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Credit to @[email protected] for the original meme.
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Flippanarchy
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A distributed surplus value is not an expoitative one.
Which sounds all nice and good but... yeah, that's not how that went down.
Says who? Anyway, the change to capitalism didn‘t improve that.
In case you were thinking the opposite, i think we can safely assume that neither this meme nor the comments support capitalism.
Classes like the Party members, the Bureaucracy members, the Military members does not make for a classless society, and neither does the work hierarchy and the use of Taylorism and Fordism.
More importantly to the current times, "surplus" based on cheapened nature such as undervalued waste sinks may not actually be a surplus, but a loss.
The change from State Capitalism to Private Capitalism, indeed, did not improve that.
It doesn't make a classless society, but it is necessary at least for a short while to establish the class rule and an actual path towards socialism and withering away of the state.
You can't have socialism without having all of people's needs met which requires repurposing the means of production, you can't have socialism without strong control during the post-revolutionary period given the counter-revolutionary tendencies of bourgeoisie/third-party opportunistic groups (most revolutions happen in pairs/chains, its the most volatile period) - that's the purpose of the period of transition.
Historically, countries such as USSR, China (though its a question if China's revolution was proletarian at all) and later didn't get past the transitionary period because of tens if not hundreds of millions of peasantoids and underdeveloped industry, having them to stay in this awkward period for a long time, which led to complete degeneration of ideology after opportunists took the reigns (like Stalin), who bastardized the meaning of Socialism and essentially caused the countries to become "red bourgeois".
The state, likes its private corporate children, functions as undead zombies. It doesn't wither away peacefully, it grows and attacks.
I agree that the state isn't the perfect solution, I'm not some dogmatic statist and who knows - maybe dutch leftcom councillism can work really well.
Historical examples of communist revolutions who wielded the state were awful, I agree. However, using USSR in particular as anti-"withering away of the state" argument just shows a lack of understanding of the concept and history.
The state isn't some metaphysical evil that's the "big bad", no - it's the oppressive class relations, and the state is merely an instrument to enforce such class relations. For the state to start withering away, one needs to do away with classes entirely, which means building up or repurposing productive forces for socialist mode of production, suppressing counter-revolutions (like in Russian Civil War) to keep the bourgeoisie away from returning to power, etc.
USSR had a peasant and industrial underdevelopment problem, where after the revolution there was no way to quickly "build up" these forces without taking multiple decades to a decent enough state where everyone's needs could be met via a planned economic model, which is a major task of a centralized state. Without this task being completed, capitalist commodity production model persists and state cannot wither away.
But of course, all I have is a wall of materialist analysis and not some moralistic anarchist slogans. I do like Anarchists don't get me wrong, but I wish there was more materialism incorporated into your analyses, like actual material reasons for why the state should be immediately abolished and actual alternatives to seizing control and making sure revolution succeeds over moralization and pointless prose.
Just because you put ideas in a bucket it doesn't mean that there are causal relationships between them. The bourgeoisie return to power by taking over the state again, or a new bourgeois class grows up, a local and organic one, and does the same.
States and corporations, in of themselves, are entities similar to what's now called "AGI". They become self-sustaining self-centered entities. The ancient tradition, as pointed out by others ( https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/ ), is to kill states early, in their infancy. Kill the state, start a new one or a different one when it's necessary, and repeat.
What's the point if you still end up with capitalism? These regimes are just doing a different flavor, an A/B test of a different strain of capitalism. You're relying on this causal claim that "it will happen", but it's based entirely on old theory that has not aged well at all. The "plan" literally looks like beating Capitalism with capitalism. That's just going to lead to more capitalism. I simply don't get how you can declare that such plans lead to the goals. And if they don't, they need to be scrapped.
Worse, still, is the issue that we live with a ticking timebomb (the stability of the climate and the biosphere, separately and together, collapsing.) Time is running out.
I think so long as reigns exist there will always be opportunists ready to take them.
Genuinely, isn't this just a "no true communism" argument?
That doesn't apply every time someone says that a thing is not part of a group. No true Scotsman has never been to Scotland, and no true communist society has a state, classes, or money.
Mom, can we have political agency?
Nope, it still is exploitative, given how surplus value implies workers not being paid full value for their labor. Even if workers were to seize the means of their production and got a say over their surplus value and where it gets repurposed, it'd still be exploitative due to how markers and competition works, and workers having to exploit themselves by "paying themselves" less, as that's the only area where you can reliably cut costs of production.
The only non-exploitative mode of production is socialist mode of production, where markets, private ownership, commodity production, wealth accumulation get all done away with for planned for-use production.