No, socialization of the economy is not the only metric. It is not even the key metric. The class character of the state is primary. Socialization is a single, highly important factor within that determination, but it remains derivative. A nationalized industry under bourgeois state command functions as state monopoly capital.
Evaluation proceeds from the principal contradiction to its secondary aspects. The principal question: which class holds monopoly over political power and the means of coercion? This determines the direction of all other processes. Secondary metrics, the rate and depth of socialization, the trajectory of productive forces, the composition of administrative personnel, the character of ideological struggle, these are not irrelevant. They are conditional. They either consolidate proletarian state power or undermine it. There is no neutral technical criterion. The same policy, e.g. grain procurement or industrial planning, produces opposite class effects depending on which class commands the state apparatus.
The state is not a passive vessel for economic measures. It is the organized expression of class rule. Transitionary societies contain multiple modes of production in contradiction. The state resolves which mode dominates. Empirical assessment must therefore begin with the class basis of political power.
I view the class character of a revolution as primary. Once in power, a certain class such as the Proletariat may be likely to democratize the economy and abolish all class. If they fail to do so, I fail to see a viable path to communism. A state apparatus that can be said to be run be “workers” is meaningless except as a motivator for this democratization.
What do you mean by taking the class character of the revolution as primary. The revolution is not an abstract event. It is the process by which a class seizes or establishes state power. To treat the revolution’s class character as separate from the state it produces seems to detach the act of seizure from the instrument seized. Can you clarify how you understand the relationship between the revolutionary moment and the state form that follows?
Also you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what “abolishing all classes” means in socialist theory and practice. It is not a moral injunction or an immediate erasure of social differentiation. It is a historical process where class distinctions disappear through the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, whose members are then, together with the peasantry, gradually folded into the proletariat through transformed relations of production. Once there is a single class, there is effectively no class antagonism. That is the endpoint.
Your phrasing that the proletariat “may be likely to democratize the economy” reveals an idealist lens on a structural question. This is not about likelihood or moral inclination. It is about material interest. The proletariat, as a class, has an objective interest in expropriating the petty and large bourgeoisie because its own emancipation requires the abolition of capitalist property relations. This interest does not depend on goodwill. It is inscribed in the position of the proletariat within the mode of production. To treat it as contingent is to substitute voluntarism for political economy.
Finally, the state is not an abstract motivator. It is the concrete instrument by which one class exercises rule over others and advances its class interest. Under bourgeois rule, the state organizes the accumulation of capital, reproduces wage labor, and suppresses challenges to private property. Under proletarian rule, the same apparatus, transformed in class content, organizes the socialization of production and the proletarianization of any remaining classes. The direction of transformation follows from which class commands the levers.
I’m not saying this to be accusatory, and I hope it lands as intended. It just feels like your grasp of communist theory and the history of socialist practice is shallow to put it mildly. I can give you some book recommendations that might clear some of this up if it would help.
Can you clarify how you understand the relationship between the revolutionary moment and the state form that follows?
The revolution of a desolate majority underclass creates the material conditions that are, at least in theory, conducive to the development of a democratic state apparatus that distributes political power. The mutual interest of the members of that class should make the development of such a state likely. By the nature of their having collaborated effectively enough to effectuate such a revolution, we can assume that they have developed the capacity to organize in such a way as to realize that collective interest.
This is not about likelihood or moral inclination. It is about material interest.
I don’t consider moral inclination to be relevant to this analysis, but I do use probabilistic terminology, because I don’t view social theory as a hard science.
The direction of transformation follows from which class commands the levers.
One must be careful about the loss of information when labeling and subsequently using those labels. People can move between classes, or their material interests can change. A group of people who are members of the Proletariat can easily lose class solidarity if given outsized political power. I would only consider a class to have gained power if they succeed in doing so in a democratic context. Also, once they gain that power, I would not consider them to be the same class that they were before doing so.
It just feels like your grasp of communist theory and the history of socialist practice is shallow to put it mildly.
Maybe. But I suspect this impression may be due less to my lack of familiarity as much as a lack of orthodoxy. I don’t take much issue with picking and choosing ideas or reinterpreting them in a way that I think makes sense.
You still have not answered the actual question I posed.
I asked how the class character of the revolution operates independently of the state it produces. You did not explain that mechanism. Instead, you restated your preference for a democratic outcome after the revolution and described conditions you think make that outcome likely. That does not resolve the point. A revolution is not a free-floating event. It is the seizure or construction of political power by a class. If you say the revolution’s class character is primary, but then detach that from the state form that emerges from it, you are asserting a cause while refusing to identify its concrete political expression.
Your reply also shifts from class analysis to normative preference. You say you would only consider a class to have gained power if it succeeds in doing so in a democratic context. But that is not a meaningful definition of class power. It is an external political criterion you are imposing onto the analysis. The state is not validated by whether it conforms to an abstract democratic ideal. It is analyzed by which class holds power, through what institutions, in whose interests, and against which opposing classes.
You also continue to treat class as though it were mainly a question of sentiment, solidarity, or personal disposition. It is not. Class is defined by a group’s place within the social relations of production, its relation to the means of production, and its role in the social organization of labor. Individuals can move between classes, yes. Political degeneration is possible, yes. But none of that abolishes the category itself.
On your use of probabilistic language, the issue is that you retreat from determinate analysis into vague possibility. Substituting schema, impression, or what one finds unconvincing for concrete engagement with the real movement of social forces. To say the proletariat may or may not act in accordance with its structural position, and to leave it there, is not nuance. It is a refusal to complete the analysis. It is ridiculous to proceed by asking whether a development feels persuasive at the level of personal intuition. Instead one must ask what contradictions are operative, what class interests are materially constituted, and how they express themselves through political organization, struggle, and state form.
You also still do not understand class in a rigorous way. Administrator is not a class category. Administration is a function. Class is determined by relation to the means of production and to the appropriation of social surplus. So long as those administering do not privately own the means of production and do not expropriate surplus value as a distinct property-owning stratum, they do not thereby cease to be proletarian simply because they hold office or carry out administrative tasks. The socialist transition does not abolish the proletariat the moment it takes power. It is the period in which proletarian rule continues the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, suppresses restoration, and transforms the relations of production until class antagonisms are rendered void through the abolition of class society itself. The endpoint is not your abstract democratic test. The endpoint is the historical supersession of antagonistic classes through there ultimately being only the associated producers, at which point class in the antagonistic sense disappears.
On not being “hard science”. This is not a matter of arbitrary plausibility. Dialectical and historical materialism have repeatedly proven their explanatory force precisely because antagonisms and contradictions are the drivers of history. The contradiction between forces and relations of production, between exploited and exploiting classes, between an emergent mode of production and the decaying order that contains it, is the motor of historical development. That is why Marxism can explain the rise, development, crisis, and replacement of social orders with a seriousness your framework cannot match. Once you reduce these determinate antagonisms to mere probabilistic tendencies, you empty the theory of its strongest content and replace analysis with hesitation.
The problem is not heterodoxy as such. The problem is that you have tossed aside the core of the theoretical framework and replaced it with an eclectic mix of idealism and materialism, despite the fact that the two are incompatible as methods. You want to retain Marxist terminology while hollowing out what makes it coherent: class without a stable relation to production, revolution without determinate state expression, and political power judged by external moral-democratic criteria rather than by its material class content. That is not a serious reinterpretation. It is a conceptual patchwork. And eclecticism of that sort cannot critique Marxism from within because it has already abandoned the premises that make Marxist analysis possible in the first place.
Some books:
Lenin, The State and Revolution
Marx, The Civil War in France
Lenin, A Great Beginning
Mao, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Your reply also shifts from class analysis to normative preference.
Fundamentally everyone bases their political inclinations on some kind of preference. My preference is for the maximal utility to be realized for humanity. Democracy isn’t an end goal, but I view it as necessary for any kind of communist society to emerge.
It is ridiculous to proceed by asking whether a development feels persuasive at the level of personal intuition.
If you think that you are able to predict future history based on a priori scientific truths, you are sorely misguided. Personal intuition isn’t sufficient to understanding, but neither is adherence to arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.
Class is defined by a group’s place within the social relations of production…Administrator is not a class category.
An administrator could certainly hold a different place within the social relations of production, and could have different material interests than, say, a factory worker. It would depend on how much social power they hold as administrator.
The problem is that you have tossed aside the core of the theoretical framework and replaced it with an eclectic mix of idealism and materialism, despite the fact that the two are incompatible as methods.
I’m not sure they are completely incompatible, but that’s beside the point. I’m not making an idealistic argument. I’m just speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions.
political power judged by external moral-democratic criteria rather than by its material class content
If I am not to apply personal preferences, moral convictions, or political ideals, on what basis am I to embrace communist goals?
Some books
I have read 1, 2 and 6. Out of the rest, which would you most recommend to persuade me of your position or fill a gap in my understanding?
No, socialization of the economy is not the only metric. It is not even the key metric. The class character of the state is primary. Socialization is a single, highly important factor within that determination, but it remains derivative. A nationalized industry under bourgeois state command functions as state monopoly capital.
Evaluation proceeds from the principal contradiction to its secondary aspects. The principal question: which class holds monopoly over political power and the means of coercion? This determines the direction of all other processes. Secondary metrics, the rate and depth of socialization, the trajectory of productive forces, the composition of administrative personnel, the character of ideological struggle, these are not irrelevant. They are conditional. They either consolidate proletarian state power or undermine it. There is no neutral technical criterion. The same policy, e.g. grain procurement or industrial planning, produces opposite class effects depending on which class commands the state apparatus.
The state is not a passive vessel for economic measures. It is the organized expression of class rule. Transitionary societies contain multiple modes of production in contradiction. The state resolves which mode dominates. Empirical assessment must therefore begin with the class basis of political power.
I view the class character of a revolution as primary. Once in power, a certain class such as the Proletariat may be likely to democratize the economy and abolish all class. If they fail to do so, I fail to see a viable path to communism. A state apparatus that can be said to be run be “workers” is meaningless except as a motivator for this democratization.
What do you mean by taking the class character of the revolution as primary. The revolution is not an abstract event. It is the process by which a class seizes or establishes state power. To treat the revolution’s class character as separate from the state it produces seems to detach the act of seizure from the instrument seized. Can you clarify how you understand the relationship between the revolutionary moment and the state form that follows?
Also you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what “abolishing all classes” means in socialist theory and practice. It is not a moral injunction or an immediate erasure of social differentiation. It is a historical process where class distinctions disappear through the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, whose members are then, together with the peasantry, gradually folded into the proletariat through transformed relations of production. Once there is a single class, there is effectively no class antagonism. That is the endpoint.
Your phrasing that the proletariat “may be likely to democratize the economy” reveals an idealist lens on a structural question. This is not about likelihood or moral inclination. It is about material interest. The proletariat, as a class, has an objective interest in expropriating the petty and large bourgeoisie because its own emancipation requires the abolition of capitalist property relations. This interest does not depend on goodwill. It is inscribed in the position of the proletariat within the mode of production. To treat it as contingent is to substitute voluntarism for political economy.
Finally, the state is not an abstract motivator. It is the concrete instrument by which one class exercises rule over others and advances its class interest. Under bourgeois rule, the state organizes the accumulation of capital, reproduces wage labor, and suppresses challenges to private property. Under proletarian rule, the same apparatus, transformed in class content, organizes the socialization of production and the proletarianization of any remaining classes. The direction of transformation follows from which class commands the levers.
I’m not saying this to be accusatory, and I hope it lands as intended. It just feels like your grasp of communist theory and the history of socialist practice is shallow to put it mildly. I can give you some book recommendations that might clear some of this up if it would help.
The revolution of a desolate majority underclass creates the material conditions that are, at least in theory, conducive to the development of a democratic state apparatus that distributes political power. The mutual interest of the members of that class should make the development of such a state likely. By the nature of their having collaborated effectively enough to effectuate such a revolution, we can assume that they have developed the capacity to organize in such a way as to realize that collective interest.
I don’t consider moral inclination to be relevant to this analysis, but I do use probabilistic terminology, because I don’t view social theory as a hard science.
One must be careful about the loss of information when labeling and subsequently using those labels. People can move between classes, or their material interests can change. A group of people who are members of the Proletariat can easily lose class solidarity if given outsized political power. I would only consider a class to have gained power if they succeed in doing so in a democratic context. Also, once they gain that power, I would not consider them to be the same class that they were before doing so.
Maybe. But I suspect this impression may be due less to my lack of familiarity as much as a lack of orthodoxy. I don’t take much issue with picking and choosing ideas or reinterpreting them in a way that I think makes sense.
Give me your top 3?
You still have not answered the actual question I posed.
I asked how the class character of the revolution operates independently of the state it produces. You did not explain that mechanism. Instead, you restated your preference for a democratic outcome after the revolution and described conditions you think make that outcome likely. That does not resolve the point. A revolution is not a free-floating event. It is the seizure or construction of political power by a class. If you say the revolution’s class character is primary, but then detach that from the state form that emerges from it, you are asserting a cause while refusing to identify its concrete political expression.
Your reply also shifts from class analysis to normative preference. You say you would only consider a class to have gained power if it succeeds in doing so in a democratic context. But that is not a meaningful definition of class power. It is an external political criterion you are imposing onto the analysis. The state is not validated by whether it conforms to an abstract democratic ideal. It is analyzed by which class holds power, through what institutions, in whose interests, and against which opposing classes.
You also continue to treat class as though it were mainly a question of sentiment, solidarity, or personal disposition. It is not. Class is defined by a group’s place within the social relations of production, its relation to the means of production, and its role in the social organization of labor. Individuals can move between classes, yes. Political degeneration is possible, yes. But none of that abolishes the category itself.
On your use of probabilistic language, the issue is that you retreat from determinate analysis into vague possibility. Substituting schema, impression, or what one finds unconvincing for concrete engagement with the real movement of social forces. To say the proletariat may or may not act in accordance with its structural position, and to leave it there, is not nuance. It is a refusal to complete the analysis. It is ridiculous to proceed by asking whether a development feels persuasive at the level of personal intuition. Instead one must ask what contradictions are operative, what class interests are materially constituted, and how they express themselves through political organization, struggle, and state form.
You also still do not understand class in a rigorous way. Administrator is not a class category. Administration is a function. Class is determined by relation to the means of production and to the appropriation of social surplus. So long as those administering do not privately own the means of production and do not expropriate surplus value as a distinct property-owning stratum, they do not thereby cease to be proletarian simply because they hold office or carry out administrative tasks. The socialist transition does not abolish the proletariat the moment it takes power. It is the period in which proletarian rule continues the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, suppresses restoration, and transforms the relations of production until class antagonisms are rendered void through the abolition of class society itself. The endpoint is not your abstract democratic test. The endpoint is the historical supersession of antagonistic classes through there ultimately being only the associated producers, at which point class in the antagonistic sense disappears.
On not being “hard science”. This is not a matter of arbitrary plausibility. Dialectical and historical materialism have repeatedly proven their explanatory force precisely because antagonisms and contradictions are the drivers of history. The contradiction between forces and relations of production, between exploited and exploiting classes, between an emergent mode of production and the decaying order that contains it, is the motor of historical development. That is why Marxism can explain the rise, development, crisis, and replacement of social orders with a seriousness your framework cannot match. Once you reduce these determinate antagonisms to mere probabilistic tendencies, you empty the theory of its strongest content and replace analysis with hesitation.
The problem is not heterodoxy as such. The problem is that you have tossed aside the core of the theoretical framework and replaced it with an eclectic mix of idealism and materialism, despite the fact that the two are incompatible as methods. You want to retain Marxist terminology while hollowing out what makes it coherent: class without a stable relation to production, revolution without determinate state expression, and political power judged by external moral-democratic criteria rather than by its material class content. That is not a serious reinterpretation. It is a conceptual patchwork. And eclecticism of that sort cannot critique Marxism from within because it has already abandoned the premises that make Marxist analysis possible in the first place.
Some books:
Lenin, The State and Revolution
Marx, The Civil War in France
Lenin, A Great Beginning
Mao, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Mao, On Contradiction
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
You provide a lot to respond to.
Fundamentally everyone bases their political inclinations on some kind of preference. My preference is for the maximal utility to be realized for humanity. Democracy isn’t an end goal, but I view it as necessary for any kind of communist society to emerge.
If you think that you are able to predict future history based on a priori scientific truths, you are sorely misguided. Personal intuition isn’t sufficient to understanding, but neither is adherence to arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.
An administrator could certainly hold a different place within the social relations of production, and could have different material interests than, say, a factory worker. It would depend on how much social power they hold as administrator.
I’m not sure they are completely incompatible, but that’s beside the point. I’m not making an idealistic argument. I’m just speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions.
If I am not to apply personal preferences, moral convictions, or political ideals, on what basis am I to embrace communist goals?
I have read 1, 2 and 6. Out of the rest, which would you most recommend to persuade me of your position or fill a gap in my understanding?