The Myth of Twentieth-Century Socialism and the Continuing Relevance of Karl Marx

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Notes

1. To use Marx's term having an ironic reference to the composer Richard Wagner (Marx 2008: 794).

2. This text is the only place in Marx's writings where this two-phase temporal division of the future society is found.

3. In his edition of the manuscript published as Capital III Engels translates this passage into German, but not quite literally (Marx 1964a: 99).

4. Like the widely used phrase of the Left, “victory of the October 1917 revolution,” by which is of course meant the seizure of political power.

5. This idea reappears in Marx's second manuscript for Capital II (Marx 2008: 347). Interestingly, considering both the texts of the two volumes of Capital on allocation-distribution as given here, one sees clearly that they refer not to the higher phase of the socialist society but to its lower phase referred to in the Gothacritique; that is, we already have a society of free and associated individuals with neither commodity production nor wage labor.

6. The term “shopkeeper” is in English in the text.

7. Although Marx considered the 1871 Commune as proletarian rule, he never connected the Commune with the first phase of communism.

8. For Marx wage is simply the value of labor power, which is a commodity (see e.g. Marx 1988: 16).

9. The discussion of socialism in Lenin's case was purely theoretical, the outcome of his specific (mis)reading of Marx, while for Stalin the theorization came as a rationalization of the actually existing regime he was heading.

10. In the expression the term “separate” (otdelnyi) does not appear in Moscow's English version.

11. Translated from Chinese and transmitted to us by the distinguished Chinese scholar Wang Hui, in a private communication.

12. Che Guevara, with his otherwise refreshingly critical notes on the Soviet Textbook on Political Economy in his recently published manuscripts, does not cross the bounds of the “state socialist” framework, including its commodity production and wage system. See Guevara (2006).

13. This echoes what Marx had said in his 1871 Address on the Commune: that it had made “individual property a truth” by transforming the means of production “into instruments of free and associated labor” (Marx 1971: 75).