Anti-Bolshevik CommunismThis title was first published in 1978: Communism aims at putting working people in charge of their lives. A multiplicity of Councils, rather than a big state bureaucracy is needed to empower working people and to focus control over society. Mattick develops a theory of a council communism through his survey of the history of the left in Germany and Russia. He challenges Bolshevik politics: especially their perspectives on questions of Party and Class, and the role of Trade Unions. Mattick argues that a?The revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the a'association of free and equal producersa?, but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state. Based on the peasantry, but designed with accelerated industrialisation to create an industrial proletariat, they were ready to abolish the traditional bourgeoisie but not capital as a social relationship. This type of capitalism had not been foreseen by Marx and the early Marxists, even though they advocated the capture of state-power to overthrow the bourgeoisie a? but only in order to abolish the state itself.a? |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 21
... human endeavour to the new fetish of capital production . The history of capitalism , as distinct from that of its early prota- gonists , is the history of the increasing dehumanisation of the social relations of production and of ...
... human consciousness " .12 Human history is a product of universal history . In a certain sense , this is true and follows from the admission of the existence of the external world independent of human existence . And it is clear that ...
... human responses to definite necessities . Man must eat in order to live , and if he must work in order to eat , the work itself leads to a regulated behaviour on his own part and in connection with his obeying of , and his struggle ...
Contents
From Marx to Hitler | 1 |
Luxemburg versus Lenin | 19 |
The Lenin Legend | 49 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown