The American haute-bourgeoisie want a leftist form of capitalism.

[Proletarian]

An entire class of millions cannot directly control or oversee every minute decision.

Nobody has ever posited that "an entire class of millions" should control or oversee every decision.

There will ALWAYS be a small class of leaders and they’ll always be open to influence.

Informal leaders of small social groups, or even elected leaders subject to recall, do not constitute a "class" when they are not capable of appropriating the means of production to themselves.

Marx was a genius in some ways but in others good god the man was an idiot.

The man held not only a Ph.D. in law, but self-educated himself for his entire life. Among other disciplines he taught himself Russian and English, studied political economy at the British Library, and learned about proto-computing through his correspondences with Charles Babbage.

Lenin May have copied elements of state capitalism but he saw himself as a communist and was working to that end. If he used state capitalism it was as a means to an end.

It doesn't matter what Lenin's private aims were. The individual, or even collective, will is subordinate to and determined by material conditions.

Pretty much all communist regimes either starved or murdered large chunks of their people, just like capitalism.

They were capitalist.

[Surlethe]

Not even in a sociological or economic but in a narrowly historical-poitical sense, I believe that social democracy tends to produce conservatism as a byproduct, as well as the reverse. Or rather, that the logic of each is embedded in the other.

...

I believe that conservatism and social democracy must be understood as a single logic, just as I hold that the market and the State must be understood as a single logic (and this holds good even of systems wherein a cartel of businesses function effectively as the government, i.e. an imagined anarchocapitalism). Rather than looking for cleavages we must look for continuities. We must understand them as one logic, as one system - as Capital. Only by grasping them as a totality, rather than a disparate collection of opposing parts, can you see the logic of how it functions in concert.

Yes, but what is conservatism? I want to understand how you're defining the term. What is the "narrowly historical-political sense" of the word, and what are the sociological and economic definitions you're contrasting with?

Also, how are you defining "Capital"? The definition I'm familiar with is the standard one from economics: "goods that are used in production." It sounds like you're imbuing it with a political meaning, which I guess from context is common among communists?

I think we can have an interesting discussion, just want to make sure I understand you first.

Lastly, can you please not abuse the word "logic" like that? It's like the sound of nails on chalkboard to my mathematical ears.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Also, how are you defining "Capital"? The definition I'm familiar with is the standard one from economics: "goods that are used in production." It sounds like you're imbuing it with a political meaning, which I guess from context is common among communists?

I don't want to speak for him, but the standard conceptualization of "Capital" in Marxist discourse is rather complex. It is in part referring to the accumulation of surplus value (which you would traditionally think of in terms of goods or currency, though it doesn't necessarily need to be that tangible), but is is also referring to the role that this accumulated capital plays as a social relationship. This is a decent but, as is regrettably typical in Marxist literature, presented a bit esoterically. But I think the best elevator pitch for it is something like what I said above, where we not just referring to money (or goods) in the economic sense, but specifically the way these concrete economic principles relate to and reinforce social relationships.

[Straha]

Also, how are you defining "Capital"? The definition I'm familiar with is the standard one from economics: "goods that are used in production." It sounds like you're imbuing it with a political meaning, which I guess from context is common among communists?

I don't want to speak for him, but the standard conceptualization of "Capital" in Marxist discourse is rather complex. It is in part referring to the accumulation of surplus value (which you would traditionally think of in terms of goods or currency, though it doesn't necessarily need to be that tangible), but is is also referring to the role that this accumulated capital plays as a social relationship. This is a decent but, as is regrettably typical in Marxist literature, presented a bit esoterically. But I think the best elevator pitch for it is something like what I said above, where we not just referring to money (or goods) in the economic sense, but specifically the way these concrete economic principles relate to and reinforce social relationships.

The way I start to teach it is that the distinction of capital in the material sense and Capital, in the Marxist sense, starts with the abstraction of ownership that begins in the late 'middle ages' via things like the fungibility of debt, joint stock companies, etc. which allow people to both 'own' means of production without a material or formal relationship to them and then to transfer that same ownership stake without any change in the material/social conditions of either the owners or the workers. Capital, in that sense, then becomes a way to understand how ownership begins to accrue in people who can take an ownership merely because they 'own' other things and are paid a rent ('profit') from that ownership.

Obviously it's much more complicated than two sentences can explain, but I feel like this is the easiest intellectual entry point to the concept.

Lastly, can you please not abuse the word "logic" like that? It's like the sound of nails on chalkboard to my mathematical ears.

Not to be nit-picky, but his use of the word logic is absolutely in line with its use in philosophical circles, and especially so in political (and economic) philosophy.

[Proletarian]

Yes, but what is conservatism? I want to understand how you're defining the term.

The political expression of self-identified conservative interests in a society and nothing more.

What is the "narrowly historical-political sense" of the word, and what are the sociological and economic definitions you're contrasting with?

Nothing more than the obvious expression of self-identified conservative political interests in a society - conservatism as it defines itself on the superficial political level of society.

I am contending that these will always build on the history of self-identified social democratic or left-liberal political interests in a society, just as Reagan invoked the holy name of FDR or Thatcher regularly referred to Clement Atlee positively, as an institution builder. An elected conservative leader will always draw on the legacy of a perceived left-wing predecessor to justify himself - e.g. Trump invoking John Kennedy's tax cuts.

None of this is hard to parse.

Also, how are you defining "Capital"? The definition I'm familiar with is the standard one from economics: "goods that are used in production." It sounds like you're imbuing it with a political meaning, which I guess from context is common among communists?

Capital is the process animating production in capitalist society.

From Capital I§3, "The Production Of Absolute Surplus-Value":

By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the product. From his point of view, the labour-process is nothing more than the consumption of the commodity purchased, i. e., of labour-power; but this consumption cannot be effected except by supplying the labour-power with the means of production. The labour-process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that have become his property. The product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar.

Marx does not conceptualize capitalism as a voluntaryist product of the individual will of any particular capitalist, or even of a group of capitalists. Engels acknowledged this in a letter to August Bebel of October 1882: "we (Marx and Engels) only regarded the bourgeoisie as a class and hardly ever involved ourselves in conflicts with individual bourgeois". This is in sharp contradistinction to populist movements of both the political Right and Left, who focus on the individual actions of individual actors - whether the Koch Brothers or George Soros or Jeffrey Epstein - as explaining events which occur within the context of modern capitalist society.

It follows that the exact composition of the capitalist class changes with each rearrangement of the productive process. As Engels writes in Socialism: Utopian & Scientific:

If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

This realization is unique to Marxism: precisely that the function and role of the capitalists themselves is determined by the organization of production. This leads e.g. Amadeo Bordiga to write of Soviet "State capitalism" that

Capital is only concentrated in the state for the convenience of surplus-value and profit manoeuvring. It remains “available to all” or available to the components of the entrepreneurial class — no longer simply production entrepreneurs, but openly business entrepreneurs — they no longer produce commodities, but, Marx has already said, they produce surplus value.

The capitalist as person no longer serves in this — capital lives without him but with its same function multiplied 100 fold. The human subject has become useless. A class without members to compose it? The state not at the service of a social group, but an impalpable force, the work of the Holy Ghost or of the Devil? Here is Sir Charles’s irony.

Thus worker's co-operatives etc., which have no real singular capitalist controlling interests, are thus no less capitalist than the most vertically-integrated businesses, because they remain organized on capitalist grounds - those of generalized commodity production for exchange.

This is also true of trust funds etc., where the role of the individual capitalist disappears behind a web of interests.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Nothing more than the obvious expression of self-identified conservative political interests in a society - conservatism as it defines itself on the superficial political level of society.

I am contending that these will always build on the history of self-identified social democratic or left-liberal political interests in a society, just as Reagan invoked the holy name of FDR or Thatcher regularly referred to Clement Atlee positively, as an institution builder. An elected conservative leader will always draw on the legacy of a perceived left-wing predecessor to justify himself - e.g. Trump invoking John Kennedy's tax cuts.

None of this is hard to parse.

Actually, it is a little hard to parse your arguments, and this coming from someone that generally agrees with your arguments! Don't take this as an attack (this is meant purely as constructive criticism), but your posting style can be a bit byzantine at times. I am having a hard time following anything but the broadest strokes of your argument about conservatism because instead of clearly defining what your argument is you are just twisting yourself up in flowery prose and metaphors. Remember, this is a discussion forum, you don't need (and ought not) style every single rejoinder as a philosophical essay or manifesto; it is easier for other people to engage in the discussion if you allow yourself to speak more informally.

Now, first would be for you to actually clarify what type of "conservatism" you are referring to. You wave your hands and appeal to "self-identified conservative elements", but that's utterly meaningless when conservative can mean so many different things to different people (especially across the Atlantic). Are you referring to conservatism in the generic sense of commitment to traditional values and opposition to progressive social forces? Are you referring to conservatism in the American sense, which is really just synonymous with neoliberalism?

It's also a little hard to determine the "so what" of your arguments. You seem to just be saying that conservative elements in modern society are somehow "building on" non-conservative historical doctrine, but you aren't really clarifying what the precise connection is. Reagan mentioning FDR in a stump speech isn't some ironclad evidence of ideological overlap unless you actually make an argument for why this is the case. Simply pointing out examples of "conservative" politicians mentioning the legacies of "non-conservative" politicians doesn't really mean anything. Politicians on both sides frequently appeal to the legacies of historical politicians on both sides of the political spectrum, for a wide variety of purposes.