Wait, music is political now ?
It is.
Very interesting. When I'm talking about Marxist, I'm talking more about the philosophy and vision of the world rather than the way it is meant to structure the society. But you are right, it's not really the same thing.
Now, help me understand because I'm not a native English speaker and this video was an hardcore one.
I didn't understand how they defined "Socialism" in "socialism as a period of transition". I had the understanding that Socialism was what Marx called the final stage of the communist society. But it seems like I was wrong on that.
The idea of Zoe Baker's writing is that, the idea of socialism being a transitory period between capitalism and communism, is something that isn't found in Marx's writings, only in Lenin's writings, and in the writings on those who went on with marxism-leninism,
Here is a link to the article, and a link to the video, for those who would like to read or see their arguments:
Article:
https://anarchozoe.com/2018/05/03/maoist-rebel-news-does-not-understand-marx/
And here is the video:
I will try to put some things here that explain part of their argument, to get an idea of it,
This is a quote of Zoe's article:
Maoist Rebel New’s view can be summarized as follows: Muke is wrong to think that Marx does not distinguish between socialism and communism because if communism is a stateless society and if Marx advocates a revolutionary state during the transition from capitalism to communism then there must be a mode of production in-between capitalism and communism which has a state. A mode of production cannot after all simultaneously be stateless and have a state. The mode of production which contains the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism. Given this, Marx holds that the achievement of communism is a three step process during which society transitions from the capitalist mode of production to the socialist mode of production and from the socialist mode of production to the communist mode of production.
In arguing this Maoist Rebel News is operating on the false assumption that the only way to conceptualize the transition from capitalism to fully fledged communism is through the notion of an intermediary mode of production called socialism. Marx himself, as Muke correctly pointed out, did not distinguish between socialism and communism. Marx instead held that there was a single mode of production – communism – at two different moments of its development: communism during its phase of becoming, when it is arising out of capitalism and contains the dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism during its phase of being, when it is stateless. To explain what this means I will have to explain a) how Marx thinks about society, b) what Marx thought about the transition from feudalism to capitalism and c) what Marx thought about the transition from capitalism to communism. I shall discuss each in turn. Before I do so its important to note that the ideas presented here do not stem entirely from my own original research but are rather largely based on the ideas presented by the Marxist theorist Michael Lebowitz in his books
The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development and
The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, which I highly recommend.
Marx’s View of Society
For Marx society is a totality, or as he sometimes calls it, an organic system, composed of parts which come together to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The parts which form the whole are not separate independent entities but rather co-exist with one another, mutually determine one another, co-define one another and support, constrain or damage one another. This perspective can be seen in the Poverty of Philosophy where Marx writes that an organic system is one “in which all the elements co-exist simultaneously and support one another” (Marx and Engels 1976, 167). Marx similarly claims in the Grundrisse that “production, distribution, exchange and consumption . . . all form the members of a totality” in which “[m]utual interaction takes place between the different moments”, as is “the case with every organic whole” (Marx 1993, 99-100).
Given this framework, Marx holds that we must think about economic systems as totalities composed of parts that presuppose one another because each part is constituted through its relations with all the other parts. This perspective can be seen throughout Marx’s work. In the Grundrisse Marx writes that,
in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system (Marx 1993, 278).
Marx similarly writes in Wage Labour and Capital that, “capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other” (Marx 2000, 283). Capitalism is therefore reproduced in so far as a chain of interlocking parts, which presuppose one another, continually create the necessary social relations that not only stand between each part but in addition constitute them. For Marx one of the prime examples of this was the process whereby capitalism continually reproduces the division between capitalists and workers. As Marx writes in Capital Volume I,
The capitalist relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. (Marx 1990, 874).
This process of reproduction begins with capitalists who own the means of production and seek to make profits, and workers, who do not own means of production and so must, in order to reproduce themselves, sell their labour to a capitalist in exchange for a wage. As a result, a worker enters the labour market and competes with other workers for jobs. Once a worker has a job they engage in labour under the direction of a capitalist, who in turn appropriates the products produced by the worker. The capitalist proceeds to sell these products as commodities and pays the worker less than the value that they produce. The worker uses up their wage to buy commodities and thereby reproduce themselves, while the capitalist re-invests their profits in the business and is thereby able to keep earning profits. The cycle then begins again with a worker needing a wage to reproduce themselves and a capitalist needing workers to make profits from.
For capitalism to be a dominant mode of production is therefore for every economic relation to presuppose every other in its capitalist form, such as the economic relation of selling labour power presupposing the existence of a labour market which in turn presupposes production for profit, the private ownership of the means of production by capitalists, and workers having nothing to sell but their labour power."
@Logiko I think another way to think about it is with the idea of prefiguration and the building the new in the shell of the old,
I would like to use slavery as an example,
Say you have a society where slavery is very popular, how do you change it?
First you build an alternative structure within that society, so that when the slaves are freed, they have an alternative to go to, something to work on, a place to work to sustain themselves, tools, means of self-defence and living,
Otherwise if they are freed, and have no alternative, they will either die starved, or come back into bondage,
This is I think what we see with God freeing the israelites in the desert too, first He prepares Aaron and Moses, and the alternative way of life that the jewish people can go to, and then He frees them, and when some jewish people doubted and thought there was no alternative, they even said this:
Exodus 14:11-12
And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt?
12 Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.
A free society has two stages too, its stage of becoming, which is when it is being prefigured, when the structures to support a system free of slavery are being built and people are organising it while the old society is still there, and its stage of being, when it has overthrown the other society based on slavery,
Just because there is a period of transition between slavery and a slave free society, it doesn't mean there is an intermediary mode of slavery, where slaves are owned and managed by the people who want to free them,
Same with capitalism and communism,
And actually one really important anarchist idea is that the means and the ends are the same, which is to say, if you push a ball one way, all else being equal, the ball will move in that direction, so if all you do is reproduce capitalism, and reinforce the state, like many anarcho-communists say that marxist-leninists do, you will only end up with capitalism and with a stronger and stronger state,
Edit: And I would like to add another example of the idea of an organic system pressuposing other parts of it, Proudhon said that property is theft, and in response Marx said that that can't be true, because theft pressuposes property, so if someone stole your property, before that you had stolen someone's property, and so on, making everything theft, not just capitalist profit,
Proudhon may have responded, I'm not sure, but I think this may a good example of it,