousness forming the material world. The materialist worldview, conception of history, and dialectic, is not dead or static, but dialectical reasoning creates a conflict theory based on contradictions and antagonisms and their historical resolutions, evolutions, and revolutions. In fact, while Marx and Engels formed the Communist League in 1847, a merger of the League of the Just and the Communist Correspondence Committee, the egalitarian inheritors of the left-wing of the Jacobins from the French Revolution and the 1795 Conspiracy of Equals headed by Babeuf. It wasn’t until 1871 when the Paris Commune emerged that Marx wrote ’The Civil War in France’ where he coined the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as the first post-capitalist stage of government in his theory of historical materialism, the historical outcome of a proletarian revolution that in Paris, in which existed the indispensable form of government that allowed the proletariat to exercise power - the workers’ council. Though workers’ councils as a form of government didn’t appear again until the 1905 revolutions in Russia and Poland. Then, from 1910-1920 in the Mexican Revolution. Then most famously, Soviets (workers’ council in Russian) would arise during the 1917 February and October Russian Revolutions, and in the 1918 German Revolution. While the Russian Revolution would be successful, the German Revolution was not. The word soviets entered the English language inspired by the Russian proletarian dictatorship of the Soviets, and applied in theory as soviet democracy or council communism. The form of government known a “Soviet Republic” refers to a government that is based on soviet democracy. The term “People’s Republic” dates back to the People’s Republic of Ukraine, which gained independence from Soviet Russia in 1918 as part of the Ukrainian War of Independence which started after the February Revolution in Russia when a multitude of different ethnic groups began demanding self-determination, and continuing after the October Revolution, when in southern Ukraine Nestor Makhno and his followers formed the anarchist Free Territory, and in the remaining land two Bolshevik-formed Soviet Republics were established.

The Comintern in 1928 divided history into three periods: “The “First Period” that followed World War I and saw the revolutionary upsurge and defeat of the working class, as well as a “Second Period” of capitalist consolidation for most of the decade of the 1920s…the current phase of world economy from 1928 onwards, the so-called “Third Period”, was to be a time of widespread economic collapse and mass working class radicalization. (Wikipedia)” With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933, from 1934 on the Comintern would begin advocating for the organization of “Popular Fronts” to fight the rise of fascism; these organizations were broader than the so-called “United Fronts” that emerged during the 1917 Russian Revolution to unite the minority of the revolutionary working class with large numbers of non-revolutionary workers and trade unions and simultaneously attempting to win them over to the revolutionary cause; the “Popular Fronts” included centrist, liberal and social democratic as well as revolutionary socialists, communists, and anarchists. The system of government that emerged during the Popular Front period was known as “People’s democracy”, which unlike the direct democratic nature of Soviet democracy, represented a parliamentary multi-class multi-party democracy; this change of tactics by the Comintern was directly in response to the rise of fascism in Europe. Stalin knew that the revolutions that followed World War I (1917-1923) had mostly failed and the Comintern recognized that this “Third Period” of revolution never came about. This also influenced Stalin’s national policy of “socialism in one country”.