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.
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.