Can somebody tl;dr the big leftcom thinkers and how they differed?

in what way is this post larping?

Look again, I was responding to the pirateposter. And he's LARPing because he thinks performatively acting out Anarchist vs. Marxists bullshit is more important then analytically tackling different ideas and tactics to create actually sustainable Socialism.

How's shitposting from a armchair LARPing?

If you're more interested in the idea of being a Leftist then what it would actually take to meaningfully negate and sublate Capitalism, and if you're more interested in the accomplishments of Leftists from the past then considering current material conditions, then you're a LARPer, regardless of whether you do it from your basement or if you become one of the many professional career activists who get cushy jobs at NGO's, or a tankie who sits around in political parties that essentially amount to Soviet Historical Societies, or a smashie who thinks all Leftism amounts to is dressing in all black and throwing brick bats through shop windows. These are all different forms of Leftist LARPing and they're all equally retarded.

Do vanilla Marxists exist? It seems that everybody who isn't an ML or a Maoist is considered a leftcom

Who are some Leninist leftcoms?

I wish everyone here would read this.

By vanilla marxist he means orthodox marxist i guess

"Leninist leftcoms" are leftcoms who see vanguard parties as important for bringing about the revolution but reject one-party exclusivism being more in favor of decentralisation

aka Rosa Luxemburg

How much do you think Lenin's democratic centralism was his preferred method of organisation or a consequence of the material conditions of the time.

I use the term vanilla Marxist to refer to Marxism as per Marx and Engels.

Amadeo Bordiga, Onorato Damen.

No, orthodox Marxism is already a step away from vanilla Marxism. Orthodox Marxism refers to the Marxism predominant in the Second International (Kautsky is a big name here).

The key difference between Leninism as originally per Kautsky/Lenin versus the Italian faction of the Comintern lies in how they view the vanguard's position and where they see it arise.
>Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without; that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. (From Lenin's What Is to Be Done?)
Lenin here clearly states the party's leadership must come from outside the proletariat. Bordiga disagreed, as for him the vanguard of the class party leads the class; the most advanced proletarians lead.
>The class forms itself as certain conditions and relationships brought about by the consolidation of new systems of production are developed – for instance the establishment of big factories hiring and training a large labour force; in the same way, the interests of such a collectivity gradually begin to materialise into a more precise consciousness, which begins to take shape in small groups of this collectivity. When the mass is thrust into action, only these first groups can foresee a final end, and it is they who support and lead the rest. (From Bordiga's Party and Class)
He clearly sees through most advanced sectors of the proletariat as the leadership of the vanguard class party, not the viewpoint of someone outside the class relationship.

This text probably clears up Bordiga's views on the matter best: libcom.org/library/role_party_bordiga.

Very.

Rosa was Second International, no?

Bordiga always called himself a Leninist (and you see this very clearly in the Lyons Theses, arguably the defining exposition of both his younger views and what would later grow into what was seen in works such as "Doctrine Of The Body Possessed By The Devil"), but evolved more and more into something distinct as he aged (which may be part of why what you see of him around here are his ugly old pics and not his better-looking young ones). That being said, the argument could be made that he was never a Leninist (and I would agree, although that may be because of a visceral dislike of Lenin's writings), but that's a very complex issue.

Very informative user. I'm fairly new to leftcom and thats what happens when i try to explain things, lel. What drew me in was reading up on council communism and the soviets and concluding it is a better system than what the ussr became.

What's the reason left communism has been gaining popularity as of lately, at least on Holla Forums? Is it became of all the antifa nonsense that has been going on, that lead many people to read more into leftcom literature? I have the feeling the two events coincided.

Can someone give me a very clear idea of how leftcoms plan to bring about socialism, from our current material conditions in the world? This just may convince me

I don't see the connection. It's more because they usually to know their shit and are visible thanks to their constant theoretical critiques(see: every marksoc thread). I bet ML would also start getting big again on Holla Forums if Ismail led a shitposting crusade.

...

I'm unaware of what you guys want to do, please inform me

As already mentioned, "left communists" are a umbrella term. I belive it's quite obvious that Bordiga and the German-Dutch council-communists had quite different ideas on how communism would arise, and what praxis is adequate.

No, they simply can't and won't

How the fuck is saying communization theory as you guys understand it is basically the same as Kropotkins anarcho-communist theory Larping exactly? Hes not role playing, hes just saying the way communization theory is described is extremely similar to what Kropotkin wrote in "the conquest of bread" almost indistinguishable in fact.

There is nothing "preformative" about it, its a point of theory.

Is exactly what he is doing, comparing two strains of thought to each other.

I will note that none of you provided a coherent answer to the criticism, instead engaging in ad hominems about how hes larping when he clearly is not.

why, it contains no substance at all

Ok…thanks for the preamble but just summarise the general framework for me

I'm not quite sure what you want beyond what and already mentioned? Could you reformulate your question/concerns a bit more precisely?

Also, I just wrote that last comment you responded to, and I'm still reading into all of this (see me not using the leftcom flag), so please forgive me if I can't answer every question you have perfectly, but I'll try my best nevertheless.

mate you are wasting your time I swear. For the last week I have been trying to get an explanation from a leftcom as to what they believe.

None of them have been able to coherently explain what they actually believe OR two of them say things that are totally at odds.

One "rejects stagism" and another wants labour vouchers.

The stagism rejecting ones cannot and will not explain how they mean to go from capitalism to communism

See look, this is how far they will go. You will get endless comments like this, when the question is pretty fucking clear,

by what praxis will you get from A-B?

A being Capitalism, B being communism.

keep them going long enough and you'll be linked Giles Dauve instead of getting an answer mark my words

Its become a fashion for people want to seem superior

They don't know their shit, none of them, not one of them can even explain their shit

saying "muh theory" and telling people to read things you haven't read yourself and not pointing to any specific phrase or passage which would make this name dropping relevant in any way while repeating ad nauseum "its not the boss but the firm bro" is not critique is just pretentious jerking off

holy shit imagine being this triggered

I said I'm still learning, why do you expect me to know everything? There is no need for this excessive hate, just because we disagree. The reason you're probably getting different answers is 1) became there as been a rise in popularity over the last few weeks/months (as least that's the way I've been experiencing it) 2) people, just like me are interested in the theories of people who have been placed unter the umbrella term of "left communism", which directly implies that they don't all hold the same opinions. The way you're putting this reminds me of right-wingers trying to prove that communists in general are incoherent became he compared what a ancom said with what a tankie postulated.

im fucking sick and tired of them. All they do is whine and pretend to have read boatloads of theory when none of them have. Exactly what is wrong with the left, pretentious, snide, superior acting but ultimately impotent and weak.

if you didnt ALL have the superior attitude and shit on EVERYTHING in the same manner ever time it would be okay, but you're a bunch of smug stuck up idiots who pretend to have read things they clearly have not read.

WHY do you call yourself a leftcom if you haven't engaged with the theory enough to explain it properly?

Ill tell you why, because it s a fashion badge, you don't actually give a shit, one of those idiots who changes ideology like clothes. That is who leftcom are, its not about socialism, its about following trends

I haven't called myself a leftcom, I've only said I'm interested and am currently reading into it. I wanted to help the lenin-hat user understand, since he was asking kindly.

And as far as I see, I haven't been posing as superior, but have kept my calm and modesty throughout the thread, so at the very least I am not asking superior.

Also, if it were about "being trendy" what would left Communism as such have to do with this? Isn't it the people who do this the ones you should be conceded with? I mean, after all, today they might be leftcoms tomorrow they could be using black flags.

is acting superior.

Not reading said theory AND THEN telling others to read it in order to maintain this air of superiority is what makes them pretentious.

You will notice we are now posts and posts deep and still not one of you can coherently explain what it is the fuck you actually believe.

Its infuriating kekistani tier elitism

But these two posts do just that >>1761514

I'm not sure where you've seen
happening beside when people do this to intentionally annoy others for fun.

I remember reading that a leftcom here once said he never used his flag in serious discussions, because people immediately reacted differently to the same concent, just because of the flag, and them knowing (or assuming) that the poster was a leftcom. Maybe something like this also was the case for you. But I won't make any assumptions.

Other than that, I'd be glad to try and answer a question to the best of my knowledge, if I am given a concrete matter or problem you have. Again, I'm still leading, so I'll probably have to take some time to look up some sources to give you a better and more indepth answer, just so that nobody here is annoyed or angry.

So according to these posts left communism is:

1) A rejection of stagism 2) A rejection of entryism 3) not leninism 4) Council communists 5) a "communization theorist" (repeated but not explained what communization theory actually is) 6) Also anarchist and insurrectionist 7) " Communization still assumes that post-capitalism will contain the birthmarks of the old capitalist mode of production in some form, or will at least for a period be a very underdeveloped communist mode of production." so… not a rejection of stagism then and 8) " left communist umbrella includes both Leninists who assume an (alternative) idea of the vanguard and a clear dictatorship of the proletariat, as well as the council communists who seek a mediated transformation of the productive relations through both the state's occupation and its dismantling directed by workers' councils." Definitely not a rejection of stagism then.

so… that jumble of contradictory shit is a coherent ideology to you? One so coherent and superior you can shit on all others with it like it was some kind of immortal science?

No, it is repeatedly being told to read things which are not explained in any meanginful way over to course of the week. Put up or shut the fuck up.

Explain communization theory, no links, 200 words or less

You didn't read it at all, it seems.

You missed the repeated mentioning of the fact that it's an umbrella term that has no full coherence, just like anarchism may refer to an insurrectionist, platformist or anything else.

And that's honestly just the two biggest misportrayals in your post. You know for someone pumping out brainless redditspaced posts complaining about others not reading you can't even read a few paragraphs properly and sum them up. At least try to put your verbal feces into a single post when you sperg out.

It seems jumbled because they're describing different currents within left communism. For instance Bordiga didn't reject stagism that's a more of a modern communization thing. You seem to have a really hard time understanding that within the grouping of left communism there are contradictory schools of thought.

Lol poor black flag

Communization theory, 200 words or less, no links. Go our shut up, the rest of these are basically repetitions of points i have already argued.

If people are telling you what to read then maybe you'd find the answers you seek if you stopped trying to angrily browbeat people into teaching you and just read the books

For example:

Marxist Leninism: Seize state, abolish value by creating for use, eventually state will whither.

Anarco-Collectivism: Abolish state, replace with workers councils, keep wages but pay labour vouchers

Ancom: Abolish state, move immediately to a system of free distribution overseen by democratic federations.

Social Democracy: Maintain the market system but tax the rich and give it to the poor

Communization theory:

so, you can't explain your own beliefs then…this is why I am buttmad, i have been repeatedly asking this question and none of you can answer. It has got to the point where I can see no other reality other than that you are a bunch of posers and you don't know what you are talking about. I'll stop being buttmad the moment this is resolved, but I keep asking, and you keep dodging the questions (I am not the only person asking these questions, over this week leftcom have had a number of opportunisties to explain themselves and they have no explained themselves, so now here we are.)

They aren't my beliefs, fartknocker. I just think you're acting like a dickhead as people try to help you and instead of doing any legwork yourself you throw a tantrum because you aren't being spoon-fed enough.

It's embarrassing, frankly.

...

Kekked hard.

Those are all differenct tendencies within left communism (which as I've said over and over again, is a umbrella term, ie. a more general category of leftists, not a "ideology" in the sense you use it). It's still the same like saying (Anarcho-)communists reject the state, but (marxist-lenninist-)communists had big states, so all of communism is contradictory and can be ignored.

Ok, I know this will annoy you, but I'll first post a direct quote from Davue, then I'll procede to put it in my own words, ok?

From libcom.org/library/communisation, "In a nutshell"

Their point is that instead of "creating the conditions for communism", as the USSR claimed to do, by introducing a stage inbetween communism and capitalism, they want to directly start abolishing capitalism and capitalist relations. Furthermore, there should be no "leader" or representative of the "proletariat", but wage-labour can capital should confront themselves directly, instead of by means of a organization (union, party, councils, state, …). The force of the revolution may not come from outside, so to say.

That's at least what I undestand, I might be wrong, and I'd gladly be corrected by others who know more.

Again you're missing the point. Communization theory has insurrectionists, autonomists, councilists, and vanguardists. There is no communization party line or strategy because it's just a loose term that is only tied together by the rejection of stagism and the belief that socialism is the abolition of the law of value.

its got to this stage. Either I get a clear answer, like I have been asking all fucking week, or you retards shut the fuck up, or i continue to sperg out.

It should not be this difficult to get somebody to explain their beliefs.

If you shit on somebodies idea with "muh.. comunization theory, read this, read that" the burdern of proof is on you to prove your shit, not the other way round.

Only SJW say "its not my job to educate you" any body with real genuine passion for what they believe would be happy to explain, and would go out of their way to do so

I guess it's good that I didn't say that you fucking retarded. People are here trying to educate your dumb ass and you just keep sperging out.

This ain't a court room or debate club my dude. You're asking for information so people are providing you the resources to attain that information.

What you haven't explained, which every other theory does explain is HOW you will do this.

As far as you have explained, commuzation theory is "creating communism" which I'm pretty sure is every communist. The difference is those ideologies have an actual plan. What does a Communization theorists do in order to achieve communization

This is not a matter of proving stuff, but just that we're currently on a image-board primarily made and used to entertain onself, not detailed theoretical discussion. If people are telling you to read a introductory text, it's because they're assuming that the text will explain it better than they could, and it's generally easier than just copy pasting passages.

I'll give you that it might be used as an excuse, bit since it is a kind of Holla Forums meme after all, I wouldn't get too rustled about it.

yeh you did. I'm asking questions, if they cared, they would have no problem spoon feeding.

A large section of what this board is is a debate club, this is the most disingenuous comment in this whole thread.

yes, yes you fucking do if you are going to claim it.

This is not a matter of proving stuff, but just that we're currently on a image-board primarily made and used to entertain onself, not detailed theoretical discussion.

so im supposed to "read theory like professor leftcom" but also not have detailed theoretical discussion. No fuck that, this board should be for theoretical discussion and it used to be.

its fucking all we do here what the fuck is this.

Everyone, please calm down !

Yes. Debate takes up a lot of this boards discussion but not every conversation has to or should be held up to the rigors of a debate. That would be exhausting and unhealthy tbh.

In many ways it's more of a critique prior and existing communist tendencies rather then some kind of revolutionary program, but insofar as it does prescribe a set of actions it would be a stageless transition (rejects transitionary society) to communism that rejects mediation of the revolution through formal labour organisation (parties, unions, etc) in favour of emergent forms of direct organisation. In many ways a combination of council communism and "bordigism" while rejecting aspects of both of those tendencies (the fetishisation of certain organisational forms for example).
You really should read some Dauve, fam. It won't hurt you to do so even if you disagree with it.

Right. There is also shitposting and memeing. Sure. When you debate though, you fucking debate, and you don't get to decide half way through a debate that you aren't debating any more. Seriously what the fuck?

I'm not debating you. Nor am I interested in debating you. You seem insufferable.
You also don't get to waltz into a thread asking for basic information and then declare it a debate zone where all comments will now be held to up to the scrutinies of debate.

Such as?

Honestly I started out asking these questions so I could get a better idea so that I could have a look into the lit. That was a week ago. I don't usually post like this, not usually assmad and sperging, but really the attitude I have had for the last week has been completely appalling for somewhere that has pretentious for being better than Holla Forums because the response has been Holla Forums tier

All the answer I really need tbh and all I've come to expect. Don't live in a glass house if you spend all day throwing stones and do nothing else.

scroll up retard, I didn't waltz in looking for debate, i waltzed in flinging shit and informing lenin hate poster that he won't get an answer and shitting on left coms, they then defend their position, i then attacked it back, so really, i didn't start this debate.

The fact you are pretending this board isn't for debate is so dishonest it really doesn't surprise me a this point coming from a leftcom

Still don't have that answer do I. For years people will ask, what IS communisation theory? But alas not even its main proponents know…. a mystery for the ages

This is a remarkable lack of self awareness.

Informal organisation in this case just means people getting together and deciding to do something, instead formal democratic organisations like councils, or bureaucratic motherfuckery like unions or "democratic centralist" parties. These informal organisations would start out as simple things like a bunch of people going out for drinks to compare wages and discus means of taking action (either to increase wages or simply improve conditions) and then expand from there, growing to fully fledged strike organs that then network with one another and form the basis of future revolutionary organisation. It has the advantage to being very difficult to police, while at the same time not granting a platform for opportunists to suck away revolutionary energy pursuing their bullshit goals, something which plagues all formal democratic organs.

That's the simple version anyway. I've gotta sleep soon, but I might post more on the topic tomorrow.

This isn't a issue of proving anything, people are just redirecting you to texts that explain what you are asking, since for the most part they are better written and people don't feel like repeating exactly what was said in that text, over and over again.

Have you ever even considered reading a text that anyone recommended you on communication theory?

Your problems seems to be the very essence of CT. To quote again from the text mentioned above:

This thread aksed for a TL;DR on leftcom thinkers and their differences. You came out of nowhere and wanted to "debate" by insulting everyone first.

Now I could link you for François Martin's Text "The Class Struggle and its Most Characteristic Aspects in Recent Years" which goes through a enumeration of historical examples, but I guess you really want me to tell you, right?

Just to let you know I would respond to these questions but I've been banned by faggot mods for no good reason. This place has gone completely to shit. Everybody who has been here for a while agrees. Sort it the fuck out

Good fucking riddance. At least the mods can do a single thing right.

Yeah and it's definitely because of the leftcoms who remind us of what generalized commodity production is and totally not because of the hundreds of "ironic" NazBol shitposting threads, Holla Forums bait that takes way too long to be deleted, idpolites and autismos like you who couldn't get something through their skulls if they tried.

and i thought you couldn't be gayer

I could blame leftcoms for causing bigger ideological uniformity, but not for causing the fucking drop in quality. I assume you're so buttblasted because we can't go back to the simpler times where everyone but those fucking tripfags was a drooling retard posting le selfish ghostbuster ad nauseam and jacking off to Sanders(and even then leftcoms were eager to critique him).

Bordiga:

Dauve:

This is still dodging the question

That's bullshit that they banned you. Give it a day and one of the other mods should fix it, I'm sure of it

What if this is what makes their shitposts so strong?

People ate up that Leftcom shit way to easy. That is a drop in quality, because it stifles discussion. Leftcom drops a bunch of links (but apperently can't be arsed to explain what he actually tries to say) and the average Holla Forums user, suffering from Dunning-Kruger-Syndrome, is intimidated by it so he adopts the Leftcom stance.

This sort of shit inhibits discussion, especially because Leftcoms are insanely autistic about semantics. In my country, we had some law firm sending letters to people who torrented movies, demanding 10k as compensation. That, of course, wasn't legally justifiable. Yet most idiots paid them because the letterhead said something about a lawyer. That's basically how Leftcoms hijacked this non-sectarian board with their obscure, irrelevant tendency. I recommend everybody who seriously wants to debate shit to go on >>>/marx/

I'd rather see Ismail and people on /marx/ regrouped and launched a crusade, they know their shit, which makes leftcom vs ML threads so entertaining.

It kinda is. There is a lot of theological drivel in Leftcom philosophy, as if they were talking about the nature of God and all that.

I mean, I don't necessarily object to people doing that, but the bad part is that they lash out against everybody with a different tendency - also a very nice parallel to Christian sects.

Their main problems are MLs and Market socialist, that's barley everyone.

Also, it seems everyone is either a leftcom, neutral or totally despises them (as seen in this thread). There seem to be no inbetween position, why is this?

some kind of disagreeing anime girl.jpg

A lot of MLs are fine with Leftcoms is that they consider Leftcoms to be irrelevant. There isn't nearly as much as bad blood between MLs and Leftcoms as their is between MLs and Anarchists, because both have opposed forms of organization and praxis, so they are bound to clash with each other, while Leftcoms don't really organize and even when they do they teach orthodox Marxism to people which is not something that a ML would object to.

However now they've actually hijacked this board and ruin it with their extremely autistic sectarianism and nihilism. Also, this is one of the reasons we barely have threads about activism or investigating leaks and what not. This is all done by Holla Forums, they have 10 stickies up every day about something they do or investigate (as stupid as they may be).

It's very apparent you know nothing about either of them.

I'm pretty sure it was just a temp ban, he'll be back and shitposting in no time.

Admittedly the quality of leftcom posts has declined over the last year, but I think that's mostly because of an increase in their numbers. It's only natural that someone new to a theory would be less able to effectively argue for that theory. Back when there were fewer leftcoms (like three of them), it was the leftcoms that tended to drop walls of text everywhere. I want those leftcoms to come back, or post more if they are still around.

If you want to see him argue with leftcoms, just look back through revlefts history. Though most of Ismail's posting history is just him autistically posting Albanian state propaganda and various historical documents. It wasn't unusual for him to be the only poster in the thread.

I used to be neutral/friendly about Leftcoms but they completely alienated me with intellectual dishonesty and by actively sabotaging organization. No wonder some people hate them.

Well you guys need to start to actually argue with their material. Posting links and telling people "this is not what it's about" is not sufficient. The problem is that a lot of historical data that is used by Leftcom theory is false and outdated - that doesn't make the theory wrong, but the USSR as the big other is the integral part of the Leftcom identity. Once you take that away, you just become a regular council communist.

These old school Leftcoms were alright, also because they were able to make posts without being a sectarian edgemasger

This is true, but you overlook a few important details that are the key: They drop "relevant" links where this is required(somebody asks about dialectics? A leftcom will post a relevant link) and are vocal about many aspects of theory (eg. every single co-op thread). Similarly, in a "I'm new to leftism, what to read?" thread you will see general reading recommendations + at least one leftcom reading list.
This is why eg. Bookchinites never managed to get big when compared to the infants, they were not as persuasive with their "google bookchin" posted here and there when compared to "read this book/article I linked"
I believe anyone who adopts the same strategy should be successful, be it a narcho, ML or perhaps even a marksoc. "Be the change that you wish to see in the world" as some Indian niecefucker said.

No genuine leftcom objects to actual labour organisation. Just the kind of parliamentary bullshit that is so often trotted out as if it's fucking revolutionary, rather than just a massive distraction.

When? Seriously, justify this shit. The cybernetics thread and the /gnussr/ board had/has plenty of participation from leftcoms, we have no objection to useful organisation like that, just opportunistic bullshit. Even then, we aren't actually stopping you from doing anything, just critiquing your proposals. If that's enough to stop your proposed activity then maybe it really is shit.

Assuming he doesn't ban evade again he should be back to autistically ranting in five hours or so.

ML praxis has a dual approach of both organizing outside the system and also trying to hijack the system. I've yet to hear a good argument as to why communist parties shouldn't participate in elections. What makes it so different from other forms of praxis?

There is a difference between MLs and Democratic Socialists. DemSocs want to only use a parliamentarian approach, and also want to confine themselves to the rules imposed on them by the system, only making changes to the system gradually. MLs agitate tactically, don't reject militant approach or activism depending on the material conditions of the county, and want to abolish the bourgeois state once in power.

His criticisms are completely valid, though, and he's actually trying to engage in a productive debate unlike you.

I'm only one man, and I don't have neural link to Holla Forums with which I can post 24/7.

Seriously though, several of us have complained about this problem, though there's not much we can do about it if those other leftcoms don't want to actually engage in debate, it's not like we can force them. I'd also like to point out that leftcoms aren't the only ones with an increase of relatively clueless newcomers, I've seen some truly terrible posts from various other tendencies recently, I think it may just be a symptom of our numbers increasing, and the quality ought to improve as people become more familiar with theory (to an extent anyway)

This is true, sadly because most MLs only talk in Eastern Bloc jargon which is rejected by most young people, so they become disillusioned and complain about the CIA and revisionism. They need to modernize their rethoric.

Also, gotta hand it to Leftcoms "Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement" is a pretty badass book title. Leftcoms have this stylish intellectual style which apperently is appealing to the userbase here

People like you are absolute cancer, I recommend you fall into a steak knife.

Multiple people have been banned here recently, mostly MLs, and they've done nothing but honest arguing. Some guy was banned because of "climate change revionism". Wtf?

It seems like you both share a spot on the spectrum

Go back to the pixel war thread

Honestly, if you lot want to "modernise" your movement and renew its appeal, you should probably be pushing Paul Cockshott's stuff a lot more. Personally I think he's the best thing to come out of Marxism-Leninism in a long time, even as a leftcom I'm pretty impressed with his work (despite disagreeing with him on many things, obviously).

I've been shilling Cockshott in debates with non-communist normies a lot recently. Don't agree with everything either, but he is especially good as an entry pill because the first part of the book is pretty much explaining how capitalism is bad and how social democracy is inefficient - so people don't need to read 19th century tomes first.

Basically talking about automation and how economic planning can replace an obsolete market economy is a great way to get people to become MLs. Talking about the proletariat as the revolutionary agent will make people discard you right away.

This, of course, is entirely different for Third World revolutionary movements.

Also I forgot to give an example
edensauvage.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/reading-list-for-aspiring-ultra-lefts/
Look at the infant reading list, after the introductory texts you have a thorough reading through Marx with some secondary texts, only then readings for every current, after that critiques of other positions, interpretations of things that happened in history go in the end. Even if nobody will ever fucking read all of that, the initial impression even from reading the first texts would stay and encourage the reader to go the rabbit hole because it simply covers fucking everything.
Also is right, the fact is that eg. ML seems to be too focused on "defending" things that were in the past rather than laying framework for current interpretation of the world.

Really, because I'm looking back at this thread and everything seems to be going fine until black fag saunters in to pick a fight. You have

Both giving their perspectives and pointing the direction in which to go, and then, unprovoked

The autistic shrieking starts, dismissing all information he's given because it isn't in the format he wants it.

I can't decide if you're just a buttmad faggot or a buttmad faggot that has a hateboner for leftcoms. If the other ML's that got banned are as retarded as you and your black flag friend then I wouldn't doubt that they deserved it.

Basically we need more people like this chick:

youtube.com/channel/UCepkun0sH16b-mqxBN22ogA

…and not some 60 year old border guard from the GDR talking about an anti-fascist protection wall

Bordiga:
"The following schema can serve as a re-capitulation of our difficult subject… : Transition stage: the proletariat has conquered power and must withdraw legal protection from the non-proletarian classes, precisely because it cannot ‘abolish’ them in one go. This means that the proletarian state controls an economy of which a part, a decreasing part it is true, knows commercial distribution and even forms of private disposition of the product and the means of production (whether these be concentrated or scattered). Economy not yet socialist, a transitional economy.

Lower stage of communism: or, if you want, socialism. Society has already come to dispose of the products in general and allocates them to its members by means of a plan for ‘rationing’. Exchange and money have ceased to perform this function. It cannot be conceded to Stalin that simple exchange without money although still in accordance with the law of value could be a perspective for arriving at communism: on the contrary that would mean a sort of relapse into the barter system. The allocation of products starts rather from the centre and takes place without any equivalent in exchange. Example: when a malaria epidemic breaks out, quinine is distributed free in the area concerned, but in the proportion of a single tube per inhabitant.

In this stage, apart from the obligation to work continuing, the recording of the labour time supplied and the certificate attesting this are necessary, i.e. the famous labour voucher so much discussed for a hundred years. The voucher cannot be accumulated and any attempt to do so will involve the loss of a given amount of labour without restitution of any equivalent. The law of value is buried (Engels: society no longer attributes a ‘value’ to products).

Higher stage of communism which can also without hesitation be called full socialism. The productivity of labour has become such that neither constraint nor rationing are any longer necessary (except for pathological cases) as a means of avoiding the waste of products and human energy. Freedom for all to take for consumption. Example: the pharmacies distribute quinine freely and without restriction."

Keep in mind his position more or less aligns with Marx's in the Gothakritik

Usually mods can't handle the edgy banter in a debate coming from Stalintrips

There is definitely different standards for MLs being banned on this board

This has been pretty similar to my experience. Years ago when I was first getting interested in leftist politics, it was Towards a New Socialism that actually convinced me of the need for communism. I almost certainly would have never read Capital or gotten into marxist theory at all, let alone Left Communism, if it weren't for that book.

I agree with this too. Ironically the techno-utopian environment fostered by the like of Elon Musk and his ilk has actually made it easier to make a technological argument for communism. As you point out it's actually a much easier way of approaching the subject matter than traditional lines of argument, which people seem to be inoculated against these days.

To all the MLs in this thread, I'd concider your theories, if all of Marxism-Lenninism didn't seem like a elaborate attempt to legitimize the USSR and it's crimes. I mean, whatever went wrong is always to blame Revisionists and CIA plots, but never the structure of the party itself. If you ask me, there wouldn't habe any relevance at all, if they weren't the most predominant ideological tendency among "Communists", just became they were the state doctrine. If Communism involves anything like the USSR, I wouldn't be a communist, since I just don't want Dictators pretending to be democratically elected, all people who question the state being killed, while this all happens under the banner of socialism and a better future. I see no practical difference between this and a religion telling me "follow my rules now, you will be rewarded in the afterlife". What's worse is that I used to have some ML tendencies (bc of the reason mentioned about), and I could never defend my beliefs to anyone. It was always a struggle to not look like a nazi defending the Holocaust. I once even started looking into Maoism (because ofnthe Revisionism meme), but luckily I got out soon enough, before I started LARPing and actually defending Mao & Stalin. As soon as that happens, people tend to not go back.

Before I started reading leftcom literature, I was permanently insecure about my beliefs, constantly thinking "wouldn't it just be easier to be a liberal, and accept capitalism?" - the alternative didn't seem worth it, but communism as a goal did. If this had gone on, "Communism" would have just been a phase for me, as for so many others.

This is the danger I see in ML and my problems with it. Left communism helped me for the first time coherently argue my points, since it's far more principled from my perspective, and has far less historical baggage. I don't want to force anyone, but I love to see people convincing me I'm wrong, and for some reason authoritarianism is actually good and will solve all our problems… next time.

Also, I'm not a anarchists, simply became of most people who are anarchists. Not that great of a critique, but still kept me away from it.

...

When i went to sleep last night there were like 13 posts in this thread and I honestly thought it was just going to die while I was asleep. I guess i'll try to respond to some of the Blackflags posts, but i haven't read the thread yet. I'm the user that made this post

So basically what you are saying you are spooked about muh gorillions (which has all been thoroughly debunked) so you made adjustments to your ideology not because you agree with it, but because you don't want to deny the Holodohoax in public.

You are the definition of an opportunist.

I don't understand how someone can call himself a democrat and not be a Stalinist.

So what? People can't be critical of other ideologies now? We have to just tolerate every ideology instead of criticizing it, or is leftcom just so special that it must be free of all criticism? Get real faggot

What I was mentioning there wasn't the fact that they weren't democratic, I know ofnthe criticisms of democracy after all. I'm complaining about them pretending to be elected over and over again, by the people, which should legitimize their rule.

Not only that, but the mere popular association with Stalin & Mao with the deaths of millions, is already a huge problem in being taken seriously. I habe no interests of every conversation about the future turning into appologism for the past.

By for example saying stuff like this.

Other than that, Leftcoms had formulated a critique which I had already vaguely conceived, which was a plus. Also, having have spoken to people from the former eastern-block, not even avid anticommunist or anything, just (more or less) neutrality describing the day to day reality of their lifes, it basically included everything I don't lilike about Capitalism, just with more secret police. Furthermore I consider ML praxis outdated, especially in the modern world

You really aren't doing a good job of convincing anyone, and I hope you lnow that.

And I'm not a democrat. See first response.

Nazbol in the streets, Leftcom in the sheets

Because you are a LARPing western liberal, ML movements are growing all over the world and there are active revolutions going on, for example in Nepal. Kerala also has an ML government who are turning the local economy and welfare state into a democratic council system and yielding great results, such as the highest living standard in India. Marxist-Leninist policy has never failed anywhere in the world and was always deliberately dismantled. Even if you critisize that, or ridicule that, Leftcommunism has a track record of zero success, nada, null. By ignoring thay you're also intellectually dishonest - which I already figured by the way you pick your ideology according to which give you the best bonus points when debating liberals.

"real communism has never been tried" is the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard and everybody who isn't in your camp will righteously just break out in laughter. If you are too lazy to engage in actual debate by fact-checking wrong claims, you and your kind will continue to get bullied and ridiculed by right-wingers while MLs scare the living fuck out of them.

Fucking this. I wish vaguely left people would at least educate themselves before throwing such trite shit which only makes you a laughing stock. Debunk their shit rather than making such childish hand washing.

Help me make a swastika in the middle of the stars

http:[email protected]/* */,727

What us so ridiculous about claiming the experiments of the 20th century failed at the task at hand? Claiming the USSR was a succes will likely gain you more laughs, at least in the west.

Opinions are varied on praxis. Obviously some believe in "spontaneous" revolution and I think that's a little hand wavey. For Leftcoms who are more Bordiga oriented the answer is honestly Lenin's The State and Revolution, with some minor tweaking, particularly making cadres more accountable to the rank and file. For Council Communists it was something along the lines of establishing extremely horizontal Dual Power. For the most part, the the connecting thread is the idea that material conditions will naturally radicalize workers and that Marxists can't create the conditions of a revolution where those conditions do not exist, but rather can only react to the environment given to them. This is why some Leftcoms choose to opt out of activism, but that's nowhere near a universal opinion, and most Leftcoms would argue the best kind of praxis is union organizing.

Idk fam, seems like you're putting on a hell of a performance right now.

contentless ad homs

Well, the first thing that's worth pointing out here is that one thing Marx and Engels' were rather adamant about when defining Scientific Socialism in counter-distinction to Utopian Socialism was the conviction that Communists should never create blueprints for revolutions, i.e. you don't make predictions as to how a future hypothetical society will look, this forces you to try to bend reality to theory. What you want to do is react organically and scientifically to your current material and historical conditions, not produce a formula of "revolution" that then needs to be forced onto all real conditions like a square peg into a round hole. All we can know is what we wish to negate within our current society, we can't know what that negation will produce, and any Marxist who claims otherwise hasn't actually read Marx.

Sounds like you've been linked some Dauvé but never bothered to read it.

more contentless ad homs

anti-intellectual ad homs

butthurt as fuck ad homs

This is what I mean by LARPing, this level of angry polemics would make perfect sense if we were in the context of a broad and robust workers movement where there was a very real battle of ideas taking place, but we're not. The Left is incredibly fringe at this moment, even in peripheral nations where there's literal armed struggle taking place. So chill the fuck out, you're embarrassing yourself.

Well let's pick apart your post.

Yes, Leftcoms feel Communism is a "movement", although admittedly Marx himself believed in stages and even Dauvé argues there would be something like stages, in reality it's a rejection of Soviet-style "productivism" and the idea that there's a "lower stage" of Communism.

Honestly this is everyone besides Trots.

Yes Leninism, the Lenin of The State and Revolution is extremely Libertarian and anti-authoritarian, before the harsh conditions of the post-revolutionary Russia forced the Bolsheviks into further and further pragmatism.

Yes, a good model for horizontal organizing, although as someone who leans more towards Lenin and Bordiga I'm always a little skeptical of "horizontality" in it's extremes.

HOLY FUCK YOU COMPLETE UTTER RETARD COMMUNIZATION IS JUST THE SYNTHESIS OF VARIOUS BORDIGIST, COUNCIL COMMUNIST, SITUATIONIST, AND OTHER ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN MARXIST PERSPECTIVES, IT'S AN INTELLECTUAL AND THEORETICAL SMORGASBORD, NOT A PARTYLINE, WHY IS THIS SO HARD FOR YOU

There's and anarchist wing and a Marxist wing to Communization. Throughout this thread we've been talking about the Marxist version, Dauvé and Endnotes. There are also Anarchists, like the Invisible Committee and Joshua Clover. I'm sorry if this level of non-sectarianism is too much for you to handle.

No? This just describes the USSR.

W E W

So where are all these contradictions m80?

Multiple anons have already done this.

Jesus Christ, this is just Communization. You just described it. Are you this retarded? Are you a troll? You just repeated shit that other anons said when describing Communization.

No, you're mad because you're addicted to LARPing you faggot.

This is patently untrue. Most Anarchists, as much as I love them, don't have well defined praxis. They have Platformism, but most ancoms these days don't practice that shit, if they even know what it is. It's just a lot of affinity groups and voluntarism, and rioting. Most Leftists in general don't have a good idea of how we can get from Capitalism to Communism. Marxists had control of Russia for 70 years and weren't able to transiton fromCapitalism to Communism. The whole point of Communization is admitting we're stuck and then doing the actual work of figuring out how we can get unstuck, without living in the fantasy world of tankies who just want to recreate the Soviet Model.

Okay, the rest of your posts seem to be you repeating yourself. Anyway, that's my input.

But at least I have the knowledge and arguments to debunk their claims, while "not real communism" is not salvageable because you refuse to actually engage in the right-wing critique of it because there is no way to prove that your specific special snowflake tendency is even slightly feasible or is not just going to end up like it 20th century socialism.

And the USSR was clearly a success. Why denying the truth? You are in a corner anyway, they ridicule you when you say it socialism, you can as well just be honest about and debunk their shit and throw Grover Furr at their face

*when you say it wasn't socialism

Attributing everything good to your ideology, attributing everything bad to backstabbers. Sigh. Funny how this same story repeats itself across different political persuasions.

If anything the lesson of the ML is that socialism in one country/"peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist world does not work. Socialism has no chance of surviving unless capitalism is dismantled worldwide.

wew

Good fucking job cutting out the rest of my post. I said while legitimate criticism can be applied here (MLs do it pretty much all the time) I was saying that's an argument of absolute intellectual dishonesty because you are proposing an alternative which isn't feasible or even had the slightest spark of success besides a fat fuck getting imprisoned by fascists because elections are bourgeois

Imagine being this utopian

You can debunk western propaganda without maintaining the delusional belief that the USSR had achieved socialism.

Do you have an actual argument against a guy who physically went to Russia dozens of times and fact-checked every claim made by propagandists with first source information in the Soviet Archives?

No, you don't, you're just a random asshole

There is already a thread in the catalog debating this issue so I'm not going to speak another wall of text discussion by properly replying to that.

The whole debate is purely semantic anyway, which is all what Leftcoms have going for them, arguing and nitpicking about semantics.

But what is their criteria to call it socialism? Usually it is either "when the government controls everything" or "because they said so". They failed in abolishing commodity production, and thus also the proletariat. It was not communism.
But we already know the USSR failed, putting "my special snowflake ideology" above it
The burden of proof is not on me this time

...

It's interesting that everyone who doesn't Upvote le Immortal Science of Margsism-Lenninism, is immediately a larping liberal. I don't even know where you inferred that I was a liberal. I'm just having second thoughs about Stalin being a infallible god…

I don't "pick" my ideology to please liberals, I'd be a liberal in that case. What I can se from your accusations though, is that you seem to be a ML just to be provocative. Might be wrong, but it's certainly a possibility for some people. Also, don't forget thst the MLs in India are shrinking in size every year. Sure to be the bright future, right?

Also, in regards to the USSR not being "real Communism": keep in mind that nobody ever says this. It implies it was some kind of "fake Communism", and it jist needed a few tweaks here and there to be fixed. No, we directly say it was capitalsim, capitalist accumulation went on, profit was generated and and commodity production dominated. I'd post a link, but you people start crying when that happens. And after all, you've probably seen the links over and over again, one more time won't help.

Here again, it's sad to see you denying the nature of the USSR, just became you presumably defended the glorious Stalin too often, and would be ashamed of pack-pedalling now.

lmao no one is arguing it happening at the exact same time, only that coexistence with capitalism will inevitably erode whatever gains that are made. This is something that Stalin even agreed with (at least in his writings, see image)

Can you please post that link?

Depends on what you mean by success. The Bolsheviks captured state power and established a DoP. That was a success. Afterwards? They never made it out of a transitional society, with capitalist elements growing stronger until the USSR's complete dissolution.

and m8 Furr's works aren't peer reviewed for a reason. he isn't a reliable source of history.

==NO SHIT.== Marxism-Leninism sees what's usually being referred to as "Socialism" as a transitional stage towards communism which is outlined by Marx (and later Engels) and described as "first-stage communism" in the Critique of the Gotha Program. Do you even know what Marx means by "Commodity Production"?

The USSR didn't fail. It didn't survive, but it didn't fail.

The USSR had both production for use and democracy. You are historically illiterate.

The constant, beaten-to-death debate about wether or not something can be labeled as "socialism" is semantics. The USSR was clearly not capitalism.

Take all of them. Not actually "all", but nevermind

- Why Russia isn't socialist sinistra.net/lib/pro/whyrusnsoc.html
- An Analysis of Russian Economy marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/index.htm
- The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm
- The Nature of the Russian Economy marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/statecap.htm
- Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/doctrine.htm
- The Spirit of Horsepower libcom.org/library/horsepower-bordiga
- Lessons of the counterrevolutions libcom.org/library/lessons-counterrevolutions-amadeo-bordiga
- State Capitalism and Dictatorship marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/dictatorship.htm
- The myth of "socialist planning" in Russia sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/lipo/lipoebubie.html
- Eight Supplementary Theses on Russia (Dialogue with Stalin 1953) sinistra.net/lib/upt/comlef/art/eightsuppe.html

- Capitalism and class struggle in the USSR libcom.org/library/capitalism-class-struggle-ussr-neil-c-fernandez
- The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience
- State capitalism and world revolution libcom.org/library/state-capitalism-james-clr

- The Incoherence of “Transitional Society” as a Marxian Concept marxisthumanistinitiative.org/tag/transitional-society
- The Nonsense of Planning marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1937/08/nonsense-planning.htm
- Capitalism and Planning marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1935/01/capitalism.htm
- Value and Socialism marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1969/marx-keynes/ch22.htm
- Review: “The Revolution Betrayed” marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1937/11/revolution-betrayed.htm
- Marxism and Russia sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/lipi/lipifbibie.html
- The Revolutionary Workers Movement and the Agrarian Question quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/revolutionary_agrarian_question.htm
- "Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder" - condemnation of the renegades to come quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/left_wing_communism_00.htm
- China: The bourgeois Revolution has been accomplished, the proletarian Revolution remains to be made sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/lipi/lipifbobee.html
- "Proletarian dictatorship" and "socialist society" in the new Chinese constitution sinistra.net/lib/upt/prcomi/ropa/ropaerebie.html
- Mao's China, certified copy of the bourgeois capitalist society quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/maos_china_certified_copy.htm
- Theses on the Chinese Question quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/theses_chinese_question.htm

State capitalism is not a new form of economy nor is it a transitional form between capitalism and socialism: it is pure capitalism, and appeared along with all the other forms of monopoly in the period of the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal powers. On the other hand, the capital-state relation lies at the basis of the bourgeois economy in all of its stages.

I don't think I'm going to go through all the trouble of replying to each individual post, but I guess I'll post this as a general response to the tankposter in the thread. I have no problem with the USSR in general, I think certain aspects of Capitalism persisted throughout it's history and I feel they were never able to fully move past the NEP completely, but the USSR was Socialist, and arguably Socialist even all the way up to Gorby, if we're willing to call the Social Democracy of Khrushchev and Brezhnev "Socialism". But here, I suppose is my question. The Soviet Union failed. At the end of the day it was never able to actually produce Communism, now a lot of that came from conditions both historical and material that were both unforeseen and out of the hands of the USSR, but it did fail all the same, and Socialism in One Country has never produced anything other then dead end Social Democracy. So why shill these defunct Socialist Republics so hard? Why tether yourself dogmatically to decades old theory and praxis that has nothing to do with your own historical moment? Why shill for a Soviet Model that was created under ridiculous circumstances that we hopefully wouldn't face today? And, if you're a Marxist, why would defending the past history of the USSR matter more then using a Dialectical analysis to figure out what went wrong and to try to conceive of a better way to create Communism, what it would take to actually reach a point of classlessness and statelessness, because this is not what happened under SiOC in the USSR, as sympathetic as I am to the former Soviet Union.

It failed because it never produced Communism. If Stalin had been right about Socialism in One Country then they would have been able to achieve Communism without sacrificing "national security", otherwise you're being ridiculous by claiming it's Utopian to be an Internationalist because you're admitting that SiOC can't produce Communism without global revolutions taking place anyway.

As "first-stage communism" it failed in getting to "the second stage", the very goal of a first stage.
Are you the guy who the other day insisted that bureaucracy bloated to the max is actually democracy?
To tell me how wages (especially varying wages) are compatible with production for use though.

The Gothakritik is usually ignored by most of the M-L's I've spoken to. Interesting. But yeah, as I'm sure you know the leftcom critique is that the USSR, China, Cuba, etc. never even reached that lower stage described in the Gothakritik

You sound pretty desperate mate. I've debated your "links" over and over and I frankly don't want to do this again. It's fucking ridiculous, a modern pedantic historian like Furr isn't "peer-reviewed" but apperently Trotskysts like Raya Dunayevskaya are who was claiming that there was unemployment in the USSR 70 years ago while being a secretary of fucking Trotsky himself. You are seeing the USSR as your big other to the point that you are actively anti-communist.

Proof please

...

I am a anticommunist, if the USSR is Communism. But since I disagree on a fundamental level with that assertion (or it being socialism, before you invoke Lenin again), I don't see myself as a anticom. The failure (yes, failure, not "oh, they chose to stop", but it was not possible) of the USSR in my eyes is just another confirmation of what Marx wrote.

Also, the fact that you're complaining that our literature isn't " peer reviewed", while you cannot offer anything but direct propaganda to support your case, is just sad.

Wage labor described by Marx didn't exist in the USSR. Receiving a reward for your labor =/= wage labor. Varying wages? Again, CotGP clearly describes that Socialism means equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.

What? What are you even trying to say? One thing doesn't presuppose or guarantee the other. I can't make an omlette without eggs.

>>>Holla Forums

Data isn't propaganda.

If you crack eggs and fail to make an omelette, you failed.

I'm still closer to the omlette than somebody who refuses to even buy eggs

...

No you're not. Don't claim the accomplishments of October as your own, every fucking ML acts like they aren't sitting in an armchair because of shit other Marxists did a century age half across the world. You're delusional if you think fetishizing the USSR is the same as meaningful praxis.

If you don't like our omlettes you can always have capitalism. I refuse to buy into this myth that Leftcoms/Anarkiddies have actually produced something which isn't directly or indirectly a continuation of capitalism, so the 5th line in that meme is bullshit.

How do you know I'm not doing anything? How do you know I'm not supporting actually fighting ML movements in developing countries? Why do you suppose I'm not willing to critique certain ML tendencies for refusing to adapt to different material conditions? All I see is a bunch of strawman.

This is true, I don't know what you're up to, but I would be willing to bet all my life's savings that there is a 0% chance that you're actively involved in a current armed struggle. Also, respond to

You're posting on Holla Forums and have been defending the legacy of a failed capitalist state to total strangers on the internet, without posting any source, making any convincing argument and frankly just making a embarrassment of all Marxist-Lenninist - implying they couldn't be more of one. You aren't participating in any relevant uprising against anyone, and what you consider a revolutionary act is probably just pure LARPing on par with the worst of Antifa.

Poe's law in action, gomerade.

Don't underestimate him, user. Supreme comrade tankie is currently providing intense critical support for Assad against US imperialism by channeling the Dialectical(tm) life energy of the holy doctrine of Marxism-Leninism itself. And what have you done, huh?

Varying wages means there will be a differing demand on products that may be just as useful to society, and supply will be adjusted thereafter. Hence the social usefulness of a product is not considered in the production, only the exchange value.

reddit.com/r/leftcommunism/comments/4t5oap/the_ussr_was_a_capitalist_society/
What did he mean by this?

Hey, I got it from a leftcom a few months ago, maybe he got it from there, or from somewhere else, I can't say anything for sure. and who knows if the redditor got that from somewhere else.

But anyways, it's quite irrelevant where the collection of links was also posted on, it's not /r/soc, so it's more or less fine my be.

So wait you're telling me there's an Orthodox Bordigist organization out there that actually does shit? How do I sign up?

sicobas.org/

lmao don't waste your time there unless you're looking to get absolutely flooded with ML- trash. It's about as good for "serious debate" as Holla Forums.

I can get a similar omlette to yours from socdems, but without the gun being pointed at me.

There's a difference between someone talking about contemporary events (like Dunayevskaya) and someone posing to be a historian (like Furr).

That doesn't mean that her writings shouldn't be critiqued using the primary sources we have available (we should), but the point it's not fair to compare someone who wasn't attempting to be an historian to someone claiming to be one whose writings fail the profession's standards.

What's the point of armed struggle when the material conditions are not allowing such things? Are you saying I'm a pussy and if I was born 100 years ago I wouldn't have picked up a gun? Way to make this awkwardly personal.

I do this because I feel I have a moral obligations for the millions of comrades who died for the idea of communism and fought for the future of humanity, creating existing socialism against incredible odds only to have some neo-"communist" on a imageboard with CP to pour buckets of shit on them. Again, "no true communism" gets you laughed at, righteously so.

Then we agree. But I already said that wage labor like Marx defined it didn't exist in the USSR under Stalin, therefore people got rewarded according to the use value of the product they created, not according to the exchange value.

Empirically false. Social Democracy has huge inner contradictions, it is economically flawed and will be subjugated to a neoliberal shock therapy after ten years or so.

That's my entire point. I don't necessarily hate her, she's a fucking theorist, not a historian, so don't use her as some historical source about what happened when in the USSR.

It fell, it didn't fail. Did the Byzantine Empire fail?

Marxism-Leninism is - per definition - applied to the varying material and historical conditions of the countries according to its usefulness. It's universally applicable. Nobody wants to carbon copy the USSR onto, I don't know, England or something even thought that would probably an improvement

This is also the reason why Marxism-Leninism actually yielded results, because it's adaptable, while the ideologies you defend never did anything.

That doesn't mean I 100% support all the shit everything all ML at all given times, nor I don't critisize some members of them obviously living in the past. But unless somebody shows me a functioning alternative, it's the only system that makes sense. Even Rojava uses MLM praxis when it comes to mobilization and shit.

Have you read Cockshott? He applies plenty of critisicisms to the USSR, but for most posters here taking the good things of the USSR out of it makes you a red fascist or Taylorist-Blanquist or whatever have you. And sorry, the good things about the USSR massively outweigh the bad. It's also a very practical stance since people will think socialism = USSR and by debunking slander about it you make people more susceptible for it. You can't have socialism unless there the idea that communism killed 500 gorillion people, Gramsci was right.

Fugg

I meant: "everything ML party members do at all given times"

And the tanks that crushed workers uprising and demonstration all over the eastern block too? And the millions that perished under misfortunate planning? And all those executed for not obeying the party line? You have sympathy for those workers which were deceived into creating a capitalist society under a red banner, but none for all those who fought for socialism despite itand those which unrighteously suffered under them?

You're a hypocrite with a Soviet fetish - don't forget what you flag stands for after all! It isn't the tank that "fought fascism", but the tank that democratically crushed the people, the real actually existing people, the workers against the workers state! But this is of no value to you. They were bourgeois spies! They were imperialist counterrevolutionaries! They were backstabbing trots! The excuses and the conspiracies never end, that's something you all learned from uncle Joe. I laugh at you, while all of this saddens me, for nobody hinders progress as much as alleged allies of the working class like you do.

No leftcom has the right to talk about meaningful praxis

The amount of non-reactionary people killed by the USSR is ridiculously low, and the amount of people loyal to the USSR is insanely high. We can talk about the Hungarian "Revolution", but a lot of stuff there is highly dubious, including the involvement of fascists and CIA. This isn't a conspiracy you nuthead.

By denying the proletarian character of both the revolution in 1917 up until the collectivization in the 30s you're drinking liberal Kool Aid. To think that only Stalin as a mastermind could have done it alone is hogwash. It was a proletarian movement.

Forgot pic

Not even a tanky but that ain't true at all the tank literally did fight fascism all the way to Berlin lmao

He's referring to the 1956 uprising in Hungary which is the event where the term "tankie" was used the first time for members of the communist parties in Britain who defended that

It's now just a term for MLs

I'm not denying it had a proletarian character, it's nice to see you're just assuming stuff, I'm just arguing that it failed as a proletarian revolution.

But it's late now, so I'll continue the conversation tomorrow.

Add 60 or so years at best to that and you've got ML states.

Wrong. There is nothing that suggests that ML states, that includes the revisionist post-1956 USSR, were confronted with an economic necessity to dismantle themselves. Those were individual, politicial decisions.

Very unlike Social Democracy which stifles innovation and leads to overproduction so they have to regress back to classical liberalism out of economic necessity.

The Byzantine Empire wasn't a Leftist project to create Communism. Also, i don't think Marxists should get in the habit of comparing their political projects to empire or nation building.

Not to be pedantic but these statements kind of contradict one another. I agree that the Marxist critique of political economy does apply to most Capitalist societies, and I agree that Lenin broadly speaking was mostly right in regards to questions of organization a praxis, but at the same time MLs do fall into the trap of fetishizing the democratic centralism and the Soviet Model to the point of completely cutting themselves off to a more flexible and organic manner, instead of reading praxis into theory. Also, there the simple fact that a lot of the issues that arose in China, aside from the Capitalist Roaders, did come from the fact that the USSR did act in a "social imperialist" manner, and the Soviet Model was a terrible fit for China. The question of whether Productivism was or wasn't a good thing, I suppose, is a tougher question, the question of whether it payed off in the end, but the failures of the Great Leap Forward, far more then the Great Famine in Russia, can be directly traced back to improper implementation theory, i.e. forcing reality to bend to theory. No theory is completely universal.

Well, they definitely did something, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily worth defending. Now I do think the USSR is worth defending to a degree, but the logic you're using is faulty. After all, Communism has never existed, but I don't think that's a good argument as to why humans should do everything within their power to try to figure out how it could be achieved.

I'm just going to be completely honest with you here fam, no Leftist project in history has ever actually achieved it's goals. Every Anarchist project so far has been unable to create a truly classless and stateless society, and every Marxist project has failed to create a classless and stateless society. I don't say this to be defeatist, I say this to point out that thinking repeating the mistakes of Leftists from the 1930's probably isn't a good model for future praxis.

Yeah, I like Cockshott actually, and I think a planned economy is far, far more feasible then it was in the past. I do kind of think something closer to Chile's Project Cybersyn might be cooler though, because it was more decentralized.

Part 2

USSR was definitely not "red fascist", although Taylor-Blanquist is kind of accurate in describing Lenin at times, but I fucking love that nigga tbh. But I think when his theories are applied at their worst is when you get shit like Weather Underground and Red Army Faction. Now you can say that they have nothing to do with you, and I'd respect that, that's not what I'm saying, what I am saying is that there is a Blanquist streak to some of Lenin's ideas and a Blanquist reading of his theories isn't entirely inaccurate, arguably the Cuban Revolution and Focoism is incredibly Blanquist. MLMs are almost 100% Blanquists. As for the Taylorism, well, that comes back to the Productivism of the USSR, but much like the Blanquism I'm agnostic on these matters, I'm by no means anti-Bolshevik, I just think many MLs are undialectical in their application of Marx and Lenin's theories. I also think that MLs look at mistakes in the USSRs history, as well as awful policies born out of pragmatism and shitty material conditions, and then interpret them as good ideas, or praxis to be emulated, and I think that where shit starts to go south.

I'd say the best thing to do is to be intellectually honest and dispel them of the idea that it was a complete hellhole while still admitting it wasn't perfect and that ultimately it's not what Socialism has to look like. What most MLs do, on the other hand, is come off as frothing-at-the-mouth zealots. Normies can't handle that shit, all they know is that they were taught in middle school that Communists are worse then Hitler, that's all they know, they don't know what Communism is, they don't know who Karl Marx was, a lot of them don't even know what the Cold War was or why it was important, a lot of them genuinely only know what Communism is because they pop up so often as villains in movies from the 80's. Which is why Socialists have an enormous chance to regroup and rebrand. We don't have to defend the past in situations where doing so hurts our cause. Also there's a huge difference between defending the USSR and basing all of your politics around the party line of a country and government that hasn't existed for close to 30 years.

Yes, but if you're going to say that then know what you mean. I agree that the Left needs to use culture as a tool, but that also suggests that you understand how it works and how to best utilize it, and let me tell you, memes about Stalin and Mao is not it, it just makes us look like autistic retards. Honestly, regardless of how you feel about their politics, things like Jacobin mag, Chapo Trap House, and the DSA are the only things popularizing Socialism and wining cultural battles for the Left right now. Everything else is mostly just Leftists either creating insular communities for themselves online or shooting themselves in the foot.

I forgot my flag in the first post, but obviously both are me

Also, obviously here I'm talking about Burgerstan, so apologies if you live literally anywhere else.

Part of the problem is that the original leftcoms didn't actually have much in common except that Lenin attacked them all in the same book. It's like if Holla Forums wrote a book called "Degeneracy: An Infantile Disorder," and one hundred years later people were trying to synthesize a coherent "degeneracy school of politics" out of the random people it happened to cite. So you get a lot of different and mutually contradictory ideologies (councilism, Bordigism, modern theorists influenced by both to various degrees and by other Marxist tendencies as well), all under the same "leftcom" banner.

it's not a bordigist organization, just a grassroots union movement. any group of workers (e.g. a bunch of people in a single factory) is free to create a COBAS and use it as a union. It's basically a union for guys who don't trust unions. "COBAS" comes from "COmitati di BAse", which means "Base Committees".

Lenin's Leftwing Communism is only about Council Communists and and some Leftcoms in Britain that literally no one gives a shit about anymore. He mentions Bordiga once in a footnote to chastise him for being abstentionist, but then agrees that he's taken a proper line in response to Turati for being an opportunist. Lenin's own words right there. Also, Bordiga literally agreed with everything Lenin said in Infantile Disorder, and plenty of contemporary Leftcoms agree with Lenin's critique of Council Communists as well. And that's to say nothing of the Situationists. But to claim that Leftcoms are Leftcoms simply to spite Lenin is ridiculous, lenin did have contemporaries, and there were plenty of contending theories of praxis in Lenin's own time. For all we know, if the October Revolution had failed maybe today things like Council Communism and DeLeon's Syndicalist Marxism would be viewed as just as valid and viable as possible tactics as Lenin's Democratic Centralism.

That's literally not the point though. If you buy eggs, and let them go bad, you can't say "Oh, but I bought the eggs!" If you didn't make the omelette, you didn't make the omelette.

On that note: sinistra.net/lib/upt/comlef/ren/renegadeae.html

Worst threads by far. Need to get rid of that flag entirely. I hadn't been on the site for a few months, and I was disgusted by the sheer amount of shit coming from the ass they call their mouths. I thought the e-celeb bullshit was the worst thing on site, but they sure proved me wrong

agreed

I think it's that + he's a lit professor making stalin apologia with bad methodology.

This is a great post

kys

The functions performed by the capitalist are only the functions of capital itself performed with consciousness and will — the functions of value valorising itself through the absorption of living labour. The capitalist functions only as capital personified, capital as a person, just as the worker only functions as the personification of labour, which belongs to him as torment, as exertion, while it belongs to the capitalist as the substance that creates and increases wealth; and in fact it appears as such an element incorporated into capital in the production process, as its living, variable, factor. The rule of the capitalist over the worker is therefore the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer, since in fact the commodities which become means of domination over the worker (but purely as means of the rule of capital itself) are mere results of the production process, the products of the production process.

-Marx

This beautiful son of a bitch.

The SiCobas is not itself Bordigist but the Italian ICP (influenced by Bordiga) influence it because it interestingly popped us as an alternative type of class rather than trade union, which they believe may actually yield revolutionary potential. Check this out: libcom.org/library/interview-international-communist-party-sicobas-movement and libcom.org/blog/recent-events-around-sicobas-italy-16042017 (for too).

I like how still, with almost 200 posts, leftcoms have been completely unable to outline any kind of praxis to their theory. Really makes you think

Can anyone show me what Pannekoek's critique of anarchism was?

I'm trying my hardest to stay out of this thread because I realise I sperged out pretty considerably yesterday and nobody like that. But.. yeh

Nah you made some completely valid criticisms, and instead of addressing the criticisms most likely because they can't they gaslighted you

For some of them that's the point, so the accusations isn't that they're not telling you, but rather that they don't want to have
praxis. But since it's been said over and over again that leftcoms aren't a unified doctrine, I consider this a rather meak accusation.

you have to go back

It's almost like leftcoms are critical of activism or something.

Just because there are multiple tendencies under the umbrella of "left communism" doesn't mean that they shouldn't have and elaborate on a praxis. Without a praxis all you have is a purely negative program relying on some millenarian event.

no u

see above

Leftcom praxis is to read in armchairs and hope if a revolution occurs it isn't taken over by opprtunists who ruin any proletarian character the revolution may have had. If you disagree you're an idealistic utopian opprtunist. Read Bordiga.

kek

Don't forget critiquing other movement, and getting hate for just saying stuff.

Just because we don't want to join your shitty party or think co-ops are somehow revolutionary, doesn't mean we don't advocate doing anything. Much of what we advocate activity-wise is similar to what has been done in prior revolutions, the difference being that we are very critical of what happened afterwards, as well as opposing the fetishisation of various organisational forms. We don't have to completely invent an entirely new praxis because the groundwork has largely been laid by prior movements. Rather we seek to critique what was done in the past and discard what doesn't work, while retaining and modifying what does.
For too many of you your idea of praxis is creating formal organisations with which to either disseminate utterly ineffective propaganda before degenerating into cesspools of liberalism and identity politics, infiltrating bourgeois political parties (lol trots), creating "red" unions that fail to achieve even the low level of labour organisation that conventional unions do, or creating fucking worker owned businesses that simply end up reproducing capital. These kind of organisations have historically tended to fail to achieve their stated objectives and typically haven't been what has actually lead to revolutions (though parties often position themselves as leaders of revolutions, often helping it grow before strangling it in the crib). Naturally those of you who only see praxis in terms of formal organisation will tend to see anything outside of this as "not praxis".

Now actually elaborate in detail on how you plan to accomplish these things, and then we can have an actual conversation of the merits of left communism.

I mean to me that reads like "we don't change anything, but we pretend that this repetition is somehow different and whine a lot"

But i thought you wanted is "similar to what has been done in prior revolutions" ?

>we seek to critique what was done in the past and discard what doesn't work, while retaining and modifying what does.

Right, so what works and what doesn't according to left communism?

and plz what is communization theory

We don't have a "plan" in the positivist sense that you mean it (how the fuck can you plan emergent organisation). As I said in a previous post:

You can only really plan the initial steps of such a thing and it is unlikely to take hold outside of a crisis. The best you can do in the mean time is form organs to agitate within work places for better wages and standards while preparing to escalate when such a crisis occurs. The last time we had this opportunity was during the "financial crisis" of 2008, though nothing of consequence occured, partly because the crisis was severe enough, and party because of a general lack of labour organisation at the time. The particular form is organisation that is most effective also varies from place to place and industry to industry. I imagine the manner in which workers need to organise in fast food chains in the west is going to be rather from a sweatshop in china or india.

You've missed the point entirely. I was saying we advocate a modified form of a existing approach, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water but that doesn't mean we want to use approaches we know to be ineffective or outright failures.

Informal networks of workers directly acting to fight capital and the state (according to communisation theory anyway). The non-mediated action of workers.

Formal democratic organisations with dues paying members, whether parties, unions or councils, and the state. These organisations are generally speaking havens for opportunism. They tend to rule over and constrain workers rather than allow them to escalate their attacks. If I had a dollar for every time a party or union (yes even "communist" parties) told workers to end their strike and go back to work, I'd be a fucking millionaire.

You've had it explained to you enough times already. Both by myself and others. At this point I think you might be trolling. Either re-read the thread or read a text on the matter. Here's one to get you started:

libcom.org/library/communisation

Leftcoms get hate because most of what they say is empty. For example
Doesn't describe what they actually want to do or how they will avoid "what happens afterwards". It's as vague as describing communism as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" and doesn't make their position clearer.

And here we see leftcoms are only capable of describing what they don't do, which increasingly seems to be anything that would put them into contact with people who haven't read our autistic tomes or understand what the fuck bourgeois or proletariat actually means. Obviously these are flawed in various ways and very prone to backfiring, but starting a co-op with your friends and telling others how much better it is without a boss or getting disaffected democrats to read is certainly more likely to get proles to read up on theory than spamming libcom.org links from the armchair.

Why do you consider participating and encouraging unionless strikes, slowdowns and other informal worker activity to be doing nothing? As someone who has been betrayed by a union before, or rather, the union simply did fucking nothing about the shitty conditions and crap pay of my former work place, while pocketing our dues, I'd certainly consider it more effective.

The problem with this is that your hopes for spontaneous informal organization is contingent on mass awareness of capitalism's contradictions, and without any kind of movement to do this (informal or formal) you're essentially waiting for something that will never come. I've seen leftcommunists on here say that it's pointless to try and spread class consciousness because that's somehow a form of idealism or utopianism, so while you may advocate for agitation in the workplace how do you reconcile it with the belief that trying to spread class consciousness is idealism?

left-communism is like a lazy man's post-leftism

More to the point: such activity is an excellent opportunity to push communist theory under conditions they are much more likely to be susceptible to it.
(sage for double post)

Better to be lazy than a petty-bourgeoisie productivist.

Who said that in what context?

Nice ivory tower

Sounds like reformism + waiting? I thought leftcoms hated reformism?

There's a difference between trying to spread "consciousness" by trying to force party newspapers on people that not receptive, and taking advantage of certain material conditions to raise consciousness organically, not through ranting communist theory at them, but by making them more receptive through successful organisation.

My "ivory tower" is a room in a shitty apartment that I can barely afford thanks to losing my job. I sure as hell don't have the capital to be able to start a business.

Bronze tower then.

So what would be the problem with these informal networks forming co-ops in order to use that financial and solidarity base when this crash comes?

That word doesn't mean what you think it means. Taking industrial action in order to attempt to lay the foundations for broader revolutionary organisation (to create "dual power" to use lenin's wording) is hardly reformist. Reformism is attempting to change capitalism into communism in a piecemeal fashion without a revolution, either through getting elected into government and implementing reforms, or through economistic means such as co-ops.

I never mentioned those. Blame yourself for being incredibly vague.

Good, but unless you get enough people you're just going to get fired and replaced. Either way capitalism will continue on and at best a few people will come to hate porky.

Ineffective

Fucking around at a burger joint, like that swedish article, is self-interest at best. It's equivalent to larping in sovietboo gear.

Unions are shit and in burgerland are porky shills, no idea what it's like for eurofags but would be surprised if it's different.

As opposed to autistic tankie parties, infiltration to redpill disaffected socdems, workers organizations, or even co-ops? What makes fucking around in the burger joint or striking without a union a better opprtunity than those?

But you've just rejected organization in the form of parties, infiltration, unions, and co-ops. This just smacks of "it's ok when we do it" faggotry.

Some left com made a thread a while back essentially stating that class consciousness cannot be spread through agitation and education but somehow occurs spontaneously. There's a difference between education and proselytizing, and I think education is an essential part of revolution

The problem is that they can simply take over as the new managers of capital, thereby "saving" us from the crisis, and returning to capitalism.

I'm guessing that was a misunderstanding in terms then.

This is exactly what I would like to do. At least then you have capitalism where the capital is controlled by the workers and there are no bosses to stand in the way of what you would call "communisation".

In the mean time they can also set up things like the black panther free breakfast and can fund propaganda and other co-ops, thus also raising the profile of the left when the collapse comes, not only through community service and propaganda but also through showing increased wages and better working conditions.

When the crash comes, I would rather have a formal network of democratic businesses in charge than an informal network of corporations.

People who have worked in a commie run co-op network providing community service, propoganda and education are likely to be far more receptive to what I think you would describe as "communisation".

Not least because they would actually own the capital, rather than having to ask somebody else to communise for them

Bronze is expensive man, it's more of a dirt tower.

If you can actually make these co-ops work for your movement and not the other way around, and as long as you don't start seeing co-ops as the objective, then there's nothing wrong with it. I don't know how well it would work though. From memory the first international did this to an extent, but it ended up being criticised by a number of later theorists. At the end of the day what matters is whether the workers in those co-ops support the broader communist movement and communisation efforts, if they wish to remain as an independent business once the revolution takes hold then they will have become counter revolutionary.

That wasn't what I had in mind, and yeah, I think that article was pretty bad too.

Obviously you need the numbers, and the point is to spread the activity as much as possible, hence why in previous posts I spoke of the need for a network of organisations.

I rejected formal organisation, I didn't reject organisation itself. I object to paying the wages petite bourgeois parasites such as "professional revolutionaries" and labour bureaucrats when these people often act to undermine the movements they're meant to be leading, and I object to formal democratic organisation as a believe it inhibits action. I have no objection to people forming informal strike organs that perform the function of unions (or rather the function that unions are meant to perform), or people forming groups for the creation and discussion of theory (akin to a party, without a stratified internal structure and leadership, and all the bullshit that comes with it). It's the structure and resultant behavior of those formal organisations that I am objecting to. I'm objecting to the cliques of fucking cardres constantly trying to assert dominance over the workers movement whenever it arises, and inevitably fucking it up in the process.

While what you describe in the first part of the post, has the danger of falling back onto bureaucratic structures of false activism against capital, and renew the strength of capitalism as a counterrevolutionary force (eg. larger coops accumulate more power, and wish not to progress) this part
Is already communization in some sense. But yu still talk about it in some derogative sense, for no reason at all.

How about you repond to this

In the literal week that I participated in that Communism vs. Communalism thread on here not a single Communalist offered a meaningful answer to what a Communalist praxis would look like. Admittedly i came out of that debate with a lot of respect for Communalists and Bookchin, but ultimately it was a lot of handwaving about "Dual Power" and "intentional communities", and while I'm very sympathetic to those ideas, and I think the establishment of Dual Power in counter-distinction to the State would be the Left's best option, it's why I'm so fond of the Panthers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that answers the question of praxis. What Leftcoms are pointing out is that almost all Leftist conceptions of praxis are tragically myopic and shallow. Praxis doesn't just mean "doing shit", there has to be a point where that activity actually breaks through and has to potential to negate the value form, and literally no Leftist has a concrete idea of how this can be done. The reason it's so easy for tons of Anarchists and Communalists to think that revolution is this extremely simple and straightforward thing is because you haven't honestly thought this shit through. Neither have most MLs, Trots, and Maoists, who think it's as easy as just seizing State power and making a bunch of top down reforms. The whole point of Left Communism isn't to stop other Leftists from organizing, it's just Marxists trying to actually consider what it would take to truly overcome Capital, and as much as i really like Anarchism, especially Anarcho-Communism, I've literally never seen a single Anarchist conception of praxist that didn't boil down to a "???? profit!!" meme. I know this makes Leftcoms seem elitist, but it's about as elitist as the Blackflag sperglord in this thread, these are the kinds of debates and conversations that Leftists need to be having right now tbh.

Are you serious right now? If Leftcoms don't have a concrete answer to praxis it's almost by design, they're saying no one has a good answer. Post-Leftists are far, far, far worse, all Post-Left praxis is a combination of affinity groups, voluntarism, rioting, spontaneity, which you said earlier is bullshit, and various other hippie retard nonsense about "temporary autonomous zones", and let's not even get into the bullshit that is Anarcho-Primitivism, their idea of praxis is literally "go live in the woods and blow up dams", wow, very inspiring.

says the anarchist

lel, and not even just an anarchist, but a fucking Blackflag Post-Left Anarchist. ffs

Now that's just patently unfair. I was in that thread and many used either DFSNS as an example. Communalist praxis can be summarized a first creating an intelligentsia, promoting and participating in the creation of popular assemblies, then using these assemblies as a basis for a dual power. The process of actually accomplishing any of this isn't simple, and individuals are going to have to adjust and plan for things spontaneously, but what is extremely important and ultimately key is that these decisions are informed by a preexisting knowledge and revolutionary ethic. So then, what revolutionary ethic does leftcommunism offer?

Black Flag is just for anarchism, not post-left anarchism. You're thinking of the anarcho-nihilist flag which is half grey

I mean not fully obviously. Leftcoms being lazy is a meme after all.
Anyways, nihilists might be said to be somewhat similar, in that we might say no one has a good answer on how to build the new society from within this one, but we think negation of any given thing is possible and when it comes to almost everything about this society, desirable.

That isn't anymore concrete than anything that has been posted in this thread. Also what the fuck is a revolutionary ethic? I've never seen such a term used by marxists so I'm guessing it's something specific to communalism?

they were actively subverted according to David Graeber

It is my personal opinion that they would be much less susceptible to this than regular corporations that would have to be convinced were it not co-ops. I think co-ops are far more likely to be susceptible for the reasons described above.

what… "it seems like your putting on a performance now" THEN accusing me of ad hominems after that?

k

Extremely hand wavey, only hand wavey

How?

that just sounds like State and Revolution with minor tweaking and more accountability…

Also, all of this is completely contrary to what one leftcom on here is describing as communization…

Only if you are autistic about your theory

leave that to stand alone.

which is why i'd like to use a network of co-ops, because unlike unions, membership of which is declining, co-op enterprises are gaining strength under my material conditions i.e. the west

Why can't we know? You've just made up that we can't know. I mean we can't know for sure, but we can have a pretty educated guess. This is extreme hand waving and makes all of your other points moot.

You claim various forms of praxis and then underline it with simple nihilistic total negation.

You can't disagree with god emporer Marx apparently… even though he thinks the Lumpen are not revolutionary when this is clearly not the case.

>Sounds like you've been linked some Dauvé but never bothered to read it.

I have been specifically asking for somebody to tell me what this theory is so I can know whether or not to bother to read it, so far doesn't look like I will.

Also somebody else quoted Dauve and it is completely different from anything you described, basically lifestyle anarcho-communism

its not an ad hom to say you can't explain your shit when you can't explain your shit. I am not the only person here claiming this.

I am not dressing up or doing anything to do with Larping… and you have the gaul to say I'm using ad homs?

If i was a leftcom right now I'd be saying "i don't have to debate you this isn't a denate club" right now.

so.. you reject stagism… but also you don't reject stagism. Yup sounds Strong and Stable to me.

Can you see why I complain about you guys not being coherent when you can't even come down on something basic like this?

meaning it is not really a distinguishing factor, and no other ideology goes around calling everyone else opportunists

>Yes Leninism, the Lenin of The State and Revolution is extremely Libertarian and anti-authoritarian, before the harsh conditions of the post-revolutionary Russia forced the Bolsheviks into further and further pragmatism.

So.. it was part of the organic revolution to do this, because thats what the material conditions demanded?

Leninist… but also horizontalist…..

Again, incoherent

it is hard for me because its followers are shit at explaining it, thats why.

just makes communes and blow up train tracks lmao

How will the communes be funded? where will they get resources from?

Theres a difference between being non sectarian and just not having any coherent theory.

an ML and an Ancom getting along is non-sectarian

an ML and an Ancom pretending their theory is the same is just straight incorrect.

I was directly quoting a leftcom so again… incoherence

did you read what you wrote after you wrote it?

It at least offers the a baseline of creating study groups. Revolutionary ethic more or less means "how should behave in relation to our ultimate revolutionary goals?".

quote me where. Why are multiple people saying they have not?

well then…. why aren't you an ancom and why aren't leftcoms ancoms and why didn't anybody write that when I asked and why did you describe something completely different from that in the rest of your post?

The state and revolution tweaked is distinctly not ancom..

i haven't Larped in any way, you're just using a stock insult, I'm mad because you faggots are retarded, you can seriously post all that shit and claim it isn't contradictory? Honestly to the point where I feel like you are trolling, every line is at odds with every other line.

explaining how anarchists don't have praxis is not explaining how you do have praxis.

If you want me to explain me Praxis I gladly will

Its completely disingenuous anyway because Rojava is an actually working example of communalist praxis in praxis.

For where is the leftcom praxis that anybody even adopted?

Did Italy even have a revolution?

and Luxemburg was a proto leftcom right? How did her revolution go again?

oh.. it failed utterly and the socdems gave her the bullet.

I'm starting to think she deserved it

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, we don't intend to convince corporations of anything, but rather abolish them by force. Those informal organisations are spoke of before are the basis of dual power, they aren't for the administration of production.

I'm not a post leftist, if you knew anything about leftist history you would know the origins and uses of this flag. As an anti nationalist flag, as an ancom flag, etc

Personally, I just chose the plainest flag, I have my own beliefs which differ from but are similar too many strains of anarchism so none of the others fit

I am quite clearly saying you are less likely to have to abolish a network of co-ops by force than a corporation.

What is it with leftcoms and being unable to talk straight? This is how this thread started. You guys will try and squirm out of anything

Too far tbh

obvious bants m8

So, the democratic administration of capitalist society?

Russia of 1917 comes pretty close in some ways. And as for italy and germany, both of which has failed leftcom movements: modern leftcoms have been very critical of both of those movements, hence the existence of communisation theory.

There you go being a twat again, I wonder how long the mods will ban you for this time.

Killing Rosa was the only thing Socdems did right.

I literally didn't understand what you were trying to say, the way you phrased it wasn't very clear. You also used the word convince which made it sound like we were gonna ask nicely or something.

I'm not here to defend communalism although I prefer it to left communism.

I was merely pointing out its funny to say they have no praxis when they have actually existing societies right now.

and… what is communization theory?

crying to daddy mods. Pathetic tbh smh

well sorry fam but its a heated thread and what with all the other squirming I kind of assumed, its difficult to see the wood for the squirming trees

Terrible meme. You can't expect any revolution to just immediately abolish the commodity form, and it's dishonest to say they are not actively in the process of trying to do that.
You would like The Third Revolution

Yes you can user, and it will happen organically without any activism, trust me Bordiga said so

How's that contradictory, the hysterical ad homs are the performance.

Glad we agree, but that "spontaneity" is just as common among Anarchists as Leftcoms, i think it's just something Leftists tell themselves when the Left is so fringe there's no chance of organizing in a normal manner.

Under Organic Centralism, as opposed to Democratic Centralism, cadres are subject recall and replacement, it's far less heirarichal and there's a good deal more consultation and interaction with the party's base, kind of like Mass Line in Maoism, although to be frankly honest most Maoist parties throughout history haven't actually practiced Mass Line, it's mostly rhetoric.

Also, all of this is completely contrary to what one leftcom on here is describing as communization…
No, they reject Democratic Centralism completely, it's almost closer to a lot of ideas that Greaber and Paracon people have about direct consensus democracy, basically all decision making is made by the worker's councils themselves. Also, you don't seem to know too much about different Marxist movements or ideas, so I'm a little confused as to how you can get so fucking angry about this shit when you're operating on so little information.

No, Marx and Engles are extremely clear about this, not making blueprints for a revolution and basing theory on current material conditions as opposed to fantasies of a hypothetical future is literally the core difference between Scientific Socialism and Utopian Socialism. If you can't see the value in that then let me explain, at the core of Marx's philosophy are two brilliant insights, the first is the Materialist conception of History and the second is the recognition of the Labor Theory of Value. The first dictates that the rudder of history is class conflict and material conditions, and that these material conditions proceed thought and consciousness, that consciousness is dictated by material reality, not the other way around. This is why Marxist try to avoid Idealism, history isn't changed by ideas, all we can do is interpret the material conditions around us and react accordingly. The Labor Theory of Value points out that

Are you trying to use that out of context to imply that I'm reactionary? Yeah, I can tell this debate is going to be extremely intellectually honest.

I have no issue with co-ops, but if this is your answer to the question of praxis that's a little embarrassing fam. They're fine as a short term measure, and decent as a thing to do to help the movement and create more class conciousness, but this goes back to Marx's initial critique of Proudhon, as well as the general critique of Market Socialism, even with complete and total worker's control, so long as the value form persists workers do still have the capacity to exploit themselves, so long as production for value exists workers are still alienated from their labor and still aren't receiving the full fruits of their labor as it goes into reinvestment. Capitalism without Capitalists is still Capitalism.

Holy fuck! You can predict the future?? That's amazing user, why didn't you mention this earlier in the thread. But in all seriousness that's just literally not how reality works. Under feudalism no one could have predicted what Capitalism would look like, and the Bourgeoise didn't make up an elaborate fantasy of what a hypothetical Capitalist society could look like, the material conditions created the foundation for Capitalism and the Bourgeoise acted out their historical role as a class that fought for self-determination. You can't force a revolution where the conditions for said revolution don't exist, and you can't create Communism where the conditions for said Communism don't exist.

Even to this day he was pretty much the closest anyone's ever come to actually understanding just what Capitalism is and what it would take to completely negate and sublate it.

It happens. One doesn't belong here if they don't sperg out from time to time.

A critique and synthesis of prior leftcom theories that advocates a stageless transition (in the sense of there being no transitional society/mode of production) to communism, using a network of informal workers organisations in place of formal democratic organs, to form the basis of dual power in order to carry out a revolution. It opposes mediation by any "professional revolutionaries" and advocates the immediate destruction of state power in favour of the workers directly administering the revolution.

You can't expect them to instantly abolish the value form (especially in a tiny region like that), but you can expect them to take immediate action towards it's abolition, something I don't see them doing (and no, co-ops don't count). The actions taken by russia in 1917 and 1918 on the other hand contributed far more to the destruction of the value form, despite happening in a country that was still mostly feudal.

Literally no one said this. Not even Bordiga.

Pt. 2

At this point you're going to have to start asking more specific questions because it's getting to the point where i'm not entirely sure what it is you're not getting. It seems like all of your issues with Leftcommunism stem from it just not being Anarchism and not having the same answers to theory and praxis as Anarchism.

LARPing is honestly all any Leftists are doing right now.

A movement can have stages, so long as they're actually temporary and transitional, Lenin and Stalin's concept of "Two-Stage Theory" is what Leftcoms reject, it's a specific theory that states there needs to be a "Lower Stage" and a "Higher Stage" of Communism, and it's based on Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program, but tbh the Soviet Union never even came close to fitting what Marx described as the "lower stage" in CoGP.

No, I can't, it's just Marxists trying to figure out what went wrong in the 20th Century and how to adjust accordingly, I don't see why it rustels your jimmies so much.

I was referring specifically to Entryism you idiot. MLs and MLMs are fine with parliaments and aren't abstentionist at all, most Leftcoms would reject working in bourgeoise institutions like parliaments and congresses. Also, Lenin called plenty of Marxists opportunists for the same reason Bordiga did, because historically speaking whenever Marxists do get into local offices they do immediately drop all of their revolutionary goals and end up getting swallowed by the machine.

Yes, now you're getting it, the material conditions weren't ripe for Communism, all they could have gotten was shit like the NEP and the Five Year Plans, it's all about material conditions, not the will of great revolutionaries. This is why Leftcoms reject Blanquism.

Again, incoherent
Only if you've never actually read The State and Revolution. you brainlet

t. brainlet

Yes, because Leftcoms, and Marx himself in the Critique of the Gotha Program points out that any revolution that doesn't negate the value form will still effectivel have Capitalism in some aborted way. And that's what the USSR had, and that what Leftcoms want to avoid in the future.

Why don't you just tell me?

I'll quote myself
Leftcoms reject Stagism in the sense that the phase of a Nationalized economy with the goal of Productivism and an enormous welfare apparatus is unnecessary. That's what MLs still want to do because they live in a fantasy world where it's still the 1930's. Also, they reject the fact that all marxism has become opportunists trying to vie for State power, as opposed to organizing workers and going where the workers actually are. This is simple shit tbh.

Because ancoms don't have a meaningful answer to the issue Marx raises with the value form. I also don't think they go far enough with their concept of statelessness and what they describe as "statelessness" is still a state tbqh

Nah fam, you're LARPing like a mother fucker right now.

Besides Platformism what do anarchists actually suggest? A lot of dead end activism and rioting. No offense because I like a lot of Anarchism, but it's hilariously ironic for Anarchists to criticize Leftcoms for not having praxis when all Anarchist praxis amounts to is keeping yourself busy while Capitalism continues to exist unperturbed. The only difference is that Anarchists don't read Marx and don't identify with the history of the USSR so they drastically overestimate how easy it would be to overcome Capitaism and usher in a new society.

Nah nigga, it's just going to be some shit about co-ops and the power of friendship.

Rosa wasn't a Leftcom.

priddy based tbh

some of the best posters on here imo

Thank you famiglia, I try my hardest.

Some leftcom poster in another thread mentioned that communization theory in practice would look a lot like libertarian municipalism in some respects; that there would be popular assemblies of workers who would decide on policy for their city, that policy would be carried out by recallable administrators, and that industry would be run democratically while production could be dictated by a democratically-adopted system of planning.

Yeah, this describes a lot of Council Communism to a T. To be frankly honest, most Anarchism, Marxism, and Communialism, if implemented effectively, would look identical, the real question is just how we actually get there. Even Marxism-Leninism and Maoism does have the goal of creating completely classless and stateless radical democracy and egalitarianism, they jus think there needs to be a long period of authoritarian red terror in order to get there. But if they were correct, and I'm just going to hazard the guess that they're not, it would totally justify their insanity and end up looking like exactly the same shit Ancoms and Communalists want. except that wouldn't happen because MLs are Social Democrats with guns and they couldn't negate the value form if you gave them a road map

Because saying I'm just performing is itself an ad hom. It has nothing to do with the words I'm saying.

well that isn't what you said, I was quoting you when I said "State and Revolution with minor tweaking and more accountability" its not my fault you are vague, probably intentionally so.

>No, Marx and Engles are extremely clear about this…blahblahblahblah etc

This is why people find you annoying, you have rambled on for a whole paragraph, telling me shit I already know, while still avoiding the subject. I am well aware of Marx's ideas. I was criticising them, there is no reason you can't alter your theory when the conditions show it to be false.

Unless you are arguing complete determinism in which case why do anything? The fact that we can't know exactly the post revolutionary material conditions does not mean we can't make an educate guess by any stretch of the imagination.

But you didn't address this at all, which was my point, instead you decided to condescendingly repeat irrelevant shit . This is left communism. Argue with my point, not the point you wish I had made, but tbh I can't even see what point you wish I made.

well it isn't my answer, I'm not responding to this, because you are literally pretending I have said or implied things I have actually directly denied and explained why, at this point you are just lying. Read the thread and engage with what I actually said about co-ops. You know what I said. It had nothing to do with this, and that is whats embarrassing.

Do you know how many times this

has been repeated in this thread? Seriously go up and look. At no point have I ever said co-ops will remove the value form. At no point, but this seems to be all you guys have to say against them "they wont remove the value form" when nobody has suggested that and in fact said the opposite, they are an organisational tool and nothing more. Its just completely dishonest when I have said this not very long ago and its there plain to see for anyone reading this. Its a ridiculous strawman. Again, argue with the point I made, not the point you wish I made.

Your praxis is "informal groups will just like, revolt, bro" …but then at the same time say you support "council communism" which would imply formality. You have contradicted every point you have made.

And that's whats embarrassing. No financial base, no even union dues so strikes can continue in the usual manner…

It IS how reality works, a great number of things have been prediceted AND AGAIN WITH THE DISHONESTY/STRAWMAN AND AGAIN with arguing with a point I didn't make instead of the point I made. Funny that you magically leave out the part where i specifically say "educated guess" its Fox news tier.

Even to this day he was pretty much the closest anyone's ever come to actually understanding just what Capitalism is and what it would take to completely negate and sublate it.

doesn't make him infallible or immune from criticisms. Historically he has been wrong about the lumpen also.

this was 200 posts back, im a little closer, but still not certain.

It is basically pretentious anarco-communism.

cop out of an answer, you know fine well I wasn't larping. And if we're all larping, then you're larping to.

Every leftcom position is just someone elses position but with added semantic games.

if you didn't go around pretending nobody else had read a book and calling everyone opportunists etc there would be no problem. If you were willing to engage in honest debate there would not be a problem. This one does not count, because I have had to beat it out of you.

I know that. Stop pretending like I've said any different.

so then you accept the need for democratic centralism and why left communism is an infantile disorder then?

I think i've found leftcoms problem, they think they can simultaneously adopt every position at the same time

Again, pretentious, you have no idea who I am. State and Revolution places great empahsis on devolving power to the soviets I wouldn't call it horizontal however. Did you read it?

Not like my big leftcom brain. Yawn.

but what if the material conditions demand not abolishing the value form and the organic revolution of the proletariat does not want it at that stage either?

consistently sucking each other off is also Holla Forums tier.

Well then why do you shit on all these other ideologies and suggest no means to actually get there?

...

The words you were saying were purposeless and counterproductive ad homs.

I didn't think anyone in this thread needed that much handholding, in my original post I figured I'd share a few things I know about Left Communism and then people would google and read things for themselves if they were interested. Don't blame me for your illiteracy.

But what are your actual literal disagreements? It's like like you're mad at Marxists for being Marxists, if I thought Marx was full of shit then I just wouldn't be a Marxist, I'd be a Liberal, or a SocDem, or an Anarchist. I'm just telling you what Marxists believe, that's the purpose of this thread, not for me to convert you to Dialectical Materialism.

It's not my fault you are vague, probably intentionally so :^)

Then why are they good praxis?

Then why are they good praxis?

Sounds more like wasted time and wasted resources.

Honestly I'm not a Leftcom, I'm just sympathetic to them. Personally I think Dual Power and something close to what the Black Panthers looked like would be a lot more effective, as well as a diversity of tactics, both engaging in local electoral politics as well as forming meaningful alternatives to the State. But I think Leftcom critiques are incredibly valuable and pretty on the nose about shit, way more then idiots like Bob Black or Wolfi Landstreicher, or whatever Post-Left retard you think is smarter.

I would support any Leftists if they were actually getting shit done, but they're not, and I think a lot of it comes down to what Leftcoms say, the Left has become a lot of professional career activists and LARPers who play at Leftist politics. But it doesn't have to be that way.

No, it's not. Ideas don't materialize reality into existence, but not thinking Dialectically is why non-Marxian Leftists make so many Idealist and Utopian arguments.

I forgot to respond to this earlier, but while I think Leftists should have meaningful and positive responses to issues that Lumpens face, like homelessness and unemployment, I definitely don't think they have a revolutionary character at all. In fact, it was the overestimation of their revolutionary potential that lead to the Black Panther's collapse, they brought drugs and violence into the party, and justified FBI COINTELPRO, and they're the main reason most Americans don't even realize the Panthers were Leftists, because they think they were a gang, and to be frankly honest a lot of chapters basically were just dope dealing operations.

It's basically Marxists who read Marx and don't regurgitate Pravda party lines from 70 years ago.

You haven't realized yet? Holla Forums is a board specifically made for online roleplaying. Did you not read the FAQ before posting?

No nigga, every Leftist position is a Leftist position but sectarian retards would rather act out the animosities of the past then realize that almost every Leftist has been talking about the same shit for the past two decades but then getting into pointless arguments like the one we're having now because of semantical bullshit.

I'm not every Leftcom you've had an argument with on this board, please stop projecting your insecurities onto me.

You're literally the reason this thread devolved so much, if you had come in good faith i'm sure plenty of anons would have come to you in equal good faith. Instead you came out the gates with autistic screeching. Also, and I'm just going to be honest, but the whole "read a book" meme isn't just a meme, you really shouldn't be this mad about anything you haven't put even the most bare minimum research into. I don't go into Anarchist or Communalist threads and shitpost without having read any actual theory on the subject, having this amount of grievances is honestly something you have to earn, you seem to know so little about the actual history of Left Communism, both in theory and in praxis, that it makes you anger seem preposterous, and yes, I'm sorry, but very performative.

Then why did you imply in your post that I was only talking about Entryism? A lot of Leftcoms are abstentionist, but you implied that Leftcoms should be alowed to call themselves Leftcoms because other Leftists don't like Entryism? Seems like a retarded use of logic.

No, I'm saying that the failures of the USSR were born out of material conditions that they couldn't overcome by merely having a Utopian blueprint of a future to come. You can't change reality with ideas, but as the Bolsheviks proved, reality can change your ideas. At the end of the day the infantile Leftwingers were absolved by history. They were right.

The fact that you think Lenin is a fundamentally authoritarian thinker does give me the impression that even if you have read him I feel that you read a lot of the USSRs history back into his writing.

t. brainlet

THEN YOU DON'T HAVE A REVOLUTION BECAUSE ALL IT WOULD PRODUCE IS MORE CAPITALISM

I don't. I've stated multiple times that I like AnComs and Communalists. I feel like you're really projecting a lot of shit onto me fam. I'm sorry if a really mean Leftcom ruined your day once, but you gotta chillaxe familia. Also, to your question, my whole point is that most Leftists don't know how to get there and what Leftists should probably do is put their heads together in a non-sectarian manner and actually hash these things out, but a lot of that would involve shooting down bad ideas of praxis that won't lead us anywhere positive, and you can't get this angry when comrades poke holes in your theories.

I don't think they do anymore then most Leftists, but at least their ideas wouldn't lead to literal genocide.

but not a performance, so to call out an ad hom is hypocritical.

my god you are so dishonest, it wasn't that you didn't give enough information, its that you gave completely different information. You said something different to what you then went on to say. Anybody reading this can see that.

How about you go and read them, I made it extremely clear, ill show you again

But you didn't address this at all, which was my point, instead you decided to condescendingly repeat irrelevant shit . This is left communism. Argue with my point, not the point you wish I had made, but tbh I can't even see what point you wish I made.

See that last bit? Yeh, I repeat it.

This is how this has gone, you have made a point, i have countered it, and then you have pretended im "mad at marxists for being marxists" instead of addressing the point.

go back and read what I have already said.

….they would create resources. Thats the whole poiint, again, go back and read the thread, this is puerile at this point.

again with the wishing im arguing things that I am not. Nobody said shit about Bob Black or whoever. That was all you.

again, copping out, not addressing the point, which was that council communism implies formality.

I'm done. I'm not going to argue for things I literally haven't said, and I'm not going to keep telling you to actually address the things I have said only for you to just utterly make up what I'm saying.

Every single point you have made so far has been you creating a fantasy of what I said rather than actuall adressing the crit. Ludicrous childish bollocks. Grow up. If you want to rephrase these posts so that they actually address the points I'm making, please do so, otherwise expect no further communication from me.

What a joke. Its like talking to a religious fundamentalist, you say one thing and they just quote a random passage from the bible and pretend its relevant.

I did not say ideas materialize reality into existence, I said you can make an educated guess and act accordingly.

If you have to pretend im saying things I am not, that should be a sure indication that you're talking out your ass.

AFAIK only the communization theorists are against formal organizations. But at the same time I'm not too sure how formal workers councils are. It's not like it's a officially registered organization, approved by that state and so o

The first thing I think you're having trouble with is discerning the difference between my opinions and those of Leftcoms, as well as the fact that not all Leftcoms believe the same shit, so whenever I point out that different Leftcoms think different shit you freak the fuck out.

If what your arguing as far as "changing theory when it's proven to be false" relates to praxis, then that's what Leftcoms, particularly Communization theorists, are already doing, they're admitting that the various ML, Maoist, and indeed Leftcom projects of the 20th Century did not succeed and what could be done differently. If your idea of changing theory is abandoning Dialectical Materialism then obviously no Marxist is going to do that and you haven't explained why you think Dialectical Materialism is wrong.

Imagine having so little self-awareness. You're literally angry because my opinions and my worldview is different then yours, that's how every arguement or debate functions, we're operating on different logic and playing a different language game, you can't expect me to constantly conform to how you view politics just because you're mad on the internet.

Admittedly at that point I was fucking with you, but I do think co-ops aren't the best praxis, maybe if they were happening parallel to a organized mass movement, but in and of themselves they're usually nice, but to call their existence a form of praxis in and of itself makes about as much sense as calling communes a form of praxis.

Earlier you made a facetious comment about Leftcoms being lazier Post-Lefties. I don't think it was entirely out of bounds to assume you had sympathies there.

Leftcommunism does not have a party line that must be towed at all times, and it isn't expressly against formal organizations. Coincidentally the only people I've seen make arguments like that are Post-Left Anarchists and Individualist Anarchists. Bordigists were literally Vanguardists.

Hell no. Infantile fo' life! Goo goo ga ga n' shit nigga!

Yeah, if you can't win an argument in two posts it means the other person is a zealot, not that they just have different opinions.

And yet when you reject Dialectical Materialism this is what you end up arguing without even realizing it.

Making educated guesses and literally making a blueprint and claiming you can know the future are two extremely different things, now who's being dishonest?

I'm not going to feel bad for you just because you're exasperated, you've been a cunt this entire thread.

pic related, Leftcoms are the alpha and the omega

Self awareness? mate the above is your answer to me saying that I think you can make educated guesses about future material conditions. You then said that was me being angry at marxists for being marxists, now your saying its just because your view is different to mine.

Neither of these address the point or has anything to do with it.

I did not.

I'm just pointing these ones out because they are so obviously you trying to squirm out of your bullshit.

If you could word your issues with Leftcommunism in less then 200 words what would it honestly be? Because this entire thread has been you demanding answers for questions you're never even entirely clear about. I don't know if you even know what you disagree with tbh.

So instead of admitting you have been arguing with a ghost that did not say the shit you claimed, you're gonna double down and be a facetious cunt. Cool. I saged this for a reason. Show me where I said leftcoms were lazy post leftists and tell me how saying I think we can make educated guesses for after the revolution is lacking in self awareness, angry at marxists for being marxists or angry at people for having differing views?

Also I saged this for a reason.

So you admit you can't explain your grievances in 200 characters or less? Interesting :^)

Also, for the record I mistook this post as yours
so apologies on that front, wasn't paying full attention. But seriously. 200 characters or less. Give it your best shot fam.

Also, I didn't sage on purpose, impolite bump.

I could explain my own beliefs in 200 words or less, that would be the real comparison.

Nice try though

Let me get this straight, you officially, without reservation, admit that you literally can not explain what it is you disagree with Leftcoms on in less then 200 characters? Okay, I accept your surrender.

um, nice try sweetie :^)

Yeah, because leftcoms don't LARP as revolutionary subcommandants like far too many socialists do

still don't know what communisation is

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Screencap or you're samefagging.

...

Well I'll be damed lol

Why? All I've gotten so far is that communizatiom is pretentious ancom. And I'm neither of those posters.

It just seemed very convenient tbh

ITT leftcoms are closet ancoms who have a boner for Marxist jargon.

I think that about does it

Yeah, a lot of Communization does draw from Anarcho-Communism and Insurrectionary Anarchism.

That was actually an accidental same fag when I switched to my phone

It's honestly just Ancoms who read Marx and Marxists who reject the Soviet Model.

I forgot to add, with an elitist attitude not suited to horizonatalism

wdhmbt?

You can know your class position on an intellectual level but actual class consciousness is formed by the struggle and is represented by praxis and the level of organisation. A worker isn't stupid and can advance his or her interest along other people in a similar situation without knowing any theory at all.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ffmg6i0lv_k

m8 if you honestly can't tell the difference between Bordiga and Kropotkin then you're a lost cause

He somehow can't understand that communization and left-communism aren't the same thing.

No

So Holla Forums?

normie here, just wanted to say this is a really good thread and makes me glad I left /r/socialism

Leftcoms are the only communists actually doing shit theoretically. No other left tendency, except maybe communalism and its cousins, is gaining traction in developed countries and is connected to a living academic body of study.

Marxist-Leninism, outside of Cuba and parts of India, has devolved into nostalgist movements penetrated by reactionary sentiment. Many old communist parties, once dominated by Soviet ML doctrine, are now just social democrats who discuss Marx sometimes. The French Communist Party is probably to the right of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Maoism has no relevance outside of several agrarian socialist movements in South and Southeast Asia which do little more than kill a couple dozen police every year and seem more interested in pleading for clemency (ie, surrendering) than overthrowing bourgeois governments.

Trotskyism is not a serious movement in any country. Since the 70s, there have been no noteworthy theorists of that tradition. Nearly all communists who reject the Sino-Soviet tradition have embraced left communism to some extent.

lmao, do you really believe that? Leftcommunism has almost no traction in academia, except marginally in Critical Theory/Frankfurt School circles.

They also like unfunny image macros.

Academic circles have always been shunned by ultras.

The growth he's talking about is likely from looking at the massive amount of new left communism-affiliated journals and theory circles popping up. The last few years for example saw Chinese and American ultras forming the Chuang collective which actively writes about the Chinese situation. Other journals like SIC, Aufeheben, Blaumachen, Endnotes and so on are all very alternative Marxism-inspired revolutionary takes.

Compare this to the MLs who basically who manage to shit out what is at best some new evidence showing that Stalin really didn't hate gays before criminalizing their existence or whatever and it just pales. Even anarchists have a thing going on similar to what the ultras have.

Left communism appeals to people with high-functioning autism.

My sides
I'm still a Marxist newb but one left come said that there needed to be islands of production in the same way there were islands capitalism during feudalism.

Wheat was still being made through the feadualist mode of production while textiles were mass produced with the capitalists mode almost exclusively.

That made me get more serious about open source.

This seems contradictory. He's telling him that educating agitating and organizing is paternalistic but those are all forms of fighting.

Then tells him to fight. Leftcoms from my understanding aren't saying don't fight just don't make the same mistakes of the past.

Huh?

I don't think MLism has any theoretical presence these days.

Leftcoms sperg out about opprtunism while throwing out vague phrases that don't mean anything on obscure websites. You're better off reading history to figure out why Lenin's actions deviated so heavily from State and Revolution or Bakunin's Revolutionary Catechism or even Bookchin for an alternative to ML.

Can anyone explain Organic Centralism to me?

Only leftcoms understand Marx though

international-communist-party.org/English/Texts/CPTraLef/CPTraLe2.htm#IV.4

chapter 4

Where exactly are these leftcom groups gaining traction in the developing world exactly?

this is like a mantra you tell people in the hope that if you repeat it enough it will come true

Leftcoms stuff might be stronger concerning the philosophical aspect, but ML shadows every other tendency in terms of economic research.

I think I understand now. Members of the party must abide by the common goal, and without Democracy, internal factions and disputes will not happen. Membership is voluntary but members must know what the party stands for and what they must do. Is this more or less correct?

MLs and Maoists directly contradict Marxism with the belief that nationalized wage labor is socialism, and communism is just wage labor managed by grassroots organizations

Asking in good faith – who?

I don't know of any notable ML theorists born after 1935.

I'm guessing he's thinking of Cockshott, who he believes is a ML in any practical sense. The only thing that I'd think of to support that claim, would be his belief that the USSR was socialist.

this is just totally dishonest. You know fine well they do not believe any of this and believe instead in stages. If you want to attack the practicality of stages fair enough but don't pretend like you retards somehow have read more Marx than Lenin

also

See THIS is the problem with Leftcoms.

But the problem is that not one Marxist-Leninist movement had managed to get past the DoP.

Not one of them actually abolished wage labor.

Every ML society has been a militarized social democracy, and what particularly bothers me about MLs is not their habit of creating such miserable capitalist societies, but instead their apparent belief that these miserable capitalist societies were very very good.

That's not what Marx meant when he was describing wage labor.

The USSR had the highest Human Development Index and the 2nd highest GDP per capita only few years after a devastating war.

And just look at what a socialist paradise south America is now. It's almost as if we would have to rethink and question our established theories, instead of crying out blasphemy in the presence of critics.

cockshott is an ex(?)stalinist with a dodgy record on imperialism. many former BICO members gone mainstream now but the history is there for the masochistic or the bored to discover

What do you mean? What did he support?

Probably the USSR :^)

But boy did people sure love living over there. No secret police or corrupt bureaucracies. No mass emigration to the west to live a better life, no stagnant quality of life for the everyday man (compared to the west).

I'm not saying the west was heaven, or did this morally, just the fact that most people didn't want to live under "socialism"

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_referendum,_1991

What did the Soviet citizens mean by this?

You're right, fellow leftist! In the west, there is no secret police and the secret services are doing their best protecting your rights and are democratically controlled by the constitution!

The issue was to stay together as a Union or not. Are you actually trying to make me beli people loved the system they had in the USSR? Especially by 1991, where you tankie tyrpes should be screeching "Revisionism! Revisionism! Not enough Gulags!" because Gorby was too soft on the west?

I mean, even if it was only because they though the life in the west was all about coca cola, denim jeans and rock& roll, and other false illusions, you can't say people actually said "the current system is good and preferable to all other alternatives". Or are you that delusional?

I'm not saying the west is the best, but one has to at least admit that during the cold war, ones privacy was in a better shape in west Germany that under the GDR and the Stasi. Nowadays the west has stocked up their surveillance, no doubt, but this whataboutism won't solve the actual problems of the allegedly "socialist" eastern block.

Also, this
Is something that would certainly not sound interesting to a person who's already free in the first place. I mean, it was a non-issue, right? Why even mention it in the first place?

Source?

Also, once this once "revisionists" had taken over?

You're an idiot if think that people base their polticial ideology on Coca-Cola and Denim jeans.

rt.com/politics/340158-most-russians-regret-ussr-has/

Russians are significantly worse off under free market capitalism. Gorbi was a right-winger, and little did you know that Andropov actually wanted to implement more worker control and to drive back market forces, which was killed in it's fetal stage by Gorbi because Andropov died early, but nonetheless yielded great results insofar as it was implemented. It's economically and politically delusional to think that the USSR couldn't be salvaged by 1989 and wasn't deliberately dismantled by those in power.

You're drinking the liberal Kool-Aid so much that you are de facto an anti-communist.

youtu.be/AgX92v0VNWI

BICO were (lambeg)drumbeaters for the british state in ireland. after leaving BICO he put his name to the following doc: marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/whatiscobi.htm
all funposting aside cockshott and his mates from back in the day were v creative thinkers who need to be dealt w/ whether u agree w/ them or not.

You so casually discard the actual lives of real people for your ideological purity.

Sandinistas> Contra's
Castro>Batista.
FSLN> CIA Death Squads

Every time.

Every single one of these countries increased the standard of living dramatically and their projects only failing was falling foul of the US government and allies.

I really really really hate that you are willling to be this ahistorical to defend your ideology.

I'm not even an ML

I'm not talking about "ideologies". I'm just mentioning the fact that many people had a longing to live in the west, particularly in the non-USSR states of the Warsaw-Pact. Was this partially based on false information and propaganda? No doubt. Would they have though twice if they had known the realities of life in the west (or their life under free market capitalism)? I think so. All I know is what I've heard from people who have lived in the eastern block, be it that some were more critical, others far less.

Also, I won't say People had a better life after the dissolution of the USSR. Of course great reform and restructuring will bring disturbances to the lifes of many. I remember a talk where Zizek mentioned how people in the new republics just didn't know where to go and who to bribe to get what they needed. And the fact that this was done, wasn't a subversion, but in fact kept the system formally going on. Had the black market been abolished, I think there would have been dire consequences. Nor do I Andropov's reforms would have helped much. Any exposition or democratization, just like Gorbachev showed, harmed the system, sadly. I certainly would have also welcomed a opening and democratization of the USSR. You know, less of the things liberals in the west drillied them on, insisting Communism was equivalent to the human right abuses in the east. But I still suspend judgment, and assume, for not knowing how things would have differently played out, that thrre was something in the system that had established itself for so many years (what many call"Revisionist ") that was just unhealable, and couldn't be fixed though reforms. But for people like you and our fellow thread Tankie, this gives you a chance to believe, to hope and to assume it could have all just worked out. Sadly, I don't trust chance so much, to just believe the disappearance of the USSR was random. You of course don't have to agree.

Also, the fact that you believe I'm a liberal anticommunist, just for saying the USSR wasn't perfect and abstaining form all criticism, shows your position full well. Ignoring that I don't even consider the USSR (as what historically existed not the theoriecal idea of itself) sociaist, you shouldn't have to leap to the conclusion that, especially the late-USSR, was great. Also, it would be nice for you to argue in good faith, instead of just dismissing me with buzzwords and baseless assumptions.

I'm not talking about "ideologies". I'm just mentioning the fact that many people had a longing to live in the west, particularly in the non-USSR states of the Warsaw-Pact. Was this partially based on false information and propaganda? No doubt. Would they have though twice if they had known the realities of life in the west (or their life under free market capitalism)? I think so. All I know is what I've heard from people who have lived in the eastern block, be it that some were more critical, others far less.

Also, I won't say People had a better life after the dissolution of the USSR. Of course great reform and restructuring will bring disturbances to the lifes of many. I remember a talk where Zizek mentioned how people in the new republics just didn't know where to go and who to bribe to get what they needed. And the fact that this was done, wasn't a subversion, but in fact kept the system formally going on. Had the black market been abolished, I think there would have been dire consequences. Nor do I Andropov's reforms would have helped much. Any exposition or democratization, just like Gorbachev showed, harmed the system, sadly. I certainly would have also welcomed a opening and democratization of the USSR. You know, less of the things liberals in the west drillied them on, insisting Communism was equivalent to the human right abuses in the east. But I still suspend judgment, and assume, for not knowing how things would have differently played out, that thrre was something in the system that had established itself for so many years (what many call"Revisionist ") that was just unhealable, and couldn't be fixed though reforms. But for people like you and our fellow thread Tankie, this gives you a chance to believe, to hope and to assume it could have all just worked out. Sadly, I don't trust chance so much, to just believe the disappearance of the USSR was random. You of course don't have to agree.

Also, the fact that you believe I'm a liberal anticommunist, just for saying the USSR wasn't perfect and abstaining form all criticism, shows your position full well. Ignoring that I don't even consider the USSR (as what historically existed not the theoriecal idea of itself) sociaist, you shouldn't have to leap to the conclusion that, especially the late-USSR, was great. Also, it would be nice for you to argue in good faith, instead of just dismissing me with buzzwords and baseless assumptions.

Please quote me where I denyed that these government improved the situation. I'm sure they did, haven't been there to check myself, but I believe it. Yet there is something parculiar about the fact that every movement was crushed, corrupted or disappeared. And as much as it might be true, simply blaming the US for everything that went wrong, becomes cheap after a while. I mean, I'm not denying their involvement, but you have to admit that it isn't particularly convincing to just push of the blame to the US all the time.

Also, what "ideology" so you see me defending? What doctrines do you see me insisting on? I'm jusyt questiong how perfect previous movements were, and don't seek to defend them unconditionally, just became I might agree with their (alleged) cause.

Ignore the double post. I'm writing this on my phone, it's all incredibly laggy because the thread has gone on for so long. That's also why I'm having so many typos. It tkes up to five seconds for the letters to appear on the screen.

You honestly think it would have been any different in terms of

If they had instantly abolished the value form on gaining power?

why though? The facts are the same no matter how many times they are repeated.

In a lot of cases, yes. In Latin America between lets say 1850 and today? No, it is a perfectly legitimate historical position.

I assumed some brand of leftcom as this is a thread for that and you were discussing with tankbro leftcom v ML. apologies if not

which also makes the above value form comment irrelevant if you are not, but in that case, what do you think these movements could have done better?

No, because that's not done that way. One doesn't keep the circumstances that create value in the first place, while proclaiming it gone.

I know, and on a purely factual/historical level I do agree with you. All I want to say it that the analysis can't just stop here, because especially then it becomes "cheap". I can't tell you what it is, maybe I'm also wrong, but at least as of now I do believe something is still missing.

One of them, although I wouldn't call myself a leftcom. I'm just interested in their theories, among other reasons for what mentioned. But since I don't know everything I think I would have to know, I still keep my modesty and don't call myself a leftcom (which btw, I don't considered a "ideology" in the same sense as ML is considered one).

All I'm doing is disputing the socialist character of the USSR, mainly, and saying that something was inherently excellent about previous left movements. Sadly I lack the theory to elaborate on this, as of now.

I think I've already touched on this, and as I just mentioned, I can't say "X, Y and Z had to be done in the following way". One couldn't just "abolish" the value form by stating it's gone, especially in lesser developed countries, just as one couldn't just say commodity relations would be the predominant form of human relations in slave societies. I don't mean to sound like some crude determinist, but sometimes it does sadly look like their failure wasn't a matter of false decisions being made, or at least that their success would have required quite some luck.

One thing I can say though is that standard communization critique of certain institutions and organizations (Parties, Unions, …) seeking to reproduce themselves become a counter-revolutionary force in times of crisis, since their existence ultimately in some sense depends on capitalist production and capitalist relations. But again, I don't know enough to elaborate on this too much, my apologies.

Also, are you reddit spacing intentionally?

I really think there is something to this. If someone subscribes to a "older" theory (Marxism-Lenninism, Lenninism, Anarcho-Communism, Troskyism, …) it's not necessarily because the theories are old or wrong in their own sense that people look down upon those who do so, thinking "Oh, it's just a phase, caused by some underlying frustration!" or "How naive they are to believe in a better society!".

I'm not sure if it is true, and I don't mean this as a insult to older ideas, they have their value in their own rights, but have in a certain sense been integrated to such a degree into societies, that is is to be expected that a certain percentage of people are in a ML party, that a certain kind of person sells trot newspapers, and that others gather as anarchists to protest XY [conservative/nationalist/anti-immigrant/etc.] cause.

I'm not sure, but the newer and more contemporary theories (not always and certainly not necessarily) do seem to have a slightly more subversive potential, in the sense that they are not immediately sucked up into the dominant liberal ideology, as a kind of necessary and to be expected resistance to it. At least as of now, it seems to still occupy a position "outside" of what is usually known, with no steroetypes or standard gotchas to just sweep them aside without a second thought.

I think there could be a real potential to it. Also the structure of what I've seen until now, doesn't make it appear as "yet another dogma", which is mutually exclusive and necessitates infighting/fragmentation. There is certainly some value found in looking into this.

But I mean, are the ideas really new? From this thread I can see two kinda strains, one which is basically anarcho-communism and really can't see the difference, the other is basically doing what Lenin said he'd do but not being a shit and lying.

Are you talking about communization? That's at least what I'm talking about. And when actually reading their literature, I wouldn't say they're the "basically" the same. I don't know enough about ancoms, but an immediate difference would be the reasoning. Ancoms say it was always possible for capitalism to start building a anarchist society, mainly focusing (not surprisingly) on issues of hierarchy. Communization Theorists on the other hand explicitly say that the conditions for communization to take place have only relatively recently (if at all, I'm not sure) been created, and one of the main things they mention over and over again, is the concentration on value and production, instead of "just" hierarchy.

The whole argument behind them being "basically" the same, is just that both aren't ML and don't say "we need a big state, because…", ancoms: "there's no inherent need for it anyways" and communizers: "the conditions to abolish the value form and establish communists relations have already been created by capitalism". It's, basically, a bad meme.

People, many anarchists, but also Marx himself, have been talking about building a society in the shell of the old for an extremely long time, that is also not a new idea.

libcom.org/library/relevance-dolgoff

I know that, that's not the new idea itself. One aspect of it's novelty is probably in the same sense Marx was new and subversive (and in some aspects still is), by recombining and bringing together older and already established theories, such as marx's and even some by anarchists together, and relating them to each other. By point was just to show it isn't "basically" anarcho-communism.

+ I mean, that's all in some sense the whole point to the materialist approach, to see how a new society arises from the old one, instead of, like a Utopian, constructing it next to the existing one in isolation and good will.

Also, maybe to clarify, I maybe thinking more of the theories of the Situationist Internationals and the society of the spectacle, theories which modern threads of communization theorists have responded to and taken account of.

Okay lets ignore the Bordigists, as I think they are known and focus on the Communization Theorists.

AFAIK that this isn't "immediate" but as the word already implies a process. The point should be, if I'm not mistaken, that we don't need to reach a specific "state", while lead by a state, that will give us the conditions to start the process. A quote:
– libcom.org/library/capitalism-communism-gilles-dauve#10_Communisation

I might be mistaken though, in that case I apologize in case I'm corrected. Again, I haven't read Kropotkin (and have a bad habit in form of a kind of aversion to anarchism in general), so there could be greater influences I don't know of.

Kropotkin basically (not basically, that is what he believed worded differently)believed this but way back whenever he wrote the bread book late 19/early 20th century I think

Ok, so I've taken a look at a few basic essays again, and I've got a few reverse questions on Kropotkin and anarchism, which might help understand the situation better:

- How would a revolution the carried out?
- By whom?
- What is communism?
- What's the role of democracy?
- What happens to the economy?
- What happens to politics?

I might think of more later, but I believe especially at these points the differences will crystallize themselves.

Not him but,

spunk.org/texts/writers/kropotki/sp001856.html

So this is a pretty short (less than 5 minute) read that explains it.

BUT tldr:

1) Any number of ways, violent or non violent insurrection in various forms as the conditions dictates (I personally believe 1 extremely specific way, I can elaborate on this if you want)

2) A revolutionary party not just made up of workers but "among" them

3) Communism is a stateless, classless society based on free distribution of goods and services.

4) The free distribution of goods and services is overseen by a democratic federation

5) The economy is entirely collectivised

6) Politics ceases to exist and in its place a network of associations

Along with what said, despite overlap there are some sizable differences between what Kropotkin and Dauve advocate. Kropotkin seemed to be fairly obsessed with independent communities and small scale production, little units of "true democracy". Dauve seems to regard this as missing the point somewhat:

libcom.org/library/a-contribution-critique-political-autonomy-gilles-dauve-2008

I thought that Ismail is a Dengist.

Back in the days of Revleft he was a pretty hardline Hoxhaist and anti-revisionist. Now he's a "tankie" in the original sense of the word and he defends the legacy of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Deng.

So how does he solve it? I mean, I guess I just fundamentally disagree on that point. I think that does solve the problem.

Who was Pannekoek btw?