Lets have a thread on basic definitions of left-wing terms.
It doesn't seem to me that even the most foundational words like "Socialism" are consistently defined.
<"To each according to their contribution."
<"Worker ownership of the means of production."
<"Between capitalist and communist society 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."
Which of these you accept has implications such as on the form of the argument over the USSR takes.
Other terms which aren't defined consistently to my knowledge are terms like "imperialism", "left-wing", "worker", "identity politics", etc.
>>2230027This might be how this goes judging by
>>2230034, or rather there's going to be more methodological questions like
>>2230036.
>>2230033>understand the meaning the speaker intendsThat's the thing though, am not sure it's always clear.
Especially when you get into debates involving application of the term.
e.g. Campist threads where imperialism is actually used.
or e.g. the debate over how to interpret the USSR.
>>2230036>let's reduce marxism to slogans, sociology and dictionary definitionsDon't think there's anything anti-marxist about definitions, especially if they're e.g. quotes of Marx.
>>2230036this
OP you are too dumb for marxism, just like some people are too dumb for math or too dumb for literature. find something else. you can contribute money and such to a party but please leave the reading, writing and talking to more competent people
>>2230016>Which of these you accept has implicationsPoint in case of what I mean by using superficial and reductive definitions of complex concepts against you.
I would strongly object to all the proposed definitions anyway. Socialism is closer to being defined as the project for human emancipation from class society and to transition into a society for itself.
>>2242750>Point in case of what I mean by using superficial and reductive definitions of complex concepts against you. No sorry, the text can only be understood in its totality, and so-on, *sniff*. Each object cannot be divorced from a true infinity of relations to everything else *cough*. This includes an infinite relation to what it is not, yes? Contained in socialism is not only what pertains to it rightfully like "you being sent the gulag", but also things that don't belong to it like "your toothbrush". Think you see the problem now.
In all seriousness though if you can't produce definitions you're going to have endless squabbles over definitions, and avoiding the squabbles isn't possible because they're involved in actual applications. Further the obscurism can be used just as much against you as the definitions if not more so. A lack of definitions means that everything you say or has been said can be purported to mean something else entirely. At every point of debate regarding practical applications you're to be met with a critique which doesn't accept the formal terms. It's absurd!
>>2250221<A proletariate is one who has no means of production of their own, meaning for their own use, and are forced to sell their labor power out of necessity.<A bourgeoisie is one who owns the means of social production, meaning not for their own use, and employs wage labor.There is no contradiction between these two definitions if a laborer didn't own their own means of production and had to sell their labor power out of necessity and yet owned some of the means of social production and indirectly employed wage labor. This bourgeois proletariate is the middle-class (excluding from it the petty-bourgeoisie).
>>2250774>[T]he fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat.Apparently the term "bourgeois proletariate" was actually used, and by Marx in a letter to Engles (and in other letters by Engles and Marx identically) to describe exactly this.
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_10_07.htm
>Marx and Engels, therefore, did not consider the labour aristocracy principally as a stratum in the proletariate. They were concerned about it as a shift in class relations which involved a historical connection of capitalist monopoly to opportunism. Changes in the political and sociological characteristics of the proletariate were a consequence of that.Am not sure then that the labor-aristocracy by contrast is a class at all, but rather a part of the proletariate with altered class-consciousness, on account of their having won certain advantages over the remainder of the proletariate. Perhaps much of this class would be labor-aristocracy, but this doesn't explain their class relations.
https://links.org.au/engels-and-theory-labour-aristocracyThe bourgeois proletariate does seem to be an actual class on account of having altered relations to the means of production. Perhaps they could be considered petty-bourgeois but they aren't merely small holders, but also wage-laborers, without a means of production of their own, also proletariates.
>>2251010>For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.>An interesting Lenin quote in line with the theory that Socialism as merely DotP.<The first phase of communism, therefore, cannot yet provide justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences in wealth will still persist, but the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production – the factories, machines, land, etc. – and make them private property…. Marx shows the course of development of communist society….which [firstly] consists in the distribution of consumer goods "according to the amount of labor performed" (and not [yet] according to needs).A counter point from Lenin. To Lenin, and this is very clear now, DotP is merely a condition for the establishment of Socialism which is the abolition of private-property. Even the previous quote indicates this in the establishment of Socialism as state-capitalist, that is DotP ownership of the means of production. Think the reason we don't see a definition of the lower-phase of Communism in Marx is that this term predates him and is widely known to be the abolition of private-property.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm#s3 >>2252321>Between capitalist and communist society 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.>When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.Interestingly in the first quotation Marx does not say between the first-phase of communism and the second phase, but rather that there exists a phase of DotP between the abolition of private property in socialism, and capitalism. If we accept a class as a relation to the means of production, then it follows that socialism is a classless society, and that this occurs "when all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation" in both Lenin and Marx. The DotP is then a mechanism for the abolition of private property, after which in a classless society and the withering of the state are theorized.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm >>2252653Settled on a definition after some stooping around:
>>2252321 as DotP ownership of the means of production. In effect all the definitions given in
>>2230016 were correct, but not my claim here
>>2251010.
DPRK is still socialist; Cuba has MSME which are about 15% of employment; it's still more socialist than not. There are socialist elements to China, Vietnam, and Laos also however, since there is a DotP controlling portions of the means of production.
>>2252653>>2252655>>2252657samefag?
>>2252661>This seems more like the job of a wikiThis could be neat, it'd be a bit more authoritative, and don't claim to know too much however.
Am mostly just searching through the texts, reading, and then drawing a conclusion atm.
Also have only done this for a handle full of definitions now, but would expect a wiki to have more.
Might look some into software to see if there's anything interesting in terms of editor/platforms.
>>2230027Came here to post this. Just use a more specific term instead of 'socialism', '[x]-wing', 'fascist' if you're having a serious conversation.
Anyone who fell for the definition game here was baited into wasting their time, and would benefit from learning from it.
>>2252661This was tried (maybe with less effort) a while ago.
https://wellred.miraheze.org/wiki/Defining_socialismSee what it did right, and see what it did wrong.
>>2252713Think definitions and hermeneutics are effective for solving certain problems.
Strong intuitions take too long, being difficult to communicate, and reason with.An authoritative method or tradition can make it a good tool for reason, and communication.
Such a thing is inherently a centrifugal task; the point is of making a reasoned argument.
However they're really only effective when their's a power to enforce or influence to propagate.
This is not the case here.
>>2252714Seems the target audience, method, and goals are different there.
The goal seems to give a weak intuitive sketch of the boundaries of a term to normal people.
What they're giving is not a tool to reason with, or even really to communicate accurately with.
Still this might be useful.
>>2230016feudalism = feudal ownership
capitalism = capital ownership
socialism = social ownership
This is really simple to understand when you realize that socialism predates Marx by hundreds of years and there are many different types of socialism, some of which are reactionary.
Any arguments over the definition of socialism are people simply trying to promote their preferred type of socialism as the one true definition.
>>2230036People will definitely get mad at me for saying this, but if you're going to be using a term regularly within a field, you need
some kind of definition if it's going to be useful. Otherwise you end up with people using the same words in the same context to mean vastly different things, and nobody is ever able to reliably know what's actually being discussed. This isn't a matter of ridged linguistic prescriptivism, it's about baseline communication. If term means whatever the author (or, worse, reader) thinks it does in the moment, you're going to have a hell of a time saying anything meaningful with it.
PS, I've heard people say that scientists don't use definitions. I don't know where this claim came from, but it is very wrong.
>>2242750Complex things aren't hard to define. All you need to do is break them down to their components, come up with terms for those, and then go back and combine them into a new definition. For example, "a foo is the bar of a baz and a qux". You might go through many layers of this kind of breaking-up concepts, leading to a lot of individual definitions that are kind of hard to understand on their own, like "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors", but still, a clear, succinct definition can indeed be given for most any complex concept, provided the reader is also willing to learn other terms.
No, what is difficult to define is, on the contrary, things so abstract and
simple that they cannot be described in terms of other things. The very notion of a "thing", for example. How do you define something like that in a non-circular way? That's where you're going to find the most difficulty, as opposed to breaking "socialism" apart into its base elements.
>>2254396>In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.>The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state.>State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "abolished". It dies out.Am still somewhat confused by the definition of state according to Marx and Engels. It seems to be defined as
nothing but a instrument of class domination, and we are told that even "after its [the proletariat's] victorious struggle for class supremacy" that the state can continue to exist as "
at best an inherited evil". We are further told that the proletariat cannot "
avoid having" to remove its worst features in this same situation. These together imply that such a maneuver is a necessity, but it doesn't necessarily happen. In the second quote we see that Socialism involves the abolition of the state as the state, as "a machine for the oppression of one class by another." but this does not necessarily imply the abolition of the "evil inherited" and so is reasonable.The last quotation is most difficult to reconcile; does anyone have any idea of how this is possible?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm >>2254981Given that the second and third quotes are in the same context perhaps what "
dies out" is the "
state as state" and not the "
evil inherited".
>>2254396Fair point, however, since we use widely used terms that are defined in other contexts, and even in the same context they might mean different things in different times. For example, the bourgeoisie is the ruling class, but this wasn't always the case.
In your example, those terms used together exist pretty much exclusively in the sphere of category theory, and they're essentially not contingent on other relationships. In socialist theory, you have things like "value" which mean many things in normal conversation. Even in economics it isn't strictly defined. A huge mistake people constantly make is to start at the definitions and then apply that to reality, but the method of analysis is supposed to be backwards. You start at the details and work yourself up into the general. Like what a proletarian is. Instead you see people saying Starbucks employees are actually bourgeoisie or some stupid shit.
So there's practical reasons why it's not the best idea to strictly define concepts, as these concepts are contingent on a reality that is constantly evolving.
Of course, defining these things can still help. I'm not denying that. But the method of analysis is absolutely crucial. otherwise you end up in silly dogmatic superficial understanding which is pretty inert.
>>2254991I agree to an extent. Definitions often do depend on context (I think of Sartre redefining "bad faith" to mean something completely different that it is traditionally understood to), and obsessing over definitions for their own sake leads to some truly moronic worldviews.
But at the same time, language is ultimately a tool for communication, and in order to communicate anything consistently, the terminology of a given field must mean
roughly the same thing from person to person, regardless of time or place. It's good to have a degree of flexibility, to allow the specific understanding of a word to change to fit the conditions it's being used in. Likewise, it's better to tease out meaning from sentences and paragraphs than it is individual words, since what can be communicated with a single word is fairly limited. We should not, however, allow infinitely many competing definitions of words like "bourgeois" or "socialism", because the end result is sentences that could mean so many things that they end up meaning nothing at all.
As a metaphor, different implementations of the C programming language are allowes to do things differently, in order to allow implementations to take full advantage of the hardware they're running on. This largely applies to weird things that you probably shouldn't be doing, like dividing by zero or accessing memory that doesn't exist, but it's also the case for simpler things; for example, the C standard specifies the minimum range an int must be capable of representing, but says nothing about the maximum range, nor how it is to be implemented, and in practice, most compilers make an int something capable of storing a much wider range of numbers than the C standard requires, and most programmers take advantage of this. But at the same time, if you can read C code for one platform, it's pretty easy to figure out the C code of another platform. The specifics of an int might change, but in the broad-strokes it's still a data type that represents an integer; it's not going to turn into a tuple that stores two floats and a char because the compiler writer wanted it to.
>>2255280Let me reiterate that of course I agree that definitions can be useful. However I'm pointing out the danger of leaning in too much into it. Specifically when it comes to Marxist theory, the end result of the analysis is the abstraction, the word that groups a phenomenon. The investigation of the phenomenon is the important part, and the words are crystalized concepts, so to speak.
As I mentioned, people get these definitions and then use them to coerce reality into these categories and abstractions. "Is X person bourgeoisie? Is X profession proletariat? Russia is imperialist because it checks off Lenin's checklist", rather than go the other way around and analyze the concrete activities of the particular instances and see if they constitute a coherent abstraction or are part of said abstraction.
There's two good-ish glossaries I can recommend. One is the one in Marxists.org and the other is the great soviet encyclopedia which used to be online but now I can't find it….
Just as a side note, if you see these entries:
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/o.htm#bourgeois-societyhttps://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/i.htm#civil-societyThe concept of bourgeois society arguably developed in Marx's life. What he originally called bourgeoise society (bürgerliche Gesellshaft) bürgerliche meant both civilian and bourgeoise. Later he opts to separate the terms bourgeois society from civil society, the economic and political sphere, taking from Hegel. And yet in another point finds a term that unifies both the economic and civil sphere, and calls it modern society.
And shockingly, Engels asserts that the bourgeoisie is the middle class, and that the middle class is the ruling class
>we therefore propose to designate the same stage of social development; the first expression referring, however, more to the fact of the middle class being the ruling class, >>2255229>post scarcity abundance as a requirement for the withering of the state.This doesn't sound like what Engels was saying though.
In the first and second quotation
>>2254981, it sounds like Socialism is enough.
>>2255499but those quotes are together, one leads into the next. i also think hes talking from the position that communism would happen first in advanced countries. marx also says in the manifesto the the first action of the dtop is to increase productive forces as rapidly as possible. it sounds to me like he was thinking a 1 or 2 year NEP max for a place like germany or england, basically just to organize things under centralized control and smooth out the bumps. right before that engels quote hes talking about a crisis of production sparking revolution to overcome the anarchy of the market in conditions where;
>The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But “abundance becomes the source of distress and want” >State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution. >But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself. >The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.i think the reason this didn't happen that way is because the revolutions happened in backwards countries that had to catch up in order to defend themselves from imperialism, and in all these cases they were constantly behind through their whole existence, the only one who "made it" is china and they are approaching the transition right now and expect to be about even with the capitalists for the immediate future and cant let their gaurd down yet. like what engels is describing doesn't seem to correlate to a country that immediately has massive famines after the rev because they dont even have tractors yet.
>>2255229>>2255667>It turns from a organ for coercing production into an administration for distribution>This didn't happen that way is because the revolutions happened in backwards countries that had to catch up in order to defend themselves.So the idea is that there is a flawed assumption in Engels, that Socialism would occur only once the means of production had reached a certain level of development. This would imply that Engels final quote given (in my post) is simply mistaken without resolving this assumption.
Have given it a good bit of thought and think you're right in your first post, what was missing was the idea of base and superstructure. So the state "dies out of itself", and the people "can't avoid having to" remove its worst features, which they must act to do unless it persist as an "inherited evil", but ultimately this movement in the superstructure is caused by changes in the mode of production, which at this point has become dominated by the state.
The quotes you've given seem to further emphasize that Socialism was sufficient and not post-scarcity abundance. Am thinking of the whole thing as sort of a Socialist version of neoliberalism where the state is reduced to the minimum to maintain the mode of production. This is what "dies out of itself" means to me.
>>2256896>The sufficiently developed base (owned by the state) effects the superstructure compelling the people to act against the state, and remove it as an "inherited evil".Doesn't this still imply that it was "abolished" in addition to "dieing out of itself" however.
Seem to have the problem down to a word or two.
>>2256896>The quotes you've given seem to further emphasize that Socialism was sufficient and not post-scarcity abundance.To me hes saying for the population size of England and the world development of technology plus their own means of production would be enough to be post-scarcity abundance already but its not because of the irrational anarchy of market competition.
A lot of times in debates about if X or Y is communist or even imperialist people will say that because such and such a country has reached the same level of development as 1800s british empire that means they are imperialist or have the ability to press the button now and arent because they are fake communists just holding on to power for its own sake, but I think its always relative and contextual to the rest of the world. Paris was developed too but the commune didn't last, and places like Cuba are still getting fucked because they werent developed first. So I dont think "socialism is sufficient" applies without already leading the world in industry and having the capability to defend the revolution from external forces.
>>2257338>Aufheben ([ˈʔaʊ̯fˌheːbm̩, -bən] ⓘ) or Aufhebung ([ˈaʊ̯fˌheːbʊŋ] ⓘ) is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", "cancel" or "suspend", or "to sublate".[1] The term has also been defined as "abolish", "preserve", and "transcend". In philosophy, aufheben is used by Hegel in his exposition of dialectics, and in this sense is translated mainly as "sublate".[2] >>2257810Overall am not happy with the progress have made on this issue.Regarding if the state (and not just the state as the state) could have been abolished in AES think that oddly it has moved in this direction. The USSR completely abolished the state as the state by my reading, but were left with an "inherited evil", which the last quote applied to with time. The problem is that this was in the end too effective, they ended up throwing out the the mode of production at the same time. Don't think it was imperialism which did them in in the end either.
>Aufheben or AufhebungTried to look up the word, but suppose my sources were not reliable or extensive enough because couldn't find the meanings you've given. The contrast between "sublate" and "die out of itself" is most striking. The state is then analogous to class-society in that there ought to be no remnant of it, the dialectic logic expunges it. The last quote now seems to be in alignment with the others.
<[Having turned the means of production in the first place into state property] [the] [s]tate [as the base] interference in social relations [as the superstructure] becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous [as at best an inherited evil], and the dies out of itself [through the superstructure because the proletariat cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment its worst sides]; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "sublimated". It dies out. [No part of it remains.]It this absurd? Think of it as a sort of neoliberal-style governance by algorithm, once the rest of the state has been lopped off by proletarian force.
>>2258129drug dealers
prostitutes
telephone scammers
email scammers
gangsters
neets
etc.
>>2258129>The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the “dangerous” classes, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. […] Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army […]. Third, the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer; the victims of industry', whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.>This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués [someone who engages overly much in sensuous activity] with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème [the bohemians];Think its roughly anyone not "integrated" or marginally "integrated" into the mode of production, this includes the precarious: old, broken, beggars (including beggar children), but also criminals, and bohemians.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch05.htm >>2258938>From whore to pope, there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and ‘working’ lumpenproletariat belongs here as well; e.g. the great mob of porters etc. who render service in seaport cities etc.The lumpenproletariat also seems to include precarious contract-workers, as being sufficiently marginal.
This is just by having the notion of 'working' lumpenproletariate and identifying them with porters.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm >>2262659Of course that the vanguard was DotP doesn't rule out alternatives.
For example left-communist and reformist movements may also be capable of making a DotP.
That this hasn't happened so far is no reason to believe that it can't happen.
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