Why Socialism isn't Inevitable and how Historical Materialism is Wrong

A student of history would not be as quick to dismiss this.
There are plenty of examples of localist/municipalist proto-socialist libertarian movements through-out history.
This information was not as readily available back in the times of Marx, thus leading him to the erronious conclusion that feudalism must lead to capitalism and capitalism must lead to socialism, when in fact there are many historical examples of rebellions returning society to primitime agrarian socialism, lead not so much by the working-class, but in many cases by a declining working-class, indeed raising the point that the biggest revolutionary potential might indeed lie with the lumpen-proletariat and the dispossessed.

Delet dis

Argument not detected :^)

Cite when Marx said feudalism must lead to Capitalism, he said Capital would uproot and abolish whatever mode of production was around at that time, whether it be feudalism or anything else.

I am pretty certain that in terms of his materialistic dialectics he believed that feudalism arose from the contradictions inherent in chattel-slavery societies.
Which to a degree is very true. Feudalism was the only statist alternative that could survive the crisis that arose due to Roman imperialism.

What movements? When? Where?
From what i know most of the revolutionary attack against the "feudal status quo" in Europe for examples the italian communes, the heretical movements in italy and in the south of France, that happend after the 1000 A.D were all lead and supported by the burgeoisie of the various cities.
Marx actually talks about the predecessors of socialism,: for example Thomas More. He talks even about some proletarian movements as the levellers or the jacobins.
As before What rebellions?When?Where?

I'm not sure this gets at the heart of the idea of "inevitability" of socialism. If I recall the point is that the way capitalism is structured is that the only possible next stage is to be socialism. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will ever actually happen.

How can he say socialism isn't inevitable when we are currently watching the breakdown of the exchange of labor power for wages happening around us due to technological change?

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Did you guys actually read the article?

Off the top of my head, the Ikko Ikki stands out and that movement was created and lead by buddhist priests. What are you referring to exactly? As Bookchin points out, they are mislabeled as bourgeois, or at least in the case of the french revolution they were.

Since people can't seem to be arsed to click the link and read the article, I'll post the parts that addresses your questions.

Historical materialism has some good insights, but it is necessary to heavily modify it by the dialectic of ideas (i.e. culture).

Whereas Marx's materialist conception of History sublated Hegel's idealism, Bookchin's naturalism sublated Marx's materialism.

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bump

The Mazdaki, The Ikko Ikki, The Hussites (sorta), the vast majority of the Native American revolts, The Sans culottes and those are just off the top of my head.

The obvious criticism is that they were attempting a regression of society not its progression. Marx didn't consider the peasantry capable of advancing society, IIRC. And they all failed to boot. I know off the top of my head Oda Nobunaga smashed the Ikko Ikki during his campaigns, and that the Mazdaki were all but wiped out, like American Indians. Hussites I dunno. Sans culottes, well, they too were repressed and marginalized, but I wouldn't argue they were regressive; quite the opposite.

I disagree. Aside from merchant capitalists, professionals/artisans with significant skills were bourgeois for the reason they often headed production or even went into business for themselves if they could find a merchant capitalist to support them. Peasants with enough land could become rentier capitalists, though I'll admit I'm rusty on that aspect; however, agricultural and merchant capitalism were the direct precursors to capital penetrating into production.
Nothing in that statement is incompatible with the idea of a bourgeois class, and classes are not stable; otherwise they'd be castes.

As bookchin points out, capitalism is not a progression of society but it's destruction.
Whether or not they were wiped out is irrelevant. Athens and Rome are perhaps more salient examples.
Now you're just redefining what bourgeois means to make it fit the dogma, just as the authors he criticized in the article did. Marx clearly considers peasants, artisans etc as pre-capitalist i.e. pre-bourgeois.

Utter nonsense.
Of what? Progressions? Certainly. They also had their share of revolts and rebellions. Marxists love Spartacus btw.
I'm not redefining anything. And you lack reading comprehension. An artisan who disciplines workers in production via superintendence or secures backing in order to become bourgeois himself is clearly changing his class position. It's not like historical development is neat and even. There was a long period where capitalist production existed only in pockets, regions which were particularly advanced for their time – like around Glasgow during Adam Smith's time.

He's obviously talking about the early Republic and the ideals of communalist property management and primitive democracy that the brothers Grachii stood for. The later republic and Empire are obviously not good examples of communalist libertarian societies.

I would hardly call the early Republic a good example either. Lets not forget the brothers were assassinated.

pic related

Of libertarian upsurges overthrowing more authoritarian systems

It's almost like you didn't even read the article

continued

Capitalism, always a dormant system in the larger context of precapitalist social orders, essentially burst upon the world in a period of sweeping social decline. The feudal system of orders which the absolutist monarchies of Europe seemingly held together had fallen into complete decay. By the 18th century, Europe existed in what was little more than a social vacuum within which capitalism could grow and ultimately flourish, a period in which there was a general erosion of all mores, not least of which were traditions that inhibited the growth and authority of the burgher strata itself. Capitalism began to emerge as a predominant economy feeding on the decomposing corpses of all traditional status-oriented societies. It pandered to the vices of; a decadent nobility, to the profligacy of a malignant court, to the indulgent pretentions of the nouveau riches and it battened on the misery of abandoned masses — peasants, laborers, guildsmen, and lumpenproletarians — that feudalism had cast aside to fend for themselves with the decline of the patronal system and its traditional nexus of rights and duties. The good “burghers” of the declining feudal world and the era of absolutism — the so-called “ nascent bourgeoisie” — were no less status-oriented and later no less royalist than the “classes” they were supposed to oppose and displace. T here is nothing to show that these nascent bourgeois were capitalist in any unique sense other than their desire to accumulate capital with a view toward buying titles that would make them part of the nobility or acquire land that would validate their noble status….

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Yeah, but the early republic had a maximum income, publicly administrated land distribution and direct democratic leglislative assemblies that had veto-rights over the senate.
It's a long shot from perfect, but to deny the libertarian nature of the early Roman republic is to ignore the plebian side of the revolution against the monarchy.

You know what's not an argument? A wall of text copied from someone else.

I'm not well versed enough in Roman history to disagree. As you say, it's far from perfect, but I understand referencing it for a few progressive features.

Is it really so difficult to read a few paragraphs of text? Stop being intellectually lazy and put the effort into reading the article like I did, otherwise we might as well be talking about two completely different things.

I just picked up on something that interested me. I came to argue with someone on Holla Forums not Bookchin. I'll read through the article and post later.

Except that we're arguing about what bookchin said. If you can't be bothered to actually know what he said then why argue with you? Good.

Marx never claimed socialism was inevitable. The fuck is this shit?

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you got me to read up to there though gj

Nobody says that
If you're pulling out of your ass the claim that Historical Materialism supposedly argues that socialism was inevitable, what makes you think your shitposts has any validity left after the title and make people read more of your stupid crap?

rated 0/10
saged and reported and also go kys
never seen such fast self invalidating balderdash before

see

you are a nigger and you need to kill yourself right the fuck now

t. triggered dogmatist that didn't bother to read the article. Historical Materialism is wrong for many reasons, one of them being that socialism is inevitable. Another false claim that it makes is that history is determined more by material self interest and not social order, and that capitalism was an inevitable development following feudalism and was a progressive force. Read the actual article instead of sperging out.

wew lad. way to be intellectually dishonest

There's a thread up right now in the catalog with quotes from Engels where Engels says he's worried about putting too much focus on class struggle because it would reduce diamat to nonsense that contradicts itself. You have no idea what you're talking about, Marx was against the rigid strawman you're preaching. He wanted diamat to be looked at as an evolutionary theory of history (hint: not teleological), using Hegels logic and focus on contradiction as the impetus for the various stages. Just like in evolution, the impetus is the environment favoring one mutation over another.

kys you dumbfuck nigger

At least read the article before resorting to autistic screeching

Seriously?

>>>/kys/

Why would that be a given?

Yes, but only because people have to revolve around that. That doesn't mean there can't be dumb ethnic or culture wars that while playing off the base can take on the life of their own. After all, human beings are the movers of this progressive force, or else we're talking about something else entirely.

I don't know why you think you're embarrassing anyone but yourself with this display of total ass anguish. Pretty entertaining though

Sad.

Did you even read the article? Social status has historically been more of a determiner then material self interest. The wealthiest pleb was still a pleb, after all. Read the article and then comment, because until then we might as well be talking about two different things

Yes, those tendencies left on their own would destroy Capitalism. If there were no class struggle, the proletariat's real wages would decline. There is, that quote is considering Capitalism ceteris paribus. Something like the introduction of the state into the market on a massive scale is not something Marx addressed.

Stopped reading right there.

t. Lenin
What do you guys gain from such blatant intellectual dishonesty?

Keep worshiping those failed states

It would destroy itself the same way cancer destroys itself, with the death of the host. There's struggle, but it's not limited to proletariat struggle and encase you haven't noticed wages have indeed been decreasing. As bookchin points out in the article, the period which did most resemble marx's predictions ended not with proletarian revolution but with capitalism stronger then it ever was. There were benefits to being a patrician definitely, but this wealth was not at all unique to the patricians and indeed you had plebians wealthier then patricians, Mark Anthony being one example

Keep worshiping those failed "non-states" then buddy. :^)

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Have you read The German Ideology?
Also, what happened resembled the "Fragment on Machines" from Grundrisse. Exchange based on labour value broke down, we now use fiat money to get around that.

Keep accomplishing nothing.

Lmao ok

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What's your point? He also describes the proletariat as an "invincible" army. That doesn't mean he thought he could just sit back and let the Civil War win itself.

Capitalism will destroy itself by making the environment an uninhabitable hellscape.
Seems like a cop out. Nothing about the core contradictions of capitalism really changed, the relationship between bourgeois and proletariat was still maintained.

Point being that the conditions in which the "proletarian revolution" should have happened didn't, and even trotsky recognized that if WW2 did not result in a proletarian revolution that many of the core tenets of marxism would have to be rethought. A strong labor movement disappeared over night and all marxists could do was to try and cling to the hope that vietnam and other conflicts would lead to global revolution and it never did.

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Was enjoying and tentatively agreeing until this:

Such a community must presume that solidarity outweights status or class interests, that its way of life can absorb the centrifugal interests that separate human from human, that a shared ethics imparts the consciousness, conscience, and sympathy needed to override a sense of selfhood that risks degenerating into selfishness and that preoccupation with private concerns so characteristic of the contemporary therapeutic age.

What does this mean? What kind of shared ethics? How is it established and maintained? This paragraph reads to me like a better written "why cant we all just get along bro" platitude.

The core dynamic of exchange changed, something predicted by Marx.

Possible, but without agents of change there can be no revolution. Socialism or barbarism my friend.

source on this?
Read the article. It's not as if he's not offering a revolutionary program, he just believes that the historical dialectic is different.

I suppose in order to understand this you have to understand his theory of Dialectical Naturalism. If you want to see a real world application of this sort of shared ethics and how it's established and maintained, DFNS is the only currently existing example. Well, that and the turkish movement but that's being suppressed by the government quite heavily

“The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.”

This is from the fragment on machines from the Grundrisse.

I did, I reject his rigid interpretation of Marx which is one Marx argued against. Even if Marx had wanted to be interpreted teleologically, it wouldn't negate his contributions related to the base/superstructure.

What's your point here exactly? How does this demonstrate the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, or that the proletariat is the inevitable vanguard of socialism?
Nobody is saying that there's nothing to be gained from Marx, only that his assertions regarding the nature of the bourgeois as a revolutionary class in regards to feudalism and the proletariat as a revolutionary class in regards to capitalism is an ultimately false premise.

That was in response to you saying "capitalism" emerged stronger than ever. Well yes and no - production for exchange value broke down, and now exchange takes place through valueless fiat that might as well be dirt. Two world wars is exactly the type of crisis that I referred to when I said "what is creative destruction", but even that couldn't offset the contradictions bringing about Bretton Woods in 1971. Take a look at GDP in dollars and GDP in gold, and tell me there wasn't a breakdown of Capitalism just like Marx predicts in that quote. (pic related).

Anyway, I'm getting tired of saying not to interpret him rigidly so I'm just going to quote him directly.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm

Engels says here:

So, this can perfectly explain everything you're talking about. Plebians who were wealthier than Patricians were wealthier because of social dogma's that had previously been established. Retardo ethnic, or religious conflicts that see the consolidation of opposing views into one unified cause do not contradict diamat. Ultimately, those people still have to reproduce themselves and how that reproduction will shape the contradictions in any system. This is no way implies that the contradiction will resolve in X way, or has to resolve in Y amount of time. Marx (and Engels) were populist, wanted their doctrines to be read by proles, and thus throughout Capital, The Manifesto etc you will find Marx's use of rhetoric to further elucidate a point. It's easy to read contradictions or dogma's into Marx that weren't really there or at the very least, are nowhere as fervent or rigid as his critics make them out to be.

Sorry, this should read "were of a lower social class", not "were wealthier"

I should also clarify, I doubt Bookchin had access to obscure bits of Marx and Engels work and I don't fault him for critiquing HisMat in the article because there very much was the dogma he critiques within Marxism during the 20th century, but "Marxism" was an ideology before we those who espoused it had access to the full body of his work. The most important text on diamat The German Ideology was never published until the 1930's.

True. It is unscientific and dumb. That's why socialism in one country is the true solution.

It's not like they're editing the works.

If DIAMAT is correct then why are so many of the conclusions drawn from it wrong? Marx considered peasants and lumpens to lack revolutionary potential but indeed socialist revolutions have historically taken place in mostly rural, agrarian areas. To say that his belief was based merely on the fact that he was a "populist" and not on diamat is too be intellectually dishonest.

Bookchin did indeed read the German Ideology. It's hilarious that the one book he didn't think good enough to release is the one that you think best describes diamat.

They couldn't find a publisher, and I'm not the only one who believes that. It's considered widely to be an important part of the Marxist canon. I meant the various letters were Marx and Engels clarify diamat.

Well, one of the conclusions (the collapse of the gold standard) was correct. I'm wondering specifically what conclusions you mean, and what the context they were made in is. The conclusions drawn from it can basically come down to: a. we all have to eat, and therefore produce on a material level. and b. society is autodynamic. That's it. When you study something using diamat, you look at what has already happen and try and look for the dialectical changes which is what Marx and Engels do in Capital. There are a million different fucking confounding factors, so even if Marx did believe that the proletariat would revolt (which I don't agree with, quoting something like the Communist Manifesto - a populist party pamphlet meant to rally up the workers is intellectually dishonest), it's pretty clear you're not supposed to interpret the conclusions rigidly and rather use the material basis of society to study the changes of society. But it's nice we've moved past whether Marx and Engels wanted to be looked at as material mystics making apocalyptic or otherwise proclamations.

see and
How do you rectify that if the fact that, by your own admission, social order determines much despite what material conditions may be. The plebian is still a plebian after all, irregardless of wealth or "material conditions". The claim that society functions on a "material basis" is the very thing being disputed, and you can't reconcile this interpretation of society with the reality of social relations based on social order. You certainly can't write off these social orders as inconsequential or anomalous. The fact that you call me intellectually dishonest when the impression I've gotten from you this entire conversation is that of someone who did not even bother to study the actual argument being made i.e. reading the article, despite your claim to the contrary. The destruction of our environment is not "mystical", nor is the look of history through the lens of domination of nature by man and later on man by man mystical either, but rooted in historical fact.

Also, you completely ignored my examples of false predictions made by Marx. Why is that, I wonder?

That's not how you spell Marx? Are you talking about someone else?

Yes, production based on exchange value broke down. Marx was correct I'm glad you agree with him, see . A developed countries exchange relations eventually becoming completely divorced from labour values is probably the single most important prediction Marx made.

So, to be sure: you don't believe that we need to eat? Because this is what Marx and Engels assert - any given society must reproduce itself, through labour. This is the starting point of diamat. I'd like to clarify that you do not believe that we need to eat or drink, and can live purely off social superstitions, regardless of how developed or what mode of production is used. The plebian is still a plebian, but he still needs to eat and how he obtains his food is the material basis of society.

I also like Bookchin and his views on ecology and authoritarianism, I just think he's reading diamat like the Soviets did and not how Marx and Engels intended for it to be read.

If you'd like a good book on diamat, I can give you one and you can give me one of Bookchins works

Of course, but that relationship of production does not ultimately determine how social order comes about. It plays a part, but it's not the ultimate determiner.
Are you implying that Lenin did not have a firm grasp of DiatMa? Not that that wouldn't be consistent with what you've previously said, but I'm sure the vast majority of people on here would disagree with you. Also, you're ignoring the other post like you continue to ignore my previous point regarding Marx's view of peasantry and "lumpens". I would recommend The Spanish Anarchists, though it's not so much about his own theory as it is a look at the history of the spanish anarchist movement. If you want a book on his own theory of communalism I would say The Ecology of Freedom.

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Bookchin, his mini-statism, and unwarranted arrogance over his ignorance of Marxism is the worst plebbit meme.