A Marxian Theory of Democracy
Socialism and Democracy, 2000
Mehmet Tabak
https://www.academia.edu/3061865/A_Marxian_Theory_of_Democracy

Marx's Theory of Proletarian Dictatorship Revisited

Author(s): Mehmet TabakSource:
Science & Society,
Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall, 2000), pp. 333-356

Published by: Guilford Press

https://www.academia.edu/36909948/Marxs_Theory_of_Proletarian_Dictatorship_Revisited

ROAD-MAP TO SOCIALISM_edited docx.docx

2018

Binay Sarkar

Democracy is the road to socialism
Win the battle of democracy
Do away with private property
Abolish the wages system altogether

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A COMRADE FROM THE WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 

Democracy nowadays is communism - Engels

Binay Sarkar

Some workers even after getting involved in the World Socialist Movement hold on to the erroneous view that we should support movements for political democracy, owing to the phony belief that the struggle for democracy takes precedence over the struggle for Socialism. 

Actually, democracy in itself is not a system of society, but just the language of a social relation and a principle of organization and action. It is human nature to live socially, and democracy is the spontaneous social expression of human nature.

“The struggle for democracy is bound up with the struggle for Socialism, and not the struggle for Socialism bound up with the struggle for democracy.” (Socialist Standard, June1939).

THE LABOUR DEBATE AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE THEORY AND REALITY OF CAPITALIST WORK

https://www.academia.edu/3190057/The_Labour_Debate._An_investigation_into_the_theory_and_reality_of_capitalist_work

What is to be Done? Leninism,anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution today

 

 

Chapter 1

What is to be Done? Leninism,anti-Leninist Marxism and theQuestion of Revolution today

 

Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler

I

Of one thing we can be certain. The ideologies of the twentiethcentury will disappear completely. This has been a lousy century.It has been filled with dogmas, dogmas that one after anotherhave cost us time, suffering, and much injustice (Garcia Marquez,1990).

Amid the resurgence of anti-capitalist movements across theglobe, the centenary of Lenin’s

What is to be Done?

in 2002has largely gone unnoticed. Leninism has fallen on hard times – and rightly so. It leaves a bitter taste of a revolution whoseheroic struggle turned into a nightmare. The indifference toLeninism is understandable. What, however, is disturbing isthe contemporary disinterest in the revolutionary project. Whatdoes anti-capitalism in its contemporary form of anti-globalization mean if it is not a practical critique of capitalismand what does it wish to achieve if its anti-capitalism fails toespouse the revolutionary project of human emancipation?Anti-capitalist indifference to revolution is a contradictionin terms. Rather then freeing the theory and practice ofrevolution from Leninism, its conception of revolutionaryorganization in the form of the party, and its idea of the statewhose power is to be seized, as an instrument of revolution,remain uncontested. Revolution seems to mean Leninism, nowappearing in moderated form as Trotskyism. OrthodoxMarxism invests great energy in its attempt to incorporate the

 

2

What is to be Done?

 

class struggle into preconceived conceptions of organization,seeking to render them manageable under the direction of the party. The management of class struggle belongs traditionallyto the bourgeoisie who ‘concentrated in the form of the state’(see Marx, 1973, p.108), depend on its containment andmanagement in the form of abstract equality. The denial ofhumanity that is entailed in the subordination of the inequalityin property to relations of abstract equality in the form ofexchange relations, is mirrored in the Leninist conception ofthe workers state, where everybody is treated equally as aneconomic resource.Hiding behind dogma, contemporary endorsements of therevolutionary party as the organizational form of revolution,focus the ‘distortion’ of socialism on Stalin, cleansingLeninism and maintaining its myth.

1

 Was the tragedy of theRussian revolution really just contingent on the question ofleadership, a tragedy caused by a bad leader who took overfrom a good leader, and should Trotsky had succeeded Lenin,would his leadership have been ‘good’, rescuing the revolutionfrom the dungeons of despair – the Gulag? Whateverdifference Trotsky might have made, is revolution really just aquestion of personalities and their leadership qualities?Orthodox accounts do not raise the most basic question of thecritical Enlightenment –

cui bono

 (who benefits) – and,instead, show great trust in the belief that revolution has to bemade on behalf of the dependent masses, so that all goesaccording to plan, including the planning of the economicresource labour through the workers state. Marx’s insight thatcommunism is a classless society and that ‘to be a productivelabourer is...not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’ (Marx, 1983, p.477), is endorsed in perverted form: the party’s directorshipover the proletariat is a fortune for the misfortunate. Thosewho take the project of human emancipation seriously, willfind little comfort in the idea that the party knows best.Contemporary anti-capitalism does well to keep well clear ofthe Leninist conception of revolution. However, itsindifference to revolution belies its anti-capitalist stance. This,then, means that the

ratio emancipationis

 has to berediscovere

Outlining a vision of Communism in 21st century as an alternative to Capitalism
(by PKD (Parivartan ki Disha), Nagpur,India)
 ‘Humanity …..chooses its present from the perspective of the future, and thus forms its present on the basis of a projected future.’

The Life of the Dead: Karl Marx in Context
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. By Gareth Stedman Jones
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2016) 750 pp. $35.00
REVIEWED BY Peter C. Caldwell
“The Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth”. So concludes Stedman Jones’ monumental new biography
of Karl Marx. In part, he is making a specific point, familiar to those who followed the debates among Marxists of the 1960s through 1980s: Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, and others constructed the Marxism of the Second International, a closed doctrine of social development that could not encompass Marx’s own intellectual surprises. Stedman Jones is also making an argument about intellectual history, which he conceptualizes as the careful contextualization of ideas. Patterns of radical thinking, the content of radical movements, and the events of radical politics
dominate his account of Marx’s intellectual development rather than, for example, the social structure and cultural norms of the educated bourgeoisie stressed in Sperber’s recent biography.

‘State Capitalism’ in the Soviet Union 
History of Economics Review
M.C. Howard and J.E. King*
 Introduction 
The aim of this paper is to explore the reactions to the Bolshevik Revolution of one group of critics from the left: those who saw it as ushering in a new form of capitalism. The controversy over state capitalism had both theoretical and practical significance. At the analytical level it presented an important test of Marx’s conception of historical materialism, which had been formulated in a largely successful attempt to explain the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe but had encountered difficulties when applied to other epochs and other continents. In political terms, the class character of the Soviet Union was a crucial question for those who wished to understand its internal dynamics, the nature of its contradictions and the potential that it offered for revolutionary change. It remained central, even after 1991, to any serious Marxian analysis of post-Mao China, though this is not a topic that we develop at any length here. 

Proletarian Dictator in a Peasant Land:Stalin as Ruler 
Ronald Grigor Suny 
Alex .Manoogian !Professor of .Modern Armenian History 
The University of Michigan
 A,-paper,.prepared for the conference on , 
20th Century Russia - Germany in Comparative Perspective
 September 19-22, 1991 University of Pennsylvania

Any revolution from above is inevitably
revolution by dictatorship and despotism.
(Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 1849)

Arto Luukkanen The Party of UnbeliefThe Religious Policy ofThe Bolshevik Party, 1917-1929  PDF 
The Finnish Historical Society has published this study with the permission, granted on 18 April 1994, of Helsinki University, Faculty of Theology.  

Abstract Arto Luukkanen The Party of Unbelief — The Religion Policy of The Bolshevik Party, 1917-1929. 
The main objective of this dissertation is to study the religious policy of the Soviet Bolshevik party during the years 1917-1929 by utilizing historical methods. The Bolshevik religious ideology was influenced by Left-Hegelian philosophy, Marxist materialism and the anti-clerical attitudes of the Russian intelligentsia. The period under examination can be divided into four separate sections. During the civil war (1917- 1920) the ruling regime limited its official religious policy to legislative acts in church-state relations and its main political objective was to isolate the Russian Orthodox church, the ROC. The mission of executing Soviet religious policy was given to the NKYust's "Liquidation Committee" and to the Soviet security organs. The introduction of the early NEP policy (1921-1923) did not automatically represent a relaxation of the religious policy but, on the contrary, the Bolshevik government, especially Lenin and Trotsky, engaged in general attack against the ROC during the so-called "confiscation conflict". Trotsky and his "Liquidation Committee" conducted this anti-religious campaign in order to obtain money and to undermine the role of religions in the Soviet society by fomenting pro-government schisms inside the religious organizations. After Lenin lost his grip on power, the "triumvirate" and especially Stalin outmanoeuvred Trotsky in the anti-religious work by organizing their own antireligious cabinet (CAP). This change was rationalized by certain slogans of the high NEP (1924-1927) which underlined the importance of seeking reconciliation in the Russian countryside. Moreover, foreign pressure also played into the hands of the "triumvirate". This policy of appeasing the peasantry also implied a relaxation in the antireligious campaign. The 12th and 13th party congresses represented the beginning of the high NEP and of "detente" in Soviet religious policy. The more moderate party leaders wanted to stabilize the Russian countryside by making concessions to religion while at the same time hard-liners attempted to brake the normalcy of the NEP in this area. The NEP could not survive the introduction of the Cultural Revolution (1928-1929). The criticism from the left-opposition gradually undermined the fundamentals of the NEP's civil peace. Stalin was also anxious also to utilize this mood in order to get rid of his "rightist" allies and to this end encouraged the Cultural Revolution by supporting Komsomol's drive to politicize Soviet society. In the religious policy former religious political organs were disbanded and their responsibilities were transferred to the VTsIK. The battle between moderates, so-called culturalists and hard-liners (interventionists) was one of the most characteristic features of anti-religious activity at that time. As a conclusion, it must be stated that the Soviet religious policy was always dependent on the general political objectives of the party leaders. The development of the Soviet religious ideology must 6 therefore be studied in association with other major political battles. 

Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence: Its Significance for Our Time

Franklin Dmitryev* and Eugene Gogol**

*Independent researcher, franklin.dmitryev@gmail.com

**Independent researcher, egogol@hotmail.com

Abstract: How can Marx’s ideas help us with the problem of how to make new revolutionary beginnings in a time when the counterrevolution is ascendant, without losing sight of the need to prepare for the equally crucial question of what happens after the revolution? Capitalism has taken various forms as it developed, with the latest shaped by its endemic crisis since the mid-1970s generated by its falling rate of profit. Throughout these stages, the humanism and dialectic of Capital remain prime determinants of allowing Marxist responses not to stop at economic analyses but to release, rather than inhibiting, new revolutionary subjects and directions. Critical for the present moment is to take up Marx’s humanism and dialectic as crucial dimensions of his philosophy of revolution in permanence. This encompasses not alone the famous March 1850 Address to the Communist League, but also the full trajectory of Marx's revolutionary life and thought from the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts through Capital to the new moments of Marx's last decade as expressed in his writings on Russia and his Ethnological Notebooks. We trace Marx's theoretical/philosophical concept of permanent revolution in a number of his writings, to confront how various post-Marx Marxists addressed or ignored this dimension of Marx's thought, and explore whether this concept can be seen as central to Marx's body of thought, and can assist in the dual task of needed revolutionary transformation – the destruction of the old (negation) and the construction of the new (the negation of the negation).

Keywords: Karl Marx, revolution, permanent revolution, Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxist humanism, women’s liberation