(11-17-2020, 02:55 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(11-17-2020, 02:15 PM)Einzige Wrote: As an actual Marxist, I see very little difference between the platforms of the Democratic Party and the Republicans. Both are ultra-capitalist, ultranationalist parties of the bourgeois and their bootlickers among the privileged sectors of the working class (the"middle-class", whose own relationship to the means of production is identical to the lowliest Third World laborer). Bill Clinton created the Imigration And Customs Enforcement agency weaponized by Trump with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996; Barack Obama was the Deporter-in-Chief. These parties are structurally and functionally identical.
As a practical matter, I reject the concept of proletarian revolution because it has never worked well. The dictatorial regimes that replace the predecessors (exclusion: Nazi Germany) prove just as dictatorial and despotic as the nasty regimes that they replaces.
Yes, Communism will be totalitarian - just as capitalism is today. You cannot exist outside of capitalist relations today; there is no way to achieve independence from money relations, no matter how skilled the individual may be (even survivalists must buy their land, pay property taxes, buy tools, etc, all to encourage them to remain in the system.). Capitalism as a mode of production is all-encompassing now. So Communism will be also.
Quote:Marxist socialism is simply the imposition of state ownership of the productive capital, and that proves simply a newfangled form of feudalism.
Wrong. Read Engels' Socialism: Utopian & Scientific Chapter III:
Quote:If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.
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, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
So what happened in the Soviet Union? It simply passed from feudalism into State capitalism, as even Lenin recognized. Per The Tax In Kind.
Quote:While the revolution in Germany is still slow in “coming forth”, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, without hesitating to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism. If there are anarchists and Left Soeialist-Revolutionaries (I recall offhand the speeches of Karelin and Ghe at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee) who indulge in Karelin-like reflections and say that it is unbecoming for us revolutionaries to “take lessons” from German imperialism, there is only one thing we can say in reply: the revolution that took these people seriously would perish irrevocably (and deservedly).
At present petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”.
Quote:Markets are much more rational than is central planning because markets take the human part out of decision-making of what gets made and what gets offered. The human part in central planning is often simply foolishness, making a surfeit of what is obsolete or substandard because such is easier than responding to consumer demand.
There is no central planning under socialism. There is social planning, in which the whole of society directs production for the whole of society, unmediated by bureaucracies or markets.
Quote:"Socialist" economies have proved backward in technological innovation (think of the old East German version of 'high tech') except in military equipment (the Drug Enforcement Agency bought some MIGs for surveillance aircraft, and after overthrowing Saddam Hussein the US bought plenty of AK-47's of Soviet design for the new Iraq).
There has never been a socialist economy.
More later.