General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Capitalism is NOT a dirty word. [View all]Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)If you're referring to the state capitalists USSR and China, well, they had a class and state (just switched classes with the old order), and Labor did not control or manage the means of production, nor have control or manage the fruits of their labor. This was done by the state bureaucratic class.
No, socialism hasn't been implemented in either place, nor anywhere else for that matter. And by the way, socialism wasn't a 19th century creation. You can here the calls of social revolutions even prior to the Enrages of the French Revolution. Even prior when looking at the Levellers and the Diggers in the 1600s. Socialism has been a human condition since the time of our ancient ancestors, and in political form in conjunction with the rise of capitalism.
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We have already expressed several times our deep aversion to the theory of Lassalle and Marx, which recommends to the workers, if not as a final ideal at least as the next immediate goal, the founding of a peoples state, which according to their interpretation will be nothing but the proletariat elevated to the status of the governing class.
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Ultimately, from whatever point of view we look at this question, we come always to the same sad conclusion, the rule of the great masses of the people by a privileged minority. The Marxists say that this minority will consist of workers. Yes, possibly of former workers, who, as soon as they become the rulers of the representatives of the people, will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from the governing heights of the State; they will no longer represent the people, but only themselves and their claims to rulership over the people. Those who doubt this know very little about human nature.
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There is a flagrant contradiction in this theory. If their state would be really of the people, why eliminate it? And if the State is needed to emancipate the workers, then the workers are not yet free, so why call it a Peoples State? By our polemic against them we have brought them to the realization that freedom or anarchism, which means a free organization of the working masses from the bottom up, is the final objective of social development, and that every state, not excepting their Peoples State, is a yoke, on the one hand giving rise to despotism and on the other to slavery. They say that such a yoke dictatorship is a transitional step towards achieving full freedom for the people: anarchism or freedom is the aim, while state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses of people, they have first to be enslaved!
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Upon this contradiction our polemic has come to a halt. They insist that only dictatorship (of course their own) can create freedom for the people. We reply that all dictatorship has no objective other than self-perpetuation, and that slavery is all it can generate and instill in the people who suffer it. Freedom can be created only by freedom, by a total rebellion of the people, and by a voluntary organization of the people from the bottom up.
~ Mikail Bakunin's State and Anarchy (written in 1873) which was remarkably prescient of the dangers of a Bolshevik style revolution (which proved Bakunin right).
Statism and Anarchy at Marxist.org