/marx/ - Marxism

As early as 1847 Engels noted that: "It would be desirable if [the peaceful abolition of private property] could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it... But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working toward a revolution with all their strength."

Over 100 years later, Enver Hoxha noted that: "History has proved, and the events in Chile, where it was not yet a question of socialism but of a democratic regime, again made clear, that the establishment of socialism through the parliamentary road is utterly impossible. In the first place, it must be said that up till now it has never happened that the bourgeoisie has allowed the communists to win a majority in parliament and form their own government. Even in the occasional instance where the communists and their allies have managed to ensure a balance in their favour in parliament and enter the government; this has not led to any change in the bourgeois character of the parliament or the government, and their action has never gone so far as to smash the old state machine and establish a new one."

Reforms have only ever come about as a response to mass working-class struggles, with the intention of "buying off" the workers. In periods when the working-class movement is in retreat the bourgeoisie in turn begins to scale back the gains won by the workers.

I don't see how capital being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands (a tendency discussed by every Marxist starting with Marx and Lenin) makes reformism easier to accomplish. A reduction in the income of a bourgeoisie in one country doesn't change the balance of class forces internationally, nor does it change the fact that the army, police, and other sections of the bourgeois state remain in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

>>2913

>For example if we look at the European nations which have been quietly and steadily socializing for the past half-century or so. Even the United States has gradually developed more and more of a safety net and regulations on production.

I don't see that being the case at all. Since the 1970s there's been cuts in all sorts of welfare measures and "social services" in Western Europe and the USA. The power of the trade unions, especially in the USA, has been in constant decline. Environmental and other regulations have also been scaled back.

>But suppose that after every crisis, more regulations are put into place and more state control over the management of the capitalist's enterprise essentially wrests his private ownership of the means of production away from him in the sense that he loses decision making power over it and the production and management of the capital is brought more under the control of the state.

The result is that the workers will look to the bourgeois state for security, to bourgeois politicians for promises, and to reformism for "socialism." The working-class struggle gets reduced to winning a majority of seats in a legislature so that "state control" is not scaled back by avowed capitalists, even though it is precisely through such political degeneration into parliamentarianism that the "communists" of earlier years (such as the SPD) became advocates of "people's capitalism" and dropped their demands more and more, until what regulations they called for made no inroads whatsoever on private property. Besides the fact that the army and police can intervene at any time, there's also such "checks and balances" as the Supreme Court, the President's executive orders, and all sorts of other legal means whereby reforms can be undermined or discarded altogether.

None of this is new. It was preached by the Soviet revisionists and their West European counterparts, who argued that on the basis of anti-monopoly coalitions it was possible for socialism to be built peacefully in capitalist countries. It is the same sort of logic that led Tito to praise the New Deal as a step towards socialism.

>Ultimately the abolition of private property must occur, but perhaps it can fall into place as a matter of course, rather than being pushed into existence against great reaction "ahead of time". That reaction is doomed to gradually wither away.

The capitalist state does not "wither away." At best it is forced to commit suicide in the course of a new imperialist world war in a desperate bid for competition with other capitalist states, in which conditions are created for the working-class to carry out revolution.

>In a way today we can see the rudiments of socialism being built slowly and piecemeal under the capitalist system.

As Lenin pointed out, capitalism obviously creates the sort of machinery that allows for the socialization of the economy.

In "The State and Revolution," for example, Lenin said,

>At the present the postal service is a business organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type, in which, standing over the “common” people, who are overworked and starved, one has the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic machinery of the modern state, we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite”, a mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all “state” officials in general, workmen's wages.

This holds true today, for example the development of modern computing which makes the planned development of the economy far easier than it would be in prior decades. But it doesn't mean that socialism is creeping into capitalist economies. Regulations on capitalist enterprises are not socialism. When Lenin and Stalin spoke of state-capitalism, for example, they envisaged capitalist concerns operating not only in conditions where the state was led by the proletariat, but also where the buying, selling and renting of land and means of production was illegal, something quite unlikely to be achieved through a bourgeois government.

>In the case where workers make gains under the bourgeois system, the state actually shifts to represent them to an extent and the worker's fractional control of the state increases.

This is akin to the standard bourgeois narrative, wherein the state is an arena in which different classes compete for influence. You forget that gains are *concessions* made by the capitalist class to the working-class. They do not signify that the workers have actually gained some power over the state, merely that the state has been obliged to divert some of its funding or impose certain regulations.