Bordiga's version of Leninism led him to promote that socialism was not a society of workers controlling their...

What's the difference between democratic centralism and organic centralism? I haven't read much Bordiga yet but they seem pretty similar.

nothing in practice.

Well I'm not sure that you can apply the "in practice" thing to Bordiga since his ideas never became big outside Italy (and maybe France) and even there Bordigism is as niche as Trotskyism is in the Anglophone world.

Sweet "situation" guys. How incompetent can leftcoms be?

Basically, Lenin's conception was democracy for workers but dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. The parasitic elements in the bourgeois state would be purged, and wherever possible the state would be smashed and streamlined.

When explaining the concept of democratic centralism Lenin compares France and Switzerland and argues that the common people have far more liberty in France precisely due to its centralization then they do in Switzerland which has a federal republican system. For Lenin and Stalin the Soviets are the ideal representative body for the proletariat and in a way they bind the grassroots of local activism or opinion to the national and centralized whole.

Shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone that exploiting classes love localism when they can bend it to their favor.

What democratic centralism means for the party is that party decisions are binding upon all members, so that enemies of the proletariat don't undermine decisions made by the majority.

marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch04.htm
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

Hope this helps

The only difference between Bordiga and Lenin is that Bordiga wants to cut the pretenses of Leninism (of explicitly democratic principling, representation, etc.) and to fully assume the fact that any vanguardism will be organic in the sense that it does what the vanguard believes is to be done. "Organic" centralism is only different from democratic centralism in the sense that it's only the more apt title for an organizational form that is built and maintained organically through its inherent belief in being more suited than the non-vanguard in its role of guiding society towards post-capital.

The second difference, if it truly is a difference, is that Bordiga believes that any revolutionary not completely conscient of his role as monster doomed to dictate society forward, who tries to make compromises about muh representation, muh democracy, etc. will inevitably fool himself and either regress his odds of enacting his tyrany, or fall to opportunistic compromises like Stalin did (Bordiga's biggest criticism of Stalinism, outside of his insane death tolls, was that the death tolls themselves had no proper justification; that Stalin was a pussy who killed now for his little left-nationalist, "anti-imperialist" ambitions, and that these are no proper justification for assuming the role of Dr. Doom).

Fascism minus racism = Bordiga.

There is more magical handwavery in Bordiga than in the writings of the Technocrats. He is like a mean-spirited parody of it.

>people end up reading Wikipedia articles on Bordiga
Business as usual, really.

12 million members of the PCI at its height, defeated only by Mussolini's brownshirts in a coup.

Assuming you're a Stirnerite like most other black flags, I wish you'd stop making appeals to popularity (or even content, for that matter).

wtf i love bordiga now

Business as usual, really.

I feel it deep within, it's just beneath the skin
I must confess that I feel like a monster
I hate what I've become, the nightmare's just begun
I must confess that I feel like a monster

Top heh

Not a leftcom; just have actual respect for Bordiga, and not for Stirner. The only reason I even mention Stirner in the first place is because he has a little non-ironic popularity on here. Speaking of which, don't you have any Wikipedia articles to read?

...

...

Almost, except I'd change it to what you truly know it is

I don't get to declare victory on Siamese ornithology forums this early this often.

ideology is one hell of a drjug

Every Stirnerpost you see is completely and 100% serious.

...

Do tell what your ideological alignment is, then.

Also, reminder that Bordiga proposes you become the ultimate unironic Stirnerite, and thinks psychopaths (aka muh opportunists) won't just be able to run game over everyone if you just meme the correct mental schematic of religion-tier materialism out there hard enough, preferably through the arthurfist.jpg praxis he outlined.

Whelp, guess I won't be wasting my time on Bordiga soon.

"This is why I don't read" thread no. 733.

I shun this very plausible reality, thank you.

Notions of "superiority" are entirely detracted here. It's all about honesty and by extension efficiency.

If a revolutionary could reject revolution, he is not a revolutionary. But you know better than me that both the aforementioned implications are false.

Marxist communist without adjectives, but if it helps I take most inspiration from Marx himself, Lenin, Luxemburg, Althusser, Lacan and Zizek.

But Bordiga rejects post-Hegelian lifestylism (see: Spirit of Horsepower).

But Bordiga rejects categorical notions of "correctness" or vulgar utilitarian approaches to casualty (see these quotes: In the name of a greater civilisation, we curse those who for the sake of their ambitious dreams, brought about the massacre of so many young lives! and No matter how brutal the crime, you’ll always get glorification of its heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture!, from Bordiga's commentaries on the Balkan Wars and its similarities to the Stalinist and Spanish exploits).

Also, next time you report all of my posts because you know you can successfully get them removed by Prickly, think again. Because my posts may be deleted and archived, but I'm autistic enough to keep coming back for more.

pce

This is an impressive amount of unselfaware idealism

You don't know what you're saying, user. Let me help you out with PDF related.

Add Adorno and Saussure to this list.

No, that's exactly what I mean. You're dressing up mere ideas an abstractions as materialism and its quite pathetic.

And yet because you are placing honesty and efficiency as your priorities, in this context you are treating them as superior. Stop being so disingenuous.

He says one things and then directly contradicts himself in the implications of his proposals. As leftcoms tend to do do.

What metaphysical handwaving?

Finally you'll stay long enough to debate a point. FWIW, I never report posts, and the hotpockets love deleting my "arguments" as well.

I reject revolutionarism based on ill-formed theory.

I agree he is a pure Hegelian, my argument is his "doomed man", from my understanding via your memes, is he is functionally indinstinguishable from the ideal Stirnerite, as he has given up everything except his pure thirst for revolution, revolution for its own sake abstracted, it's demanding psychopathy, it's just asking for opportunism, due to the very fact that psychopaths can dissimulate perfectly. And, providing such a template for your /our guy/ in no way guarantees such a person ever existing.
"Vulgar" seems a little dismissive to recoiling in horror at any form of unjustified murder. Saying "well the imperialists did it too" is not good enough for me. I reject all such endeavors, and see a communist revolutionary project founded on "oh well, moral calculus is gauche" is not going to bode well. Explain what you mean by "categorical 'correctness'"?

I only read the Democratic Principle, on the recommendation of you memers, and that was enough for me to feel like he wasn't worth pursuing further. I haven't seen much to change my mind but further haughty proclamations, so I'm just going on shitposts. I'll give him more of a chance if you actually stick around to argue for once.

It really isn't. You're very confused and incredibly unaware. Notions that intrude into your worldview are not free terrain for uneducated buzzword slinging. Idealism within philosophy has a clear epistemological connotation. Read Politzer.

I really don't know why my entire thread was removed the other day and all my posts in other threads, but I suspected reports. Can't know for sure, but mods are mongoloids lately.

We can never posit anything in theory as materialism. We can methodologically build up the justifications for our ideas using materialism, but an idea and an abstraction is something inherently synonymous with the term idealism. It's where the term comes from. Materialism does not here stand opposite to idealism as vulgar scientism. My man.

I'm not. Or rather, you're implying Bordiga does but he doesn't, since he's the subject. What Bordiga says it that no matter our priorities (which in all cases should be an honest adherence to the proletariat's interest in post-capitalist society), we will crucially break away from notions of equal say, democracy and participatory politics when we perform the decivise acts that devise such a duty's ultimatum (the actual break into post-capitalism; which will necessarily give birth to something fundamentally undemocratic, which is consistent with a discursive (dialectical) relation to the proletariat's function as the motor of the revolution).

Which proposals? Bordiga's proposals are not unique. He's a Marxist communist. There is but one proposal to him.

Again this fixation on left communism as not only a particular ideology, let alone one that isn't incredibly varied in its content and then incredibly varied again in its ideological landscape.

Stop.

He's confused, I think.

I only left the other day because I needed sleep for the next and because you were honestly not worth losing sleep over in that thread, or at least were being increasingly more so. Which sucks, because you're not an idiot.

Then map the illness, instead of slinging buzzwords you don't (fully) understand (contextually) and presupposing the backdrop of the subjects at hand (Bordiga, communism, vanguardism, etc.) as if you know them but then evidently don't. Put in some fucking effort, Jesus.

Comparing the essence of revolutionary activity to Dr. Doom, or Nechayevian "doomed man", is to be taken as just that. It does not describe anything conscious; it descibes the unavoidable fate the content of any successful revolution(ary) will have in that his success is dependent on an abandonment of former relations and concepts, including democracy (which is suspended and overthrown post-capitalism, for it serves no mechanic function in its maintenance or legitimization).

This is not only a characteristic innate to the revolutionary ideal pre-Stirner, but the very conditions for revolutionary activity itself. Stirnerite egoist ethics, even though they are incompletely, self-defeating and based on incomplete or faced epistemological suggestions, if we take them directly also do not align with an obsession with. The categorical notion of "self-interest", as vague as Stirner posits it, cannot occur as vanguardist, for the vanguardist crucially acknowledges that he does impose his own duty upon himself (socially constructed, or esoterically in Stirner's words: (a) "spook"), and does it quite vicariously through the suffering of an entire class of society and for that class. For that class to disappear and exist but only as an artifact of history.

?

DSM/egopsy garbage diagnostic categories in my conty thread. GTFO pls.

There are no guarantees whatsoever.

I like you fam

et al.

Btw I'm banned atm for "shitposting." Gotta go home to repeal it.

"Unjustified" precisely because utilitarianism posits only notions of numerical tallyings, where one day is minus 1, and every hypothetical life saved in spite of it an infinite plus 1. This is vulgar, both as a representation of any notion of success to a revolutionary (reductive here too), but also to any argument behind Bordiga's critique of opportunism and its excuse making.

Opportunism? Opportunism means co-opting a pre-existing condition (your leadership over the USSR) for a particular purpose (also known as "private use of reason"). This requires more than the vulgar materialist explanation of "personal interest" ("Stalin did left nationalism because it gave him a boner!"), but also a strict look into social structures. In the case of the USSR, especially the backdrop of the party form is to be focused on as such a structure. Stalin could only have been Stalin on the condition that the party was built for it to be possible for him to become Stalin. Considering Bordiga rejects the idea that Lenin's survival could have changed anything, or that Trotsky were any better, he sees the problem at the very base of the Bolshevik party form as it was. Given that he is a Marxist, and the blank slate that is the party form as a tool, he decides to take a critical look at the way the party can be. This is where his critique is valuable. The same goes for any other tool of class rule, such as a federation, its syndicates, its municipalities, etc. Anarchists can, just like Marxists, not escape the use of directed action, hence why his critique of democracy as a principle is important, because it shapes the contours of rule itself, and is itself reliant on preconditions.

Exactly! I've said this before in another thread, but Engels' classic rebuttal to anti-"authoritarianism" ("Is there anything more authoritarian than a revolution, in which one portion of society overthrows the other?"). We need to truly look at what it means to rely on any form of rule towards this overthrow, and what this means in relation to this form's continuity and whether it is principled and honest to itself.

What does it truly mean to participate in a revolution? And I mean this not as what would the experience be like, but what does it signify inherently? What does revolution stand for, and what is its final objective, brutally?

It was in context of your previous comment
>correct materialism
implying that there is anything correct or incorrect use of materialist thinking, which is simply to never raise B before A.

Mods are incredibly neurotic as of late.

marxists.org/history/australia/1970/philosophy2.htm

You're still not getting it. You may say you're a materialist philosophy, but why would a materialist philosophy rely on the autism of a small group of people to change history? You do not intend to change material conditions first to bring about socialism, you merely intend to seize power first and have your organic party force through changes. And why does the party do this? It's not because of material conditions or self-interest, it's because of aberrations in the superstructure! You pay lip service to materialism, and then conjure up a revolutionary who's will comes from nothing!

Such a project will almost certainly be doomed for failure.

t. demagogue

...

Excellent post famalam.

Oh, I was mainly funposting in that thread if it's the one I was thinking of.

I reject vanguardism based on empiricism. I'm absolutely in no sense a strict DiaMat man if that wasn't obvious from my anti-organicism, nor even a "strict" historical materialist or even a full blown Hegelian. I see Marx and Hegel as one overlapping description or framework that can never be the full picture, or at least, they need to be elaborated, they are complementary/supplementary, another layer of meaning and description that may not be reducable to another layer, but illuminates, gives sense to the others. So in a sense we're always going to be talking past eachother if you subscribe to it as near to a completed metaphysics as we're going to get under capitalism as I believe Bordiga does.

Nah fam, psychopathy is the real deal and I'm certainly no big DSM fan, but I also tend to reject (most) psychoanalysis so I'm not going to put it in that context if that's what you're after. I have to sleep soon so I'll come back to this.

But isn't this his argument, that the revolutionary should have no pretenses of being otherwise? And in doing so he avoids the trap of opportunism? How is this not prescriptive?

Here's where I'd disagree, I find this somewhat arbitrary. After all, Marx himself will be irrelevant after capitalism, and Hegel, and a lot of things. I actually made notes on the Democratic Principle. The vanguardist state is transitional, and I see no relationship to how it should function and the post-capitalism it should bring about except facilitating its own withering away. I disagree with his analysis of its inherent liberalism, and I fundamentally disagree with the idea that anything liberal is automatically bad. It's basically a genetic fallacy. And I think it's essentially self-refuting if you apply it to Marx (and Engels ffs), or Hegel, or the whole liberal tradition, without which, the theory would not even exist in the first place. So at least some aspects of liberalism are being retained, if obscured by the theory. This is at a pretty high level of description though.

My allusion was referring to the fact both seem to prescribe, ultimately, in reality, if adhered to in the strictest sense (which I do not think is actually humanly possible), a state resembling psychopathy, despite eithers' pretenses otherwise. The problem here is that this can provide the ideological deep cover where psychopaths can hide (not even memeing).

I think there are issues with circularity when you strip it back this far. Duty in what sense, Aristotlean? I get wary when people say shit like "morality is a spook lmao", as I believe virtue on a fundamental level is in some sense irrefutable.
Psychopaths are pure opportunists. I consider vanguardism particularly vulnerable to capture by them.

Pls.

Indeed, but the stakes are rather high in this case….

Lol bit of a mess that middle paragraph, need to sleep asap. "Made notes on Democratic Principle but I will have to come back to this as well" *

Hope it made enough sense.

Thanks for the recommendation, haven't heard of him before. Where to start, bookwise?

Idealism versus materialism? I get it more than you do, because I've read both Politzer and Tripp and Politzer is both pedagogically much more effective, has a deeper understanding of philosophical materialism and he's much cooler.

From the PDF I posted here above:
monly, we consider a materialist to be someone who only wishes to enjoy
material pleasures. Playing on the word "materialism,” which contains the
word "matter," people have given it a completely false meaning.
going to return its true meaning to it. Our being materialists does not
prevent us from examining materialism or from having an ideal and
fighting for its triumph.

Now get a name or trip so I can filter you or, to everyone else in the thread who wants to bother, put on a name or trip yourselves so I know I'm no longer talking to this specific user, who's now so pervertedly stunted by discourse that he's finally confirmed his insecure dihonesty by accompanying his post with an anime image.

Elucidate "empiricism", or I'm afraid I'll still have to be skeptical of an underlying vulgar materialism (or scientism, worse yet).

Agreed. I think we need, for example, Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to properly map notions of human desire and consequently the root of their motivations, and most importantly to replace Marx's really weak and self-defeating idea of "material self-interest" (because it logically concludes "false consciousness" to be the cause of capital's prevailing and hegemony).

I don't, but we want to be fucking materialists or at least reduce effect to its cause(s).

He doesn't, although he's much more a classical Marxist communist and he needs to be taken as a man of his time. By no means do I see more use in him than the subjects we've discussed ITT (n.b.: critique of democracy, Bolshevism, Lenin's Leninism, Stalinism, and the concept of organicism).

Psychopathic symptoms (psychosis, symbolic break, etc.) are acknowledged under psychoanalytic theory, but it is categorically rejected as a condition (psychopathy) because insurance companies and prescriptive drugs are not the psychoanalyst's first recourse.

When I referred to "mapping" the illness, I referred to the illness within revolutionarism you supposed. We are not in any school of the psyche on this subject.

Yes, no, it isn't.

The first point strikes at the heart of pretenses towards his actions simply (to reject categorically modes of action that compromise with the goal's essence itself, which would be the opportunism you are looking), the second was never uttered (opportunism must be structurally enabled; it is not a matter of mindset, I also talked about this). Finally, it is only "prescriptive" in the sense that consciously or unconsciously, the revolutionary undertakes the form of the monster in practice regardless of whether he subscribes to the Doom Pill or not.

How so? Marx gives us a model for interpreting matter dialectically. This model can still be read after the fall of capital; it will simply look different. We can start discarding matters that pertain to capital in our glorious communist society and read the discourse of history further, but we will keep reading it and we will not cease to think dialectically (world is still contradictory innately) of matter (world is made of matter).

Because Bordiga properly once more reasserts the fact that the vanguard does not operate in some "transitional society". It operates within capitalism, and is obsoleted only once capitalism actually ends. The entire idea of socialism and communism as two different things is quite ironically a Stalinist revision of Marx's idea of the DotP as the revolution itself, but instead the DotP being some sort of half-half thing (watch: youtube.com/watch?v=qyFMKiHFZXg). So while Marx never spoke of a vanguard, the vanguard is Lenin's idea of a more drawn idea of what the DotP could look like. Because Marx, while clear about the vague points of revolutionary praxis, was not at all prescriptive and only rarely does he have commentaries on the communist subject in-depth (Gotha Programme is honestly the only one that's even close), for Marx was first and foremost a critic.

Its inherent liberalism lies not in democracy inherently being liberal (it was concocted in pre-capitalist, even pre-feudal times of slave society). The point is that democracy as your modus operandi for revolution completely self-defeats itself, and it necessarily can never come close to being the stake that pierces the heart of capital.

So do I! Meliorism, universalism, etc. are all conceptually liberal values, but I cherish them and see them as invariably functional.

I hope my prior replies mean the rest of my views will elucidate themselves, as it's honestly just gonna be me reasserting prior points over and over at them.

Explain yourself then. What does psychopathy here mean, how is it probIematic and what does it signify in this context?

I understand your point, but raise you structuralism.

Your self-ascribed duties are inescapable. We have super egos.

Duty in the revolutionary sense implies just that: your self-imposed placing into the coordinates of a revolutionary movement, and the actions this demands of you. At the end of the day, this means annihilating the values of democracy by brutal overthrow and imposition over others (the Engelsian critique of >muh authoritarianism), as well as the abandonment of democracy's functional coordinates (the society of capital you just now burried, and where democracy then functioned as the only thing making "fair" and otherwise much less "fair" society, by its own unfair design).

Is this suggesting Stalin was one, or that he became, as it were, a "psychopath" (do modernpsyfags even subscribe to the idea of symptoms being developmental phenomena and that morbidity is structural?)? Also, why not just give ol' Stalin a prozac or whatever the fuck you'd make him pay his insurance company to swallow to get back to the machine and operate it properly?

That was you I was talking to? The subject was materialism as being practically synonymous with science (observable phenomena). I assumed you were implying that there is an immaterialism in theorizing about things using philosophical materialism, or one that, if it is there (it is, in a sense), I didn't overcome.

I'd rather go and see what comes out of my meeting in Petrograd than stay put and reassert the perpetuation of capital.

Politzer's only really interesting book is his Elementary Principles, which I've posted ITT. You simply can't get a better introduction to philosophy accompanied by an insanely good and pedagogically functional introduction to materialism.

Psychotics can't have symptoms, tho. "Sinthome" is another matter (see Lacan's seminar on Joyce). Psychotic break is a structural possibility for psychotic subjects.

So an intro book. I'm not sure early 20th century books on idealism vs. materialism suffice, but I'll look into it nevertheless.

Damn bra, I'm glad someone here is not retarded. Thanks for these extensive and thought provoking replies. I'll do my best to keep up haha. Baring in mind I still haven't slept, so likely to be incoherent.

Rejecting straight up utilitarianism seems easy but we're sort of in trolley problem territory here. Because for me the primary reason to overcome capitalism is its total immiseration of ~2 billion, its own deathcounts. Handwringing about alienation and schlock culture replacing high modernism, or whatever, is by far the lesser of my concerns. Paling into utter insignifance really. There's a lot inbetween of course but it remains to be seen if any of the promises of any leftist theory can be fulfilled in a way that in reality, would reliably be any better.

Precisely, but I think MORE democracy, not less, is the key. For me the emancipatory project is nothing more than radical democracy. Expanding it to include economy. And I think metaphysical Hegelo-Marxism is far too restrictive to successfully make demands of the correct form. Why should I prefer the organicism of Bordiga to Gentile? To me there is barely much difference.
But there are a million shades of authoritarianism. Revolution for how many decades, repression for how many? How do you stop the secret police from becoming the deep state with the party a rubber stamp formality? And so on. Totalitarianism for a century is unlikely to wither. Indeed it was incoherent and merely reproduced capitalism with an iron fist.
I think the formalism is far too elastic, far too simplistic. The entropy comes flooding through in every aspect of the overall human experience it ignores. It's easy to say post hoc that the revolution merely wasn't sufficiently attentive to theory.
For some, it is pure romanticism. :^)

Materialism isn't simply adherence to causality. Causality is ill-defined as well. What of retrocausality in some interpretations quantum mechanics? What if a new physics enables technology that changes the entire material basis? How well could Marxism cope under this scenario?

I think the over-rationalizing (autistic) impulse underlying scientism is similar to dogmatic materialism. I simply meant, it's in evidence, from the historical example. But also that other ideas from science create issues with the whole program. A problem with Marxism is its difficulty with incorporating other learnings, becoming too easy to identify everything you don't like with liberalism/bourgeois, so you have the problem of the bourgeois engineers under Stalin, all the way to Pol Pot who (understandably……) merced the entire liberal intelligentsia for his Sartrean national primitivism or whatever the fuck he was going for.

Not a fan.

Define causality in generality and then we'll be cooking with gas.

Under mainstream, psychopathy is not recognized as curable, nor treatable with any medication. They tend to exist either high functioning, for instance at every echelon of power, including the workplace. Or as criminals, generally ending up in prison.

Come on now

Under mainstream, psychopathy is not recognized as curable, nor treatable with any medication. They tend to exist either high functioning, for instance at every echelon of power, including the workplace. Or as criminals, generally ending up in prison.

Again, I'm being lazy, and this is sort of my own theory. But intelligent psychopaths tend to be attracted to power for power's sake. Why wouldn't the maximum amount of power possible be attractive to such a person? They can manipulate and dissimulate others perfectly, I'd say vividly empathic without care or emotion. They can learn any ideology and mimic it (it's not that hard to learn). I think many ideologies, in their inability to deal with feels, tend to leave wide gaps for psychopaths to insert themselves.

So the form of the party must account for the doom-status. Obviously opportunism can only exist within a structure that enables it to be possible in the first place, but we must look to the psychic mechanisms behind why this happens as well. The mind is based in biology to some extent, just try flooding your 5HT2A receptors with any of the good agonists, which as a contyfag, we all know you already have, then stand there and deny it. Even if we cannot just jump into the phenomenal like scientism suggests, cognition is to SOME EXTENT accessible. To ignore this is anti-materialist!

But part of my problem with theory is it tends to equivocate between is-ought by nature. A revolutionary might read Bordiga and internalize this as prescriptive. Theory integrates itself into the superstructure at the level of ideology, operating according to a logic that is its own (its esoteric sense, perhaps), rather than strictly the logic which is exoterically readable from it. So it becomes extremely complicated here lel.

Perhaps not Hegel, but why would we really need Marx after we have overcome the capitalist mode of production and created a society based on need?

What is to stop someone from vouching for a "friend" who in turn ensures government contracts to those who got him to power

Sounds literally perfect

> Because Bordiga properly once more reasserts the fact that the vanguard does not operate in some "transitional society". It operates within capitalism, and is obsoleted only once capitalism actually ends. The entire idea of socialism and communism as two different things is quite ironically a Stalinist revision of Marx's idea of the DotP as the revolution itself, but instead the DotP being some sort of half-half thing (watch: youtube.com/watch?v=qyFMKiHFZXg). So while Marx never spoke of a vanguard, the vanguard is Lenin's idea of a more drawn idea of what the DotP could look like. Because Marx, while clear about the vague points of revolutionary praxis, was not at all prescriptive and only rarely does he have commentaries on the communist subject in-depth (Gotha Programme is honestly the only one that's even close), for Marx was first and foremost a critic.
I find it funny that ML's try to claim they aren't Stalinists when Stalin himself coined their title haha. I agree, they only exist within capitalism until they don't.

I found his criticism of it weak in DP. His argument was that it was some spirit that grants sovereignity to monarchs under divine right but just transposed into each individual, equalized across the franchise, which ignores material inequality. To me it was basically not a full scope critique, just one idea saying "it's dogmatic liberal metaphysics" while supplanting it with his own dogmatic metaphysics of organic technocracy. Democracy is epistemic as well, I'll elaborate on this if you want.
Welp,

Skipped a few as answered elsewhere.

Same thing. :^)

Duty in the revolutionary sense implies just that: your self-imposed placing into the coordinates of a revolutionary movement, and the actions this demands of you.
Check your is-ought, and addressed above. I am critical of superego, but I'd be willing to talk about conscience.

Yes.
Became, no. It usually develops in childhood. I think "functional psychopathy" is ALSO possible though.

There is no medication or talk therapy for psychopathy. Incurable, untreatable.

Got me confused with someone else I think, but I know it's you, Zizek. Hegelo-Cogntivism will win…

One thing I'd suggest is dumbing this down for normies here. People don't respond well to "read X", and I for one counter-signalled your forced meme out of spite. An analogy to form of the party and opportunism, is literally this very board. Tripfags vs anons for example. Think about it. If it can't be shitposted it's not worth saying.

Read "The Elementary Principles of Philosophy" by Georges Politzer. You'll be able to find it on a thread on FreEdu

That's tankie shit

"Rejecting utilitarianism" is the proper precondition of revolutionary politics. The whole problem you invoke is basically: how to be a revolutionary without recourse to utility?

Yet for Marx & Engels (et al.) the motivating force wasn't immiseration (though they did write about it extensively).

You are the first ITT bringing up alienation…

Good job! No, really. GOOD JOB! Now would you care to actually define "democracy" (this supposed element we "need more of") or not? (pic related)

To what? More BBQ is the key to having more BBQs. It has nothing to do with communism.

Maybe read the fugen thread before asking redundant question?

There's only one shade of "authoritarianism:" marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

Obviously.

The party membership will reflect that of society. There's literally no problem with having psychopaths in the party, just like there's literally no problem with having perverts in the party, just like there's literally no problem with having hysterics or obsessives in the party.

Wow you seem kinda mad and dumb now. Is this the same poster?

keep your hurtposting to the thread you are being btfo'd:

Freudposter is an oldfag, so I'm guessing you're new. Also, your rebuttal is vacuous.

There is absolutely no reason to expect that would be the case. And if democracy is bad, why should you care about party membership reflecting society?

How come?

If? If?! How is democratic coercion communist?

Because all kinds of groups created reflect the subjective positions of society as a whole. I've never seen a party where psychotics or perverts didn't participate.

Countertransference. Other guy is actually bright. Still mad about the time I annihilated you in about 4 brief shitposts?

wew

Spurdo, my old nemesis, is that you? Wow, the asshurt is palpable. Can the subnormals stop screeching please, I was actually having a conversation with an equal.

Some kinds of people will be less inclined to participate. Most of your party will probably be college students.

So democracy is bad because it's coercive? interesting. What makes a coercive central authority better?

If you care about the subjective positions of society as a whole, why not just take a poll? Why make assumptions that the people in the party will necessarily reflect the positions of people outside the party?

Well, you're probably going to have to deal with that the way most groups do. Deal with those people when they cause problems or screen people ahead of time.

Kill yourself.

In your mind, that is.

Authoritarians are the whiniest babies.

Lacanian wit.

...

First of all, do you know anything about my ideal party structure/program/praxis when I didn't specify any of it ITT?

Interesting indeed, you seem to be defending a coercive structure just because it resonates with the currently hegemonic ideology.

Of a post-rev party? Are you retarded?

Jesus, how is this relevant? Are you actually implying that anarchist collectives are immune to psychotics? Like, what the actual fuck? I get that in your idiotic mind anarcos have no hiearachies or power-relations, but in reality (as recorded by history) you are just as prone.

Literally: >muh kind of special society will be better than allayas because muh fantasies.

The problems is not with the coercive nature of democracy, the problem is assuming Democracy is the communist ideal. The ideal is communism, not democracy. So when we consider Democracy as the means to an end, it's shortcomings are clear. It does not allow the brutal, pragmatic force necessary to apply to Capital to be exercised freely. Democracy allows for the competing interest of Capital to becomes present nay, ubiquitous within the party and for the coercive nature of Democracy to be use against the communist ideal.

Both, tbh. Those who think that communism is an extended kind of democracy are pawns of the currently hegemonic ideologies.

What about ancient Greek democracy, though? You got anything against them?!

I'm telling you this is true of every group that has ever existed. Some kind of people will be more inclined to participate than others.

I haven't defended anything, and I'm quite opposed to parliamentary democracy. Don't make assumptions.

No. Of society. That's what you're party is trying to reflect, is it not?

Quite the contrary. I'm saying that both your party and any ordinary group will be prone to psychotics. I'm not sure why you're so fixated on this topic, although, direct democracy would probably lend itself to be less likely to be hijacked by psychopaths because they can't gain institutional power over society as easily, as power is greatly diffused.

This is why I was quite surprised by him bringing up coercion. That being said, I would hardly fight for communism if it didn't afford me greater freedom, of which power of the laws I live under is included.

Is this supposed to be a joke?

Consider you're advocating for the same coercive power but with muh "organic party" I don't think you have much room to talk.

The vanguard party is transitional, it only needs to abolish capital then itself by its own internal logic, it does not need to conform to post-capitalist society, it only needs to serve its purpose. Authority won't exist in communism either, but here you are not suggesting its abolition, because it is indispensable. Actually maintaining worker control over the means of production rather than just saying "fuck it" and falling immediately into a permanently repressive and paranoid deep state security apparatus given absolute power, to surveill and blackmail any party official while they hastily rebuild capitalism behind the scenes for example. Vanguardists make this leap all the time yet never seem to understand when they're called out on it.

What would you describe as the dictatorship of the proletariat then? Is it the violent suppression of one class by another as it is now?

Democracy is not transitional, that is precisely the problem. It is a blank state which anything can be projected onto. Fascism can take over using Democracy, slavery can be enforced using it, or a Marxist can just as easily step into power ala Allende. This is why it's always abolished or transmuted from its "pure" idealized form into a lack thereof or castrated vignette. And this applies just as well to Democracy, where the nature of Democracy is altered to allow a violent abolition of private property with measures in place (which are violent as well) to maintain the abolition. Any monopoly on force is not open to change or rather, should not be open to change. Otherwise the monopoly is weakened and eventually overthrown. So the revolution is not Democratic, and the aim of the revolution is communism. If aim of the revolution's end is stil miles away, why should it relinquish its monopoly and become a blank slate?!

Slave holding democracy. Now name a kind of democracy, historically existing, that wasn't relying on some form of slavery (literal, wage-slavery, or otherwise)!

Sure! What's the problem, tho? Some proles are psychotics, some are perverse, some are neurotics. What's the problem?! It's people we are talking about on the one hand, and structures (party, union, etc.) on the other. If you really think that your kinda special "whateverism" will be immune to _the people_ then you are "spooked" as fuck.

Freedom from what, to do what?!

A communist party is a vehicle for for carrying the desires of regular people. This of course excludes you, because psychotics can't and don't have desires, but nevertheless.

Just, wow.

...

I'm not sure what you're on about there. I'm just telling you that you're party won't reflect society as a whole, irregardless of neurotics or what not. I don't what my special whateverism to be immune to the people, I just want it to provide me the most power over my own life should I want to exercise it.

Freedom of autonomy. Material conditions is a part of that, as is controlling the laws one lives under.

And how do you determine what they desire? How do you determine what is a regular person?

How rude cigarman. You really shouldn't diagnose people you haven't met in person.

Also, not the person bringing up greek democracy, nor do I find it an inspiring example. But why don't you name a historical kind of communism that didn't rely on the primitiveness of mankind while we're at it.

You were the one ITT who cried wolf about how "psychopaths" would take over the party. By the same gesture you implied that somehow anarchistic modes of organization would evade such missteps. Literally: LOL.

Well no shit, you bourgeois fuck! The party of the proletariat will never be able (nor it should be) to "reflect" society as a "whole," because society as a "whole," as it is, reflects class relations, you under-read mongoloid.

THE VERY MEANING OF PROLETARIAT POLITICS IS THE NEGATION OF BOURGEOIS POLITICS, YOU FUCK! WE ARE NOT FOR "ONE" OVER THE OTHER. WE ARE FOR THE DISSOLUTION OF THE WHOLE, POSSIBLE ONLY BY THE PROLES!

I just want to make sure that this point registers with you: you will be gulaged after a revolution. Got it? Good!

What does this even mean? Are you allowed to express yourself as you wish? Sure. Are you allowed to shill for capitalist relations, post-rev? No way.

What it even mean, niglord?
Your life is already (and will be) controlled by social forces around you, you Stirnerite sinner.

Nobody determines what "they" (the working class) desires, because they can express it without any kind of restrain. (Btw, again: you as a psychotic moron can not have desire and you are asking about a category that does not enter and could not in your life….)

Much tears were shred.

it was actually me, ppssst!
Because the only kind of communism we had so far was primitive? Are you literally illiterate? If not, what is your shtick?

Why don't you name a kind of historical democracy that didn't rely on slavery?

Different person. I sort of just jumped in.

I do however maintain that diffusing power would decrease the consequences of psychopaths in society.

As we are talking about a society in transition, the bourgeoisie should have already been eliminated. You however, where the one to claim that the party would reflect society.

Kek, the pseudo-intellectuals like you would probably be the first to go.

Means having control over my life.

I haven't expressed any support for capitalist relations thus far.

Surely you are not so dumb as to think some people have credible control over laws, and others don't? Read Rousseau faggot.

It means the freedom to starve isn't much freedom at all.

But they are restrained by the party's internal structure. Why not hold an open forum, or take a poll.

how pathetic

Exactly. And the only kind of democracy thus far has been either that of slave-masters, aristocrats or bourgeoisie. Just as there can be non-primitive communism, there can be non-bourgeoisie democracy.

...

*not think

How do you live with yourself knowing that the discredited quack's got his phimosis pudenda lodged so far down your gaping maw you're suspended in a state of terminal faggotry? Infantile psychopath shilling for other psychopaths, how unique and edgy. Who would ever think to combine Lacan and Marx, except you can't string a line together with 5% of Zizek's charm or erudition, you're merely a would-be sperm depository for history's ugliest tyrants. Leninists are right to execute your kind immediately after taking power, if anything Pol Pot didn't go far enough. Full Communism only when the last smarmy bohemian HIV-vector who's taken it upon themselves to never stop talking shit is strangled with the entrails of the last bourgeois "professor".

You are missing the point, entirely. It's not that psychopaths exist, neither that hey are diffused in ways, but that for you they serve as an excuse to criticize forms of collectivity you don't agree with. Cheap as fuck.

Are you literally retarded? They won't just "go away" thru a revolution. Are you familiar with all the revolutionary history we had?

I was the one to claim that the party's individual structure would _reflect the structure of society as a whole._
Are you able to critique that?

Sadly this is not the case. As a self-proclaimed revolutionary I am prepared to wither with the revolution, but the "pseudo-intellectual" sticker just doesn't seem to stick, which brings us to the theory of the vanguard… The working class' spontaneous consciousness differs from communist consciousness. This isn't a "BTFO cringe," but a literal fact.

People (regardless of the capitalist MoP) already have "control" over your life, just like history does. You, as a newborn autistic baby have literally no control over how your life is managed.

For what purpose? I'm a communist, you drooling idiot!

Good question. Every element in every structure is restricted by said structure. What is the purpose of the communist party? To restrict you behind reason? To make you feel shit, etc.? Naturally, no. You invoke your "point" as if alternative structures wouldn't suffer the same _structural_ shit.

What makes your anarchist forum more desirable? It's allusion to democracy? LEL, ITS LITERAL ALLUSION TO ANTI-COMMUNISM?

Thread fucking closed.>>1209494

...

I have no idea what this sentence means. PLZ help me!

I have no idea what this sentence means.

Are you having a psychotic break atm (pic related)?

This makes sense.
This makes some sense.
Literally "i want a state but don't call it a state"

Predictable, but pathetic nevertheless.

much tears were shred

You're an insipid reptile. I can't wait to actually bother to tear you apart the next thread I spot you shitting up, rather than just watch you embarrass yourself yet again. Imagine being an "oldfag" and still this autistic. Your life is a joke.

Ah, but here lies the rub. It is not only psychopaths we have to be worried about, now is it? Certainly, in such a framework, any disingenuous person, anyone who is not completely correct in their theory, anyone who only cares about their own interests, would cause your system to fail. For if they get power, particularly over how the party functions, then you're fucked. A diffusion of power goes a long way to prevent such situations.

Do you care to point me to a revolution that actually eliminated the bourgeoisie? It is such an authentic revolution that would actually bring us communism.

Yes, because only society can have the structure of society. You have to make many assumptions to attempt to represent society at large, and even if they are mostly correct, you cannot force all of society to participate. Like I said before, most of the people in the party will probably end up being college students.

I don't disagree, but considering the rhetoric you're using, I have a feeling you'll get offed at somepoint, and not by forces of capital, either.

To a certain extent, yes, but some of that is due to artificial hierarchy, and some is due to the reality of nature. Why should we tolerate the former?

He was a proto-socialist, if you actually read his work you'd realize he puts forward very good arguments against capitalism.

You're autism is reaching impressive new heights. But to answer your question, the forum and poll is more preferable because it allows you to ascertain with greater certainty what people desire, and allows for greater debate on the topic.

Shit, user. Your post totally debunked not just my life, but my posting habits on this board. I wish I could recover, but my intellectual honesty suggests that I will never be able.

...

Dude, how is this not a critique of any kind of organisation? What is your preferred one, btw? I don't see you openly espousing it, btw. What is needed here is this:
good job!>>1209643

1917 was pretty effective in this regard.
post sources

So let's have a medical operation on this sentence:
Who said that we could? As opposed to your mode of org. that could?! Name it, if so!
Ok? Could you? Could your special kind of org.?
…
literal autism

This is where you should realize my point: NOBODY who called himself a socialist ever actually tried to overthrow capitalism. Name ONE movement that actually attempted to do it under the banner of general "socialism!" You can't? Wonder why!

1) Polls can never capture what people truly desire.
2) Having polls on a topic does not allow you to have (top kek:) "greater debates" on a topic
3) you are a 17 years old idiot

cheers

It's obvious to any idiot with half a brain that it's the other way around.

Reminder that this Stirnerite-tier sperg thought psychopathy was something you could cure with an insurance form and "prozac" while dismissing actual science as irrelevant to his fetishistic "praxis" hahaha. You cobbled together your understanding from 2-3 Zizek essays, it's pretty obvious you've never even encountered anything resembling a job, and undoubtedly had to learn to decipher what facial expressions were supposed to mean from a book.

It is a critique of any kind of organization. I'm simply saying, that when power is more dispersed in an organization, this is less likely to happen. I personally prefer a Roussueian style democracy.

On the contrary, I am only saying there are better ways to deal with people seeking power for negative reasons. In terms of a state, having the people, as a whole, being the ones drafting and passing laws without representation greatly diffuses power and gives everyone a credible say in the laws they live under. There would still be a state and bureaucracy, but they are only carrying out laws made elsewhere.

Society itself

I don't aim to. You appear to, though, if you actually want to represent society. All I want is the credible ability to influence the laws I live under.

You mean like Vladimir Lenin? Socialism without adjectives is interchangeable with communism.

Which is why I also mentioned forums and general debate.

See above.

Incorrect.

Your argument has the following form:
>The person who disagrees with me gives a reason for his opinion, but that reason is irrelevant, as the real reason (which I know because I can read his mind) is an eeeviiil reason, and thus his position is refuted, even though I can't refute his alibi reason, but since it is only an alibi, it doesn't matter.

The problem with that sort of reasoning, if it can be even called that, should be obvious, but given that Bordigaboys, pomos, and Freudians are not very good with that thinking stuff, I guess I have to tediously explain it.

An alibi reason can be a convincing reason even if one knows it is said by an asshole. In that it is different from a convincing-sounding alibi in a murder mystery. That is, when somebody wants something to be true for some assholish reason and then tries to come up with a non-assholish alibi reason to justify this, and then eureka! It turns out it is a fucking good alibi reason, then this reason is not tainted by the person being an asshole.

Now, we don't actually know for sure that the reason was made as an alibi reason (if your post was honest you have delusions about mind-reading others), but this is actually irrelevant. A good fabricated alibi reason is a real one.

First, I'd like to start off by letting you know that I'm glad you prefer a Roussueian style democracy. In fact, I'd love to skip the transition and just go straight to FALC. But let's be realistic here.

I'd like to reiterate what Stalintrip said in that other thread. What happens after revolution in the U.S.:
- The country is completely unstable, the likelihood of civil war is high. I'm going to be generous and say that half the military has defected, but the other half is staunchly against us. We have classcucks in the South, and the majority of the intelligentsia and yuppies are Keynesians or Neoclassical's who have more influence over the population than your (most likely small) revolutionary party.
- Workers also do not know how to run the factories, how to distribute resources etc. This is a completely foreign situation.
- Not only that, but most liberal countries are spreading lies about you, and have decided to embargo you. Keep in mind, we import most of our supplies and a pathetic amount of people work in agriculture. If we do not act fast, people will starve.

So what do you do with your democracy? How are going to organize it? What if proletariat vote against you in the face of uncertainty? Do you capitulate?

There is no room for Democracy in revolution. It is a fantasy. That being said, if you can lay out a revolutionary plan as pragmatic as "We use our available force to its fullest extent to get the country up and running", be my guest. I will gladly revert back to libsoc.

What kind of madman would throw a perfectly edible pizza into the ocean? a crime like this should not go unpunished.

You're completely detached from reality, though. Your eschatology and purple flourishes supposedly dictating its form, is motivated onto by a masturbatory fidelity to the selection of books you happen to have read over others, and nothing else. Your chances of happening across anything like genuine wisdom are no better than just that, pure chance. Hence you reject notions on their "vulgarity", perhaps even their "banality", it drips through your entire persona, and hideous prose which contains not a single original idea indicating genuine deeper understanding, but rote regurgitation - empty enthusiasm. You are a pure theorist, basically the same as an alternative history nerd, or any other hobbyist, and are also a disgusting human piece of shit as evidenced by your callous disregard for mentally unstable people, like most psychoanalysts. It's just yet another layer of mysticism (Lacan himself admits this), obfuscation. An endlessly empty template, motivated by nothing, in the end, but by what you see in your messianic figure in Marx "really wanted for us". I cannot respect someone like you, let alone admire you as you do yourself. If you can look in the mirror, and honestly find in yourself the quality of individual supposed to administer the vanguard with no sense of irony about this appalling situation whatever, your mere existence refutes it.

Also reminder that Bordigologists unironically think Stalin et al's problem was he was just a moralist who was totally shaped by the party dogma and external circumstances, he couldn't help it, he was bound to be, whereas it would have been chill if only could have just dropped all pretenses and stopped trying to be the Good Guy from the start and fully embraced being a monster. More monsterism is more leftist! They're insanely autistic fascist mystics and fanfic-tier at this stage, nothing else.

Dude I'm not Freudfag, him sperging out has nothing to do with me and I don't see why structuralism is relevant to Marxist thought either, thus I have no investment in his e-psychoanalyzing antics. I don't think Democracy is a feasible way to conduct a revolution. I'm open to an argument from you over what you would prefer and how you intend to execute it, including reformism.

Oh sorry, anyway my points all apply to Freudfag.

I agree democracy is a difficult proposition in revolution, but reminder that it comes in many forms. I just see the theory as lacking, it's woefully incomplete. It can't fit democracy in there and thus leaves no margin for error, but you see this as a fundamental flaw in any revolution, I see this as the result of the incompetence of the theorists. Not an insult, we are all incompetent when it comes to trying to think outside the ideological architecture we are all bound in. I think dialectical leftism isn't meta-analytical enough, but perhaps this is even outside what we are capable of thinking about as humans. Thus we need a feedback mechanism which sums over individual experiences, to offload some of the task into the combined power of the social mind: democracy.

Maybe not flaw,* but you see it as a necessary, realistic outcome of any revolution, repressing democracy. But I see democracy as essential to any successful revolution. If it can't be done, then all revolutions will fail in one way or another. We are just not good enough at gaming ideology, it's outside of us as individuals, and an "organic party" (what the "democratic central" party ultimately was anyway) radically retards this process. There's a reason the bourgeoisie ALLOWS science. Think about that, and why, and you'll be closer to the answer

Bordigaist National Bolshevism when?

I have absolutely no idea what this sentence was supposed to mean.

Same.

I understand where you're coming from and agree to a certain extent. Though, Lenin's observation that the working class tends not to develop class consciousness, and really only trade union consciousness is even more true today. Marx's original conception of class consciousness is "not even wrong" today.

So, how is this democracy supposed to be implemented? I really am curious, I switch between ideologies a lot since the ideal of communism is so monumentally hard to achieve and no matter where I am between the "Authoritarian" and "Libertarian" scale I always find shortcomings that could be deadly.

Ah, yes, pic very much related.

Good for you!

WUT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Theses

I'm not going to argue against open demagoguery.

THE LIST KEEPS GROWIN!

I have no idea. That's for the theorists to work out. If it can't be done, it has to be scrapped, unless you want total capitalism with no possibility of revolution. Reminder that the "communist" revolutions actually inhibited any actual revolutions. I see part of the problem is with the inherent class interest of (petit-bourgeois) intellectuals. They are predisposed to becoming preoccupied with their own mind and think they can come up with the grand template through the ingenuity of their own mind, so they start to think no one else's voice might matter, so they forget about the whole "social" thing - the basis of society. Ironically, they think they are materialists but conceive of themselves as the radical individual occupying a vacuum of pure reason. I'm trying to fix the left by exposing all the posturing cretins like Freudfag, they do nothing but inhibit the furtherance of the dialectic to come to a solution.

You really are just an idiot aren't you? Unless you weren't the guy I was replying to before. He seemed way smarter. Or did you just revert to pure autism when you realized you were outclassed in every way?

Care to decipher that comment, then?

good luck with the run-on sentences

Too bad faggot. You haven't read much, I often see sentences that span pages hahaha.

This is fair, and I agree that it seems like "the left" is more or less obscurest philosophers writing a lot of useless theory trying to become the next Marx.

You asked me if I was smart enough/capable enough to lead the vanguard: I would answer absolutely not. But where do you picture yourself in the revolution, if there were to ever be one? I'm not being inflammatory, but if we are to agitate for socialism we should be realistic about where we see ourselves in a post-rev environment. I personally see myself as a subordinate to whoever is in charge of economics as well as proliferating culture (not propaganda, but trying to allow the post-rev environment to have some semblance of a creative outlet). And what do you mean by "it needs to be scrapped"? At what point will it be scrapped, and by "it" do you mean Democracy as a whole, or just the particular variation?

...

I don't. I can't. I try not to fantasize, it's folly, self-delusion. I want to focus on fixing the broken ass dialectic now, which is all I can do. The dialectic then will figure it out, maybe there will be another Marx, but it most likely will not be me kek. I can only work with what I have and can see now. That's the whole idea.

Are you active outside our obscure Chinese basket weaving chamber?

Nah I've had some ideas bouncing around and I figured going user was a good way to try avoid the egotism that comes with attaching a name to something, even a blog, it becomes "your baby" or whatever. you implicitly want ownership over it, to defend it, rather than it just going out into the pure ether. Kind of an experiment in a way I guess. I was hoping to have some good discussions here but mainly ended up shitposting and trolling. If I end up writing anything I'll post it here.

We'll please do, because I'm open to critique of theory and praxis.

Check this shit out, comrade:

It really is stupid. I actually got banned in between yesterday and now for "shitposting" one post in another thread (posting pic related, an edit I made for a thread about muh anti-revisionist Stalinists).

And then I thought a narcho like Prickly would be the retard behind my deletings and bannings; turns out there's either an actual tankie or a humorless fuck on the mod team (or both, really).

Pic very much related.

…

I'm probably just too stupid to understand it but what is mystical about Bordiga? I've seen it mentioned ITT a few times.

Nothing. Bordiga just utilizes Marxist theory (n.b.: dialectical materialism, critique of ideology, critique of capitalism) for various things. Most notoriously, he wrote The Democratic Principle (critique of democracy from Marxist POV) and led the Italian communist party to a membership of 12 million, organizing several general strikes and almost capturing parliament before Mussolini was granted full autonomy by the Italian bourgeoisie. He was also one of the original ardent critics of the Bolsheviks post-revolution and Stalinism while member of the Second International and co-created the left of communism along with the council communists.

marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1922/democratic-principle.htm
Time and again, leftcoms post this link, but are they able to debate the content of it? I actually read it and found it very weak.
>On the other hand, the intensity of the struggle in particular phases demands speed of decision and movement and a centralized organization of efforts in a common direction, which, as the Russian experience is demonstrating with a whole series of examples, imposes on the proletarian state constitutional characteristics which are in open contradiction to the canons of bourgeois democracy. Supporters of bourgeois democracy howl about the violation of liberties, whereas it is only a matter of unmasking the philistine prejudices which have always allowed demagogues to ensure power to the muh privileged. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, the constitutional mechanism of the state organization is not only consultative, but at the same time executive. Participation in the functions of political life, if not of the whole mass of electors, then at least of a wide layer of their delegates, is not intermittent but continuous. It is interesting to note that this is accomplished without at all harming the unitary character of the action of the whole state apparatus - rather to the contrary. And this is thanks precisely to the criteria opposed to those of bourgeois hyperliberalism, that is, virtual suppression of direct elections and proportional representation, once, as we have seen, the other sacred dogma of the equal vote, has been overthrown.
Gerrymandering is bad when the capitalists are doing it, when we do it like marxistically-scienceyrifically, it's completely different!
A normal person would call that opportunism, and as you know Bordiga didn't like opportunists either, so this is totally different from him being a slimy opportunist, for reasons that are too big and complicated for your tiny prole brain to comprehend. But trust him.
Anything goes, weee! Actually, it's impossible to neatly separate form and content, that's an idealist viewpoint.
The more delegation levels you have, the more extreme you can gerrymander things. Proportional representation would screw with that however, it needs to be the winning combo of non-proportional elections and many delegation levels. Gee, how could a bureaucratic caste emerge from that I wonder? Did Bordiga really fail that much at basic mathematical/logical thinking when he wrote it or was he just a dishonest cunt here?

In the trash it goes.

The allegation of "gerrymandering" resting on what?

"Normal person" being defined how?

Your brain being where?

Time and time again, writing a book for proles to read with the purpose of challenging their ideas is seen as a violent intrusion into the gentle proletarian baby (a patronizing categorization only you end up invoking when you say that an amalgam of letters imposes upon the proletariat anything but a new perspective!).

No. Pseudo-Rousseauan appeals to an idealist conception of human nature (lol) for example, do not. Or social democracy at the barrell of a gun. The list goes on.

I cannot find where to begin cringing at this. In fact, I do not know whether I should cringe at the form (uneducated slinging of barely comprehend buzzwords) or the content (barely comprehend buzzwords slung together to form what ends up being little more than a projected appeal to moral relativism while explicitly decrying one type of advocacy as morally reprehensible).

First point of my post (define gerrymandering), and critique your own position towards democracy (equal representation) and how it varies in content within the council of labor.

How so? Quantify your assertions, you lazy fuck. I'm here to challenge myself and challenge you, not see you in such weak form.

but I digress
Improper form altogether.

I tip my balaclava to you, my good scientismo-anarchist friend.

Holy shit are you retarded. Keep on memeing. It's all you have.

You've done little more than throw your own buzzwords (gerrymandering, representation, "winning" (lol)) without any kind of defining qualities, and consequently why they have any pertinence to any kind of tangible critique whatsoever outside of your own head (which is why they're buzzwords up until now; because they serve no function in discourse until you give them more meaning here besides the figurative sound of a buzz).

Step it up, comrade @RichardDawkins.

Gerrymandering is a clear and simple concept, the opposite of what a buzzword is.

I'm sure we won't be needing to justify our use of terms, elucidate what they and do not imply or contextualize the blanket buzzwords we pick in there.

The revolution will clearly not be built on theoretical grounds and its ability to move a proletarian movement, but it will instead be built on spontaneously agitated latest edition Merriam-Websters annihilating the bourgeoisie with the buzzing thunder of dictionary definitions and their etymological origins!

Before tipping your fedora, you need to wear it first.

How about you make a non-memey goon post as to what on earth makes you believe that winner-take-all elections to send delegates who meet for another winner-take-all elections to send delegates who meet for another… won't have a massive gerrymandering problem?

Decentralized conflicts of interest resting upon prior centralized conflicts of interest, each of them solved by their own internal managerial processes, do not have a problem of inconsistent application of delegation (gerrymandering).

It's nice that you've managed to not only finally raise a proper formulation of what you consider probIematic, but that I realize you've been seeing communist councils as social structures that are to exist within capitalism for the overthrow of it, instead of their very obviously posited existence post-capitalism as delegating structures.

...

Freudfag made it much more interesting IMO. What one needs to do to properly consume Freudfag's contributions to anything is to learn to detach his cynicism and vulgarity from his content. It doesn't help that Freudfag doesn't know to inhibit this flavor of discourse or that he doesn't at times remind is that it is only for flavor, of course, but he knows his shit my dude.

That's what gerrymandering is?
That was already in post
>but that I realize you've been seeing communist councils as social structures that are to exist within capitalism for the overthrow of it, instead of their very obviously posited existence post-capitalism as delegating structures.
The thread is about Bordiga. The post is about a text by Bordiga, in which he praised the structure of the Bolshevists.

Why didn't you reply to my last substantive post LeftCom, it seems like it's you again? Or was I too brusque with the polemics? I was just trying to induce an anal fugue state in Freudfag for coming in with autism blaring. The gerrymander man is not me btw.

Gramsci > Bordèga.

Henceforth, to have systemic structures that end up giving rise to results inconsistent (disproportional; unfair, etc.) with their prescribed function.

Nowhere does Bordiga compare his critique of democracy with his advocacy of councils (decentralized, necessarily organically managed organs of organization). This is the whole point: that notions of democracy cannot but insist upon a limitation to existing only pre-capitalism, while any kind of alternative to democracy can only exist post-capitalism. You've been screaming opportunism (without understanding its implications) at something that is not a suggestion, but the imcompromisable reality of any actually possible post-capitalism. The whole point of Bordiga's critique of democracy being that it only acts to legitimize that which already prevails and cannot sincerely pretend to be able to function as motor for change for these reasons.

Thanks for reminding me what the thread is about, what text we're currently treating and what this text in part does. Literally what pertinence does this have to me reminding you to see the council as that which can not be compared to democracy within capitalism, and that the latter cannot exist post-capitalist precisely because of reasons Bordiga outlines?

Has the latest edition of Macmillain made your thinking so tacit and positivist that you can't even afford to argue in theoretical terms about theoretical subjects surrounding purely theoretical phenomena?

It's me. I was banned once again the other day, half way in this thread. I've written about this above.

Although I doubt you've truly done much to Freudfag at all but make him work down a few kolbász and liquor in ennui, I will look to perhaps reply to your posts later.

Consider a trip ITT. If not for clarity, simply so I can properly start ignoring the other autismo here once he really starts offering nothing stimulating.

Contribution-wise, at least in quantity, I absolutely agree.

Inconsistent is not another word for disproportional or unfair. Proportional results are not a function of winner-take-all elections. Everything you have posted here is humpty-dumptying.

Let's forget about attention-whore posters and get back to Bordiga. The reason his writing is so silly is pretty simple. Capitalism has two aspects, class rule and m-c-m'. Every conspiracytard populist has at least some sense that there are groups of people who have different interests from the vast majority and who combine to be leeches (whether they locate that in the free masons or jews or Nintendo etc). What makes Marx different from these is his view of the systematic aspect.

When babby Marxists first learn about this other aspect, they easily get so excited about it that they forget the class-rule aspect. (It is also convenient to not remember it, given the family background of many of these self-styled intellectuals.) Hence, the complete absence of considering any precautions against the re-emergence of different classes in their magical communism.

Ouch, a bloo bloo!

Fucking finally.

It doesn't; its name capitalism. The motor of capitalism is capital, or else it would be called capitalistism. But let's move on.

Themselves raised from structures and phenomena; there is no pre-existing division of interest, at least not one which needs to first be raised into being via the prior annal of human language.

Marx differs precisely from the peers of his time in that he is the first to see the primary motor of capital not to be class division (which in capitalism must first exist by extension of the fact that it first emerges from feudalism: a strictly class society), but from the structural roots of capital and its driver: the firm.

The most notable example of this fact would be to look at what separated Marx from Proudhon; Proudhon sought to maintain the process of M-C-M' within the frameworks of a market-based socialism. Marx then says that any notion of socialism proper must excluse any idea of markets, or production for exchange. For it is production for exchange that characterized capital (dead labor), not the specific chain of command within the process of capital's driver: the firm.

A glance at "Poverty of Philosophy", Marx's rebuttal to Proudhon's "Philosophy of Poverty", outlines Marx's points as follows:

Following Marx's critique, we need to exit philosophy's own boundaries to analyze the world in a new perspective of political economy, based on the desire to change society. Philosophy to be an intellectual weapon instead of its own space of justifications.

Furthermore, Marx critiqes Proudhon on the necessity of Proudhon's (supposedly post-capitalist model) consumption tax and Proudhon's opposition to striking (Proudhon literally envisions a post-capitalism in which any discontent over labor's reaction to impersonal market forces via striking would be an illegitimate response, lol).

Finally, the text ends with the George Sand citation of "Combat or death, the bloody war or nothingness. It is in this way that the question is immortally posed."

Not only have you not read Bordiga, but you haven't read Marx if you try to edgily school me on things you obviously know nothing about. Shit, you might not have even read the Wikipedia article on Marx and get all of your knowledge from jpegs and School of Life shorts (hollow and uncritical fetishism of democracy probably comes from this too, jej).

Fuck, I could've been done right there but this is too fucking hilarious, so let's go on.

Ooooooooooo~

Of a class-ruled capitalism being its innate form?

He says, while insisting on the necessity of a system meant to wade out the conflicts of economy-systemic inconsistencies (democracy). Ha. Haha. Ha.

*tip*

As if the very critique of representation born from Marx himself weren't designed precisely to annihilate any potential for this.

The way I see it, there's only two more options for you: a little more fucking effort towards Doctor Doom, or suicide.

One more thing:
is fucking hilarious when you sage every fucking post you get while insisting on wanting to discuss Bordiga, meaning you restrict any potential additional interest to the thread as much as possible; only hearing from me because I'm still fucking here.

And here we can observe the namefag mid-goalpost moving. The claim this windbag "responds" to was:
Now he says m-c-m' is the primary motor.

As we read the rest of his faggy post, where he farts around about Proudhon, who wasn't mentioned anywhere prior in the thread, he then ends crowning himself as the debate winner as if any of that demonstrated the irrelevance of the class rule aspect.

How did the Soviet Union dissolve?

Sageman started the goalpost-moving by alluding to the supposed essentials of Marxism in a Bordiga thread, I mind you.

Literally nothing false about this l0l. Get back to Bordiga already before embarassing yourself on elementary Marx.

Nor was Marx, or elementary Marxism, but just like you brought those up to BTFO yourself I brought up Proudhon to BTFO you once more. You reap what you sow, faggot. There's some elementary dialectics for you, too.

In a thread about the democratic principle and how it always adheres to prerequired necessities of class rule to mediate.

Glad you want to change subjects again, but sure: the Soviet Union dissolved because it couldn't maintain the pretenses of its capitalist nature by not liberalizing entirely, in effect liberalizing being the only thing that saved the Soviet clique's transfer into the Russian Federation and why so much of the KGB cushily maintained in power (together with the emerging liberal maffia, which in and of itself was largely ex-KGB).

Sage me harder, comrade.

Right, Bordiga doesn't have much to do with Marx after all.

What you have is at best a parody of Marx. Capitalism isn't entirely automatic. Capitalism doesn't automatically evolve out of feudalism. It required more than a little nudge to happen, with several attempted and failed revolutions.

Marx had a more nuanced view than that, and mature Marx even more so. Old Marx continued to research the lives of peasants in Russia, and found pretty stable pre-capitalist peasant relations even in pockets of Germany.

>the Soviet Union dissolved because it couldn't maintain the pretenses of its capitalist nature by not liberalizing entirely waffle-waffle gobblegobble
The Soviet Union had bureaucrats, but not a ruling capitalist class. It had planning with material balances, not m-c-m'. Inb4
Today there exists a ruling class in Russia, which to a large extent comes from former bureaucrats. Gee, I wonder how that could have happened.

You lot have nothing to offer to the left. If I wanted to be a follower of magical organic centralism, I would follow the real deal Mussolini and not some autistic third-rate knockoff.

All Bordiga did was read Marx and write books.

Coming from mister sage with such classics as "capital cannot survive without a vertical chain of command in the firm".

They do not know it, but they are doing it. (- t. Garl Margs)

Yes, it survives because of the ideology of capital; the ideology capital solidified into popular conscience, and the recuperative functions of all that capital structures, such as most importantly the firm and the state. This is the beginning of Marx's critique of ideology, from which a whole discipline was built (critical theory) and from which many still borrow to very interesting results (n.b. psychoanalysis).

Capitalism crawls out of feudalism's basis of primitive accumulation (finance capital), as the blossoming bourgeois class rises from its corpse to create a new class society dominated by capital. Henceforth, Marx adamantly uses the term capitalism (which already existed well before Marx, and well before capitalism, which Marx saw first flourish and solidify) and not capitalistism. Henceforth, Marx's critique of Proudhon first puts on the chopping block the first victim of utopian socialism, which still believes that dead labor (capital) is separable from just the chain of command of the firm that pumps it out. This is also the only motivation for mentioning Proudhon: the convincgly shit on your poor knowledge of anything Marx, and thus by extension Bordiga, who builds on Marxist notions. You cretin.

What a shitty summary! Pfah! I just did it much more eloquently, and with more than just a novel about Marx's life. Low energy!

Perhaps the most pertinent point I'm making: capital does not need a strict firm-centric caste of bourgeoisie in the traditional manner. Any form of human effort directed at regulating the flow of capital, democratically or not, upholds capitalism. This is why the USSR couldn't escape the law of value, wage labor, the forming of inter-Kolkhozi competition on the market (yes, the USSR had a market economy, even a literal chamber of commerce for the heads of state).

marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/index.htm

Nope, kill yourself. :^)

By believing in the idea of "transitional" societies (impossible; you either have socialism or you don't), which is ironically the biggest revision of Marx possible despite Marx being pretty adamant about this (and Bordiga restated it). Ain't it funny how now "revisionism" sounds like a much shittier descriptor for what went wrong rather than "opportunism"? Thanks, Amadeo! Il pazo assoluto!

There is no if, for your break away from capitalism will be born from organic decision-making, not democratic decision-making. You can go as far as you want with democracy of course, but never quite before you perform the ontological break from capital, which defies democratic boundaries.

Mussolini, as we know, getting to where he got via democracy. Like always with democracy though, there's buyer's remorse, because nobody is honest enough to admit that the only function of democracy is to safeguard the prevailing ideology.

*posts Lacanian Margsist Jodi Dean*
Really, nigga?

Maybe you should actually follow your own advice and read a book, goon.

Haha. Have a good day, comrade.

I'll be back here tomorrow on the slim chance that there's actually some good discourse left to be had after all the assblasted sages.

You mix up several questions when you make a vague pronouncement like that:
1. Does capitalism need such a group to come into existence?
2. Does capitalism need such a group to maintain itself once it exists?
3. Does an economy without buying and selling MOP that is coordinated top-down by a small group make it more likely that capitalism will exist again?

Yes. HisMat concludes this.

No.

By definition, exchanging proprietorship over the MOP (or its produces) implies the presence of private property relations. We are already within capitalism, where exchange enters a self-motivated cycle.

Irrelevant to property relations which function upon exclusivity within separate firms; it then does not matter whether or not the firms operate horizontally or not (Marx himself rebuts Proudhon on this himself, which is essentially what Proudhon wanted minus unions, opposition to striking and a central banking system of personal loans).

This small group acts as the vanguard of its own system; that of capital, managed by inner-firm relations that are vertical (has its roots largely in inheriting bourgeois class post-feudalism, which was already verticalist, but also the ideology of liberalism born out of post-feudalism which is explcitly mirroring thing). This top-down group is in this instance the existence of capitalism itself. It (the bourgeoisie) needs to be overthrown along with its structures of its economic machine (the firm), not its functions democratized, should we want to constitute a break away from its mode of production.

The Switzerland of Lenin's time was nowhere near as reliant on direct democracy as modern Switzerland. Still even during his time, i believe Lenin was overall still wrong on this point.

A wild non-shitpost appears: How did that happen?!
Historically speaking, there is good evidence for you being right on point 1, but I can't rule it out entirely happening due to weird random shit, I just think it unlikely. On point 2 I agree with those who say that capitalism with co-ops would still be capitalism. I don't understand your answer to point 3. Did you parse that question as being necessarily about the Soviet Union?

Never even noticed that post.

"The facts speak for themselves" is the arch-statement of ideology.

Assuming you're referring to yourself here; I'm hard-pressed to call my posts ITT bigger shitposts (or at all, really) than the other guy's.

More than evidence. It's the only way to quantify the birth of the bourgeoisie as its own revolutionary agent in manifesting its own society, along with its values and by consequence its system. The proletariat is to effectuate the same thing: to annihilate all that is bourgeois as well as the bourgeoisie and advance the annals of history to post-capitalism (the characeristics of the proletariat itself; the resistance of subservience to that of the bourgeoisie, which are capital).

Then quantify it, or just abandon materialism altogether. Nothing is "random" in materialism; the closest to "random" there is is ideologically unconscious manifestations of the prevailing ideology, which still hinges on materialist bases.

If you're the same guy, I don't see how you can boast about being better than "babby Marxists" while not knowing this. If you're not that guy, that guy must be literally getting spoonfed Capital vol. 1's first tenth right now.

Good, but once again this is all I contest: that is anything more than left-liberal or progressive capitalism with democratic ethics. I am in no way opposed to cooperatives on principle; it is massively preferable to "traditional" capitalism. The problem is that they follow the democratic principle, which Bordiga very nicely rips apart and is skeptical about as itself the basis for any actual further change beyond the prevailing of capital.

It has been theorized that in a historical process we could see this progressive capitalism as a sub-step towards post-capitalism; one enamored by an abandonment of the division of labor and capital in form, but not content. However, due to the function of ideology, this would probably not make the break towards post-capitalism any easier, perhaps harder because it justifies itself properly by the prevailing ideology itself.

Because I uttered the term "vanguard"? Quite ironically we could make a parallel to Lenin's vanguardism of democratic centralism to provide the perfect basis from capital can reflourish, but no, I made no necessary allusion to it. When I said "vanguard" I meant literally that the bourgeoisie historically builds up and consequently acts as the first vanguard of capital literrally: it safekeeps its hegemony and seeks to permanently make prevail its workings.

Now THIS is utopianism

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAH

What a shitty mindset.

I hope you choose the latter.

meant for

See, this is where you avoid the ironic reverb to Marx's conclusions: inconsistency is the way of the world. There is no being without contradiction, for it iscontradiction which powers the necessary impulse towards change.

The beauty is that we can fully enarmor these inconsistencies and push history towards a new paradigm of different inconsistencies; a paradigm where contradiction is not a conflict between capital and labor. A conflict which is henceforth what motivated us to seek to map these contradictions, analyze their workings and formulate the next step in the never-ending cycle of history. Utopianism is on the contrary believing that in spite of contradiction being world-systemic, that the world is forever to be relationally shapped the same way, with the same machinic workings and flows of resources, and that the only course of action is to initiate system-specific band-aids on the system specifically, unable to see how system-specific band-aids work to mediate specific types of contradictions as opposed to contradiction altogether.

Thank you again for teaching us this, Marx.

If the fact that Proudhon was never again to be seen after his peers in the IWA saw his intellectual poverty and that all cooperatives have done little more than weed their way into capital, the conclusion is tacitly still as following: the impossibility of materially contradicting solutions to non-conforming systems means that your solution is little more than a chocolated laxative; it will time and time again, forever, prove not to alter material reality! "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAH" indeed!

No, you get to play super hero to my super villain. This mindset is terrific; you will feel like you are salvaging what good is left, never to realize that you are in fact sustaining the conditions necessary for whatever good you see slipping away constantly! Ain't that dialectical?

I hope you choose the above.

reread the original post, why don't you

Yes, and democracy is a good way of reconcile contradictions, regardless of who or what they are between.

top kek

Look what rot vanguard revolution has brought us in Russia, in China, and across the world. And then to the useless echoes of leftcom critique.

My point was precisely there are not superheroes or villains. There are, however, authentic enemies.

What you are doing, to take the metaphor of your image, is substituting the escapist fantasy of batman for that of Dr. Doom. That if only! If only! Just one incorruptible man were put in charge! If I were put in charge! Everything would work itself out. So, if anything less than then perfect fantasy were to come to pass, it suffers from the same flaws of all other efforts to change the world. No, it is not a fantasy based on morality, I'll give you that. It's even more childish. It's the boyish power fantasy of saying "wouldn't it be cool if I could succeed where everyone else failed!" a fantasy that only logically operates with your will at the center.

...

Review your own proposed praxis to follow this revelation then, why don't you.

Correct; all it does is reconcile them. That is its onus, and the deathbed it dies on.

Minus idealism and phenomenological conceptions of historical processes.

In the name of Marx, we have at least seen the largest mass of emancipatory communist power ever seen up until now, even if we critically fell short or even majorly screwed up before again coming to slumber. The beauty lies in the fact that Proudhonian, or other utopianisms, are still nowhere to be seen, or are getting to relevant traction whatsoever. The restrictive logic of their onus's inherent impotence, of course, being the repeated final nail in the coffin!

I see it.

I read it.

With both things above, though, we at least see something to critique; we have substance, and we have moments of authenticity, of wisdom and of substance to obveserve and analyze next to all the tragedies and failures. Isn't that the beauty of it; that failure itself brings to light new constitutive elements to critique, and isn't it doubly beautiful to see that there is actually something in practice to learn from on the Marxcom side of things? Ah…

There are. You and I. Now on the playwright.

Woe to those who risk tackling the content over the form! They are destined to fight within their own confines!

Of ruthlessly looking to actualize class interest in historical stage, as opposed to mechanizing prior mechanisms in an attempt to overcome their inherited origins?

But I want as many like me as possible; as many like me, who know we need to fight ourselves ruthlessly! As ruthless as the bourgeoisie formed cliques to one day break in the most ruthless act of overthrowing its own restrictive class relations and birthing in a new mode of production pure of capital! So must we, too, ultimately, whether we say it or not, realize it or not, embody the ideology of our class's mind, as opposed to hinging onto concepts that mechanically reproduce that which prevails! I want a Party, after all, and it takes more than one for that! And I want the authentic super hero; the democratic and just strongman, who protects the many from brutality, while ignoring the systemic brutality he himself defends in a system that is born and upheld in violence!

Perfect? There is nothing "perfect" about actualizing the next contradictory stage of history. It is chaotic, violent and brutal. It knows no notions of popular appeal; it knows only the blooming of new contradiction!

Demos!

1/2

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.
- t. garl margs

I spit on morality, and overcome the inherent utilitarianism and consequentialism inherent to morality and what perhaps epitomizes popular moralism as an engine: democracy. That we should baby our own ignorances, afraid of truly enforcing the cure!

Do you want to fail? Ignoring your pettiness and the truckloads of salt in this thread, is authentic failure more dear to you than voracious success?

Your will being epitomized, knuckleheadedly, by concepts you only hold dear because you are bound by prevailing notions of participatory principles; principles you can only abandon should you strike the final blow to your true final desire (lest your ideal of socialism is just as vacuous and disingenuous as your ability to argue with more than a change of subject, buzzwords and chloridious bitterness, of course!).

2/2

Out for real now; let us perhaps meet again tomorrow, or the day after if the thread is still around and I do indeed have some stuff to do tomorrow.

Marxposter is that you?

says the anarchist lmfao

Yes, let's just completely not address contradictions! I'm sure that will end up great!

And think for a moment what would happen if they were not reconciled? We would have never progressed past feudalism. Ignore the studies of liberalism at your own peril. Hell, go and read The Prince, if you think it's a good idea not to reconcile interests. Politics is more than just a method to further history, it is much more dangerous than that.

Go and read On the Jewish Question and the 1844 Manuscripts and then get back to me.

I hope this is ironic

where, specifically?

oh yes, and you may never get a chance again because of those screw ups.

Mutualism, perhaps not, but the dream of a cooperative economy, of market socialism, communalism, even social democracy, are doing a hell of a lot better than left-communism and orthodox marxism.

I'd say the same of your ilk.

don't make me laugh again, now! At least the Leninists and Maoists actually did something. And yes! I think there is still value, however small, in their work, and what do you think I'm doing here if not critiquing them! If anything, my primary objection to you is that you have not critiqued ENOUGH of what has actually failed! I think Marx did an excellent job of analyzing capitalism, and expanding the critique of it, but that does not mean I have to agree with everything he said! I think it's disingenuous to say that all leftists projects of the 20th century failed because of a certain revisionism, as that means there is still a vast amount of theory we have completely removed from the space of critique!

I refuse to fight you as a villain. It would be too easy.

So you claim to be concerned with content. But don't be so shallow as to presume that is my opposition to you. What you will to do is at odds with my own freedom, and my own well being. Don't shrink away from the mantel of terror, power and destruction you hold. You're above that. You even admit the high possibility of opportunism and death! Why on earth should I stand idly by when morons play with fire nearby? Don't expect me to evaluate your project's odds of success as higher than mine, either.

If the contradictions are not enough to overcome the institutions they were born with, then they weren't much of contradictions at all. It's a lack of reform that turns normal people away from mainstream politics, but if we are not there with actual legitimate political organizations to capture their imagination, then the far right will, as they have no such qualms.If we show no effort in trying to make things better for people, then we shouldn't expect to be taken seriously, even by enough people needed to create a revolution.

This is exactly the narcissism I was speaking of. There aren't enough people like you! And you shouldn't expect there to be.

Also, as you cite the example of the bourgeoisie, you shouldn't forget that it was reforms by the old Kings that weakened the power of the feudal lords that helped empower them to such heights, (see tocqueville). Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, neither was capitalism. I would expect the same to be true of socialism and communism.

If it was so chaotic, violent and brutal, why should it need you to bring it about?

You are very mistaken if you think that's what I'm doing here.

I don't think I'm the one who needs that quote at the moment.

I expected you would.

You are more foolish then I expected if you truly think utilitarianism and consequentialism are the only reasons one might support democracy.

No. But I do not allow fantasies to inform my politics, either. I engage in politics to pragmatically benefit myself and those I care for. Still be sure, that is a rather wide scope. Capitalist catastrophe is around the corner, I will try to stop it, but if I cannot, I will also do what I can to lessen its blow. We should be concerned very much with the day after, both in success, and in failure.

Unlike you, I will admit to wanting more power. But I want it for myself, not for some stupid ideal. A truly participatory democracy, whereby I could help write the laws I live by is the most secure way to do that. I want an assurance I will have that power no matter where I am in society.

My ultimate hope, as unrealistic as it may be, is that we may achieve socialism through no more terror and bloodshed than we are used to. That we can use the tools that liberal capitalism forged for itself against it, and indeed in the process create a more prosperous and efficient economy. That we can create a system which slowly and orderly destroys itself through its expected contradictions, giving individuals more freedom both in how they use their labor, and how they rule their society as it goes on. Modern Capitalism, through the wonders of capital accumulation has become ever more and more centralized. So much so that it will only take seizing control of a select few institutions in the next capitalist crisis to begin undoing the power of the capitalist class, and eventually capital itself too. And eventually, through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and for capital to be reinvested into automation, we'd reach a technological point where production for exchange becomes obsolete.

The principles I've chosen are liberty and equality. I've chosen them because of how they benefit me and those I care for. It would be silly for us, after all, to critique liberalism for failure to deliver on this promise, and not wish to see it realized ourselves.

You, on the other hand, have made autism over the contradictions and progression your values. History has become your God, your Big Other, just like the Stalinists you wish to critique. You protest that no, you will actually kill millions for a true purpose! But don't dare think for a second that Stalin didn't believe in a purpose behind his madness!

I didn't see this posted but this was literally the conclusion of the Democratic Principle.

In the end that was his mighty closing statement after equivocating between actual post-capitalism and the necessary form of the transitional vanguard, using a dubious metaphysical form of Marxism (which doomposter admits is a folly), strawmanning and making basic genetic fallacies, and essentially just rhetorically justifying an empty structural template.

The claims he isn't a mystic are false. It's essentially left-praxeology, an a priori "science" of human action, built on a posteriori observations, then by sleight of hand, turned into an ontology of the party. It's euphemistic ultra-Leninism. The fact these retards are all Lacanians while shunning "vulgar scientism" (ie any working knowledge of science, aka literally just actual materialism) as gauche Dawkinsian autism, as well, speaks volumes to their seriousness and worth as thinkers. I dare you to read Ecrits and not laugh. It's that peculiar strain of continental that happens to be ALL showy artifice, and proud ignorance. The equal and opposite pathology of the analytics who insist on elaborating syntax bereft of meaning.

Doomposter also complains about the ad populum argument then goes on to whine that PCI had 12 milli followers and was only usurped by Mussolini. Yet the brownshirts didn't kill him, interesting… Perhaps it suited them to have a fellow Hegelist organicist visionary who could retroactively rationalize anything with lofty prosaic drivel.

Me again:
Of course causality here is only defined within the Hegelo-Manichean cosmology of diametric opposition as inherent in substance, rather than framing it within a somewhat more grounded transcendental context. It appears radically incapable of handling causality outside of this teleological historicism. "It's totally down to earth guyz and not Absolute IDEALISM aka the Uttermost Autism."

I'm not doomposter, that being said I don't why Lacans theories of the mind have to be materialistic. Structuralism isn't opposed to Marxism at all. I also don't see how Lacan's assumptions (the big other being the most glaring and unfounded one) are any less scientific than Marx's assumptions. We will never be able to prove that value regulates prices beyond the self evident truth that labour creates the concrete values we must consume. Likewise, we will never be able to prove we are moulded by the "big other" beyond the self evident truth we are brought up in a world of language with connotations to each word that are wholly divorced from an animalistic state. I disagree with people who decry scientism except in the case of evo psych , but let's not act like Marx's materialism is somehow more scientific than psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis can garner empirical support (i.e. the case studies psychoanalyst provide to prove their methods work), likewise the countervailing tendencies in Marx's theory can be confirmed or denied in the aggregate but the core of his theory is more or less axiomatic.

Economics is awarded a degree of leeway because of the nature of social sciences, I see absolutely no reason why Lacan should be any different.

I don't see why Lacan's theory of the mind (as in, ideals) needs to be hardcore materialist.

It has to be based on something though, otherwise it's ecstatic scholasticism. I personally am unmotivated to grant Lacan credence, I see it as baseless, it picks out nothing in the grid of appearances, forms and meanings that are given to me. It's just a dues ex, an inner demiurge, another ghost in the machine.

I more just find it funny that the LeftComs contyfags here are bleating about insufficient materialism while brushing off science as though there were a dichotomy between their autism and the Degrassi-Tyson flavor, rather than science being essential to add detail to a Marxist view. They dismiss the materiality of mind while scraping the cannabinoidal resin from their pipes. While they seem to prefer literature, as if Infinite Jest weren't filled with rudimentary errors about psychopharmacology, and didn't even manage to mention Sergio Tacchini tracksuits in the 60 pages I managed to get through without committing it then to the flames.

Don't get me wrong, I have huge problems with a lot of "scientific" quantitative psychology as well. I find it funny you casually dismiss evo psych while shrugging at scientism in general. Saying "well it's an academic discipline so we should just respect it" is liberalist argument to authority. Fuck 'em.

I haven't read Ecrits just bits of a A Clinical Introduction, and I found some value in it. Though if this is your reasoning, to each his own. I also have no strong opinions on the leftcom fags.

No it has more to do with the premise of evo psych. The idea that the human mind is a computer with millions of little modules dedicated to performing a single task in a single social setting is not supported by what we do know about how our brains develop, which indicates that neuroplasticity and behavior traits are more a result of our environment. Behavioral traits are most likely going to be a result of what you see growing up, cultural and not linked to same innate "apple picking module" in the brain. It also relies on a lot of ad hoc explanation, you can basically explain anything away by pointing out ways in which X behavior was viable to Y organism at Z time, it doesn't matter how contradictory it is. It's not much more scientific than psychoanalysis.

Marx's labors were proved correct, because they would have correlated in the aggregate with price and they did
users.wfu.edu/cottrell/eea97.pdf

Literally who is that idiot that keep recommending Politzer's Stalinist textbook on philosophy

*labor values

Undialectical as fuck, and probably comes from an anarkiddie or libsucc who thinks you can similarly take the good from the likes of Durruti while ignoring his actual misrule following his own theory.

Haven't read the entire Politzer book yet but I can definitely see its "pedagogical" values if you simply ignore USSR apologetics. It's perfectly congruent with Marx, except barely a few hundred pages long.

Jodi Derp, err Jodi Dean (inb4 I get sent to the gulag for people suspected of redditorism): "I reject the critique of representation. I think the critique of representation is confused. I think it's confused, because I think it combines two different, I think it's a, a weird active it's, it's become a weird problem that combines some theoretical problems of what are the limits of representation with political problems with real existing democracies. And eh those two have become kind of conflated so it's like theoretical limits on representation somehow are seen to be the same thing as political problems of representation.

Umm, one problem with th-the way that manifests for horizontal groups is they say they're against representation, but they act as if an individual can represent her own interests. So the individual becomes the locus of representation. There is representation, it's self-representation. That's it. If however, you accept any basic ideas of psychoanalysis, you know there is an unconscious, and that someone can never fully represent themselves. If you accept most post-modern theory-theoretical positions, you recognize that the individual is a fiction, that the individual is em em ahn entity created with all sorts of in- urr exclusion you represent its ideological structure and so this idea of self-representation doesn't make theoretical sense. But yet, horizontalists speak as if k-you know they can just say, oh critique of representation and this has a kind of political, theoretical coherence. So the first problem is, it is basically individual self-representation but that's theoretical faldada dats a mistake. Ahm, I think, ahm, the second problem is the supposition that you can have politics without division…"
Wat.

Underrated post.

Basically.

Also capped for truths.

Wow holy shit that is dumb

What was the point of transcribing figures of speech here, and why did you stop a third of the way in? Did you get literally none of that or are you just trying to look edgy?

I'm more than fine with this summary, even as a Bordigist Leninist.

Yeah, Bordiga's rant "against" democracy is just a pseudo-radical bait-and switch. It's typical attention-seeking behavior. Like this:

A: I'm a racist!
B: Whaaaaaaaaaat?
A: A racist, a proud racist. I am. A racist for the human race. Human race is number one for me.
B: Very funny.
A: I heard there are people on the internet who want to marry cats and I think that's wrong. You know, I prefer kids to cats.
B: *looks another way*
A: Ahem!
B: *still looks another way*
A: I said I like kids. You hear me, kids! I'M A PEDOPHILE!
B: WHAT
A: A pedophile, you know in the classical meaning. Being a something-phile means you like that, for instance, if you like books…
B: *face of disapproval*
A: …then you are a bibliophile. You know there are some pedophiles who feel kids are sexy, I just think that's super-weird and I'm not like that at all.
B: *puts on coat, turns away*
A: Why turn away from me like that? Is it because it makes you uncomfortable to see the foundation of your world view getting swept away by my radical critique? Do you even know that I am against democracy? I mean capitalist democracy by that, if workers want democracy, well not that I care strongly either way, but, umm, you know…
B: *leaves*
A: Hello? Where are you going? Someone pay attention to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

...

Typical Holla Forumsack tier bollocks ad hom

and I hate the Bordiga meme as much as the next guy

Is that Bordiguese for being a fat basement dweller?

Based

Are you even aware of

…

anything

...

Le capitalisme va de pair avec la nature humaine

Bordiga front confirmed most pathetic ideology. Posting a photo-shopped image of Bordiga to make him look more attractive! Tsk, tsk.

Viva Espanola, 🕉🕉🕉🕉🕉🕉🕉🕉✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡✡☮☮☮☮☮☮☮☮☮☮☮☮☪☪☪☪☪☪☪☪☪☪☪🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🔯🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎

You don't actually want people to read shit, that would get in the way of you feeling smug for having read things other people haven't.

Same as people on Holla Forums who claim they read Evola. You lurk in a thread about a corruption case, when suddenly a very special guest pops in to spread the following wisdom:
Everybody else: Yeah, probably, anyway, the news about-
Is there anything in there that relates to the news piece we are discussing here, specifically?

It's just shitty memes by narcissistic twats.

...

Did he actually have a problem with those? I've read a bit of bordiga and he doesn't strike me as the sort who would much care about death tolls. His critique of democracy was really good imo, but I find a lot of the solutions that he proposes instead rather difficult to agree with. He often just comes off as your classic tankie: utterly dismissive of concerns for personal freedom and general well-being. Maybe I'm missing something about him?

...

Good thread bump 5

the source on that article is adam buick from the SPGB (the let's convince 51% party). I'd suggest you listen to their debates between SPGB and CWO or SPGB and ICC

Bordiga-Leftcoms seem to believe that democracy came into being with capitalism and that it is the usual state of affairs in capitalism. Both claims are historically false. I am sure that somebody who thinks of himself as radical doesn't like to hear the following, but it's true as far as I can tell: That particular belief seems to be based on what liberal propaganda turned into "common sense". That is, the belief of democracy being an invention of statesmen and liberal thinkers like J. S. Mill, the idea trickling down and finding some usage in lower-class life as well. You might protest that you don't believe in that exactly, but a less stupid variant where it's the capitalist class making that, not a few Great Men. But either version is wrong. Historical reality is that the majority principle had been used in medieval guilds and on pirate ships long before that, and voting as a general right is the result of pressure from working-class organizations like the Chartist movement in Britain. You have to redefine the terms capitalism and democracy in order to have anything resembling a valid claim, but that only has a chance of convincing anybody when giving it no more than a quick glance. Since the words of other people (including Marx) don't build on these definitions, at the end of the day, with all your hard thinking and (allegedly) reading, what you are committing, is, and remains this no matter how much you dress it in obfuscation and snark, a simple fallacy called equivocation.

That about sums it up.

In a thread explicitly saying that democracy came into being practically since the first class societies (slave societies), and as a clear and concise concept ("democracy") in ancient Greece (as a way to directly make rule among the patricians over the plebeians easier, but that's yet another critical point that isn't primary, so I digress).

Bordiga doesn't even reach towards historical origins, just the fact that, as democracy functions as little more than as the mediator between contradictions that cannot be solved without it "softening" their impersonal workings (capital's need to grow at all costs), it is inherent to upholding class societies as legitimate. In effect it's the same thing Zizek says today: democracy definitely has its authentic moments, but more often than not it functions on a purely ideological level. Bordiga here says that democracy under its own economic system needs to be overcome, or at least suspended, going effectively against all that maintains the prior system's sanity, and to birth a post-capitalist society in which democracy for the first time radically changes form into proletarian democracy, and can effectively not truly be called democracy anymore.

Not even a Bordigafag, but I can see the general point he makes here, and that his solution of a sort of Leninist party that delegates economic matters to a self-organized working class, decentralizes the military (universal militias) coupled with his "organic" centralism, you essentially recreate this instant shot as a weapon against capital and birth in a communist society, or your entire construct will instantly fall apart as there is no pretense of a "democratic" central state the masses can be fooled into believing will rule them properly, effectively preventing a USSR situation where the population managed to believe in mandates like muh historical necessity, anti-revisionism, "greater good", etc. all under the idea that their vanguard was a self-checking system with a democracy.

This as well. Bordiga does have a point about honesty though. You can't set a system based on the romantic fervor and/or ideological purity of the vanguardist hero.

The problem is they seem to fall into the same trap by insisting on an anachronistic and dogmatic interpretation of Marx. Which will fail at what it is supposed to accomplish. Every single time.

There are other merits to formal democracy such as (hypothetically lel) enabling an engaged citizenry, embodiment of rights in the individual, liberal institutions, rule of law, etc. It's more of a political formula.

It's not like we don't understand these types of critiques, I have made similar claims myself. But let's be real here for a second, despite their shittiness, liberal democracies are far better than many alternatives, and it's simply flat out wrong to say that all ONLY drugging us into feeling like it's better than it is, and so sustaining captalism. I agree with Zizek and other critiques of how it functions ideologically, but it's another matter to get histrionically hyberbolic about it and start demanding we launch head first into another totalist overriding contradiction.

Seeing everything in the most abstract class terms (state simply and only being class rule over another, speculating about the revolutionary party being an organic outgrowth of class regardless of any actual reality of the situation, and so forth) then running around frantically solving various contradictions by a massively empowered bureau operating in secret, while ignoring gaping contradictions in dogmatic strains of Marxism itself, is a fool's errand.

The fact remains under liberalism, Marx was able to write and publish, and we are able to have this discourse at all. Because of this, there is always an irredactable trace of liberalism contained in every revolutionary process that comes after it, it will always be "tainted", precisely because of the ubiquity of ideology also under liberalism.

Liberalism carries with it the possibility of panoplies of discourses, whereas various tyrannies, including Communist-flavors, tend to not, cementing contradictions into place to cover old ones, while the entropy increases and new contradictions form in the shadows obscured by doctrine, until it collapses into a self-parody, and thereby profanes any noble truths supposedly laid into its foundation.

Formal democracy I agree is also part of the discourse of legitimation of liberalism, especially as of recent world history in the US imperial project, but they have always used any excuse, it's simply an expansion of noblesse oblige - "civilizing the savages". And that's basically over now for anyone not totally assfucked by liberalism: look at what the Trump fiasco has done to the final shreds of credibility of the neocon "humanitarian" war project predicated on the exceptionalism of American democracy.

I find that under liberalism, the purest of pure ideology naturally coheres around the default "center". The margins is where shit gets interesting. Rather than than social realism and maybe a couple dope Tarkovsky films if lucky.

So that's why the Italians let him go

I like this, but it's still too vague. Leninism (as per Lenin) might have proven to be too weak, but at least Leninism was well worked out.

I'd say this is a given Marx completely accepts; capitalism itself provides with possibilities entirely relative to its stage in history, complete with freedoms, etc.

The problem therein lies not so much in how much worse revolution or communism is; the problem is that if this revolution itself doesn't construct a radically new society that is self-sustained both materially and ideologically, you'll see whatever this "sub-society" it upholds become worse and worse. I think looking at how civil liberties went on to become worse and worse in the USSR is a perfect example of this; the revolution was authentic, the plan concise, etc. but it never managed to do more than rocket fire Russia from a semi-feudal society to a fully capitalist one but with all the liberal values of it devoid, and all emancipatory freedoms lessening gradually over time (early USSR was incredibly free, if we are to believe most historical accounts, then gradually turned worse and worse as the purpose of the "sub-stage" became redundant and had to legitimize itself beyond that).

Nothing to add, just a vanity bump.

Same.