Simpler is Better

Why are capitalists so obsessed with making more money than they started with? This isn’t just due to their greedy personalities, but because of competition. Competition forces capitalists to "accumulate capital"– they have to buy more and more labour power and more and faster machines to stay ahead of their commercial rivals. Thus, the driving goal for the capitalist is not production for use, or production simply as a means to increase his personal consumption. It is production for the sake of money, as a means to further accumulation–every capitalist must accumulate capital or go under. As an executive at U.S. Steel once famously declared, "we’re not in the business of making steel. We’re in the business of making money."

Under capitalism the economic organisation of society is determined by the requirements of profit accumulation. Work, the essential relationship between human energy and the natural environment, is transformed into a commodity. To work within the capitalist economy is to be employed, and employment is an alienated labour process in which one's mental and physical abilities are appropriated by an employer. Work is an activity performed at the behest of the buyer of wage labour. It is an activity characterised by a tense and antagonistic relationship between buyer and seller, producer and possessor, profit-maker and profit-taker. Like work, distribution takes a specific form under capitalism. Goods and services are not distributed solely because they are needed. They must be purchased. If one is incapable of buying in order to satisfy a need, then one must be deprived; one is free to buy in excess of any explicable need if one has the buying power to do so. This process of distribution is known as market allocation, and defenders of capitalism, usually well-trained economists, refer to it as the most rational method of resource allocation available - probably the only one. The control of the capitalist economy is linked directly to ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. Such control is not democratic, is highly centralised and bureaucratised, and leaves non-controllers (who constitute the majority of the population) with the status of secondary economic citizens. 

Many appear have you heard of “free access” socialism and appear to be confusing what is often described as “state capitalism”, which is public ownership and not common ownership. Socialism or communism (Marx and many socialists use the terms interchangeably) could be better described as “the free association of producers”. Trouble with some post-capitalist economic models is that they continue with prices and wages and money, instead of abolishing them all and accept the Von Mises Economic Calculation Argument, that allocation of resources require prices, rather than the alternative, which would see production-for-use based on Calculation in Kind, physical real determinations based on people’s needs. Instead of elaborate constructs, simpler is better. Abolition of the wages system and from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs – and not according to their work (thats why labour-time vouchers must be rejected too.)

State capitalism may require central planning and a bureaucracy (just as the Catholic church had collective ownership of church property – no individual private ownership, but yet still based on the private property system.) but real socialism is a self-regulating, decentralized and inter-linked system to provide for a self-sustaining steady-state society. Marx advocated a “…communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

Much of the roots of the problem involves history such as the Second International’s statism, the acquisition of political power by the Bolsheviks when Russia was socially, economically and materially unable to achieve socialism and where the nomenklatura and apparatchiks substituting themselves for the capitalist class.

As well documented by anthropologists there has been many societies which have not involved a monetary economy – in fact some exist even today in isolated parts of the world. Dollars and cents, pounds and pence, salary checks, and price tags on goods are not an intrinsic part of the human essence.  

Free access to goods and services denies to any group or individuals the political leverage with which to dominate others. This will work to ensure that a socialist society is run on the basis of democratic consensus.

According to capitalist economic theory, prices are the means for determining the rational allocation of resources in a money economy. But, in fact, prices are not intended for the purpose of organising production. The function of pricing is to fix costs with a view to making profit. In practice, costing and pricing are ultimately about calculating the exploitation of labour, enabling the capitalist class to live and accumulate capital from the wealth that the working class produces but does not consume. The problem of rationally allocating productive resources in an economy is common to all human societies at least as long as these resources remain relatively limited compared to needs. However, there is no need to assume that this allocation could be effected rationally only through the exchange of resources taking the value -“price”- form.

Labour power, your ability to work, is a commodity that is sold on the open market like anything else, the `price’ you get for it is your wage. If you have special natural skills or a training to perform a particular kind of labour which is in high demand then like everything else you can command a higher price for it, as well as good working conditions.

A monetary economy gives rise to the illusion that the “cost” of producing something is merely financial. Money is the universal unit of measurement, the “general equivalent” that allows everything to be compared with everything else under all circumstances—but only in terms of their labour-time cost or the total time needed on average to produce them from start to finish.

Such non-monetary calculation of course already happens, on the technical level, under capitalism. Once the choice of productive method has been made (according to expected profitability as revealed by monetary calculation) then the real calculations in kind of what is needed to produce a specific good commence so much raw materials, so much energy, so much labour.

In socialism it is not the case that the choice of productive method will become a technical choice that can be left to engineers, as is sometimes misunderstood by critics, but that this choice too will be made in real terms, in terms of the real advantages and disadvantages of alternative methods and in terms of, on the one hand, the utility of some good or some project in a particular circumstance at a particular time and, on the other hand, of the real “costs” in the same circumstances and at the same time of the required materials, energy and productive effort.

Production- for- use would operate in direct response to need. These would arise in local communities expressed as required quantities such as grammes, kilos, tonnes, litres, metres, cubic metres, etc, of various materials and quantities of goods. These would then be communicated as required elements of productive activity, as a technical sequence, to different scales of social production, according to necessity.

Each particular part of production would be responding to the material requirements communicated to it through the connected ideas of social production. It would be self -regulating, because each element of production would be self-adjusting to the communication of these material requirements. Each part of production would know its position. If requirements are low in relation to a build-up of stock, then this would an automatic indication to a production unit that its production should be reduced. If the register of needs and the communication of every necessary element of those needs to the structure of production would be clear and readily known. The supply of some needs will take place within the local community and in these cases production would not extent beyond this, as for example with local food production for local consumption.

Other needs could be communicated as required things to the regional organisation of production. Local food production would require glass, but not every local community could have its own glass works. The requirements for glass could be communicated to a regional glass works. These would be definite quantities of required glass. The glass works has its own suppliers of materials, and the amounts they require for the production of one tonne of glass are known in definite quantities. The required quantities of these materials could be passed by the glass works to the regional suppliers of the materials for glass manufacture. This would be a sequence of communication of local needs to the regional organisation of production, and thus contained within a region.

Local food production would also require tractors, and here the communication of required quantities of things could extend further to the world organisation of production. Regional manufacture could produce and assemble he component parts of tractors for distribution to local communities .These would be required in a definite number and , on the basis of this definite number of final products , the definite number of component parts for tractors would also be known . The regional production unit producing tractor would communicate these definite quantities to their own suppliers, and eventually this would extend to world production units extracting and processing the necessary materials.

This would be the self-regulating system of production for need, operating on the basis of the communication of need as definite quantities of things throughout the structure of production. Each production unit would convert the requirements communicated to it into its own material requirements and pass these on to its suppliers. This would be the sequence by which every element of labour required for the production of a final product would be known.

This system of self-regulating production for use is achieved through communications. Socialism would make full use of the means communications which have developed. These include not only transport such as roads, railways, shipping etc. They also include the existing system of electronic communications which provide for instant world-wide contact as well as facilities for storing and processing millions of pieces of information. Modern information technology could be used by socialism to integrate any required combination of different parts of its world structure of production.

Socialists seek to abolish economics.

“No exchange, no economy Socialism, being based on the common ownership of the means of production by all members of society, is not an exchange economy. Production would no longer be carried on for sale with a view to profit as under capitalism. In fact, production would not be carried on for sale at all. Production for sale would be a nonsense since common ownership of the means of production means that what is produced is commonly owned by society as soon as it is produced. The question of selling just cannot arise because, as an act of exchange, this could only take place between separate owners. Yet separate owners of parts of the social product are precisely what would not, and could not exist in a society where the means of production were owned in common.

However, socialism is more than just not an exchange economy; it is not an economy at all, not even a planned economy. Economics, or political economy as it was originally called, grew up as the study of the forces which came into operation when capitalism, as a system of generalised commodity production, began to become the predominant mode of producing and distributing wealth. The production of wealth under capitalism, instead of being a direct interaction between human beings and nature, in which humans change nature to provide themselves with the useful things they need to live, becomes a process of production of wealth in the form of exchange value. Under this system, production is governed by forces which operate independently of human will and which impose themselves as external, coercive laws when men and women make decisions about the production and distribution of wealth. In other words, the social process of the production and the distribution of wealth becomes under capitalism an economy governed by economic laws and studied by a special discipline, economics.

Socialism is not an economy, because, in re-establishing conscious human control over production, it would restore to the social process of wealth production its original character of simply being a direct interaction between human beings and nature. Wealth in socialism would be produced directly as such, i.e. as useful articles needed for human survival and enjoyment; resources and labour would be allocated for this purpose by conscious decisions, not through the operation of economic laws acting with the same coercive force as laws of nature. Although their effect is similar, the economic laws which come into operation in an exchange economy such as capitalism are not natural laws, since they arise out of a specific set of social relationships existing between human beings. By changing these social relationships through bringing production under conscious human control, socialism would abolish these laws and so also the economy as the field of human activity governed by their operation. Hence socialism would make economics redundant.

What we are saying, in effect, is that the term exchange economy is a tautology in that an economy only comes into existence when wealth is produced for exchange. It is now clear why the term planned economy is unacceptable as a definition of socialism. Socialism is not the planned production of wealth as exchange value, nor the planned production of commodities, nor the planned accumulation of capital. That is what state capitalism aims to be. Planning is indeed central to the idea of socialism, but socialism is the planned (consciously coordinated) production of useful things to satisfy human needs precisely instead of the production, planned or otherwise, of wealth as exchange value, commodities and capital. In socialism wealth would have simply a specific use value (which would be different under different conditions and for different individuals and groups of individuals) but it would not have any exchange, or economic, value.

In socialist society productive activity would take the form of freely chosen activity undertaken by human beings with a view to producing the things they needed to live and enjoy life. The necessary productive work of society would not be done by a class of hired wage workers but by all members of society, each according to their particular skills and abilities, cooperating to produce the things required to satisfy their needs both as individuals and as communities. Work in socialist society could only be voluntary since there would be no group or organ in a position to force people to work against their will.

Socialist production would be production solely for use. The products would be freely available to people, who would take them and use them to satisfy their needs. In socialism people would obtain the food, clothes and other articles they needed for their personal consumption by going into a distribution centre and taking what they needed without having to hand over either money or consumption vouchers. Houses and flats would be rent-free, with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, communications, health care, education, restaurants and laundries would be organised as free public services. There would be no admission charge to theatres, cinemas, museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation. The best term to describe this key social relationship of socialist society is free access, as it emphasises the fact that in socialism it would be the individual who would decide what his or her individual needs were. As to collective needs (schools, hospitals, theatres, libraries and the like), these could be decided by the groups of individuals concerned, using the various democratic representative bodies which they would create at different levels in socialist society. Thus production in socialism would be the production of free goods to meet self-defined needs, both individual and collective. “

From final chapter of “State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management”

To advocate monetary calculation, is to advocate that only one consideration—the total average production time needed to produce goods—should be taken into account when making decisions about which productive methods to employ. This is patently absurd but it is what is imposed by capitalism. Naturally, it leads to all sorts of aberrations from the point of view of human interests. In particular it rules out a rational, long-term attitude towards conserving resources and it imposes intolerable conditions on the actual producers (speed-up, pain, stress, boredom, long hours, night work, shiftwork, accidents).

Socialism, because it will calculate directly it kind, will be able to take these other, more important, factors than production time into account. This will naturally lead to different, in many cases quite different, productive methods being adopted than now under capitalism. If the health, comfort and enjoyment of those who actually manipulate the materials, or who supervise the machines which do this, to transform them into useful objects is to be paramount, certain methods are going to be ruled out altogether. The fast moving production lines associated with the manufacture of cars would be stopped for ever; night work would be reduced to the strict minimum; particularly dangerous or unhealthy jobs would be automated (or completely abandoned).

 Work can, in fact must, become enjoyable. But to the extent that work becomes enjoyable, measurement by minimum average working time would be completely meaningless, since people would not be seeking to minimize or rush such work. The supply of some needs will take place within the local community and in these cases production would not extent beyond this. Other needs could be communicated as required things to the regional organisation of production. Local food production would require glass, but not every local community could have its own glass works. The requirements for glass could be communicated to a regional glass works. Some organisation for such as mining for raw material sources would require world co-ordination. When socialism is established it will be necessary to set up councils at local, regional and global levels for the administration of social affairs in every aspect of productive activity. Also there will have to be councils whose functions will be to co-ordinate the work of the various specific councils. The majority of the people in a local area will make decisions affecting that area specifically, the people in a certain region will make decisions for that region and everyone will make global decisions.

The problem with a centrally-planned model of socialism is amongst other things its inability to cope with change. It lacks any kind of feedback mechanism which allows for mutual adjustments between the different actors in such an economy. It is completely inflexible in this regard. A decentralised or polycentric version of socialism, on the other hand, overcomes these difficulties. It facilitates the generation of information concerning the supply and demand for production and consumption goods through the economy via a distributed information .Stock or inventory control systems employing calculation in kind are absolutely indispensable to any kind of modern production system.

In a “free access” socialist economy income or purchasing power would, of course, be devoid of meaning. So too would the notion of status based upon the conspicuous consumption of wealth. Because individuals would stand in equal relation to the means of production and have free access to the resultant goods and services

Marx saw the communist administration as a federation of self-governing groups largely concerned with their internal affairs and collaborating for the comparatively few purposes that concern all the groups. The association of free producers, not a centrally planned State whose roots go back to “Bismarckian State-Socialism” and Lassalle, so readily endorsed by Lenin and his Bolsheviks yet so rarely acknowledged by his pupils.

How are these needs communicated? What allocation mechanism do you use? Certainly it won’t be by getting those individuals needs allotted to them.

Decisions involving choices of a general nature, such as what forms of energy to use, which of two or more materials to employ to produce a particular good, whether and where to build a new factory, there is a technique already in use under capitalism that could be adapted for use in socialism: so-called cost-benefit analysis and its variants. Naturally, under capitalism the balance sheet of the relevant benefits and costs advantages and disadvantages of a particular scheme or rival schemes is drawn up in money terms, but in socialism a points system for attributing relative importance to the various relevant considerations could be used instead. The points attributed to these considerations would be subjective, in the sense that this would depend on a deliberate social decision rather than on some objective standard. In the sense that one of the aims of socialism is precisely to rescue humankind from the capitalist fixation with production time/money, cost-benefit type analyses, as a means of taking into account other factors, could therefore be said to be more appropriate for use in socialism than under capitalism. Using points systems to attribute relative importance in this way would not be to recreate some universal unit of evaluation and calculation, but simply to employ a technique to facilitate decision-making in particular concrete cases. The advantages /disadvantages and even the points attributed to them can, and normally would, differ from case to case. So what we are talking about is not a new abstract universal unit of measurement to replace money and economic value but one technique among others for reaching rational decisions in a society where the criterion of rationality is human welfare.

Planning in socialism is essentially a question of industrial organisation, of organising productive units into a productive system functioning smoothly to supply the useful things which people had indicated they needed, both for their individual and for their collective consumption. What socialism would establish would be a rationalised network of planned links between users and suppliers; between final users and their immediate suppliers, between these latter and their suppliers, and so on down the line to those who extract the raw materials from nature. There is no point in drawing up in advance the sort of detailed blueprint of industrial organisation that the old IWW and the Syndicalists used to, but it is still reasonable to assume that productive activity would be divided into branches and that production in these branches would be organised by a delegate body. The responsibility of these industries would be to ensure the supply of a particular kind of product either, in the case of consumer goods, to distribution centres or, in the case of goods used to produce other goods, to productive units or other industries.

Since the needs of consumers are always needs for a specific product at a specific time in a specific locality, we will assume that socialist society would leave the initial assessment of likely needs to a delegate body under the control of the local community (although, other arrangements are possible if that were what the members of socialist society wanted). In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period, would enable the local distribution committee (for want of a better name) to estimate what the need for food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period. Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants, builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the bodies charged with coordinating supplies to local communities.

The individual would have free access to the goods on the shelves of the local distribution centres; the local distribution centres free access to the goods they required to be always adequately stocked with what people needed; their suppliers free access to the goods they required from the factories which supplied them; industries and factories free access to the materials, equipment and energy they needed to produce their products; and so on. Production and distribution in socialism would thus be a question of organising a coordinated and more or less self-regulating system of linkages between users and suppliers, enabling resources and materials to flow smoothly from one productive unit to another, and ultimately to the final user, in response to information flowing in the opposite direction originating from final users. The productive system would thus be set in motion from the consumer end, as individuals and communities took steps to satisfy their self-defined needs. Socialist production is self-regulating production for use.

To ensure the smooth functioning of the system, a central statistical office would be needed to provide estimates of what would have to be produced to meet people’s likely individual and collective needs. These could be calculated in the light of consumer wants as indicated by returns from local distribution committees and of technical data (productive capacity, production methods, productivity, etc) incorporated in input-output tables. For, at any given level of technology (reflected in the input-output tables), a given mix of final goods (consumer wants) requires for its production a given mix of intermediate goods and raw materials; it is this latter mix that the central statistical office would be calculating in broad terms. Such calculations would also indicate whether or not productive capacity would need to be expanded and in what branches. The centre (or rather centres for each world-region) would thus be essentially an information clearing house, processing information communicated to it about production and distribution and passing on the results to industries for them to draw up their production plans so as to be in a position to meet the requests for their products coming from other industries and from local communities. The only calculations that would be necessary in socialism would be calculations in kind. On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products.

Stock or inventory control systems employing calculation in kind are, as was suggested earlier, absolutely indispensable to any kind of modern production system. While it is true that they operate within a price environment today, that is not the same thing as saying they need such an environment in order to operate. The key to good stock management is the stock turnover rate – how rapidly stock is removed from the shelves – and the point at which it may need to be re-ordered. This will also be affected by considerations such as lead times – how long it takes for fresh stock to arrive – and the need to anticipate possible changes in demand.

A typical sequence of information flows in a socialist economy might be as follows. Assume a distribution point (shop) stocks a certain consumer good – say, cans of baked beans. From past experience it knows that it will need to re-order approximately 1000 cans from its suppliers at the start of every month or, by the end of the month, supplies will be low. Assume that, for whatever reason, the rate of stock turnover increases sharply to say 2000 cans per month. This will require either more frequent deliveries or, alternatively, larger deliveries. Possibly the capacity of the distribution point may not be large enough to accommodate the extra quantity of tins required in which case it will have to opt for more frequent deliveries. It could also add to its storage capacity but this would probably take a bit more time. In any event, this information will be communicated to its suppliers. These suppliers, in turn, may require additional tin plate (steel sheet coated with tin), to make cans or beans to be processed and this information can similarly be communicated in the form of new orders to suppliers of those items further down the production chain. And so on and so forth. The whole process is, to a large extent, automatic – or self-regulating – being driven by dispersed information signals from producers and consumers concerning the supply and demand for goods and, as such, is far removed from the gross caricature of a centrally planned economy.

It may be argued that this overlooks the problem of opportunity costs .For example, if the supplier of baked beans orders more tin plate from the manufacturers of tin plate then that will mean other uses for this material being deprived by that amount. However, it must be born in mind in the first place that the systematic overproduction of goods that Marx talked of – i.e. buffer stock – applies to all goods, consumption goods as well as production goods. So increased demand from one consumer/producer, need not necessarily entail a cut in supply to another – or at least, not immediately. The existence of buffer stocks provides for a period of re-adjustment.

Liebig’s Law of the Minimum – states is that plant growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources available to a plant but by the particular factor that is scarcest. This factor is called the limiting factor. It is only by increasing the supply of the limiting factor in question – eg nitrogen fertiliser – that you promote plant growth. Liebig’s Law can be applied equally to the problem of resource allocation in any economy. It makes sense from an economic point of view to economise most on those things that are scarcest and to make greatest use of those things that are abundant. To claim that all factors are scarce (because the use of any factor entails an opportunity cost) and, consequently, need to be economised is actually not a very sensible approach to adopt. You cannot treat every factor equally – that is, as equally scarce – or, if you do, this will result in gross misallocation of resources and economic inefficiency. The most sensible basis on which to make such a discrimination is the relative availability of different factors and this is precisely what the law of the minimum is all about. When a particular factor is limited in relation to the multifarious demands placed on it, the only way in which it can be “inefficiently allocated” (although this is ultimately a value judgement) is in choosing “incorrectly” to which particular end use it should be allocated. Beyond that, you cannot misuse or misallocate a resource if it simply isn’t available to misallocate (that is, where there are inadequate or no buffer stocks on the shelf, so to speak). Of necessity, one is compelled to seek out a more abundant alternative or substitute.

To determine priorities Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” would be a guide to action. It would seem reasonable to suppose that needs that were most pressing and upon which the satisfaction of others needs were contingent, would take priority over those other needs. We are talking here about our basic physiological needs for food, water, adequate sanitation and housing and so on. This would be reflected in the allocation of resources: high priority end goals would take precedence over low priority end goals where resources common to both are revealed using the earlier discussed “points” system of cost benefit analysis.

To sum up, a communist steady-state equilibrium, will have been reached. Gradual change, growth, will be simple and painless. The task of planning becomes one of simple routine; the role of economics is virtually eliminated.

It was Marx who said in communism it is now society’s free (disposable) time and no longer labor time that becomes the true measure of society’s wealth.

The main problem with all those artificial social constructs is that while they are trying to get to somewhere that could (arguably) be thought of as fairly close to what world socialists want, it seems to be going a long and difficult way round. They address the political sphere while leaving relatively intact the economic sphere.

To have a system that allows wages to be dispensed on the basis of work carried out, allows money to circulate, and presumably restricts access to wealth (e.g. food or housing) unless you have sufficient money to purchase something, doesn’t seem to be too far from capitalism for me in terms of its outward appearance. More importantly, despite its relatively limited ambitions, we fail to see how they could actually work.

It seems to us that it would be far better and easier to actually just go one step further. Don’t just remove ownership of the means of production but remove ownership of money – by opening up access to wealth, thereby making money redundant.

Too many supposed alternatives to capitalism are about building a fairly massive (and socially unproductive) state administration for policing all the wage levels, labour outputs etc. In contrast the practical aspects of a world socialist revolution is not about creating ever greater bureaucratic structures, but probably quite the opposite – it will be about removing the barriers capitalism has developed which prohibit access to wealth, and at a stroke create an economic environment without individual (i.e. monetary) incentives (“from each according to ability, to each according to need”)

The reason they all go to such lengths to construct such a complex and wasteful system of checks and balances is ultimately that its proponents are unwilling/unable to challenge one of the central arguments propping up capitalism, that humans can – if given the right economic framework (or arguably no economic framework) in fact consciously co-operate, work and consume.

The anti-capitalists should be moving beyond just being “anti” and need to start discussing how an alternative system could operate. But in our view, the anti-capitalist movement doesn’t just “not go far enough”. They offer a model that retains major elements of the market system, but more importantly is simply highly unlikely to be workable in the real world. Cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises may be  attractive to those who dislike capitalism, but, in the final analysis, their proponents lack confidence that either there are sufficient resources on the planet, or that human beings can:

– work voluntarily, and/or

– co-operate to organise production & distribution of wealth without chaos, and/or

– consume wealth responsibly without some form of rationing

We are trying to demonstrate that “from each according to abilities , to each according to needs” is an achievable and practical demand.  We could be perhaps describe as a Marxist-based (a William Morris – Peter Kropotkin amalgam, may be a better description) but non-Social Democrat 2nd Internationalist, non-Leninist 3rd Internationalist, non-Trotskyite 4th Internationalist, viable alternative to capitalism, that has been presented (with not much success, granted) by a formally structured yet non-leader political party for over a hundred years .

Rather than direct criticism at genuine Marxists, the more appropriate target would have been the Leninists (including the Trotskyist variety.) After all, it was they and not Marx who argued that the working class required the dictatorship of a vanguard party, with professional revolutionaries to lead them and that the working class was incapable of anything more than trade-union consciousness. Marx certainly never shared these ideas. And if a Marxist did advocate such views , to paraphrase Marx, then Marx himself would not have been a Marxist. The Marx and his meaning of Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a mere synonym for the conquest of political power by the working class. – in contrast to Lenin’s interpretation .

Indeed Lenin is quoted as saying “Now we are repeating what was approved by the Central EC two years ago . . . Namely, that the Soviet Socialist Democracy (sic!) is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at best realised by a Dictator who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed” (Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 17, p. 89. First Russian Edition).

Lenin’s short article The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913) is a concise explanation of the basics of Marxism. It is noticeable however that Lenin’s Three Sources article contained no mention of the phrase or Lenin’s particular conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  But by 1918 the dictatorship of the proletariat had become for Lenin “the very essence of Marx’s teaching” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918.)

Why not read Paresh Chattopadhyay’s Manifesto ofEmancipation, on Marx approach in the Gotha programme to the transitional period – which is far removed from any Leninist or Trotskyist idea of “workers state”.

And as for Lenin, was this not what he said:

“If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years”

And also from What is to be Done:-

“The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. ” “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside of the economic struggle, from outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers”….“The spontaneous working class movement by itself is able to create (and inevitably creates) only trade unionism, and working class trade unionist politics are precisely working class bourgeois politics”.

It is sad that we still possess political parties that claim to be socialist advocating the cul-de-sac of the workers state.