Skip Navigation

You're viewing a single thread.

442 comments
  • I understand that this is an anarchist comm, so you're free to post whatever you want, but I don't think it's productive to take a stance that fundamentally rests on misrepresenting what you're critiquing. Since you invoked my username in one of your comments here, I'd figure I'd give the Marxist stance its fair representation.

    First, there is no such thing as "true communism." The obsession over purity in politics is a result of dogmatism and book workship.

    Secondly, for Marxists, the stance isn't that you "do a state" and then "stop doing the state." For Marxists, not just Marxist-Leninists, the state is purely a body that resolves class contradictions through class oppression. It isn't hierarchy, and it isn't organization. Communism in the marxist conception, as a stateless society, is stateless in that once all property is collectively owned and planned, there is no class distinction. Administration remains, and is not to whither, as that's a necessary product of mass, industrialized production.

    Taking that into account, the state can only disappear if all class disappears, and class cannot be abolished until all global production is collectivized. There has never been that point, you cannot have communism in one country. You can be socialist, in that public property can be the principle aspect of the economy and the state can be proletarian in character, but the state can never whither until all states are socialist, interconnected, and borders fading away into one democratic system.

    Socialist countries like the PRC do rely on commodity production to engage with the global economy, as they must for the time being. They can't achieve a global system as one single country. As long as the state holds control of the large firms and key industries, and resolves class contradictions in the favor of the proletariat and against the bourgeoisie, then as the economy develops and grows it will continue to take on an increasingly socialized character. You cannot "declare socialized production" with the stroke of a pen, it's something that must arise from development. That doesn't mean the character of an economy that is dominated by public ownership is capitalist, either, just that it is on the "socialist road," ie it is socialist, and working its way to higher levels of socialization until communism is achieved.

    This is all starkly different from the anarchist position, that we can develop from the outset a decentralized, horizontalist society. I'm not going to debatelord here, this is an anarchist comm, but if you're going to misrepresent the views of Marxists, then I feel you're doing a disservice by making anarchists less prepared to engage in productive conversation with Marxists.

442 comments