Both Marx and Engels used the concepts of socialism and communism to mean the same thing. Nowhere in Marx or Engels do you find the concept of socialism being a transitional State towards communism. You do find a reference to the transitional stage of a 'dicatatorship of the proletariat' in THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE. The Paris Commune was held up as an example of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' to critics of Marx and Engels who accused them of being anti-democratic e.g. anarchists. One could just as easily call the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' a 'proletarian democracy', just as a bougeois democracy is a dictatorship of the capitalist class. In either case (a DOP or PD) a State was being described, whereas socialism/communism were concepts associated with classless and Stateless or 'An adminstration of things'.
Communism is not capitalism; it is an association of free producers who create a society where, to paraphrase M&E, the condition for the freedom of each is the condition for the freedom of all. Marx and Engels wrote pages of critique of the political-economy of capitalism. So, one can assume, socialism would not have the same features of production/consumption that capitalism has, in fact communism would be the negation of Capital. One can assume that that the main pillar of the social relation described by Marx as Capital would be negated in a communist society thus, the appeal by Marx in his 1865 speech to the IWA (reproduced after Marx's death as the pamphlet 'Value, Price and Profit') for workers to inscribe on their banners, "Abolition of the wage system". The precondition for socialism is the class consciously organised reduction of a life devoted to the creation of wealth for those who own the productive apparatus of society, the capitalists. Marx wrote a pretty piece indicating this direction on page 707 of the GRUNDRISSE: As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations -- two different sides of the development of the social individual -- appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. 'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.' (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.) http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Grundrisse.pdf In addition to other negations of Capital, one can assume common/social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. One can also assume, by many references to it in Marx's work, that this socialist association producers would plan their production of goods and services based on use value, without the burdensome shell of exchange-value fettering the satisfaction of human desire. Hi-ho, Mike B) *********************************************************************** If all the people who make a living by selling their skills to employers were to stop working, no wealth would be produced. Labour theory of value anyone? http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/ __________________________________________________________________________________ Get more done like never before with Yahoo!7 Mail. Learn more: http://au.overview.mail.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
