cabral68

That was 1847 - as the communist movement developed it became clear this wasn't the way forward, especially after the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 showed the way. I believe they say this in a later preface to the Manifesto.

He wrote quite a bit about the state - charting its historical development in class society in his Ethnological Notebooks (which later would become the basis for Engels's famous book), and studying its role in the class struggles he witnessed in his day.

He concluded, based on the experience of the Paris Commune, that the working class cannot lay hold of the ruling class's state, but must destroy it and create its own, working class power, which is markedly different. The Paris Commune was the example of such a power.

What I want to ask you, Prof. Wolff, is if you think there is any value to this revolutionary theory of Marx's, or if you think socialism can be brought about by the mere establishment and expansion of workers' cooperatives. If the latter is true, do you think this fits with Marx's analysis of the Law of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital?

Just because he wrote more about, for example, the working day, doesn't mean he had "little interest in the state, wrote very little about it" - he was clearly very interested, and dedicated much time to it, precisely because it forms an essential part of the capitalist mode of production.

What I was getting at with my question about the law of value is that it lays bare something else, something relevant to co-operatives - that any firm, whether it has a boss or not, has to produce profit in order to survive within capitalist society. Therefore what tends to happen in co-operatives is that the workers have to exploit themselves, eventually either getting outcompeted or being forced to shift to the normal bourgeois operation of a firm.

This goes back to Marx's analysis of the state, which shows that moving beyond capitalism necessarily requires a political confrontation, one in which the working class must abolish the bourgeois state and exercise power over society.

I'll ask more clearly, and hopefully you're not too swarmed to answer: do you agree that the workers need to take this power in order to transcend capitalism, or do you think the expansion of co-operatives is enough to achieve that end? Do you think the abolition of commodity-production is a historical necessity?

The Paris Commune happened more than two decades after the Manifesto was published.

By the Marxist definition, i.e. the extraction of surplus value.