Not could be wrong. Marx was actually wrong, along with Engels, about many things. This is not contestable. This is why we have to understand what is essential to be “Marxism” or “Marxist” and what is not, because if the standard is just “Marx said something in disagreement with you”, then nothing is Marxist. At least, unless you believe revolution first and most strongly arrived in the industrialized European nations and it did so in the early 1900s. I don’t think we’re entertaining that idea, it is just to drive home the point.
and how productive critique that remained Marxist was performed
I don’t remember seeing this.
my point was obviously that the vagaries about Marx being able to be wrong disguise that there is a difference between different contradiction to Marx, whether they are criticizing some application of the system as being incorrect or they are revising the basic system itself. Do you understand?
No, I am really not sure what you are trying to say with that. It is written very unclearly. But I will repeat myself to say that pointing out Marx is not always right is a direct response to the link OP posted, a poorly-formulated argument. You have taken it upon yourself to treat this like a damnable offense like I’m injecting esotericism, but I am not.
There are different types of “critique” and some of them are revisionist, the latter kind specifically.
Yes I know what revisionism is.
Keeping in epistemic suspense about if Marxism is actually correct that doesn’t make the revisionists ipso facto wrong, but it makes them not Marxists, just Marxist-inspired maybe-socialists.
The first part is something that is neither said nor implied by anybody in this thread nor any Marxist anarchists under discussion.
You can find lots of helpful information about the utility of centralization even in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. My apologies for not providing a reference.
Yes I have read Engels and taught this text several times, despite your intense condescension. Here is a link for you to review it. I assume the parts you would identify are in Part III, such as “Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.”
i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat, as has already been mentioned.
But then beginning on the very next line:
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole:
in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;
in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;
in our own times, the bourgeoisie.
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not “abolished”. It dies out.
In other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state. No timeline is presented outside of the necessity of abolishing class relations.
Can you tell me how this is incompatible with Marxist anarchists’ formulations? Have you ever read them? Do you think they are just stupid and didn’t read Marx before creating the entire tendency? There are very silly “Marxists” out there, so this is something you could be saying.
Not everything the Bolsheviks did was due to innovations by Lenin, and I argue that here it was a straightforward application of Marx’s model of development and the “victory of democracy”.
The extensive establishment and integration of the party and state, and therefore extended centralization, were an innovation crafted to their conditions. They discovered it to be necessary, at least from their perspectives, and it’s difficult to argue that they were not the most effective faction in opposing capitalist revanchism both external and domestic.
Edit: furthermore, and I suppose this is my fault for not being specific, I didn’t mean that an existing petite-bourgeois class that is an element of the polity of a newly-socialist nation-state would do a revolt like Ukraine did, though it’s not a completely inappropriate comparison, I meant that under some decentralized mode of production in a communist global order, there is nothing preventing the more advantages collectives from developing practically petite-bourgeois relationships as coops exploiting their neighbors. It is true that this bears some similarity to Stalin’s view on how to minimize racial violence (or so I’ve been told), but I’m not getting it from him, just the bare facts of the situation as-stipulated.
Okay. I’m not sure what to say to this, but I do want to point out that you have ignored basically the entirety of my response.
I object to the claim of sectarianism. You can be an anarchist, I don’t give a shit, but I don’t like people wearing Marx’s skin.
Not could be wrong. Marx was actually wrong, along with Engels, about many things. This is not contestable. This is why we have to understand what is essential to be “Marxism” or “Marxist” and what is not, because if the standard is just “Marx said something in disagreement with you”, then nothing is Marxist. At least, unless you believe revolution first and most strongly arrived in the industrialized European nations and it did so in the early 1900s. I don’t think we’re entertaining that idea, it is just to drive home the point.
I don’t remember seeing this.
No, I am really not sure what you are trying to say with that. It is written very unclearly. But I will repeat myself to say that pointing out Marx is not always right is a direct response to the link OP posted, a poorly-formulated argument. You have taken it upon yourself to treat this like a damnable offense like I’m injecting esotericism, but I am not.
Yes I know what revisionism is.
The first part is something that is neither said nor implied by anybody in this thread nor any Marxist anarchists under discussion.
Yes I have read Engels and taught this text several times, despite your intense condescension. Here is a link for you to review it. I assume the parts you would identify are in Part III, such as “Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.”
i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat, as has already been mentioned.
But then beginning on the very next line:
In other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state. No timeline is presented outside of the necessity of abolishing class relations.
Can you tell me how this is incompatible with Marxist anarchists’ formulations? Have you ever read them? Do you think they are just stupid and didn’t read Marx before creating the entire tendency? There are very silly “Marxists” out there, so this is something you could be saying.
The extensive establishment and integration of the party and state, and therefore extended centralization, were an innovation crafted to their conditions. They discovered it to be necessary, at least from their perspectives, and it’s difficult to argue that they were not the most effective faction in opposing capitalist revanchism both external and domestic.
Okay. I’m not sure what to say to this, but I do want to point out that you have ignored basically the entirety of my response.
Can you be a Marxist anarchist?