Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development
barsoap@lemm.ee 14 hours agodespite robust democratic control.
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.
administrators of public property do not constitute a distinct class,
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 14 hours 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.
barsoap@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
Absolutely.
Plumbers are not in a power hierarchy relationship to electricians so that’s a strawman.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Class isn’t “power hierarchy” in Marxist analysis, though. That’s an Anarchist interpretation, one I won’t say you can’t hold personally as valid, but that’s not the Marxist critique. Engels and Lenin specifically called managers Labor aristocracy as they are necessary aspects of large industry, and not a class in themselves. Class instead is a social relation to ownership of the Means of Production.
In the “Administration of Things,” as Engels puts it, there are to be administrators, and production along a common plan. It’s through this that large industry under Capitalism paves the way for the transition to Socialism, and then Communism, socialized production requires an informed plan.
barsoap@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
And the managerial class doesn’t have that? Is it easier or harder for an MBA to get a loan to become a millionaire than it is for a worker coop? To furnish golden parachutes for themselves while leaving workers with not even the dole (heard of some nasty practices in the US, there, making people ‘quit without cause’ by bullying etc which would disqualify them from welfare).