Communism vs communalism

this has to be b8
if not, hang yourself

His thought was shit even to other anarchist philistines. You should have been able to tell that you're reading third-rate bourgeois theory when you knew he couldn't remember (or actually figure out) a single thing about Marxism from when he was a $$$"Trot"$$$

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kys

No, Bookchin merely recognizes that hierarchy and domination first emerged through changes in the superstructure as opposed to the base. Furthermore, Bookchin uses the anthropological work of Paul Radin and Dorothy D. Lee as opposed to the now outdated work of Lewis Henry Morgan that Marx and Engles used.
Not sure where you got this misconception from. Bookchin has multiple reasons for no longer believing that the proletariat is the revolutionary agent. We can't pretend that Marx did not put primacy on the factory worker, though. To say otherwise is to be intellectually dishonest. Here's an essay detailing some of his problems with historical materialism libcom.org/library/were-we-wrong-murray-bookchin
Much more nuanced then that. Bookchin viewed the democratic assembly, soviets being a prime example, as the essential revolutionary institution. The revolutionary agents are those who participate and propagate these institutions, which isn't limited to the proletariat. Peasants were quite active in soviets as well, and if you're going to paint him as a class collaborationist then you must call soviets bourgeois institutions of class collaboration as well.

You mean Bob Black? Anarchy after leftism is absolutely laughable, and I've picked it apart on here before. His main criticism against works like Ecology of Freedom is that they were not embraced by academia, which is pretty hilarious coming from somebody like Bob Black.

not bate, just true.
more like bookshit

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You gonna actually put the effort into stating how it's a strawman, the relevant work showing it's a strawman, or are you just going to shitpost?

I wouldn't say it's a firmly communist ideology. They work with somewhat difference conceptions of history (DiaNat as opposed to DiaMat), which might sound small but produces some very big differences, chief among them being the view of what constitutes the revolutionary agent.

You want to elaborate on this?

Anarkky is an edgy meme ideology that has lost its chance the second we left the trees.

wdhbt?

What's difference between Bookchin's Libertarian Municipalism and Ocalan's Democratic Confederalism?

Ocalan came from petty-bourgeois and Stalinist influences. It speaks for itself how easily he had transitioned to Bookchin.

kill yourself leftcom

One is for pre-enlightenment societies seeking to establish an enlightenment (DemCon), the other is for post-enlightenment societies (Libertarian Municipalism). I would suggest just making another thread to ask that question tbh.

everytime

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really makes you think

ancaps are made fun of for the same reason ancoms should be. It's fucking meme tier. stop it. jesus fucking christ. stop. No one wants a part of your shitty little village meme. Zizek was right.

so salty

I don't know, but from what the last Bookchin fanatic argued, it's fucking retarded and stems from a misunderstanding of Marx.

not an argument. An* are an embarrassment to both side. Go tip over a trashcan, kid.

Like what?

Like Bookchin conflating Marx's goal of elimination of class with that of elimination of hierarchy, and his placing of the superstructure first. If you reject materialism, you're already fucked and Bookchin did exactly that. Not only that, but nobody who argues for his shit can ever properly define "hierarchy". Bookchin is a meme-tier faggot that shouldn't be listened to. He produced no real theory, as opposed to Marx who made testable predictions the whole way.

Bookchin: The contrarian's dream meme

You can't even meme right. FSA is either hostile to PYD or they are subordinate to it (like Thuwar ar-Raqqa etc.)

Actually Bookchin is critical of Marxism for not addressing hierarchy and domination.
"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase."
Bookchin doesn't reject this, he merely recognizes that hierarchy first emerged purely from changes to the superstructure as opposed to changes in the base. This is not rejecting the the base/superstructure relationship.
"By hierarchy, I mean the cultural, traditional and psychological sys­tems of obedience and command… To say this, however, does not define the meaning of the term hierarchy, and I doubt that the word can be encompassed by a formal definition. I view it historically and existentially as a complex system of command and obedi­ence in which elites enjoy varying degrees of control over their subordinates without necessarily exploiting them… Hierarchy is not merely a social condition; it is also a state of con­sciousness, a sensibility toward phenomena at every level of personal and social experience."
What's wrong with this as a definition, besides recognizing the trouble of establishing a "formal definition"?
Both DiaNat and DiaMat make testable predictions. One of Bookchin's reasons for breaking with Marxism is the fact that the conditions for revolution that Marx predicted arose in the early 20th century, but did not result in the end of capitalism as predicted. Bookchin makes the prediction that the assembly is the essential revolutionary institution, and this is evidenced by the current revolution in Syria (and I'm not talking about purely Rojava). What do you know of DiaNat and communalism? Have you actually taken the time to learn about either?

Just let this kid thread die so we can have real Marxist discussion. Or memes. or anything but snarky anarkky threads about how great your silly little ideology is.

Literally no one wants to participate in your village. Anarkky will ==never== be a thing.

bump

Nigga u gay, let it die. Go knock over a newspaper stand and draw Ⓐ on shit like a hot topic child. You're playing yourself with your ideology.

bump

You're the only one bringing snark here instead of arguing in good faith

So from what I gathered people that hate Bookchin either never have read him or they reject him because they misinterpret his misinterpretation of Marx. For the most part Bookchin either didnt say to much about Marx outside of his criticism of the proletariat as the revolutionary actor at the workplace or he held him in high regard and praised him.

And there are the tankies triggered by the fact that a hierachical society will ultimately allways create new class society.

Still not seeing how he misinterpreted Marx though

Right, so his theory is shit. Congratulations.
Gee, I wonder. The fact is that his concept of "hierarchy" doesn't mean anything and there is no compelling reason why we should worry about it.
Except that's not what Marx said, but go ahead and keep being stupid. He explicitly avoided saying how shit would come about because he didn't fucking know.

Than all self proclaimed marxists except some leftcoms have misinterpreted him.

Marx was worried about the next step in human history, not the last

He's pretty explicit in how he defines hierarchy, and it's on that definition that you should criticize him on if you're going to criticize it at all. Admitting that it's an informal definition is not admitting to no definition at all.
Why are you equating "traditional and psychological sys­tems of obedience and command" with "doesn't mean anything"? I mean, if you've got no problem with social stratification then fine but then why even be a marxist then?
So Marx did not believe that the crisis of capitalism would result in a revolution? That the contradictions inherent to capitalism would result in it's overthrow? In a time were these contradictions were most apparent, were the crisis described was in line with prediction, revolution was not the end result but ultimately the strengthening of the entire system of capital.

Communalism is not seen as the last step in human history. Bookchin rejected the hegelian concept of an end to history.

come on, tell us more about that "species-essence" spooky fairy tale again

People that dislike Bookchin are butthurt marxists, but they are irrelevant anyways

This.

these anti-bookchin posters are just Holla Forumslacks trying to subvert the read bookchin meme

they don't even know what the fuck they are saying

This user has never read theory.

That's a whole lot of nothing of substance to your post.

stirnerites are the worst tbh

lrn 2 read

Do most Communalists identify as anarchists? Or is Communalism something completely different?I've seen Communalists claim they don't reject seizure of State power outright.

Communalism is Maoism with Anarchist Characteristics.

Communalism is yet to go through that stage where a leader who had praised freedom and democracy his whole life becomes a tyrant as soon as he reaches power.

Communalism is a separate tendency from anarchism. Communalists reject the state but not institutions of power, just institutions that use power to dominate like the state. Some communalists might want to seize state power in order to abolish it, but that's revisionism on their part.

Truly ebin

Apo is in prison so I don't see how that can realistically happen.

kek, because Egoism conforms so easily to actually existent human behavior, that's why we're all soulless polyglot sociopaths who just run around seizing eachother's property and naturally reject all forms of communal bonds and social hierarchy.

Doesn't have to be Apo. In fact, he strikes me as more of a Bukharin.

Interesting comparison. What's your reasoning? Apo is pretty much the only one with the cult of personality that could enable that sort of dictatorship to arise.

Bukharin seemed like "the sensitive one" out of the bunch, the one most likely to perceive and resent the human cost of what they had to do. Apo's turn towards the more humane (for now) communalism seems like a step in that direction. So yeah, I got no solid reasoning, just gut feeling.

And communalism's big break might not be Rojava. This might be just its Paris Commune instead of its October Revolution. Best of luck to those plucky Kurds tho.

The idea that any single person can exert that much control over a movement, let alone a whole country (I suppose "region" in the case of Öcalan) is hopelessly liberal. Whether it's the Great Purges in Russia, or the Cultural Revolution, all of these things were done with mass support from the people, I'm not saying the well established cults of personality didn't help, but in the case of Mao most contemporary scholarship shows he was almost reacting to a social movement, not starting one. J. Arch Getty's scholarship also shows the degree to which the Purges weren't all just top-down decisions made by the central committee, but rather the Party had produced an environment where the Russian people very willingly participated in these highly public whichhunts. So the issue, I think, isn't Öcalan's possible corruption, but rather material and historical conditions that often can be completely unpredictable.

google "the ego and it's own" and actually read it

devoting your ego to hedonism and envy means you ego is a slave to them

Arguably, the Paris Commune was it's "Paris Commune". Bookchin credits one of the Paris revolutionaries for first coining the term Communalism.

Is there anything that isn't a spook?

The idea I had of the Cultural Revolution was what a writer for Exiled called "Lord of Misrule". Mao decidedly was not in full command, and in fact fanned the flames of chaos, but he did so because he was literally the only person immune from them. His cult of personality not only gave him the most authority with the various players, but made him the only person above criticism. In that sense, he wasn't a regular leader of the movement, but he most definitely was atop the pyramid, such as, playing the army against Red Guards at one turn, then the reverse in the next.

Of the Purges, just today I think I read someone say that part of its point was for Stalin to buy favor with regional party authorities, which fits with his style of acquiring power. He allowed them to command their own local purges, which would be responsible for God knows how many of the total executions. But the idea that people in general participated in the purges is new to me, I confess.

I have one of a million things I need to read here, Getty's "Excesses Are Not Permitted": Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s. Is that the one you're referring to?

But to get to your point, yeah you're right, Rojava is its own creature.

Observe the Bookchinite thread:
r-read Bookchin!
u didnt understand bookchin the p-proer w-way!
google bookchin f-for realz!!!

The red star of socialism guiding mankind through the ages and the cosmos.

Anyone can see that's bullshit just by looking at the thread user.

and this is just the first "retort" ITT

This is kind of an ungenerous reading of the Cultural Revolution, while I know Holla Forums hates Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution was undeniably a debacle, it was still a movement that started among peasants and students who felt cheated by the Party bureaucracy and wished to push class struggle beyond the revolution. Now, the degree to which Mao's actions at this time were opportunistic are up for debate, by 1966 he had been stripped of most of his actual political positions, the government was mostly run by Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and, surprisingly Deng Xioping. What people fail to understand about China is that it didn't just experience a Communist revolution, it experienced a Liberal and Communist revolution at the same time and the Party at that time maintained both Liberal and Communist wings. The Cultural Revolution wasn't just a bunch of chaos, it was essentially a civil war between multiple factions, a Maoist faction, a Lin Bioist faction (MTWs are weirdly into Lin Bio) which was loyal to the Soviet Union, and Ultraleft faction, and a Liberal faction, not all Red Guards were Maoists, some were Liberals, and even the People's Liberation Army was split into various factions, it's a difficult moment in time to parce through, but blaming it all on Mao as a mythically charismatic demagogue is just an easy scapegoat to avoid a nuanced critique of history.

As for Stalin, I do think it's easier to claim he acted opportunistically, but it's also undeniable that he honestly believed that if he killed enough "reactionaries" some sort of new Communist generation untainted by bourgeois culture would be born into existence. Almost everyone Purged were people of non-proletarian backgrounds, especially the Old Bolsheviks, and all of them were replaced by cadres deemed "genuinely". It was an act of workers chauvinism that also had the unfortunate flavor of antisemitism, as so many persecuted were among the Jewish intelligentsia that had been so vital to the Communist movement before Stalin's ascension to power.

See

Bretty ebin tho fugster :DDDD

*"genuinely" proletarian

Hedonism and envy are appetites, not spooks.

Communalism is a meme, communism isn't

Multiple revolutions have occurred. Just because they haven't been totally dominant yet, doesn't mean they won't be.

In the most underdeveloped parts of the world, another thing that Marx predicted wrong. Bookchin's theory is more in line with the realities of Russian, Spanish, and Ukranian revolutions then Marx's.

France? Germany?

Elaborate.

marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/communist_review/1922/07/soc_rev.htm
Since we're on the topic this might be worth reading. In regards to France, Paris was not the industrial heart of the country. Only a very small portion of the industrial proletariat. The revolutions in both France and Germany were ultimately crushed because of their failure to establish a Dual Power, the case being especially true in Germany. The Paris Commune was of course a dual power that had successfully taken over Paris, but what was required was the establishment of a Dual Power throughout all of France not just Paris. Essentially, Bookchin sees the supreme revolutionary institution as the popular assembly which create a Dual Power. In Russia, this took the form of the soviets. In Spain, it was the institutions created by the CNT, which did not limit itself to purely trade unions but had regional assemblies as well. Ukraine likewise had it's own soviets of course and Dual Power, being foremost expressed militarily through the Black Army. In all cases, these Dual Powers did not limit themselves to purely participation by the proletariat. Peasants were also in active part. In all three cases, the countries involved were some of the least developed. As the link points out, "The theory of increasing misery is the theory of the social revolution. " Misery tends to be reduced in the most developed of countries, in the least developed it is exacerbated.

Please excuse the grammatical and writing errors. I'm sick with the flue and it tends to make me foggy minded.

/thread

Communalism abolishes the current state of things through a Dual Power, embodied by revolutionary institutions like the soviets. I don't know why you guys think memes are somehow an argument. I swear, you're just as bad as Holla Forums sometimes.

A dual power?

I'll be nice about it though. A dual power are institutions that take power away from the state and give it to the "citizenry", those that participate in these institutions and further propagate them. Soviets are a classic example of a dual power. These institutions are not merely reduced to a single class, the Soviets being populated heavily by both

*peasantry and proles in historical examples like Ukraine and Russia. A modern day example is the federal system in Rojava.

Dual Power is a tactic for revolution, not a different set of conditions in and of themselves, even extremely reactionary groups like Hezbollah and Hamas are performing effective Dual Power right now. That being said, what they meant, I assume, is that Marxism seeks to understand the material and historical conditions of political economy under Capitalism so as to abolish it, whereas Communalism proposes a sort of idealist vision of a utopian return to Athenian polity and some idea of a pure democracy before the nation-state. Now personally I think it takes more then negation to create a successful revolution, there needs to be at least some positive vision of what comes next, but the idea that what a classless/stateless society would look like could be completely mapped out is ridiculous, and I think a lot of Communalism will hit this wall.

As far as I know
Communilism is small communist community
Communism is worldwide lack of classes, money and government.

Why would you assume that the user who doesn't know the definition of Dual Power is also one of the anons who recognized a direct quote to the German Ideology?

Dual Power is THE tactic for revolution. In the conflict between first and second nature, dual power manifests itself to challenge the established institutions of hierarchy and domination throughout history. This can be traced back to even before athens, and to the American revolution and Paris Commune as well as the Russian Revolution. It does not strike you as odd that Dual Power has been such a consistent part of history? That the most autocratic of countries with no history of democracy like Russia still had the widespread proliferation of institutions of direct democracy like the soviets come about? Hezbollah and Hamas utilize elements of a dual power but do not truly constitute one. Dual Power and democracy are inseparable.
No, communalism seeks to understand the origins of hierarchy and domination. The conclusion it comes to is that changes to the superstructure first brought about the emergence of hierarchy and would later culminate in the introduction of class and state institutions. In this way, changes in the superstructure preceded changes to the base. Furthermore, it recognizes the historical contradiction not merely limited to class but of hierarchy and domination, including class. To put it another way, the conflict between "first nature" and "second nature".
I think given the anthropological and historical data, especially as it pertains to revolution, much can be said of what stateless/classless society would look like. What is definitely obvious is the means by which such a condition can be achieved, and the necessity of a dual power as being indisputable to that aim.
see

What a powerful concept.

it's obviously a simplistic answer, but I can't be arsed to spoon feed people the entirety of communalist theory. It's telling how willing people are to judge it without actually even the most basic concepts associated with it like first and second nature, as well as DiaNat in general

I'm going to bed. Check out the sidebar of r/Communalists for the basics on communalism

Goodnight, and thank you, this has been a good thread

See, it's the abandonment of Historical Materialism that leads to these exact kinds of critiques. First of all no, I don't find it odd that one can find situations similar to "dual power" all throughout history, creating a sort of revolutionary base from which to establish a sort of counter-hegemony to the dominant structure just makes sense under any revolutionary situation that isn't either just a military coup or a transition of power from one oppressor class to another. But this was my exact point, it's a """tactic""", it's mere presence says nothing about it's class character or it's goals, which is why Hezbollah and Hamas are still perfect examples of Dual Power regardless of how undemocratic (to say the least) you or I may find them. The Paris Commune and the Soviets of Revolutionary Russia on the other hand are a perfect example of Dual Power established by proletarians for the sake of proletarian revolution and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

I honestly can't help but feel like all this talk of "hierarchy and domination" is needlessly vague and obscures a more concrete analysis of our current historical epoch under Capitalism, these categories seem just too broad. It also seems like Communalists have a tendency to collapse all of history onto itself, not unlike the way many anarchists do, like how I see most anarchists define Capitalism by the Liberal definition of "markets", which would mean that ancient Rome and Egypt were Capitalist. But yeah, aside from that I just fundamentally don't agree with anything you've said here. Capitalism was most certainly not created through developments within the Superstructure of society. There were no grand plans or schematics involved in the origins of Capitalism, no "state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself". It happened through a combination of material conditions lending themselves to the creation of a bourgeois class, and then that class's ruthless negation of all Feudal power, much the same way Proletarians were created by the material conditions of Capitalism, and how it's now our time to ruthlessly seek our own class interests. But what this negation and class struggle entails, just like the Bourgeoise's accession to power, is not any certainty to the shape of the society that this struggle will produce.

Once again, you're collapsing all of history onto itself, Communism is not just the social relations of hunter-gatherer societies, but with the material conditions of Capitalism, it's something we honestly can't even imagine for the same reasons Greeks living in slave societies could have never imagined Capitalism, it's a set of social relations we can't even dream of, a world where the value from has been completely sublated. What Marx envisioned in Das Kapital is far more revolutionary, far more visionary, far more Utopian, and far more alien to our current society then anything anarchists or communalists have ever proposed.

This is correct.

I second this

I merely asked you one question: what is this "dual power?"

Please show me where Bookchin proposes the end of history under communalism. Communalism is a tactic and a strategy that tries to build a communist society based on the historical tendency of the regulary and allways repeating conflict between democratic local structures and states(as Bookchin saw them). That tries to end class conflict and hierachy at the same time. Bookchin never denies the reality of class, he never proposes the athenian "democracy" as his ideal. Everyone that whines about muh utopianism can go and shoot themselves, describing a potential avenue for revolution and trying to revive genuine politics and its powers is not some mythical utopia.

I cant remember Bookchin denying marterialism as the emergence of capitalism. Anyone want to fill me in? Only for the emergence of hierachy from the organic society(which is a constructed thing that he says probably never existed but postulates to see what forces will act on it to create hierachy) he says that culture played an effect. For example even in a society with strict gender roles hierachy is not a must. Only when males became responsible for the relationships with other tribes combined with gerontocracy male dominafed politics/early forms of stafecraft emerged and started to form hierachies. This might seem like idle theorizing about anthropology but teaches us about the kind of institutions we need for a less hierachical society.

Bookchin doesnt see the proletarian at the worplace as the revolutionary force that Marx thinks he is. Bookchin actually creates a propper understanding of nature that Marx lacks completely and he considers the issue of hierachy which Marx doesnt.

Point one and two dont need explanation. And if you neither consider hierachy and also dont want to describe a path to communism because that would be "utopianism" then you will allways stay ineffective or create another failure like Marxist-Leninist states.

And back to utopianism it is.

good posts

No wonder you people still debate why the soviet union fell kek. Nothing will change if you dont act. Even Marx understood that, and to act you need to have a plan. Its surprising how similar Marxists are to anarkiddies.

Except that this is a lie:

If you actually have the slightest clue you would know that. But it seems like Marxists rather wank themselves a few more times to magical thinking and watch while capitalism survives one crisis after the other and finally ruins this planet.

Yeah, remember that time the bourgeoisie thought up a full blueprint of the future society before the French Revolution?

A plan of immediate action != a model for your ideal utopia.

And to act meaningfully you need to have a plan with a realistic goal. Which you don't, since you decide of your goal ("a less hierarchical society") before anything else.

Marxists study history and deduct what its next phase will be no matter if we personally contribute to the revolution or not.

You decide of your end goal in your head, and only then start looking for the "institutions" you need to shape society according to your desire. This is textbook utopianism.

People usually don't like their theoretical enemy's characterization of them. It doesn't mean it's a lie, it's just something you'd rather not stomach.

Seems like you operate on memes and not actual knowledge. Bookchin never described some kind utopian society to be achieved. Athenian democracy is an example of past structures that hint at a potentiallity that we could achieve. Not a call to copy them. If you think that "confederated local democracies" is some kind of blue print then all Ansyns, council communists, Leninists ect. are also utopians.

They are.

So I am debating with screeching armchair leftcoms that are upset that people do what Marx predicted they will do, even if he was slightly wrong about the way they are doing it. If you think that communalism is not a direct reaction to the present state of capitalism then you are retarded af.

Anarcho-syndicalism is merely a strategy for revolution through federated trade unions (syndicates).

Council communism is also merely a strategy for revolution through, you guessed it: council communism.

Leninism is merely a strategy for revolution through, wait for it: a vanguard party.

None of these are ideologies that imagine the ideal end point prematurely; their namesake does not refer to or imply a thing unto itself. Their ultimatel end goals are all the same: to systemically abolish the excesses of the capitalist mode of production and alter it so that a new one arises from its ashes. This is the way all revolutions have happened.

Through workers' councils*, oops.

And how is that different from communalism?

Communalism: a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.

Which is just wrong. But I guess repeating stuff makes stuff more true in your reality.

Communalism here: communalismpamphlet.net is literally defined as an ideal model, not a movement.

So basically 21st century hippies?

Add a bunch of anthropology, social studies and class collaborationism into the mix, and yes.

Confirmed for never having read Bookchin, seriously stop talking bullshit. Communalism is opposed to all kinds of mysticism and maintains class struggle as an integral part of its ideology, just outside the workplace in a different political sphere.

Strawman harder, also you havent given a single argument against the criticism Bookchin raises or his way of organising towards a revolution. But I guess class consciousness will hit any minute now and you dont need agitation to change anything as obviously all the proles see capitalism as only one of many possible systems. When the next crisis comes the enlightend vanguard will take power and surpress the actual revolutionary actors because they never read Bookchin and think they are the avatar of the working class.

Okay. From what you posted, Bookchin talks about changes in the superstructure (culture primarily but also psychological dispositions) but he can't describe what set those changes in motion. Excluding an outside force, like God, what accomplished this? His answer is that men got it into their heads that they should oppress women – and that's how we ended up with class and the state.
But that still doesn't answer the question of why men, in general, decided it would be a good idea to oppress women. And it still doesn't answer where, exactly, that idea came from.

Men didnt just decide to do what they did. I dont know where the idea comes from Bookchin rejected Materialism, he described how hierachy emerged before class through the fact that hunters(males due to biology) where the outside representatives of their groups formed around kinship ties thus became the main group that dominated politics that wasnt direct coordination of their daily lifes. Adding the gerontocracy that arrises through the mere fact that old people naturally mainly act in the social sphere and their advantags through long standing social ties and you have the basis for a patriachal group of older men dominating the rest of the group. This with the shift from shamanism wich was a highly personalised type of not yet religion unto more formalised religions where the priests no longer held personal responsibillity and blamed the wider group for failures formed the basis for the first economic exploitation, and the first, if not fully developed class systems. This means that hierachy is the basis of class systems and that maintaining womens political power and youth political power is necessary to maintaim a non hierachical society. I dont see how this is not materialistic or how this utopian.

Also for the record Bookchin never postulates that a society where these basic structures didnt exist ever existed. Hes not a fucking primitivist.

Because the people in this thread seem highly autistic I have to mention that Bookchin hates shamanism for a variety of reasons and doesnt think that a return to it is the answer to the religious question.

Bookchin explicitly rejects class struggle in Listen, Marxist!; he recognizes its existence but does not consider it the motor of history. Instead, his revolutionary subject is "the People(tm)" and his ideal a model society.

It's a fucking text written by adherents of the ideology. Are you dense?

This is the actual strawman. Give me a text in which any adherent of Marxism says this and I'll reconsider calling a website made by actual adherents of communalism a "strawman".

All mass orgnisations ever did that
i think you are smart enough to see the problem here
While I think Bookchin was not creative enough to see the intricacies of class struggle hes still right that the popular conception of Marxists "predictions" of how class struglgle would show itself under capitalism was wrong

Also a polemic against Marxists(not Marx iirc) on an issue that he held different opinions throughout his life is not a good basis to dismiss all of what he said and especially is conception of nature and how to move beyond unionism.

Are you retarded?

Listen, Marxist! was written by Bookchin. How unfamiliar are you with your own utopian's writings? Just like communalismpamphlet.net was written by Bookchinites, you're just generally illiterate.

This has nothing to do with the Marxist conception of class struggle.

There was never an artificial limit on unionism in Marxism. It's quite the opposite: unions are not innately revolutionary at all.

Then be so kind and explain what your idea of Marxism actually wants, since you seem so sure of your knowledge it should be easy to show the clear destinction in tactics and strategy. Because I get the feeling that you are just angry that someone tries to formulate a basis for an actual movement. Also be so kind and explain how you maintain revolutionary structure after taking power and how you prepare society for the post revolutionary situation. How you want to adress the issue of ever deepening capitalism and ecological issues. How you adress the failure of workplace radicalism and the lack of class consciousness. Also since it has been a historical problem how you productivly use a revolutionary situation in 3rd world regions.

And what the fuck is your idea of class struggle. Really you dont make it seem like Bookchins dislike for Marxists was unjustified.

How the fuck do you convince people to join your cause when you dont describe a better alternative? I hope to god that not all Marxists are this retarded.

He literally talks about hierarchy as a state of consciousness. Utter bullshit.

So hunting created patriarchy. What it did not create was class society. It was the production of a social surplus that created class. Priesthoods, politicians, soldiers, etc. can only exist because they're not working – not engaged in production. Marxists never claimed that there was no social inequality (oppression) before class society, only that exploitation and class society go hand in hand. If elder hunters could exercise 'political' influence, it's likely because they were, in years past, pivotal to the survival of the social group. If shamans exercised 'religious' influence, it's likely because they claimed to represent higher powers that must be appeased by offerings and rituals. These were not, however, a permanent class. While they could oppress they could not exploit. It wasn't until the creation of agriculture (mostly by women) that class societies began to appear. And it wasn't because of hierarchy, it was due to the development of the forces of production. This is why Bookchin rejects materialism. He draws a straight line from hierarchy (really patriarchy) to class societies, as if one necessitated the other. But hierarchy, as he demonstrated, could exist without class – and that was due to the poorly developed toolset and knowledge that had yet to be accumulated over thousands of years of trial and error. Once agriculture and other production methods were developed, thence came class society – and only once those conditions had been met.

You're both wrong, it was agriculture that created class and hierarchy.
Because if you've got a farm you have to defend it, therefore a warrior class arises which dominates everyone else, they can afford to be skilled in combat by enslaving others to work the farm for him.
Creating a proletariat class.
Men are better at fighting than women so they naturally form most, if not all of it.

Communalism is a theory, like Marxism. You appear here as someone who understands and subscribes to this theory. And you happen to have an utopian discourse. Conclusion? Either you have a bad understanding of communalism, in which case your suggestion to read Bookchin is of no value; or communalism itself is utopian.

GREENIES READ FUCKING MARX OR PROUDHON OR KROPOTKIN LITERALLY FUCKING ANYONE

FIND A BOOK THAT ISNT DUMB HIPPY SHIT

FUCKING READ IT

ANY OF THEM

Would you be opposed to your city or state becoming Communalist and seceding from its surrounding country?

Cultural hierarchy qua geronotocracy predates social surplus and agriculture.

Yes, Communalism is utopian. It is a part of the utopian socialist tradition, you autist.

hmmm

… and thus counter-revolutionary.

no

yes

yes

no

I don't think Marx was self-indulgent enough to make a prediction. That's entirely different from not being "smart enough" to see ahead. Its a reasonable position to say 'I cant predict the future'.

Personal property can include a house and a small garden/farm. If you are only taking up enough space and using enough resources for a couple or a family that's fine. Small plots of decentralized self-sustaining family/community farms dotted by micro industrial centers is ideal.

This is literally the same plan of Hitler, Stalin, Mao.

and then comes Bookchin.

You just cant be a dick and fence off the only local water source or something like that.

Centralized economy is not okay.

Taking control over large swaths of land to create excess surplus personal property or centralized state property without democratic consent of the local people is not okay.

Except that "counter-revolutionary" isn't equatable with "things I don't like". The utopian socialist tradition is a long one, and one that Marxism could not fully escape. Read "The Utopian Impulse":
social-ecology.org/wp/1983/12/the-utopian-impulse-reflections-on-a-tradition/

Indeed. It is equatable with "things that are objectively an obstacle to the revolution". Like utopianism.

What is up with the cancer spacing?

Been looking for a chance to use this meme.

Marxism's crude materialism and being entirely wrong about the role of the state has been an enormous obstacle, and continues to be one to this day. To borrow the language of Marx, your dead traditions weigh on the brains of the living.

What's the problem with materialism?

I beg your pardon?

This.

It must be heavily modified by the dialectic of ideas to be objective. This is what Bookchin does. Whereas the materialist conception of history sublated Hegel's idealism, Bookchin sublated materialism with their naturalism. Dialectical naturalism is best understood as an expansion pack to materialism, not an outright dismissal of it.

The state is bad and regressive.

Well meme'd my comrade :^)

Bookchin doesn't abandon materialism see
Hezbollah and hamas can't be considered a dual power for the reason that you included, considering it's merely one group of oppressors replacing a different group. Revolutions deteriorate when the institutions of dual power, essentially democratic institutions, are compromised. See Russia and Spain for case studies of this.
As I've mentioned before, neither were limited to the proletariat. Russia was mostly a peasant population and peasants constituted the majority of the participants in the soviets. Paris wasn't even the industrial center of the country.
He defines it pretty clearly as "systems of obedience and command". First and second nature are pretty explicit categories and define the historical conflict quite well if you would bother to actually understand these most basic of concepts.
Capitalism is more then just markets, and Bookchin never pretended otherwise. It's one thing to say that capitalism has it's roots in market exchange and another to say that market exchange is all there is to capitalism. Funnily enough, Market Socialists tend to criticize Marxists for categorizing market exchange as capitalism.
I said Class and State emerged from the emergence of hierarchy and domination which itself emerged from changes to the superstructure. Capitalism developed as the dominate system much later with the decay of the feudal social order. In that sense, capitalism was never an inevitability, nor is it terribly progressive as marxists like to pretend it is. Indeed, Marxism has become a tool to legitimize capitalism since it views it as a historical necessity, instead of a cancerous growth that grew out of the decaying social order of feudal society. The Bourgeois never sought to overthrow the monarchy. Indeed, the centers of Bourgeois power were strictly counter revolutionary and pro-monarchist during the french revolution. See libcom.org/library/were-we-wrong-murray-bookchin for a more detailed critique of the classical historiography your using and historical materialism in general.

I'm not sure why you criticize Bookchin as utopianism and then go on to call Marx utopian as if that's perfectly fine. Furthermore, you cannot speak to how revolutionary, visionary, or even Utopian communalist thought is because you do not even understand the most fundamental basics of the theory and historical analysis it employs. Furthermore, the synthesis of First and Second nature is not "Communism with the social relations of hunter-gatherer societies". That would entail the destruction of the city, which in itself was an immensely important social advancement that helped to to deteriorate the brutal tribalism based on blood ties of the past. We can analysis different species and make definitive statements to how they organize, distribute resources etc. Indeed, we can say the same about humans and the conflict between how we lived for millions of years in first nature compared to how we've lived for the last 10000 years or so in second nature. Likewise, we can come to a vision of a synthesis between these two same as Marx did with capitalism and his vision of a socialist society.

Marxism is pretty clear in it's use of the state to establish a socialist society, as well as it's failure to recognize the irreconcilable conflict between statecraft and politics as bookchin defined them

It's pretty simple: he's not me, and I'm not him.

what did he mean by this?

Since you have obviously understood it, care to explain what it consists in?

Boooooooh!

The world is covered with states today. So states in themselves are conservative at best. In fact, only the bourgeois state are conservative; a proletarian state would be progressive by definition.

There are several different people on this thread?

Historical Materialism is the analysis of class contradictions produced by forces within political economy. Bookchin's categories of "hierarchy and dominance" on the other hand are needlessly obscurant, and not too far from nebulous idpol ideas of "oppression". By rejecting that superstructure is subordinate to base Bookchin is no better then a Frankfurt School petty-bouge academic. That being said, I do like Bookchin's theory on the origins of Patriarchy because I'm actually rather partial to Engels' belief that the devision between men and women was the "first class".

No. Hezbollah and Hamas are not "one oppressor class replacing another". If the Nation of Islam in the United States declared a war on white America, started shooting cops in the street, and made the Black Belt into some kind of autonomous territory in the heart of the US it would most certainly be reactionary in it's character, and it would be an example of reactionaries using Dual Power, but it wouldn't be "one oppressor class replacing another". Notice I said class, class denotes a relationship to both means of production as well as a relation to Capital. As much as you might hate Islamist militancy it would be crazy to call them Capitalists. It's also undeniable that they're basically some of the only people still carrying out effective Dual Power strategies besides Maoists and Rojava itself. But a lot of this comes from the fact that Bookchinites don't seem to have a particularly concrete definition of class.

Proletariat does not mean "factory workers". The Proletariat is anyone who does not own land or the means of production. Also, Capital itself, beyond a certain point, is private property and a form of MoP unto itself. The reason Marx and most Marxists have historically focused on factory workers and miners is because the uniquely socialized and unionized work they do, along with their direct relation to socially produced wealth means they have a higher chance of class consciousness. That being said, peasants and lumpens tend to have more petite-bourgeois inclinations, do to their alienation from the actual social relations of the mode of production, but they're most certainly still apart of the revolution, peasants played pivotal roles in both the Russian and Chinese revolutions.

I'm not saying Communalists believe this meme, just anarchists who read too much Chomsky. But yeah, there's a lot worse to Market Socialists, mostly because they don't realize that the system they advocate for, modeled after Yugoslavia, is literally identical to the Soviet Union itself of the same time. Persistence of waged labor, persistence of surplus value extraction, persistence of currency, even persistence of small private ownership of factories, it's crazy. But at the same time I would be curious to know what the Communalist solution to the dilemma of the value form is.

See. You're still doing that "collapsing" thing. You're acting like there's absolutely no meaningful difference between slave societies, feudalism, and Capitalism, because they're all examples of "systems of obedience and command", which frankly sounds a little too close to Foucault and Deleuze for my Badiouian tastes. But yes, Capitalism creates the conditions for Communism, just as Feudalism had done for Capitalism before it.

I'm sorry, I meant it as a metaphor, as to say that Communism is a state of social relations so radically alien to our current conditions that Bookchin's fantasy of cosplaying as an Athenian wandering around the forum in a toga can't live up to. A World already in this World, but yet to be articulated.

Would some Marxist please explain how the fuck you would overcome class society without overcoming hierachy?

No, "hierarchy" is not obscurant. Bookchin is explicit in that they refer to a hierarchy as an institutionalised system of command and obedience. Yes, Bookchin was heavily influenced by Frank Furtschool, though.

1.) the hierarchy of the Bourgeoise over the Proletariat is overcome through class warfare.

2.) "hierarchy' itself can mean anything, for example Bookchin's griping about "geronotocracy". In a Communist society, freed from the Capitalist mode of production all the natural differences and differences in abilities of man might become far more pronounced. Without the artificial rules of "competition" imposed by Capitalism we might actually see what true "meritocracy" looks like. But even the fact that I can't envision this outside of an idea like "merit" shows just how subordinated by logic is to Capitalist Base. And this is where I think most anarchist and communalist visions of praxis fall apart, they grossly underestimate the degree to which we can imagine a world without Capitalism and asume they can jump past negation and create a sort of new planned society out of their own imagination. Which is useful, I'll admit, for the same reason so many avant-garde movements have been useful to the Left, but it's all stipulation, and outside of the realm of art it's not all that practical.

Marxist believe the State exists as a form of class warfare, not an ends in and of itself. Capitalism is the establishment of one-sided class warfare and class hegemony by the Bourgeoise against the Proletariat. Socialism is the opposite. We don't know what the contradictions and antagonism of Communism would look like because know one's gotten there yet friendo.

So you dont have a clue. Taking power from the bourgs isnt the end of the story, the power needs to be given to new institutions. And I thought some Marxists learned from the Soviet Union.

Without overcoming hierachy(thats not leadership or responsibillity) economic power will be centralised again into fewer hands leading to rise of new classes.

We did learn from the Soviet Union, it's anarkiddies, tankies, and memechinites who want to repeat the mistakes of the 20th Century indefinitely until the world implodes instead of actually reading history and theory and trying to think some new shit up that actually pertains to this current century.

I'd argue any category that conflates all other categories into itself would be obscurant. Like when very shitty marxists try to claim that all forms of "oppression" can be articulated thought the category of class. Or like when idpolers take Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to just absolutely mean everything, and I mean everything, that they don't like. But if you want to explain the nuances of the theory then I honestly will read your post with an open mind.

That's retarded though. What you're basically saying is that people shouldn't do philosophy, and have their own philosophical concepts within a given philosophy. This is the definition of "hierarchy" according to the philosophy of social ecology.

You think philosophy is conflating multiplicities into totalities? Is this what Bookchin does to the young impressionable brains of communalists?

Do you know what a class is, my friend?

And this was the point where I realized that neither you or whatever book you read had no clue what was meant by the term 'proletariat'

I wonder what did he mean by this? Really makes my brain ponder

I don't know about hierarchy, but I'm pretty sure class first emerged after the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies

Yeah and he doesn't abandon analysis of class contradictions, he just includes the existence of other forms of hierarchy and domination as part of his analysis.
No clearly defines both, as I've pointed out already numerous times."Unless hierarchy is to be used in Schjelderup-Ebbe's cosmic sense, dominance and submission must be viewed as institutionalized relationships, relationships that living things literally institute or create but which are neither ruthlessly fixed by instinct on the one hand nor idiosyncratic on the other. By this, I mean that they must comprise a clearly social structure of coercive and muh privileged ranks that exist apart from the idiosyncratic individuals who seem to be dominant within a given community, a hierarchy that is guided by a social logic that goes beyond individual interactions or inborn patterns of behavior."
It would most definitely be one oppressor replacing another. Whether or not that constitutes a separate economic class is inconsequential, since the oppression would be just as real nevertheless.
Communalists do not reject the Marxist definition of class, they merely understand that hierarchy and domination are not exclusive to it. Furthermore, a dual power cannot be considered such unless it is authentically democratic. Otherwise it is merely the replacement of one state apparatus with another.
I realize that, but my point was that it was not virtue of the fact that they were proles that the Dual Power was established in either place. Participation in a dual power is contingent on somebodies place within the highly complex social hierarchy which is not merely limited to class. It is not so much a matter of "class consciousness" but consciousness of shared position within this social structure, not merely of prole relating to prole but of lowest on the social stratification relating to others who are just as low.
Production for use through Municiplization of the economy, essentially planning through assemblies from the lowest level and when necessary up to the confederate level.

No there's a difference of course, and I never suggested otherwise. Each society has different manifestations of this resistance to hierarchy and domination, but what all of them have in common is the sort of assembly system that bookchin talks about. In slave society it manifested itself in the assemblies of the plebians in rome, and in the policite in athens, and even before that in sumerian cities. In feudal society it manfiested itself as renegade christian movements based in the peasantry. In the modern day it manifested itself in the CNT's regional assemblies and in the soviets in russia and ukraine. As the social stratification changes, so to do the participants in these movements.

My whole point is that the basis of communalism has existed since the emergence of social hierarchy in the first place. The movements and the institutions that have resisted this have propagated throughout history, and in this sense it is "World already in this World"

Not disputing that.
And here in lies the problem. You ignore the contradictions outside of class, the contradictions inherent to hierarchy and domination. The use of statecraft, of an institution outside of society for it's management, is contradictory to politics, the self management of society by it's inhabitants. One puts in power professionals over everyone else, the other empowers the populace to manage themselves. Not just class contradiction, but the contradictions of all social stratification can only be overcome by rejecting statecraft and embracing politics

Bookchin believe that the domination of man by man gave rise to the attempt "dominate" nature by man.

In what way does he do that by defining hierarchy thusly?

So what you mean is that "statecraft professionals" have power over the bourgeoisie?

Your relationship to the means of production. Hierachy will allways influence that relationship in society in favour of the more powerful.

All the examples you just gave of ancient Dual Power are either small religious cults or literal State Apparatuses. By this logic Jim Jones and any small local city councils are perfect examples of Dual Power in motion.

I don't disagree with you here. The whole point of class is to talk about a very specific social relation, a social relation of the exploitation of labor by capital. Not all forms of "oppression" can be conflated with class, which is why Marxists should focus on exploitation when discussing Capitalism. That said, I don't think you realize the degree to which you keep projecting "domination and hierarchy" as a sort of ground zero from which all other forms of oppression spring, which is the exact kind of determinism, reductionism, and idealism that most Marxists try to avoid.

Dual Power in the Marxist sense is not predicated by democracy, only a meaningful counter-hegemony to state power and the dictatorship of the dominant class. And whether you like it or not there are plenty of examples of reactionary Dual Power. The Iranian and Algerian revolutions were reactionary as fuck, but they were undeniably anti-colonial movements fought by oppressed people against their oppressors. ISIS, while a perfect example of abject human evil, is still technically an anti-imperialist movement. Does that mean Leftists should support them? No, of course not, but it's still Dual Power. But now we come down to my biggest problem with Bookchin and Communalists in general, maybe you'll find it pedantic, but it's that as a Marxist I find it necessary to be as interventionary and partisan as possible when discussing the importance and centrality of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to any Leftist movement. Without it your entire movement might as well be a sort of petty-bouge power grab for small center-left municipal libertarianism.

Not the person you're responding to but:

Yes, they can, I can't remember if either Marx or Engels said that in times of relative equilibrium between classe's power, the state can rise above both.

the plebian assemblies were not sanctioned by those in control of the state, it was through the tumults that they had to cede more power to them through the establishment of a plebian tribune. Early Christianity was very much a precurosor to later socialist and anarchist movements. They were voluntary and autonomous collectives that not only worshiped but met each others needs, in contrast to the roman state that merely collected taxes, suppressed disorder and waged war. It was only later on that the church was formed and created a rigid hierarchy, but even then you had counter movements to this in the form of early protestant challenges to the established order. Jim Jones and other cults cannot be compared to this because there was a rigid hierarchy established from the start of it with no democracy included. Similarly, local city councils do are not an authentic organ of democracy in so far as any form of representative democracy is an inauthentic democracy.
Let me talk about this in terms of superstructure/base relationship. Primitive surplus accumulation did not have to result in the creation of the first classes. Previous changes in the superstructure allowed for this primitive accumulation to turn into class relations. I'm not saying that changes in the base did not create this primitive accumulation. Marxism is deterministic for stating that primitive accumulation had to lead to class society, and it's this argument that ultimately communalists reject. Rather, it is us communalists who see Marxists as sometimes being reductionist and deterministic.
And this is where Communalists once again differ from Marxists. Communalists see it as the continuation of a "Legacy of Freedom" as Bookchin puts it. Dual Power in this sense is not limited to a counter-hegemony to the dominate class, but the institutions of domination in general. Nationalist movements (which Boocking was quite critical of, see "Nationalism and the National Question" for more) seek merely to establish new institutions of domination. The institutions that they create in contrast to the hegemonic institutions have all the characteristics of being institutions of domination, but merely in competition with the current prevailing institutions of domination. It is in this sense that they are not an authentic dual power, at least not in the communalist sense of the phrase. In regards to "petty-bourgeois power grabs" taking over, the current Rojava revolution is an excellent case study. Certain marxists criticize it for not having a proletariat, being a mostly agrarian society based in peasantry. There exists no DotP in this region, but you don't see a take over by landowner over the TEV-DEM system. Indeed, landowners side with enemies of the TEV-DEM system like the Barzani backed KNC. This is because the system of libertarian municipalism is by it's nature exclusionary to those like the bourgeois.They can't exercise power unilaterally that they can through institutions of domination, since the democratic nature of TEV-DEM makes such a thing impossible.

Yeah I was aware of the population's rsentment towards local Party authorities, and as far as my admittedly limited knowledge goes, Mao did opportunistically tap into it to regain power.

Now this I'm very interested about. I confess I never saw the Cultural Revolution as a civil war of sorts. Any books to recommend?

I recall Orwell saying that this was done so there would be no one in any position of power left who remembered how life was before Stalin. I know Orwell isn't the most unbiased source, but this does sound a lot like something Stalin would think up.

Isn't the largest difference the communalist understanding that non-proletarians can be revolutionary?

That's one difference certainly but I would point you to some of my other posts in this thread for a more detailed description of the differences

ironic that a Turk is sprinkling it

I think this is a good post but I can't tell why, help me understand

It isn't. See

Yes, I tend to agree. Especially when one looks at his eventual capitulation with Liberals (Capitalist Roaders) and his reactionary "Theory of Three Worlds" late in life. I think he was obsessed with his own cult of personality and really started to drink his own kool-aid, he just really wanted to go down in history as a world historical figure on the same level as Marx and Lenin.

Yeah, the whole Chinese Revolution was built around United Front tactics, heavily pushed by Stalin and the Comintern because of the onslaught of Japanese Imperialism. Basically all the Liberals ended up getting absorbed into the Communist Party in order to fight their common enemy of the Kuomintang. And this is more or less why China is even more shit today then any other former Socialist Republic. As far as books you can read I highly recommend Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, William Hinton's Fanshen, Mobo Gao's The Battle For China's Past, and Dongping Fang's The Unknown Cultural Revolution. These are all pretty orthodox Maoist, but well sourced. As for a well sourced text that gives a directly critical anti-Maoist perspective I recommend Michael Schoenhals and Rodrick MacFarquhar's Mao's Last Revolution. Or just fuck all that shit and just read Badiou's essay Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? which is in The Communist Hypothesis, which you should read anyway tbh

I mean this is very consistent with Orwell's opinion on the Soviet Union in general, and while I agree that Stalin was a paranoid power hungry loon it's also pretty clear that what was going on was a little more complicated then that. There was an idea, common in the Party, but also in the general population that the Purges were good, that the Russian people were effectively birthing a society of a new kind, and these Purges were viewed as the necessary measure to solidify this change.

This excites me but I'm too dumb to read books. Help me understand.

READ THE MANGO

Yes. Communalists reject class struggle and fully embrace class collaborationism of all kinds.

Ebin meme. Read the thread

just dropping in to say this is a really fucking good thread

I've learned a lot about both communalism and communism

where do I find it

Glad you're finding it to be informative gomrade! Hopefully now people will be less likely to parrot misconceptions about both.

Read Goldman

libcom.org/forums/general/das-kapital-manga-11062014

It's true, this is definitely some of the most fun I've ever had on Holla Forums. I also hope Communalists on this board know that everything I said was meant in good faith and is meant to be read in only the most comradely tone. I actually like Bookchin quite a bit, and think Marxists should read Anarchists and Communalists, if not just to realize they aren't Anarchists or Communalists themselves.

Thiriart's Communitarianism is better than both.

Read David Harvey's companion book: libcom.org/files/David Harvey - Companion to Marx's capital.pdf

Yes. Very quality discussion

I'm well aware of this connection, particularly it's connection to Marx through Hegel. Hegel's entire definition of Freedom is, after all, based on these early radically egalitarian Christian communities, communities where all social realtions, supposedly, were based on Love. And while I find this very romantic and appealing, Marx and Engel's critique of this Utopian strain is obviously one of the core motivators of this entire disagreement. If these sorts of communities constituted Dual Power then we would have to concede that the whole 60's New Left "hippy commune" craze was also an effective form of Dual Power, seeing as how it was these early Christians they wished to emulate.

You only find Marxism deterministic because you're interpreting everything I'm saying as strictly structuralist. I'm not denying that superstructure can't effect base, that's a fundamentally anti-Marxist, almost a form of economic mysticism, maybe closer to the way ancaps view reality, as if Capital is a conscious entity with agency. Superstructure, however, is subordinate to base, and base creates the limits of what we can imagine, even when we try to imagine the past, not just the Communist future. Political economic realities create class, classes are not created because certain people get it into theirr head that they need to oppress other people, this is why 80% of anarchist class analysis is so retarded, because they basically fall for the Liberal memes of "crony capitalism", "bankers", "corruption", and "a few bad apples", your assuming far too much about people's inner psychologies, at the end of the day our participation in class society, whether as oppressor or oppressed is a highly unconscious one, this is why Marx has a tendency to describe Capitalists as puppets to Capital, or a sort of human mask that Capital wears. Also, this just underlines, once again, how impossible it is to "plan out" a future set of social conditions, this assumes that people are always 100% in control of the social movements they take part in, when the 20th Century has shown us anything but that.

Communism is the dream that will wake us from this world user.

It is not sufficient to merely condemn early christian movements as utopian. My reason for bringing them up is merely to point out the prevalence of liberatory institutions in contrast to the dominate institutions of power in their day. The hippy movement had potential to become a dual power, but they disdained institutions and their rejection of enlightenment ideals made them ultimately impotent and doomed to failure. I do not bring up the idealistic movements of the past to say that we should perfectly emulate them, but merely to demonstrate the red line through history which includes these idealistic movements.
The mistake you're making is to not recognize that superstructure ultimately determines the choice that is left to us by the realities of the base. Class was not an inevitability, nor was the state. You sort of contradict yourself by saying that it's not deterministic and at the same time go on to say that "political economic realities create class", as if to suggest that the base is deterministic. I agree with you that the base gives us the options by which to choose from, but ultimately the choice that was is made is because of the reality of the superstructure. It is based on this that we say that class had it's basis in the development of the superstructure before changes in the base allowed for primitive accumulation and ultimately the existence of class. When we talk about the emergence of hierarchy and domination, we're not saying it as purely an idea of "oppressors seeking to oppress", but of the unconscious development of social muh privilege through positions in society like that of the shaman. When I point out the existence of this red line through history, this legacy of freedom, it is not my intent to say that we can totally predict everything that will happen. We can merely have a glimpse at probability, at the chance for a different future.

When I say this, I mean it in terms of probabilities, not definitive results. It's not my belief that the superstructure is deterministic anymore then the base is deterministic.

What do you believe is deterministic then?

Deterministic, in the since of determinism. Base and superstructure can only "determine" probability. Nothing is ever assured.

*sense.

So you don't think there can be a science of human societies and their evolutions?

Well, science itself only deals with probabilities as well. Induction does not in itself offer complete assurance. So yes I do believe there can be a science of human societies, but science itself only deals with probabilities.

Yet both developed, and all you can do is bluster about how it could have been otherwise. Just like Bookchin can quibble about the details of the 'so-called' bourgeois revolutions yet acknowledge that the bourgeoisie emerged as the dominant class. And it wasn't because of the realities of the superstructure, it was because they controlled the means of production. It wasn't because of hierarchy and moral decay, it was because the forces of production came into conflict with the mode of production, jettisoning feudalism into the dustbin of history. Probability is on the side of the materialist conception of history.

I can't believe I'm the only one who saw the connection
LOGH best anime

How many layers of ideal horizontalism are you on, my dude?

This.

this thread made me a communist

But that isn't true, the biggest mistake that entire generation of the "New Left" made was exactly putting too much faith in institutions, particularly believing that Bourgeois institutions could be in and of themselves reformed and changed from the inside without having to first change the economic base and the actual class character of society itself. It produced a generation of poweless civil servants, petty bureaucrats, and center-right incrementalists, all because they bought the myth of "changing the system from the inside". Now I'm not saying that Communalists want to do that, but they do seem to drastically underestimate just how thoroughly many of these institutions are structured by the logic of Capital and the class interests of the Bourgeoise, and you're both projecting modern Bourgeois ideas of Liberal Democracy onto plebeian slave societies, as well as assuming that present-era Liberal Democracy can be used for Leftist ends. As a Marxist this seems hopelessly doomed. That, being said, changing economic base isn't enough in and of itself, and even negation isn't even enough in and of itself, but we need to radically rethink how we think about political structures and culture itself, and I think Communalists don't realize the degree to which they uncritically assume the logic of Liberal Democracy i.e. a democracy that does not acknowledge it's own class interests, regardless of whether it is representative or direct. Gramsci's Modern Prince meme basically.

Class is literally a relation to political economy, if you doubt me then go outside, proclaim you've taken upon yourself a Bourgeois consciousness and see how quickly you don't find yourself rolling in piles of money Scrooge McDuck style. It's like saying that gravity is deterministic because we're all pulled to the Earth, class is a symptom of political economy, which is why, in order to escape class based society the only option is, effectively, to abolish political economy itself, in a sense, the abolishment of the value form. Class is not a "choice", we aren't in the grocery market of ideologies, picking out our modes of social relations, these things happen naturally, organically, and then the classes within these modes of production then have the power to break free from these forms of exploitation, but no class forms a "blueprint" for their own future society. One interesting example is the Bourgeoise itself, arguably the first "bourgeoise" was not the wealthy Industrial Capitalists of 19th Century Britain, Germany, and France, it was the wealthy merchants of Renaissance Italy, who prefigured the common bourgeois of today. But was it through their vast will that we broke free from Mercantilism to Capitalism? No, they prefigured the system (just like the radical Christians of old) and naturally adjusted in the most opportunistic of manners when Capitalism itself finally emerged (these same families are, after all, still the wealthiest in Italy to this day).

Marx's definition of class, if he could be said to even have had a consistent one, (he didn't, but his primary focus was on capitalists and industrial wage-laborers) is a nonsense category that renders almost everyone on the planet classless, as most today have no role in production whatsoever.

"Uh, agent, I don't think you're supposed to be that overt with the attempts to divide Holla Forums. Maybe try something a little more subtle."

Point 5: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Class is one's relationship the productive process of society. The proletariat is that class which subsists primarily on selling its laboring abilities, the bourgeoisie is that class which (privately) owns most of society's wealth and means of production.

>industrial wage-laborers
Confirmed for literally not having read any Marx.

[citation needed]. With your shitty understanding of what class entails, I'm very curious to indulge you and find out what you mean by this.

So politicians, intellectuals, salaried management, soldiers, and cops are all proletarians by virtue of having a job yet lacking capital?

Try going outside, or reading a book made after the 19th century. Everyone else is aware that we live in a service-economy now.

Petite-bourgeoisie.

Proletarian.

In the name: salary = wage; proletarian.

Proletarian.

Proletarian.

Here's a book written after the 19th century for you: theanarchistlibrary.org/library/francois-martin-and-jean-barrot-aka-gilles-dauve-eclipse-and-re-emergence-of-the-communist-move.

You literally do not understand what selling one's labor entails and the difference between constant and variable capital. Is it really surprising when your ideology has a penchant for not having any critique of political economy or economic dimension to it, though, is what I wonder. Marx wrote some of the most paradigmatic economic analysises ever and Memechin is literally just edgy anthropology.

Let this be a lesson to you if you want to convince anyone: obtain a proper understanding of the things you attempt to criticize. The best way to harm a cause is to defend it with faulty understandings and consequently faulty arguments.

By what logic?

So Stalinism was a proper DoTP then.

You might as well just throw shareholders into the proletariat too at this rate, since you're OK with conflating vastly different parts of society into one faction solely for the sake of maintaining your caricature of Marxism.

I think you are I are very aware of the fact that the differences in wealth and power between a worker and management give them very different interests and worldviews. Binding them together under the label of "proletarian" doesn't explain anything except the fact that they both get paid.

What, is this supposed to be your substitute for an argument? Most people in the West have no actual role in producing goods, this is as true now as it was before your post.

Not sure why you think I give a shit about Bookchin.

Better advice: loosen up a bit and steer clear of weirdo cults like Marxism. I can assure you it did me a lot of good.

Once again, the Bourgeoise is those who own land or own the means of production. The Proletariat are those who do not. They have to sell their labor in order to merely survive. The only reason Marx and so many Marxists since him have focuses to intently on factory workers is because a.) they're unionized and Unions can, hypothetically be a good vehicle for radical organizing (mind you, today only 16% of workers in the US are Unionized, Unionizing workers is literally a federal crime in the South, and large unions like the AFL-CIO are reactionary as fuck) and b.) they have an extremely direct relationship to the actual means of production. This is literally the exact same reason Ancoms anf Syndicalists did it. Please, for the love of god, read a book, fuck

I assume you're referring solely to the West, and particularly burgerstan, because literally no one could look at Global Capitalism on a world scale and honestly say we live in a "post-industrial" society. But as for the US, it still counts for a majority of the worlds manufacturing, it literally still beats India and China, and by a margin in fact, something most Leftists seem completely ignorant of. But I know what you'll say:

Well comrade, that's because, you guessed it, two thirds of all that manufacturing is either completely automated, or done my prisoners in large for profit industrialized prisons for no pay.

You're conflating the student movements at the time with the hippie movement. Protesting is not the same thing as participation in institutions, and participation in the dominate institutions is not the same as participation in liberatory institutions that I'm talking about. Furthermore, you're conflating representative "democracy" with actual democracy, the former being based in "statecraft" and the latter based in "politics". As I've said previously, class is merely a component of the system not it's entirety. There are other forms of hierarchy and domination not necessarily based in class, and "consciousness" in the collective sense of the word lies with your position in this complex system which can't merely be reduced to class.
I'm not sure where I stipulated otherwise. This does not change the reality that class was not an inevitable result of primitive accumulation, and to stipulate otherwise is to be deterministic. Primitive accumulation never necessitated elitist distribution, private ownership etc.
Recognizing the influence of the superstructure as it shaped the choices left to us by the base is not to suggest "individual" choice, but merely what is in the boundaries of the collective conscious for what was permissible
My point is that the superstructure determined what was permissible. Arguably you can go back further then that and say jewish money lenders were the precursor to the bourgeois, but their role in society was not a desirable one, it was one that was forced upon them by the christian society at the time that barred them from any other profession leaving them if the only profession no christian would accept considering that it was impermissible for Christians. To go back to my original point, the elitist distribution and the proliferation of private property leading to the value form would not have come about if changes in the superstructure had not taken place in order to make such a thing permissible in the first place.

wdhmbt?

What were you before

Developed western nations.

Then he didn't make testable predictions as the earlier user claimed

What a brick of a thread. I'm proud of you Holla Forums. Extended commentary incoming.

Marxist are fine with social stratification seeing as both Marx and Engels repeatedly argue that communism won't eliminate inequalities between different individuals; that's not its purpose. They don't necessarily consider hierarchy as a net negative seeing as even if you reduce society to two individuals each one will have advantages over the other, whether physical or intellectual, and that will affect how each person contributes to the others existence.

There were revolutions. It was a very frightening time for the bourgeoisie. The main reason we never saw a revolution in the United States was a systematic campaign of lynching, intimidation, incarceration, and execution over decades. Even so, FDR had to create the New Deal and drag the US into World War II in order to stave it off. Bookchin is very uncharitable to the proletariat, who had done much of the fighting and the war production for the better part of half a century, combined with communist (and anarchist) agitation – with all the risks that included. To then criticise Marx over how a revolution did not follow in the immediate wake of WWII shows a real callousness towards the struggles of that period. Also, the capitalist system has not become stronger, just more generalized. I don't think there's anywhere left to be subjected to primitive accumulation. The overdevelopment of some areas appears to rely on the underdevelopment of others – something, IIRC, Marx did not predict.

So did Marx, it was Hegel who thought that the 19th century Prussian state was an 'end'.

A state without the domination. Pure ideology.

It's readily acknowledged that the proletariat will need the aid of other classes; what is not accepted is that any other class than the proletariat can be the revolutionary agent. I.e. able to carry the revolution through to communism. It may fail – others will fail. If a class other than the proletariat leads us to communism then, and only then, will Marx be conclusively refuted.

This has already been covered but to attribute the superstructure as dominant is against the basic conception of materialism. Bookchin cannot, in one breath, acknowledge that the base is predominant, and then assert in another that the superstructure generated hierarchy out of nothing. Indeed it was not nothing – it was the sexual divison of labor, which is not superstructural, but rooted in how a society produces and reproduces its own existence. So either Bookchin is contradicting himself or the idiots here aren't doing him justice.

(cont.)

Creating a conception a priori and then applying it to reality is idealism. This is not up for debate.

From what I understand Bookchin considers hierarchy to be basically the same since the end of the so-called "organic" society – social institutions of domination, with one constant: oppression. Marx considers class societies to have changed significantly over thousands of years, with one constant: exploitation. Exploitation, moreover, had a definite beginning, while Bookchin has to resort to some kind of idealist conception (of an "organic" society) to provide a beginning to hierarchy. Exploitation is easily measureable and definable – one class produces the surplus product and another appropriates it, makes it their property despite not having produced it. Oppression – lets be generous – not so much. People have been telling each other what to do and discriminating against each other on innumerable bases for far longer than class society. Abolishing exploitation is consequently much more achieveable than attempting to abolish hierarchy. Besides, Bookchin's solution appears to be an ideal democracy. As if no one has tried that before.

This is an important point not often appreciated. Lenin put it accurately, in that unionism is bourgeois politics for the working class.

Naturalism is just a different form of idealism, from what's been posted here. So it 'upgrades' materialism with idealism. This is called a regression.

As Lenin would put it, the peasants want land and freedom – the proletariat wants an end to exploitation. This is the key difference.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/12.htm
Proletarian demands by necessity go much further than the peasantry.

This is true. The bourgeoisie found themselves fearing popular (peasant, artisan, etc.) revolt more than the aristocracy; it precipitated a trend of aligning with the forces of reaction. However, the bourgeoisie eventually displaced the aristocracy. How to account for this descrepancy? Bookchin leaves us scratching our heads, but it makes sense with Marx. The bourgeoisie took the general cry of emancipation and made it bourgeois emancipation – the rights of man became the juridical rights of commodity owners in the market. Via merchantilism and the centralization of production of handicrafts into manufacture, the bourgeoisie undermined the aristocracy on a material level, and used it to cement their rights against aristocratic muh privilege. Was this an uneven process? Yes. Did the bourgeoisie eventually put a collar and chain on the aristocracy? Yes. No mystery to it.

(fin.)

There's nothing better about the first nature over the second, nothing more natural or organic, only more underdeveloped.

Come on now. It doesn't exist independently of society. It cannot exist without society providing its basis and content. That is utter nonsense.

The bourgeoisie and the state (for the most part) fucking abandoned Rojava due to the civil war. We'll see how impossible things are should the DFSNS survive the peace.

>Recognizing the influence of the superstructure as it shaped the choices left to us by the base is not to suggest "individual" choice, but merely what is in the boundaries of the collective conscious for what was permissible
This is a terrible, incurable case of idealism. 1) Positing possibilities against what actually happened is ridiculous – if you can't refute what happend, whining about it won't change history. 2) As if class could not have emerged if people simply thought differently – as if it all could have been avoided if people agreed it was not permissable – fucking ridiculous. 3) The whole point of a surplus product is that it freed people from the production process and allowed culture and technology to develop to a higher level, which necessitated higher degrees of political and religious sophistication – and this is how the state and class society developed. See

Good thing class is about your relations to the means of production and now how you subjectively feel about things. This is how class is different from every other form of hierarchy. It's not culture – it's production. The capitalist mode of production has been adopted by vastly different cultures the world over, yet it remains fundamentally the same. Proletarian and bourgeoisie.

And I forgot to run it through spell check. Please forgive stupid errors.

Damn, these are good posts user. I've also been enjoying this thread, it's good to see there are Marxists on this board who actually read history and theory. Also, even though I ultimately disagree, I've enjoyed seeing Communalist arguments and responses, and it's definitely encouraged me to dig deeper into his writings.

Right, but these protestors and hippies did move around in the same circles and they did share a lot of similar ideas, particularly that they could change these "dominate institutions" from the inside, I'm not just condemning activists for getting swallowed in to the Democratic Party's apparatus, or getting absorbed into the NGO machine, and therefor giving up on revolution, I'm saying they all suffered from the same delusion that Communalists are suffering from, that these "dominate institutions" can become "liberatory institutions" just because of the intentionality of the people participating within them and the mere existence of Dual Power tactics in and of themselves without any consideration of the class character of these institutions in the first place, as well as how subsumed their consciousness is by the logic of Capital even when they want to completely step outside of the logic of Capital, an issue any Socialist revolution will face, be it Communist, Anarchist, or Communalist. "Hippies" believed they could revolutionize the institutions of religion and spirituality (which most certainly are Ideological State Apparatuses) and more politically minded SDS types believed they could radicalize the institutions of small local civics like school boards and city councils, and they both failed because they both underestimated the degree to which it isn't just the way these institutions are used, but the fact that to some degree these institutions are and and of themselves inherently oppressive so long as they function within a class dictatorship of the Bourgeoise. It's a bit like playing with the double edged swords of Liberation Theology and Revolutionary Nationalism. Can they be powerfully useful in a tactical sense? Fuck yes. But are they fundamentally reationary at the end of the day? Yes, they're gateway drugs to revisionism.

In a sense there's literally no such thing as either, there's only the dictatorship of one class over another, there is no such thing as a democracy without class characteristics. So long as democracy is practiced within a class based society it cannot withstand the contradictions of class without assuming the class interests of one over another. "Democracy" is not a goal in and of itself for Marxists, but rather the dictatorship of the oppressed class over the oppressor class for the express purpose of said class's complete negation. If Communalists end up doing this "by accident" so to speak, then I would support it, but I feel like without the unique environment of Rojava, especially if exported to the West, you would find these contradictions mount rather quickly.

You stipulated it by stating that people basically just "got it in their heads" to start dominating eachother as a weird cultural virus that spread across the globe for inexplicably no reason that can be explained through concrete material conditions. And maybe maybe I'm being unfair to the nuance of your arguments, but what's more likely? Primitive accumulation lead to domination because all across the globe, in places completely separated and isolated from one another tons of people just decided to flip the "domination" switch in their brains and start subjugating their fellow man? Or rather did the discovery of agriculture allow people to settle, form more complex societies, and start producing surplus product that then leads to the emergence of division of labor, and with the emergence of division of labor, the emergence of class (not to mentions slaves) nobody "decides" to do this, it's the material conditions that decide class relations. Also, the problem of scarcity in these communities did, for the most part, "necessitate" in so far as it directly caused elitist distribution.

I agree that it doesn't suggest "individual" choice insofar as individual people, but Bookchinites in this thread do seem to be arguing that people can "collectively" choose what kind of society they live in through basically a combination of will to power ("""politics, not statescraft"""") and mob rule (Dual Power without class characteristics). That being said, I will concede that many MLs and Trots, as much as I have a soft spot for them, do basically believe the same shit, by putting all faith into the realm of politics, without considering the vast complexities of economics you've set yourself up for a situation not too dissimilar from MLs and Trots think revolution is just as easy as taking state power, only for you it's ""institutions"".

...

Woah bucko, slow down. They can't. The "bourgeoise" of Renaissance Italy had vast political power and hegemony in Italian society afforded by their relation to Capital, Jewish money lenders had no such power. If anything they were petite-bourgeois at best, like merchants of the same time.

This thread will never die!!

This is not true however.
It's the orthodox position according to Marxist theory, but it does not correlate with reality, as any good scientiffic theory ought do.
Not so many years ago, a 12.000 old city was excavated in the Melikgazi area of Anatolia; the interesting part about this city is that byond the town square, it harboured no signs of central administration and no large difference in wealth, meaning that it had gone from a tribal society to a civil society without the establishment of classes.
This indicates that clearly there is a sphere of politics that lies outside of classes, which also very much explains the deterioration of the soviet union which carried the exact same kind of state-craft eliminating politics that capitalism and feudalism did, only historically being countered by the emergence of communalism in the medieval cities and agrian communes.

Likewise, no every society that began primitive accumulation became hierarchical, and in many cases, city-life was a lot more liberated and gave the individual way more personal politcal influence than, say, tribal life did.

In other words, class struggle, just as gender, race or gay struggles are struggles that can be alienated from emancipatory politics (and has been so plenty of times during the 19th and 20th centuries), precisely because they deal with abstract identities rather than concrete communities.

No, what people are suggesting is that the kind of society that people live in inform the their ethics, and this goes beyond just class-relations.

in 1789 in the eve of the French Revolution, women were given the right to vote, black people were freed and given equal liberties and homosexuality was decriminalized.

This is all more than a 100 years before the first serious Feminist, Racial Justice and Gay movements had ever seen the light of day in Europe.
This was the result of the commualist movement, a movement of creating direct-democratic cities in Europe that had existed since at least the 850's, rising at first in the Italian city of Forlí. To these people, the ethics of civic nationalism beyond any tribalism was dominating, and thus they saw other human beings as simply that; just human beings, all equal before the law, for that was the kind of society they lived in.
And before you claim that this was merely the ethos inherent in capitalism that arose, let me remind you that capitalism, that gained a foothold in Europe later on did all it could to combat exactly this kind of Ethos, only fully giving equal rights to blacks in the US during the 60's, a good 170 years after the frenchmen did.

So in this case, it was evidence that the concrete social mode of organization, much more so than the economic system (although the "grow-or-die" ethics of capitalism certainly also has done a lot to contribute to the degeneration of our society today) informed the ethos of the late 18th century rebellions.

communism = historial abortions and spooks liberals from talking to you

communalism = municipal democratic socialism

Fuck, if you're going to shitpost this hard you should at least switch to a Nazbol flag

Communalism is also, unlike communism, a real historical movement that has existed in praxis for centuries.

While this all sounds very interesting it also sounds like a lot of speculation on the part of the anthropologists, and speculation that's inconsistent with what most historical and anthropological sciences tells us about most agrarian societies. And even if it were true, you're now playing a game of "could've beens", especially over a community so obscure it completely died out 12,000 years ago and no one's ever heard of it. At the end of the day history clearly moved in a very specific direction, and explaining it through abstract psychologism is beyond insufficient. That said, please feel free to share links

Here we actually agree comrade, the biggest mistake the Soviet Union made was ending Dual Power between the Soviets and the State after the success of the revolution. It's only through continued class struggle, through effective Dual Power that a Socialist Republic continues revolution and stops itself from receding into some form of State Capitalist social democracy. That said, I actually believe this is exactly what took place in China with the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, which I talked to another user about earlier in this thread:

And as I've stated, this Dual Power was ineffective because of the unfortunate history of New Democracy and United Front tactics during the Second Sino-Japanese War. But the funny thing is, it's this exact class collaborationism and contradictions that I think would plague any attempt at Communalism.

Fist of all, class is not just an "identity". But neither is race or gender. This is the whole fallacy of idpol in a nutshell. All of these things are created through interpellation, what this means is that based on this very specific, material, and mostly meaningless abstraction (skin color, your genitals, who you want to fuck, how much money's in your bank account) the State, which remember, is always a manifestation of the political economy, a certain class's interests, and, under Capitalism, the logic of Capital, forces you into a whole set of social relations against your will that you never signed up for. Class analysis does not seek to conflate racial and gender oppression into itself, that's the same point I've been making time and time again in this thread, that this is, in fact, exactly what Communalists do with their categories of "domination and hierarchy". Which is incredibly ironic and funny because you seem to be trying to do the exact opposite. But yes, by conflating everything into everything else, and ignoring the material conditions they spring out of, you make a system of critique that is both too abstract to meaningfully focus in on anything, but also too narrow to answer the complexities of it's supposed component parts. Like how idpolers say they care about class and "economic justice" but then actually literally get triggered if someone mentions class.

And as we can see this centuries long struggle has yielded so many revolutionary gains :^)

Just like the USSR is a beacon of emancipatory freedom for the entire world today 🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀)

The point here was exactly that the Marxist assumption of what is the anthropological norm and indeed, histroical norm, is not so.
Indeed, almost all primitive communist societies have hierachies, that make no sense in an economic sense, but still leads to a rigid societal form, where power is placed in the hands of a few and human kind is divided up into parochial tribes, that compete rather than cooperate for the resources, meaning that systems of patriachy and racism much outdate any kind of class-society, although certainly they are informed by class in our modern-day world.

The opposite is to be seen in city-societies. Whether you're talking aobut the early greek cities, the median cities, the western medieval communes, the Mazdaki societies or the Ikko-Ikki the rise of cities and the face-to-face non-hierachal assemblies let to the universalist ethics that were instrumental in fostering the western revolutions, all evolutions that were independent of class-relations. See

When that is said, of course a communalist movement must be anti-capitalist and abolish classes. But we must understand that noone is just a worker, every person is a complex nexus or several important social factors, and thus the most important part of the forming of the ethics of any society, and indeed how one is to fix society, is to be found in the way a society is arranged politically rather than in strict terms of production, as Marx would have it.
The state right now draws a lot of power amongst bourgeoisie individuals, but as the USSR demonstrated, the state can easily exist without the bourgeoisie; this is further cemented by the fact that the state sometimes has to go against bourgeois interests, at least temporarily, of the fact that class-unity amongst the bourgeoisie does not exist. The state is thus not just merely a tool of an abstract concept (class), but rather a real entity unto itself.

So whereas Marx takes another abstract community and base liberation upon that, just as radical feminists would base liberation of all of human kind upon an abstract community women, Communalists, rather than conflate everything and have nothing to focus on, focus on what really matters:

The concrete, rather than the abstract.
Meaning, the mode of political organization comes before all.

The reason Western states even have to pay lip-service to democracy today is because of communalism.

Damn, I didn't realize Communalism was just an elaborate form of Alternative History fanfiction, why didn't you say sooner?

Social stratification is not merely "I can do X better then you", it's an institutionalized relationship based on power.
It's not being uncharitable, it's merely observing the reality of the matter. I'm not denying the existence of revolutions throughout this period. You had reactionary terror in pretty much every country that did have a revolution prior to the revolution and after the revolution as well, but they revolted nonetheless. To criticize Marx for falsely assessing the conditions in which a global revolution would take place, the countries that it would take place in, is likewise not being "callous" but looking at the reality of the flaws in the predictions.
I was responding to your assertion that Bookchin did believe as much.
I'm sorry but frankly the rhetoric of proletariat as the revolutionary agent has failed to meet the reality of the revolutions both in the past and present. Rojava has achieved much without subscribing to any idea of the proletariat as being the revolutionary agent, and the system reflects that.
This is why it's referred to as Dialectical Naturalism as opposed to materialism. You're again failing to realize that you're essentially taking a deterministic stance in regards to the base. Primitive accumulation occurred, therefore class was inevitable. This is an essentially deterministic statement. Let me put it this way. Base determines possibilities x y z. Superstructure determines out of x y z which one is "chosen". Class was a possibility, but not a necessity. Furthermore, the superstructure can have changes within it without changes to the base occurring. Hierarchy did not emerge uniformly and at the same time, but over a long period of time and unevenly. It emerged in changes in the expansion of the importance of the "civil" role of men who's domain included that of war and shamanistic practices, things which can not simply be reduced to being of the base which deals specifically with production. To look at things in any other manner then probability is to have an essentially deterministic outlook of the world.

I think that's supplanting rhetoric for reality tbh, and does not contrast well with the realities of both the Ukrainian project and the current Rojava project.
To equate this with the bourgeois being the revolutionary agent in the transition of feudal society to capitalism is absurd though. They were merely an opportunistic group that took advantage of the situation created by the true revolutionary agent, the Sans-culottes. The thing that allowed the bourgeois to replace the nobility is because the institutions of domination that existed to serve those at the top of the social strati still existed, i.e. the State. Once again, the preexisting reality of the superstructure was more of a deciding factor then the mere fact of the bourgeois accumulation.
I'll reiterate, to speak in any other terms but probabilities is to make a statement that is ultimately a deterministic one. Why would class come about if it was not socially acceptable for it to exist? Merely because it was inevitable? Then you are making a deterministic statement. Higher levels of culture and technology does not necessitate higher levels of hierarchy either. It is only because hierarchy previously existed that it developed this way.
It's not how you "subjectively feel about" if you are discriminated against based on age or sex or race, that is not merely a subjective experience but an institutional reality based on relationship to power. Likewise, hierarchy and domination takes different forms but maintains the basic relationship of Ruler and ruled.

Hey, completely off topic, but if I want to read some of Öcalan's writings, as well as other Democratic Confederalist books, or even books written on Rojava, what would you recommend? What's considered definitive? Besides Öcalan's Democratic Confederalism itself of course.

Manifesto for a Democratic Society will most likely become his defining theoretical work. Currently only the first volume is translated to English though. Worth reading regardless of it's incompleteness.

Thanks user! Also, if I wanted to better understand Bookchin's theories of history and anthropology which of his books would have that? Besides super introductory texts like The Next Revolution what do you think is his best work/most important/definitive work? Or even just your favorite tbh

Hold up there son. Communalism does not at all say that you should engage in parliamentary reformism. At most, it advocates participation at the face to face municipal level. Beyond that, it's about creating institutions outside of the state apparatus. Communalism does not say to engage in these institutions of domination but to disempower them by creating contrasting institutions in direct opposition to them. One example of this might be the BPP's food program. Furthermore, the necessity of an intellectual vanguard is indisputable, which is to be based on the principles of the enlightenment and reason not on spirituality and religion.
An assembly is populated by 100 people. 99 of them are an assortment of the lower classes, 1 of them is bourgeois. Is the bourgeois able to exercise a dictatorship over the other 99? No, his vote counts for 1 like everyone else. Is the assortment of the lower classes exercising a dictatorship over the other members of the lower classes? No, because in the end their position at the bottom of the social strati still make have similar interests. To call this relationship a dictatorship is to reduce the term to meaningless dimensions. To use Rojava as an example, the bourgeois don't even go so far as to participate in these institutions because they know they cannot exercise power unilaterally through them. Instead they with parties seeking to destroy them, and the majority peasant population of Rojava certainly can't be said to be exercising a dictatorship over the proletariat or vice versa.

No, it's not a matter of individual subjectivity. Shamans have legitimacy because of their supposed connection to the gods. This legitimacy can reinforce itself continually in a sort of snowball effect, not necessarily out of any intentional will. Hierarchy and domination happened unevenly and not at all at the same time. Again, it's important to look at things in terms of probabilities, not necessities. This user here does a good job of responding to the rest of it

If you only ever read one work by Bookchin, make it "The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy". Here's a link to it libcom.org/files/Murray_Bookchin_The_Ecology_of_Freedom_1982.pdf

I haven't read the entire thread but I felt the urge to state that this is utterly and evidently false. I study history and there hasn't been a single case in which the superstructure was changed prior to the material conditions.

You can criticize Marx' Historical Materialism as being vulgar and simplifying, especially in terms of eternal class struggle since the approach of historisized cultural or civilisational philosophy in order to find the final driving scheme of historical cycles or progression were en vogue in the 19th century both on the left and right. That doesn't change the fact that Marx was fucking on point with his model of the base defining the superstructure - this also has nothing to do with outdated anthropological civilisational concepts like the ones of Lewis Henry Morgan or Oswald Spengler, it's standing on his own feet as it doesn't close itself off from more multilayered approaches of historical analysis.

In practice, Bookchins theory of culture being the defining aspect of political and economic life is quite hurtful for the left and is even more retarded than Maos theory of the Cultural Revolution. Not only you can justify the most neoliberal shit with this (Žižek dedicates most of his body of work at this), it's something Bookchin was literally pulling out of his ass because his theory isn't based in historical reality. Remember that Bookchin was never an academic, he was a factory worker who was indoctrinated by Trots, he is completely alien to any academic or scholastic approach.

I agree, the Panthers are both a perfect example of Dual Power, as well as the single best example of Dual Power in recent time and exactly what effective Dual Power can look like in the Late Capitalist West, something I think the Marxists of today might consider emulating. But the Panthers understood the category of class. My problem with Communalism isn't that they want to create counter-hegemonic institutions, it's that by discarding class and the Proletariat as a revolutionary subject they completely underestimate the degree to which the institutions they're taking part in are already subsumed by the logic of the Bourgeoise. Here's Fred Hampton talking about how not all education is revolutionary education:
youtube.com/watch?v=Ffmg6i0lv_k

Bookchin didn't reject class, but rather they sought to place class struggle within the context of the municipal assemblies (of which the working classes would invariably be the largest portion of).

Bookchin doesn't reject the base-superstructure distinction. DiaNat is more of just an add-on to the materialist conception of history. Bookchin's main contribution was using updated anthropology (the anthropology Marx and Engels used is laughably outdated now), to demonstrate that PRIOR to the emergence of class, hierarchy developed that was not strictly economic (i.e. was cultural).

The whole point of metaphorically reducing society to two people was to demonstrate that there will always be hierarchies between people. Reducing your horizons to institutions, however, begs the question of how they are maintained. In every society of significance the answer is class – and communalism is no different.

You acknowledge there was repression and terror but then attribute to Marx something which he has no control over – whether the revolutions actually succeed. He never said, outside the Communist Manifesto, which was written while he was still in his 20s, that there was anything inevitable about the revolution or its success. Moreover, the bourgeois revolutions took centuries to complete, starting in Renaissance Italy in the 14th century until just before Marx's own lifetime. There's no reason to expect that only one round of revolutionary upheaval will do the job. We would have been very fortunate if this were the case – sadly, we are not.

Rojava has achieved about as much as the best of the anarchist experiments of the last century, for a little bit longer. Its true fate, largely out of its control, has yet to be determined. Rojava also did not need a proletarian revolutionary agent since, in the case of Democratic Confederalism, it was the PYD and TEV-DEM which has organized the entire thing from the top down – entirely consistent with what Bookchin stipulated, I might add. They moved in when Assad largely moved out, and there was little he could do about it.

No, it's more like this: Primitive accumulation occurred, therefore so did class. Not so deterministic now, is it? Quite logical, actually.

How can you possibly demonstrate that class was chosen? You can't. It's an a priori assumption. I.e. idealism. And to state that it was chosen because of the pre-existence of hierarchy is nothing short of tautology.

The superstructure, at least in times past, took a long time to adjust to changes in the base. Feudalism was absolutely creaking by the time bourgeois social relations were fully entrenched and generalized, but it was still around all the same. By your conception, the superstructure changed while feudalism was still the mode of production, and this eventually resulted in the mode of production changing to capitalism. What prompted this change? I'd be curious to hear.

It contrasts quite well with the militancy of the workers of Petrograd, however.

(cont.)

Yet we are not ruled by Sans-culottes. We are ruled by bourgeoisie and their state. And you should well know by now where Marxists think the State comes from – certainly not some pre-existing superstructural hierarchy. You belittle a decisive fact. Here's a hint: Marx didn't think the proletariat would one day realize their historical role in some revolution of consciousness – he believed their material subordination to the bourgeoisie would, eventually, become intolerable. Whether this ended in revolution was a matter of there being a movement to abolish the present state of things – the communist movement. As for the bourgeoisie, aristocratic muh privilege and power was a grating halter on their material interests. One they eventually, if unevenly, abolished.

You seem to think that these things come about by consensus, as if there's no such thing as coercion – in the sense that one class of people are made to depend on another for their existence in some way. Also, it's more deterministic to state there must have been a choice in the matter. History develops on a grand scale, far beyond the choices of any social group. You may as well argue that the aristocracy could have chosen differently and defeated the bourgeoisie. History, by this reading, is more of a pick and choose your ending than the march of grand forces.

If you think discrimination is merely due to hierarchy then you are mistaken. What allows the dominator to dominate? The ruler to rule? It's class. Class means some are able to restrict access to things that should be held in common by all, allowing discrimination to flourish. It also means that the ruler has objective power over the ruled by enforcing the reproduction of class relations – through institutions. Class underwrites it all.

(fin.)

Did you notice something here? A minority bourgeoisie unable to exercise influence over a majority peasant population? Should this really come as a surprise? The peasants surely do not rely on the bourgeoisie for their means of subsistence – they provide their own, otherwise they would not be peasants. I wonder how this would work where there's more than one bourgeois to an assembly, perhaps a significant minority, and a majority of workers. For sure the power of the bourgeoisie would be reasonably curtailed, formally, but the class relationship would entail that they would hold influence both outside the assembly informally, and inside it they would exercise a significant degree of influence so long as the assembly respects their private property. My initial judgment is that this is wide open to abuse and distortion by class politics. This is a basic materialist perspective so I'd be interested to hear some rejoinders.

You can repeat yourself all you like; I'd be happy to do the same, but I think you know where to find my arguments.

How would this work in any country where the Bourgeoise is thoroughly and deeply planted within the Sate and it's State Apparatuses? How do you not see the uniqueness of Communalism in Rojava springing out of a decades long National Liberation Struggle that forced most of the local Bourgeoise out of the entire region, any attempt at this anywhere else, where the Bourgeoise have a substantial hold on the all pre-revolutionary institutions, and have acted as a social vanguard for centuries, to the point where large portions of the Proletariat have taken on a petite-bourgeois consciousness, will lead to far more roadblocks then you think, and the fact that you think it's as simple as a matter of sheer demographics shows just how naive the revolutionary theory of Leftists can become when the sciences of Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, and Scientific Socialism tbh

when these sciences are rejected/forgotten, sorry, got distracted and didn't finish the sentence kek

I'm not gonna lie famiglia, Bookchin's Dialectical Naturalism seems, from the way it's been protrayed in this thread, like some real meme tier Materialism, like when Engles tries to constantly apply DiaMat critique to all kinds of random shit outside of political economy, like culture and physics (even just the name alone, "Dialectical Naturalism" evokes Engel's worst work, Dialectics of Nature, at piece of theory so bad it almost makes you feel second hand embarrassed to read it today). That said, I'm not saying Dialectics can't be applied to other fields, particularly the realm of culture, I love Engels' The Origin of the Family, and I like Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Frederic James, Althusser, and post-Althusserians like Žižek and Mark Fisher, but clearly this kind of thinking is a slippery slope to Idealism, as so many of the posts Communalists here have shown, as well as some of the nebulous noncommittal politics of some of the Marxists I just named, as well as the degree to which their ideas can be so easily claimed and appropriated by idpol liberals.

It's not. It's materialism, significantly modified by the dialectic of ideas, without regressing back into Hegelian idealism. That is, it sublates both idealism and materialism.

Like it or not, the anthropological material in the materialist conception of history is extremely dated. Unless we're to ignore this, and continue to embrace unilineal evolutionary anthropology (which has been pretty much universally rejected by anthropologists), then we must revision Marx's ideas in light of this new information.

Give "The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism" a read.

What am I reading here? This is practically gibberish. I gotta be honest, the biggest meme that ever been pushed on the Left was when Frank Furtschool tricked everyone into believing that culture can determine base, and that if anyone denies this they're an "economic determinist". Marx not only rejected the Idealism of Utopian Socialists during his life, he even rejected his own, by the second half of his life, what Marxists refer to as the Mature Marx of Das Kapital and the Gotha Programme, as opposed to the Young Marx of the Manifesto and the German Ideology, he basically completely dropped most of his Hegelianism and even "Ideology" as a term, instead developing the far more theoretically rich, if not completely under-theorized, Materialist notion of Commodity Fetishism. "Sublating" Hegel does not mean accepting that superstructure controls base, it means applying Dialectical science to explain why superstructure exists the way it does through the analysis of material realities.

Please tell me this is not what Bookchin actually believes.

No Shamans are just seen differtiated from later more hierachical religion that created the first cities centered around temples. Where the priests managed the surplus in the name of some religion. Shamanism is a religious mode that was less hierachical but contained the seed of the developement into hierachy. Its not important at all in Bookchins thought but a good example how he tries to trace the emergence of early hierachy and the legacy of freedom.

Creating city assemblies is a way of bringing politics back to life. Politics is dead and no new revolutionary massmovement can arise because of that. Repolitizing daily life is important to create consciousness and solidarity. Bookchin never
is against an organisation of dedicated revolutionaries that exists outside of the communal assemblies. By imprinting their ideology on the assembly and by reviving the communal structure it become possible to oppose the capitalists and to take communal controll over the means. Only when we engage the prole in his imidiate life that he wants to controll and not in his alienating workplace that he hates we will see success. Thats exactly what conservatives do too when they go om about drugs and crime in our neighborhoods. The communalist answer is to use these and other concerns and the incapabillity of local government to bring collectivism as a solution.

I am tired af so I am very sorry if this is just garbled nonsense.

So let me get this straight. Bookchin is saying that superstructure precedes/effects base because a social class created by material base forces used cultural and ideological apparatuses like religion and social customs, many of which probably arose organically out of people worshipping nature, as their crops and agriculture, and by proxy their entire economic base at the time, lived or died by whether it rained or didn't, in order to oppress another grouping of people also created out of their relation to both this economic base as well as their relation to labor and access to said crops? Do you see where this falls apart?

No worries, I actually agree with everything you've said here to be quite honest. Besides the part where you said not to organize in the workplace I guess, but I think this is a sound argument comrade, and in line with what I think constitutes good Dual Power.

You can't be serious.

I dont really get it because I cant remember where Bookchin actually talks about superstructure preceding base. I mean organic society is dominated by necissity and simple facts of life, on which Bookchin bases a lot of his reasoning. I dont really get how someone can call that not base. I would love if some fellow Communalist could quote Bookchin where he actually states the thing this whole thread seems to be about.

Bookchin really fluctuated on the workplace organisation issue. Between complete rejection and just seeing it as not enough. I think a good communalist movement should definitly engage with unions, especially ansyn unions to promise democracy truly everywhere. Also unions are important to keep the struggle alive in potential coops associated with councils and to prevent city assemblies exploiting the coop workees to hard before a full revolution can happen.

It's absurd to say that person x being stronger then person y is a hierarchical relationship. The mere fact that someone is better at something then does not give them power over you, in the sense of commanding obedience and making decisions unilaterally. Institutions are maintained through fostering an empowered citizenry, empowered in the sense of having the knowledge to make informed decisions and the arms to defend them.
Marx was not unfamiliar with repression or terror. In fact he advocated it. The current reality of our world does nothing to help lend credence to the idea of the proletarian revolution anymore then the revolutions of the past did.
Rojava isn't an anarchist experiment. To say that it's fate is "out of it's control" is to pretend as if decision making is pointless. Currently the evidence points to the spreading of the revolution to the rest of Syria. So because Rojava had a vanguard it did not need a revolutionary agent? By that logic the proletariat as the revolutionary agent is a misnomer and not required for revolution.
No you did literally nothing to change it from being a deterministic statement.
Notice that I put chosen in parenthesis. I did not mean that in the literal sense of the word. To put it in other terms, realities of the superstructure carried themselves over to the realities of the new base. Hierarchy existed before hand and perpetuated itself as the base changed. Instead of primitive accumulation manifesting into surplus for all, it manifested into surplus for some because of this.
Incest and the degradation of the legitimacy of the system through incompetence and tyranny, among many other things including the decadence of the aristocracy.
This does nothing to say anything negative about the demands of Rojava or the Ukranian peasants, your point being that their demands were "not as revolutionary" and didn't/don't demand an end to exploitation.

But wasnt the slow eroding of the feudalist claim to legitimacy because of the material structure promoting decadence ect? I allways understood Bookchin more in the sense that culture and ideas shape in what direction society could develop and that material relationshipsbfoem the motor of the change in general. Not that culture actually creates revolutionary change on its own.

I'm not even going to address the fact that blaming the fall of any society/mode of production on "cultural decadence" is inherently reactionary a Holla Forums tier analysis of history. That said, The reason Feudalism fell was because large slave plantations on Colonies in the Americas brought great amounts of wealth to owners and merchants in France and England in the 16th-18th centuries, creating an incredibly wealthy landowning "middle class" that was neither worker nor aristocrat. This new classes wealth lead to newfound political power, and the enormous agricultural surplus produced by aforementioned plantations, combined with new technological advances in the late-18th century, and a freed up working class to fill up these new factories, all lead to the earliest incarnations of what we'd call, individually, the Bourgeoise and the Proletariat. Read the literal first chapter of the Communist Manifesto for more on this. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

Yeah elitist classes take over elitist institutions necessarily, i.e. the state. This is why the state cannot be used by revolutionary agents to create a new system, only perpetuate domination in a new form with themselves still being dominated.. This does not make the bourgeois the revolutionary agent, it only means that the Sans-culottes needed to abolish the state and create their own institutions outside of and in contrast to it. Lower classes cannot "rule", but self govern.
No, my point is and always has been that the preexisting superstructure would go on to decide how developments in the base would be utilized. Primitive accumulation could have lead to surplus for all as opposed just surplus for some. You had division of labor previous to class after all.
No there's more to domination then class. A bourgeois black man could still be denied access to white drinking fountains or white restaurants regardless of his class. You denied previously being a reductionist and then go on to make reductionist claims

Then apply the analogy to wealthy land owners then which peasants labor under, and I said peasants and proles mind you. The ratio of 99 to 1 is actually pretty generous considering that the bourgeois would number even less then that in most circumstances. Once again see Rojava for a case study. The nature of these assemblies mean that political power is exercised over economic power, and economic power cannot translate into political power for the simple reason that 1 bourgeois is still 1 bourgeois.
Different person from me, but I feel like this conversation has devolved merely into repeating myself only to have you once more ignore what I say and reiterate old marxist dogma as if repeating it enough will make it true

Yeah you're right, I misspoke. Bourgeois did gain power over the superstructure though the base. This does not negate that preexisting realities of the superstructure do carry on into the new realities of the base.

Don't worry about that, you should be able to speak freely, so long as it's done in good faith, a thread like this is for discussion, debate, and learning.

I'm just going to leave this here:
libcom.org/library/rojava-reality-rhetoric-gilles-dauvé-tl

If any Communalists want to read Dauvé's criticisms of Rojava. It does touch on a lot of the stuff Marxists have already been pointing out in this thread though.

pretty much the argument can be summed up as "the revolutionary agent isn't the proletariat so therefore not a real revolution" as well as the typical memes about it being an ethnostate

Proof that you either haven't read it or have the most garbage reading comprehension.

Perhaps this is more your speed: indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/12/519016.html.

This text is still as relevant as ever. What's going on with the Kurds in Rojava may be progressive, but it's not a revolution and it has absolutely zero to do with socialism or the class struggle. I look forward to looking back in 5 years with the then-vivid supporters at the events and hearing the excuses and crypto-tankie type accusations that anything deviating from their ideals is western-imperialist-Turkish-Syrian propaganda.

I'm going to bump this once, because I assume most Communalists have never read Dauvé's critique of Rojava.

It's pretty weird, Rojava is basically creating an entire generation of anarkiddies who believe in revolutionary nationalism, yet they refuse to see their overlap with MLs, or to learn from the mistakes of Marxists from the 20th Century.

I know that some Leftcoms here like to shit on Rojava, but you're taking it a bit too far. Rojava has absolutely something to do with socialism or the class struggle, the Rojava revolution after all claims to be a socialist one. It might not have realized a socialist society and will most likely fail to do so, but that doesn't mean it's not socialist at least in ideology.

It's a terrible article. Duave suggests it's ethnic nationalist, national liberationist, a centralized state structure of decision making etc, despite the fact that it's actually a dual power that hopes to encompass the whole of syria. He claims it's a apparatus of centralized decision making, despite being an appartus decentralized democratic decision making. He complains that markets and wage labor still exist (as if FALC can be immediately achieved), even though all economic enterprises are under the administration of the communes, as if this isn't a step towards economic planning. He claims the communes lack any power, and claims this purely because he sees no mechanism by which they execute it. This is Duave's ignorance of the system, not a valid criticism of it. The method by which communes exercise power is well documented, and easily accessible information. Duave suggests that this a "revolution that does not scare the bourgeois", despite the fact that the bourgeois do not participate in the communes and support parties actively undermining the system like the KDP. Frankly, I can't be arsed to read the rest of the article. What I have read of it is littered with inaccuracies and intellectual dishonesty. If you want an actual critique of the Rojava project, read cooperativeeconomy.info/the-economy-of-rojava/

bump

Quick question.

What does a person's criticism of the praxis of Rojava - even if they're all 100% accurate - have to do with the ideological theories of Bookchin, many of which are not the same as Democratic Confederalism?

...

You're not entirely wrong, but it would be dishonest to say Bookchin's own criticism of Marxism aren't based on strawmen arguments about MLs and Maoists, particularly the New Communist Movement of the early 70's. And you'd be lying if you didn't admit a lot of blanket arguments made by Communalists and Anarchists against Marxism are purely about the Soviet Union and don't address any of Marx's ideas. But I agree, it is a sidetrack. But I do think it's a solid critique of some of the things going on in Rojava, but not a complete condemnation of the revolution.

TOP KEK what did you expect? Besides, I don't think I'd call this thread a shitfest, it was mostly comradely, if not at times pointed, debate. Although I guess if I had to answer your initial question in a non argumentative way it'd be this: Communism is the creation of classless and stateless society through the establishment of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat which negates Capitalism and class relations through a process of class warfare. Communalism is the use of Dual Power to create local direct municipal democracy, and intentional communities, in order to solve the ecological crisis and finally create societies based on horizontal freedom as opposed to domination and hierarchy. A lot of people might disagree with the definitions I put forth, but that's kind of the whole reason something like this would never not degenerate into debate, but I think the debate was mostly constructive.

Also, I hope the user who had a flu feels better now.

Examples?
No. You can be critical of his acceptance of hierarchy and state independent of the soviet union. You can criticize his over emphasis on the base as well as his view of the bourgeois as the revolutionary agent against feudalism, as has been done in this thread.
I'm not seeing it personally. From what I read, it's more about reality not conforming to Marxist rhetoric then the rhetoric of the revolution not conforming to reality. Duave makes many misinformed claims regarding the TEV-DEM project and tries to characterize the revolution as being backed and supported by the bourgeois, a claim easily dismissed by simply looking at who land owners and other bourgeois actually support which is the KDP.

I do. Thanks

Now things have calmed down a bit we'll carry on.

It's not absurd. The basic hierarchy between parent and child is enforced in such a way. To think otherwise is to believe, naively, that all people are equal outside of institutions, and can have no positive or negative impact on each other informally. Humanity becomes a homogeneous mass devoid of particularities like age, sex, gender, etc. Institutions are also maintained by recruiting talented individuals to serve in some way, and in Bookchin's system assemblies still elect people as delegates to councils do they not? This remains a hierarchy with the key difference that there's accountability from below.

We have the largest proletariat in world history. It's far too early to write it off yet.

1) It was a comparison not a literalism. 2) It is largely out of its control. Projects like this never succeed or fail purely on their own merits. There's a lot of other influences to contend with, not the least of which is Erdogan and Assad. 3) The proletariat is required for communist revolution. Communalism, as others have said in this thread, starts not from "the people" but from a core group of intellectuals founding the community assemblies and fostering a change in consciousness. Communalism requires no agent as such, built as it is on class collaboration. It imposes a mode of organization onto a polity without fundamentally challenging its class relations. Rojava has had an easy ride in such matters because so few bourgeoisie remain; in other words, due to the civil war.

This is exactly the tautology I just described. Hierarchy was linked to social function – as has been argued earlier in the thread. Elder hunters, shamans etc. all served the community and were dependent on it for their legitimacy. There were no social relations that ensured their means of subsistence was divorced from that social function. It was only when the forces of production had developed to a certain level that hierarchy as social function was transformed into class as social domination. The change came from the base, it was not merely carried over from the superstructure. Class and hierarchy are also qualitatively different. Hierarchy can exist without exploitation; class cannot.

The bourgeoisie were initially not an elite class. They were the growing middle class between the peasantry and the aristocracy. They became an elite class as they further undermined and displaced the aristocracy, and this elite status was concurrent with the state serving them over the aristocracy. Eventually, even the absolute monarch became the first bourgeois of the kingdom, before he was deposed as superfluous or reduced to a symbolic head of state.
Again, you attribute it to choices rather than the material position of the class in question. The Sans-culottes would have had to go much further in the seizure of power if they were to negate both the aristocracy and the upcoming bourgeoisie, but proved incapable of doing so in any case. 'Self-government' is democratic rulership; decisions are still enforced.

(fin.)

Once more, this is tautological and ultimately unprovable. The sexual division of labor, as has been previously argued, was rooted in the base not the superstructure.

Leaving aside a bourgeois needing to use a public fountain, who owns it? Who owns the restaurant? How can they restrict access? I shouldn't need to spell it out.

It's a very limited case study and a highly unusual case at that. Separating political and economic power is absurd to anyone with knowledge of political economy. More to the point, if you cannot acknowledge how class politics can distort assemblies and in turn councils then there's little more to be said. There was no denial that the private property of the bourgeoisie would be respected (and it is). That's enough for my purposes.

I've made specific arguments using the materialist conception of history. Calling it Marxist dogma is not a refutation. If we keep addressing the same points in the same ways I'll simply ignore your responses in favor of something interesting.

A rather stunning reversal. Nonetheless a step in the right direction. Of course, the bourgeoisie had to deal with pre-existing superstructural realities. Marx's famous dictum is that people make history, but not on their own terms. The negation of aristocratic muh privilege resulted in a sublation whereby bourgeois muh privilege was enforced. This was nonetheless an improvement, socially, despite what Bookchin thinks.

Basically the entirety of Listen Marxist! is him attacking various strawmen and misrepresentations of both Marx and the Soviet Union. Maybe his later work has more nuanced critiques, I wouldn't know, but you have to admit that as far as polemics go Listen Marxist! is pretty weak. Also, in typical Bookchin fashion he doesn't even realize how close his ideas are to the actual ideas of the people he's misrepresenting in the first place. How would Communalist revolutionaries not function as a Vanguard? How would any revolutionaries not function as a Vanguard? This is the kind of crazy logic you come to when you're idea of what's wrong with society is as vague as "hierarchy".

I honestly don't see how Marx's, or even Lenin's for that matter, idea of seizing State power is all that different from Bookchin's notions of seizing "political institutions", other then the fact that making a distinction between "politics" and "statecraft" seems like an elaborate form of cognitive dissonance.

This ought to be good, please elaborate.

I'd say it's a good rundown of some of the contradictions one finds in the Rojavan Revolution, an anarchist revolution to establish a Nation, "decentralized councils" that function like a centralized State, the persistence of class based social relations, nothing you said in this post refutes his claims.

You're welcome comrade

I am not that user, but I will deal with your claims.

Yes, it is true that the dominating relationship between a parent and a child, between master and slave, between man and woman, between bourgeois and toiler is reinforced through a difference of force and access to violence, but that does not mean that a difference in strength means a difference in hierachy. If this is to be claimed, then one must also conceed that even primitive communist society was heirarchal, and that fully-automated communism of the future will also be hierachal, meaning that the communist movement at its very basis is not an emancipatory movement. That is something that Marx, even at his most authoritarian, would disagree with.

Once again, Marxists conflate politics and statecraft, even though they're anti-thetical in nature. You claim that all organization is heirachy (as some of the most edgy anarchists would) ostensibly because "all decisions are enforced" and thus we already almost arrive at the stalinist conclusion that when all organization is hierachy anyways, what does it matter if it takes its orders from above or below.

Absurd! A delegate is an adinistrative position, madated by the very people they're supposed to administrate, removable instantly through a vote. That is not domination. It's the absolute opposite of a statesman send out by the powers that be to lord over the same people, and the two systems are very much in competition with each other.

As for the proletariat, even when trying to lump in the "salariat" of white-collar workers of the west and even a sizable portion of the 3rd world, has lost all class-consciousness. We are no longer workers, and we're not going to organize around worker-conflict for a long time now.
Not that it matters much, since worker's movements do not guarentee the abolition of capitalism; rather, they may create worker capitalism, as seen during the Spanish Civil War or State Capitalism as seen in the wake of the Russian Civil War.

Sure, the proletariat it central to a theoretical communist revolution, something that has never successfully happened.
Communalism has a much richer history of targeting citizenry and their communal yet universalist ethics, ethics that eventually gave birth to the communist movement, but before that fostered vibrant confederations of communes in Europe during the medieval era.

You point it out yourself; domination, such as gerontism, xenophobia and theorocracy lived richly in societies without economic expoitation in any meaningful sense; Thus the conclusion is that the end of economic expoitation is not inherently emancipatory and a civilizing force for human beings.

Rather, citizenship has; The french revolution, born of communalist principles (and not a bourgeoisie movement as claissically assumed since the bourgeoisie largely supported the monarchy) liberated french slaves, gave women the right to vote and decriminalized homosexuality, all without any large-scale anti-racist, feminist or gay-right agitation.

That said, the end of economic exploitation is of course important to.
Communalists seek to do this not through the establishment of cooperatives and working-class capitalism, nor through state-capitalism with a politboro exploiting the labour of toilers, but rather through the municipalization of the economy, meaning putting the local democracy as a whole in full control of the economy as a whole.
That has nothing to do with class-cooperation, that just means that commuanilsts see the municipalist real and the appeal to citizenship as key to emancipatory politics, be it the end of exploitation or other forms of domination that make no sense in term of economics.