You aren't listening. I never said anything would be dismantled. All I said is that once classes are gone it would cease to be a state. There will continue to be planning, governing, and an administative apparatus. There will just not need to be violence. Communism does not mean an end to authority.
QueerCommie
joined 2 years ago
The text On Contradiction should be helpful. In addition, On Practice (first) and On the correct handling of contradictions among the people. Contradictions are basically things that are in conflict or opposites. The metaphysical philosophy of liberalism cannot comprehend contradictions existing within something, whereas dialectics see contradictions as inherent to all things.
The state is defined as the monopoly on violence. We agree, it seems.
Your explanation is simple malthusianism and doesn't address my argument. People have burned coal for millenia. It was not until Capitalism that it become systematically exploited along with many other things to produce unprecedented abundance. Capitalism is the most efficient system at exploiting resources in history. That is why the population boomed, the necessity for growing the workforce and markets enabled by new innovation and exploitation.
but then the answer to the question of "why more slaves today?" would just be "because we haven't built socialism yet"
I still don't know what kind of point you're trying to make with this. No one would explain anything by the lack of something to bring it to an end.
This assumes that noone is violent under conditions of abundance, which is false
where did I say that? On the subject Lenin (in state and rev) says this:
spoiler
Lastly, only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed--“nobody” in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to "wither away". We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away.
There's every reason to believe that, because it's happened thousands of times over already. Human history started as roughly socialist tribes, who were intra-socialist, but inter-oppressive.
Again, there's a difference between a scarce world in which agriculture can produce new surpluses and create the possibility of private property, and one where scarcity has been surpassed.
if you achieve utopian global abundance, and then dismantle the state that achieved it, it is certain that the world will devolve again into what it is now.
Why? This is just the regular pessimistic overused human nature argument. Lenin also addresses the false claim that we seek to introduce Communism and abolish the state at one stroke. This is what the anarchists want to do, not us.
spoiler
The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the rule: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", i.e., when people have become so accustomed to observing the fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labor has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability. "The narrow horizon of bourgeois law", which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than anybody else--this narrow horizon will then be left behind. There will then be no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely "according to his needs".
From the bourgeois point of view, it is easy to declare that such a social order is "sheer utopia" and to sneer at the socialists for promising everyone the right to receive from society, without any control over the labor of the individual citizen, any quantity of truffles, cars, pianos, etc. Even to this day, most bourgeois “savants” confine themselves to sneering in this way, thereby betraying both their ignorance and their selfish defence of capitalism.
Ignorance--for it has never entered the head of any socialist to “promise” that the higher phase of the development of communism will arrive; as for the greatest socialists' forecast that it will arrive, it presupposes not the present ordinary run of people, who, like the seminary students in Pomyalovsky's stories,[2] are capable of damaging the stocks of public wealth "just for fun", and of demanding the impossible.
Until the “higher” phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor and the measure of consumption; but this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the establishment of workers' control over the capitalists, and must be exercised not by a state of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers.
The selfish defence of capitalism by the bourgeois ideologists (and their hangers-on, like the Tseretelis, Chernovs, and Co.) consists in that they substitute arguing and talk about the distant future for the vital and burning question of present-day politics, namely, the expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of all citizens into workers and other employees of one huge “syndicate”--the whole state--and the complete subordination of the entire work of this syndicate to a genuinely democratic state, the state of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
In fact, when a learned professor, followed by the philistine, followed in turn by the Tseretelis and Chernovs, talks of wild utopias, of the demagogic promises of the Bolsheviks, of the impossibility of “introducing” socialism, it is the higher stage, or phase, of communism he has in mind, which no one has ever promised or even thought to “introduce”, because, generally speaking, it cannot be “introduced”.
-VI Ulyanov, State and Revolution
Even if everyone has their physical needs met, certain people want more power and control, and they'll figure out a way to "oppress their own people" to gain control of a larger amount of resources than the others, and then it's history.
Your issue is with the Anarchists, not the socialists. We do not seek to abolish the state, but to protractedly abolish classes resulting in the governing apparatus to be purely administrative and not a tool of oppression of anyone.
So, what, do you think it will be an issue in your lifetime? I don't think it's something anyone should worry about, especially as such fears lend toward ecofascism. If it becomes an issue people will deal with it. Idk why you're so worried about it. Btw, in your original comment it is wrong to characterize the existence of fossil fuels as the reason for population boom, just as it is wrong to blame the existence of humans for climate change. The laws of population in the modern era have been dictated by capitalism.
I addressed this in my original comment. A lot of people are also having a lot of children because they are struggling. Increased comfort, access to contraceptives, and relational liberation might likely have a depressing effect on population growth. There's no reason to worry about overpopulation today, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Lenin addresses this directly. Historically states are means of oppression of the working class by the ruling class. We smash the state and create something ceases to be the same sort of state, but still is a state. For once the majority suppresses the minority that would wish to exploit. It is a very unique state, but it is still a state as such, for a state is a mechanism of class rule. When there are no longer classes there shall be no state.
very weird, it works for me. Try this: https://dokumen.pub/socialism-or-extinction-climate-automation-and-war-in-the-final-capitalist-breakdown.html
As Engels said, "These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves." We scientific socialists seek to smash the bourgeois state and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. That means that the interests of the majority will be guarded and workers of the state will not be payed more than anyone else, or have a prioritized existence, and so on. The most successful anarchists (like the Catalonians) establish a dictatorship of the proletariat and refuse to call it such. I encourage you to read or re-read Lenin's State and Revolution. Also, a primer on how China's socialist system actually works, like Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: a Guide for Foreigners, might be helpful.
Maybe so, but we marxists can solve the problems of our states without some principle of "anti-statism." Obviously, we want an end to the state, and a smashing of the existing state. It would be revisionism to have reverence for any state as an entity more than the people. However we can solve the problems of our own states through democratic centralism and criticism and self criticism like China's doing.
You don't understand the Marxist definition of a state. https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/State Please read Lenin.