I've actually read the full version of Das Kapital, Volume I (in portuguese, naturally), and a condensated version of the full work (which was frankly more useful, Marx in the original is excessively pendantic and repetitive).
Its funny, I think Marx's mind loops he sends readers through could benefit more from being edited out (into a condensed version, that is) than Smith's silver price lectures. Both men could do with a health dose of parataxis.
I've also read some of his journalist work and earlier essays, as well as part of his correspondence.
It was kind of the key part.
Most of Marx's bloodthirsty remarks (as well as his racist remarks) can be found in his correspondence. Capital was of course an analytical piece, he was not even supposed to make a judgement of value on Capitalism in that work (though he does so in several passages).
As for Bakunin, as I said he was hardly a role model. He was correct in criticising Marx for his authoritarianism, but he was on the whole even more bloodthirsty (and quite a bigot, too).
By virtue of my studies, I haven't had time to read much in the way of theoretical works, mainly those of a strictly historical nature. I own copies of both Kapital Vol. 1 and his dispaches for the
New York Tribune, hopefully sometime within the next year I'll actually be able to read them. As I just finished Trotsky's colossal
History of the Russian Revolution yesterday, I'm not keen on tackling another enormous codex so soon.
I wonder, though, who is he a "bigot" against? Marx, I mean, not Bakunin.
Anarcho-collectivist systems are fine with me, though I prefer communism. When I say wage slavery, I refer specifically to a system in which workers are paid wages by a capitalist who they are subjugated to.
So I should assume you agree that workers can set their own wages.
Capitalism is the current state of affairs. Socialism is the doctrine that the current state of affairs is untenable, undesirable, and all around evil, and therefore it must be abolished. Socialist systems are proposed methods of administering a post-capitalist society. Communism is merely the most popular of these methods.
This shows a clear ignorance of the Dialectic.
You mean to say that it is impossible to create socialism from the top-down; that is must instead be created from the bottom-up? I agree fully, but Marx does not. He holds that the revolution must not destroy the apparatus of the state, to be replaced with decentralized administration of life by the workers themselves, but that it should seize the state and issue decrees on how socialism ought to be implemented. If Marx's conception of "utopian socialism" is top-down reform, then Marx himself is one of those utopians he so arrogantly looks down upon.
Top-down reform means when a society is created for the working class when the creator is not of the working class. Its quite possible to hijack the operations of state and use them to empower the worker, if the hijackers themselves are the parties of the workers.
A revolution from the bottom up cannot have leaders. It cannot be lead by politicians, or "intellectual elites." It must be common endeavor of the producing classes as a whole. This is why revolutionary syndicalism succeeded in Spain, whilst Marxism failed in Russia.
This is dead wrong. This is precisely why the February Revolution, a real, spontaneous uprising against Tsarism, was handed over to the bourgeois Provisional Government. Precisely because there was no direction, the masses knew not what to do with power once they had it, so they were more than happy to “share” it with the bourgeois minister-capitalists, which was a complete betrayal of everything the workers and soldiers fought and died for. The war did not end, and they had fought for peace; they had no bread, and they had fought for it; there was no land reform, and they had fought for it; the Soviet was forced to share power, and they had fought to create it. That’s why the Bolsheviks succeeded in gaining any following at all, because the Narodniks and the Anarchists, in seeing the people as being capable of deciding their own destiny without guidance, refused it, and all they did was deliver the power they had won to a new oppressor. That is why the Bolsheviks grew into the majority party in only 6 months, and that is why anarchist revolts will
always fail, because the people need knowledgeable leaders to direct them and shape their anger into useful demonstrations and acts, and a shadow government to take over power once it has been wrested from the capitalist oppressors. Had the Bolsheviks allowed the masses to seize power in July, as they had wished to, then the Revolution would have been crushed just as the Paris Communards were, because they had not won over the countryside yet. The Bolshevik leadership saw this, because they were capable of seeing the big picture that the factory worker and peasant soldier storming the streets was not, and were able to temper the crowds enough to prevent full insurrection, because the time was not ripe. That is why a revolution
must be led by a vanguard of the people, to know what is best for the people until they can know what is best for themselves.
When capitalists argue against us, saying there is no such thing as wage-slavery because we are free to chose who we work for, what is our response? We say that the ability to pick your oppressor does not make you any less oppressed.
That holds true here, as well. The ability to vote between two or several politicians to rule over you does not make you any less oppressed by whomever happens to win the election.
No, we say that to pick from among the ruling class is not a choice; if we do away with the ruling class, and we elect and empower representatives of the proletariat, then we are not merely picking the type of poo we wish to eat.
There is no such thing as a just government, because the just society recognizes the individual liberty and right to self-determination of all its people. Government, by definition, exerts control over its citizens, thus compromising their liberty. Therefore, government is necessarily unjust.
Yes you are right. Because a society that is too free with destroy itself. As I said, you anarchists don’t seem to understand that people don’t know how to live communally any more. We have to teach them. I agree with your eventual goals, but we cannot simply wish them into being and trust people to act correctly; it won’t happen. We have to teach them, to give the old prejudices and mores time to be forgotten, and our new ones to be taught, before we can have such a society.
Have you, by any chance, been reading Trotsky? He's hardly an impartial figure when discussing anarchism, considering the great crimes he committed as part of the Bolshevik suppression of the Russian left.
I have, but it was his historical work
History of the Russian Revolution, not an ideological work. I nonetheless think him to be quite right, if he indeed thinks the things I have said, but I have not said them because he said them, as I wasn’t aware of him saying them.
Anyway, your conception of anarchism is not quite correct. Specifically, let me discuss anarcho-syndicalism. We do not simply plant explosives beneath parliament and watch the fallout; that is, indeed, no way to have a revolution, it is the way to a coup. We build the structures of anarchist administration within capitalist society. Specifically, the anarchist trade union, in federation with other unions based on both industry and locale, ultimately leading up to the IWA.
So should I assume you would defend capitalism against socialism? I suspected as much. And you wonder why the Kronstadters were massacred? Not that I approve of the actions there, but its easy to see why you would be branded a counterrevolutionary.
The Spanish revolution is the primary example. The CNT-FAI of the Spanish Revolution was not built in a day. For decades, Socialism had taken a libertarian character in Spain, and the anarchists had always been involved in the labor movement's struggle against capitalism, at great costs. The Spanish Revolution saw its success precisely because of the work of the CNT and its predecessors in organizing the workers along decentralized, libertarian lines, such that they would be fully prepared for the circumstances of the Revolution and the society to follow.
Yes I understand what you mean and I think its admirable, but you must realize that labor unions are only tools of class warfare, used to protect the worker from his employer
; they can not and should not be expected to continue long into a socialist society. The unions should probably be instrumental in cooperating with the Parties and making the revolution happen, but their authority must be yielded in the face of a true workers' state, where there is no longer anyone to defend the worker against.
Marxism, on the other hand, does nothing other than enhance the capitalist enslavement of the workers through the brutality of its inevitably state-capitalist regime. Compare the two sides in the Cold War; Bolshevist Russia and the United States. In which country was the working class better off?
Once again you fall into the old trap of using the USSR as the Exhibit A of what socialists want to create. I’ve explained before, and recently, why this is not the case.
There is no such thing as a workers' state. The state exists for the purpose of aiding a small group in ruling over a much larger one. If the producing classes are self-administering, then the state does not and can not exist.
Its like you have no concept of class-consciousness at all.
When democracy is created from the bottom, it is called "anarchy."
Not really.
Social welfare is irrelevant when all are provided with everything they need. Education does not require a state, either; should the communes so chose, they can draft a unified curriculum for their students at the Federal level, but this proposal is ultimately up to the democratic decision of the commune's people to decide, not some overarching state.
Education is the thing that requires such centralization the most, because education
must be standardized, otherwise it is not uniform, and you have crazy things being taught by loonies in different parts of the country. It should most definitely not be left up to the communes to decide.
As I have already described the anarchist principle of Federation and dismissed the relevance of social welfare, that leaves national defence. There would be no war in Socialist society, so you must be referring to the conditions of the revolution, not post-revolutionary society. I must disagree that we need the state to organize our revolutionary militia; the revolution can well occur with minimal bloodshed. While the capitalists will inevitably put up some resistance, we can use the general strike and anti-militarist propaganda to largely deal with it.
Now who sounds like Trotsky? This sounds like a passage out of
The Permanent Revolution. Socialist societies will be created one at a time, not worldwide at once. We must be able to provide for the common defense, otherwise our enemies, including the capitalists, will overrun us and ruin all we have fought for. There
will be war if we follow your anarchist plan, and we
willl lose if we have no ability to defend ourselves.
I do not believe in councils - rather direct democracy for the commune. Having given some thought to syndicalism as well, I am partial to the idea of Federations based not only on locale (i.e. federating together communes based on region) but also on industry; e.g. steel manufacturing plants would be in federation with iron ore mining, etc. as this may well be an efficient method of administering the economy.
Our societies are too large for direct democracy to be of much value, save for in small businesses or locales. I think it should be up to the people organizing to decide what is appropriate; there’s obviously no need for a worker’s council in a business of 5 people, but direct democracy in the Microsoft corporation would be disastrous and impossible.
More Marxist revisionism, I am afraid. Marx himself stated excitement on the situation in Russia, that it may well lead Europe in revolution, in a foreword to one of the later editions of the Communist Manifesto, if I recall correctly. There is no reason that the proletariat cannot cooperate with the peasantry;
Of course not, it should be expected. Russia serves as a model in some respects, most notably in the art of insurrection. The very symbol of the hammer and sickle acknowledges the union between proletarian worker and peasant, both in the body of the soldier and in the
muzhik repossessing his land from the landlord.
it occurred in Spain, so, too, did it occur in Russia, wherever it was given the chance to do so before being snuffed out by the forces of Bolshevism.
If anything, it was Bolshevism that allowed such a union to occur at all. The anarchists were content to betray the peasants, and allow the peasants to betray themselves by entrusting the minister-capitalists with power that should have been theirs.
Can you explain? I don't get this at all...
The Hegelian Dialectic. In his
Philosophy of History, Hegel put forth the idea that history runs in cycles. There was an initial society, the "thesis," which was defined by a specific type of relationship between classes and people. From thinkers or actors to the contrary arose the "antithesis," which was a way of living quite the opposite from the thesis, as the name implies, and through combining the best or strongest parts of the two, a new, more stable society was created, which is their "synthesis." And the synthesis of one cycle is the thesis of the next one. Now, he never used those words to define them, they were added later, but that's the general idea. Where Marx added to this is that he said the impetus for any and all of these changes in society is class struggle. From that idea he created what we now call Dialectical Materialism, that is, the philosophical grounding for Marxism. Using this, he attempted to use the patterns of the past to "predict" where mankind should go from the present (capitalism). He gave socialism as his anti-thesis, a society directly contrary to capitalism, and through combing the best of both worlds, we would reach communism. But I've also heard it described as the proletarian worker himself being the antithesis, so that by taking a society where he is realized to be of primary importance and synthesizing it with capitalism, which would take away the parts which contradict his importance (i.e. class struggle, wage slavery, etc), and we would be able to create communism from that.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is through an example. Let us use the most recent cycle, that is, let our Thesis be Feudalism. Feudalism has certain characteristics which make it a unique system: power is decentralized, society is very regimented and inflexibly structured, where the king has baron subjects who has duke subjects who has knight subjects who have lesser knight subjects so on and so forth until you reach the peasants on the bottom, who have nothing. Trade is primarily through barter, and levy armies are the call of the day. Now, since most people, being human, aren't content to suffer their lot in life, especially on the bottom, they're going to try and make their lives better, what we might call "moving up in the world." Over time, some peasants accumulate enough wealth to buy their freedom and become merchants, who are not bound to the land. At the same time, princes and dukes are always vying for more power amongst themselves, and when they succeed, they become more wealthy and powerful. In order to command more wealth and power, those things must become more centralized. As luck has it, the merchant needs towns as well in order to do business, so he also flocks to these towns (which are called burghers, which is where
bourgeois comes from, but also the words burgh and and burglar), which accumulate even more wealth and power for the prince who commands them. Eventually, with this rise in trade, a money economy becomes more viable, and since shiny objects also give you power to buy things with, it becomes the trade medium again.
And now, suddenly, we have a society functioning in direct conflict with that of feudalism. This is
antithesis. This was historically called mercantilism. Many aspects of the old system remained, such as the peasantry, but they are slowly diminishing. Serfdom was abolished in the 15th century for most of Western Europe, which is the same time that nations like France and Spain are solidifying themselves and their power over the lesser dukes and lords.
As this process continued, always driven by class struggle (the desire to have a better life than before, to gain more power in doing so), so these societies amassed more and more gold and wealth and riches and power, until it became necessary to store them in things like banks. Then people figured out "hey, I can let people borrow this money and pay it back later, and get a little something extra in the process!" and thus the modern bank was born. And with all this wealth and the capability to lend money, the ability of the joint stock companies to even exist was allowed, and we all know how speculation fuels the system today, so I won't even go there. So after a few centuries of this, we have the very foundation for capitalism, the
synthesis of the whole operation. The transformation is complete, and society is reorganized, and the old order is done out in favor of the new, the kings and nobility give way to the factory owner, the moneylender, the speculator.
Do you understand?
