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

[Proletarian]

Why America’s CEOs Are Talking About Stakeholder Capitalism by Mark Roe - Project Syndicate

When the US Business Roundtable recently renounced shareholder primacy, the shift – by an organization representing companies with combined annual revenue of more than $7 trillion – prompted a wide range of reactions, from welcoming to dismissive. But the move is primarily an attempt to keep activist shareholders and populist politicians at bay.

CAMBRIDGE – Back in August, the Business Roundtable, which comprises the chief executive officers of America’s largest companies – with combined annual revenues of more than $7 trillion – updated its long-standing statement regarding corporate purpose. It’s not just about shareholders, the CEOs say; their firms must be committed to all stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and the environment. In fact, shareholders came in last on the CEOs’ new list. And the statement’s principal author, in his apparent exhilaration, is reported to have said that he felt like Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence.

The August announcement generated three main strands of reaction. First, some liberal commentators applauded US business leaders for finally getting the message. They criticized not the goals, but the lack of a proposal for how stakeholders can hold CEOs directly accountable. More skeptical observers said that the statement differed little from previous Business Roundtable pronouncements on corporate purpose: boards and executives need, or at least want, discretion to balance the interests of various stakeholders other than the company’s owners. For these critics, this latest declaration offered nothing new, but was a restated manifesto of CEO and board discretion and power to run their companies as they see fit.

The third strand of reaction came from business realists, who pointed out that successful firms cannot run roughshod over their customers, employees, suppliers, and communities. Even a company that is laser-focused on shareholder value must gain the loyalty of other stakeholders and avoid making enemies of them. Suppliers will not rush a delivery if they fear they won’t be paid, sullen employees will not produce a quality product, and irate customers will buy elsewhere.

There’s much to be said for these views. But two deeper forces help to explain why the Business Roundtable felt that it needed to say something now.

First, activist shareholders are making life uncomfortable for the boards and senior executives of America’s largest corporations. The Business Roundtable’s statement is thus in part a plea from CEOs for more autonomy vis-à-vis shareholders. In effect, the Roundtable’s statement does constitute a “declaration of independence” – one seeking to liberate CEOs and boards from the influence of activist investors. Thus interpreted, US corporate leaders are building a coalition against activist shareholders, and want employees, customers, and those demanding more ethical sourcing to support them. Freeing boards and executives from shareholder influence, the statement implies, will enable corporate America to treat employees, the environment, and communities better.

Second, as politics and public opinion shift beneath corporate America, CEOs are trying to maintain their balance. US Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, have called for major changes in the way large corporations are run. Warren, for example, wants employees to be represented on boards (as is common in Germany and some other countries) and favors breaking up America’s largest firms. And while US President Donald Trump has yet to turn his anti-elite populism against the corporate sector, he is unpredictable – and some of the most powerful examples of elite privilege occupy US C-suites.

[Elheru Aran]

...and your point is what exactly.

[Proletarian]

...and your point is what exactly.

Simply that these titans of industry are already preparing themselves for the election of a social democrat like Warren or Sanders and getting ready to restructure their interests in a way more amenable to the new period. Formerly this happened behind-the-scenes, as when Bernard Baruch helped the big capitalists of the thirties adjust to the New Deal, but now we can witness it in real-time.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss - but with a this time.

[Proletarian]

The case for this volte-face is already being circulated publicly.

Sally Kohn: Elizabeth Warren should be capitalists' new best friend.

Indeed, Warren’s capitalist bones have deep marrow. By several accounts, she was a pro-big business “law and economics” libertarian-leaning Republican who became more progressive because she saw that economics on the ground wasn’t living up to its theoretical ideals.

In particular, when as a young law professor Warren went to study bankruptcy courts expecting to find cheaters and deadbeats, she instead encountered a wide range of hardworking, ordinary Americans crippled by economic systems that should have been designed to help them but were instead only helping the rich and powerful.

The revelation didn’t turn Warren into a fist pumping protester but a thoughtful reformer, for instance coming up with the idea for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and then leading the fight to implement it. Just like we shouldn’t have cars that suddenly explode on drivers, we shouldn’t have bank loans that suddenly explode on borrowers — loans that banks were getting away with because they weren’t being sufficiently regulated, just like cars were unregulated once upon a time. Warren implemented a smart fix to the economic system in order to make capitalism work better for working people.

Capitalism is on the ropes. That’s not news to many of the nation’s small business owners who have experienced the U.S. brand of capitalism as decidedly rigged against them more and more in recent years. But mega-corporations and the super-rich need to wake up to the threat they’re facing, a threat their greed for short-term profits and deregulation has exacerbated rather than solved.

[Broomstick]

I get that you lean towards communism, hell, your user name makes that pretty clear, and that's fine, but I'm not here to review the words of other people for you. I would be a hell of a lot more interested in engaging in your threads if YOU had anything to say about the stuff you post.

[Zaune]

Simply that these titans of industry are already preparing themselves for the election of a social democrat like Warren or Sanders and getting ready to restructure their interests in a way more amenable to the new period. Formerly this happened behind-the-scenes, as when Bernard Baruch helped the big capitalists of the thirties adjust to the New Deal, but now we can witness it in real-time.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss - but with a this time.

Progress, however slight, is still progress. I call this a win.

[Ziggy Stardust]

This is also, frankly, old news, I'm fairly certain we already had a dedicated thread discussing it (or perhaps it was subsumed into one of the megathreads, I forget). But, yeah, capitalists gonna capitalize.

(I think there is also a dark undercurrent to this whole issue that people don't address, is that this move is implicitly trying to ensure that CORPORATIONS, not the people or the state that is supposed to represent their interests, have the ability to set social agendas and priorities. If anything, this whole move is pre-empting any future moves towards real socialism by further entrenching the role corporations play in society. So, I don't view this as at all a good thing.)

[Proletarian]

Simply that these titans of industry are already preparing themselves for the election of a social democrat like Warren or Sanders and getting ready to restructure their interests in a way more amenable to the new period. Formerly this happened behind-the-scenes, as when Bernard Baruch helped the big capitalists of the thirties adjust to the New Deal, but now we can witness it in real-time.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss - but with a this time.

Progress, however slight, is still progress. I call this a win.

Is it indeed?

Again, I find myself thinking back to the big financiers who supported Franklin Roosevelt's first election bid in 1932 - a story which is virtually never told because of how the New Deal is constructed historically, but one worth studying.

Every major faction of Capital was well-represented in the first New Deal campaign, e.g. the banks:

Behind both political parties was also a grim struggle between two factions for control of the giant Chase National Bank. Backing the Republican Hoover were his 1928 mentors, the House of Morgan. Opposing J.P. Morgan was this other group of stockholders headed by John Rockefeller, Jr., and including Vincent Astor, the Vanderbilts and Guggenheims. The fight centered about the policy of J.P. Morgan, who controlled the bank, in forcing the Chase National to engage in practices outside its own legitimate field, such as lending money for speculative purposes, the floating of new stock and bond issues, and buying and selling on the stock market. Rockefeller, Jr., and his allies who are primarily industrialists, violently disapproved of this policy blaming it in great part for the stock market crash of '29. They not only wanted to gain control of the bank and return it to its normal commercial banking practice, which is to provide funds to industry and business for meeting current expenses, on good security, but they wanted control of the federal government in order to enact federal legislation against the Morgan policy which had become widespread under the influence and example of the Chase National. The Lehman Bros. (among which is Gov. H.H. Lehman of N.Y.) the country’s second largest firm of investment bankers, and other investment houses such as Halsey Stuart, supported this attempt to legalize against their competitors.

Agribusiness:

A political party that promised to raise farmer purchasing power (fallen in 1932 to almost one-half that of 1929) was bound to gain the support of industrial interests dependent on the farmers and so we find the McCormicks, owning the monopolistic International Harvester Co., and other farm implement and fertilizer manufacturers joining the Roosevelt band-wagon.

And above all railroads, as the cited essay demonstrates.

Now, you might, and likely will, ask "well, weren't the New Deal programs beneficial to the poor and working-class in the middle of the Depression?". Sure. But those programs didn't arise ex nihilo, as a spontaneous response to the Depression by the great masses. And they helped to perpetuate the system that led to the Depression in the first place - indeed, in a lot of ways there was more continuity between the New Deal and the neo-liberal turn than subsequent analysts typically allow for.

Reagan: FDR's True Heir

Common wisdom holds that Ronald Reagan, a devoted FDR acolyte during Roosevelt's life, became the most powerful opponent of his legacy after Reagan's swing to the right. But the common wisdom is wrong. Reagan, in word and deed, was actually FDR's true heir.

Reagan never explicitly claimed this, but his speeches and writings suggest that's exactly what he thought. He readily admitted he had voted for FDR four times and in 1982 wrote in his diary that he was trying to "undo the Great Society," not the New Deal. He always said that he had not left the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party had left him. He even quoted FDR directly in the 1964 television speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater that made him a national figure.

Time and again, Reagan turned to FDR's words and made them his own. This extended far beyond repeating memorable phrases like "this generation has a rendezvous with destiny" or calling working Americans "the forgotten man."

...

Reagan's debt to FDR was intellectual as well as rhetorical. Roosevelt's basic innovation was to place government squarely on the side of the average American in his or her quest for comfort, dignity, and respect. If private markets and charity did not afford these things to someone who worked to improve themselves (Roosevelt had no truck for slackers), then it was government's duty to provide or encourage their provision.

Conservatives then and forever since have often distinguished themselves by openly or tacitly rejecting this principle. Such open opposition forms the heart of Herbert Hoover's argument for his re-election and of Goldwater's best-selling book, “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Open opposition today is left to libertarians, but conservatives still tacitly deny it when they oppose virtually any extension of federal subsidies for any social program.

Reagan never embraced that view. He told audiences in his early speeches that he wouldn't repeal most post-New Deal programs "at any price. They represented forward thinking on our part." He supported federal grants to states in the early 1960s before Medicare was adopted so that needy seniors could afford care. And in 1961 he said "any person in the United States who requires medical attention and cannot provide for himself should have it provided for him."

...

Reagan owed his political success to his unique "New Deal conservatism." Unlike more ideological anti-government types before and since, Reagan attracted enthusiastic support from blue-collar whites, people who became known as "Reagan Democrats." Conservative leaders from Barry Goldwater to Newt Gingrich to Mitt Romney have seen their hopes dashed on the rocky shores of these voters who have never preferred low taxes and liberty to a government that has their backs. Ronald Reagan succeeded where they failed precisely because this former fan of Roosevelt was singing from the same hymnal as were Roosevelt's worshipers.

It is my contention that social democracy and conservatism, like the State and the market, are not antagonistic forces; indeed, unlike populists who talk about "corporatism" and "crony capitalism", it is my contention that they never are. And just as the bourgeois State selectively intervenes in the interests of the market, so too does social democracy serve to produce conservatism, abd visa versa.

This has largely to do with my view of the function of redistributive mechanisms within Capital, which in my view are the equivalents, in developed capitalist countries, of primary (or "primitive") Capital accumulation: essentially that they function as an attempt to turn the worker into a little bourgeois.

[Darth Yan]

And you're just reciting communist buzzwords.

People are ALWAYS going to want to acquire their own property and goods, or have ownership and power will NEVER be in the hands of an entire class. That's what communists never get and it's why any attempt to put communism in practice is doomed outside of small cases.

Funnily enough communism also doesn't usually take control in healthy democracies. Russia, China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Nicarugua and Cuba all had pretty poor records with democracies, and communism most took control there.

[Proletarian]

And you're just reciting communist buzzwords.

You can refute my points, then? You know, the concrete ones I've advanced drawing on the historical development of social democracy in the United States? Feel free.

People are ALWAYS going to want to acquire their own property and goods,

People are always going to want to have their own possessions - which they can produce for themselves.

or have ownership and power will NEVER be in the hands of an entire class.

It already is, for the most part.

Funnily enough communism also doesn't usually take control in healthy democracies. Russia, China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Nicarugua and Cuba all had pretty poor records with democracies, and communism most took control there.

None of these were Communist. Not even the Soviet Union claimed to be Communist.

No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, had denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognized as a socialist order.

- V.I. Lenin, "Left-Wing Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality"

[Darth Yan]

Nope. They were all communist. Thing is that the end result of communism is almost always corrupt bureaucracies that fuck over the very people they claim to help so it's apologists always invent excuses to get around that. Here's a hint; that capitalism sucks doesn't make communism any better

Also people have been trying to get what others have for since the dawn of time. Communism ain't gonna change that.

Most people on the forum have moved on, and quite of those who stayed are openly apologists for communism. That's the main reason you aren't getting a beat down like you deserve

[Proletarian]

Nope. They were all communist.

They didn't even call themselves Communists, and acknowledged that they were not. Feel free to actually address the substance of my posts at any time.

Thing is that the end result of communism is almost always corrupt bureaucracies that fuck over the very people they claim to help

Bureaucracies? You mean a social class comprised of bureaucrats? In my classless society? Get outta here.

Also people have been trying to get what others have for since the dawn of time. Communism ain't gonna change that.

Fortunately, Communism does not require this.

Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint (Max Stirner - ed.) because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals.

Hence, the communists by no means want, as Saint Max believes, and as his loyal Dottore Graziano (Arnold Ruge) repeats after him (for which Saint Max calls him “an unusually cunning and politic mind”, Wigand, p. 192), to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a figment of the imagination concerning which both of them could already have found the necessary explanation in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.

- K. Marx The German Ideology

In other words, "selflessness" and "egoism" are moralistic abstractions from the real behavior of individuals, generalities used to explain the behaviors of individuals in concrete circumstances, and, crucially, that this behavior changes with a change in circumstance.

For example, one of the philosophies espoused by capitalist apologists is that of the inherent value of "enlightened self-interest". We can grant, for the sake of argument, that there is an objective moral value to this self-interest. It does not follow however that a proletarian's self-interest naturally flows into becoming a capitalist - as opposed to, say, appropriating the means of production.

This holds good too of e.g. moral calumnies against "colectivism". Communism does not produce collectivism - capitalism does, for the sake of perpetuating "individualism". In the name of preserving individualism an order has been created which homogenizes and standardizes the great mass of working-people and their lifestyles, regimenting their lives around a strictly-defined work schedule with more or less uniform modes of existence.

We do not say that individuals will convert en masse to an idealistic vision of Communism in a political sense. We say they are being primed for it by the inherent functions of capitalism.

Most people on the forum have moved on, and quite of those who stayed are openly apologists for communism. That's the main reason you aren't getting a beat down like you deserve

Thanks for admitting that you aren't competent to deliver that beat-down.

[Rogue 9]

So if none of those countries were Communist, it means that Communism is a failure because it couldn't even take root in governments purporting to actually work towards it. QED.

[Proletarian]

So if none of those countries were Communist, it means that Communism is a failure because it couldn't even take root in governments purporting to actually work towards it. QED.

Or, rather more accurately, that Communism cannot be realized in the political sense, as it is not simply a mirror-image of bourgeois society. This is quite in keeping with Marx.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Or from the Preface to the Contribution To The Critique Of Political Economy:

The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

To whit, Communism for Marx is not the "end of history" in the Hegelian sense, but the beginning of history. He in no sense believed there would be a straightforward, linear progression from capitalism to feudalism, anymore than there had been a steady development of capitalism out of feudalism. This misinterpretation is based on a single paragraph in the Communist Manifesto - a pamphlet published for polemical purposes and, what's more, one written for pay (by the League of the Just):

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The work itself, however, undercuts this claim to inevitability, acknowledging only that class conflict, and not its outcome, are inevitable:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The Preface of the 1882 edition furthermore puts parentheses around the notion of Communism as a linear development out of capitalism when questioning whether the large Russian communal farms could bypass the capitalist phase of development altogether:

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

This is a theme which Marx would take up in his Letter on Russia; it was precisely Marx's rejection of the linear, teleological interpretation of the need for a society to pass through a particular mode of production that enabled the Bolsheviks in post-feudal Russia to contemplate Russian socialism:

Now, what application to Russia could my critic draw from my historical outline? Only this: if Russia tries to become a capitalist nation, in imitation of the nations of western Europe, and in recent years she has taken a great deal of pains in this respect, she will not succeed without first having transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once brought into the lap of the capitalist regime, she will be subject to its inexorable laws, like other profane nations. That is all. But this is too much for my critic. He absolutely must needs metamorphose my outline of the genesis of capitalism in western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course, fatally imposed upon all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed, in order to arrive finally at that economic formation which insures with the greatest amount of productive power of social labor the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. He does me too much honor and too much shame at the same time.

(As an historical aside, it ought to be noted that the obschina had basically been dissolved by 1917, and therefore were not capable of serving as a material basis for the Russian Revolution. Rather, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were left to contend with each other and the S-Rs for a tiny emergent working-class in the industrial districts of Petrograd and Moscow. Stalin's agrarian collectivizations failed to reproduce the original obschina system.)

Marx readily acknowledged, too, the possibility of failed or flawed revolutions, as per The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Napoleon.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [cat’s winge] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out:
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
(Here is the rose, here dance!)

So no, the failure of socialism to form in the Soviet Union is nothing more than evidence of the failure of socialism to form - in the Soviet Union.

[Darth Yan]

Explain the "dictatorship of the proletariat" Marx kept bringing up. Explain how that won't end in tears.

I'll just quote Nathan Robinson of currentaffairs

The critiques that Bakunin made of Marx exactly predicted the nature of the Soviet Union, decades before it came about:

“[Marxists] 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.”

Bakunin said that strong states, of the kind advocated by Marxists, would inevitably produce “military and bureaucratic centralization” and that the only difference between this kind of government and a monarchy is that a monarchy oppresses and robs the people in the name of the King, while the proletarian dictatorship does it in the name of “the people.” But, he said, “the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled ‘the people’s stick.’” (Bakunin himself was often loathsome, an anti-Semite with violent tendencies, but again, this is the magic of thoughtful reasoning: I am able to accept the sensible parts of his ideology and discard the insane ones.)

Marxism by it's very nature creates dictatorships

[Proletarian]

Explain the "dictatorship of the proletariat" Marx kept bringing up. Explain how that won't end in tears.

You don't know what the term 'dictatorship' means as used by Marx.

Per Hal Draper:

By the nineteenth century political language had long included references to the “dictatorship” of the most democratic assemblies, of popular mass movements, or even of The People in general. All Marx did at the time was apply this old political term to the political power of a class.

In other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat as Marx conceived of it isn't simply referring to the assertion of total political power by a class - though it's referring to this, too. Rather, it's used far more broadly, to refer to a period in which the interests of society are coterminal with the class in reference, in this case the proletariat.

What makes the working-class unique from all preceding classes, however, is that it alone has the capacity to abolish itself as a class, rather than simply asserting itself as the new ruling class.

The critiques that Bakunin made of Marx exactly predicted the nature of the Soviet Union, decades before it came about:

“[Marxists] 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.”

Bakunin said that strong states, of the kind advocated by Marxists, would inevitably produce “military and bureaucratic centralization” and that the only difference between this kind of government and a monarchy is that a monarchy oppresses and robs the people in the name of the King, while the proletarian dictatorship does it in the name of “the people.” But, he said, “the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled ‘the people’s stick.’” (Bakunin himself was often loathsome, an anti-Semite with violent tendencies, but again, this is the magic of thoughtful reasoning: I am able to accept the sensible parts of his ideology and discard the insane ones.)

Marxism by it's very nature creates dictatorships
[/quote]

Marxism doesn't advocate "strong states", so Bakunin's critique falls flat. Indeed, this is particularly rich coming from Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated an "Invisible Dictatorship", which he meant in a far more strict sense than Marx, insofar as he actually tried to organize such a thing within the auspices of the International Workingmen's Association.

But again, Marxists do not advocate a "strong state", so the point is moot.

Now, to be sure, a revolutionary period will be authoritarian. As Engels says,

All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

But it isn't as if we are not subject to the authority of the bourgeois State every day. And I care as little for the capitalist class as, for example, their forebears cared about the British tax collectors whom they tarred and feathered.

[Straha]

Yan, Proletarian beat me to the punch of a reply. Three things:

A. You don't understand what Dictatorship of the Proletariat meant in Marxist writings. I refer you to my pending question in the history sub-forum.

B. Interesting that the quote you bring up cites Bakunin, who is legendarily a socialist anarchist. Bakunin would flatly, and bluntly, disagree with the entire premise of your response here.

C. The article you cite explicitly disagrees with what you're saying here regarding the purported 'communism' of the regimes you've brought up. This is the Article, titled "How to be a socialist without being an apologist for the atrocities of communist regimes. Here is a pull quote:

The history of the Soviet Union doesn’t really tell us much about “communism,” if communism is a stateless society where people share everything equally: it was a society dominated by the state, in which power was distributed according to a strict hierarchy. When Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman visited the Soviet Union, they were horrified by the scale of the repression. “Liberty is a luxury not to be permitted at the present stage of development,” Lenin told them. Goldman concluded that “it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic.” (Her pamphlet “There Is No Communism In Russia” argues that if the Soviet Union was to be called communist, the word must have no meaning.) Bertrand Russell visited Lenin and was alarmed by his indifference to human freedom. Russell left disillusioned, “not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.” Lenin himself acknowledged that he was implementing a form of “state capitalism.”

You either didn't read the article or you did and chose to actively misrepresent what it was trying to say in the context of this thread. Which either makes you an intellectual fraud or outright, and pathetically, dishonest. Given that you didn't bother to put a URL in your post I'm personally going for the latter instead of the former.

[Darth Yan]

Oh I read it. Robinson still came down on marxism, arguing that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was bad and refers to the "disdain for moralizing" that Marxism has. He's definitely a socialist (again I agree socialism has a lot of good elements to it) but he agrees Marxism has flaws, and that many marxists do tend to ignore ethical implications or the possibility that communism can lead to atrocities.

[Straha]

So are you now conceding that you were wrong about the communist nature of the Soviet Union et al. ?

[Darth Yan]

Nope. Communist THEORY has good ideas but in practice people are selfish and will always find a way to pervert things. People will ALWAYS want what others have, the "producing your own goods" won't work, and Robinson himself was harsh on Marx's ideals saying that the "dictatorship of the prolateriat" element was unsalvageable.

Communism is like your idea of decolonialism. If it COULD work it would be wonderful. But for a lot of reasons it will only ever be a naive dream that can never really be achieved. Notably proletariat seems rather cavalier about the possibility that things might go wrong, kinda like how some people refuse to accept that it's entirely possible for the oppressed to so internalize the values of their abusers that they basically become every bit as bad as their oppressors (when the color purple came out a lot of black men were rather upset that some black men were portrayed as abusive husbands and fathers even though a lot of black women felt that no that part was fairly accurate. That conservatives like Reagan overplayed the problem didn't mean the problem didn't exist.)

Real life is murky and complicated. That Capitalism is also abhorrent doesn't absolve communism of it's sins

[Straha]

So now we're back to you shotgunning buzzword arguments that you don't understand and engaging in deliberate and thoughtful misrepresentation of authors. Neat.

[Proletarian]

Nope. Communist THEORY has good ideas but in practice people are selfish and will always find a way to pervert things.

Yes, we know. Original Sin and all that.

(T)he communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form... The communists do not preach morality at all, etc.

People will ALWAYS want what others have, the "producing your own goods" won't work,

Uh, why? If I have more than enough for myself, why, other than reasons of sociopathy, should I want what someone else has?

and Robinson himself was harsh on Marx's ideals saying that the "dictatorship of the prolateriat" element was unsalvageable.

Who cares what this guy thinks?

[Darth Yan]

So now we're back to you shotgunning buzzword arguments that you don't understand and engaging in deliberate and thoughtful misrepresentation of authors. Neat.

Nope. Not at all. You can't just write off every regime as "not true communists"; you yourself ignored that Robinson was harsh to Marxism as well. And are you accusing me of misrepresenting Alice Walker in the color purple as well?

Nope. Communist THEORY has good ideas but in practice people are selfish and will always find a way to pervert things.

Yes, we know. Original Sin and all that.

(T)he communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form... The communists do not preach morality at all, etc.

People will ALWAYS want what others have, the "producing your own goods" won't work,

Uh, why? If I have more than enough for myself, why, other than reasons of sociopathy, should I want what someone else has?

and Robinson himself was harsh on Marx's ideals saying that the "dictatorship of the prolateriat" element was unsalvageable.

Who cares what this guy thinks?

Look at history. People have ALWAYS wanted what they can't have. And given that Robinson is himself a socialist that he sees problems with Marx is damning.

[Proletarian]

So now we're back to you shotgunning buzzword arguments that you don't understand and engaging in deliberate and thoughtful misrepresentation of authors. Neat.

Nope. Not at all. You can't just write off every regime as "not true communists";

When they explicitly acknowledge that they are not Communist we most certainly can.

you yourself ignored that Robinson was harsh to Marxism as well.

A. Who cares?

B.

The history of the Soviet Union doesn’t really tell us much about “communism,”

The rest is pablum. Communism is not a "society where people share everything equally".

Marx and Engels on "equality":

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

- Marx, Gothakritik

"The elimination of all social and political inequality,” rather than “the abolition of all class distinctions,” is similarly a most dubious expression. As between one country, one province and even one place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated. The living conditions of Alpine dwellers will always be different from those of the plainsmen. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept deriving from the old “liberty, equality, fraternity,” a concept which was justified in that, in its own time and place, it signified a phase of development, but which, like all the one-sided ideas of earlier socialist schools, ought now to be superseded, since they produce nothing but mental confusion, and more accurate ways of presenting the matter have been discovered.

- Engels to Bebel

Look at history. People have ALWAYS wanted what they can't have.

This is voodoo thinking.
Why can't they have it?

And given that Robinson is himself a socialist that he sees problems with Marx is damning.

Considering that he formulates Communism as a "society where everyone shares everything equally", which both Marx and Engels disavow as primitive, he doesn't know much about socialism either.

To whit:

The history of the Soviet Union doesn’t really tell us much about “communism,” if communism is a stateless society where people share everything equally

- Robinson

"The elimination of all social and political inequality,” rather than “the abolition of all class distinctions,” is similarly a most dubious expression.

- Engels

[Darth Yan]

I read through that article you linked. Lenin ALSO accused the "left wing communists" of being bourgeoisie and not real communists.

Lenin specifically says

It is precisely in the interests of “strengthening the connection” with international socialism that we are in duty bound to defend our socialist fatherland.

Lenin saw himself as a socialist