Primitive accumulation against primitive communism

The fact that remnants survive of the way of life that existed under forms of what Engels (social-democratic buddy/sponsor of Marx) described as primitive communism enables us to study and perhaps even preserve these as a foundation for the future.

I'd really disagree with the characterization of Engels as a "social democrat," especially in the modern sense of the word. Just because he encouraged the development of socialist parties in Germany and elsewhere doesn't mean that he was only interested in "humanizing capitalism," which is the goal of most social democrats today. It's also true that both Marx and Engels made statements regarding the possibility of a peaceful/parliamentary road to socialism in certain countries (e.g. see Marx's comments on America and Britain in 1872), but they never restricted themselves to parliamentary means, nor argued that workers' tactics should be everywhere the same.

During Engels' time, the term "social democrat" itself also did not carry the same reformist connotations that it does today. It was basically synonymous with "socialist/communist," which is why revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg used it in works such as Social Reform or Revolution?.

The process of primitive accumulation is partly the process of creating free labour, i.e. freed of ties to the land that once sustained us. The acts of enclosure and the highland clearances are the most notables instances of primitive accumulation in England and Scotland respectively.

With respect to the creation of "free laborers" in the U.S., it's interesting to note that the creation of textile mills in places like New England was also accompanied by the undermining of farmers' and others' subsistence practices. The construction of dams and canals to help power the new textile mills disrupted the livelihoods of the lower classes who relied on such rivers as a food source (i.e. fishing) and in other ways. So in addition to workers' opposition to the emerging factory system from within the mills (e.g. the well-known opposition of the Factory Girls, as was captured in labor magazines like the Voice), there was also this resistance to the undermining of the lower classes' subsistence practices. Ted Steinberg discusses such developments in his book Down to Earth (see especially Ch. 4): "Long before water became a commodity for powering New England's factories, before the dams and canals produced energy, farmers relied on rivers and streams to provide food for the family economy" (58). I'm not sure to what extent such undermining of subsistence practices directly contributed to the creation of an American working class "freed" from any other means of surviving except working for a wage, but it certainly seems like the creation of textile mills in New England assisted that process.

To abbreviate Engels: this new social order will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production and institute a system with the participation of all members of society.

What could match the description of social-democracy Marx gave more than Engels' vision of a future society?

There’s nothing in Engels’ Principles of Communism, which was basically a preliminary version of the Communist Manifesto in catechism-form, that advocates for merely improving the condition of workers under capitalism, as is the goal of most social democrats today. In the quote above, Engels is saying that society as a whole should take control of industry, ending the isolated and chaotic production that characterizes capitalism, and conduct it according to a definite plan for meeting human needs (i.e. ending commodity production or production for exchange).

Engels also directly attacked bourgeois socialists (or modern-day social democrats) in the Principles of Communism (MECW Vol. 6, p. 355),

The second group [of socialists] consists of adherents of present society in whom the evils inseparable from it have awakened fears for its survival. They therefore endeavour to preserve present society but to remove the evils bound up with it. With this end in view, some of them propose measures of mere charity, and others grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretext of reorganising society, would retain the foundations of present society, and thus present society itself. These bourgeois socialists will also have to be continuously fought by the Communists, since they work for the enemies of the Communists and defend the society which it is the Communists’ aim to destroy.

You think that communism means "destroying society as whole"? What is that supposed to mean?

Engels, Marx, Luxemburg, Pannekoek etc were all Social Democrats and communists. It's just that word in its older meaning doesn't mean the same as it does now. The distinction between "social democracy" and "communism" comes with the Bolsheviks

Engels is saying that civil society as a whole should take control of industry. Precisely, there lies social-democracy. The communists, i.e. the proletariat, do not destroy society as a whole, just one element of it.

This discussion was intended to be about the destruction of primitive communism by means of primitive accumulation but has been derailed to a discussion whether Engels' petty bourgeois position within society led necessarily to his social-democracy or whether he is a true arbitrar of communism.

Your interpretation is off there mate. If not the economic order itself—the basis of class society and exploitation—then what other aspects of capitalist society do you think Engels was so eager to preserve? You also just quoted Engels saying that he was interested in destroying the whole of capitalist society, so it's unclear what you actually disagree with.

It's doubly strange that you're wanting to talk about Engels' account of primitive communism, as discussed in such works as the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, while you also (erroneously) describe him as nothing more than a "petty-bourgeois social democrat." If Engels' politics were no different from some modern-day social democrat's, then wouldn't that cast doubt on his description and praise of communistic societies (e.g. his description and praise of the Iroquois)? On the contrary, here's Engels praising the Iroquois for having mastery over their production in contrast to capitalist society, in which the whole of society is dominated by their own products/commodities (MECW Vol. 26, p. 216),

Engels wrote: The Iroquois were still far from controlling the forces of nature but within the limits set for them by nature they were masters of their production. Apart from poor harvests in their little gardens, the exhaustion of the fish stocks in their lakes and rivers, or of game in their forests, they knew what the outcome would be of their mode of gaining a livelihood. The outcome would be: means of sustenance, meagre or abundant; but it could never be unpremeditated social upheavals, the severing of gentile bonds, or the splitting of the members of gentes and tribes into antagonistic classes fighting each other. Production was carried on within the most restricted limits, but—the producers exercised control over their own product. This was the immense advantage of barbarian production that was lost with the advent of civilisation; and to win it back on the basis of the enormous control man now exercises over the forces of nature, and of the free association that is now possible, will be the task of the next generations.

The fact that remnants survive of the way of life that existed under forms of what Engels (social-democratic buddy/sponsor of Marx) described as primitive communism enables us to study and perhaps even preserve these as a foundation for the future.

The Eurocentric analysis of the periphery of primitive communism by Engels sits perfectly with his social-democracy.

So if Engels' account of primitive communism is so flawed and Euro-centric (as opposed to your favorite thinkers?), then I guess it doesn't actually enable us to learn all that much? You do also realize that "primitive communism" and "primitive/original accumulation" are not just generic terms and ideas, but rather terms and ideas coined and developed by Marx and Engels?

If you were to have also read Engels' Origin of the Family—the chief work that deals with primitive communism, which you're so eager to discuss—then you would know that he actually praises "barbarian" societies throughout the work. Engels' use of archaic terms like "barbarian" and "primitive" (which he adopted from Lewis H. Morgan, whose own anthropological writings greatly influenced Engels' work) does not signify any sort of negative appraisal of past societies or peoples. On the contrary, Engels regarded certain Indigenous peoples, such as the Iroquois, as models to emulate in terms of their mastery over production, as well as in terms of the higher social status accorded to women in such societies. He's far more critical of bourgeois "civilization" (naturally) and the modern bourgeois family, which he associates with the enslavement and degradation of women (MECW Vol. 26, p. 181),

Engels wrote: The modern individual family is based on the overt or covert domestic slavery of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules. Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the bread-winner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.

I certainly wouldn't say that there is nothing to critique in Engels' Origin of the Family (e.g. we have better anthropological and historical evidence today as compared to 140 years ago), but you don't tell us what you actually disagree with.

Yet bourgeois man's control over the forces of nature transpires to be nothing of the sort. The dams that bourgeois man builds to expropriate energy are nothing but disasters waiting to happen when faced by inclement weather.

Where does Engels suggest that people can have "complete control over nature" (or that a communist society would simply continue using science and technology the same way as under capitalism)? It reminds me of a passage by Engels in the Dialectics of Nature, as quoted by John Bellamy Foster, which directly contradicts what you're saying,

Engels wrote: Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. . . . Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

If the ideas of Engels (co-author of the Communist Manifesto) were so antithetical to those of his life long collaborator Karl Marx it seems strange that Marx never noticed this nor commented on it.

The meaning of the word "social democracy", like all political terms, was always contentested, with its meaning changing over time.

The idea that Pannekoek and Luxemburg did not take proletarian self emancipation seriously is laughable. What evidence do you have for that?

I think your mistake is thinking that "social democracy" had some kind of fixed meaning - state ownership of means of production perhaps -when it didn't. Instead we have to look at what the people using the particular term at a particular time meant by it.

"I know that Engels is sometimes co-credited with authorship of the Manifesto but it does not ring true to me. I think that Jenny Marx probably had more input into its composition."

That's pamphlet had *always* been credited to them both. And nowhere has it been suggested otherwise. Why make stuff up? Weird.

Now you think someone was saying that Engels wanted to demolish all housing? Wow.

There's seems little point continuing this exchange.

Of course Engels was not a social democrat in today's sense -- but today's sense came about because of the strategy he and Marx insisted the working class follow, namely standing in elections. As Bakunin correctly predicted, this simply generated reformism.

I don’t really think Marx and Engels are responsible for the reformism of today’s social democrats, or the activities of any other "socialists/Marxists" (Stalin, Mao etc.) throughout history who claimed to have correctly embodied their ideas.

If you also want to talk about strategic blunders, then let's also mention Bakunin’s call on Russian student-radicals to “go to the people/narod” in 1873, which didn't quite succeed in making socialists out of the Russian peasantry. See for example his book Statism and Anarchy, which appeared in 1873 and directly contributed to the Going to the People Movement a year later,

Bakunin wrote: In such a situation, what can our intellectual proletariat do, our honest, sincere, utterly dedicated social-revolutionary Russian youth? Without question they must go to the people, because today—and this is true everywhere, but especially in Russia—outside of the people, outside of the multi-million-strong laboring masses, there is neither life, nor cause, nor future.

Bakunin wrote: However beclouded our peasant may be by his senseless historical faith in the tsar, he is finally beginning to understand that himself. And how could he help but understand it! For ten years now, from all corners of Russia he has been sending his deputies to petition the tsar, and they have all heard but one answer from the tsar’s own lips: “You will have no other freedom!”

No, say what you will, the Russian peasant may be ignorant, but he is no fool.

Rather than winning the peasantry over to socialism, the Movement mostly resulted in peasants turning the student-radicals—who had dressed up as peasants in order to infiltrate peasants’ communities—over to Tsarist authorities. Bakunin had even noted the reactionary character of the Russian peasantry (e.g. peasants’ admiration for the Tsar) in Statism and Anarchy, yet still portrayed them as if they were "ready to revolt."

If anything, Bakunin bore more direct responsibility for the imprisonment of Russian socialists, through his mistaken belief in the receptiveness of Russian peasants to revolutionary ideas, than Marx and Engels did for the reformism of today’s social democrats. Marx and Engels were not really to blame for the emergence of a reformist faction within the SPD, let alone the crushing of the German Revolution by this faction later on, especially when they consistently fought against such elements (e.g. see Marx and Engels' "Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke and Others" from 1879).

While you're here by the way, you might also want to update the AFAQ and remove the part where you falsely claim that Marx "stole" the expression concerning the self-emancipation of the working class, as it appears in the 1864 Rules of the International, from Flora Tristan,

the AFAQ wrote: Marx’s use of the famous expression—"the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself"—dates from 1865, 17 years after Proudhon’s comment that "the proletariat must emancipate itself." Moreover, as Libertarian Marxist Paul Mattick pointed out, Marx was not even the first person to use the expression "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself" as Flora Tristan used it in 1843. [Marx and Keynes, p. 333] Thus a case could be made that Marx was, in fact, the third "major socialist thinker to make the principle of self-emancipation—the principle that socialism could only be brought into being by the self-mobilisation and self-organisation of the working class—a fundamental aspect of the socialist project."

First, Marx’s use of the "famous expression” in the Rules dates from 1864. Second, Tristan never even used the expression, and had you actually read her using it, then you would have directly quoted it—but you didn’t directly quote her, because her use of the expression doesn’t exist! It's true that Tristan says things similar to the “famous expression” in her 1843 book The Workers’ Union (as did countless people before her—there is nothing unique about the expression or idea itself), but she never used the exact wording as in the Rules of the International. It's also worth pointing out that Tristan, as evidenced by her book, appealed extensively to the upper classes in the process of securing the financial and other resources needed to construct her “workers' palaces.” As the translator's introduction to that book correctly notes, Tristan was far from a revolutionary socialist,

Beverly Livingston wrote: While recognizing the inherent antagonisms of class society, she nonetheless advocated co-operation for peaceful reform, believing bourgeois and upper-class participation feasible and desirable in the workers' struggle. Her challenge did not attempt to subvert private enterprise or deny the manufacturer's right to compete for profits, and she did not call for the total dismantling of the economic order; she simply and soundly demanded a fair share for the laboring poor.

I also have other corrections to the AFAQ if you'd like me to share.

Of course Engels was not a social democrat in today's sense -- but today's sense came about because of the strategy he and Marx insisted the working class follow, namely standing in elections. As Bakunin correctly predicted, this simply generated reformism.

Let's also not forget the time Bakunin, the supposed anarchist-abstentionist, encouraged his friend (no, not his murderer-friend Nechaev, who tried getting him out of translating Capital—arguably a far better use of his time—into Russian by sending some threatening letters) Carlo Gambuzzi to become a candidate for Deputy from Naples (Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 218),

Bakunin wrote: You will perhaps be surprised that I, a determined and passionate abstentionist from politics, should now advise my friends [members of the Alliance—Dolgoff] to become deputies—this is because circumstances have changed. First, all my friends, and most assuredly yourself, are so inspired by our ideas, our principles, that there is no danger that you will forget, deform, or abandon them, or that you will fall back into the old political habits. Second, times have become so grave, the danger menacing the liberty of all countries so formidable, that all men of good will must step into the breach, and especially our friends, who must be in a position to exercise the greatest possible influence on events. . . .

So you're also wrong about Bakunin's opposition to socialists standing in elections; he was for it so long as it was one of his dodgy "anarchist" friends.

About the main topic, Marx could name Primitive Accumulation something else and we could still understand from that chapter that process of expropriation was ruthless and bloody. Is that process still going? I think it is. When a kind of product or service becomes profitable, small producers or service providers will lose business (property) and they become wage slaves by larger corporations or capitalists or even states.
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About the other discussion, the problem with Marx and Engels concept of revolution is that they thought that a democratic state is necessary to lead workers to a classless anarchist society called communist society. What they couldn’t see is the force of desire to dominate in human beings - a cultural trend. This is why, contrary to what they wished, the working class didn’t get a party, they got many competing communist parties, parties that all were managed by authoritarian mentality. Revolution must be anti-authoritarianism to form a new way of living, which is an effort to create a new culture (way of living) for survival, prosperity, and recreation. We may have good jobs, enough money, and a lot of fun, but all of these are created through authoritarian mentality. It is not economics stupid; it is authoritarian mentality. Also, this is why Marxists cannot lead feminist revolution or real anti-imperialist revolution (without becoming one). Also, they cannot have a non-hierarchical organization.
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See, the problem with Marx and Marxists is not just the way they will behave after overthrowing the states, the problem is the way of doing it too. States must be overthrown by learned anti-authoritarian mentality. They wrongly think that the issue is just economic policy, missing the fact that the mind that make the policy is actively at work, not the “matter.”

I think sometimes words become problems and we need to go to definition in order not to become fools. So, I drop discussion about “social democracy” thing.
So far, this is my understanding and view of Marx and Engels’ plan when they were alive. I am always willing to change my mind. Don't forget, it is about social democracy, but without using the term.
My View:
I would call both Marx and Engels socialists who wanted to create a political party for the working class. Workers who accepted their program were those who have gained class consciousness. So, workers with class consciousness are those who have become socialists by Marxian terms. By Marx suggestion, their political party must get the state power. I think their way of having state power was not important for them, it could be by winning in election and becoming majority, or by violent uprising of working class, both under the hierarchical leadership of the party.
Both Marx and Engels were for gaining state power to plan socialist planning of the entire economy hoping that their historical materialism is correct and economic reform will create more class consciousness or socialist workers. This completely matches their view of the relationship between the structure of economy and ideology.
My assessment:
The problem with their plan (actually, their ideology) was (and is with current Marxists) that they couldn’t see that authoritarianism is a psychological mode which destroys the integrity of any political institution, and, by its definition, it should. Why couldn’t they see this fact? I think because they didn’t think well enough about their historical materialism. They simply ignored human mind hoping that their theory explains human mind.

Yes, I referenced Marxist Paul Mattick on the matter -- presumably he was claiming that Marx "stole" the expression as well? And I took him as a reliable source on the matter -- I did not have Tristian's book at the time (I have it now but not got around to read it yet -- sorry for not being able to read everything).

Mattick never even mentioned Tristan—he quoted Rubel who referenced her. Here's what Mattick actually said (with the quote originating from Rubel's "Reflections on Utopia and Revolution" in the anthology Socialist Humanism):

Mattick wrote: For a socialist revolution must mean precisely the creation of a social structure in which the producers themselves control their product and its distribution. It is conceivable only as one made by the working class which ends social class relations. "What Marx – and before him, in 1843, Flora Tristan – formulated in one single proposition, namely, that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’, remains the implicit postulate of all genuine socialist thought" (Mattick 333).

If you wanted to cite/paraphrase the Rubel quote, then do that instead of falsely claiming that Mattick said that Tristan was first to employ the "famous expression" from the Rules. If I recall correctly, Rubel also never claimed that Tristan was the first to use any "expression," so you're really just making stuff up, guided as you are by your intense dislike of Marx and Engels.

I guess no one should make a comment on anything until they read everything related to it (I won't write another word on Marx and Engels until I finish all 50 volumes of their Collected Works...)

You shouldn't lie. And if you're so averse to doing actual research and honestly presenting your findings, then maybe you shouldn't write.

So the Russian socialists should have just ignored the peasantry and made no attempt to win them over to socialist ideas? Interesting. Presumably they should have waited until economic development ensured that the peasantry was eliminated? Also, I wonder if any town-based socialists were informed upon by workers?

Are you suggesting that Marx and Engels advocated the destruction of the Russian mir/commune and the development of capitalism in Russia, when Marx actually bitterly condemned such developments in numerous writings? Engels also wrote (e.g. "On Social Relations in Russia") about the possibility of Russia being spared from capitalist development through the success of revolution in Western Europe, so I'm not quite sure what you're talking about there. I also don't claim to know exactly which strategy socialists should have pursued in nineteenth-century Russia, but flocking to the peasantry (while also pretending to be peasants themselves) in order to convert them to socialist ideas would probably be on the lower end of my list of proposals. Of course Bakunin was also not the only influence on the student-radicals.

Ah, right, they are not responsible for the outcome of applying the strategy they advocated and split the International over. Seriously?

Yeah, Marx and Engels are not responsible for the bourgeois/reformist "socialists" of today who they repeatedly criticized in their own time, as should be obvious. They are also not responsible for the activities of any of the famous "socialists/Marxists" throughout the twentieth century (Stalin, Mao etc.) who claimed to have correctly embodied their ideas. I'm not quite sure what makes you think that they are.

@westartfromhere

"The working class, by necessity, is now the most resolute and determined section of civil society. We are as a whole, the communist party."

In manifesto they were not in a situation to have any party. So, they thought of a party as a possibility in future. What you are saying is their concept of what a worker’s party should be, it is not what they would do if they had the opportunity.

Also, this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm

Do you think you can argue that Marx wouldn't join that Party in France if he could? I think you cannot.

@westartfromhere
I don't understand what you mean, Party Ouvrier was a political party.
Wish you well!

@westartfromhere

Manifesto was written by Marx and Engels. The Preamble is a good document to judge that Marx was interested in party politics. Also, Marx critique of Gotha program is another one.
what do you think about this:
"A rotten spirit is making itself felt in our Party in Germany, not so much among the masses as among the leaders (upper class and “workers”)."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/letters/77_10_19.htm

@westartfromhere

Do you agree that The Preamble and the letter gives us this idea that Marx had a sense of party belonging and that "his" party should participate in election if it is possible and useful?

Don't forget, what the party program should be is irrelevant here. Our discussion (and my discussion) is about if Marx was interested in forming political party for (or with) working class or not. Once we settle this, we will go to the next level.

You need to answer my question, otherwise we cannot go further.

@westartfromhere

OK, thanks for the topic and the dialogue.

Anarcho wrote: Yes, I referenced Marxist Paul Mattick on the matter -- presumably he was claiming that Marx "stole" the expression as well? And I took him as a reliable source on the matter -- I did not have Tristian's book at the time (I have it now but not got around to read it yet -- sorry for not being able to read everything).

So what have we learned? Well, I made a typo (1865 rather than 1864) and Paul Mattick was not as reliable as I thought on this matter. However, we have confirmation of the point I was making, namely that "there is nothing unique about the expression or idea itself".

adri wrote: Mattick never even mentioned Tristan—he quoted Rubel who referenced her. Here's what Mattick actually said (with the quote originating from Rubel's "Reflections on Utopia and Revolution" in the anthology Socialist Humanism):

Mattick wrote: For a socialist revolution must mean precisely the creation of a social structure in which the producers themselves control their product and its distribution. It is conceivable only as one made by the working class which ends social class relations. "What Marx – and before him, in 1843, Flora Tristan – formulated in one single proposition, namely, that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’, remains the implicit postulate of all genuine socialist thought" (Mattick 333).

If you wanted to cite/paraphrase the Rubel quote, then do that instead of falsely claiming that Mattick said that Tristan was first to employ the "famous expression" from the Rules. If I recall correctly, Rubel also never claimed that Tristan was the first to use any "expression," so you're really just making stuff up, guided as you are by your intense dislike of Marx and Engels.

It seems Anarcho/McKay has fixed the date typo in the AFAQ for when the 1864 "Rules of the International" was published (after I brought it to his attention), but has retained his misattribution of quotes and his erroneous claim that Tristan was first to employ Marx's self-emancipation phrase. I'm inclined to compile all of my responses in this thread into an expanded article, especially considering the prevalence of the Tristan claim and how Anarcho doesn't seem to want to correct it in the AFAQ. In Anarcho's defense, I suppose if you started removing all of the false claims in the AFAQ, then there wouldn't be much left of it afterwards.

The offending passage (among others) as it stands today, with some commentary:

AFAQ wrote: Marx's use of the famous expression -- "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself" -- dates from 1864, 16 years after Proudhon's comment that "the proletariat must emancipate itself."[1] Moreover, as Libertarian Marxist Paul Mattick pointed out, Marx was not even the first person to use the expression "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself" as Flora Tristan used it in 1843. [Marx and Keynes, p. 333][2] Thus a case could be made that Marx was, in fact, the third "major socialist thinker to make the principle of self-emancipation -- the principle that socialism could only be brought into being by the self-mobilisation and self-organisation of the working class -- a fundamental aspect of the socialist project."[3]

Similarly, Bakunin continually quoted Marx's (and so Tristan's) words from the Preamble to the General Rules of the First International: "That the emancipation of the workers must be accomplished by the workers themselves."[4]

1. Not to defend McNally, but Marx and Proudhon simply did not share the same goals. Their visions of an emancipated society were nothing alike. Proudhon pushed for his little form of market "socialism" (in which women would remain subordinate to men—it's worth mentioning) whereas Marx and Engels advocated a society in which people directly related to one another and had mastery over their production, i.e. one in which people were not dominated by their own commodities or products. The same applies to the goals of Marx and Tristan. Tristan was essentially a Christian social reformer who appealed extensively to the upper classes in order to win the financial and other support needed to construct her "workers' palaces." She saw herself, as one can see from her journal, as the "Christ-like" savior of the lower classes who was going to rescue them from their misery. She was also not a revolutionary socialist in any sense of the word, as the editor to her book the Workers' Union notes:

Beverly Livingston wrote: While recognizing the inherent antagonisms of class society, she nonetheless advocated co-operation for peaceful reform, believing bourgeois and upper-class participation feasible and desirable in the workers' struggle. Her challenge did not attempt to subvert private enterprise or deny the manufacturer's right to compete for profits, and she did not call for the total dismantling of the economic order; she simply and soundly demanded a fair share for the laboring poor. (xxiii)

What's the point of arguing that Proudhon advocated for workers' self-emancipation before Marx did if Proudhon's vision of emancipation (i.e. commodity production, mutual banking, free credit etc.) had nothing in common with Marx's? The goals of each person or their conception of emancipation matter.

2. Mattick never even mentioned Tristan. He quoted the Marxist Max Rubel who mentioned her in the anthology Socialist Humanism (edited by Erich Fromm). See the above. The relevant work in which Rubel actually deals with Tristan and Marx is also Flora Tristan et Karl Marx, though Rubel never argues in that piece that Marx stole any specific "expression" from Tristan (unlike the AFAQ does).

3. See footnote 1.

4. “Tristan’s words”—if you had a quote from Tristan employing the self-emancipation phrase from Marx's "Rules," then you would have directly quoted it, but you don’t have one, so you lie instead. All of this is also just ignoring what Tristan's (and Proudhon's) vision of an emancipated society actually was and how she went about trying to achieve it (e.g. by appealing for upper-class support). See footnote 1.

I don’t get the defense of Marx and Engel’s advocacy of social democracy in this thread. I think almost everyone knows that social democracy was originally not reformist as it is today. But the criticism many of us have of social democracy even in its original form is that it would mean the same thing in practice as social democracy in its recent form.

It is said in this thread that Marx/Engels didn’t advocate only social democracy; they supported other tactics as well. Well, what tactics are those?

Another one of you said they are both social democrats and communists. Sure, they can be communists as far as their long term aims. But that is kinda meaningless. Like they aren’t even close to anarchist communists in practice.

I don't get the defense of Marx and Engel's advocacy of social democracy in this thread. I think almost everyone knows that social democracy was originally not reformist as it is today. But the criticism many of us have of social democracy even in its original form is that it would mean the same thing in practice as social democracy in its recent form.

What do you mean by social democracy in its original form? The term "social democrat" was just a synonym for "socialist/communist" that various Marx-inspired socialist parties employed, and which did not carry the same reformist connotations that it does today. If you're talking about the formation of socialist parties like the SPD, then there was never anything inherently reformist about them; many SPD members, like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were dedicated to overthrowing capitalism. It is also certainly not the case that the SPD was always destined to succumb to reformism or that the German Revolution was always doomed to defeat at the hands of this same reformist faction. It was particular historical circumstances (e.g. the 1878 and subsequent Anti-Socialist Laws, which encouraged many SPD members to become less radical) that helped contribute to the rise of reformism/revisionism and to the SPD abandoning the goal of transcending capitalist social relations. Marx and Engels, while they were still alive, were also consistently critical of such bourgeois-reformist tendencies within the SPD, as one can see in their 1879 “Circular Letter to Bebel, [W.] Liebkneckt, Bracke, and Others”:

Marx and Engels wrote: As for ourselves, there is, considering all our antecedents, only one course open to us. For almost 40 years we have emphasised that the class struggle is the immediate motive force of history and, in particular, that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the great lever of modern social revolution; hence we cannot possibly co-operate with men who seek to eliminate that class struggle from the movement. At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes. If the new party organ is to adopt a policy that corresponds to the opinions of these gentlemen, if it is bourgeois and not proletarian, then all we could do—much though we might regret it—would be publicly to declare ourselves opposed to it and abandon the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German Party abroad. But we hope it won't come to that. (MECW 24, 269)

The Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, who were not reformists at all, also successfully overthrew the Provisional Government of Kerensky in the 1917 October Revolution. In response to the reformist turn of social democratic parties like the SPD, Lenin also argued for the Bolsheviks to start using the word "communist" instead. See for example Lenin's comment in a footnote to his 1917 "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution":

Lenin wrote: Instead of “Social-Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the “defencists” and the vacillating “Kautskyites”), we must call ourselves the Communist Party. (LCW 24, 24)

Another one of you said they are both social democrats and communists. Sure, they can be communists as far as their long term aims. But that is kinda meaningless. Like they aren't even close to anarchist communists in practice.

Marx and Engels advocated for a communist society, i.e. one in which people would directly relate to one another in order to meet their needs without the mediation of markets or exchange, before communism was even a major anarchist tendency. The original anarchists, such as those who helped found the First International, were mostly Proudhonists who pushed for Proudhon's (petty-bourgeois) form of market socialism and small-scale handicraft production.

There is also some irony in how Proudhon is celebrated as the "father of anarchism" when he became a member of the French Constituent Assembly following the 1848 Revolution. He also ran in multiple other French legislative elections and, at various other points throughout his life, appealed to the French ruling classes to help implement some of his mutualist ideas. His later advocacy for abstentionism in the French legislative elections of 1857 and 1863 was, to a large extent, motivated more by his opposition to the 1851 Coup of Louis Napoleon rather than any kind of “consistent anarchist principles against electoral politics." His participation in the government of the Second Republic, it is important to note, also came eight years after he declared himself an anarchist in What is Property? It is thus not without reason that Proudhon is described by some anarchists as the “man of paradox” (favorably implying that there is some kind of ultimate coherency to all of his conflicting ideas and actions), though if they cared about accuracy then they would call him the "man of contradiction.”

I agree with Agent of the I ..., and I add my own view “briefly”.
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- Marx and Engles didn't break from authoritarianism mentality, so they stayed within the reactionary mode of hitherto human existing culture. They were practically reformist and state capitalist. They hoped that state capitalism managed by Marxists workers could change society to communist society. They totally ignored and sometimes argued against the importance of authoritarianism. In the Council Movement, Marxism was less authoritarian, they had to reject the idea of forming political parties and hierarchy, it seems they couldn’t achieve this because of their irrational as well as unscientific royalty to Marx and Engles.
- Concept of revolution is important and central. We need a definition to know if we are talking and discussing the same thing.
- Revolution is overcoming domineering culture - it doesn't do anything with economic formation of society in different periods. I am not ignoring the fact that economic relations are important. The key is psychological tendency. Unlike other living entities, we change our life based on our plan. The more that decision making is taken from, the more reactionary forces grow.
- Reactionary culture is that in which one group dominate the others, quality is not important. 99 reactionary and 1 revolutionary, make society of 100 a bad one, a reactionary one.
- Anarchism must, theoretically, come from authoritarianism, it is in humans, or perhaps animals, to resist those forces that contradict our self-determinism. Self-determination has also a biological logic. Thus, it is difficult to find when anarchist thought had emerged.
- Anarchism is universalized form of tendency to self-determination. Non-universalized form of tendency to self-determination is not necessarily revolutionary, it could be even reactionary or tend to move to.
- Both anarchism and authoritarianism are tendencies. Unfortunately, authoritarianism prevailed and has created a bad human society which is qualitatively inferior to other species.
- Authoritarianism is actualized in particulate forms, like patriarchy, wage slavery, colonialism or neo colonialism, etc.
- Because of the above, revolution is a multitasking effort. Neither of the aspects or dimensions of revolution must be ignored, otherwise one reactionary part will encourage the others, and a movement will be defeated unconsciously or by the authoritarians.
- At this moment, we have no serious revolutionary movement, we have semi, half mature, and reactionary movements.
- It seems that Proudhon and his movement had limited idea of what anarchism is about. Proudhon had many reactionary and reformist thoughts.
- Anarchism must be Total to be truly effective, life changing, or precisely, culture changing. Its totality is not at all totalitarian, because its principle is very simple, it doesn’t belong to elites and it doesn't tend to form any dominating group over the others unless it wants to contradict itself.
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Marx and Engels advocated for a communist society, i.e. one in which people would directly relate to one another in order to meet their needs without the mediation of markets or exchange, before communism was even a major anarchist tendency. The original anarchists, such as those who helped found the First International, were mostly Proudhonists who pushed for Proudhon's (petty-bourgeois) form of market socialism and small-scale handicraft production.

I want to add to my response to this above that the significance of anarchist communism is that it was the first current to advocate communism as an immediate goal of social revolution. It held no place for a transitional phase in the movement for communism. Most of the major Marxist movements, including social democracy, were really collectivist, advocating stages of social transformation, renumeration tied to labor, and a role for the state. It was probably council communism that was the first Marxist tendency to really embrace communism as an immediate goal. I could be wrong on that because I’m not too well read in it.

Even if we accept that Marx and Engels advocated communism before the anarchists, it was only as a long term goal.

I want to add to my response to this above that the significance of anarchist communism is that it was the first current to advocate communism as an immediate goal of social revolution. It held no place for a transitional phase in the movement for communism. Most of the major Marxist movements, including social democracy, were really collectivist, advocating stages of social transformation, renumeration tied to labor, and a role for the state. It was probably council communism that was the first Marxist tendency to really embrace communism as an immediate goal. I could be wrong on that because I’m not too well read in it.

Can you quote any source where Marx or Engels stated that a socialist/communist society could only emerge as a result of a lengthy transitional period that all countries were obliged to undertake, regardless of the particular circumstances of a region undergoing such a communist transformation? I think you're conflating the ideas of Marx and Engels with the ideas and policies of Lenin, Stalin, and co., along with the twentieth-century experience of the Russian Revolution. If you want to understand Marx's or Engels' views on societal transformation, then it's best to leave the baggage of the Russian Revolution behind and to read Marx and Engels within their own historical context.

Not to suggest blueprints for the future or to try and predict how a revolutionary situation might unfold, but it's also a bit naive to suggest that communism could immediately replace capitalism without any kind of transitory or revolutionary measures in between. Even the Bakuninist-Kropotkinist Makhno recommended the summary execution of people convicted of banditry or counter-revolution during the Russian Civil War in Ukraine, which is obviously a transitory measure that one would hope to cease following the victory of revolutionary forces. (I would hope in a more developed communist society that people accused of something would be fully investigated and that the focus would be on rehabilitation rather than retribution.) In situations of scarcity, which we are not really confronted with today, but which might arise in some revolutionary scenarios, it also makes sense to limit goods to those who refuse to contribute to production or who oppose the expropriation of the expropriators. As I said, it is difficult to predict what sort of temporary measures might be necessary in a revolutionary situation or in a communist society just emerging out of capitalism and still marked by certain features of the latter.

Regarding Marx's views on the transition, he wrote about a lower and higher phase of communist society in his "Critique of the Gotha Program" (posthumously published by Engels), but that had absolutely nothing to do with Lenin's conception of "socialism" and "communism" as distinct phases of society representing a lower and higher stage of development respectively. Neither Marx nor Engels ever distinguished between these words in this way; as I've said before, they regarded the terms as essentially synonymous, favoring the one term over the other at different points in time. Marx's support for labor certificates within the same work was also based on nineteenth-century conditions and was only a transitory measure that he recommended for a society just emerging out, after "prolonged birth pangs," from capitalism. Marx, in other words, was not a "collectivist" who advocated remuneration according to deed as a permanent feature of a communist society.

Similarly, both Marx and Engels never advocated any kind of stage-ism, as is often erroneously attributed to them, or argued that predominantly peasant countries/empires like Russia were always doomed to suffer through a capitalist phase of development. Engels, for example, wrote about the developmental path of Russia in his text "On Social Relations in Russia," which was published in 1875 as part of a critical exchange between him and the Russian revolutionary Pyotr Tkachev. In the text, Engels wrote about how Russia might be spared from capitalist development on the basis of the Russian commune/mir (i.e. on the basis of the peasantry) and with the crucial assistance of revolution in Western Europe:

Engels wrote: It is clear that communal ownership in Russia is long past its period of florescence and, to all appearances, is moving towards its disintegration. Nevertheless, the possibility undeniably exists of raising this form of society to a higher one, if it should last until the circumstances are ripe for that, and if it shows itself capable of developing in such manner that the peasants no longer cultivate the land separately, but collectively; of raising it to this higher form without it being necessary for the Russian peasants to go through the intermediate stage of bourgeois small holdings. This, however, can only happen if, before the complete break-up of communal ownership, a proletarian revolution is successfully carried out in Western Europe, creating for the Russian peasant the preconditions requisite for such a transition, particularly the material things he needs, if only to carry through the revolution, necessarily connected therewith, of his whole agricultural system. (Engels 48)

Marx made similar comments on the possibility of Russia avoiding capitalist development in, among other places, his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich:

Marx wrote: In analysing the genesis of capitalist production, I said:

At the heart of the capitalist system is a complete separation of ... the producer from the means of production ... the expropriation of the agricultural producer is the basis of the whole process. Only in England has it been accomplished in a radical manner. ... But all the other countries of Western Europe are following the same course. (Capital, French edition, p. 315.)

The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. The reason for this restriction is indicated in Ch. XXXII: ‘Private property, founded upon personal labour ... is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of the labour of others, on wage­labour.’ (loc. cit., p. 340).

In the Western case, then, one form of private property is transformed into another form of private property. In the case of the Russian peasants, however, their communal property would have to be transformed into private property.

The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source­ material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.

As you point out later in your post, Marx did distinguish between a lower and higher phase of communism.

And? Marx distinguishing between a lower and higher phase of communist society had nothing in common with the later Leninist and Stalinist regimes that claimed to be in a so-called “socialist” stage of development and striving towards a so-called higher “communist” stage. (The same applies to modern-day state-capitalist regimes like the People’s Republic of China, which similarly claims to be working towards “communism,” for decades now, while also being home to hundreds of billionaires.) You still seem unable to consider Marx and Engels within their own historical context and are constantly referring back to the Russian Revolution.

What Marx essentially advocated was the concentration of all the means of production under the control of the state. That was the outcome of the revolution as he saw it. Eventually, the state would wither away.

Marx’s and Engels’ conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a transitional state of affairs in which the working class would wield political power to suppress reactionary forces, was quite different from the sort of one-party and one-man rule that eventually emerged in Russia. The Leninist and Stalinist regimes were more of a dictatorship of a small group of “professional ‘revolutionaries’” who were more interested in consolidating their own authority rather than allowing workers/peasants to govern themselves.[1] It was also precisely this sort of dictatorship that Engels had critiqued in Part II ("Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees") of his Refugee Literature, published over 1874-75, when discussing the ideas of Louis Blanqui:

Engels wrote: Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary, a socialist only in sentiment, because of his sympathy for the sufferings of the people, but he has neither socialist theory nor definite practical proposals for social reforms. In his political activities he was essentially a "man of action", believing that, if a small well-organised minority should attempt to effect a revolutionary uprising at the right moment, it might, after scoring a few initial successes, carry the mass of the people and thus accomplish a victorious revolution. [...] Since Blanqui regards every revolution as a coup de main by a small revolutionary minority, it automatically follows that its victory must inevitably be succeeded by the establishment of a dictatorship—not, it should be well noted, of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who accomplished the coup and who themselves are, at first, organised under the dictatorship of one or several individuals. (MECW 24, p. 13)

One also doesn’t really need to speculate much about what Marx or Engels meant by the “transitional proletarian dictatorship” or workers “seizing state power,” seeing as how they provided an example in the form of the Paris Commune, together with their criticisms of the Communards. Here’s Engels in his 1891 introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France:

Engels wrote: Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Marxists always invoke the idea that it is because of particular conditions or circumstances that different countries find themselves in that they can’t do without these transitional phases.

Once again, you are clearly referring to the Bolsheviks/Russian Communist Party here, along with their War Communist and later policies. Why? What does any of that have to do with understanding the works of Marx and Engels? I also agree that Lenin and the Russian Communist Party tried to portray their War Communist and other policies as “necessary”—and dismissed anyone who disagreed as “infantile” or “counterrevolutionary”—when that was absolutely not the case (e.g. the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt, the suppression of dissident views, the more generous rations that party elites received, and so on). Also, when you say “Marxists,” are you referring to Russian left communists like Gavril Miasnikov and his Workers’ Group? Miasnikov criticized the Leninist regime and its policies and was ultimately murdered under Stalin after being duped into returning to Russia.

Even if Marx didn’t advocate a transitional phase toward communism, that doesn’t change the fact that social democracy as a movement were collectivist, prior to the Leninists or Bolsheviks. Sometimes, when Malatesta, Kropotkin and other anarchists were criticizing collectivists, they were actually talking about collectivist social democrats.

You’re saying the entire social democratic scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a form of anarcho collectivism??

Communism can be achieved after capitalism immediately, but that does not mean that the process towards that outcome is not a lengthy one. Anarchist communists would argue that it would require a lot of preparation before the social revolution is carried out, primarily because it requires the vast majority of humanity to be convinced communists, to realize it on a voluntary basis. What they don’t see feasible are transitory measures that are supposedly meant to deal with problems that can’t be dealt with on a communist basis.

So do you disagree with the Makhnovists’ temporary measure of summarily executing people convicted of banditry and counterrevolution? Would summary executions characterize a fully developed communist society? It was also far from the case that the majority of peasants/workers in Ukraine (which had been part of the Russian Empire) were class conscious communists; in fact the peasantry, as Bakunin noted in Statism and Anarchy (and then quickly forgot—see his role in the Going to the People Movement), could be quite reactionary and misogynistic at times. What about conditions of scarcity during a revolutionary period? Do you expect there to be free access to all goods when international production has yet to be fully organized on a communistic basis? It doesn't seem that you have really given much thought to the feasibility of directly transitioning to a communist society without any sort of transitory or revolutionary measures in between.

Your first sentence above also seems like a contradiction: either communism can be immediately achieved without any in-between measures (which in the majority of cases it likely can’t) or transitory measures are indispensable.

There are two things that can be said here. First, if communism, as anarchists see it, is the outcome of the vast majority of humanity becoming convinced communists, wouldn’t you think people would want to contribute to production or expropriate the expropriators? If such problems you fear exist, then that would mark a premature revolution in my view, as opposed to one that was well prepared for in advance. In situations of scarcity, measuring people’s contribution to labor is just impractical and contradictory.

Regardless of how well-prepared a revolution might be, it is quite idealistic to imagine that we will just leap straight into a communist society without any sort of temporary measures for the revolutionary period. Your thinking, it is worth noting, is also at odds with a number of anarchists themselves. If I can invoke Anarcho's (always fun and amusing) Anarchist FAQ:

AFAQ wrote: Another area in which Marxists misrepresent anarchism is in the assertion that anarchists believe a completely socialist society (an ideal or "utopian" society, in other words) can be created "overnight." [...]

So rather than seeing a "full blown" communist society appearing instantly from a revolution, anarcho-communists see a period of transition in which the degree of communism in a given community or area is dependent on the objective conditions facing it. [adri's emphasis] This period of transition would see different forms of social experimentation but the desire is to see libertarian communist principles as the basis of as much of this experimentation as possible. To claim that anarcho-communists ignore reality and see communism as being created overnight is simply a distortion of their ideas. Rather, they are aware that the development towards communism is dependent on local conditions, conditions which can only be overcome in time and by the liberated community re-organising production and extending it as required. Thus we find Malatesta arguing 1884 that communism could be brought about immediately only in a very limited number of areas and, "for the rest," collectivism would have to be accepted "for a transitional period." This was because, "[f]or communism to be possible, a high stage of moral development is required of the members of society, a sense of solidarity both elevated and profound, which the upsurge of the revolution may not suffice to induce. This doubt is the more justified in that material conditions favourable to this development will not exist at the beginning." [quoted by Daniel Guerin, Anarchism, p. 51]

Perhaps us horrible Marxists (not just Marxist-Leninists and other non-serious "Marxists"?) misrepresent anarchism so much because some anarchists actually argue like this!

1. Pankhurst incidentally echoes this view regarding the question of a proletarian dictatorship in Russia in the Vol. 10 No. 16 (7 July 1923) issue of the Workers' Dreadnought, while commenting on the Manifesto of the Unemployed Workers’ Organisation:

Pankhurst wrote: One phrase has crept into the manifesto of the Unemployed Organisation which requires discussion. It is a phrase of which all Communists have made use, both of late and also since the days of Marx, Engels and Bachunin [Bakunin]. We refer to the term "the dictatorship of the proletariat." This in its original use meant the rigid suppression of the middle and upper classes in so far as they may endeavour to resist the coming of Socialism and to combat the popular will.

Latterly, under the inspiration of Russian bureaucrats, the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" has been used to justify the dictatorship of a party clique of officials over their own party members and over the people at large. So far has the dictatorship been carried [out] that the parties submitting to it have become utterly sterile as instruments of education and action. In Russia the dictatorship has robbed the revolution of all it fought for; it has banished Communism and workers' control.

Liberty is an essential part of the Communist revolution. We must not sacrifice it to the ambitions of would-be dictators.

I was not at all thinking of the Russian revolution. The fact of the matter is that Marx advocated a program that involves the working class organizing into parties, which would capture state power, and through that control all means of production. This movement of parties would be organized in a hierarchical manner, so that you end up with a minority directing the subordinate masses in every step of the way. This is the program of the social democrats. It is something that they have rationalized as a transition to actual socialism or communism.

You’re saying the entire social democratic scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a form of anarcho collectivism??

Notice in my post I said collectivist social democrat. Just as there were collectivist anarchists and communist anarchists, there were collectivist social democrats and communist social democrats. The collectivism of the social democrats was different from the collectivism of those anarchists who subscribed to such an idea.

Collectivism for the social democrats meant that in that program I explain above, renumeration according to work done will be issued by the state. Others argued for equal wages. Eventually the state and the wages would all disappear, inaugurating a higher phase of communist society. Anarchists say that will never happen.

What about conditions of scarcity during a revolutionary period? Do you expect there to be free access to all goods when international production has yet to be fully organized on a communistic basis? It doesn't seem that you have really given much thought to the feasibility of directly transitioning to a communist society without any sort of transitory or revolutionary measures in between.

Let me explain this again because I thought I explained it quite well in my post above. I’m not sure what measures you have in mind for situations of scarcity. The collectivist idea of tying renumeration to work done is not a good way to handle scarcity. Such a system is impractical; it’s also contradictory to a situation where production is already carefully planned to meet needs. The problem of scarce goods or services can be solved on a communistic basis. As I said above, not everything has to be left free for all to take but you don’t have to institute measurement of work and prices on goods.

Quite frankly, all these proposed measures that the working class have to accept, whether it is to deal with counterrevolution or situations of scarcity, are just justifications by social democrats and other Marxists to convince workers to accept a state of affairs that is short of genuine socialism or communism, that they may label the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or socialism.

The task would be for Marx and Engels to explain reality by developing a theory, not to alter the presentation of reality as to support the theory (later Marxists afraid of altering initial theory). That would be unscientific and "idealist".

The reason social democracy is not explained well by M&E is that it didn't exist yet. For those who are idealists a political and economic "system" would come to existence after an "idea", a model, has been developed to form such.

I am convinced that social democracy is a dialectical product of class struggle, the clash between industrial capital and organized labor struggle. From the time that some of the anti-capitalist ideas inspired labor organization and this organization collided with capital, for the capitalist state to survive, some room had to be made where labor interests would also be protected by the state. In the case of the Soviet Union that room wasn't created in adequate time to prevent the collapse, possibly because that state was neither a clear capitalist state, nor was organized industrial labor a significant force in toppling it. In the cases of France, GB, and the US, the formation of a social democracy was the only viable way of surviving the state to prevent a revolution.

So the cumulative relations of capital, state, labor, between late 1800s and 1930s came to be known as social democracy, and the US, GB, France, are the models inspiring this evolution.

Where Marxists turn against materialism and are being anti-dialectical is where beyond this point they see capital, state and labor as unchanged, despite of all the contrary evidence of how capitalism evolved out of the collision. It would logically be expected that capitalists, just as labor, in order to survive and win the class war they needed better organization, and a social democracy clearly showed the limitation of such organization "as the state". From the times of early strike busting techniques, where the official state was limited in breaking strikes, to organized paramilitary armies, and fascism as an ideology to capture state power, we see phenomena that indicate an "alternate" class organization from above. Meanwhile class organization from below became static and diminishing in effectiveness, to the horror state of things we see today.

Going back to primitive accumulation, which occurs ONLY in agricultural communities, hierarchical social organization evolves around the very task of storage, accumulation, and exchange. Hunting gathering communities around the globe don't display the same characteristics, remain collective and denounce exchange, even up to 19th century. Not a single evidence was discovered that natives of NZ and Australia practice any form of agriculture, or exchange for that matter.

Exchange vs collective relations, even at pre-capitalist times, appear to be exclusive and contradictory. Whether M&E theorized on this or not does not mean the dichotomy doesn't exist. Exchange is an inherent structural component of capitalism, to launder it and certify it as a revolutionary practice doesn't alter the effect of being the source of inequality.

PS By the way, why reinvent a revolution and autistically remain focused in toppling and taking over the state when the object is to change social relations from exchange to collective? Especially when a successful example is in existence and growth for almost 31years, with roots to organizing 41y ago. For how many more decades will people living under capitalism, looking down at native peasants, pretend they have to invent the revolution, when it is already old news?

The juice is in the dialectic between revolutionary vanguards and the libertarian proposal of social organization. This antithesis couldn't possibly survive a 2nd century, it needs to be buried by synthesis. or face extinction as a material reality.

PS2 I apologize for my poor English, I am not a native English speaker.

by: Agent of the International

> Quite frankly, all these proposed measures that the working class have to accept, whether it is to deal with counterrevolution or situations of scarcity, are just justifications by social democrats and other Marxists to convince workers to accept a state of affairs that is short of genuine socialism or communism, that they may label the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or socialism. <

What you display here is a position where you compete with the reformist, the Marxist, the socialdemocrat on who will guide the working class out of its prison. The fundamental problem is that the working class doesn't seem to want to recognize any of you as guides or are conscious of a need to exit this system. To a large extent the working class is now blaming all those who divided and contradictory to each other have failed for a century and a half to provide a reasonable proposal on whether or not they will improve their material conditions.

Not that the working class is right on the basis of its rejection of all vanguards wanting to father this social change, but it is what it is. Whether the Marxist or the Anarchist, the radical or the reformer are right and wrong, is a secondary concern limited to those who are interested. The vast majority now, is not interested.

Nearly all have had a father/mother, a teacher, a bully in the playground, a cop, a boss, the last thing they need is to gain one more over their head to have to report and to take direction from.

So we may all have to take a step back, and reassess the social situation and rethink what we have been doing wrong all along.

My take is that providing an idea, an ideology, a theory, and demand people accept it to join an organization based on that ideology has failed. Not only it has failed it has alienated people of attempting to do anything collectively so they don't have to put up with Marxist and anarchist bullshit!