Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Jehu

"Without Revolutionary Theory, There Can be No Revolutionary Movement!

In my last critique of Jehu Eaves I made this statement:

Now, will Jehu have learnt anything from this? Almost certainly not. Like a preacher on the streets, speaking of the end times, he will angrily rant about The Fascist State, The Illiterate Marxists and the Bourgeois Simpletons, to a small and insignificant crowd of Chosen Ones. He claims that it does not matter if either he or I are correct, and he is right - even proving that all his revalations about what Marx really meant was wrong would not get him to change his mind!

It seems I am right. As Jehu responded to my last critique, he not so much responds to my questions and quotations, as he continues with his tradition of strange and misleading use of other people's texts, or describes my position in a very misleading manner.I non-the-less feel compelled to reply. To avoid any confusion: I am the @sushi_goat he refers to.

To begin with, he quotes this from me:

“If the proletariat was not a class, it would be nonsensical to claim that they act as a class, and that they overthrow the state as a class.” 

To which he responds:

"I completely agree with @sushi_goat on this point. Since Marx and Engels did not believe the proletariat was really a class, they could not very well then argue that the proletariat acts as a class without fatally compromising their argument. "

"As @sushi_goat argues, it is indeed nonsensical to claim the proletarians act as a class if they are not a class. However, this is the nonsensical claim of conventional Marxism, not mine. Since @sushi_goat, Marx and Engels, and I all agree that, in historical materialism, it is nonsensical to assert a non-class acts as a class, this would seem to suggest the proletarians are not a class — as Marx and Engels in fact state explicitly in a passage cited by @sushi_goat."

This is a nonsensical use of my quotation since I actually argued the complete opposite. I argued that since Marx and Engels explicitly states that the proletariat acts as a class in relation to the bourgeoisie in The German Ideology, it is nonsensical to claim what Jehu claims: that the proletariat doesn't act as a class under capitalism.

For Marx and Engels, in German Ideology this is what the bourgeois and proletarian classes were:
"the separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class";
there is an "antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat";
Through the condition of life forced upon the proletariat, it "becomes evident to him" that "he is sacrificed [...] within his own class" and "has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class." ;
the Communist revolution is "carried through by [a] class";
the necessity of Communist revolution is that "the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way";
and there is a "class overthrowing it".

All of these quotations can be found in the original post, or are easily found in the last chapter of The German Ideology.

None of these things can happen unless there is a class, that acts as a class: the proletariat. Jehu claimed, in his original post, that the proletariat doesn't act as a class, but Marx and Engels clearly mention them acting as a class. What I put Jehu to task for was not addressing these things, not further explaining how right he is. Either Marx and Engels know nothing about language, or Jehu is the one talking nonsense! Of course, The German Ideology is not the only text in which Marx and Engels mention that they act as a class and have class interest - under capitalism. The proletariat abolishes it's own status as proletariat only after the revolution - since there is no need for any class distinctions.  Jehu claims that it doesn't matter what Lenin said of Imperialism - it matters even less how many quotes from the German Ideology Jehu can twist and turn to remove the proletariat as a class from. The German Ideology was not released until 1932 - it never had any significant influence on the pre-Leninist working class movement. By no means does it either represent the best explanation of how bourgeois society undermines itself.  1948, two years after the German Ideology was written, came the now most famous one - which Herr Eaves has certainly read - "The Communist Manifesto". I am going to allow myself the privilege of actually quoting this at a very extended length, since almost everything in it goes against Jehu's propositions.

"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital."

[...]

"With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. "

[...]

"The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes." 

[...]

"This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried." 

 [...]

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. 

 [...]

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. 

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

 [We must here take a short break and ask ourselves - if the bourgeoisie abolishes itself through the bourgeois state making them superfluous, as Herr Jehu says, and the working class has no interest against the bourgeoisie, then what the hell are these "matters" it needs to settle with the non-existing bourgeoisie?]

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. 

In this section Jehu can blame neither Kautsky or Lenin for "imposing commercial conflicts on the bourgeoisie".  That is completely debunked according to this text, written after the German Ideology.

In this section, it is also debunked that the proletariat possessed full communistic interests on their own: "A portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. " It is blatantly clear here that Kautsky and Lenin were right - the emergence of bourgeois ideologists in the movement of the proleteriat helps the proletariat realize it's ideological mission. It doesn't matter how Jehu interprets The German Ideology here - Here's how Jehu twists this fundamental notion, pointed out by Kautsky, and then Lenin:

According to Kautsky and Lenin, the only consciousness the proletariat is capable of acquiring is one or another variant of bourgeois consciousness.

Now, Kautsky does not claim that it is another variant of bourgeois consciousness. He claims:

The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. 

The proletariat does not acquire bourgeois consciousness - it acquires proletarian consciousness through the discovery of bourgeois science. The consciousness remains strictly proletarian, but it is made possible by the bourgeoisie, and particularly "the portion of the bourgeoisie that goes over to the proletariat".  This why Lenin says directly, that "this does not mean [...] that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology". 

Let us also look at the "eerie similarity" that Jehu finds between these two claims by Kautsky, and Marx/Engels:

“Many of our revisionist critics believe that Marx asserted that economic development and the class struggle create, not only the conditions for socialist production, but also, and directly, the consciousness of its necessity.” - Karl Kautsky

“In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being … and connected with this a class is called forth, … from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness…” - The German Ideology

What does Jehu think of this?

I may be wrong, but it seems to me Kautsky is quoting the German Ideology almost verbatim to then deny Marx and Engels believed communist consciousness arises from the working class itself. 

This is obvious nonsense, since The German Ideology was released in 1936 in Soviet Russia, after Lenin was dead! Kautsky wrote this in 1901-1902, and I have yet to find any translated documentation of it outside "What is To Be Done?". We don't know, as far as I can see, the rest of the statement Kautsky made. We have literally no proof that Kausky ever read The German Ideology, nor do we have proof that Lenin did! The German Ideology was only discovered and aquired, with all the previously unreleased "Philosophical-Economic Manuscripts"  by David Riazanov, decades after this polemic occurred. What Jehu tries to claim here is historically revisionist - or just plain dumb - nonsense. But there's more!

But this is not the only problem I have with the conventional Marxist narrative on this subject: If Kautsky and Lenin are to be believed, not only is the working class unable to develop its own consciousness, it cannot develop any consciousness at all. This would make the proletarians rather unique among classes in society, but — okay — my argument is that they are unique among classes . 

As I pointed out in my earlier essay, they do develop class consciousness. They are not unable. This is argued directly by Kautsky and Lenin.

"The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc" - Lenin, What is to Be Done?

But this is absolutely untrue. Of course, socialism, as a doctrine, has its roots in modern economic relationships just as the class struggle of the proletariat has, and, like the latter, emerges from the struggle against the capitalist-created poverty and misery of the masses. - Karl Kautsky

Here, the important distinction is drawn between socialist consciousness and class struggle. Marx and Engels already believed, in The Communist Manifesto, that the workers, in order to fight for their class interests, develop a consciousness of the shared interests against the capitalist class in an economistic form. But a higher level of theoretical understanding, socialist consciousness, can only come from the "bourgeois ideologists." As the Engels said in "The Peasant War in Germany" (which I cited in the earlier blogpost):

"The German workers have two important advantages over those of the rest of Europe. First, they belong to the most theoretical people of Europe; and they have retained that sense of theory which the so-called ’educated’ classes of Germany have almost completely lost. Without German philosophy, which preceded it, particularly that of Hegel, German scientific socialism – the only scientific socialism that has ever existed – would never have come into being. Without a sense of theory among the workers, this scientific socialism would never have entered their flesh and blood as much as is the case. What an immeasurable advantage this is may be seen, on the one hand, from the indifference towards all theory, which is one of the main reasons why the English working-class movement crawls along so slowly in spite of the splendid organisation of the individual unions; on the other hand, from the mischief and confusion wrought by Proudhonism, in its original form, among the French and Belgians, and, in the form further caricatured by Bakunin, among the Spaniards and Italians." 

 The English working class did not succeed in establishing a socialist movement, because they only organized in trade-unions, while the German worker had the advantage of bourgeois science to it's disposal! It's written right there, yet Jehu, who presumably read my post, addresses it nowhere. Jehu continues with this absolute nonsense:

There is a question to be raised here: how can the consciousness of the proletariat reflect the material conditions of the other class? Since in historical materialism, consciousness is determined by material conditions, how does this happen?

The consciousness of the proletariat can never reflect the material conditions of the other class. Nobody ever said it did. Kautsky claims that scientific socialism developed through bourgeois science, which is true of Marx and Engels, not that it developed as a form of bourgeois consciousness! As it makes bourgeois science and philosophy into it's own, it creates socialist consciousness, a consciousness which is directly opposed to the bourgeois class, as Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Lenin all explicitly state. Neither, do I think there is necessarily a contradiction between the quotes in German Ideology and the Kautsky quote from "What is to be Done", like Jehu thinks:

How these two approaches to the question of consciousness can be reconciled remains a task for Marxists, but, for the most part, they refuse even to recognize there is a problem.

In the Communist Manifesto, this view receives a synthesis - it's through a section of the bourgeoisie's gradual proletarization that the ideological and scientific knowledge of socialism enters the proletarian consciousness. We do not need to "recognize this problem" - Marx and Engels already made it a non-problem! And in the very same text that Jehu uses to claim that Marx and Engels never changed their mind from "The German Ideology", "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific", we find this statement:

Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing". From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Ch. 2

Hegel, that great proletarian! What has he to with Proletarian consciousness? In contrast, Jehu's conception of socialism sounds more like the earlier Utopians: socialism for him, is an accidental discovery from the indigenous brains of the Proletariat!

Jehu then goes on to argue about "class interests":

"If I am not concerned about the interests of the working class, it is for a very good reason: I don’t know what the working class interest are and can’t know this. The interests of the working class do not diffuse among its members like some class substance adhering to each member of the class. Likewise the interests of the bourgeois class are not in any way apparent to the members of that class. We could start this discussion off with one premise: no member of any class in bourgeois society has any idea of her class interests nor any way of apprehending the interest of the class to which he or she belongs."

He is quite right that the interest of a class may not be apparent to the individual members of the class. Warren Buffett seems to have no clue, or no care, that his proposal to tax the rich is antagonistic to his class as whole. As is stated in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the "separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class". The realization of the individual members that they are a member of a socioeconomic class in society only occurs through the antagonisms between the classes. This forming of a class, and this process of becoming conscious of ones class interests, occurs gradually. Starting in the individual workplaces, against the individual capitalist, the workers start their struggle. These struggles intensify: unions form. The struggle of the unions, as well as the increased socialization of the workplace due to bourgeois centralization, leads to a greater discovery among the proletariat that they are a member of a class. Eventually they form a political party to fight for their rights - this is not only what Marx and Engels describe, it is what happened in history!

Does the fact that an individual proletarian might not know what the interests of each other individual proletariat has, as individuals, does not lead to the conclusion that no member of the proletariat knows the interests of the class they belong to. It simply does not logically follow. The individual members of a hockey team might not know what the other individual members do in their spare time, but once they are playing a game, they share the common goal of scoring more points than the other team. What the individual interests of each and every individual are here, are completely irrelevant. I do not know what my coworker wants to do with their life - write ballets, get married, build a replica of the Eiffel-tower with popsicle sticks - and as a socialist I do not care. It is our shared interest - the reproduction of ourselves as living human beings - an interests directly antagonistic to the interests of the bourgeois class, that I care about. Jehu's definition of interest here is a bourgeois individualist perception of interests, not a Marxists one. It belongs squarely in the school of methodological individualism, reminiscent of Ludwig von Mises Neo-Kantian monstrosity, which states that the subjective wants and wishes of individuals create the society under which they live, and are not subjected to class antagonisms, or material conditions.

He describes the bourgeois state:

The interests of the bourgeois class find their ideal expression in the form of a state that also stands over against the members of the class. This is why the bourgeois state is the “ideal” representative of the bourgeois class and it is also why the bourgeois class cannot rule directly on its own behalf, but only through a state. No member of the bourgeois class knows the interests of that class; they only know their own interests. 

Of course, this is nonsense. That the individual bourgeoisie cannot rule directly is a given, seeing as the individual capitalist also competes with other capitalists  - that is why there is a class organization under capitalism - the State - were the bourgeoisie in general, collectively, can make arrangement that defends their status as a class. This is analogous to the function of a trade union for the proletariat - the proletariat is also internally competitive, competing for jobs, higher wages, better positions and social status. But since the workers collectively share an interests in higher wages and more favorable work hours, they band together in a trade union. Of course this union does not express the wish of every single member of the workers in the trade, which is showcased by the fact that not all workers join a union. This does not matter - a generalized social formation never fully encompasses the subjective wishes of every single individual.

Now, as I proved in my last post, the proletariat does have a class interest. Jehu at least acknowledges that they do, but then make this statement:

What constitutes the interests of a class are only the average material conditions of the class and these conditions are entirely independent of the members of the class themselves. Thus Marx and Engels argued, “the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals…”

Now, what are the average material conditions of the proletariat? Wage Labor. Without the sale of their labor power, no worker could last for even a month. But it precisely the average conditions of the class — labor — that drive the class into poverty and creates capital as a power over it. Ideally, its interest is in the sale of its labor power, but this interest itself has been turned against the proletarians by capital.

So if I can be faulted for anything, it may be in saying the proletarians have no interest — but this is only because the interest they do share drives them to destitution. Their interest as an average member of their class is itself the very thing that grinds them under the capitalist machine. 

No other class in society is positively destroyed by pursuit of its own material conditions of existence, its own interests and this, of course, presents us with a logical paradox: How can any class in society have an interest that operates only to undermine its conditions of existence? Clearly if a class has an interest that positively undermines its own material conditions of existence, the class itself should collapse.

 Now, Engels states that the antagonism is this:

The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie. - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

This sounds different to Jehu's take on the class interest of the proletariat. Jehu says the interest is in the sale of labour power. It is of course not wrong to mention wage labor, as this is a fundamental part of capitalistic appropriation, but it must not be confused with the actual class interest. Even though the workers fight for higher wages, and more secure wages, it is only a partial expression of their true interest. As they state in The Communist Manifesto:

But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour.

The workers, through their labor, do not create property for themselves - only capital, that property which is used to further exploit the laborer through wage labor. The antagonism here is not wage labor as such; receiving a wage for doing labor does not necessarily imply exploitation. The wage as a form does not even imply capitalism: the question is whether or not labor is a commodity - wage labor is simply the value form. Some capitalists receive a wage - but this wage actually exceeds the amount of labor they do by quite a bit. In the case of a workers cooperative. there is no wage exploitation at all - the surplus generated by the cooperative (i.e the income generated that exceeds what the workers need to reproduce themselves as individuals) is put into the cooperative itself, and doesn't fall in private hands. In a socialist state owned enterprise, the state takes the surplus and not only reinvests it in the industry, but also invests it in infrastructure, healthcare, education and all the other necessities the working class needs.

"On our collective there is no room for priests or kulaks"

This is not exploitation, because at no place does the surplus generated by wage labor fall in private hands or a class that it exclusively benefits from it to control for their ends. Hence, the workers being antagonistic toward capitalist appropriation - it's not an appropriation which benefits them as a class, and is therefore antagonistic to their class interests. That Jehu invokes wage-labor as the class interest here, and not the wage-labor+capitalist surplus antagonism, paints a picture where its wage-labor in itself that is the material condition of the working class. But class interests are something expressed in relation and opposition to the other class/classes. The material conditions of the working class is not wage labor in itself, but wage labor in relation to capitalist appropriation.

Now Jehu goes on to sum up what he sees as his achievements in the past argument. Lets see how he did.

1. As I stated in the 3 previous sections, there are severe defects in the arguments of Marxists regarding class. Most Marxists assume the working class is indeed a class, when Marx and Engels made clear they thought it was not. As I showed in my previous blogpost, and this blogpost, they do. They do so clearly and without fuzz or mystification. It doesn't matter what that one quote in The German Ideology says - they do, and you need to stop saying they don't.

2. Marxists routinely refer to something they call a working class consciousness, when there is no evidence for this in historical materialism. As I've shown, Marx and Engels did believe in working class consciousness. They do so clearly without fuzz or mystification. With none of the quotes I've provided regarding this issue in this blog post and in the previous one, is there any question as to what they truly mean. They believe that there exists working class consciousness, period.

3. Many Marxists continue to insist, contrary to Marx and Engels own explicit statements, that the working class is incapable of producing its own communist consciousness and does not need the ‘assistance’ of vanguardists. Marx and Engels claimed that the workers are capable of producing class consciousness, but they also clearly stated that theoretical advancement and complete ideological awareness is only possible once theoretically advanced sections of the bourgeoisie go over  to the proletariat. They said this - and you need to stop saying they don't.

Finally, Marxists routinely refer to the “interests of the working class” when such an interest does not and cannot exist. It does. Marx and Engels clearly describe it. It can and does exist - because the proletariat is a class, antagonistic to the ruling class, and such an antagonism implies an interest. In fact, Marx even wrote an entire chapter of Wage-Labor and Capital entitled "The Interests of Capital and Wage-Labour are diametrically opposed".

Ah well. Jehu has not learned, and most likely, will not learn.

He goes on, this time about the state, his absolute weakest points in a serious of extremely weak ones:

Marxists make a big show of believing it is an urgent task of the working class to put down a rebellious group of formers capitalists. In fact, unlike as in Marx’s day, the number of real capitalists is actually very tiny and requires almost no effort at all to police. 

This is nonsense - pure unadulterated nonsense! The power of the capitalist class never laid in it's number of members, it laid in it's power and resources, it's ideological hegemony over parts of the proletariat, and it's ability to bribe certain portions of society to act in it's interests. Our modern capitalists have private armies in their disposal, private police, and private weapons industries. It has more resources now, than ever, to be used to destroy workers power! In Marx's day, in fact, it would've been easier! If they had overthrown the European governments, the new, proletarian state would essentially have no external enemies to worry about, and the internal enemies, the capitalists, while larger in number, were weaker in their collective class power.  In the modern imperialist world, you not only have to worry about the internal bourgeois overthrowing your state, you also have to worry about the external, imperialistic bourgeois of the entire world overthrowing you, a bourgeois class which still has it's government intact, and will come up with all sorts of reasons to attack you.

This is why I claimed that the "Return to Marx" is an absolutely worthless guide to revolution in the modern world - you need to understand Imperialism as Lenin described it! With a "pure Marx", Jehu seems to think that a revolution is a generalized thing that happens globally, all at once, as if the state of the working class in relation to it's national, imperialistic bourgeoisie in America is comparable to the working class in India's relation to the imperialistic bourgeoisie!

He goes on:

Marxists always want to turn our attention to the role the commune plays in suppressing its exploiters, but this is not the problem most “really existing socialisms” faced. Instead, we see the opposite problem, where the public authority separates itself from the commune and becomes a power standing over against it.

Now, to be honest, anarchists like Bakunin pointed out this danger to Marx and Engels in their own time. We cannot just look away and pretend that did not happen or that the problem is not significant. It is not simply a question of replacing the present state by a commune as @sushi_goat implies. It is not simply a problem of acknowledging the need for authority, or that the capitalists must be suppressed, it is also a question of the extent to which authority and suppression is even necessary. 

Here, Jehu makes a claim about "really existing socialism". Now, he says nothing to back it up - he does not explain where, in the USSR, public power turned against the workers. He merely assumes it did - through the given narrative that the bourgeois dogmatists have provided the working class with to scare them away from communism. That's a huge statement to make. Now, it also has nothing to do with historical materialism - it is also a completely misleading view of the USSR. As Al Szymanski shows in Is The Red Flag Still Flying?, the USSR remained a proletarian dictatorship, and socialist, until at least the early 80's. Even when the USSR was at it's most unequal, bureaucratic and authoritarian, it had an unprecedented level of social mobility, worker influence and participation in government, in relation to any capitalist country in existence. Labor as a commodity - the foundation of the capitalist mode of production - was abolished. Even as a bureaucratic strata developed, this group could only marginally better their condition, and they could not pass this privilege onto their children, which is one of the fundamental sociological basis for a class to emerge. Nobody could enrich themselves by exploiting the labor of others. If the USSR represented a "new class society" were the bureaucratic state apparatus is somehow a class onto itself, it is the first and only class society in which class is defined as having slightly bigger apartments. While not a perfect utopia, it was never meant to be one either. The USSR, throughout it's existence, faced bloody invasion, attempts at foreign subversion and wrecking, trade embargos and other economic pressure, and was finally forced into collapse by the West, who had forced them to militarize to point of complete economic meltdown.

He says Bakunin "pointed out the danger"of the State under socialism- but Bakunin did nothing but preach idealistic fatalism that Western anarchists would interpret as some sort prophetic sacred wisdom. It has nothing to do with materialist class analysis. Bakunin's warnings about the inevitable Red Tyranny is rooted in a completely bourgeois and idealistic "power" perspective, where power is a thing onto itself and does not have a class character. To even grant it legitimacy as a critique is to give up any pretension that you actually believe in Marx and Engels methods of analysis. But, lets continue.

While Marx argued that there is a fairly lengthy period between capitalism and communism, he made this argument in his day, not ours. By what yardstick is the extraordinary period of revolutionary transformation to be measured? Is this period fixed? Does it change over time? Is it longer today than it was in Marx’s time? Marxists are fond of telling us that some period is necessary, but they don’t have clue as to how to measure this period’s duration. And this is critical, because the greater the duration, the more likely the public authority is to escape the control of the commune.

Marxist are constantly asked how long they envision the State existing. We rarely answer this, because there is no way we can. It is not a question that even makes sense. It assumes that there can be a prediction for this, when, by it's very nature, it can't. It is exists as long as it needs to. It cannot logically end before the fundamental contradictions it needs to resolve are resolved. We have no prediction for this - we do not know in what state the world will be when the workers grab power in any specific country. The particularities need for the transformation period is determined by the national conditions of the proletarian dictatorship. If, for example, the US carried out a revolution, the main imperialistic bourgeoisie of the world could be targeted, and the process would be made simpler and shorter. But, seeing as revolutions tend to occur in the weakest links of the imperialist chain, we are more likely to see a revolution in a peripheral country, which is going to have to fight longer and harder to gain dominance locally, against for example , the US bourgeoisie, as well as developing the productive forces. But as I stated earlier, this is all just speculation and does not mean that we know how long the proletarian dictatorship needs to whither away.

Nor does the purpose of his asking of this question make sense. He has offered no proof of public authority ever escaping the "commune", or why this becomes more likely to happen over time, and what any of that has to do with class analysis! He just assumes, with given knowledge, that this is what happened in the USSR, China, or Albania. Almost certainly, those countries used violence against individual workers or groups of workers, socially and politically punished dissidents and deviated from the traditionally formulated goal of socialism on some instances - this has, of course, nothing to do with class analysis. "Repressing the Hungarian Revolution" is not a social formation or an economic system - it tells us nothing about whether or not the state was sociologically proletarian in it's class base, or if it's form of industry or commerce are socialist. These authoritarian abuses against members of the working class are about as indicative of class power having escaped the hands of the workers as the US government putting Bernie Madoff in jail or forcing the cigarette companies to put "Smoking Kills" on the packets is indicative of the anti-capitalist nature of the US state! In reality, we cannot explain the sometimes abusive and authoritarian nature of the proletarian state without looking at the system that surrounded it, namely imperialist capitalism. The growth of a largely militarized and bureaucratic state, like the USSR was in the 80's, can only be explained through realizing the actuality of the Western aggression perpetrated toward it, not in some internal nature of the State itself.

He continues about his use of the term"the fascist state":

What does it mean to be a fascist state? It mean the state is now the direct exploiter of proletariat. The assumption of management of the national capital, as @sushi_goat explains, does not do away with the capitalistic relationship; it simply renders the capitalist class itself superfluous to that relationship: as Engels argued, the state itself becomes the national capitalist.
Again, I did not make this up, @sushi_goat saw it for himself in the passage he quoted — he just preferred to ignore it.

While I didn't ignore it, I did perhaps make an incorrect statement in that I claimed the state being the national capitalist was simply the emergence of finance capital. Although that is relevant, it doesn't say quite what Engels says. However, Engels didn't say the state becomes the national capitalist in the section I quoted. Let us return to it:

"But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital." - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

It says the State is the ideal personification of the total national capital: it never once said that it has become a national capitalist, that exists independently of the bourgeoisie. Instead, that section is to be found quoted in Jehu's original post:

“All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.”

Does this mean that when the workers overthrow the state, there is no bourgeoisie at all? No. Even as Engels claims there is an increase in state ownership or direction of industry, it does not mean that the bourgeois class is abolished - it merely cannot secure the reproduction of it's class interest through the anarchy of the market. The capitalist relation cannot exist without someone receiving a capitalist surplus. The State cannot merely be act as a capitalism without capitalists. It directs the production - Engels is clear on this - but nowhere does he say that the profits generated from State industry or State investments goes to the public power system. The bourgeois remains the profiteers of this project. The bourgeois class is not superfluous in the sense that they do not exist as a class anymore. They are, Engels says, "shown to be superfluous"for the working class. The working class no longer believes that the bourgeoisie are capable of running the system they have created - but nowhere in the following quotation is it suggested that the bourgeoisie has disappeared as the general profiteer of industry:

"If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose." - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

The capitalist centralization of Capital proves to the people that there is nothing essential to the capitalist, as an individual economic actor, that makes him somehow more skilled or fit to run and profit from the socialized forces of production than the workers themselves.

Capitalism's self-legitimation always rested on the idea of it being decentralized, a system in which individual self-interest expresses itself outside of some general plan or directive. Capitalism is productive according to classical capitalist theory, because it responds to decentralized knowledge and preference of local communities. Unlike the "irrationality of central state planning", it claims that decentralized individual entrepreneurs competing with each-other to produce the best product or service satisfies the needs of all. People looking to "act according to their own self-interest" create new factories, with new technologies and can employ more and more. As Adam Smith famously said:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages” - Wealth of Nations

But as the competition is done away with by the process of competition itself, it becomes more and more of a system of central planning itself. Every "decentralized" aspect of capitalism becomes gradually destroyed or distorted. Class mobility becomes a structural impossibility, and the "choices" presented to the consumer when going to market no longer represents choices between several different, competing capitalists. While there is an increasing multitude of different commodities, the providers of the commodities have shrunk in number - the choice between this or that product no longer becomes meaningful, since the profits go to the same 3-5 massive corporations that produce the given commodity. Even if one wants to "buy local", the centralization effectively assures that this is no competition for the mega-corporations. It is no longer the radical, individual entrepreneur, the basement inventor or those who think "outside the box" who maintain and drive forward the socioeconomic order. Radical competition is replaced with radical monopoly, which act as a central planner, more and more attached to the State in order to ensure stability. Centralized capital already acts as the straw-man capitalist ideologues built against State central planning: economic activity is decided by a few businessmen in suit, far removed from the reality of the average consumer and worker. As the capitalists radically lose their ability to act as competitive capitalists, they become superfluous in driving production forward, Essentially, they have lost all of what makes them a progressive force in society, but retain their status as an exploiter of wage labor. The State, rather than the market forces, becomes central in reproducing the bourgeoisie's profit. They become superfluous - they no longer move production, technology and industry forward, while it remains unable to provide the worker with it's most basic needs, or any advancement in wages. The workers more and more realize that they do not need the bourgeoisie to manage industry and society, that all the functions of the State and industry could be performed by proletarians themselves!

Jehu makes this claim when he (quite correctly) argues against my use of "state as national bourgeois" as mere finance capital:

Indeed, in the last financial crisis, Washington actually bailed out the finance capitalists themselves.  

Yes, because the state is the "personification of national capital!" It exists to guarantee profits for the smaller and smaller, but increasingly more wealthy and powerful bourgeoisie! The entire bourgeoisie is not thrown out - the bourgeoisie just becomes more and more dependent on the state functioning as a subsidizer and planner for it's survival. Jehu has not explained to me, yet, what the "state as national capitalist", in his view consists off. Is it merely the state doing any form of investment? In this case, the State has always been a capitalist, since the State has always been involved with creating infrastructure and providing services. Does the profit fall in private hands or does it fall in the hands of the State to enrich the senators and judges? In either case, let us continue:

And Engels did not simply predict finance capital; he predicted the state would become the national capitalist. I have constantly pointed out that this is the context within which I use the term ‘fascism'; but Marxists who object to my writings choose to ignore it. And they choose to ignore it because they know the implications of the state being the national capitalist: politics is dead.

This, once again, is complete nonsense. Nothing about the state being a national capitalist implies that politics is dead. Engels does not suggest it does. It suggests that capitalism has reached it's final stage - however, as I have shown earlier, Marx and Engels believe in taking political power. They do so without any fuzz. or mystification. Indeed, Engels states directly in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" that: "the proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property". So clearly, politics is not dead - if it was, there would be no need for the proletariat to grab political power. Jehu cannot claim that the statement: "politics is dead", originates in the thought or logic of Engels, because Engels blatantly states the opposite.

Now, Jehu claims I object to the term "Fascist State" to describe the state as national capitalist. I have never intellectually "objected" to the term - I have merely laughed at it. Jehu, perhaps, does not know how silly his rantings on the "Fascist State" sounds. He claims that talking to the workers have no idea what I am talking about socialism and class interests, but is supposed to be free from ridicule with his own use of language. But let us see how he - "intellectually" - defends the use of the word "Fascist State":

That is the only reason why I use the term fascist state — because no one has any illusions that a fascist state need not be overthrown.

This, of course, does not make any sense what-so-ever. It makes about as much sense as Tony Cliff claiming his analysis of the USSR as state capitalist originates with his distaste for the state (which I believe he did, but I cannot find the source) - it has nothing to do with the scientific definition of things . It aims to create a idealistic distaste for something, and is thus, little more than Rude Words. It doesn't matter if Jehu calls the level of capitalism in which the State assumes the dominant role "Fascist". He might alternatively just do what Engels does, and call it the "national capitalist", and it would be necessary to overthrow it all the same. He could call it "The Great Scary Boo-Boo Ghost" and it would still need to be overthrown. He could even call it something nice, like "Job Creating Teddy Bear", and it would still need to be overthrown. The change of words to describe a thing does not become the thing. Instead, he introduces the confusing and exaggerated term "Fascist State". Now, let us remind ourself that the actual Fascist states did not work the way Engels claims the National Capitalist does. In fact, Nazi Germany went against state-ownership and control! While the entire Western capitalist world was building social democratic institutions and increasing State ownership, Nazi Germany privatized several vital industries and banking:

The Great Depression spurred State ownership in Western capitalist countries. Germany was no exception; the last governments of the Weimar Republic took over firms in diverse sectors. Later, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership and public services to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in the Western capitalist countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s. Privatization in Nazi Germany was also unique in transferring to private hands the delivery of public services previously provided by government. The firms and the services transferred to private ownership belonged to diverse sectors. Privatization was part of an intentional policy with multiple objectives and was not ideologically driven. As in many recent privatizations, particularly within the European Union, strong financial restrictions were a central motivation. In addition, privatization was used as a political tool to enhance support for the government and for the Nazi Party. - Germa Bell - Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930's Germany .

This suggests that Jehu's description of state as national capitalist is harmful, because the original term was used to describe a system that acted differently to how Engels describes the national capitalist. While the rest of the capitalist world was building state industry - Jehu cites Washington building 1500 in WWII industries as proof that the American state is"fascist" - Nazi Germany destroyed the conversion of industry to public hands. Now, another problem with how Jehu approaches the issue of "Washington building 1500 industries in WWII" is that he merely claims the state building industry means that the state is a national capitalist. The State, in every stage of Capitalism, has always been a part of building infrastructure and other things, and so we have to prove not just that the State built something, but that this represents the capitalistic relation, or that it is the dominant form of production. Jehu does not prove it. Anyway, he finishes the blog post:

"So, why does @sushi_goat and other Marxists object to the term? What possible reason could they have for denying the state is fascistic. What part of the existing state do they want to save?"

Nobody ever denied that the state was "fascistic" - Jehu merely changed Engels terms and claimed that questioning the merits of this change in terms is equal to denying what the term describes! If Jehu started calling his dick "Enver Hoxha", and we all thought that was pretty dumb, Jehu would presumably claim we deny that his dick exists!

This blog post has now gone on for all too long. I congratulate everyone who made it this far. I expect a reply, but unless it does not address more directly what I bring up than his previous post, I might not write another one.