> Russian social democracy had as its goal the overthrow of the Czarist state
> and replacement with something more democratic. Trotsky, and then Lenin,
> argued that the only way to guarantee that the new state be fully
> democratic is if it was a dictatorship of the proletariat. The concept of
> the dictatorship of the proletariat is as deeply rooted in Marx's thought
> as the labor theory of value.
1. Of course we will have to study Marx's few actual references to the dictatorship of the proletariat and contending interpretations (Hal Draper, Richard Hunt, John Ehrenberg). We will have to study the impact of the Paris Commune on Marx's ideas of the possibilities of new political forms.
2. We will have to study how and why Marx thought the law of value (he does not himself refer to the labor of theory of value) to have historically specific relevance to the regulation of the capitalist mode of life only and why Marx and Engels (as well as the council communists but not Stalin) agreed that post capitalist production would be regulated without reference to the dreaded "value".
3. We will have to study the Hilferding proposition of whether a transition to socialism will entail simply a state take over of the commanding heights of the centralized financial economic power which develops under capitalism. From here there are interesting questions to ask about how Doug conceptualizes the transition to socialism in his Wall Street; it can be compared to the vision in Zellig Harris' The Transformation of Capitalist Society for example.
4. We will have to study the Austrian critique of socialism and just as importantly the Marxian critiques of the market socialist respondents (Lange, Taylor). And we will have follow the debates into today (Cockshott and Cottrel's critique of Hayek; the Frank Roosevelt, ed. volume on market socialism; David Schweiker's Beyond Capitalism; the recent Verso volume on John Roemer's market socialism; the volume on non market socialism ed. byMaximillen Rubel, the great Marxologist,). I can't do this now.
> Citing Paul Mattick
> or Hannah Arendt won't raise any eyebrows. Lenin and Trotsky citations are
> guaranteed tenure-killers.
The reason to cite Gorter and Mattick is simply the truth of their critiques, not to access that huge fucking council communist scholarship fund (though it is fund of genuine insight). The radical implication of their thought is that the Bolsheviks were no less revisionist than the Austro Marxists.
As Louis P doubtless knows, the council communists had a very important indirect influence on the movements of 68.
I had to respond to this provocation but I am hanging low. Take the last word Louis P.
bye, rakesh