Your reply also shifts from class analysis to normative preference.
Fundamentally everyone bases their political inclinations on some kind of preference. My preference is for the maximal utility to be realized for humanity. Democracy isn’t an end goal, but I view it as necessary for any kind of communist society to emerge.
It is ridiculous to proceed by asking whether a development feels persuasive at the level of personal intuition.
If you think that you are able to predict future history based on a priori scientific truths, you are sorely misguided. Personal intuition isn’t sufficient to understanding, but neither is adherence to arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.
Class is defined by a group’s place within the social relations of production…Administrator is not a class category.
An administrator could certainly hold a different place within the social relations of production, and could have different material interests than, say, a factory worker. It would depend on how much social power they hold as administrator.
The problem is that you have tossed aside the core of the theoretical framework and replaced it with an eclectic mix of idealism and materialism, despite the fact that the two are incompatible as methods.
I’m not sure they are completely incompatible, but that’s beside the point. I’m not making an idealistic argument. I’m just speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions.
political power judged by external moral-democratic criteria rather than by its material class content
If I am not to apply personal preferences, moral convictions, or political ideals, on what basis am I to embrace communist goals?
Some books
I have read 1, 2 and 6. Out of the rest, which would you most recommend to persuade me of your position or fill a gap in my understanding?
You are still evading the question I asked earlier.
I asked you to explain the mechanism by which the class character of the revolution remains primary if it is not expressed in the class character of the state that the revolution establishes. You still have not answered that. Instead, you have shifted again into a discussion of your personal political commitments, your preference for democracy, and your moral reasons for embracing communism. That is a different discussion. It does not resolve the theoretical issue I raised.
No one denied that people hold values, preferences, or moral commitments. That is not the point. The point is that materialist analysis does not begin from those commitments. It begins from the objective structure of social relations, class antagonism, and state power. You are repeatedly replacing the question of what a state is materially with the question of what kind of politics you would prefer to endorse. That is precisely why your replies keep sliding away from the issue.
You say democracy is necessary for communism to emerge. But you still leave “democracy” at the level of an abstract good rather than analyzing its class content. Democracy for which class, through what institutions, under what property relations, and against which class enemy? Bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy are not the same thing. A democracy that preserves bourgeois property is not a neutral framework within which communism gradually appears. It is one form of bourgeois rule. So simply invoking democracy explains nothing unless you specify its class basis.
You also misstate the issue when you contrast “personal intuition” with “arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.” That is a false opposition. Marx did not “make up” Marxism in the sense of inventing a doctrine out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. Newton identified and documented a mechanism already operative in nature. In the same way, Marx identified and explained real mechanisms already operative in social development: class struggle, contradiction within the mode of production, and the conflict between the forces and relations of production. Marxism is not an a priori prophecy about the future. It is a scientific account of the real tendencies and antagonisms internal to class society. The point is not that history unfolds by wish or intuition, but that social forms have objective structures and move through determinate contradictions whether one finds that persuasive at the level of personal impression or not. Once again, instead of engaging those mechanisms, you retreat into skepticism about theory itself.
Your point about administrators shows the same confusion. Of course an administrator can occupy a distinct function within the division of labor. That was never in dispute. But function is not the same as class. A school principal, factory manager, a party cadre, a planner, a technician, a doctor, or a local official is not thereby a separate class merely by exercising authority. To become a distinct exploiting class, they would have to stand in a distinct relation to the means of production and the appropriation of surplus. If they do not privately own the means of production and do not appropriate surplus as a property-bearing class, then you have not demonstrated a new class, only a differentiated role within an ongoing socialist transition. You keep substituting differences in authority or political influence for differences in class position. That is a basic category mistake.
Likewise, when you say you are “speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions,” that only confirms the problem. You are treating class analysis as a loose exercise in conjecture rather than a determination of structured relations within production. Material interests are not invented by speculation. They arise from an objectively given position within the relations of production. Without that anchor, the term “material interest” becomes empty and can be attached to almost any institutional arrangement you happen to distrust.
Your final question makes the confusion most obvious. You ask: if not on the basis of personal preferences, morals, or ideals, then on what basis embrace communist goals? But this again sidesteps the actual issue. Of course political commitment involves conviction. The question is not how an individual justifies commitment to communism at the level of ethics. The question is how communism is analyzed scientifically as the historical movement generated by capitalism’s own contradictions. You are collapsing two distinct levels: normative commitment and materialist analysis. Because you collapse them, you keep answering a question about why you might want communism when I am asking you how class power, state power, and transition are to be understood.
So the problem remains exactly where it started. You have not explained how the class character of a revolution can be primary while the class character of the state that issues from it is treated as secondary or even irrelevant. You have not explained how class ceases to be class once it rules without dissolving the entire concept. And you have not shown that differences in administrative function amount to a distinct class relation in the absence of distinct ownership and appropriation.
Also idealism and materialism are mutually exclusive because they begin from opposite answers to the most basic philosophical question: what is primary, consciousness or material reality? Idealism holds, in one form or another, that ideas, consciousness, spirit, or categories of thought are fundamental, and that social or historical reality is ultimately shaped by them. Materialism holds the reverse: matter exists independently of thought, and consciousness is a product of material conditions rather than their creator. They are compatible in the same way Last Thursdayism is compatible with Evolution.
The main issue here from my perspective is that you are trying to discuss class, state, and transition without the minimum political-economic precision those concepts require. You keep replacing analysis with preference, relation to production with institutional suspicion, and concrete class content with abstract democratic language.
Newton identified and documented a mechanism already operative in nature.
Just wait until you learn about relativity.
Marxism is not an a priori prophecy about the future. It is a scientific account of the real tendencies and antagonisms internal to class society.
Marx provides theories about reality that may or may not be true. He also implies values, which are not scientific. OP absolutely implies values. To determine whether North Korea is “bad”, we cannot just apply scientific analysis.
you keep answering a question about why you might want communism when I am asking you how class power, state power, and transition are to be understood
The core question is why one should support North Korea.
You have not explained how the class character of a revolution can be primary while the class character of the state that issues from it is treated as secondary or even irrelevant.
The class character of the state that issues from the revolution must necessarily change, as soon as the revolutionary class actually gains power over the means of production. If class is defined by orientation to production, that changes when the class gains power. If only a portion of the class gains power, than that portion will have exited its original class, and a new class will have formed that has power over the original.
You have not explained how class ceases to be class once it rules without dissolving the entire concept.
Class ceases to be if all members of a society are given equally distributed control over the means of production.
you have not shown that differences in administrative function amount to a distinct class relation in the absence of distinct ownership and appropriation.
Ownership is only a legal term. What matters is control. In a capitalist society, ownership grants the majority of control. If an administration retains practical control over the means of production, then it fulfills a distinct class relation.
Your latest reply does not resolve the argument. It mostly confirms my original criticism.
Starting with the Newton point: that “just wait until relativity” line is a gotcha that does not work. Newton was not refuted in the childish sense you are implying his formulae are still widely used across science and engineering fields. Physics advanced by deepening and superseding earlier formulations while preserving their real explanatory content within a broader framework. The point of the analogy was obvious: Marx did not invent social laws out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. He identified real mechanisms already operative in society. Later Marxists developed, refined, and extended that analysis in light of further historical experience. That is how a science develops. It does not become arbitrary because it advances.
On Marxism more broadly, you say Marx “provides theories about reality that may or may not be true.” That is more empty skepticism. Any scientific theory is either confirmed, refined, or overturned through engagement with reality. The relevant question is whether Marx’s core account of capitalism and class society has been historically vindicated. In the main, it has. The concentration and centralization of capital, the recurrent crises of capitalist production, the persistence of class antagonism, the political domination of the state by ruling-class interests, and the tendency of capital to subordinate social life to accumulation have all been borne out repeatedly from Marx’s time to the present. Marxism is not reducible to a moral preference just because Marxists also hold political values. Its explanatory core is an analysis of objective social relations and contradictions.
And no, “why one should support North Korea” may be the core question of the thread as a whole, but it is plainly not the question of this current exchange. The question in our exchange was whether the class character of the revolution can be treated as primary while the class character of the state issuing from it is treated as secondary, and by what mechanism that separation is supposed to work. You keep retreating from that question into a different one because you cannot answer the original without conceding the state is the concrete expression of the revolution’s class content and thus primary in the analysis of socialist countries/movements.
You then return again to this confused notion that once workers gain “power over the means of production” they thereby cease to be proletarian and become a new class. That does not follow. Administrator is not a class. It is a function. Nor is every exercise of authority a new relation of production. A planner, cadre, manager, or official can be part of a differentiated stratum within a socialist transition, but a stratum is not the same thing as a class. To demonstrate a distinct class, you would have to show a distinct relation to the means of production and to the appropriation of surplus. Differences of role, authority, or institutional responsibility do not by themselves establish that. Engels’ distinction between the “government of persons” and the “administration of things” makes precisely the point that administration as such is not identical with an exploiting class relation.
You still have not answered the actual question I posed earlier. The issue was not whether class disappears once all of society has equally distributed control. The issue was your claim that the proletariat ceases to be the proletariat simply by gaining state power. You have still not explained the mechanism for that. If the proletariat takes power in a society where antagonistic classes still exist, where bourgeois remnants still exist, where the means of production are still being transformed, and where class struggle still continues, then the proletariat does not vanish merely because it now rules. The whole point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that proletarian rule is required precisely because the transition is incomplete.
Finally, your point on ownership is simply wrong. Ownership is not merely a legal title in the narrow juridical sense. It is a social relation. It concerns who has the effective right and power to dispose of the means of production, to sell them, transfer them, inherit them, command their use, and appropriate the surplus generated through them. Law is one expression of that relation, not its whole content. So when you say “what matters is control,” that is only half-formed. The question is: control by whom, on what basis, for what class end, and with what relation to surplus appropriation? If an administrator cannot alienate the means of production as private property, cannot pass them on as personal property, and cannot appropriate surplus as owner, then you have not shown capitalist ownership. You have shown administration within a different social relation. That is exactly why reducing ownership to “who seems to have practical control” is inadequate.
So the problem remains the same. You are substituting skepticism for analysis, authority for class, and “control” in the abstract for a concrete relation of production and appropriation.
You provide a lot to respond to.
Fundamentally everyone bases their political inclinations on some kind of preference. My preference is for the maximal utility to be realized for humanity. Democracy isn’t an end goal, but I view it as necessary for any kind of communist society to emerge.
If you think that you are able to predict future history based on a priori scientific truths, you are sorely misguided. Personal intuition isn’t sufficient to understanding, but neither is adherence to arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.
An administrator could certainly hold a different place within the social relations of production, and could have different material interests than, say, a factory worker. It would depend on how much social power they hold as administrator.
I’m not sure they are completely incompatible, but that’s beside the point. I’m not making an idealistic argument. I’m just speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions.
If I am not to apply personal preferences, moral convictions, or political ideals, on what basis am I to embrace communist goals?
I have read 1, 2 and 6. Out of the rest, which would you most recommend to persuade me of your position or fill a gap in my understanding?
You are still evading the question I asked earlier.
I asked you to explain the mechanism by which the class character of the revolution remains primary if it is not expressed in the class character of the state that the revolution establishes. You still have not answered that. Instead, you have shifted again into a discussion of your personal political commitments, your preference for democracy, and your moral reasons for embracing communism. That is a different discussion. It does not resolve the theoretical issue I raised.
No one denied that people hold values, preferences, or moral commitments. That is not the point. The point is that materialist analysis does not begin from those commitments. It begins from the objective structure of social relations, class antagonism, and state power. You are repeatedly replacing the question of what a state is materially with the question of what kind of politics you would prefer to endorse. That is precisely why your replies keep sliding away from the issue.
You say democracy is necessary for communism to emerge. But you still leave “democracy” at the level of an abstract good rather than analyzing its class content. Democracy for which class, through what institutions, under what property relations, and against which class enemy? Bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy are not the same thing. A democracy that preserves bourgeois property is not a neutral framework within which communism gradually appears. It is one form of bourgeois rule. So simply invoking democracy explains nothing unless you specify its class basis.
You also misstate the issue when you contrast “personal intuition” with “arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.” That is a false opposition. Marx did not “make up” Marxism in the sense of inventing a doctrine out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. Newton identified and documented a mechanism already operative in nature. In the same way, Marx identified and explained real mechanisms already operative in social development: class struggle, contradiction within the mode of production, and the conflict between the forces and relations of production. Marxism is not an a priori prophecy about the future. It is a scientific account of the real tendencies and antagonisms internal to class society. The point is not that history unfolds by wish or intuition, but that social forms have objective structures and move through determinate contradictions whether one finds that persuasive at the level of personal impression or not. Once again, instead of engaging those mechanisms, you retreat into skepticism about theory itself.
Your point about administrators shows the same confusion. Of course an administrator can occupy a distinct function within the division of labor. That was never in dispute. But function is not the same as class. A school principal, factory manager, a party cadre, a planner, a technician, a doctor, or a local official is not thereby a separate class merely by exercising authority. To become a distinct exploiting class, they would have to stand in a distinct relation to the means of production and the appropriation of surplus. If they do not privately own the means of production and do not appropriate surplus as a property-bearing class, then you have not demonstrated a new class, only a differentiated role within an ongoing socialist transition. You keep substituting differences in authority or political influence for differences in class position. That is a basic category mistake.
Likewise, when you say you are “speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions,” that only confirms the problem. You are treating class analysis as a loose exercise in conjecture rather than a determination of structured relations within production. Material interests are not invented by speculation. They arise from an objectively given position within the relations of production. Without that anchor, the term “material interest” becomes empty and can be attached to almost any institutional arrangement you happen to distrust.
Your final question makes the confusion most obvious. You ask: if not on the basis of personal preferences, morals, or ideals, then on what basis embrace communist goals? But this again sidesteps the actual issue. Of course political commitment involves conviction. The question is not how an individual justifies commitment to communism at the level of ethics. The question is how communism is analyzed scientifically as the historical movement generated by capitalism’s own contradictions. You are collapsing two distinct levels: normative commitment and materialist analysis. Because you collapse them, you keep answering a question about why you might want communism when I am asking you how class power, state power, and transition are to be understood.
So the problem remains exactly where it started. You have not explained how the class character of a revolution can be primary while the class character of the state that issues from it is treated as secondary or even irrelevant. You have not explained how class ceases to be class once it rules without dissolving the entire concept. And you have not shown that differences in administrative function amount to a distinct class relation in the absence of distinct ownership and appropriation.
Also idealism and materialism are mutually exclusive because they begin from opposite answers to the most basic philosophical question: what is primary, consciousness or material reality? Idealism holds, in one form or another, that ideas, consciousness, spirit, or categories of thought are fundamental, and that social or historical reality is ultimately shaped by them. Materialism holds the reverse: matter exists independently of thought, and consciousness is a product of material conditions rather than their creator. They are compatible in the same way Last Thursdayism is compatible with Evolution.
The main issue here from my perspective is that you are trying to discuss class, state, and transition without the minimum political-economic precision those concepts require. You keep replacing analysis with preference, relation to production with institutional suspicion, and concrete class content with abstract democratic language.
Just wait until you learn about relativity.
Marx provides theories about reality that may or may not be true. He also implies values, which are not scientific. OP absolutely implies values. To determine whether North Korea is “bad”, we cannot just apply scientific analysis.
The core question is why one should support North Korea.
The class character of the state that issues from the revolution must necessarily change, as soon as the revolutionary class actually gains power over the means of production. If class is defined by orientation to production, that changes when the class gains power. If only a portion of the class gains power, than that portion will have exited its original class, and a new class will have formed that has power over the original.
Class ceases to be if all members of a society are given equally distributed control over the means of production.
Ownership is only a legal term. What matters is control. In a capitalist society, ownership grants the majority of control. If an administration retains practical control over the means of production, then it fulfills a distinct class relation.
Your latest reply does not resolve the argument. It mostly confirms my original criticism.
Starting with the Newton point: that “just wait until relativity” line is a gotcha that does not work. Newton was not refuted in the childish sense you are implying his formulae are still widely used across science and engineering fields. Physics advanced by deepening and superseding earlier formulations while preserving their real explanatory content within a broader framework. The point of the analogy was obvious: Marx did not invent social laws out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. He identified real mechanisms already operative in society. Later Marxists developed, refined, and extended that analysis in light of further historical experience. That is how a science develops. It does not become arbitrary because it advances.
On Marxism more broadly, you say Marx “provides theories about reality that may or may not be true.” That is more empty skepticism. Any scientific theory is either confirmed, refined, or overturned through engagement with reality. The relevant question is whether Marx’s core account of capitalism and class society has been historically vindicated. In the main, it has. The concentration and centralization of capital, the recurrent crises of capitalist production, the persistence of class antagonism, the political domination of the state by ruling-class interests, and the tendency of capital to subordinate social life to accumulation have all been borne out repeatedly from Marx’s time to the present. Marxism is not reducible to a moral preference just because Marxists also hold political values. Its explanatory core is an analysis of objective social relations and contradictions.
And no, “why one should support North Korea” may be the core question of the thread as a whole, but it is plainly not the question of this current exchange. The question in our exchange was whether the class character of the revolution can be treated as primary while the class character of the state issuing from it is treated as secondary, and by what mechanism that separation is supposed to work. You keep retreating from that question into a different one because you cannot answer the original without conceding the state is the concrete expression of the revolution’s class content and thus primary in the analysis of socialist countries/movements.
You then return again to this confused notion that once workers gain “power over the means of production” they thereby cease to be proletarian and become a new class. That does not follow. Administrator is not a class. It is a function. Nor is every exercise of authority a new relation of production. A planner, cadre, manager, or official can be part of a differentiated stratum within a socialist transition, but a stratum is not the same thing as a class. To demonstrate a distinct class, you would have to show a distinct relation to the means of production and to the appropriation of surplus. Differences of role, authority, or institutional responsibility do not by themselves establish that. Engels’ distinction between the “government of persons” and the “administration of things” makes precisely the point that administration as such is not identical with an exploiting class relation.
You still have not answered the actual question I posed earlier. The issue was not whether class disappears once all of society has equally distributed control. The issue was your claim that the proletariat ceases to be the proletariat simply by gaining state power. You have still not explained the mechanism for that. If the proletariat takes power in a society where antagonistic classes still exist, where bourgeois remnants still exist, where the means of production are still being transformed, and where class struggle still continues, then the proletariat does not vanish merely because it now rules. The whole point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that proletarian rule is required precisely because the transition is incomplete.
Finally, your point on ownership is simply wrong. Ownership is not merely a legal title in the narrow juridical sense. It is a social relation. It concerns who has the effective right and power to dispose of the means of production, to sell them, transfer them, inherit them, command their use, and appropriate the surplus generated through them. Law is one expression of that relation, not its whole content. So when you say “what matters is control,” that is only half-formed. The question is: control by whom, on what basis, for what class end, and with what relation to surplus appropriation? If an administrator cannot alienate the means of production as private property, cannot pass them on as personal property, and cannot appropriate surplus as owner, then you have not shown capitalist ownership. You have shown administration within a different social relation. That is exactly why reducing ownership to “who seems to have practical control” is inadequate.
So the problem remains the same. You are substituting skepticism for analysis, authority for class, and “control” in the abstract for a concrete relation of production and appropriation.