Can Government or State be the Class System ?  - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15157442
Philosopher101 wrote:@Wellsy do you have any opinions to share ?

You’re asking What is my (or anyones) opinion about the belief that the government isn’t representative of class interests and is a neutral representation of the universal will? Thus prompting the criticism of how this isn’t the case and it clearly represents a dominant class which oppresses the other.
Is this the context you're prompting?
#15157444
Wellsy wrote:You’re asking What is my (or anyones) opinion about the belief that the government isn’t representative of class interests and is a neutral representation of the universal will? Thus prompting the criticism of how this isn’t the case and it clearly represents a dominant class which oppresses the other.
Is this the context you're prompting?
Kind of yes !
#15157448
Wellsy wrote:You’re asking What is my (or anyones) opinion about the belief that the government isn’t representative of class interests and is a neutral representation of the universal will? Thus prompting the criticism of how this isn’t the case and it clearly represents a dominant class which oppresses the other.
Is this the context you're prompting?
In simpler language why do you think, Government can't be stated as a class system as well ? Whatever would be your answer according to marxist point of view, how do you justify it ? That's it.
#15157450
I’m little confused by the association between Marxists and the characterization of the government as NOT a class based system.
Philosopher101 wrote:Kind of yes !

Well simplest point is that there is only a particular interest which asserts itself as universal. A bit like a true fact becoming generalized to everything and turning into an absurdity.
From Anti-politics, the early Marx and Gramsci’s ‘integral state’
Marx agreed with Hegel (1967) when the latter insisted that because modern (bourgeois) civil society is atomistic and composed of competing particular, private, individual interests, there is a necessary separation between civil society and the universal or common social interest implied in the form of the state. Hegel argued that modern society allowed individual freedom unthinkable in previous social formations, but also recognised that the constant competition between private individuals in civil society – Hobbes’s (1997) ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ or ‘war of all against all’ – produced unceasing social instability. He argued this necessitated some kind of organism to hold society together: the modern state.

While Marx saw Hegel as the most advanced theorist of the modern state, he took Hegel to task for claiming that the state could truly express the universal social interest.
...
Marx identified that the antagonism between civil society and the state was unable to be resolved, precisely because in a society composed of competing particular interests, the state itself would be just another particular interest – even if in a formal or abstract way it claimed to stand for the general or collective interest of the society that it governed over.

Following this is the point that the state clearly pursues things with the limits of a class’ interest.
https://nodrivers.medium.com/a-marxist-critique-of-anarchism-5b426c51dd5e
But this is far from the only flaw in the analysis quoted above. Bakunin also posits that, instead of being a workers’ state, the socialist state will consist of “former workers,” former workers that, once they begin to rule, “will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from the governing heights of the State.” Again, do all those that work within capitalist states own capital? Do they play the stock market, run a factory, or sit on the governing board of a transnational corporation? Many do, for sure, but many more also do not. Does this stop them from working in the capitalist state, from serving the capitalists’ interests? It, of course, does not. One’s class is not simply a matter of your relationship to the means of production, though this is indeed the foundation and core of it. It is also to do with your position within the social organism — your ‘social class’ as opposed to your ‘economic class.’ Just as how the bourgeoisie, bereft under socialism of the economic ties that made them bourgeois in the first place, remain bourgeois in culture, practise, ideology and aims, so too does the worker, even if he does not work, still remain a worker in that other sense, in the sense of his loyalties, of the socialisation he underwent and continues to undergo, of his worldview and his values, his loves and his hates, his hopes and dreams and fears too. If the bourgeoisie can, having been liquidated as an economic class in the USSR by the 1930s, work towards and eventually even achieve total capitalist restoration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then the proletariat can similarly function according to their material, class interests even if they are not directly working at any one time. Again, anarchism treats capitalists and workers according to evidently different standards and demands. Even here though, we are ignoring the fact that, even if a woman may not be working as she works (the paradox of that phrase should, incidentally, be telling) in the proletarian state, it does not mean she stops being a proletarian — can she now sustain herself by any means other than selling her labour-power? Does she now control a part of the means of production? Does she have a waged workforce working under her? No, to all of these things, so in what way has she ceased to be a proletarian? Only in the immaterialist, idealist and workerist sense that anarchism demands of her.

Although there are issues of how to dissolve the state that presents itself as a representation of the true community, the goal is ultimately for the community to enact itself.
#15157453
After the revolution the so-called working class, or rather the vanguard, become the new bourgeoisie faster than you can blink. The Soviet Union was more equal that many Western countries on paper, but in reality the higher-ups had access to all the goodies (often Western ones) while the "working class" stood before empty shelves or had to wait 10 years for a shitty car.
#15157457
Rugoz wrote:After the revolution the so-called working class, or rather the vanguard, become the new bourgeoisie faster than you can blink. The Soviet Union was more equal that many Western countries on paper, but in reality the higher-ups had access to all the goodies (often Western ones) while the "working class" stood before empty shelves or had to wait 10 years for a shitty car.
Do you have any kind of philosophical concept in subject defining the government as a class system? Like we have for capitalism. I think whatever the class it is, even it isn't part of class somehow come in power become the ruling class and no matter what you fought for in the end come in power you just become opposite of it.
#15157466
Philosopher101 wrote:Do you have any kind of philosophical concept in subject defining the government as a class system? Like we have for capitalism. I think whatever the class it is, even it isn't part of class somehow come in power become the ruling class and no matter what you fought for in the end come in power you just become opposite of it.


It's commonly called oligarchy, or else I don't know what you're searching for.
#15158130
Rugoz wrote:
After the revolution the so-called working class, or rather the vanguard, become the new bourgeoisie faster than you can blink. The Soviet Union was more equal that many Western countries on paper, but in reality the higher-ups had access to all the goodies (often Western ones) while the "working class" stood before empty shelves or had to wait 10 years for a shitty car.



This is just base stereotyping, as for anything else.

The historical fact that the soviet form of workers' workplace control which proliferated in the early 20th century (in Russia), and given centralized political consciousness in the Bolshevik Revolution, eventually devolved and culminated in the form of nation-state-constrained Stalinism (Stalin's so-called 'socialism in one country'), means that something went wrong somewhere.

The culprit, as ever, was Western imperialism, which militarily *invaded* the nascent workers form of collective control over social production, necessitating a typically-*bourgeois*, nation-state-type form of nationalist consolidation, hence Stalin and Stalinism (etc.).

The Western imperialist counterrevolution in 1918 *cannot* be called a 'revolution', in the same sense as the Bolshevik Revolution (of 1917) -- since it was *antithetical* and *counterposed* to the soviet / workers-council proletarian revolution of the same period.

The resulting USSR under Stalin was *not* due to the goal of socialist revolution and its protagonistic vanguard, but rather was the Western-imperialist *stunting* of the nascent Bolshevik Revolution, a distinct concrete historical factor that's all-too-often overlooked, as in this treatment of yours, Rugoz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War


Yes, the collectivist, non-imperialist (non-capital-exporting) USSR *was* stratified and somewhat elitist, but it *wasn't* capitalist since there was no private property. The catch-up development of *production goods* (factories / industrial infrastructure) was prioritized over the production of mass-market *consumer*-type goods, since there were no markets, there was collectivist production, no poverty, and the country had to catch-up to prevailing international levels of industrialized production.

So while the USSR's bureaucratic elite *was* favoritistic, it *wasn't* bourgeois, nor was it capitalist or imperialist. Western bourgeois nation-states *are* inherently bourgeois-sided, against *working class* interests, since the personnel of the bourgeois nation-state are made up of the bourgeoisie.

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