07-29-2020, 11:52 PM
(07-29-2020, 05:14 PM)Einzige Wrote:(07-29-2020, 09:19 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: 1.. Einzige -- orthodox Marxism-Leninism is dead. It has no viable derivative in the United States.
A. I'm not a Marxist-Leninist.
It can certainly be confusing.The clarification is appreciated. I have been in heated arguments with a Stalinist.
Quote:B. Communism is a response to objective conditions which will exist, not an ideology to be implemented.
Quote:It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.
- Marx, The Holy Family
Quote:Government ownership of productive capacity is even becoming irrelevant as much of the value created in America is intellectual property, the result not so much of material creation as of imagination and staging.
Communism is not "government ownership of the means of production". Read Engels' Socialism: Utopian & Scientific, Chapter III.
Quote:But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict.
OK. I recognize the difference in two very different meanings of the word Communism. One is of officially Marxist-Leninist regimes (such as those of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, Ho Chi Minh, Tito, the Kim dynasty-in-all-but-name, Castro, and Pol Pot or of causes related to an attempt to establish some Marxist-Leninist ideology as a ruling clique, as with Trotskyites or the Shining Path (Peru). This is the official contrast to the official position of the United States on 'rightful' government that recognizes property rights.
The second is of an end stage in human development in which (if I read Marx correctly) in which all human needs are met so easily that ownership of the means of production and the enforcement of economic relationships through the State become largely irrelevant. Is this achievable? Maybe... but technologies of production will need to overtake population growth and of course the menace of anthropogenic global warming.
I have a few things to say about Donald Trump with respect to this, but that will require an analysis which requires different thinkers.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
