Part of This Series of Posts:
When defining something it is important that the definition includes all instances of the use of the word (that have real material basis) at hand. It is also necessary to note that characteristics of a word do not equal a definition as if a word was to meet a checklist criteria to be defined as something then nothing would be definable. In the case of socialism we would get the ‘not real socialism’ meme from leftcoms and other ultra-leftists, and in the case of capitalism we would get the ‘not real capitalism’ in the case of some libertarians towards all capitalism currently existing or in a more general sense towards earlier instances of capitalism such as mercantile capitalism that were not as developed as the capitalism of the industrial era today. The point is that everything is in motion and developing and to reduce everything down to a dogmatic definition, a string of words that is universal, is an incorrect line of thinking and one which gives precedence to established institutions. As Marx and Engels said:
“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity” - Karl Marx
“The thing to be done at any definite given moment of the future, the thing immediately to be done, depends of course entirely on the given historical conditions in which one has to act. But this question is in the clouds and therefore is really the statement of a phantom problem to which the answer can be - the criticism of the question itself” - Karl Marx
“[V]ery anticipation of yet to be proven results seem disrupting to me, and the reader who wants to follow me at all must resolve to ascend from the particular to the general” - Karl Marx
“[Hegel] develops his thinking not out of the object, rather he develops the object in accordance with ready-made thinking put together in the abstract sphere of logic” - Karl Marx
“But had any eighteenth-century Frenchman in the faintest idea, a priori, of the way in which the demands of the French bourgeoisie would be acomplished? The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipations of the programme of action for a revolution of the future only divert us from the struggle of the present” - Karl Marx
“[Communists] develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. I am therefore not in favour of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists clarify their ideas” - Karl Marx
“To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence” - Karl Marx
“Mr. Bray does not see that this egalitarian reflection, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world, and therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on a basis which is nothing but an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as the shadow becomes embodied again, we perceive that this body, far from being the dreamt transfiguration, is the actual body of existing society” - Karl Marx
“Mr. Proudhon does not directly assert that bourgeois life is an eternal truth for him. He says it indirectly, in that he divinises the categories which express the bourgeois relations under the form of thought” - Karl Marx
“The principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history” - Friedrich Engels
“Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day. An image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head” - Friedrich Engels
“[We should not expect to find] fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx’s works. It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation and they are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formation” - Friedrich Engels
“Our definition of life is naturally very inadequate… All definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest; To science definitions are worthless because (they are) always inadequate. The only real definition is the development of the thing itself, but this is no longer a definition” - Friedrich Engels
To define socialism we first have to define capitalism. Capitalism is defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated to make profits for those who own them. Marx described capitalism as “the anarchy of production”. Engels explained:
“For in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital” - Friedrich Engels
Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, said that:
“[Capitalism is a system of] profits in command” - Mao Zedong
Simply put capitalism is a system where profits are in command, society produces for the sake of profits. Hence from the negation of the negation: Socialism is a rational system where social ends are the primary motivator/determinant of society.
This is the end of the definition anglo box -1 -2 -3.
My way of looking at it is that capitalism being when profits are in command fits every instance of capitalism and socialism being when social ends are dominant fits every instance of socialism to have existed in material reality.
Now I know that some people will point out that Stalin described a socialist society:
“Yes, you are right, we have not yet built Communist society. It is not so easy to build such a society. You are probably aware of the difference between socialist society and Communist society. In socialist society certain inequalities in property still exist. But in socialist society there is no longer unemployment, no exploitation, no oppression of nationalities. In socialist society everyone is obliged to work, although he does not, in return for his labour receive according to his requirements, but according to the quantity and quality of the work he has performed. That is why wages, and, moreover, unequal, differentiated wages, still exist. Only when we have succeeded in creating a system under which, in return for their labour, people will receive from society, not according to the quantity and quality of the labour they perform, but according to their requirements, will it be possible to say that we have built Communist society" - J.V. Stalin
However, here he is giving a description, and it is not the only description he gave of socialism. The point is that you are not supposed to take the characteristics he describes and see this as the essence of socialism, or ahistorical criteria that define socialism. A description of characteristics is not itself a definition. To summarise the descriptors of socialism he provides, it is each according to his needs to each according to his work, abolition of unemployment, exploitation/the extraction of surplus value/wage labour and oppression of nationalities. These are of course characteristics of a socialist society. However they are not the definition of socialism itself. The definition I have outlined of socialism is a "system where social ends are the primary motivator/determinant of society” is hence correct.
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Now when it comes to the topic of Chinese Socialism. In the west it is the normal view that China is capitalist, state capitalist to be exact. However the ruling Chinese Party, the CPC, completely disagree with this assessment and have actively been engaged in the construction of their own socialism since 1949. The Chinese understanding of Marxism is among the least dogmatic, China is in real time innovating and discovering what socialism is and means:
Even when it comes to dogmatic definitions of Socialism: I have proven that China is still socialist according to them when you bend the rules of these dogmatic criteria to actually apply to material reality.
However when it comes to the question of socialism today, the burning question of the inevitability of socialism must be addressed. It is the monopolisation of capital inherent (capital accumulation) of the capitalist system as well as the conditions that arise from that monopolisation (socialisation of production) which make inevitable the development of socialism, this is how us Marxists know that socialism is inevitable, and in just the same way it is the contradictions that arise in socialism which make Communism inevitable. So from this it is no wonder that capitalists would try and remain in power with some kind of bourgeois socialism as the processes they themselves created from their own system necessitate the development of socialism. Profit (while still a still a significant determinant in smaller firms) no longer dominates society, there is no anarchy of production. Social control (social end) and holding onto their power is far more important to the capitalist elite.
Engels himself referred to bourgeois socialists (which he distinguished from us Communists) as one type of socialist in the ‘The Principles of Communism’:
As did Marx in ‘The Communist Manifesto’:
Martin Luther King Jr. also referred to the concept of socialism for the rich:
It is up to the Communist party to seize power and scientifically (serve social ends) guide this process of socialisation in the interests of the proletariat (gear society towards the implemention of serving the working masses), as either way we are heading into some kind of bourgeois socialism (or arguably have been for a long time since the Wall Street Crash due to the falling rate of profit).
As Lenin said:
The foremost proof of this (and beginning of this process) was the end of the gold standard in 1931 by the Bank of England. This was done due to Great Depression that occured from the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which caused the bank to nearly run out of gold. Gold was the direct measure of value as understood by Marx as all commodities were tied to it:
Marx himself stated that as soon as labour in it’s direct form has ceased to be the creation of wealth, that exchange value breaks down. I will explain this in further detail later:
Marx also recognised that gold was the one true universal commodity. In order for money to serve as the universal measure of value, it has to contain intrinsic value, i.e. it has to itself be a commodity imbued with a definite magnitude of labour. Marx stated that it would be impossible for the capitalist class to get around this:
This is also further elaborated on in ‘An Introduction to Karl Marx’s Capital’:
Where it is stated that “Marx could not imagine a capitalist system existing without a money commodity”. The collapse of the exchange value means the collapse of the countervailing tendency for the rate of profit, Marx talks about this in Capital Volume 3. Clearly you do not understand the LTV if you think otherwise. Surplus value is not guiding the economy. Capitalists make more money off of ground rent, which Marx predicted would be the last bit of surplus value left. the prerequisite of exchange value is commodity money.
Marx explains the collapse of exchange value via absolute overproduction of capital. Commodities can still be sold, but capitalists would not make a profit by selling them. Production based on exchange value has become incompatible with production for profit; which is to say, the capitalist cannot make a profit selling commodities at their values. How can surplus value be said to drive the economy when products are no longer profitable? Hence the M-C-M’ circuit no longer applies. Price has drastically fallen below value… so much so that it cannot be said wage labour is the primary driver of the economy. This is why Marx introduced a theory of absolute overproduction of capital, and why capitalists become national capitalists. Both Marx and Engels said “the expropriators expropriate themselves…”. Clearly something fundamental occurs in the production of commodity’s, however Commodity-Money does not exist today. Meaning the value of money is socially and politically determined, not rooted in a universal commodity. What we have since 1971 is Fiat currency. Fiat has no value in a Marxist sense because the more that is printed the less valuable it becomes as it is not tied to a universal commodity.
The point is the money made from surplus today, is not commodity money or even money as Marx defined it, it is government credit being redistributed through speculative market signals. Financial profits are nothing more than redistributed government credit, backed not by any ‘real profits’ or even production, but information signals that themselves direct production. Marx explicitly outlied how, as a prerequisite for general commodity production, abstract labour and universal exchange, there has to be a universal commodity that crystalises a definite magnitude of labour value. The need to ‘socialise’ production by using the state so as to fulfill ‘social’ interests of any kind, was precisely why Marx said socialism was inevitable, and arising out of capitalist production itself.
The idea that socialism was not inevitable is revisionism. Capital transformed into an alien, occult object of socialist planning, sustained by institutions and U.S. military violence, not economics. MMT is the Hitlerite theory of economics, made by theorists of the American Empire which is trying to save its economy through the raw power of state violence (war). Mao discovered there is still class antagonism under socialism. Socialism is not the fulfillment of your ideological, moral and psychological aspirations. It is a mode of production. The question is why does there remain a class antagonism? That was Mao’s question:
‘Socialism’ is not heaven on earth, it is a mode of production, production for social ends. I can see dogmatic responses to this which hold onto dogma of Marxism specific to another era:
Which Mao further elaborates on with his opposition to dogmatism and book worship:
Marx, Engels and Lenin all spent significant time debating fellow ‘socialists’ because of an adherence to dogmatism:
Now I know that is controversial, but to put it simply, the capitalism from Marx’s day is long dead due to its innate contradictions. We now live in a socialistic centrally planned economy for the elites. We call ourselves Communists because we want a Communist party that can implement a planned economy for society. Yes, I know socialism is synonymous with the state explicitly calling itself socialist, establishing common ownership of the means of production by directly attaching them to some political power (or co-operative) that directly controls them, etc. This view of ‘socialism’ does not recognise socialism as an actual mode of production. It only conceives socialism as a political, not economic force. Stalin explicitly rejected this notion in Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.:
Do not think of socialism as an ideal but an objective mode of production. I am saying that the capitalism of the 19th and 20th century gradually evolved through the course of history. The cycle of capitalist crisis eventually led to an increasing socialisation of production. We can observe this not only in 1929 but in 1947, 1972, 2004, and 2008 and even today as we speak. So the contradictions of capitalism led to the transformation of itself. It is only that the political and ideological superstructure has not replicated this fundamental change in the relations of production:
All that socialism boils down to is the sublation of production for profits sake to transform into production for social ends. That has already happened. The Socialism of the United States is a kind of Socialism for the rich. We as Communists want a socialism for the people. Socialism won the cold war. What remains now is a socialist civil war between the West and China.
Further proof of this comes from Michael Hudson. In his work ‘Super Imperialism’ he states that through the institutions of the IMF and the World Bank that the Western elite effectively plan the economies of the third world for the benefit of themselves. The states of today are planned by the bourgeoisie for their own benefit directly, profit is no longer the primary determinant of society. Since the end of the Vietnam War, imperialism has moved from capital exports to primarily keeping third-world countries indebted, old metrics of determining imperialist powers such as net-capital exports, no longer apply as even the United States, the foremost imperialist power in the world since the establishment of Bretton Woods, has net capital imports. The imperialism of the 21th Century is based in America’s ability to borrow, not invest. What changed was that in 1971 the gold/dollar convertability was terminated (and Bretton Woods), instead it was replaced by the petrodollar (Fiat), which pegged all petroleum exports (and essentially all trade as a result, due to the importance of energy to the economy) to the U.S. dollar. This process took two years to complete, and was the beginning of neoliberalism, where before the pioneers of bourgeois socialism wanted to implement some social-reforms at home to keep the first-world in check, others wanted to self-imperialise the country at home. It was not just privatisation but it was privatisation for the benefit of the capitalist elite who were subsidised by the government to complete the tasks previously performed by the state, planning actually increased it just became more alienated. It also has to be said that the anarchy of production does not exist to the dominating degree it once did, and as Lenin stated, imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism, a transitional phase between capitalism and what came next, we have passed to that new social order and it is socialism, albeit bourgeois socialism. James Connolly spoke all the way back in 1916 as living in the “last days of capitalism”. Rosa Luxemburg stated that it would either be “barbarism or socialism”.
Since the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash the system we live under has been synarchy, bourgeois socialism or simply put barbarism. None of this would be possible if not for the bourgeois-socialists to implement it. For example, Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune in the steel industry, and today would have wealth valued at $310 billion by today’s standards, proclaimed himself in favour of socialistic doctrines. As did John D. Rockefeller who was stated to ‘sound more like Marx than our classical image of a capitalist’. Henry Ford was stated by Kojeve “as the one great authentic Marxist of the twentieth century”. Elon Musk also proclaims himself to be a socialist, which obviously at first seems contradictory given that he is a monopoly capitalist, however given what has just been elaborated as well as all of the government subsidies his companies benefit from, it is of no suprise.
This has been a gradual process which actually was completed in 1971 with the diminishing of profit and the start of the neoliberal era which effectively brings imperialism home to the developed countries. There is no free market, for example BlackRock manage assets worth over a total of $21 Trillion with it’s Aladdin portfolio management tool, it effectively is planning these assets on a rational level. BlackRock seeks complete control, ‘surplus value’, in the Marxist sense, only matters to BlackRock insofar as it is a measure of their general investment success, as represented by the return to investors. What is more important to a BlackRock executive, how much ‘profit’ they receive as a return on investment, or the general confidence in their brand? Inspiring confidence is how acquisitions are made in this day and age. They are interested in ground rent, not surplus value, so they will prioritise their image of good management over profit, since what matters is owning everything. Amazon is also known for it’s internal planning and has been unprofitable since it’s founding and is heavily subsidised by the government while effectively being an oligopoly of ecommerce. Also companies cannot just do what they want, they have to go along with government sanctions even if that means loss, as social ends of the capitalist elite dominate.
Economically the system is (bourgeois) socialist but it is politically capitalist (as in led by the bourgeoisie), whereas China is both economically and politically socialist (as it is led by the proletariat and is ruled by a Communist system). What we need is to seize power for our class (proletariat) and scientifically address the contradictions of our society, while gearing society towards the well-being of the people as opposed to a few parasites on top.
Socialism is an objective mode of production, detractors of this piece who hold socialism as an ideal are debunked by the dialectical materialist outlook of Marxism which recognises that matter is constantly in motion:
In this bourgeois socialism the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production still dominates, carries on from the old system:
Today no organisation represents this system more than the WEF. We cannot let the Great Reset Agenda of the WEF and Club of Rome (which are at the forefront of bourgeois socialism) win out. The proponents of this agenda are the elite of the elite, the Wall Street and City of London elite. These parasites want us to own nothing and be renters of the capitalist class in every aspect of life. They want complete control over us. They do not care about the consequences of what a nuclear war would entail and see overpopulation as the greatest threat to their existence. This malthusian agenda sees us merely as ants to be squashed, they see us as in the way of their continued existence as they recognise that even with all of the propaganda and attempts at dumbing down the masses with overdoses of dopamine, that they cannot hold back the angst of class antagonism. The Great Reset is a recognition of bourgeois socialism, it seeks the ending of democracy, ending of property rights for us commoners to the gain of the bourgeoisie, overall increasing state intervention and authoritarianism to serve the neoliberal cartels. The interesting thing is that they are doing it openly, and (almost) everyone just accepts it under the guise of ‘emergency measures’. Thing that would have been unacceptable and obviously seen as aggression of the elites and the powers that may be, are now seen as completely acceptable, even by the left. For a long time the establishment had to hide the fact that it is building capital’s socialism, but it was necessary because people intrinsically understood that this is very bad for them, but now it is becoming more and more open and the Great Reset is the proof of that.
We need to overcome this bourgeois socialist system and establish proletarian socialism (Communism) and scientifically guide society towards social ends for our class. There is no going back to capitalism, we have already eclipsed it economically, it is time to end this barbarism and to put power in the hands of the people themselves, not back into the hands of smaller capitalists who will just repeat the same process all over again. We must advance forward to proletarian political power!