Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: Bourgeois Democracy and the World-Historical Debacle of Leninism.

Bourgeois Democracy

and

the World-Historical

Debacle of Leninism.

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

It was Lenin and Leninism – quite easily morphing into Stalinism – that has ruined the Marxian movement, that has discredited it, globally, and that has besmirched the name and the works of Marx himself.

It was not Lenino-Stalinist state-capitalism that Marx was describing and endorsing in Capital, volume III, when he wrote there about how the new mode of production of “the associated producers” would grow naturally out of the mode of production of the capitalist system, indeed, as its historical fruition –

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organization, all the shortcomings of the prevailing system.”

“But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour [we call this transitional form 'workers' capital[ism]' — M.D.].”

“They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production [M.D.: The “social relations of production”] have reached a particular stage.”

“Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. ...”

“The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one, and positively in the other. ...”

[Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III, New World Paperbacks, NY, 1967, pp. 435-441, emphases added by M.D.]

What Marx, and Engels, were advocating, was not the, bourgeois-less, pure-state-bureaucratic ruling class dictatorship over the working class – still a wage [i.e., a capitalist] working class – in nation-states with an imperialistically retarded level of the social forces of production, and with that state bureaucracy imposing a vicious new mode of “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital, by, vampirically, sucking it out of the blood and flesh of that working class, and viciously murdering anyone who resisted that “primitive accumulation” and that dictatorship, in order to build, in record time, a military-industrial complex that could ward-off the surrounding imperialist nation-states from again invading, and overthrowing that bureaucratic ruling class – a class that cared only for the sustenance and extension of their own despotic power, and the wealth, and the perverted “perks”, that their despotism afforded them.

What Marx and Engels were advocating was not a neo-Jacobian putschist party, seizing state power in a coup d’etat, and then coercively imposing upon the rest of the society the bait-and-switch fraud of a totalitarian, police-state, bureaucratic, one-party dictatorship, dedicated to nothing other than sustaining that bureaucratic party in power, under a thin veneer of “socialism”, while actually propagating the wage-labor social relation of production – the capital-relation – throughout the rest the society, with their state as the One Big Capitalist, enslaving all –

“…neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern [M.D. – nation-]state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. …”

[Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), International Publishers, NY, 1966, pp. 303-305, emphases added by M.D.].

The failure of the Post-WWI German Revolution, and of social-relations-of-production revolution in the rest of the West as well, sealed the fate of the Russian Revolution.

The Russian Revolution was, as a result, not, in the end, a Socialist Revolution: It was a [State-]Capitalist Revolution.

Marx, near the end of his life, envisioned a real socialist revolution, and a real socialism in Russia, but only if nourished by the advanced Western productive forces, of Germany in particular.

Otherwise, Marx implied, the whole vicious business of the “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital would have to be repeated all over again, in Russia too.

And that, in the end, is what actually transpired.

One of the causes of the failure of the German Revolution, and of Socialist Revolution in the West in general, was the failure of Marx and Engels to concretely derive, from Marxian principles – and then to globally propagate – a clear vision and constitutional, juridical hypothesis, and provision, as to what, in detail, a socialist society should look like, and how to produce it.

Marx did envision that working class electoral suffrage, e.g., in nation-states like the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, would allow the working class to “win the battle of democracy”, and to usher in socialism, without violent revolution, by electoral means.

But Marx never, to our knowledge, wrote concretely about what the juridical, statutory and constitutional infrastructure of such an electorally-achieved socialist democracy could and should be, per his socio-historical theory.

That left an opening for Lenin and his ilk to attempt to “make a virtue of necessity”, and to try to pass off their pure state-bureaucratic state-capitalism and primitive-accumulationist despotism, somehow as “socialism”.

That paved the way for today, where, e.g., the hereditary, quasi-monarchic, vicious family dictatorship of Un in North Korea can claim to be a “socialist nation”, led by a “workers’ party”!

Lenin and all of the later Leninists sought an “abstract negation” of bourgeois democracy, because of the fatal weaknesses of their dictatorships in the face any degree of competitive electoral politics, freedom of the press, or freedom of speech for, e.g., the working class.

If the pre-Leninist Marxians had taken a more dialectical approach, and concretely theorized, as a key part of the nature of any truly socialist political-economy, an «aufheben» of the positive achievements of bourgeois democracy vis-à-vis feudalism, absolute monarchy, and more modern forms of dictatorship, things might have gone differently.

A little respect for “bourgeois” civil liberties and rule of law, as opposed to arbitrary, lawless rule by state-bureaucratic cliques and “cults of personality”, might have helped mightily to discredit the fraudulent claims of the neo-Jacobian Leninists to socialism.

A concretization of the theory of such an «aufheben» of capitalist, representative, political-only democracy into a truly-socialist political-economic democracy, in the form of draft socialist constitutions and bills of rights, might have gone a long way toward popular realization of the value of Marxian theory for humanity’s liberation, and helped mightily to counter the continuous calumny and libel that the capitalist media, capitalist academia, and capitalist politicians have heaped upon Marx’s contributions ever since they were published, later aided and abetted, to the point of their effective burial, from popular acclaim and use, by the Leninists, ever since.

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