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  • I love this line:

    The bourgeois will become an anarchist again after the proletarian revolution: he will once again become aware of the existence of a State; of the existence of laws foreign to his will, hostile to his interests, to his habits, to his freedom. He will realize that “State” is synonymous with “compulsion” because the workers’ State will take away the bourgeoisie’s freedom to exploit the proletariat, because the workers’ State will be the bulwark of a new mode of production which, as it develops, will destroy every trace of capitalist ownership and any possibility of its revival.

    This is exactly the crux of the failure of ideological "Freedom Now" maximalism. That maximalist freedom they want includes the freedom to exploit and take away the freedom of others. The paradox that needs to be accepted and synthesised is that Freedom necessarily must be imposed at this stage.

  • I agree that anarchists are often conceited, but do we really have to take the exact opposite position to them, and decree that because an oppressive proletarian State is in the interest of the proletariat, that we should not try and dissolve the state at all? Is limiting ourselves to the short-term desires of the proletarian class, not even considering what kind of class structures that could form in the future, really the best way forward?

    This reads a strange form of vulgar Marxism to me, a kind of reaction to the idea of anarchism that arises when you criticize it from gut opposition at their “arrogance” rather than the actual issues with it. I’m not saying the article is actually saying this, but what it is saying is dangerously compatible with such a viewpoint.

    I am a Marxist because I believe that the struggle of the proletariat has the greatest chance to end the constant class struggle of human society, not because I think that the state is a necessary or even remotely “ok” methods of human organization. It is only justifiable as a form of self-defense for the proletariat (which the dictatorship of the proletariat should fundamentally be viewed as). Anything more than that isn’t just bad from some abstract moral opinion, but because it’s completely pointless to the revolutionary struggle.

14 comments