Read theory, it's literally online for free. Join a reading group. You spend hours doom scrolling on Twitter to no end. All that's gotten you is deep knowledge of every twitter beef between 400 follower nazbols.
Edit: It’s not an issue with the site but online discourse about the left in general. Why are y'all upset about shoeonhead or black hammer or whatever new group of dumbasses is saying some new dumb shit. I'm talking about how every few days lots of leftists are surprised and upset that their fav twitter personality said something really stupid.
Right, but Marx is still in other places, like the notes on Bakunin, quite ambivalent on how much "state" there is in a worker's state. Like being a workers "state" for Marx still requires things like the destruction the bureaucracy and the army. Furthermore Marx was never completely convinced by the common instrumental view of the state that is attributed him. This period is also still pretty short, and imo from the critique of the Gotha program and some sections of Capital, it's pretty clear that the state does not exist by the time the first phase of communism rolls around (which is really the big change with the worker's state for Lenin since it still exists in the first phase of socialism).
Once again, The Civil War in France is the big turning point for Marx. He described the governing structure that emerged in the Paris commune as the form of the proletarian state. He also makes it clear that the state like that exists until the class conflict doesn't. At no point did he say that the Paris revolutionaries should have disbanded their councils and disbanded their national guardsmen.
He also made it clear that "ideology" plays no part in the formation of the proletarian state as it assumes the form it needs to survive. His evidence being that the main ideologies of the Parisians said nothing about formation of councils and revocable representatives. The workers organized in a way that they needed to to survive the encirclement.
Also I'm calling bullshit on Marx ever saying that the state stops existing before the first stage of communism. He clearly says that the length of the different stages cannot be known and will likely take generations. He also states the role of central banks in the first stage which are absolutely a state appendage.
How can central banks be in the first stage when money has been abolished in the first stage. That's ridiculous, where on earth are you getting that?
The principle distinction between the lower and higher phase of communism for Marx is that in the higher phase "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished". That is the defining feature, not the presence of the state.
Yes really, the state does not exist in the first stage of communism, it is gone. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not exist in either of the stages. The DOTP, which is the only stage with a workers state, is an intermediary stage between capitalism (really the last stage of capitalism while it is being abolished) and the first stage of communism.
Class conflict does not exist in the lower phase of communism, that is very clear. Marx would not have used the word communism if it was still there.
He muses in I think volume 2 or 3 of Capital (I was reading the Borchard edition so I can't remember exactly which, I'll try and find it tomorrow) about how Joint Stock companies would be useful and mentions that the Parisians stopped at the treasury when they should have taken it over.
He was also very clear about how centralization increases efficiency and that currency is fine, but needs to be tied to labor value or be replaced with "labor vouchers" which I think is kinda pointless now as we have a credit system and paper currency that can serve that purpose.
From The Principles of Communism
i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inher- itance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.
But that's all still in the context of the DoTP that is still heavily in the throws of abolishing capitalist society. That's all over by the time the first phase of communism begins (the taking of the treasury part, innovative political forms in the commune system etc).
The labor vouchers (which I think are problematic but that's besides the point) are purposefully something that exist after the above is all over, capitalist society has ended by then. The only thing holding society back is a "bourgeois right" to the proceeds of one's labor according to what one produces that for whatever reason still persists (Marx never really elaborated on this, it's possible it was just to make the program seem reasonable) that necessitate a voucher system, which is not currency.
Also, please don't cite the twelve demands as evidence communism has a centralized bank, they aren't defining a communist society for the mature Marx (or even for early Marx, he's clear in principles that these demands are not communism), like they become a particular articulation of working class demands that help move towards a communist society just a year later (a conception which is still highly in flux when they are written down). They are demands of the bourgeois state fundamentally. Marx and Engel's themselves noted in later editions of the manifesto that the planks would be significantly changed (they would not have changed the demand for the communal bank, however they likely would have changed the wording to make clear it happens under the semi-state that defines the DoTP, and not the bourgeois state that they are still working with in 1848).
I edited my comment with Marx's list of communist principles.
Also, I think we're agreeing, but just have different definitions of the stages of communism.
The "lower stages of communism" I always saw as socialism/dotp/that list. The higher stages would occur after the abolition of class, and the highest stage is the whole intellectual and physical division of labor thing which I don't really know about, because I'd say we're almost there under capitalism, at least with near universal education programs, so I don't really see that as a very uniquely communist thing.
Fuck the edit glitched and deleted.
Gist: lower phase really is after the abolition of capitalism, it's not the DOTP. The demands made in principles are a snapshot of early Marx where the bourgeois state and the proletarian "state" are not really articulated yet. Those demands are particular ones made to the bourgeois state that help get society on track to further progress to communism and would be significantly adjusted once the idea of the DOTP semi-state is developed. The quote about division of labor is more about how in higher communism we won't divide each other's labor in that someone may be a janitor and someone else is a mathematician, instead someone may be a janitor and the morning and a mathematician in the afternoon if that suits their individual drives and what labor they do does not dictate what they are given to socially reproduce. The full quote is
I'm just harping a bit on this since I think it's very important to keep in mind what is and is not socialism and the DoTP otherwise we can kind of lose the plot of what we are aiming for. It's also important to remember what Marx thinks the forms of the state are and conditions of labor are and how they free us or not. Marx harped on this too, considering his early critiques in works like Private Property and Communism that then persist throughout his life.
Last edit lol: pretty much all this disagreement is from Lenin trying to demarcate the lower and higher phase of communism more clearly than marx did (and then the ussr in the thirties trying to declare what they had socialism, which Lenin would not have done) and from mixing and matching different parts of Marx's work together without looking at context and difference, however by doing this we muddle Marx's own conception of communism. It's fine to take lenin's position, but I think it misses important elements of Marx's conception of communism
That passage right before your one on higher communism. I still really don't see how that's so different. It's ambiguous enough with the labor voucher thing that it could be interpreted as currency backed by labor value and not oil/gold. Which is not totally incompatible with the idea of a centralized bank in the first stage of communism (who distributes and mediates the exchange of vouchers for social product?).
I'm not under any impression that the goal of socializing production is meant to stop at the first phase, but I'm also aware that tools such as a central banking system and post office (even better if they're combined) and public transport are indespesible in the fight to reach a higher stage of development. The people won't accept a complete devaluation of their currency immediately and it will take time to supplant the existing financial systems, better to retool then to serve as more equitable versions of themselves and phase them out immediately.
Once again, at no point does either Marx or Lenin say anything about how long any of these phases will take, there seems to be some people who assume that the first phase is meant to be short, but it could very well be a 200 year struggle as capitalism's was from the mercantilism of the 1600s.
That's a Leninism. Marx defines it differently in the Gothacritik.
I just don't really see the big deal in the difference. Especially because a dotp exists with the goal of creating the conditions for the stages of communism so why is it separate from the stages of communism? Marx wasn't very clear even in Gothacritik about exactly how the lower stages would look, just that they'd "bear the birthmarks of capitalism", "have distribution of resources according to labor value". Also he frequently mentions the importance of an ever expanding democracy, which is primarily the introduction of democracy in production and formation of worker councils.
Again, it feels like this difference is really splitting hairs as the end goal of both interpretations is the same. Hell, even the intermediate goals and initial goals are the same, they just have different terminology being used.
"State capitalism" is just the highest stage of capitalism and is a vector by which Marx saw a transition to socialism happen in the industrialized nations. Lenin skipped that step with the use of peasant coalitions (which Marx pointed out as a viable option in The Civil War in France). The issue being that productive forces didn't exist in sufficient quantity in Russia to implement the lower or higher stages of communism.
So you could say that the industrialization period and NEP/5 Year Plans were not socialism and in fact "state capitalism", but they were in service of developing industry without the massive human cost of capitalist industrialization (which was a success). So whatever they were, they differed from capitalist production in social equity and human cost. They were an example of a just expansion of production that didn't require reserve labor and wage slavery. Calling that "capitalism" would be wrong, it's an entirely different mode of production.