twc
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A clue to the intended end-of-the-19th-century “socialist party” is given by the author’s attack on 19th century “socialist” Robert Cunninghame Graham.Cunninghame Graham’s political career and his close associations with radicals (Morris, Shaw, Hardie, Burns, Besant, Eleanor Marx, …), writers (Conrad, Shaw, Chesterton, …), artists (Rothenstein, Whistler, …) are summarised: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bontine_Cunninghame_GrahamBefore getting to the intended “socialist party”, it’s hard not to notice that the article appeared in Marx’s old US newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune, that was founded in the 1840s by Horace Greeley and was edited, in Marx's era, by Charles Dana (who, in the 1840s, supported Proudhon’s crank mutualist-banking scheme which Marx, and history, demolished, but which still rises today).The article makes mildly interesting reading today, a century after the Boer War, and a quarter of a century after the collapse of white political rule in Southern Africa.Basically, the writer is condemning Cunninghame Graham’s pro-Boer, anti-British stance over the Boer War, and [his perceived implication] that the US should intervene militarily on the side of the Boers.Byron Farwell, in “Taking Sides in the Boer War”, exposes the political dilemma posed by any US military intervention for Boer independence: http://www.americanheritage.com/content/taking-sides-boer-war
Farwell wrote:“The [US] administration’s position was understandable. It would have been hypocritical indeed for the American government to side with the Boers fighting for their independence from Britain while at the same time continuing to hunt down and kill Filipinos who were fighting for their independence from us. The situations in South Africa and the Philippines were embarrassingly similar.”Cunninghame Graham’s friend, the novelist, Joseph Conrad, was less virulently opposed to British military aggression, seeing anti-British German influence at work among the Boers. Such are the puzzles, hypocracies and irresolvable contradictions inherent in the Capitalist mindset.Politically, Cunninghame Graham finished up founding the Scottish National Party.Now consider which end-of-the-19th-century “socialist party” the writer is referring to…Perhaps, through Cunninghame Graham’s joint membership of the Scottish Labour Party with Keir Hardie, the writer is referring to Hardie’s Independent Labour Party — the ILP.Needless to say, Cunninghame Graham has nothing essential in common with the Socialist Party of Great Britain.
LBird wrote:To 'appropriate', 'analyse' and 'trace out', is to apply a 'theory' to 'the material' ('material', here, meaning 'our selected object of study', not 'matter').If one 'appropriates, analyses and traces out' with contrasting 'theories', one will get differing 'inquiry', 'presentation' and 'description'.Marx Disowns LBirdConsider what Marx actually saysThe method of inquiry has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexionOnly after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described.If this is done successfully, if the life [process] of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror,then [the presentation of the scientific theory] may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.Marx is defending Capital against the attack that it is merely his personal subjective, a priori, construction.Notice that LBird is championing, in his quote 2 (above), the same charge of a priorism that Marx is expressly repudiating in his quote 4 (above).Strike One!I discussed Marx’s scientific method in post https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx‘s-scientific-method.Marx’s quote 1 summarises scientific analysis. Capital’s early chapters are his scientific analysis of the concrete phenomena, or sensual appearance, of capitalist society.Scientific analysis corresponds to Marx’s “descent from the concrete to the abstract”, or “essence out of appearance”, (roughly) Thomas Kuhn’s “revolutionary science”.Marx’s quote 2 summarises the abstract foundation, or essence, upon which a science is based. The theory of surplus value is the abstract foundation, or essence, of Capital Volumes 1, 2 and 3.Marx’s quote 3 summarises scientific synthesis. The aim of Capital is to progressively reveal essence in appearance, or the abstract in the concrete, by unifying capitalist phenomena as instances of the law of surplus value.Scientific synthesis corresponds to Marx’s “ascent from the abstract to the concrete”, or “appearance out of essence”, (roughly) Thomas Kuhn’s “normal science”.(For the philosophers… Hegel’s Logic, by the upside-down method characteristic of Idealism, synthesises concrete Nature out of pure abstraction by progressive thought determinations. That, of course, is Marx’s famous critique of Hegel’s Idealism.)For Marx, the aim of science isto reduce sensuous appearance to essence by scientific analysis.to derive sensuous appearance from essence by scientific synthesis.Consequently essence and appearance don’t correspond, except through the life process of a theory.Thus, LBird is quite wrong. To ‘appropriate’, ‘analyse’ and ‘trace out’, is not to apply a 'theory' to ‘the material’. It is not synthetic at all. The whole point is to avoid prior synthesis by bracketing it out [in Husserl’s sense]. That’s the point of abstraction.Marx is here describing the act of abstraction that generates the foundation of a theory, upon which to synthesise a coherent description of apparently incoherent phenomena.Strike Two!Marx makes it clear that a scientific theory is a dynamic abstraction founded on laws of motion that mirrors the apparently incoherent development of concrete processes by deriving them coherently from their abstracted essences. LBird denies this.Strike Three!
LBird advocates “democratic communism” in whichSocial Truth is determined by universal democracy.Social groups cannot hold elite ideas.Social discourse outlaws mathematics because it is elitist.Social Truth, once agreed, is enforced universally.Social production roles are allotted by universal democracy.Social consumption goods are allocated by universal democracy.These social rules follow from an epistemological theory called “idealism–materialism”.Idealism–materialism implies that ideas precede actions. The terms don’t commute, so that idealism–materialism leads to socialism, but materialism–idealism prevents socialism.LBird believes Marx used the word “material” as a synonym for the word “production”, which begs the question of why he called “Book 1. The Process of Production of Capital” instead of “The Process of Materialisation of Capital” and Parts 3, 4 and 5, the “Production of Surplus Value”, rather than the “Materialisation of Surplus Value”. [Probably, because as LBird claims, Marx couldn’t write, or write clearly, was generally confused, and the opening three chapters of Capital are incomprehensible.]To proceed… Idealism–materialism implies idealism–productionism, which implies that ideas produce the world. This is the pure Idealist half of his idealism–materialism.LBird then relies on a standard materialist assertion that the ideas of the working class are correct because the working class comprises the producers (or materialisers). This is the pure Materialist half of his idealism–materialism, although he’ll never admit this because, for him, materialism is an elitist philosophy.Now, the masterstroke… To overcome the elitism he believes is inherent in materialism, LBird needs a universal thought police. It becomes everyone’s duty under “democratic communism” to enforce the Truth of every social idea that determines social production (= social materializations).All science, all art, all social intercourse (bedroom not exempted ) will be voted on for its social Truth, indexed against subversion, and socially enforced by everyone.Sympo, LBird asks you to judge. Is his idealism–materialism and “democratic communism” the blueprint of a new Marx, or the terrifying delirium of a self-absorbed dogmatic crank?LBird has submitted over ten-thousand posts on this same theme, day-in day-out, for over four years. He’s got a better run here than he might expect elsewhere, partly because the Party is democratic in decision making — except that it falls well short of LBird’s insistence that it take a democratic vote on whether Pluto is a planet — and the Party is averse to shutting down discussion.But it has to temper its aversion to shutting down discussion to defend itself from LBird’s unstoppable shutting down threads by perpetually hijacking them down his hobby-horse cul-de-sac of voting on everything, or face being “outed” as a closet fascist.To me, LBird is a dangerous crank, who has long outstayed his welcome. Let LBird go elsewhere, perhaps by crowd funding, to independently promote his idealist–materialist “democratic communism”, which has failed to take root here.From my point of view, a society that can only survive by policing thought is not worth fighting for.
LBird wrote:And the 'theory' that your party does espouse, 'materialism' (or, 'practice and theory'), says that workers can't change their world (and by 'world', Marx means their physical universe).It is LBird who doesn’t get it.The Party has always had a theoretical platform — its century old Object and Declaration of Principles — that is based on Marxian theory, and was partly written by Marx himself.Membership of the Party depends on adherence to its theoretical Obj and Dop. Activity is subservient to it. The Obj and Dop are the theory of Party practice, and have always been, for over a century.There is no other political party whose practice is so tightly aligned to its theory. No other Party exemplifies LBird’s highly vaunted unity of theory and practice. None!The other Parties that once had an Obj and Dop rapidly repudiated, disavowed, them.LBird, show us your own platform, your Object and Declaration of Principles. Carefully explain your Obj and your Dop.LBird’s own self-professed practice doesn’t conform to his own trumpeted theory, for he proudly boasts of telling workers to vote Labour. Is that practice before theory? Or is that just plain LBird confusion?LBird’s critique of practice without theory makes perfect sense against militant voluntarism that he actually advocates — for voluntarism blindly seeks to learn from mistakes, because it denies the might of the social laws that sustain capitalist reproduction so long as its working class accepts and fights for capitalism and rejects and opposes socialism.But materialism does not say workers can’t change their world. That is LBird’s vivid imagination. The Socialist party is not a leftist organisation seeking to wring impossible concessions from capitalism.Grow up, LBird, and comprehend the Party and its history of theory and practice over the past century and more.The Party rightly cautions against leftist voluntarism — which you take to be opposing activity — that sacred concept of yours, which for you is, mistakenly, entirely Idealist in your kindergarten misreading of Marx’s Thesis I.On identical grounds, for identical reasons, Marx scorned hot-headed Blanquists who were eager to do “something”, they knew not what when, as he said, the times for voluntarist action were unpropitious.That is the only caution that materialism can give.Freedom is the recognition of necessity (which you hotly deny) and successful activity is always bound by necessity.Sadly, educating a socialist working class is about the only rational activity, for the moment, that is available to a Socialist party bound by its century old Obj and Dop. Which is why Alan wants to water it down.You are quite correct in saying that thought precedes action (except for involuntary reaction). That is the palpable, totally obvious, form of appearance that materialism explains.Idealism, at least Idealism of the vulgar variety, mistakes such obvious appearance for reality.On the other hand, materialism scientifically challenges philosophical idealsm (all in the mind, only), for which thought can only ground thought, and seeks the grounding of thought in a world beyond thought.That’s precisely why Engels (Plato et al.) assert that materialism and idealism are irreconcilable. Either thought grounds itself, and finds its truth within itself, or it is grounded in the exteriority of itself, in the that-sidedness, in the other, in the non-subjective world of action — the material world.The grounding of thought in something beyond thought is materialist, and it has very little to do with atoms (as you ignorantly pontificate).Such a historical materialism, as Marx’s, which is grounded in the necessary social practice of social production and reproduction, encourages the working class to recognise what it is up against, and to comprehend the implications of its social action.
Dunayeskaya might just as well have said Marx was the most religious of the atheists, and the most atheistic of the religious. Such oracular pronouncements get us nowhere beyond confusion.On the other hand, read how mercilessly the young Marx ultimately rips into Hegel who, if we pursue Dunayeskaya’s vulgar game, is far and away the most materialistic of the idealists, for he really does ground the material world, and its development, in the development of the Idea, and so is forced to make the unfolding Idea take the material world extremely seriously.As for “unthinking communism that completely negates the personality of man” might that not be the variety of unthinking communism under universal thought control, subject to a regimen of from each as universally ordered, to each as universally doled out?
Of course the Bolsheviks made “history” — but only in the narrow insignificant sense. In the broad significant sense, the Bolsheviks didn’t make socialism; they made capitalism instead. They were socialist “also rans”.Making socialism is what matters when we are talking about the Bolsheviks and history. That was the celebrated task they set themselves, and they failed miserably at their self-assigned task, lying through their teeth all the while about what they knew they actually doing, while significant history was inexorably unmaking them.In terms of the significant class relations of ownership and control of the means of life, the foundation of a mode of production, the situation after the Bolsheviks is identical to what it would have been had Kerensky prevailed instead of the Bolsheviks. They simply shored up capitalist relationships of ownership and control in Russia.Such is the significant mode-of-production level of making history that they made against their own political propaganda.A child in nappies knows, at the insignificant level, that the Bolsheviks, like the local football team, made the other sort of “history”.
LBird wrote:The materialists – twc, robbo, Vin, Tim, YMS, etc. – claim that Pluto itself tells them that it is a 'planet'.They claim that this is an 'objective fact'.They deny that humans created 'the planet Pluto', and can change it.They deny that 'the planet Pluto' has a history, dependent upon social factors.What incoherent hysterical rant!Sorry, but nobody, outside of your weird imagination, would ever make the absurd claim that Pluto itself tells us that it is a ‘planet’.What Marx claims is that the act of observation is an objective act. The interpretation of the objective act is another matter, but that interpretation ultimately derives its objectivity, by descent, from the objectivity of the observation. There is no other ultimate means of thought acquiring objectivity. Thought must prove itself in practice!No, they claim that they observed its photographic image wandering relative to the stellar background over consecutive photographic plates, to which a planetary orbit could be fitted by spherical projection that conformed to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Hence a prosaic scientist would claim it was a planet. If this humdrum procedure breaks every high-falutin’ rule of philosophical discourse, then so much the worse for high-falutin’ scholastic philosophical discourse.No. But some folks may naturally get sentimentally het up over losing a favourite planet of their childhood, but such folks temper their disappointment by knowing that their favourite former-planet is totally indifferent to the IAU decision to demote its planetary status. And, what a fabulously fascinating body this demoted planet turns out to be. It has taken its ‘revenge’ to the enjoyment of all. Only an anti-scientific ignoramus thinks something political is at stake when a remote icy rock is re-classified on objective classificatory criteria.
[quote-LBird]Let’s keep it simple.So-called ‘Natural laws’ are products of the society that creates them.So, being our products, we can ‘abolish'’ them, and replace them with ‘natural laws’ suited to our needs, interests and purposes, as we create them through our social theory and practice.Simple Marxism, twc. ‘Nature’, as we know it, is currently a class construct. ‘Nature’, as we don’t know it, is, as Marx said, ‘nothing for us’.[/quote]It is not that simple. Marx wrote the materialist text in Post #21, wherein Marx writes:“Natural laws cannot be abolished.”“What can change, under historically different circumstances, is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.”“the history of the theory of value shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — i.e. more or less clearly understood”“the process of human thought itself grows out of conditions — is itself a natural process — thinking that really comprehends must always be the same”Marx is explaining to Dr Ludwig Kugelmann his scientific method in Capital Vol. 1. His explanation refutes pontificator LBird.
Nobody, apart from LBird, thinks that he is sublimely unique in holding the position that our conception of the Sun is fixed. To even bother making an issue out of it is to reveal at once the non-scientist talking.Every working scientist, without exception, is acutely conscious of his dependence on a dynamic tradition of changing scientific conception. Without exception!And especially not Engels!Most of the investigators, at least the early ones, who contributed scientifically to our conception of the Sun were scions of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie — decidedly not working class — and typically deeply religious and some even mystical. Yet those non working-class attributes proved no impediment to them altering our social conception. Those who change it know it is not fixed.Perhaps, then, in the context of our dynamic scientific conceptions, you might care to respond to some of the materialist statements in the document I mentioned the other day. Your comments will clarify your view on matters which are dear to me.“The necessity for society to distribute its social labor in these definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production — only the mode of its appearance can change.”“Natural laws cannot be abolished.”“What can change, under historically different circumstances, is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.”“And the form in which the law of the proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.”“Science consists precisely in demonstrating how this law of value asserts itself.”“So that if one wanted at the very beginning to ‘explain’ all the phenomena that seemingly contradict the law, one would have to present the science before the science.”“On the other hand, the history of the theory of value shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — i.e. more or less clearly understood, though hedged more or less with illusions or, scientifically, as a more or less definite concept.“Since the process of human thought itself grows out of conditions — is itself a natural process — thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, over time, according to the maturity of the development of the conditions, including the maturity of the development of the thinker. Everything else is drivel.”Try comments 2, 5 and 8.
LBird wrote:Marx effected a unity of Idealism-Materialism, taking something from both, and rejecting something from both. He realised that the Idealists were correct about ‘activity’, and thus united the ‘active’ with ‘the human’, but rejected the ‘divine’ and the ‘passive’.Apparently,Idealists teach active✓and divine✗Materialists teach passive✗and human✓.Idealist–Materialists teach active✓and human✓.∴ Materialist–Idealists teach passive✗and divine✗.Little does LBird realize that Marx was defending Materialism when he wrote his Theses on Feuerbach. Thesis X makes this indisputable:“The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new materialism is human society, or social humanity.”As correctly recognized by Engels when he published the Theses on Feuerbach (after Marx’s death) Marx is here seen laying the foundation of his new Materialism.The Theses capture Marx’s genesis of his new Materialism, a re-invigorated Materialism that transcends — in Hegelian fashion — Feuerbach’s old Materialism, that is forced to reduce:the religious world into its secular basis by reducing man’s religious essence into a fixed human essence.Feuerbach’s old Materialist blindspot thrusts fixity upon his discussion whenever he undertakes to discuss material man. This is despite Feuerbach relying heavily for inspiration on the non-fixed, dynamic, Hegelian Idealist system that he sets out to oppose materialistically.Marx identifies Feuerbach’s old-materialist blindspot, and this allows him to critique the old Materialism itself:Thus, Feuerbach does not conceive sensuous human activity — in contrast to thinking activity — as beingdynamicobjective.By contrast, Marx does. He takes the objectivity of dynamic human sensuous activity as his scientific foundation.This allows Marx to transcend (in Hegelian fashion) the old Materialism by recognizing that material Man makes himself dynamically — actively — through his own objective sensuous practice.For Marx, it is man’s sensuous objective practice that is his foundational activity, not his thought.So, is Marx here denying the universally agreed phenomenal form of appearance that thought guides our sensuous activity?No, of course not. Forms of appearance are what have to be explained. Explanation of thought, from the exterior of thought, has always been the role of Materialism.By contrast, the Idealists (at least those rarefied ones of the LBird variety) comprehend thought by thought alone — by the interior of thought — and also comprehend action, likewise hermetically sealed from exteriority, as being grounded by thought alone.But, grounding thought and action in thought alone leaves thought and action bereft of any non-thought criterion of objectivity — anything external to thought — which for Marx (in the Theses) is tantamount to scholasticism.By contrast, the new Materialist, Marx, grounds thought in [the necessity] of man’s sensuous activity. Man’s thought, for Marx and Engels, is ultimately the thought of his sensuous practical activity.Thus to return, and answer the question: is Marx denying the universally agreed phenomenal form of appearance that thought guides our sensuous activity?…Marx explains this appearance as follows: Man’s thought can only be a reliable guide to his sensuous activity when it is the product of his successful sensuous activity.[In passing: This conception of successful thought, in its Idealist form, accords with absolute Idealist Hegel’s Phenomenolgy, which Marx forever prized, castigating poor Dietzgen for stumbling across it too late in his ‘philosophical’ career.]As a consequence of grounding successful thought in successful action, the Theses are not Marx’s grafting of Materialism onto Idealism, because — as Marx points out in the Theses — Idealism disavows Marx’s foundational critique that real, sensuous activity is objective.LBird recognizes the purified brainy stuff, but cannot bring himself to recognize the foundational objectivity of the sensual stuff. His response is to sneer haughtily at those who do. As such, he is decidedly anti-Marx.To reiterate…Marx goes to great pains in the Theses to make it absolutely clear — i.e. irrefutably, in no uncertain terms — that he is establishing a new Materialism.Marx is not grafting his sensuously objective Materialism onto an anti-sensuous, anti-objective, purely subjective, version of Idealism to produce a mélange like LBird’s rarefied anti-scientific Idealism–Materialism.Shocking is that Marx’s new Materialism takes sensuous human activity asobjective human activity,the ultimate criterion, or arbiter, of objective truth. Any alternative is purely scholastic.For Marx, material man ultimately makes, and must make, himself through objective practice. Marx himself makes it abundantly clear that:“All social life is essentially practical.” (Thesis VIII).Man makes his own world and his own history through his objective sensuous practice in a world he inherits and of which he is a natural part, and whose social laws of motion he is naturally equipped to comprehend and then to wield in his interest.It is the role of his thought to comprehend the objectivity of his sensuous human practice, in his practical world, so that his thoughts can become, by indirection, the objective guide to his successful sensuous activity in changing that world.Man inherits the objectivity of his thought from the objectivity of his practice.The objectivity of practice, in the world of our appearances, grounds everything human.
LBird expresses hostility to materialism.In his need to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels, he blames Engels for distorting Marx with materialistic accounts.The following materialistic account about how Marx arrived at the law of value was written in 1868, only one year after Marx published Capital Vol. 1.“Every child knows that a nation that ceased to work … even for a few weeks would perish.“Every child also knows that the quantities of social products, satisfying social needs, require definite proportions of the total social labor.“The necessity for society to distribute its social labor in these definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production — only the mode of its appearance can change.“Natural laws cannot be abolished.“What can change, under historically different circumstances, is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.“And the form in which the law of the proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.“Science consists precisely in demonstrating how this law of value asserts itself.“So that if one wanted at the very beginning to “explain” all the phenomena that seemingly contradict the law, one would have to present the science before the science.“It is precisely Ricardo’s mistake that (in his first chapter on value) he takes as given all possible, and still to be developed, categories in order to prove their conformity to the law of value.“On the other hand, the history of the theory of value shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — i.e. more or less clearly understood, though hedged more or less with illusions or, scientifically, as a more or less definite concept.“Since the process of human thought itself grows out of conditions — is itself a natural process — thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, over time, according to the maturity of the development of the conditions, including the maturity of the development of the thinker.“Everything else is drivel.“The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations cannot be directly identical with the magnitudes of value.“The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production.“The rational and natural necessity asserts itself only as a blindly working average.“And then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different.“In fact, the vulgar economist boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate.”I wonder if LBird might amuse us by clearly explaining for our delight:what’s wrong with this account?whether Marx would ever have described it this way, or written anything remotely like this?
Sympo wrote:Is calling the political conditions “subservient to the economic conditions” the same thing as calling it “undecisive” in the making of history? (This question is not meant to be rhetorical)No. It depends on what you are “deciding”.If you are “deciding” on strategies for bringing about Socialism:The Labour Party wanted to bring it about gradually.The Bolsheviks wanted to bring it about by fiat.If you “decide” their actions against their claims, and if you then “decide” their claims against their abject revisions of their claims, you must “decide” that they failed absolutely to “decide” history.Rather you must ultimately “decide” that the Labour Party and the Bolsheviks were an impediment to history, since both of them landed up indistinguishable from each other, identical to the Conservatives except in rhetoric (and rhetoric is cheap), and the capitalism they “knew how to overthrow” remains as capitalism.The question to be answered is why?This is where the “subservience of politics to economic conditions” asserts itself…Capitalist politicians and politics can make all sorts of changes to the capitalist superstructure. The truth is, any fool can change the superstructure, just as any fool is able to imagine.The point, however, is to change the foundation.That political act is anti-political. It is the social act that abolishes politics forever.
Sympo wrote:Why exactly weren’t the Bolsheviks decisive in the making of history?In the narrow sense, of course they were.But they also set history back enormously…The Bolsheviks effectively derailed history, ably abetted by their western hangers on — originally the perk seeking trade-union officials and political-careerist self-proclaimed “leaders” of the working class, who eagerly grasped Russian money and willingly became an arm of soviet foreign policy in the west, supporting every thuggish nationalist movement as “socialist” (see below on the “primitive accumulation” they were championing).In the broad sense, in which Engels is using the term, they did not “decide” history, but rather history cast its fatal “decision” upon them, in precisely the way Engels foretold in his 1850 writings.What confronted the Bolsheviks historically was the necessity for them to implement what Marx calls the “primitive accumulation of capital”, which in plain speech is the creation of a working class where none, or only a minuscule one, ever existed before.The Bolsheviks, like every other state power that confronts the task of constructing capitalism out of a prior existing social system (such as a form of feudalism), were forced to create a capitalist working class by the only means available to them: the dispossession of the prior existing labouring class’s formerly owned means of production, i.e. the reduction of the majority from a state of semi-independence to one of total dependence in order to live.Read Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 31 and following, on “Primitive Accumulation” to comprehend the painful birth of the British working class.There Marx says in no uncertain terms: “Capital comes into this world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. The Bolsheviks excelled in delivering this.So, if we look to the Bolsheviks for being “decisive” then credit is due where they deserve it most:The Bolsheviks “decisively” dispossessed a prior existing labouring class of its means of living to pave the way for capitalism employing them as its very own working class.And this brutal, but necessary, act of dispossession is totally “decisive” in capitalist historical terms, but these are not the criteria Engels was adopting in the context of bringing about socialism.Thus, to repeat, in their own “avowedly socialist” terms, the Bolsheviks were destined to fail miserably at doing what they claimed they set out to be doing.What they “decisively” achieved was inevitable — establishing capitalism in Russia.And that achievement — fatal to their bombastic rhetoric — was “decisively” their own work, but it was carried out under the inexorability of an economic foundation that the very history that made them into Bolsheviks also prevented them, as Bolsheviks, from ever changing.The Bolsheviks were the victims of history, not its “deciders”. That should be the end of the matter!
