Frank wrote on Apr 19
th, 2023 at 3:59pm:
thegreatdivide wrote on Apr 19
th, 2023 at 2:50pm:
Boris wrote on Apr 19
th, 2023 at 8:44am:
Matters not to you because of Marx.
Huh? Please explain....
Note: blaming Marx for Stalin's Russia is like blaming Christ for the Spanish Inquisition.
Idiotic nonsense, parrot.
Marx was for revolutionary struggle and dictatorship:
I'm for revolutionary struggle to overcome your
gruesome neoclassical economic orthodoxy currently ravaging the world from the sociopaths running IMF, down to national central bankers.
But your chief error is Marx spoke of the dictatorship of the working class (proletariat) against the capitalists.
Stalin himself was THE dictator - not what Marx had in mind. (Marx saw communism, meaning common prosperity, as the ultimate goal.)
Quote:The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'.
Consensus meritocracy to achieve common prosperity is one model of government, which may well prove to be superior to the adversarial-party democracies.
[quoteBetween capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Programme - IV [/quote]
If the interests of the proletariat are being served, then the "dictatorship" is in fact a
benevolent authority Quote:While this utopian, doctrinaire Socialism, which subordinates the total movement to one of its stages, which puts in place of common social production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in fantasy does away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its requirements by small conjurers' tricks or great sentimentality, while this doctrinaire Socialism, which at bottom only idealizes present society, takes a picture of it without shadows, and wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of present society; while the proletariat surrenders this Socialism to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another — the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary Socialism, around Communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.
Karl Marx
The Class Struggles in France
Yes. But Marx was mainly concerned with the factors of production, and the conflict between capitalists and workers.
Today governments manage a sizable public sector (unlike in Marx's time), which can in fact be authorized to finance itself without being forced to tax or borrow from the private sector. This is the "Marxst revolution" which is relevant today.