Memes

Off the bat, I do usually agree with you more than disagree with you. I'm not saying anything out of a sense of malice or a desire to be "correct." However, I am entirely confident in my analysis here.

You're correct in saying that I'm a Marxist-Leninist, as are the majority of Marxists worldwide. The fact that Marxist-Leninists agree on this subject does not make it revisionist, nor does it misrepresent Marx.

Marx indeed did not say that Public Ownership alone makes something Socialist. Quite right, in fact, many Capitalist states like the US have sizable public sectors. However, at the same time, Capitalism is not Private Ownership. Capitalism itself can only exist as an interconnected system, trying to slice systems up and analyze each slice discretely is an error the pre-Dialectical Matetialists made, and it is an error because it obfuscates the movements and trajectories of the system.

The abolition of production for exchange-value is indeed the goal. However, saying any system that has not yet managed to do so is not Marxist, or not Socialist, is wrong. It may not be upper-level Communism that Marx describes as a future society, but in fact, Marx would call it "Lower-Stage Communism." We can observe this in Principles of Communism:

Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?

Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.

Engels was not in opposition to Marx on this. You say that it's idealism to say that we cannot simply outlaw private property, but then say we need to abolish capital relations. How do you do that without abolishing private property? You cannot, through fiat, declare Communism. Modes of Production are material things, not just agreements between individuals, the reason the Utopian Socialists such as Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier failed is because they tried to create their systems through Utopia building, not through transformation of existing society along the laws of materialism. Marx himself explains in Critique of the Gotha Programme:

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but itself life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx clearly implies that in lower-stage Communism, contradictions from Capitalism still exist. Marxists post-Lenin call this transitional stage "Socialism," but the mechanics are still quite clear.

We build Communism through Socialism. That is, by revolution, smashing the bourgeois state, replacing it with a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and firstly nationalizing all key industry and developed, large firms. Then, the process is to build up the productive forces as rapidly as possible, and that means the use of manipulated market mechanics at the lower-developed sectors, and public ownership at the higher, until the markets themselves do what Marx already observed and create an economy pretty purely of publicly owned firms. It is at this point the value form can gradually be erased, and higher-stage Communism built towards.

In the end, I maintain that it's classically Marxist because it is. Everything Marx wrote indicates this to be the general process he described. We can even observe the measures he and Engels proposed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common p!an.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction[50] between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.[51]

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally,[52] and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

We can clearly see that even by Marx's original measures, markets would remain, and it would be the job of the Proletarian state to gradually appropriate Capital to the degree it develops, not simply go through a short restructuring period and then achieve full Communism. Such would be idealist Utopia-building.