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Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 weeks agodrag refers to any Socialist system with a state as “State Capitalist,” which is a misnomer I reject. I support the NEP and I support the PRC’s Socialist Market Economy, I support Cuba, Vietnam, etc, but drag in particular is saying even a fully publicly owned economy is “state capitalist” if it has a government.
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Well it certainly is capitalist if it’s not democratic. You can have public ownership and worker control, or you can have public ownership and a dictatorship of people who are not workers. Like, bureaucrats, apparatchik, the nomenclatura, etc. Or the army. Or whoever who’s not workers.
As such drag might operate under the Anarchist definition of state (which I, as an Anarchist, can’t stand, because in <currentyear> it just causes pointless misunderstandings), which more or less bogs down to “hierarchical control”, not “organisational structure of society”. The latter definition is something perfectly neutral, the former is the face of evil itself.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
For drag, any state running production is Capitalist. They denounce the PRC, USSR, Cuba, etc as Capitalist, despite robust democratic control.
Further, administrators of public property do not constitute a distinct class, just as managers within a company are not a distinct class from the workers. There exists intra-class hierarchy and inter-class hierarchy, and these are not the same.
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
You might want to calibrate your democracy-o-meter. At the very least, not conflate a disagreement about degrees of democracy in some specific state with a disagreement on principles.
Ah. So not revisionist enough to acknowledge the professional-manegerial class, I see. I mean it’s not like the concept would break with Marxian analysis, it just re-analyses things with a more complete set of data points. So in this case you can choose between being a revisionist and giving up on materialism, I suggest the former.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I’m not conflating anything, drag quite clearly has stated that “Marx was an Anarchist.” This is wrong.
As for the “Professional Managerial Class,” it isn’t a distinct class, but a subsection of the proletariat. You also see the term “Labor Aristocracy” used by Engels and Lenin, but crucially, you don’t see the conflation of this substratum of a class with a class in and of itself. The insistence that managers make up a distinct class is more of an Anarchist thing than a Marxist one, as adopting such analysis would be similar to calling plumbers and elictricians their own classes in and of themselves, rather than substratums.
Edie@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
(not drag)