RFH Ep. 74: Marx on the Transformation of Capitalism into Communism

The episode’s main segment is a presentation by Andrew, at a recent MHI meeting, on what Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program says about the differences between capitalism and communism, and about revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism. His close reading of the text is informed by Marx’s conception of the relation between a society’s economic basis and its political and legal superstructure, and it calls attention to ways in which Marx’s critique draws on his concepts of directly and indirectly social labor and his value theory. Andrew also contrasts the standard organizational principle of post-Marx Marxism to what Raya Dunayevskaya called the “new ground for organization” that Marx’s Critique created. Andrew suggests that the failure to embrace the Critique’s new ground for organization has been bound up with a failure to appreciate or build upon the Critique’s economic theory. In the episode’s current-events segment, Brendan and Andrew discuss recent pieces by Tara Bilous, a Ukrainian socialist, on resisting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and resisting the pro-Putin apologetics of Jacobin authors, DSA bodies, and others on “the Left. ”