this
is richard wolff from democracy at work
responding to another
ask prof wolf question sent in from our
patreon
community in this case the question
and i thank him for it comes from justin
barca and what justin does is a very
appropriate
and very useful kind of challenge
he asks me how can i reconcile
my statements both verbally on these
kinds of videos
but also in my book understanding
socialism
how do i reconcile what i say there that
marx was never much interested in the
role of the state
in a future post-capitalist society
he never wrote a book about the state he
didn't write hardly anything about it
but there are remarks gestures
asides throughout his work
and one of them appears in the communist
manifesto
and justin barca quite rightly says look
it says in the manifesto
that what the proletariat is going to do
and needs to do
is to use the state to wage class war
against the capitalists to gather into
the state's hands all their capital
in order to accomplish the transition
beyond
capitalism and that that looks like an
advocacy of the state
doing what indeed it did do in the
soviet union to quite a considerable
extent and also in the other early
experiments
people's republic of china vietnam cuba
and so on
in constructing socialism so let me try
to reconcile it but before i do
let me make clear marx is not a hundred
percent consistent
no writer and certainly no great writer
ever was
there are clashes there are
disagreements in his own work
because guess what he changed over the
course of his lifetime
he learned things he decided he was
wrong
in an earlier phase what an intelligent
person usually does
so it isn't any great discovery to
discover that there are
ambiguities conflicts contradictions
excuse me in his work
and that's fine because what it does is
leave to those of us who come
later a kind of challenge how do you
reconcile do you have to take a position
for
one or the other of his statements or is
there some way
to put them together or to go beyond
them
and that's what development of a theory
always
involves in all the sciences and in all
the traditions of thought so here's how
i would handle the challenge that justin
barker
quite rightly presents
i think here is what happened in the
19th century
while marx and engels were alive in
writing
and continuing thereafter
marxists critics of capitalism who
reached the conclusion
that the system as a whole had to be
gone beyond that it wasn't a matter of
fixing or reforming
but that you needed a wholesale social
change those socialists and they were
the main ones
they decided that they had to develop a
strategy
how did you get in europe from a
capitalist society
to a really post-capitalist society
what strategy would you use what would
people who you
got to agree with you or who arrived at
that point of view themselves
what would they be doing what is the
activity the strategy the tactics
to get from capitalism to socialism
and the answer that the 19th century
came up with
almost universally was that the working
class
which was the majority would have to
take advantage
of its numerical majority
to seize the state that is
the goal the target the strategic
objective of socialists
was to get a hold of the state you could
either do it peacefully
through political parties and voting and
elections
or you could do it in a revolutionary
way
which might or might not entail violence
and that was a big debate throughout the
19th and well into the 20th
century the reformist the revolutionary
path but what both sides agree on was
get the state take over the state
as an institution within capitalism
and now here comes the key point the
idea was to
use the state to make the transition
the understanding was that the
capitalists used the state
to maintain their situation to keep
capitalism in place
to repress workers movements to repress
socialists
to repress critics which capitalists
more
or less have been doing with their state
for a long time so the socialist said
we weaken the capitalists and we become
strong ourselves
to the extent that we can capture the
state
in an election in a revolution whatever
the mechanism
proves to be what will the state then do
and as marx's comments occasionally
point out
the state will have to wage class war
against the capitalists in order to make
the transition
and what does that mean gather into its
own hands
that's the quote from the communist
manifesto
the capital of the capitalists so that
the state
becomes the owner
the operator of modern industry having
removed
capital from the private capitalist
class into its own hands
but is that socialism and the answer is
unequivocally in my view no
and let me quote no less an authority
than lenin
who says after the revolution in russia
speaking to what is now the country he
is the leader of
says to the russian people what we have
in russia what we have created
is state capitalism the working class
has seized the state by a revolution
it has done exactly what in the 19th and
early 20th centuries
was the strategy to be followed we did
that here in russia
says lenin we took this state we
now control the capital we have
taken it from the capitalists
but that allows us to make a transition
it isn't itself the transition
the job of the state is now to transform
the society from the capitalist way it
was
to the socialist way it is supposed to
be
and what would that entail
answer for that you need to go to marx's
major works
capital above all else the focus of
capital is on what marx calls
the relations of production the
relationship between the employer
and the employee because that's the core
relationship
of production and that relationship
in capitalism involves the employer as
one group of people
a small minority in most enterprises
and the vast majority the employees
that's capitalism socialism
is the antithesis the opposite
of that namely it's when the workers
themselves become their own employer
when there is no more dichotomy between
the
minority of employers and the majority
of employees
it was the task of socialists once they
had captured the state
by elections or by revolution to make
the transition
from employer employee relations of
production
to the equal democratic
community way of running a workplace
one person one vote all decisions made
democratically
because it isn't any more a capitalist
enterprise the soviet union never made
that second step
stalin said we are socialism already
with the state in control
it's as if a transition was stopped in
the middle and the declaration made
we've arrived at it no more transition
is necessary
and that became the idea of socialism
until the 21st century where the
recognition is now
ascending that no you have to transform
the workplace
as a crucial core part of the transition
and unless the state does that it isn't
doing what
marx meant when he talked about the
state
as that kind of intermediary strategic
step
i hope this has been clear and i hope
this responds
to justin barker's very good question
for which i thank him
as of course i thank our patreon
community
for its ongoing and absolutely vital
support