: CB articulates what is preserved in socialism from monopoly capitalism quoting Marx

From: Charles Brown Date: January 14, 2016 at 9:26:18 PM EST To: charles brown Subject: Fwd: CB articulates what is preserved in socialism from monopoly capitalism quoting Marx  Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: Charles Brown Date: April 1, 2014 at 4:48:12 PM EDT To: charles brown Subject: CB articulates what is preserved in socialism from monopoly capitalism quoting Marx Charles Brown David Nolan Isn't the mutual ruin of the contending classes necessary for communism to be implemented? Isn't communism a classless state? ////// I think we aim for it to be a lot more one-sided in favor of the working class, not ruining the working class, although the working class in taking state power "negates" itself; not physically, but as a class. Because there is no more capitalist class. It is "ruined". "The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. ....We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. " https://www.marxists.org/.../works/1848/communist-manifesto/ Manifesto of the Communist Party www.marxists.org Manifesto issued by Marx in 1848, regarded as founding documents of Communism

4 mins · Edited · Like · Remove Preview

David Nolan I think the west is eventually (in the next generation) going to actually embrace socialism, and from there, it will likely develop and become full-blown communism. That's my two cents.////

CHARLES BROWN I have substantial agreement with you on this. I think more in terms of objective tendencies within capitalism to prepare the ground for socialism, such as Lenin's reference to monopoly as proto-socialism still within capitalist relations of production. (See _Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism_) Also, things like socialized medicine in Canada or Scandinavia or France. Healthcare would be substantially the same in socialism, as far as I see. Socialism is a supercession or sublation of capitalism, meaning it overcomes and preserves capitalism. Some of what is capitalism now will be preserved as socialism.

6 mins · Edited · Like Charles Brown "One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are


expropriated."///////// comment CB : "the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime..." and "Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour " are all socialist forms developed in monopoly capitalism that are preserved in some sense in socialism.