Engels and "socialist government"
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Came across this link of an 1893 interview of Engels by the Daily Chronicle in which in response to the question “Then you expect soon to see, what everybody is curious to see — a Socialist Government in power?” Engels answers
“Why not? If the growth of our Party continues at its normal rate we shall have a majority between the years 1900 and 1910. And when we do, you may be assured we shall neither be short of ideas nor men to carry them out. You people, I suppose, about that time, will be having a government, in which Mr. Sidney Webb will be growing gray in an attempt to permeate the Liberal Party. We don’t believe in permeating middle-class parties. We are permeating the people.”
More reason I guess for distancing ourselves from Engels!
It seems he would have favoured “remain” in the Brexit debate. In response to the question <i>”Then you look for a ‘United States of Europe’ at no distant date?”.,</i> he responds
“Certainly. Everything is making in that direction. Our ideas are spreading in every European country. Here is” (producing a thick volume) “our new review for Roumania. We have a similar one for Bulgaria. The workers of the world are fast learning to unite.”
Jesus Christ, what an embarrassment. Engels’ Form A application for membership to the SPGB would most certainly not have been approved! But I guess we have to make some allowance for the time he was writing in
Here is the link
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/media/engels/93_07.htm
There are some writings of Marx and Engels at the very beginning of their life that they sounded like Mensheviks, and then, they changed their point of view, that is the reason why we can not depend on one single letter or one single article written by them, we must study the whole body of ideas. It is the same case of the Communist Manifesto which is also a reformist documents containing several state capitalist measures. Lenin did not move further than that epoch. Most of their ideas evolved according to the evolution of capitalism. Marx supported many bourgeois revolutions, and he also sounded like Blanquis. Both made mistakes but Engels made more mistakes than Marx and many of his wrong ideas were used and applied by the Leninists and the Bolsheviks. Engels was also a man of his time
From what you said I thought it was going to be terrible, but on reading it I didn’t feel embarrassed at all. It was a quite clear and coherent exposition of the view Engels held at the time and which he expressed elsewhere. The electoral success of the German Social Democratic Party was the basis of his conclusion that the time of seizing political power by armed insurrection, barricades and street battles was over and that the way to political power now lay through the ballot box — a position we inherited.
Of course he was labouring under an illusion — that the votes cast for the SPD were votes cast for socialism whereas in fact they were mostly votes cast for political democracy and social reforms (the party’s minimum programme). This illusion was shared by other names in European Social Democracy for whom we have traditionally also had some regard such as Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Only later did the feet of clay reveal themselves.
I thought this passage summed up quite well his approach to elections:
“Our first plank is the socialisation of all the means and instruments of production. Still, we accept anything which any government may give us, but only as a payment on account, and for which we offer no thanks. We always vote against the Budget, and against any vote for money or men for the Army. In constituencies where we have not had a candidate to vote for on the second ballot, our supporters have been instructed to vote only for those candidates who pledged to vote against the Army Bill, any increased taxation, and any restriction on popular rights.”
Not ours, but still fairly principled if you do have a minimum programme of social and political reforms. It was maintained and within ten years some sections of the SPD were doing deals with other parties.
I didn’t find the reference to a “socialist government” particularly embarrassing either. It wasn’t Engels’s term but was introduced by the interviewer and one that has often been put to us. We of course would immediately reply “We don’t seek to form a government” but then go on to say that we still wanted a socialist majority to take over political power and use it for a while however short to dispossess the capitalist class (so there would be a sort of socialist “administration”). After all, we are not anarchists and do stand for the workers gaining control of political power.
Incidentally, I think that Marx would also have failed the entrance test as he too wasn’t against having a minimum programme of immediate demands. In fact in 1880 he helped the French Workers Party draw up such a programme for coming elections there. See here. The Preamble is good, in fact excellent and finds an echo in our declaration of principles, but look at the rest.
There are some passages on the writings of Marx and Engels where they supported the existence of the bourgeoise republic, ideas which have been used by the nationalists to back up their claims, but they must be view according to the social and political movement that existed in that historical period, but then, they moved to the conception of a stateless society. As ALB wrote above, Marx also supported a minimum program like the Leninists of our time, therefore, there were not any major difference between Marx and Engels
The Marxist Humanists have blamed the problem of women on a single expression used by Engels on his book on the Family, and they have claimed that he was a heterosexual, and he did not support homosexuality, but looking deeper on Marx ethnological notebooks he did not mention anything difference to Engels either, but the daughter of Marx known as Eleanor which was also one of his secretary was heavily involved in the women movement. The Bolivarian has rejected Marx claiming that he never wrote enough about Colonialism, but there are many writings of both of them on Colonialism, which they have not read, the real problem is that Marx debunked the myth of Simon Bolivar, and he was totally right about him
Yes. Absolutely. Not that bad. Got some good bits what you can nick (permeate people not parties). That’s Mengels. What more can you reasonably expect? And, yes, administration and government are pretty much the same. If you wish to use the powers of the state through the electoral system, what has to be done is what has to be done. Socialist government. I think it’s a bad idea. But then I’m an ex- ain’t I.
“And, yes, administration and government are pretty much the same.”
Well no. Not quite so. Apart from initially capturing power to prevent the state being used against the revolution. Administration will be over resources not over people.
With locally, regionally and globally, the people calling the shots.
Government and administration are not the same concepts.
That is a distortion created in the USA to make peoples believe that every president has a different administration and that the state is not a continuation of the ruling of one social class over the peoples.
Government means governor or domination above the peoples, and administration is the management of resources.
The same shit is about Republic and Democracy, all capitalist countries are a republic and they have a bourgeois democracy where a minority group of peoples own and control everything over the majority of the peoples,
Talking about giving me back my democracy it is a total fallacy too because the majority of the peoples around the world do not have common possession of the mean of production which is the real democracy. Too many fetichism
What sort of anarchist are you? I thought they believed in a violent insurrection to smash the state but how can you do this if you have a conscientious objection to tanks and guns and armoured cars?
Or are you a namby pamby Tolstoy pacifist anarchist who thinks that the capitalist class will just give up their power and property if you disobediently sit in the middle of some road bridge?
Makes more sense to take the control of the means of political coercion out of their hands, so they can’t use it against us and that we can use it against them if they are so stupid as to attempt to resist the democratically expressed will of the majority to establish socialism.
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
Proudhon – General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth CenturyThat’s a protest of the small independent commodity producer to being regulated by the capitalist state. Which is what Proudhon was and whose class interests he expressed and representated. It’s easy to see from this the affinity between his anarchism and that of modern anarcho-capitalists. He’s in their tradition not ours. Personally I have never understood why some members like this literally “petty bourgeois” I was going to crap will leave at nonsense.
Yet on the forum you previously offered a sympathetic defence of Robert Owen who shared many similar failings…did you not?
Proudhon is similar to the US economist Henry George
You can’t compare Owen with Proudhon. Owen was a communist, ie wanted common ownership, while Proudhon was an anarcho-capitalist albeit a petty one who stood for a society of small scale producers producing for the market. Two quite different and incompatible traditions. We are in one. If anarchists want to claim him as the “father of anarchism” they are welcome to him, though it does say something about them. “Libertarian communists” sort of ok; pure and simple anarchists not.
I suggest that Proudhon’s ideas as a mutualist rather than an anarcho-capitalist are a little bit more complex than you state.
https://marx.libcom.org/library/mutualism-yes-no-iain-mckay
But, yes, Owen was not identical to Proudhon although there were similarities in their projects.
SPGB 1989 Conference:
“This Conference reaffirms that is: ‘In the minds of many workers the Co-operative movement is regarded as being in some way linked up with socialism. When the co-operators take up this attitude they claim in justification that Robert Owen, the co-operative pioneer, was actively concerned for some part of his life with possible means of escape from the capitalist system…Robert Owen’s solution was that small groups of workers should try to establish self-supporting ‘villages of industry’, in which there would be no employer, no master. They would constitute, as it were, little oases in the desert of capitalism, owning the ‘land and means of production common’. He anticipated that the movement would grown until finally the workers would have achieved their emancipation…The Co-operative Movement cannot solve the basic economic problems of the workers as a whole, or even of the co-operative societies’ own members. Its success is merely the success of an essentially capitalist undertaking…Co-operation cannot emancipate the working class. Only Socialism will do that. The workers cannot escape from the effects of capitalism by retiring into Owen’s ‘villages of industry’. They must obtain for society as a whole the ownership of the means of production and distribution, which are the property of the capitalist class. For this they must organise to control the machinery of government. Once possessed of power they can then reorganise society on a socialist basis of common ownership. Owen’s original aims can only be achieved by socialist methods’.” – carriedFurther reading
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/06/robert-owen-and-new-lanark.html
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2010/06/robert-owen-money.html
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