Engels and "socialist government"

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.

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

“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.

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.

That’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.

Proudhon is similar to the US economist Henry George

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’.” – carried

Further 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