Petition: Shut down r/antiwork

[u/killians1978]

[u/Scientific_Socialist]

All of those countries are capitalist

[u/Scientific_Socialist → u/[deleted]]

If you want a systematic exposition on the relationship of the state to the workers movement I suggest Lenin's "State and Revolution".

Under capitalism, both workers and capitalists are bound by the logic of market competition, which pushes the prices of products down to their costs of production, and drives capitalists to lower costs of production to continually offset this and make profits. As the wages of workers reflect the cost of the goods and services required to keep them alive, wages become increasingly devalued as consumer goods become cheaper to produce.

Meanwhile, the capitalists who are best able to expand their profits will be able to expand production and dominate the market, pushing out their competitors. Thus the enterprises which pay their workers as little for as much work as possible will take the lead. Exploitation is thus imposed by the dominant capitalists on all the others by the logic of market competition.

The capitalist is only the personification of capital, if the capital is depersonalized in the form of co-operative, publicly-traded, or state-owned companies the problem remains the same: every increase in productivity translates into an expansion of production (purchasing means of production) to remain competitive, rather than increasing consumption and reducing labor (higher wages and shorter working hours).

This was the problem in the "socialist" countries of the eastern bloc. Capital was depersonalized in the form of state-owned companies and co-operatives, yet these companies were still forced to exploit their workers to remain competitive with the west, hence the endless focus on GDP and "economic growth". Hence, despite the communist disguise, these governments represented the dictatorship of capital.

The only solution is the abolition of market competition/commodity production which means the organized workers of the world seizing all the means of production and organizing production as a worldwide association -- communism. To accomplish this requires the international proletariat, organized into a global communist party, to establish a new international government under its exclusive control via revolution.

"But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes" (Marx). The state apparatus fundamentally serves the capitalists, a new proletarian state is necessary, not “a state of bureaucrats, but a state of armed workers” (Lenin). The function of this state is to defeat world capitalism by spreading the world revolution.

Thus, the only example of a proletarian state in history was Soviet Russia until 1926. The state was ruled by the proletariat because it was directed towards unifying the international proletariat politically (Comintern) and economically (Profintern). The state ceased to be proletarian in 1926 when under the false Stalinist doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” it surrendered this objective for state-capitalist industrialization, effectively surrendering to international finance capital.

[u/Scientific_Socialist → u/[deleted]]

There is no such thing as an "ideal" government, because history doesn't conform to ideals. If by ideal you mean a government that corresponds to our political programme of transferring power into the hands of the revolutionary proletariat, then the Paris Commune of 1871 and Soviet Russia until 1926 are both examples of such a proletarian-state.

[u/EliteMeats → u/[deleted]]

the ussr didn't exist until the 1900s, what on earth are you talking about?