Hello everyone, welcome to Theory Thursday! This is a community led project, the point of these posts is to read about 30 minutes of theory every Thursday. Then we discuss with fellow comrades the contents of the reading. This week’s topic we are covering Fredrick Engels’ The Principles of Communism, parts 1-13.

The reading: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Discussion

  1. What was bad about the text?
  2. What was good about the text?
  3. Overall, how can we apply this reading to our current conditions?

Next week we will be discussing parts 14-25 of the text. Have a good week comrades, until next time!

  • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think my analysis will fall into “What is good/bad” so I’ll just do a point by point on what I find interesting. I was also not sure which one to reply to, so I went to the original cross-post. I think these could be posted on Wednesday night or very early in the morning depending on your timezone to keep the “Thursday” effect longer (though I understand the grad was down today).

    1. What is Communism

    Right off the get go, Marx throws a wrench into all future anarcholiberal definitions of communism as “the stateless classless society” to claim that “communism was never tried”. If you just understand communism as that simple sentence instead, all “so and so isn’t actually communist” arguments fall apart.

    2-5. Proletariat and origins

    The history is pretty spot on for the European proletariat at the time, and extends seamlessly into the development of the global proletariat later on in the timeline. It also does not account but apply to other services that are now the capitalist bread and butter, like delivery/warehouse services such as Amazon, but is still applicable for them.

    6. Classes before industrial revolution

    Here Marx shows his age and Europeanness, with generalist assumptions about ancient societies and barely even mention of the native non-European ones. Although they are today understood to be incorrect (i.e. slavery not being the only nor the majority working class in many civilisations he would describe as from antiquity), he is sadly not alive for us to correct him nowadays, and we need to understand this as a byproduct of his time and general European worldview. It seems like one quote that would be used for MarxistDebunkerxxx69.

    7-10. Differences of the proletarian to other prominent working classes

    He draws a compelling picture of how the modern proletarian as a class is unique from those that have existed in the past, and specially as the majority class for workers. From memory, I think at his time they weren’t even actually the majority in most of Europe, but after mechanical agriculture and the rural exodus peasant populations hardly even reach 50% in most “developed” countries.

    The issue with the slaves is an interesting one. His dry writing does give the impression that slaves “have it better” than proles, but what I think he was point at there is that the conflict of the slave is an individual one (that is from the slave to the master), while that of the proletarian is a class one. If a slave successfully flees from their master or kills them, they are immediately free until the state intervenes, and if no such intervention comes they can even sustain themselves with the same means of production and skills that they used as slaves. Abolishing slavery can end slavery, but single slaves can also individually have their individual slavery abolished by a variety of means. The reality of abolition without communism, as was demonstrated in Brazil later is that lots of them became rural proletarians just as he predicted. Although in theory their rights improved, “slavery by another name” continued for a very long time and is still considered to exist these days in some forms.

    A proletarian on the other hand would not be freed by fleeing as they would not have either the skills nor the means to survive by themselves. Since they are not personally owned as individuals, they must submit themselves to (wage) slavery rather than the other way around and because of that can be readily replaced without the capitalist losing as much as a cent (in Marx’s time there was no severance, nor is there in some states in the USA today). Slaves are captured and created, but proletarians must capture and create themselves. Obviously though, the vast majority of proletarians today have much better standards of living than the vast majority of slaves of his time, but that is in large part due to organised labour fights for those rights, and it doesn’t necessarily cover positions historically occupied by slaves such as prison labour, manual sugar cutting or rural housekeeper.

    11. Marx does some geopolitics

    His pamphlets are usually very weird on geopolitics, specially future predictions. Ironically most successful revolutions that followed were instead on those same “semi-barbaric” countries for many conditions that were just not there in Europe. By his time Haiti had already expelled the French and ended slavery (which was an integral to the maintaining capitalism in Europe), and this wave of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutions outside of “The West” has never stopped to this day. It is easier to want to kill your oppressors when they are capitalists and Germanic.

    12. Marx predicts the following 2 centuries

    No comment necessary.

    Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things.

    13. What follows from these periodic commercial crises?

    Marx ever the hopeful. While I agree that capitalism keeps inventing things that can help end capitalism (like automated machineguns the internet), this also fails to predict how portions of the working class can and have been co-opted by capital specifically to prevent this abolishment. The capitalist are so incredibly wealthy that they can afford to pay a quarter of society double to keep the other three quarters down.


    Overall a cool introductory text. I was going to ask why we we’re doing only half of it, but the size of my reply answers that question.

    • TT17@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Excellent! This is a really great breakdown. Definitely the high effort analysis I was hoping to find by starting this. I must admit I was kind of rushed making the post and the quality suffered a bit because of that, my apologies. Next week I’ll be more prepared. Posting it as close to 12am London time on Thursday, as you said to have a more detailed discussion through the day. I’ll refrain from my liberal framed questions, and leave it up to the user to post their analysis. I’ll also fix my formatting and crossposting. I’ll host the discussion on one page, and have the crossposts forward users to that single discussion.

        • TT17@lemmygrad.mlOP
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          1 year ago

          We’ll have a week break between texts, during the week break we will conduct the voting.

    • cucumovirus@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think your analysis of the slave-proletariat comparison is quite what is meant by Engels here. Individual slaves that managed to escape did not have a good time, and in most cases did not make it very far. In the US, there were laws in place that mandated all free citizens to aid in the capture and return of escaped slaves and even if someone wanted to be an innocent bystander, they could be charged as helping the slaves escape. Slave relation were very much class relations - take a look at the Santo Domingo/Haiti revolution for example.

      I made a comment on the cross-posted version of this post which includes some discussion of the slave-proletarian comparison which you can check out: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/925271

      • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Good point. I read your reply there, but thought it more relevant to reply here. I was grasping a bit to try and understand that one. It is such a small and early section for such a large, varied and recent development in the larger economy. There were some forms of slaves getting their freedom individually though, and it was even somewhat common for slaves in Saint Domingue to not only get their freedom and become either peasants, craftspeople or even land/slaveowners themselves. And in other colonies with greater numbers of slaves, Maroons also formed parallel societies to that of the coloniser. The USA is a bit of a weird one for slave societies because they had a way higher amount of indentured servants or otherwise white workers compared to most Atlantic colonies, so they could enforce their racist laws with more effect.

        I guess what I meant there was that slaves and their associated labour are individual property subjected to the whims of their single owner, while that of the proletarian is collectively dominated by the entire capitalist class of a society with no formal sale of workers between proletarians needed. I’m not sure if Engels meant that as I’ve not read much from him specifically on slavery, that was just my crackpot interpretation and I’ll trust you there.

        Edit: posted by accident, fixed now.

        • cucumovirus@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          There were some forms of slaves getting their freedom individually though

          Certainly, but I don’t think these played nearly as much of a role as class struggle and legal abolishment of slavery, even if the condition of recently freed slaves was on average hardly better than while they were slaves. In the US especially, they were still barred from owning property and were more or less forced into indentured servitude or similar relationships.

          I admit, I don’t have much knowledge on specific circumstances of slaves in colonies other than the US. The US did have lots of white indentures servants, but they were still treated better than black slaves or even free black people. Even with their contradictory talk of liberty while holding slaves, the laws the US enacted in fear of slave uprisings sometimes ended up limiting what the slave owners themselves could do with their slaves. Not only were free black people prevented from organizing in all ways - even talking on the street among free black people was dangerous at times, education of black people, slave or free, was forbidden because it was seen as dangerous - even when slave owners wanted to educate their slaves, they couldn’t. Other laws also affected slave owners limiting what they could do with their slaves and enforcing certain things as mandatory, especially when it came to harsh punishments. Laws forbidding race mixing also prevented slave owners from recognizing any children they had with slaves which they might’ve wanted to recognize and limits were placed on individual slave owners from freeing their slaves. In their panic and fear of slave uprisings, the “liberty loving” slave owners created a society where even their own freedoms were limited.

          • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, I understand that that was the case with the USA, which is probably the slave country Engels was most acquainted with. But in other southern colonies freed slaves often still managed to get the right to property and sometimes became prominent and even racist themselves. Toussaint himself had been a prominent freedman in Saint Domingue before the revolution, and slave countries often had a separate “race” called “mulatto/mestizo” to designate people with both white and black ascendency. I mentioned the indentured servants there because they and future proletarians and craftspeople made such a big portion of the population as white people, compared to other slave colonies that had upwards of 60% of their population be black and/or slave. If I were to hazard a guess, that would be one of the reasons why the Settler States of Amerika managed to both pass and maintain so many explicitly racist laws, with a explicitly racist police force and constitution without immediately getting consumed in fiery revolution.

            • cucumovirus@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              If I were to hazard a guess, that would be one of the reasons why the Settler States of Amerika managed to both pass and maintain so many explicitly racist laws

              Yes, it’s a factor for sure. Another is the fact that the US was from the start designed to be a racial state, and with the genocide of the natives and the stealing of the land, the enslavement of black people, and a constant influx of white settlers from Europe who were allowed to participate in the “white democracy” at least partially, the racial lines were firmly established and persisted even long after the military defeat of the Southern states in the civil war. Similar racial states were also South Africa and Rhodesia, for example, which also managed to keep their racial regimes longer than most other former colonial states.