Cowbee [he/they]

Thanks!

The State and Revolution is the best work on this, but Reform or Revolution is also a really good work! Essentially, whichever class controls the commanding heights has the ultimate power over the state, regardless of how voting goes.

Great points!

This sounds more like a coup from the Nazis than from the bourgeoisie. How did they push them into power?

The Nazis were handed power directly when the capitalists they were friendly with pressured the state.

I need to learn more about Allende history, but why is that? What makes the military defend capital, not the government?

The state is not outside of class struggle, it is within it. It is not an outside body above the class struggle. The state is there to manage the affairs of the ruling class of society and protect its interests, and the military is the monopoly on violence that the state uses to carry those out. The state is not a neutral body to be taken over and commanded like a mindless tool.

No I don’t. I don’t see what would concretely prevent the state from turning against the bourgeoisie.

What do you believe a state is? How does it function, and how does it run?

That’s fair, there really aren’t many actual accelerationists. It’s used to collapse Marxist arguments into a simplistic and destructive framing as a strawman more than anything.

Technically accelerationism is less about fascism, and more about concentration of capital. The Democrats are the accelerationist pick in the US as the more competent imperialist party. The ideas behind accelerationism are in capitalism’s built-in death clock as capital accumulates, centralizes, and socializes, not in the explicit pain or terror inflicted directly on the working class.

Other than that, agreed!

How would it materialize concretely in a western social democracy country?

Fascism emerged concretely in Germany in the 1930s. Germany was a poor social democracy at the time, devastated with war debts from World War I, and had a rising communist party. The Nazi party grew from killing labor organizers and communists, and was installed against the will of the people.

Yes, as I said, I’m not talking about reformism, but the party completely replacing the state by the dictatorship of the proletariat, just like a revolution, but from the inside.

This is reformism. I think you’re confusing reformism with social democracy, social democracy is the limit of reformism. An “electoral revolution” is not a revolution, winning elections does not translate to taking the economy by force.

Why couldn’t they do both? Pass the law, and seize the means of production using the state army and the armed workers.

The capitalist state army is not a mindless drone that sides directly with whoever is in charge of the state. It sides with capital. Allende was coup’ed by the Chilean military. Again, you are confusing elected positions as absolute mandates from heaven, because you do not see that the state is reliant upon and reinforced by the mode of production.

A Marxist party could win electorally. They’d still have to have a revolution, coming from the mass armed workers and the communist party. The socialist revolutionaries won the provisional government, but that’s not what dispersed them, they were dispersed by the workers and Soviets, who took the state directly.

There are 2 points to make here.

The first, is that bourgeois democracy is in practice democracy for capitalists alone. It provides the illusion of change, and the possibility for it. The frequent swaps between parties provides instability in governance while allowing capital to progress fairly unimpeded. Because capitalists control the commanding heights of the economy, they control the state, and can rip away the illusion of bourgeois democracy at any time they wish, essentially implementing fascism.

The second is that the state is not a neutral state, it’s a state as it relates to the base of society, the mode of production and distribution. The capitalist state is a state for capitalism, it isn’t a neutral state that can be swapped piece by piece. This is because the capitalist state co-evolved alongside capitalism itself, they are mutually reinforcing aspects. A Marxist party cannot expropriate the bourgeoisie through decree, it must come through force, and the class that holds the commanding heights of the economy holds the force of the state.

This is why change must come through revolution, replacing the capitalist state with a socialist state. Winning electorally does not translate to conquest of the means of production and distribution, the capitalists must be rooted out of their existing positions through an extra-legal movement. The state must not be replaced brick by brick, but smashed and reborn as a worker state. The problem appears to be that you still believe legal measures have power beyond how we choose to enforce them, but in reality laws are upheld or ignored depending on which class they are meant to apply to, because the state has a class character.