Why does leftypol hate the communist manifesto?

I'm incompetent please rape my face

wew lad

Bookchin is a meme but he is unironically a good starting point.

I thought/assumed his stuff was much too complicated for a newbie like myself?

The Next Revolution is pretty simple read, but i don't know about his other works.

Forgot shitposting flag

Bookchin is memeology tier, which is also why he is pretty popular around here. It's usually babbies' first socialism on Holla Forums.

Those who have read the Manifesto and understand its content do not "hate" it as much as they actually know it was just in one part a piece of propaganda for the communist movement at the time, and in the other part a list of immediate reforms to push for in Europe. It is therefore not theoretically informative, nor is it useful for contemporary communists in any way.

Yes, the Manifesto is outdated (a historical text), and depending on how and in how far you mean "outdated", there is some truth to that too.

German Ideology (chapter 1) > Manuscripts of 1844 > Wage Labour and Capital in that order. They are what is relevant to the fundamentals of Marxism and the critique of capitalism, and they provide a proper basis to tackle Capital volume 1 afterwards (you may also want to read Michael Heinrich's intro to Capital as well). The Communist Manifesto however, is not a proper introduction to anything while these works are, and they are all relatively short and concise.

Marx first had his hand in writing the Manifesto early in his writing years, and it can sort of show. While the Manifesto isn't the worst thing in the world, it ultimately ends up being a few things: a) an early, undeveloped form of Marx's analysis b) a dated historical document c) and a proponent of social democracy as we know it today (arguably its biggest "crime").

If you decide to read it through the lens as a product of Marx's early thinking and the period he resided in, there's still some small things you could gain from it.

It starts off strong with the lines necessitating the need for an internal working class party and defining the roles the communists stand in with the working class; it touches on the concept of property and the familial institution. These ideas, however, are expanded along later by not just Marx but also Engels, and in a better way. After all, this was just a pamphlet.

The part where the foundations of this text start to crumble is its ten "planks"/statements on the definiton of communism, which degenerate into social democracy and also directly contradict later Marx's radical, anti-establishment views on the movement.

The ten statements can be found here: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm (right at the bottom). Arguing for increased income tax, state-centralized credit and more social democratic goodness; it's no surprise anyone would think the USSR was Marx's final vision if this is the only thing they'd read. Today, we can take these ten "planks" as starting points for the destruction of capitalism once the working class is in power, but not as statements about a communist (lower or higher phase) mode of production and what it would look like as such.

People ultimately recommend works like German Ideology, Manuscripts of 1844, Wage Labour and Capital and Capital itself over this as introductory texts, and for good reason. More fleshed out in analysis, more radical in its understanding of the communist movement. Marx grew his understanding and later criticized these lines of thinking, such as in his argument against the concept of value, with critiques levied at thinkers like Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy and the nature of other programmes in Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Leftcoms get it

These. The strength of Marxist analysis of a mode of production, like capitalism, is its context-independence. Marx's analysis of smartphone production is fundamentally correct today, despite him having neither explicitly prepared one nor conceived of computers, because he considered production in the abstract. What you have to realize is that the platform laid forth in the Communist Manifesto is a context-dependent one. It is not analysis so much as it is a sort of party program, appropriate to 1848, outlining the first steps of a workers' government and prepared out of a sort of necessity. It should not be taken as a definitive statement on the overall, long-term policy goals of communism, because communism isn't a collection of policies or "a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself, [but] the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” Correctly understanding what is meant by that is key to understanding Marx

There is no problem with the Manifesto, but with anticommunists claiming to have read it and pretending this gives them somehow legitimation for their utter bullshit, that not only showing that they clearly didn't read it either, but also do not understand or know that it's a pamphlet and not a work on Marxist theory.

Basically it's the only thing they can name when they try to think of communist literature to "deflect" critizism of being uneducated (which they are and is proven by that move).

It's the same with Marx's work on the Jewish Question.
People quotemining and not understanding what the fuck they're talking about doesn't mean we're against those texts, instead we're against the complete nonsense people try to spin out of it.

anyone who calls himself a leftist but hates communism is either a

1. brainwashed pussy american who can't shake the years of imperialist propoganda pushed down his throat

2. idiots who haven't read enough and simply don't know enough

there is no inbetween. the immortal science is inevitable

Sounds like straightforward misuse of the term "leftist" tbh
Unless you mean that to include anarchists as "anti-communists"

Marx is not the lord of communism.
His particular flavor of communism was vague at best, and very authoritarian.
Marx was also a bit of a cunt.

...

It doesn't take a genius to know that the social democratic portions of the communist manifesto were there for popular appeal and made obsolete when they were co-opted by the capitalist state for their own survival.

The point of philosophy is not just to understand the world around us, but to change it. Leftcoms, who read, though uncritically as they may, have all but forsaken that purpose. They might deny this, but their actions, and lack thereof, speak volumes.

Zizek does more for class consciousness in one day than all the leftcom fags on this board could do in twenty years.

t. KHV Asian beta male

It's a product of its time. I find it useful when arguing for certain progressive reforms and then seguing into arguing socialism isn't so bad. Minimum wage, women suffrage, and ending child labor are all mentioned in the Manifesto and were advocated for by socialists well before they were finally achieved in the Progressive Era of the 20th century. The word "progressive" is mentioned in it several times as well.

Kek how did you infer that?

Marx wasn't particularly authoritarian, just rather pragmatic about the need for violence in a revolution. Ditto for Lenin… until he ascended to the throne and went bugfuck.

Marx literally said communism could be brought about through despotism. Not "a dictatorship of the proletariat" but despotism. The fact was he was ambivalent towards authoritarianism. No, I do think a transition to communism needs a state, but if you don't try to prevent an authoritarian state, that's what you're going to get. And despite what he thought, history tells us despotism will not lead to communism, as that would almost never be in a despots interest.

I confess I don't recall him talking that about despotism. All I remember about the term is when he wrote about the Asiatic mode of production.

Source on this? It contradicts Lenin's analysis of Marx in State and Revolution, how the "proletariat organized as the ruling class" should cease to have a political character to its administration and its offices be subject to immediate recall, precisely in contrast to the strategy of class rule through "free and fair elections" that generates a class of fungible, unaccountable bureaucrats with a distinct class character in theirs.

t

From the Manuscripts of 1844

The Section is called Private Property and Communism