robbo203 wrote:My favourite

My favourite is Chattopadhyay who seems to be a real scourge of the Leninist Left and has made some devastingly powerful and impressive critiques of the whole Bolshevik scene – another is Simon Pirani – and I wonder if the Party has made any contact with Chattopadhyay.  He could prove a very useful ally.

First, a word on the confusion about the term “socialism.” There is a widespread idea that socialism and communism are two successive societies, that socialism is the transition to communism and hence precedes communism. Later in this essay we will say more about the origin of this thesis and the consequences of its acceptance. For Marx this distinction is non-existent. For Marx, socialism is neither the transition to communism, nor the lower phase of communism. It is communism tout court. In fact Marx calls capitalism itself the “transitional point” or “transitional phase” to communism (Marx 1953: 438; 1962a: 425–26; in Most 1989: 783). For him socialism and communism are simply equivalent and alternative terms for the same society that he envisages for the post-capitalist epoch which he calls, indifferent texts, equivalently: communism, socialism, Republic of Labour, society of free and associated producers or simply Association, Cooperative Society, (re)union of free individuals. Hence what Marxsays in one of his famous texts – Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx 1964c; hereafter Gothacritique) – about the two stages of communism 2 could as well apply to socialism having the same two stages.