Somebody give me the 3 key features of communization theory

Somebody give me the 3 key features of communization theory

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=yGVTmeSBv9c&t=4840s
libcom.org/library/communisation
libcom.org/library/z-communisation-gilles-dauvé
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Is this a thing?

…or any key features, left com in reaching out Broz

I hate this american thing of encapsulating everything under the name of "theory"
"X theory" is X, Y and Z
"Y theory" is A, B and C
everybody has their little capsule they don't come out of and nothing is discussed in-depth
hate this shit

anybody? I really would like to know, the googling has only given vague answers

You should give "Eclipse and re-emergence of the communist movement" a shot

sum it up for me

youtube.com/watch?v=yGVTmeSBv9c&t=4840s

Start listening around 20 minutes in, but I also recommend the rest of the episode, as well as the previous episode as this is a two-part conversation. Basically Communization Theory is what you get when you take Bordiga, Council Communism, and the Situationist International, put it all in a pot with a like post-structuralism, and stir it the fuck up. They completely reject entryism as well as any kind of purely "political" forms of organizing, there are mainly two currents, an Anarchist current (Joshua Clover and Invisible Committee) and a Marxist current (Gilles Dauve and Endnotes), they believe in creating and prefiguring the conditions for revolution, and refuse notions of Stageism, believing that in today's world we could transition from Capitalism to Communism without the need for a "Socialist" phase of statism and development of productive forces. Also, some believe a vanguard of revolutionaries or activists is more or less unnecessary because once the conditions are right the Proletariat will simply revolt itself, they might not call it "Communism" or "Socialism", but the internal contradictions of Capitalism will lead to revolt.

It only took a good 100+ years but finally we managed to bridge the gap between anarchists and marxists.

That's actually one of the biggest reason's I'm drawn to Communization Theory, I think a lot of what's divided Marxists and Anarchists over the 20th Century was largely semantical, and I think one of the biggest issues with Marxists today is their inability to move beyond the Social Democracy of the Second and Third Internationals, theory and praxis that's completely divorced from out current material conditions. I wish more anons on this board took contemporary theories like Communization seriously. It's like what the great prophet Otto von Bismark once said after the First International split, "Crowned heads, wealth and muh privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"

Read it yourself lazy shit.

Communization by Troploin:
libcom.org/library/communisation

An A to Z of Communization by Dauve:
libcom.org/library/z-communisation-gilles-dauvé

Some more helpful links.

It's like Marxism and Leninism without the Marxism-Leninism. Basically far truer to Lenin's sentiments in State and the Revolution then the USSR or any ML State Capitalist who wants to create a Nationalized economy with a welfare apparatus. Basically Communization is real Marxism.

This is exactly how I feel. Leftcoms and ancoms are closer than they like to admit, it's MLs that they're really distant from.

about time

You mean Marxists are finally forced to admit that anarchists were right all along?

Only if Anarchists finally start reading Marx and understanding Dialectics fam.

Also, I know that was playful bantz, but Marx has always been anti-state, it's just after decades of Marxism-Leninism Marxists have seemed to forget their Libertarian origins. Hell, if you read Lenin's State and the Revolution thinking you're going to find some kind of authoritarian text you'd be greatly surprised, it literally reads like "anarchism", once again, because the differences between Marxists and Anarchists have always been semantical, but further obscured but the Social Democratic productivist projects of Marxist-Leninist States.

Marx learned dialectics from Bakunin's notes in the book he "borrowed"…

I've also been a long time believe that Leftcoms and Ancoms on this board should be natural allies, and I've also always felt that Communization Theory could be the perfect springboard for that.

Marx/Bakunin slash fiction when?

I have no problem with what they want, its the praxis in the mean time that puts me off

Do you mean the rejection of activism?

yes

A lot of the people in the /leftytech/ thread are leftcoms. They're not so bad.

I mean this,

Is basically the long and short of the conquest of bread, but I fail to understand by what method they mean to achieve this communal, money, profitless, stateless forms of life

Leftcoms don't reject action, they reject forms of class collaborationism, i.e. when "United Front" tactics turn into a professional class of activists who spend their time agitating for non-class related issues and are completely divorced from the Proletariat. If one looks at Bordiga or the ICP you can clearly see they did quite a bit, but it was all with Unions, and they refused to organize or agitate outside of the Proletariat or to allow class struggle to get sucked into the political realm as opposed to the economic realm. Obviously what I'm describing here is what ends up happening to every Trot and ML party, as well as many Anarchist groups, they just end up becoming leeches hanging off the side of big Liberal and SocDem parties, or they're gobbled up by NGOs.

Class warfare. Same thing every Leftist believes in, it's just that the goal isn't Social Democracy with guns. I don't really understand your question.

Valid crit

but you realize these days only organising with even slightly radical unions means organising with probably less than 5% of the population where I'm from and we have a strong union heritage.


If your class struggle is doing it right it will inevitably end up in the political realm, trying to have an apolitcal revolution is a fantasy.


This is only partly true, and I fail to see the leftcom experiments that did not end up like this or worse.

You have the current state of things

You have the future state of things (stateless, classless)

What is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things? How is it structured, how does it gain support, how does it grow? How does it topple the dictatorship of capital? How does it implement institutions that will allow stateless, moneyless and classless society to flourish?

I realize that, only 16% of the U.S. populations workers are Unionized. Because I came from a familly and live in an area where most people are Unionized I'll admit in my youth I had more a more optimistic view of Union organizing as a revolutionary vehicle, but Communization Theory isn't orthodox Bordigism, they don't advocate something like SiCobas. What they advocate instead is the prefigurative praxis that many Anarchists advocate.


I don't think I really agree with that comrade. I think political determinism is the exact logic that stops Leftists from organizing effective Dual Power. That does mean I advocate "apolitical revolution" whatever that even means, but rather I wouldn't want to see a revolution that thinks the key to change is seizing State power and then making a bunch of top down mandates. This is the kind of stupidity that marked the incompetence of Stalin's regime.


Maybe true, but praxis isn't an argument against theory.


First I can tell you what it's not. It isn't a State Capitalist bureaucracy. It also isn't just the management of society by the Proletariat, it isn't just a DoTP. The reason Leftcoms reject Stagism, and the reason "the real movement" has become a slogan is because it's the actual moment the Proletariat abolishes it's own class relation, it's the moment the Proletariat ceases to exist. I fail to understand you question because it seems you think the only way a revolution can achieve it's goals is if it assumes the role of the State and the revolutionaries become the custodians of Capital. I'd say the burden of proof falls on you, as this is a highly unorthodox claim for a supposed Leftist to make.

...

W E W

if 16% of the population is unionised, you can bet 90% of those unions are not really radical or effective.


right… all agreement here…so what revolution would you want to see? and you were the one who started talking apolitical.


But I mean, it totally is. This is where we differ. If your revolutionary theory fails to produce effective revolutionary praxis then literally
what is the point?


Seems about all you can my lad, usually you start of this a "first I can tell you" with a "second I can tell you" but you actually just said ". "I fail to understand you question"

Its an extremely simple question, as seeing as how I post under the black flag it is quite clear I do not mean to assume the role of the state, so this is deflection of the question.

The simple question I asked you is basically, what would a specifically leftcom revolution look like?

You've already told me that it won't be a tankfest. What WILL it be like though?

The burden of proof certainly does not fall on me to explain the revolutionary strategy of YOUR ideology, the ideology you are defending in this instance.

bump

I would like to see actual Dual Power established in counter-distinction to the State, and that this Dual Power establish autonomy outside of any larger coordinating body like a State, as well as a return to trying to actually radicalize work places. I realize a majority of Unions today are reactionary, but it's also true that Marxists have completely given up on this kind of organizing This doesn't mean I believe in an "apolitical" revolution, you misunderstood me there, what I'm saying is that one of the biggest issues with the Second and Third Internationals is this idea that became common among Marxists, today I'd say it's damn near universal, the idea that what it takes to change a society is to control it's political culture, something like Chavez or Syriza, but this seizure of political power doesn't always translate to transformations in the economic Base, these sorts of things can only be done by the workers themselves, and the political machinations of supposed revolutionaries can at times almost act as an obstacle in these situations. My idea of good Marxist praxis is maybe something along the lines of the Black Panthers.

what is the point?

The failure to produce effective praxis can be based on a number of things. Is all Anarchism and Syndicalism pointless because Catalonia failed? Not really. Is the USSR proof against MLs? I don't agree with MLs but I'm not stupid enough or Liberal enough, or maybe just not a vulgar mechanistic thinker enough, to assume this is a meaningful argument. You can use failed praxis as a punctuation to your point, but you can expect something with so many complex variables to stand in for an actual argument. Bookchin, for instance, was an awful organizer, for a lot of Marxists pointing out that he never "lead a revolution" is honestly enough of an argument against him. It's the same argument they make against Bordiga. It's how brainlets argue. At the end of the day, whether you're a Marxist, and Anarchist, or a Communalist the Let has a pretty long laundry list of failures behind it, so I don't think anyone is in a position to throw stones.


I'm not actually a Leftcom, I just like a lot of their ideas and their critiques of Marxism-Leninism. Also, your post seemed strange to me because you seemed like an Anarchist, but you were implicitly mimicking ML critiques of Leftcoms. I was just a little confused by why an Anarchists main critique of Leftcommunism would be that revolution is impossible if you don't adhere to entryism and become the Leftwing of Capital Keynes and Lenin style.

This is largely what I would like, my question is, by what method do you establish this dual power? For example, how does your party recruit and on what grounds? Once recruited, what sorts of activities do party members engage in?

Although I will say that in general this criticism entryism is extremely valid.

I am think the Panthers had extremely strong Praxis. Probably without the CIA attacks Newton might not have gone insane, but once Bobby Seale was running for mayor and things got watered down it was over.


You were explicitly critiquing the failure of other forms of praxis by pointing to their examples of failure in watering themselves down by entering into broad coalitions etc. So, you were engaging in the same game. Isn't that the whole game here?


I am in no way an entryist, hell I don't even believe in using unions for the revolution for reasons we have both discussed above.

I also said your crit of the broad front ethos was also valid.

However, that doesn't mean I would not consider joining broad allegiances under certain circumstances.

It is the case in many places that united fronts have significantly raised or altered the level and nature of the discussion. History is not this black and white game where you have a pure revolution or none at all. It goes back and forth, it has bumps, shit takes times. We are talking about the mode of production, that does not shift easily. The consciousness on top of it does not shift easily.

Lets take Occupy, you might say it was a complete failure, in many ways, it was. However, after Occupy, some years later, you have a member of the democratic party willing to run for president calling themselves a democratic socialist. Now, he isn't actually a democratic socialist, but the fact he was willing to pander to that crowd and that it gained support is something unprecedented in recent US history.

Occupy failed in the immediate but it caused a big global stir, perhaps unlike any single act of direct action ever before. Can you think of another? Without the liberals, it would have been just a bunch of smelly hippies in zucotti park talking about muuuh capitalism. With the Liberals, people had to pay attention and they largely did.

How many people were radicalised against capitalism or simply became interested in libertarian/democratic socialist ideas after that?

You will notice that in general the idea of straight liberalism is waning slowly in America, it never used to be so much under attack by the left and now it is.

I mean I just straight up never said anything like this, I actually said something along the lines of what you wanted being "the long and short of the conquest of bread"

I don't really disagree with anything you've said here tbh. What I will say is that I don't think anyone at this point has the answers to these questions. My biggest issue with the Left today is twofold. Firstly I don't think we've found the form of political organization that fits our current historical moment or material conditions. I know it isn't the recreation of a Worker's Party, especially because political parties just don't do what they used to do in Lenin's time. Today a political party exists solely to consolidate money and votes, which is only useful if a party already has substantial power or cachet. In the past political parties used to be everything, they had sports clubs, pot lucks, they did fundraisers for their communities, the political party was the center of a person's social life, nowadays all of these things are facilitated by random entities, in many cases a person's employers, or worse, the Church, as it is in the South, where the Church has filled the vacuum of what Unions would otherwise provide for workers. On the other hand, the kinds of extremely decentralized forms of organization and agitation that marked the Battle for Seattle, OWS, or BLM, are real dead ends in my opinion, and their the main reason I still put stock in the notion of Vanguardism. The second thing that frustrates me is something that admittedly I actively participate in, is the degree to which Leftists can articulate Negation, but not necissarily put forward a Positive vision of a political future, but I think there's a valid reason for that, and it's that I just don't think it's more or less possible to project what Socialism will look like once a revolution starts, but we can know what parts of Capital we wish to negate and abolish, but what replaces that I'm not sure anyone can know. To some people this might seem like Blanquism, but this is the essence of Marx's critique of Utopianism, and this is what Leftcoms mean when they talk about the "real movement", and it's why they reject Stagism, although I think it's fair to say Marx was in fact a Stagist himself, just not in the way Trots and MLs are Stagists. I think Marx believed there would be multiple unpredictable stages of negation and contradiction between Capitalism and Communism, but I don't think he ever envisioned a Socialist State as some kind of perpetual in-between roadblocking the Proletariat from actual Communism.

Forgot to attach this nice soothing picture of Marx that I like.

Last time I checked libertarians are made of meat.

bump

I think another large reason unions have broken down is because people don't work in traditionally unionised jobs so much any more. Automation and deportation of manual labour in the west has had the sneak effect of smashing unions to pieces by outsourcing or replacing the western worker. Its a double blow because it means he can now exploit workers in the the third world for cheap while draining solidarity in the west.

If we were to create a new praxis it would have to be something that encompassed the new forms of employment in the west, the service industry for example is a huge employer of young people and has little unionisation. "precariat" jobs like uber and deliveroo. Possibly I think the problem with trade unions is that it should be a simple communist union rather than one based around a trade.

I mean, none of OWS or the Battle For Seattle had any real resources or controlled anything, it was really just an extremely elaborate form of protest. BLM is more a racial civil rights movement so its kinda different more single issue.

If you believe in vanguardism then you must believe in some form of staged revolution surely? There will always be the stage in which the vanguard has control and supposedly the stage where its control is no longer required.

I never really understood why people hesitate to describe what happens after the revolution, particularly with historical proto examples like Catalonia, Rojava and Ukraine and other smaller movements likes the Honduran Campesino movements or even on pirate ships in the early 18th century, you simply transfer power of whatever resources you have to a directly democratic structure and that structure will govern henceforth

Not necessarily. Vanguard=/=State. Tons of things function as Vanguards, political parties, art movements, the media, scientific consensus, or a general public opinion, these are all vanguards, and they happen naturally whether we want them to or not. The Marxist conceit isn't to create a Vanguard as a defacto ruling class for an intermediate stage of State Capitalism, it's to acknowledge that Vanguards exist and to then use this phenomenon to our advantage, to make the Vanguard transparent, as well as to make certain it's made up of and accountable to the People. A Vanguard should, in the best possible scenario, be composed of those within our society with the most experience and knowledge, but that doesn't even necessarily mean they should be in positions of direct authority, hypothetically they would be the scientists, historians, engineers, philosophers, and artists we could defer to or draw upon for their expertise. Over a long enough period hopefully these forms of knowledge will become more common and ubiquitous among the Proletariat as labor time is freed up by automation, the division of labor becomes less pronounced, and our educational systems are severely reformed. Aside from that I agree we need to embrace the Proletariat as a broader subject made up of the non-owning class, but a.) most Marxists already do that, and b.) at what point does this type of organizing become too broad and dip it's toes in class collaborationism. I know that second one seems like Leftcom gibberish, but the Panthers themselves, the last truly promising Leftist movement in the U.S., was largely done in because of their flirtation with the Lumpen.

Also, I'm heading off to bed, but I'll respond to the rest of your post and any subsequent posts tomorrow fam.

I posted Dauve's Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, now I'm going to post the Invisible Committee's Coming Insurrection, since this thread has become a general Leftcom/Ancom solidarity thread.

I'm actually 1/4 through the coming insurrection already fams

what would you think of something like pic related?

so sometimes I shitpost as a Nazbol lol

This is one of my favourite recent developments here.

I think it was inevitable tbh. If the Left is ever going to rebuild itself in the West it's going to be some form of Libertarian Socialism, some permutation or combination of Ancom, Leftcom, or Communalist ideas I think.

We all do now and again fam.


I actually really like this chart tbh. I also think the only Communism worth fighting for is FALC.

in this scenario the 'vanguard' becomes simply those work in the network and spread its ideas. This means that basically, anybody working within the network would be the vanguard

Sorry if this is incoherent, I'm still trying to come to grips with the theory myself. I'm starting to understand just how real this communisation shit is. It completely BTFOs all the weak-ass pseudo-revolutionary theories that get bandied about both on this board and the Left in general.

I think the model you posted fails to take into account the corrosive force that production for exchange has. I'm still trying to get my head around the subject myself, but the basic problem I see with that model is the fact that the first non-capitalist thing it proposes we do is 'organisation without private property', basically halfway through the plan.

There are three main problems with that: First, it seems to think that a network of worker-run co-ops and productive factors are somehow related to the abolition of private property. This misunderstands the concept of 'private property', which refers to the exclusive nature of the property. It doesn't matter if the property is owned by a capitalist, or the workers, or the state, it's still defined by ownership.

The second, and related, problem, is that the first concrete step you're proposing is a non-remedy to something that is in reality only a symptom of the capitalist mode of production. Private property isn't a standalone 'feature' of society that you can remove in the hope of making things better. Private property is an emergent consequence of production for exchange. So up until that point in the 'plan', you're still running on the Law of Value, still producing for exchange, and still running your co-ops inefficiently compared to the capitalist market (before you protest that worker satisfaction will make you 'better' at running your businesses than the capitalists, remember that in your plan you intend to divert what is presumably quite a large portion of the co-op network's profits toward agitation, expanding into other industries, giving shit away for free, etc). This is a recipe for failure if I ever saw one: you're trying to beat porky at his own game by playing badly.

The third problem is that your plan suggests that you will spend quite a bit of time and effort trying to propagandise people and direct them to support your 'revolution' (it doesn't revolutionise the mode of production, so you have to put sarcastic quotes around it). What do you expect to achieve by tilting at the superstructure? The 'long march through the institutions' has been a complete failure. Trying to influence any part of culture or politics without first at least partially revolutionising of the mode of production is a fool's errand. The bosses have deeper pockets than you, and they propagandise from cradle to grave. You propagandise some of the time after people's opinions are already basically formed. It's no contest, never has been. Focus on the base. If you've actually revolutionised the mode of production, people should be revolutionising themselves, without you having to propagandise them. The new mode of production, when it appears, will be clearly superior to capitalism. Workers will flock to it because it will be the new 'common sense'.

Take Wikipedia for example. How did communism take over and destroy an industry many centuries old? Did it relentlessly propagandise and brainwash people into becoming wikipedians? Did it take out front-page adverts in major national newspapers? Hell no, it was simply the superior mode of organising, people recognised that fact, and communism won. That's how the new mode of production will present itself to proletarians - as a clearly superior, 'common sense' method of organising.

Of course, outside of information production and dissemination the communist mode of production has not made itself apparent yet. At present I can see no method by which production co-ordinated across global supply chains can be done without production for exchange. However, I think the previous statement will soon become untrue. I think we can figure out how to make global production directly local. I don't know how yet. I feel like it's got something to do with the Internet, like a global information network directly gauging total demand and coordinating productive factors to fulfil it? I feel like we could probably do that now where we couldn't before. Anyway as you can tell this is the bit I'm stuck on. I think maybe the more leftcomish people in the cybernetics thread are heading in the right direction.

==tl;dr== Your whole plan is backwards. The revolution starts with the appearance/creation of the communist mode of production, and flows from there.

I think a Vanguard is something a bit broader then that, and like I said, not a class of rulers in authority positions. Lenin's initial conception of the Vanguard was that they would play the role of educators, not managers. I still like the chart, I'm not sure how programmatic or actionable any of it is, I'd say it's pretty Utopian to think there can be such an elaborate blueprint to revolution and I'd say the chances that you'd get reality to bend to this image macro are slim at best, but I also think it's fun, and also useful, to make projections of the future, we can't know the future, but we can make educated guesses.

Damn, this is a good post user.

Meant to say

This proportion, is I believe, the proportion soaked up by private ownership. Take for example a bar, you have the owner the manager and the staff, the staff work for minimum wage, the manager gets maybe a dollar on top of this an hour and the owner gets all the good stuff. You remove the owner from the scenario, then the good stuff can do 2 things, 1, give better than minimum wage, what you might call a "living wage" 2, contribute to the community funds. The idea being that with several co-operatives you can do something small, with many co-operatives you can do something large. Considering the chunk that the private owner takes, I see no reason why this would not be feasible. On top of that, purely from a marketing standpoint, you do bring in people based off of the fact that your business helps out the community and, crucially the business and community projects becomes hubs around which the alienated community can organise.

There will be a large amount of people who will agitate for free, there always is, but consider that the capitalist businesses you say we cannot compete with also spend money on marketing, lots of it. Well, our marketing budget will be spent on propagandists, simultaneously delivering direct action and advertisement for the network. It is no different, its just a different way of marketing.

>It doesn't matter if the property is owned by a capitalist, or the workers, or the state, it's still defined by ownership.

in that case it is impossible to ever remove private property. Whatever removal you envisage necessarily leaves all commons in the hands of the proletariat, that is the end goal. De facto, the proletariat own the commons, the commons is owned by nobody=the commons is own by everybody.

In that regard, i fully admit that this is a gradualist plan, it is not revolutionary but neither is it reformist, it does not seek to immediately abolish property rather it seeks to build the conditions so that it might be abolished. Further it does not seek to seize or reform the state, rather it means to build separate institutions outside of the state until they supercede that state.


Do you refer to the removal of the private owner, for example in the bar scenario? It is a remedy to the drain on worker output that goes in that direction, while the workplace will obviously still be subject to mortgages etc, this is covered later on in the chart where pooled resources are used to buy out the truly bourgeois , this is the next stage.


Which is precisely what we mean to show. The entire strategy is to show a superior system of organisation and then implement it, namely, organisation by common consent over common property.


Production for exchange is the last thing to go, as it is the biggest feature of capitalism. It goes simultaneously with wage labour and only after the collectivisation of property. Essentially, the "revolution" happens at this point, everything else is merely a precursor to it, a series of pragmatic structures we build, like a military prepares for violence, only we do economic violence

What if I made the case that what past revolutions have lacked is precisely a blue print. Why did Lenin go back on what he wrote in the state and revolution? Why did it eventually liberalise? They had no plan, or none that I have seen, for the long term, they had no plan to whither away, and so when the state did whither away, it withered into capitalism.

Surely planning for the future should be the very essence and substance of the revolution?

What else is there? Nihilism? Or simply attacking and critiquhing and supporting piecemeal and hoping something comes out of it?

I'm not saying my particularly blue print, but in general, I think this is a large fault of a large part of the left, being unwilling or unable to plan post revolution.