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Hal Draper wrote a magnificent study—the definitive study—of the term Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as Volume 3 of “Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution”. [All four of Draper’s volumes are excellent, often ground-breaking, studies, despite the man’s communist intellectual lineage.]Draper retraces the history and usage of the term “dictatorship” from ancient times, and he discusses in extremely close detail every one of Marx’s half-dozen usages.Draper also published a shortened version of the work that discusses Lenin’s [ab]usage as well. These are excellent studies by one of the greatest 20th century writers on Marx. Brilliant stuff.Now to your aversion.“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is a perfectly legitimate phrase to describe the crucial act of the working class confiscating capitalist-class ownership and control of the means of life. The bourgeoisie are unlikely to confiscate ownership and control of their own free will.That grand historical act can only be the consciously thought-out democratically-condoned action of one class abolishing the foundation of all class domination. The bourgeoisie aren’t likely to abolish the foundation of all class domination of their own free will.The social act of pulling the rug from under any future attempt at class domination has to be an act of class domination in the process of abolishing class domination. The bourgeoisie aren’t likely to pull that rug of their own free will.It will be the act of the hitherto subservient class abolishing its erstwhile ruler’s control and ownership of the means of social life and conferring that power upon all of society. The bourgeoisie aren’t likely to confer social power of their own free will.If that ain’t adequately termed “dictating” to—enforcing your dominance over—your erstwhile dominator, give me a better term. But don’t waste your time in trying to find a softer, whiter, brighter, marketing term. “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is the only adequate phrase, and it will be the adequate revolutionary phrase on everyone’s lips when it is acted out. This is entirely independent of whether you abolish the phrase in your imagination or deprecate it by decree.We have far more serious issues ahead of us than “terrifying terminology”![Recall that it was Luxemburg who openly condemned Lenin for duplicitously abusing the then-accepted phrase “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” as a smokescreen to cover the actuality of his “Dictatorship by the Party”, i.e. dictatorship by himself. We, of course, know that Lenin was simply practicising what all prototype bourgeois leaders in the aftermath of a bourgeois revolution against feudalism are compelled to do in order to run a prototype capitalist economy, and embark on capitalism’s murky beginnings of forced primitive accumulation. Of course, he saved face by distorting terminology.]As to today’s common usage — that’s ephemeral in the scheme of things — on the timescale of social modes of production, which is measured in centuries, and not in weeks, months or years.Modes of production survive because they solve the social problem of how to reproduce society. That’s why they prove to be pretty damn robust things, thank god, or we’ll all be clamouring for next year’s model on the morning after the revolution.On that timescale, by the time we introduce a genuine class dictatorship that abolishes all classes, the old abused meaning of the phrase that everywhere accompanied the beginning of capitalism will hardly be a memory.On that timescale, Marx wrote (what Kuhn recapitulated a century later about serious scientific theoretical frameworks):“No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” [Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy].Current usage is, as it always is in a class society, based entirely on mistaking the outward appearance of the mode of production for its inner workings.Current usage on matters relating to a social mode of production is ephemeral, as it changes with changing outward appearance while the inner workings remain invariantly working, unchanged, as ever.Current usage will lose its force, its zing, its pizzazz, its élan, when folks start to see through that appearance, but not before they do.Then folks will look incredulously at a party, that survives only because it eschews outward appearance for inner workings, yet has jettisoned the only invariant terminology adequate to invariant inner workings, and embraced instead yesterday’s vulgar usage.We rely entirely on technical terminology. Why should we capitulate to current unsage, and ingratiate ourselves to the mob by validating its false consciousness that adequately expresses the mere outward appearance of things, when our whole case is crucially based on exposing that outward appearance for the fleeting illusion that it is.As to “rural idiocy”, well, what can I say. We have abundant examples of concomitant “urban idiocy” created spontaneously by a triumphant capitalism, expressed in today’s common usage that fetishizes the outward appearance of things.Large sections of our urban proletariat are as “idiotic” as the useless Roman proletariat that gave us the servile “idiocy” of christianity, and the feudal “cretins” who perpetuated it.For the sake of mankind, I am at one with Horace — Odi profanum vulgus et arceo, favete linguis, carmina non prius audita … canto — We sing our own songs in our own linguis. Damn the “idiotic” vulgar tongue!Sorry, but I’m not capitulating to ignorance, no matter how mellifluously its oh-so-acceptable voice charms the ear with today’s common usage.
Oh my god! I couldn’t stomach reading it through in one go.It contains more subjunctives than a talk-back radio caller who knows exactly what “should” be done because it’s so obvious.By what evidence do you declare that “The socialist movement has felt obliged to abandon the use of an important word because it had become too corrupt.”?Meanwhile, I will be posting, probably tomorrow, at your request regarding Vin and the TSSI, a modern account of Marxian economics that refutes most of what I fear you’ve said about Marx and socialism.
The shortest version that is correct isCommon-Ownership-and-Democratic-Control-of-the-Means-of-LifeorCODECOM
Alan,As you once said, quite wrongly of me, keep your eye on the ball.A condition of party membership is adherence to our socialist Object. Why? Because we hold it to be an invariant—invariably true—unconditionally.Consequently, such pre-historical niceties over my innocent [mis]use of the term “original”, and then post-historical bother over “socialism’s” deplorably multiple concurrent meanings, is bound to strike me as by no means an innocent contribution to a discussion over your floated suggestion to drop our traditional term “socialism”.In that context, I found it impossible not to see all the historical fuddiness as mere prelude to the author’s hip conclusion that “the meaning of socialism is fluid not frozen”.I found it impossible not to see his whole historical apparatus as fanfare to the conclusion that variability is the new invariant, invariably true, unconditionally— that variable meaning takes precedence over our frozen “original” corpse of a meaning, which is apparently stuck frigid in the historical ice age, while the vibrant fluidity of changing terminology and squishy meaning flourishes all around.Surely that was not an unreasonable conclusion for me to draw from his conclusion?Even after your rapid jump to personal defence, which I admire, while recognizing that it is also conveniently a simultaneous defence of your own variable position, I remain concerned. What on earth can a conclusion that “the meaning of socialism is fluid not frozen” imply on a world-socialist site which supports an invariant socialist Object?That conclusion rings socialist alarm bells! I detect ground being laid to facilitate a creeping normalcy which slowly, imperceptibly, but actually, seeks to change the meaning of “socialism” to suit opinion.I freely admit that I may be severely over-reacting to a bit of harmless historical correction. That’s why I asked for a clarification. If I have over-reacted in defence of our meaning—“original” or otherwise—of “socialism”, then I will apologize unreservedly.I trust I have explained my behaviour to your and Admin’s satisfaction, and defended my actually innocent action.
For crying out loud collinskelly, what pedantic academic hairsplitting demoralizing undermining drivel.We have kept our Object alive for a century in the teeth of everyone else, avowed foe and deluded friend, who hold a different meaning. You’d imagine that one or two of us had noticed that fact before we got your advice on the subject.If you wish to make a pedantic hairsplitting demoralizing undermining drivellous point that ‘socialism’ has other meanings for other people, please divulge your demoralizing undermining reason for bringing up what we all already know.Is it your ploy or your prelude to undermining our own Object? Is it? Have the B. guts to give a straight answer to that straight question, not a pedantic academic hairsplitting demoralizing undermining drivellous one.Yours is the sort of demoralizing pedanticism that serves no purpose but to weaken resolve.Explain yourself, or go off and join the 99.999% whose ‘socialism’ you are far more comfortable with.
No, no, no!It is up to voluntarist Andrew Kliman, Paul Mattick Jr, etc. to seek us out, unbidden, or not at all. We neither need, nor seek, political advice from our opponents.That has been the party case for a century. Nothing new of substance has intervened to change it.It’s no small political, and therefore theoretical, matter that Andrew Kilman [forget about Mattick] probably disagrees with our Object, definitely disagrees with our Declaration of Principles—which he considers at best quaint and at worst contemptible—and scoffs at our political practice.The party has always recognized that it can’t force consent from others to our unique century-old political position. But it has also recognized that, on matters political, and to that extent theoretical matters, our opponents have to learn from us before both of us can achieve socialism.We have nothing political, and to that extent theoretical, to learn from them. The party has always recognized their practice as reactionary—as obstructive to socialism. It is they who must learn from us.Now, to marxian economics.I have unbounded admiration, and extreme gratitude, toward Andrew Kliman’s (and his TSSI colleagues’) reclamation of Marx’s Capital. I declare this unreservedly.Through the strange contingencies of history, the TSSI became absolutely necessary for the survival of marxian economics, and will turn out to be the greatest service ever rendered to it since Marx. In the fullness of time, when the next generation wonders what the fuss was all about, the TSSI will seem inevitably Marx. There can be no greater tribute.Andrew Kliman has written his remarkable book, as clearly as he possibly can. That still does not necessarily make it an easy book for everyone to read. If party members want to understand it, it’s up to them to read it.Just imagine the power of a party that adheres to its century-old Obj and DOP, that treats the materialist conception of history as Marx’s theory of social necessity and of the formation of social consciousness that conforms to social necessity, and that comprehends marxian economics at a sufficient level to appreciate the TSSI.Such a party is unstoppable.That, Alan, is the political answer, and the only political answer, to your quandary. P.S. While discussing your Debs signature, I toyed with a signature of my own, trying it out on a test post that I subsequently deleted. I hadn’t realized that signatures run wild, retrospectively appending themselves to all previous posts. [Surely this is a software bug—signatures should be time-stamped.]In any case, the damage is now done, and you will have to live with my signature until I decide to delete it.So here it is, dynamically appended by the forum software.
Alan,Those extracts from Debs’s speeches are excellent stuff, attacking voluntarism, bolshevism, etc. I now understand your tempered admiration, and am happy to retract my comments regarding your signature.Nonetheless, my comments on replacing the term “socialism” stand.
It’s the author I find politically offensive. We politically oppose a “one world” based on IWW or Debsian “principles” (if such there be).You express concern that our opponents steal our phrases and reinterpret them politically against us. Plastering Debs’s name across our forum is a perfect way of, unintentionally, validating our opponents’ political re-interpretations against us on our own site.We attribute Louis Blanc’s political slogan to Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, where Marx forever stamped a world-socialist seal upon it. Blanc’s interpretation is the last thing we and Marx would politically endorse. We therefore never attribute it to Blanc, because he meant by it something we oppose.If you want Debs’s content without his political slant, do likewise—skip academic niceties and drop reference to the fellow. That then would be something we all agree on politically.
What dangerous game are you playing?You countenance relinquishing the term “socialism” on the grounds that we’ve lost its original meaning to others. The others have never held our meaning. The party has kept the original meaning of “socialism” alive for a century against worse odds than now. Nothing of genuine substance has changed today.You suggest that the party give up the term “socialism” for some alternative in order to “establish the identity of a valid idea”, in the false hope that the new alternative term we adopt in its place won’t eventually be “stolen” and besmirched also.Rest assured, if our new alternative differentiating terminology is successful, a stronger capitalism will steal, and aneasthetize it, as a stronger capitalism has so far succeeded in emasculating every other term that threatens its interests.Just consider any of our traditional terminology. It expresses technical content, or specialist categories of thought like “value”, “exploitation”, etc. None of it is common usage.Take some of our terminology that is in common usage:“Political Reform” was once exclusively used to imply pro-working class change. It has been stolen by the avowed bourgeoisie to mean the exact opposite.“Capital” has always meant, in common usage, something other than what Marx meant by it, e.g. currently by the ignorant Piketty; or in bogus bourgeois terminology like “human capital”, “intellectual capital”, etc. Do you recommend we give up the term “capital”, and thereby cede its meaning to common [mis]usage?Now Marx wrote about capital and socialism. A party based on Marx has no choice but to tread in his footsteps and defend his terminology from bourgeois corruption. It is the only terminology that makes the party case meaningful. The party cannot relinquish its technical terms to its opponents without relinquishing itself.To change terminology, as you suggest, merely to differentiate the original from the misappropriators is a mug’s game. The only justifiable terminology is that which adequately describes content. To chuck away a century’s usage of terminology to describe our content, is to signal abject capitulation to one’s opponents—submission to the bourgeoisie—which of course it could only be if the party were so foolhardy as to adopt such a populist pandering suggestion.A revolutionary party that is not prepared to fight for its own established terminology has already joined the ranks of all the rest of the weathercock swinging political panderers. Except that a revolutionary party instantly transforms itself, quite unmistakably, into a political laughing stock. Such a party may as well cede its theory that exemplifies its terminology to them as well.Yesterday you recommended relaxing the hostility clause, and earlier you strongly defended altering the DOP as a worthwhile intellectual exercise. How much more demoralization?While in the mood of terminological re-examination, you might reconsider own Web signature. It celebrates anti-socialist Debs’s French bourgeois-revolutionary term “citizen” (Citoyen), whose original revolutionary meaning has long since been lost. By the way, I for one do take offence at your parading Debs’s dubious phrase on a world-socialist site. This now almost meaningless, egotistical, phrase of a politico is in frequent common usage today by equally suspect members of any world-wide anti-socialist cause. Surely your signature has also lost its original meaning to bourgeois others. If anything should be changed on a world-socialist site, it is your anti-socialist’s signature.
Vin,Please ignore LBird’s pronouncements on Capital, which he misunderstands because he has not read it.Sample LBird misrepresentations of Capital include: (1) “value isn’t embodied in ‘money’”; (2) “whilst anyone thinks that they … can recognise ‘value’, they don’t understand Marx and are not a Communist"; etc.Marx flatly contradicts LBird.Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 3, “Commodities and Money”:“The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal, and quantitatively comparable”.“Money serves as a universal measure of value”.“Money … the universal equivalent form of value in general”.“Money is the measure of value inasmuch as it is the socially recognised incarnation of human labour”.“The commodity that functions as a measure of value, and, either in its own person or by a representative, as the medium of circulation, is money”.“This is precisely the reason why the product of his labour serves him solely as exchange-value. But it cannot acquire the properties of a socially recognised universal equivalent, except by being converted into money”.This should be enough warning to treat LBird’s pronouncements with extreme caution.Perhaps the only pronouncement you can trust is LBird’s unconscious self-lampoon that “Non-communists of necessity can’t understand ‘value’ or Marx’s Capital”.
Before proceeding, my memory did not serve me well.
Bortkiewicz’s article on the marxian system appeared in 1907.
The association between Paul Samuelson and Paul Sweezy that I mis-recalled was as follows:
The young Samuelson attended a debate at Harvard in the 1930s between a brash young Paul Sweezy and the elder-statesman of economic history Joseph Schumpeter [who was a student of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, well-known for “Karl Marx, and the Close of his System”]. This was before Sweezy wrote “The Theory of Capitalist Development” and “Monopoly Capitalism”.
Of course, all three knew of each other’s work, and Schumpeter refers to the youngish Sweezy an inordinate number of times thoroughout his giant history of economics. His fascination with Sweezy was with the mathematics, going back to Bortkiewicz, which might well be Schumpeter’s devastating, but unintended, time bomb for so-called “marxian” economists of the once-dominant Bortkiewicz school.
Samuelson [like Schumpeter] was generous to his intellectual foes, excepting Marx (probably because as Andrew Kliman surmises he had the intellectual wood on them, but not on Marx) as is evident from Samuelson’s open admission of defeat in the “capital controversies” and in his appreciative assessment of the work of Sweezy, Sraffa and Ronald Meek [the historian of the labour theory of value] and fulsome in his obituary tributes to them.
By the way, the Cambridge Massachusetts university was, of course, prof. Samuelson’s MIT.
Vin,Written in haste, because it’s getting late here.The TSSI is explained in Andrew Kliman’s book “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital”. Unfortunately it is a technical book and so may not be an easy read.The Wikipedia article also focuses on technicalities, and is probably not a good introduction.Here is a brief summary of the background to the TSSIEngels, in the Preface to Capital Volume 2 posed to Marx’s critics what came to be known as the “Transformation Problem” of abstract values into concrete prices of production, to be discussed in the as-yet unedited and unpublished Volume 3.In 1942, marxian economist Paul Sweezy of the Monthly Review school, resurrected a 1905 mathematical criticism of Marx’s solution by Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, ironically claiming it to be the correct mathematical formulation of Marx’s problem.In 1961, Piero Sraffa of Cambridge generalized the Bortkiewicz approach, and used it to attack neoclassical capital theory from a supposedly marxian standpoint. This initiated the famous “capital controversies" between the universities of Cambridge in England and Cambridge in Massachusetts, thereby engaging Paul Samuelson [who, if memory serves, had once been a fellow student with Sweezy].In 1966, Samuelson accepted Sraffa’s demolition of the neoclassical “production function”, and wrote to everyone’s astonishment of this new age of “Leontief and Sraffa”.In the process, the implications of Bortkiewicz’s initial abstractions became evident, and it turned out that Sraffa’s system also demolished Marx, whose epitaph was written by Ian Steedman in “Marx After Sraffa” [1977]. Values, it turned out, could be negative when profits were positive! Marx was incoherent.“Marxian" economists deserted Capital in their droves, many heading straight for Sraffa, now termed neo-ricardianism.The upshot was that Marx was wrong to have criticized Ricardo. Machines, robots and possibly animals produce surplus-value.The devastating malaise persisted as long as no-one could detect the error, or errors, in Sraffa.The TSSI, mainly associated with Andrew Kliman in New York and Alan Freeman in London, is the theory that detected the error—actually two fundamental errors—in Sraffianism.To be continued, where I’ll explain why, once it’s understood, we should support it. [The reviewer of Andrew Kliman’s book in a recent Socialist Standard may have some thoughts on the TSSI and references.]
This rather fine article is not written by the “ultra keynesian” John Kenneth Galbraith, who died back in 2006. It is written by his son James K Galbraith. On the evidence of this article, James is far from being the “ultra keynesian” his father was and, if he is a keynesian at all, he can only be called, at best, a highly unorthodox one.In Section 1 of the article, James K Galbraith neatly summarizes the Marxian and the marginalist conceptions of capital, and comes out on the side of Marx. He soundly criticizes the neoclassical physicalist “production function” and thereby criticizes his father’s master, Keynes himself.James presents the pithiest summary I’ve ever read of the famous, but abstruse, Cambridge capital controversies of the 1960s, in which Samuelson graciously conceded losing the battle, but in which the pyrrhic marxians lost the war (they effectively succeeded in demolishing Marx’s Capital for a whole generation until Andrew Kliman rescued it in the year James K Galbraith’s father died).Importantly for socialists, James K Galbraith’s criticism of physicalism [accounting capital in physical units], as Andrew Kliman proved in Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, lays a devastating blow on neo-Ricardian, or Sraffian, economics as well as on neo-classical, or marginalist, economics. It is the proof of Marx’s social relations of production conception of value, though James K Galbraith may not see it that way.In any case, this man is no orthodox keynesian, at least as far as his explicit theory goes in this article.Piketty, of course, is totally different. He is a pure phenomenologist, not in Hegel’s sense, but in the sense of an empirical scientist, not a theoretical one. He is a modern day Thomas Tooke, whose History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation during the Years 1703–1856 was a mine of empirical data for Marx.Fact, or data, begs explanation; it is not its own ineffable explanation. Fact, as nothing-generating-something, is what Hegel implies by being–nothing–becoming. The world won’t let us sit on the piketty fence.
LBird wrote:Marx argues for ‘humanised nature’.Yes, but not in your abstract Idealist reading of the 1844 Manuscripts.Society ‘humanizes’ nature in two senses, with significant materialist modifications.Society modifies nature for itself. It ‘socializes’ nature.However, a class-divided society has no other means of ‘socializing nature’ than by ‘de-humanizing’ it.Its working-class, in the process of ‘humanizing nature’ for its ruling class, just as certainly, ‘de-humanizes nature’ for itself, and so for all of society.The reality of ‘humanized nature’ of capitalist society is its very opposite:Extinction of nature’s living organisms—expansion of capital at the expense of mass extinction of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, plants, etc.De-humanization of nature’s ‘human’ organisms—luxury and tranquility for some at the expense of poverty, starvation, war and misery for others.‘Anti-human’ disdain for nature’s habitats—irreversible destruction of rain-forests, coral-reefs, beaches, rivers, lakes, oceans, glaciers, soils, air, etc.Society comprehends the natural world scientifically.Society’s most subversive activity is its scientific practice.Modern society comprehends nature quite differently from the way its predecessors did, even when nature’s outward appearance seems much the same to it as it did to them.For example, we see nature’s Sun rise and set, much as our predecessor’s did, even though our generation largely recognizes that it is the Earth that rotates, and so comprehends the process quite differently.We see nature’s species as separate entities in themselves, much as our predecessor’s did, even though our generation largely recognizes their evolutionary heritage, and so comprehends the process quite differently.Modern society has managed to tame nature, by comprehending its processes, in ways beyond the wildest technological ideas of our predecessors. Even on trivial technological matters, the ‘ideas man’, Bill Gates, not all that long ago, confidently declared that “640kBytes should be enough RAM for anybody” and that “CD-ROMs were the future, and not the internet”.Nature can only be ‘humanized’ in Marx’s 1844 sense, when society is. When mankind institutes our Object.
