I thought this deserved its own thread since it would shed some light on 90% of the stupid bait conversations we have on here. In his essay, Marx calls out and shows the ridiculousness of anarchists, third worldists, anti-"electoralism," anti-Americanism/anglosim, which he coins as Indifferentism. He's shows the religious nature of the theoretical dogmatists that are not actually concerned with improving the conditions for workers, but instead in having some vain sense of being ideological pure, which Marx mockingly calls "the eternal principles."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm
> “The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!
>“If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. All peaceful movements, such as those in which English and American workers have the bad habit of engaging, are therefore to be despised. Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters, who can then only exploit them for ten or twelve hours, instead of fourteen or sixteen. They must not even exert themselves in order legally to prohibit the employment in factories of children under the age of ten, because by such means they do not bring to an end the exploitation of children over ten: they thus commit a new compromise, which stains the purity of the eternal principles.
>“Workers should even less desire that, as happens in the United States of America, the state whose budget is swollen by what is taken from the working class should be obliged to give primary education to the workers' children; for primary education is not complete education. It is better that working men and working women should not be able to read or write or do sums than that they should receive education from a teacher in a school run by the state. It is far better that ignorance and a working day of sixteen hours should debase the working classes than that eternal principles should be violated.
>“If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form. Workers must not even form single unions for every trade, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society; this division, which fragments the working class, is the true basis of their present enslavement.
>“In a word, the workers should cross their arms and stop wasting time in political and economic movements. These movements can never produce anything more than short-term results. As truly religious men they should scorn daily needs and cry out with voices full of faith: "May our class be crucified, may our race perish, but let the eternal principles remain immaculate! As pious Christians they must believe the words of their pastor, despise the good things of this world and think only of going to Paradise. In place of Paradise read the social liquidation which is going to take place one day in some or other corner of the globe, no one knows how, or through whom, and the mystification is identical in all respects.
>“In expectation, therefore, of this famous social liquidation, the working class must behave itself in a respectable manner, like a flock of well-fed sheep; it must leave the government in peace, fear the police, respect the law and offer itself up uncomplaining as cannon-fodder.
>“In the practical life of every day, workers must be the most obedient servants of the state; but in their hearts they must protest energetically against its very existence, and give proof of their profound theoretical contempt for it by acquiring and reading literary treatises on its abolition; they must further scrupulously refrain from putting up any resistance to the capitalist regime apart from declamations on the society of the future, when this hated regime will have ceased to exist!'
< It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. However the working-class movement is today so powerful that these philanthropic sectarians dare not repeat for the economic struggle those great truths which they used incessantly to proclaim on the subject of the political struggle. They are simply too cowardly to apply them any longer to strikes, combinations, single-craft unions, laws on the labour of women and children, on the limitation of the working day etc., etc.
<Now let us see whether they are still able to be brought back to the good old traditions, to modesty, good faith and eternal principles.
<The first socialists (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, etc.), since social conditions were not sufficiently developed to allow the working class to constitute itself as a militant class, were necessarily obliged to limit themselves to dreams about the model society of the future and were led thus to condemn all the attempts such as strikes, combinations or political movements set in train by the workers to improve their lot. But while we cannot repudiate these patriarchs of socialism, just as chemists cannot repudiate their forebears the alchemists, we must at least avoid falling back into their mistakes, which, if we were to commit them, would be inexcusable.
<Later, however, in 1839, when the political and economic struggle of the working class in England had taken on a fairly marked character, Bray, one of Owen's disciples and one of the many who long before Proudhon hit upon the idea of mutualism, published a book entitled Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy.
<In his chapter on the inefficacy of all the remedies aimed for by the present struggle, he makes a savage critique of all the activities, political or economic, of the English working class, condemns the political movement, strikes, the limitation of the working day, the restriction of the work of women and children in factories, since all this – or so he claims – instead of taking us out of the present state of society, keeps us there and does nothing but render the antagonisms more intense.
<This brings us to the oracle of these doctors of social science, M. Proudhon. While the master had the courage to declare himself energetically opposed to all economic activities (combinations, strikes, etc.) which contradicted his redemptive theories of mutualism, at the same time through his writings and personal participation, he encouraged the working-class movement, and his disciples do not dare to declare themselves openly against it. As early as 1847, when the master's great work, The System of Economic Contradictions, had just appeared, I refuted his sophisms against the working-class movement. [2] None the less in 1864, after the loi Ollivier, which granted the French workers, in a very restrictive fashion, a certain right of combination, Proudhon returned to the charge in a book, The Political Capacities of the Working Classes, published a few days after his death.
<The master's strictures were so much to the taste of the bourgeoisie that The Times, on the occasion of the great tailors' strike in London in 1866, did Proudhon the honour of translating him and of condemning the strikes with the master's very words. Here are some selections.
<The miners of Rive-de-Gier went on strike; the soldiers were called in to bring them back to reason. Proudhon cries, 'The authority which had the miners of Rive-de-Gier shot acted disgracefully. But it was acting like Brutus of old caught between his paternal love and his consular duty: it was necessary to sacrifice his sons to save the Republic. Brutus did not hesitate, and posterity dare not condemn him.' [3] In all the memory of the proletariat there is no record of a bourgeois who has hesitated to sacrifice his workers to save his interests. What Brutuses the bourgeois must then be!
> 'Well, no: there is no right of combination, just as there is no right to defraud or steal or to commit incest or adultery.' [4] There is however all too clearly a right to stupidity.
<What then are the eternal principles, in whose name the master fulminates his mystic anathema?
<First eternal principle: 'Wage rates determine the price of commodities.'
<Even those who have no knowledge of political economy and who are unaware that the great bourgeois economist Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817, has refuted this long-standing error once and for all, are however aware of the remarkable fact that British industry can sell its products at a price far lower than that of any other nation, although wages are relatively higher in England than in any other European country.
<Second eternal principle: 'The law which authorizes combinations is highly anti-juridical, anti-economic and contrary to any society and order.' [5] In a word 'contrary to the economic right of free competition'.
<If the master had been a little less chauvinistic, he might have asked himself how it happened that forty years ago a law, thus contrary to the economic rights of free competition, was promulgated in England; and that as industry develops, and alongside it free competition, this law – so contrary to any society and order - imposes itself as a necessity even to bourgeois states themselves. He might perhaps have discovered that this right (with capital R) exists only in the Economic Manuals written by the Brothers Ignoramus of bourgeois political economy, in which manuals are contained such pearls as this: 'Property is the fruit of labour' ('of the labour', they neglect to add, 'of others').
<Third eternal principle: 'Therefore, under the pretext of raising the working class from its condition of so-called social inferiority, it will be necessary to start by denouncing a whole class of citizens, the class of bosses, entrepreneurs, masters and bourgeois; it will be necessary to rouse workers' democracy to despise and to hate these unworthy members of the middle class; it will be necessary to prefer mercantile and industrial war to legal repression, and class antagonism to the state police.' [6]
<The master, in order to prevent the working class from escaping from its so-called social inferiority, condemns the combinations that constitute the working class as a class antagonistic to the respectable category of masters, entrepreneurs and bourgeois, who for their part certainly prefer, as does Proudhon, the state police to class antagonism. To avoid any offence to this respectable class, the good M. Proudhon recommends to the workers (up to the coming of the mutualist regime, and despite its serious disadvantages) freedom or competition, our 'only guarantee'. [7]
<The master preached indifference in matters of economics – so as to protect bourgeois freedom or competition, our only guarantee. His disciples preach indifference in matters of politics – so as to protect bourgeois freedom, their only guarantee. If the early Christians, who also preached political indifferentism, needed an emperor's arm to transform themselves from oppressed into oppressors, so the modern apostles of political indifferentism do not believe that their own eternal principles impose on them abstinence from worldly pleasures and the temporal privileges of bourgeois society. However we must recognize that they display a stoicism worthy of the early Christian martyrs in supporting those fourteen or sixteen working hours such as overburden the workers in the factories. >>2454104
I said it elsewhere, but the thing with Marxism is that it's like any other branch of wissenschaft with an -ism at the end; Nietzschenism, Hegelianism, Kantianism, etc.
People here treat it like a religion, using "revisionist" as a snarl word, which completely misses the point. Marx wasn't a god, and his thought isn't a fixed set of absolute laws that reality must conform to. It's a broad intellectual framework that two particularly clever men developed based on the knowledge they had of history, economics, politics, and philosophy of science from the time and place they lived in.
Their thought is something to be elaborated on and checked against material reality, not a dogma to mindlessly obey.
>>2454342>his thought isn't a fixed set of absolute laws that reality must conform tohe even said that while alive and changed his mind multiple times. crazy, huh?
same with engels.
>>2454104>well see, that's what the third worldists etc. see themselves as doing. they see marx as a forebearer but want to repudiate his eurocentric mistakes, etc. But he already addressed their viewpoint. What is the point in calling themselves Marxists? Why not Bakunhist or Proudhonist or something?
>>2454342>>2454597What are you taking from Marx? How are you going to espouse the opposite of him and call it an adaptation of him?
>>2454342Not true at all. Marxism is more concrete than all those you listed, because it is not a philosophy but guide to act. Here are Marx's actual, historical, scientific contributions. btw comparing Marx to the dandy Nietzsche is just retarded. One was an irrationalist, the other - not so.
>labour only gets represented as exchange value in societies with private ownership and atomised production. Marx says exchange was absent in traditional Indian communities or the communism of the Incas. The prior economists had assumed that all societies produce commodities.
>the distinction between labour and labour power.>the introduction of the concept of surplus value as something functionally prior to the division of surplus value between profit, interest and rent.>a new theory to explain the falling rate of profit.>repudiated of Say’s law (the production of goods (supply) automatically creates its own demand)>the concept of absolute ground rent.>the introduction of more modes of production than the ones Adam Smith recognised.>the idea that the class struggle leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. >>2454631>where did that happenI meant the general you, and that was a focus of much of the thread including the post I was replying to was replying to:
>>2454104To put it again, there are a lot of people who swear up and down that they are "Marxist," but it seems that means to them only that, "I see myself as the next head of communism." Really no different than Americans who flog the founding fathers but want to do with separation of church and state and whatever other key things were important to them.
>>2454786Nietzche wasn't "just" a philosopher. He was also a historian, a psychologist, and a linguist. Indeed, his most important legacy was not in philosophy, but rather psychology via Sigmund Freud. And he most definitely offered a guide to act; he's probably the most prominent example of Philosophy as Self Help. That's not to say that I think Nietzsche is on par with Marx as a thinker, his followers had to do a lot more legwork than Marx's did, but in principle they're not as difficult as you'd think they are.
>>2454877>so now it will instead be china that drags the europe into the future kicking and screamingSorry to burst your bubble, but China has been very clear that it has very little interest in dragging anyone anywhere. Unlike the West, they lack both the practical need to spread their ideology, and the cultural chauvinism to want to. Even among the hardcore Chinese nationalists I've seen, the general sentiment seems to be "let the West work itself out, their affairs do not concern us". It's an attitude that I find very admirable, but it also means that leftist movements worldwide are kind of on their own.
The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm)
>After the programme was agreed, however, a clash arose between Marx and his French supporters over the purpose of the minimum section. Whereas Marx saw this as a practical means of agitation around demands that were achievable within the framework of capitalism, Guesde took a very different view: “Discounting the possibility of obtaining these reforms from the bourgeoisie, Guesde regarded them not as a practical programme of struggle, but simply … as bait with which to lure the workers from Radicalism.” The rejection of these reforms would, Guesde believed, “free the proletariat of its last reformist illusions and convince it of the impossibility of avoiding a workers ’89.” Accusing Guesde and Lafargue of “revolutionary phrase-mongering” and of denying the value of reformist struggles, Marx made his famous remark that, if their politics represented Marxism, “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”).Someone prepare the Matt Bruenig apology forms.
>anti-electoralism
Every single time this is brought up, it's implied that it's for some ideological, purist vision of a Marxist revolution rather than it being a response to the concrete observations of what electoral politics does to a worker's movement and how ineffective it is at improving living conditions in general. Nobody ever reads theory so they just assume this position is of a dork fetishizing grabbing an AK and destroying McDonalds, over the "more mature" route of voting for Bernie Sanders.
Electoralism showed its real character with the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the SPD's freikorps. The nature of bourgeois politics is that if you enter the system, you conform to that system and then seek to preserve it by any means, and in the SPD's case after killing the actual communists, they just softly rolled over for Hitler not too long after because they were predominantly focused on protecting their own positions. This was Lenin's struggle against the liquidators. Mamdani is already doing it and he isn't even mayor yet. He's already thrown the DSA platform into the trash during the debates. It's idealist to think a politician would not just immediately fold to a system that exists to transform everyone that enters it.
The only thing social democrats really cling to is FDR's New Deal, Keynesian reforms. They ignore that this didn't come from electoralism, it was a response to frequent and violent labor action that was a response to massive economic crisis of the time. It was throwing water on a fire, not some long-game strategic vote. New Deal was to placate the working class and keep them working. This is why New Deal eventually withered away after the stagflation, since Keynesian reforms cannot resolve capitalism's inherent crises.
The opponents of *still* clinging electoralism just don't have goldfish brains, rather than having a fetish for violence. Marx, was not a soothsayer and lived in a moment where people were *just* breaking free from military dictatorships. He found optimism in electoral politics, most (in)famously with Americans, because they represented a new horizon for the working class to conquer. We have since seen that the working class is killed anytime they try to utilize it, similarly to how trade unions (by definition, class collaboration) are reactionary and were definitely proven to be during WW2 where 100% of them stopped all action to "support the war effort" or in other words, nationalism. It's not idealism, it's reality that these modes of "resistance" are fully coopted by the system and serve to mediate some disgruntled workers here and there, as part of the broader part of negotiation with the working class.
It also doesn't take someone out of Marxism to reject some outdated strategy he wrote in an article. Being a Marxist means you hold his theory of historical materialism and analysis of capitalist circulation. Furthermore, when I read Marx, especially that one quote about coops, I see him saying that he was more open to the working class being creative and wiggling around organically growing different forms of revolutionary subconscious. In that text on indifferentism, I don't know his personal feelings on what "correct" activity is, but it seems clear to me he's just against religious dogma. Being against dogma though, is not support for conducting a failing strategy over and over and he made this clear in his criticisms against Lassalle. The theory that moves in that anti-electoral direction is not religious dogma, but rather a scientific analysis of cause and effect of previous strategy and where it led. I also have zero confidence that websites, where the majority of posters are under 25 and just talk about streamers all day, have actually read any of that theory. If anything, clinging to some outdated party-politics seems more religious to me.
One more DSA off-shoot and we'll vote in socialism guys.
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