[lbo-talk] Cultural Change? ( Marxist democracy)

Todd Archer todda39 at hotmail.com
Fri May 7 16:07:56 PDT 2004


Ted said, responding to me:


>>Which one are you arguing against, Ted? It seems like the latter. Your
>>examples from Marx's Civil War in France all have to do with outright
>>physical bloodshed, which is what Charles talks about in his second
>>example. What about Charles' first example? Are you arguing against
>>that one too?


>Both. The "smashing" of the "state" by the Commune consisted, in part, of
>removing from "state power" any capacity to carry out "mass repression."
>This is made clear in the following from Engels's 1891 Postscript.

I think there's some confusion here with the term "repression". Both from your arguments, in response to Charles', and from what you've posted of M & E, I get the impression you're thinking only in terms of "state violence" ie turning guns or the threat of guns on people to make them obey.

Repression also means simply, "That which represses; check; restraint" or "a state of forcible subjugation". Would repressing, say, capitalism, by the "machinery" of the dictatorship of the proletariat be unacceptable, then? And how would it do so without violence? I note Marx doesn't have a problem with armed workers or a "National Guard"; would they get rid of the bourgeois on their own? <shrug> Then you have more violence, and there's still repression.

Strictly speaking, I don't have a problem with getting rid of state authority in the manner Marx attributes to the Paris Commune (by deepening popular democratic power and limiting the power of individual politicians by low pay and the possibility of getting them out of power ASAP), but I can't imagine how the Commune would have dealt with spies, saboteurs, etc. or gotten rid of capitalism simply by decreeing it to be so. Such a decree in itself would have been repressive against the bourgeois, never mind how it would have been carried out. If the bourgeois simply abandoned factories, businesses, etc. it'd be possible (at least for one small geographic area) such as what I understand happened in Argentina in some places, but what would happen should the bourgeois decide to fight or simply ignore what the government of the Commune said?

Todd

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