Read it, it's short, simple, and you'll see... Also, dictatorship in the 19th century had a different meaning than it does now. Then it met who had power. So Marx would say America was a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist have overall power of, and within the state. So, there can be a dictatorship of the proletarian, that's also democratic; just as presently we live in a democracy, but it's clear wall street and capital run the show.
thank you for this. i always wondered about his use of the word dictatorship. i was aware he didnt mean absolute rule by terror however. although it sure doesnt help with our contemporaries joining the ranks of comrades
If I'm not mistaken Marx's ideal example of the "dictatorship" of the proletariat was the Paris Commune (before about 15,000 got gunned down within a day or two)
Can you explain how the Communist Manifesto is not about Communism? I've read it several times, and while it isn't explicit about implementation, it is certainly descriptive about certain details.
@@C3yl0 could you cite where in the manifesto a communist state is mentioned? Like I said, it's been a while since I've read it, but I don't remember that being in there.
@@blahblah4767 Isnt that theory itself flawed. Wolff said real work is when people do both mental work and physical work. And he seem to imply that only workers does that kinda real work. I dint get how that works. Because worker is basically someone who uses more physical and less mental work while entrepreneur is someone who uses more mental and less physical work. So both are indeed the same. I dont see the class. Whos not working?
@@rezaaslan4706 An entire class of people rule over the majority of people on earth from taking massive surplus value from the profits those people earn. The majority of companies in existance are sustained by that surplus value taken from the workers and not a single dime is taken from the bosses who take the workers profits to fund a company that they don't fund themselves. After the initial investment to start a company it is funded by surplus value. Workers pay more in surplus value than they do in taxes. Workers pay their bosses more from surplus value than the bosses pay them from that surplus value they created. The majority of the hierarchy of the face of the earth is from surplus value and workers don't have another option. This is only a small step from a fucked up feudalist mode of production This is a system built on theft and exploitation. People go week to week working endless hours so there family doesn't go hungry. If workers fight for more pay jobs are sent to places where surplus value will be increased. There is a hierarchy of elites among the capitalist class who essentially own the governments and rule the world from profits they steal from workers all around the world. Entrepreneurs if they are owner operators of their business and do not create capital are not capitalists. Marx aknowledged that some people have both working class interests and capitalist interest. The proletariat are the working class who see the problem and seek to end it, knowing that it is also inevitable.
Yeah, "Primitive Communism" was just hunter gatherer tribal living circa pre 10,000 years ago, and some tribal variations that remained such as current African Bushmen and several other tribes. But after the first sedentary societies began around 10,000 years ago there developed new modes of production during the 1st Agricultural Revolution, and eventually after that slavery was in many parts of the earth. And later Feudalism in many places. And these things overlap, some places will skip stages of the generalized modes of production and some will retain old forms. But you'll have things like the more recent Atlantic slave trade which was part of early capitalism. Now capitalism has spread to most the globe. It's like he made the historical modes of production confusing by using modern analogies. Keep in mind Marx stated that he doing what he is doing he doesn't have the luxury of scientific laboratories with microscopes so he must use the power of analogies.
err Marx certainly did talk about communism, as well as the state?? What about all of his talk of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and his involvement in the Paris Commune?
Marx used the term "communism" in opposition to "capitalism." He might have called it "solidarism" or "Karlism" or something else. Just for your information, in French, _commune_ means simply a place where a community lives, be it a hamlet, village, town, or city. Marx was not "involved" in the Paris Commune, though he certainly did write about it. Marx was in Manchester and London at the time of the Paris Commune uprising.
Also in his debate with Bakunin on the Paris Commune, he explains that the seizure of the State is fundamental to a successful revolution. That the lingering power of the capitalist class will be used to overthrow the revolution, and that the proletariat state must be formed and ready for such an event. He also talks about the eventual dissipation of the state once the capitalist class and its influence is completely eradicated. Stalin eventually adds to this by explaining, after the invasion of the 10 powers into Soviet Russia in 1919, that the revolutionary state must remain in power until all imperialist powers (or at least the majority) are done away with by their own revolutionary movements.
@@lesterarbusto3535 Just nitpicking, but in French "commune" has the nuance of being from the state, most of the city except for the suburbs; so a community of hippies settling in the middle of nowhere wouldn't count as one xd. So ig there's still one in Europe? in Copenhagen there's the Freetown Christiania neighbourhood or district or whatever you may want to call it.
Marx's own words: In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. Marx, German Ideology (1845) ---------------------------- When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. ... the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. Marx, Human Needs & the division of Labour (1844) ------------------------------------ We 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 really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. Marx, Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher to Ruge (1843) ----------------------------------------- Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844) ------------------------------------------ The entire movement of history, as simply communism’s actual act of genesis - the birth act of its empirical existence - is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming. Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844) ------------------------------------------- Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. Marx, German Ideology (1845) ---------------------------------------------- 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. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. Marx, German Ideology (1845) ------------------------------------------------- In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867) ------------------------------------------- In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848) ------------------------------------------------ Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Class Struggle in France (1850)
I was following along until you said that Marxism and mainstream economics are different theories but that neither can be described as correct or incorrect. This doesn't fit with any definition of the term "theory" with which I'm familiar; either a theory has explanatory power or it doesn't. If two theories are mutually contradictory, then either one has superior explanatory power or neither has any explanatory power. Perhaps you mean paradigm instead of theory (i.e. that the primary distinction between the two positions is the moral weight placed on predicted outcomes)? That fits better with the given example of religious comparisons, but the vernacular threw me for a loop nonetheless.
I'll add to what Christian said that Marx definitely considered himself a scientist and definitely felt he was developing a theory, and his theory definitely does have explanatory power. Mainstream economics, on the other hand, is not a scientific theory at all but rather begins with the prior existence of feudalism and capitalism and engages in intellectual justifications and apologies for capitalism, along with assertions (which are proving to be less and less convincing) that it is indeed the only system under which people can achieve freedom and happiness. So if you feel there's a lack of a true theory in the equation, the lack of a theory is on the capitalist side.
He was definitely a scientist, a social scientist to be precise. He speaks of the society in which we all are born, grow up, assimilate education, find the job for self sustinance, do the job for thirty years and get married in between, have kids, raise kids, educate kids, retire and then leave the land permanently. If there isn't social consciousness in a human then we have Hitler, Mussolini, Himmler, Idi Amin and any more.
The speaker says every society has to decide on how its surplus value is to be distributed, which suggests that a state decides collectively as to where to spend its wealth. This is the very foundational idea of communism where wealth is shared and the higher authority, the state, decides where to invest and how to invest. And we've all seen what happened in such societies. Except the speaker. After witnessing the fall of numerous communist nations in the world, he still fails to acknowledge that a society is far far better off by letting its individuals decide on where to spend his/her money.
No, without capitalism there is no need for a state as direct democracy rules, and if not then it is a degenerated worker's state that uses state capitalism and tyranny to enforce "the will of the proletariat," even though the proletariat are powerless to the will of a tyrannical state
lol you obviously havent heard/read all of wolff's work. Maybe try to get a better understanding of his entire analysis, alongside the meaning of communism and how it differs greatly from other economic systems such as socialism, before commenting nonsense.You have no idea what you're talking about.
Marx's own words: In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. Marx, German Ideology (1845) ---------------------------- When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. ... the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. Marx, Human Needs & the division of Labour (1844) ------------------------------------ We 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 really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. Marx, Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher to Ruge (1843) ----------------------------------------- Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844) ------------------------------------------ The entire movement of history, as simply communism’s actual act of genesis - the birth act of its empirical existence - is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming. Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844) ------------------------------------------- Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. Marx, German Ideology (1845) ---------------------------------------------- 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. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. Marx, German Ideology (1845) ------------------------------------------------- In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867) ------------------------------------------- In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848) ------------------------------------------------ Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Class Struggle in France (1850)
If possible take a close look at what is going on in West Bengal, India. Going to be teachers of Public Schools are between Fire and frying pan. The prevalent working system of recruitment of teachers is dying a rugged death. Death on the streets of Kolkata( erstwhile Calcutta).
