[lbo-talk] The State

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Tue Sep 29 13:01:44 PDT 2009


On Sep 29, 2009, at 2:36 PM, c b wrote:
> What could be clearer? For Marx the essential character of the
> proletarian regime is *democracy*. For CB the stalinist totalitarian
> regimes are "classical Marxist."
> CB: What could be more contradictory, more dialectical ? For Marx, the
> whole socialist transition is also a dictatorship of the proletariat,
> including "despotic inroads on the rights of property."

Marx certainly didn't mean that workers would lose the property right to their own labor power and be made into GULAG slaves. And neither did he mean by "democracy" those "despotic inroads" on (more precisely, extinctions of) their civil rights and civil liberties of which CB is so enamoured.

Shane Mage


> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos



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