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?
You are still evading the question I asked earlier.
I asked you to explain the mechanism by which the class character of the revolution remains primary if it is not expressed in the class character of the state that the revolution establishes. You still have not answered that. Instead, you have shifted again into a discussion of your personal political commitments, your preference for democracy, and your moral reasons for embracing communism. That is a different discussion. It does not resolve the theoretical issue I raised.
No one denied that people hold values, preferences, or moral commitments. That is not the point. The point is that materialist analysis does not begin from those commitments. It begins from the objective structure of social relations, class antagonism, and state power. You are repeatedly replacing the question of what a state is materially with the question of what kind of politics you would prefer to endorse. That is precisely why your replies keep sliding away from the issue.
You say democracy is necessary for communism to emerge. But you still leave “democracy” at the level of an abstract good rather than analyzing its class content. Democracy for which class, through what institutions, under what property relations, and against which class enemy? Bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy are not the same thing. A democracy that preserves bourgeois property is not a neutral framework within which communism gradually appears. It is one form of bourgeois rule. So simply invoking democracy explains nothing unless you specify its class basis.
You also misstate the issue when you contrast “personal intuition” with “arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.” That is a false opposition. Marx did not “make up” Marxism in the sense of inventing a doctrine out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. Newton identified and documented a mechanism already operative in nature. In the same way, Marx identified and explained real mechanisms already operative in social development: class struggle, contradiction within the mode of production, and the conflict between the forces and relations of production. Marxism is not an a priori prophecy about the future. It is a scientific account of the real tendencies and antagonisms internal to class society. The point is not that history unfolds by wish or intuition, but that social forms have objective structures and move through determinate contradictions whether one finds that persuasive at the level of personal impression or not. Once again, instead of engaging those mechanisms, you retreat into skepticism about theory itself.
Your point about administrators shows the same confusion. Of course an administrator can occupy a distinct function within the division of labor. That was never in dispute. But function is not the same as class. A school principal, factory manager, a party cadre, a planner, a technician, a doctor, or a local official is not thereby a separate class merely by exercising authority. To become a distinct exploiting class, they would have to stand in a distinct relation to the means of production and the appropriation of surplus. If they do not privately own the means of production and do not appropriate surplus as a property-bearing class, then you have not demonstrated a new class, only a differentiated role within an ongoing socialist transition. You keep substituting differences in authority or political influence for differences in class position. That is a basic category mistake.
Likewise, when you say you are “speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions,” that only confirms the problem. You are treating class analysis as a loose exercise in conjecture rather than a determination of structured relations within production. Material interests are not invented by speculation. They arise from an objectively given position within the relations of production. Without that anchor, the term “material interest” becomes empty and can be attached to almost any institutional arrangement you happen to distrust.
Your final question makes the confusion most obvious. You ask: if not on the basis of personal preferences, morals, or ideals, then on what basis embrace communist goals? But this again sidesteps the actual issue. Of course political commitment involves conviction. The question is not how an individual justifies commitment to communism at the level of ethics. The question is how communism is analyzed scientifically as the historical movement generated by capitalism’s own contradictions. You are collapsing two distinct levels: normative commitment and materialist analysis. Because you collapse them, you keep answering a question about why you might want communism when I am asking you how class power, state power, and transition are to be understood.
So the problem remains exactly where it started. You have not explained how the class character of a revolution can be primary while the class character of the state that issues from it is treated as secondary or even irrelevant. You have not explained how class ceases to be class once it rules without dissolving the entire concept. And you have not shown that differences in administrative function amount to a distinct class relation in the absence of distinct ownership and appropriation.
Also idealism and materialism are mutually exclusive because they begin from opposite answers to the most basic philosophical question: what is primary, consciousness or material reality? Idealism holds, in one form or another, that ideas, consciousness, spirit, or categories of thought are fundamental, and that social or historical reality is ultimately shaped by them. Materialism holds the reverse: matter exists independently of thought, and consciousness is a product of material conditions rather than their creator. They are compatible in the same way Last Thursdayism is compatible with Evolution.
The main issue here from my perspective is that you are trying to discuss class, state, and transition without the minimum political-economic precision those concepts require. You keep replacing analysis with preference, relation to production with institutional suspicion, and concrete class content with abstract democratic language.
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?
You are still evading the question I asked earlier.
I asked you to explain the mechanism by which the class character of the revolution remains primary if it is not expressed in the class character of the state that the revolution establishes. You still have not answered that. Instead, you have shifted again into a discussion of your personal political commitments, your preference for democracy, and your moral reasons for embracing communism. That is a different discussion. It does not resolve the theoretical issue I raised.
No one denied that people hold values, preferences, or moral commitments. That is not the point. The point is that materialist analysis does not begin from those commitments. It begins from the objective structure of social relations, class antagonism, and state power. You are repeatedly replacing the question of what a state is materially with the question of what kind of politics you would prefer to endorse. That is precisely why your replies keep sliding away from the issue.
You say democracy is necessary for communism to emerge. But you still leave “democracy” at the level of an abstract good rather than analyzing its class content. Democracy for which class, through what institutions, under what property relations, and against which class enemy? Bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy are not the same thing. A democracy that preserves bourgeois property is not a neutral framework within which communism gradually appears. It is one form of bourgeois rule. So simply invoking democracy explains nothing unless you specify its class basis.
You also misstate the issue when you contrast “personal intuition” with “arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.” That is a false opposition. Marx did not “make up” Marxism in the sense of inventing a doctrine out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. Newton identified and documented a mechanism already operative in nature. In the same way, Marx identified and explained real mechanisms already operative in social development: class struggle, contradiction within the mode of production, and the conflict between the forces and relations of production. Marxism is not an a priori prophecy about the future. It is a scientific account of the real tendencies and antagonisms internal to class society. The point is not that history unfolds by wish or intuition, but that social forms have objective structures and move through determinate contradictions whether one finds that persuasive at the level of personal impression or not. Once again, instead of engaging those mechanisms, you retreat into skepticism about theory itself.
Your point about administrators shows the same confusion. Of course an administrator can occupy a distinct function within the division of labor. That was never in dispute. But function is not the same as class. A school principal, factory manager, a party cadre, a planner, a technician, a doctor, or a local official is not thereby a separate class merely by exercising authority. To become a distinct exploiting class, they would have to stand in a distinct relation to the means of production and the appropriation of surplus. If they do not privately own the means of production and do not appropriate surplus as a property-bearing class, then you have not demonstrated a new class, only a differentiated role within an ongoing socialist transition. You keep substituting differences in authority or political influence for differences in class position. That is a basic category mistake.
Likewise, when you say you are “speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions,” that only confirms the problem. You are treating class analysis as a loose exercise in conjecture rather than a determination of structured relations within production. Material interests are not invented by speculation. They arise from an objectively given position within the relations of production. Without that anchor, the term “material interest” becomes empty and can be attached to almost any institutional arrangement you happen to distrust.
Your final question makes the confusion most obvious. You ask: if not on the basis of personal preferences, morals, or ideals, then on what basis embrace communist goals? But this again sidesteps the actual issue. Of course political commitment involves conviction. The question is not how an individual justifies commitment to communism at the level of ethics. The question is how communism is analyzed scientifically as the historical movement generated by capitalism’s own contradictions. You are collapsing two distinct levels: normative commitment and materialist analysis. Because you collapse them, you keep answering a question about why you might want communism when I am asking you how class power, state power, and transition are to be understood.
So the problem remains exactly where it started. You have not explained how the class character of a revolution can be primary while the class character of the state that issues from it is treated as secondary or even irrelevant. You have not explained how class ceases to be class once it rules without dissolving the entire concept. And you have not shown that differences in administrative function amount to a distinct class relation in the absence of distinct ownership and appropriation.
Also idealism and materialism are mutually exclusive because they begin from opposite answers to the most basic philosophical question: what is primary, consciousness or material reality? Idealism holds, in one form or another, that ideas, consciousness, spirit, or categories of thought are fundamental, and that social or historical reality is ultimately shaped by them. Materialism holds the reverse: matter exists independently of thought, and consciousness is a product of material conditions rather than their creator. They are compatible in the same way Last Thursdayism is compatible with Evolution.
The main issue here from my perspective is that you are trying to discuss class, state, and transition without the minimum political-economic precision those concepts require. You keep replacing analysis with preference, relation to production with institutional suspicion, and concrete class content with abstract democratic language.