Revolution

>it reads like a carbon copy of economic problems of socialism in the ussr

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marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1935/luxemburg-lenin.htm
libcom.org/library/fundamentals-revolutionary-communism-amadeo-bordiga
insurgentnotes.com/2012/10/notes-towards-a-critique-of-maoism/
quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/left_wing_communism_00.htm.
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It never happened

fugg ::::DDDDDDDDDDD

When was this?


Yuuup

Kek, meta as fuck. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets you a light ban but I love you OP.

yooo… that's actually fucked up holy shit. To the wall with that woman.

Pretty much ceases to be a revolution at this point tbh, whether you're looking at the Kraut or Spaghetti leftcoms at all.

Considering Bordiga's main complaint against the Bolsheviks is that they were TOO democratic, this wouldn't surprise me at all.

So Leftcommunism is essentially self-refuting once it reaches a certain stage?

Dumber by the day.

No left communism is what happened when the revolution started turning towards counter-revolution or shifts right; revolutionaries try to get it back on a primarily proletarian track. The term "ultra-leftist" was afterwards coined by the "right-communists" to effectively say "you guys are too left wing and want to give the proletariat control when it ain't time yet!''.

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can someone explain Bordiga to me? what's his deal with "spontaneity" and why does he think it's necessary?

Not if you actually understand theory.

I don't think particular ideologies should or can even lead a revolution, no, what leads the revolutions is proletarian self-interest, which is primarily found in a reaction to its antagonistic position as systemic negative in capitalism while needing to bare all be brunt and create all the value.

I do, I just don't think revolutionary terror means jailing Poles and homosexuals while carving up the pie of total national capital.


Spontaneity was the Luxemburg point of fixation. Bordiga stands with Lenin on that issue: you can't depend on the spontaneity of things outside of the already-emerging despotic proletarian element that wants to go further.

marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1935/luxemburg-lenin.htm

No, they called them ultra-left because they mindlessly shouted platitudes and dogmatic demands with no regard for material reality and were quite similar to anarchists in that sense.

So basically your claim is that it is possible to have a collective movement without having any reciprocal relationship with its leadership? Seeing how this never happened in history I find this view to be speculative and utopian.

Nah. Also, Maoists called it the same thing when workers wanted to go beyond the intended pseudo-revolutionary premises of the cultural revolution: www.thenorthstar.info/?p=9866 (good article from the based periodical that brought us Fisher's Vampire Castle, check that out more often!).


The leadership is the mass of revolutionary workers thrust forward. To simplify: why should non-classcucked workers wait for the classcucked workers outside of the movement to go further when it isn't necessary at all?

Wow, so your grand solution is bourgeois ideological pluralism

Nah it's proletarian dictatorship.

Also sounds very unlike me or any left communist and more like Second International Marxism. Most of all sounds very much unlike the immanent character of proletarian dictatorship, which at its moment of birth ceases to abide by the mass consciousness of ruling ideology when it makes its move, but eh.

People are not a hivemind, there will always be a dichotomy between a class conscious rural worker and a class conscious elite party member. Leftcoms come over as a wanting a vanguard party, centralism and all that Bolshevik stuff, but it at the same time actually don't want it. What is considered "the real movement" is also highly subjective and it depends on who you ask. You just played a wordgame, I ask you about human organization and your answer was "everybody is the leader" - that's hippie tier.

Bro, either left-communism is right or wrong. Either left-communism is the correct ideology that will lead the proletariat to victory or it isn't. It's not that fucking hard, if left-communism is correct then it's dangerous to foster incorrect trends in the proletariat movement.

This is one of those things that's pretty black and white. At least the class-determinist anarchists believe that their ideology is the ideology of the proletariat.

No. He said the most "class conscious" workers will be leading the revolution. Kinda like a vanguard.

Ideologies are a tool to direct human action. How can you deny the power of ideology when our contemporary society is a massive trash can of ideology? I mean it surely works for the bourgeoisie.

That's nothing but the Leninist definition of a vanguard. Again, where is leftcommunism specifically different from the Bolshevik model? I haven't read Bordiga btw, but if Leftcoms are unable to lay down their concept in a succinct way despite shilling for Bordiga in literally every thread I don't feel particulary motivated to read him.

Well yeah, that's the reason why the rising workers' movements must be internally despotic and ignore moans and push themselves forwards regardless. Lenin understood this perfectly when all he used the provisional government for was the numbers that showed that it would be sure that a large enough mass of Petrograd workers would follow the Bolsheviks into the workers movements' side during the October revolution. He consequently abolished the provisional government and let the workers establish a proletarian dictatorship which the class unconscious or even reactionary workers had to follow. Contrast this to Luxemburg, who critiqued him for that, and then subsequently let the movement she watched over die because she depended too much on the spontaneous order of workers to agree with the KPD's programme.

Left communists as a whole? Not with a party or even liking the Bolsheviks. I stand here with the Italian left that was decidedly class-party, but the German side of left communism was completely anti-Bolshevik, seeing the October revolution as not having a proletarian character.

What form it takes on, maybe (class-party, council, unions, etc.), but the real movement is simply defined as a proletarian mass reactively resisting capitalism and trying to topple it.

I said that the communist movement as it first arises in some place is always pretty much entirely appearing the same way: as minority and as internally democratic and outwardly despotic. It cannot do otherwise, because it's by presenting itself as such in the first way that it actually goes beyond other types of non-communistic organization. Lenin concluded that the organization should remain as such and form a vanguard that forever resides over the proletarian interest (doubt that's subjective if you call yourself a Marxist and believe in universality) programmatically. The only place where Bordiga differs is that he doesn't want this vanguard to ever dettach itself from the greater mass of revolutionary workers and stand outside it. He wants the whole movement to remain vanguardistic and as such an organic centrality, rather than split between the organic centrality plus a separate group of revolutionaries being internally democratic in its own vanguard. This is what causes clashes and gradually enables a shift to the right as the new greater centrality no longer has the same interests at heart. Bordiga's Party and Class explains most clearly what for Bordiga should be the form the workers' movement must take in order to be successful or even before that, keep a character that is decidedly revolutionary and engaged in the greater mass of revolutionary workers.

Give me an example of this right now. Shouldn't be hard; there's Bordiga shilling in every thread, right?

How do you determine whether it's right or wrong? Because judging by this statement all it takes is for you to know deep down in your heart that It's right. Doesn't seem like a very useful barometer.

The Russian Revolution didn't happen because everybody was a committed communist who slept with a copy of Capital. The conditions that lead to revolution were entirely material.

I don't think any particular strategy, either the Italian left's/Bordiga's Leninism or the Dutch-German council comminism, is itself going to give any type of guarantee for success, merely that it is going to give the working class the best method of remaining in power and making the most class-informed decisions. I'm not a teleological determinist, and as far as the 20th century goes I don't really think Lenin or the Bolsheviks could have done anything to do any better.


As
said: the revolution happened mostly because the workers' movement there found itself in a good position to act. Conciousness was built on the premises already there. user also makes the good point that workers weren't sleeping on a copy of Capital; like Marx knew, his writings aren't an immortal science we have to rigorously study to understand our predicament. We live in the predicament he theoretically explains. It can help, but it doesn't take reading 500+ pages to understand your conditions of existence under capitalism as exploited and productive subject. You'd need to explain other reactions against capital not inspired by Marx, or even preceded Marx, would have happened otherwise.

I wouldn't going around shilling my ideology if I did truly believe it in the first place. Secondly, it's not true that it's merely a matter of belief, Marx and Engels gives us ample material and basis for deciding if an ideology is scientific and can thus lead the proletariat to victory.

Thirdly, and I know this gets under the bonnet of leftcoms, but practice is a good way to see if something is correct and scientific. If anarchists were undeniably leading the global revolution against capitalism then I would seriously reconsider Leninism and depending on the variety of anarchism that is succeeding, even Marxism itself.

Just to clear things up not all leftcoms fall within the ravioli milieu.

Bordiga diverges from Lenin in matters of the nature of democracy, parliamentary participation, unions, the united front, and antifascism.

If only you were a Leninist; you'd have guided a revolution towards the establishment of one the most long-lasting proletarian dictatorships up until now (5 years of almost-pure dual power with the class-party and Soviets!) out of a successfully led revolution. Cue why Bordiga and the Italian left liked Leninism!

But alas, you're a Hoxhaist; what you have to show for us is how to properly manage social democracy in one country while erecting busts of Lenin here and there. Now, and don't get me wrong here, that's an absolute feat, but since practice proves legitimacy, I'd like you to show me where the success of Hoxhaism appears today and, if you could, use your Hoxhaist ideology to create me some of that powerful Hoxhaist praxis right now if you'd please. We're all waiting, not on the revolutionary subjectivity of an organized proletariat, but your Hoxhaist ideology, to get us those fruits. Get to it, thanks.

The thing I like the most about these discussions is that tankies always go on about how they "are critical of past experiences", but whenever they encounter leftcoms, who really are critical of past experiences, they freak out and show just how uncritical they are.
Really the Bordigists seem to just be a better version of leninists.

I think he misspelled Bookchin.

But, by that logic, Maoism and communalism are the only scientifically correct tendencies of the 21st century. They're the only ones that are having a real, concrete impact on any significant scale.

Can you not just tell me what Bordiga actually suggests with a couple of bullet points? I really don't wanna read him. I really don't understand why leftcoms are so unable to do that - are you afraid to be measured and critisizeed based on your own proposals, like you ruthlessly do with everybody else? Like, if somebody asks me about Maoism, I can easily say: Mass Line, PPW, New Democracy. Why is this not possible with Bordiga? I also argue that the Soviets actually had mechanics in place to have the party and the bureaucrats operate in the interests of workers, but you see, the very nature of the Russian situation was bound to result in a clash between workers and the party line. The NEP was a short-term compromise, that was unavoidable, unless you collectivized even earlier than Stalin, which would have resulted in an even higher human cost. Workers in the USSR could easily rat out managers who engage in capitalist behavior, so they were forced to entertain interests which align with the workers. Read John Scott's "Behind the Urals", you'll get the impression that under Stalin the movement was still very much proletarian and communist.


You don't have to read Marx to follow a communist ideology. I'm aware that material conditions spark revolutions, but ideology is part of it in a reciprocal way. If Lenin didn't hone Leninism as an ideology, and wrote "State and Revolution" as a short standard hand book, then maybe he wouldn't have been successful. This entire anti-ideology stance can be counter-revolutionary imo, you can still critisize your ideology when you provide ideological guidelines to the workers, who want to act, but don't know how.


So only war communism can be pure communism? kek

What do Leninist leftcoms think of "Left wing communism: an infantile disorder"??

Excuse me, but Democratic Confederalism of Ocalan is a revision of Bookchins Communalism, so it's actually applicable, because Communalism is pretty utopian

Also, please explain why the concept of Bordigas vanguard which should never detach itself from the workers is in any way different from Mao's mass line.

Ironicaly, it, just like marxism-leninism, has been transformed into something that cannot achieve communism.

More proof that anarchists are children

Marxism-Leninism still is very much marxist in character, and barely makes any compromises. DemCon looks like something that has an unhealthy fetish with inclusive community councils rather than socialist economics, it is way more pragmatic in character. I mean, they even encourage small businesses and entrepreneurship.

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It's a shame how all the secular and socialist liberation movements of the Middle East have been forgotten and replaced with Islamism. Even Afghanistan had a communist government once with mandatory high education for women.

More proof that tankies don't care about communism.


Indeed. It can hardly be called a socialist society. It is just highly democratic capitalism.

Probably. Don't blame 'em though, both names start with a B. Perhaps he was thinking about Cockshott and the people who mindlessly shill him? Next letter in the alphabet after all.


- To view the original thrust forward of workers' revolutionary activity as inherently vanguardistic
- To in every way possible tail this workers' movement and ensure that it remains as such and gradually more programmatic as it gains power
- See to it that, instead of internally splitting itself into a vanguard within the vanguard (thus killing the original vanguard and establishing a new one), to maintain the vanguard as such and push forward
- To topple the bourgeois state and establish a proletarian dictatorship
- Going forward with the divergence of centralized power in the form of workers' councils, establishing a dual power structure similar to the post-'17 Russian DotP; one that is programmatic like in Lenin but invariantly so because it never atomizes the dual-power structure in favour of a particular centrality
- Within this DotP, still in the capitalist mode of production, work towards the gradual abolition of the capitalist productive relationship and establish the free access of use values (making means of productive a commonality)
- As the communistic mode of production, gradually see the State (manifestation of capitalistic/class society/private property ontologies now increasingly abolished) wither away
- See emerge the free association of individuals, no longer bound by the chains of (private) property (communism)
- For Bordiga's vision then in particular, the primitive, not-yet full centralization of production, would likely in the first stages (lower phase of communism) be built upon production managed via workers' councils administering a rationing labour voucher-type system

Unfortunate. You'd get the above and more by for example reading his 1921 Party and Class, and one of the most fundamental texts of his is would be this: libcom.org/library/fundamentals-revolutionary-communism-amadeo-bordiga

Reciprocally, indeed, as the product of the conditions. What matters is keeping alive the ideology not by inculcating it and only regressively finding out that what should have been done was keeping the grip of the proletariat on its power structures in order to manifest itself further and keep the ideology alive. You cannot name a single revolution established by an ideology; it would counter historical materialism whole.

Is this what I said? I don't think that's what I said. Reread what I said.


By not doing things like this: insurgentnotes.com/2012/10/notes-towards-a-critique-of-maoism/ (pic related for TL;DR) and in fact only standing for the workers nominally, while really just "discovering" the revolutionary potential of the peasantry after killing almost every active worker, and then inhibiting working class activity that goes beyond it all as seen here: www.marxists.de/china/sheng/whither.htm.


It's been a few years since I read it, but something interesting to note is that he seems to have changed his mind about communists working in reactionary trade unions only a year later, with the founding of the Red International of Labour Unions.

As usual with Lenin, this work gets taken completely out of historical context. Trots go as far as bending it to justify entrism, while e-Maoists cite it despite the fact that it goes entirely against Maoist politics. They don't even understand the title, because most of the time they haven't read it, much less understood it.

Bordiga, and this shouldn't surprise you given the fact that he was praised at almost every mention and was a Leninist, received it quite well: quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/left_wing_communism_00.htm.

I'd like to reemphasize this: class substitutionism is what left communists will in every form, class-party or otherwise, oppose most fundamentally. Not because substitutes cannot hold the same interests (they can), but because substitutes cannot inform themselves on the ever-maximizing interests of the revolutionary group-subject, the working class, just as they cannot enact the actual revolutionary activity that must be the actual working class (and not the substitute).

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What has that to do with the issue in question, the mass line? Even if you reject Maoism as an ideological body, you can still find contributions worth preserving, even as a Leftcom and don't reject any thought per se because it's from your yellow boogeyman.


Althusser was pretty much a Maoist dude.

so bolsheviks were no better than a modern liberal in that regard

You know what, I kind of agree, but then again this extremly economically deterministic view sort of confirms Third Worldist theory. And with those guys you have quarrel as well, don't you

I'm not familiar with this but I don't think Lenin's point ever was that you always should or shouldn't work within reactionary trade unions or parliaments, but that it depends entirely on if it's strategically useful to do so in that particular situation. Always refusing to work within the system, as a matter of principle, because of "purity" or to remain "true communists" or some other nonsense is a completely useless strategy.

That I reject it wholesale because it is based on the notion first of class substitutionism (a non-Leninist vanguardism) mediating a supposedly symbiotic relationship between the toiling masses. "Toiling masses", keep that one in mind, especially as you get into reading things like this written by revolutionary Chinese workers wanting to go beyond the pseudo-revolutionary Maoist line and assert a real proletarian interest (which must be separate and whole of itself separate from the substituted class!): www.marxists.de/china/sheng/whither.htm.

I can find literally nothing whatsoever of value in Maoism. I've tried to look but nope. There's more to find in fucking Trotskyism with its reaffirmation of Marx's notion of permanent revolution to me than Maoism, a wholly bourgeois ideology started by a bourgeois counter-revolution that destroyed the early Chinese proletariat and forever changed the course of a one revolutionary CPC led by the May 4th workers and people like Chen represenative.

The difference is that there's some value I can find in Althusser, mostly because he was first and foremost a Leninist and structural Marxist. The same can't be said for Maoism.


How would it? Third Worldism posits that there is more than a personified capital and personified capital as classes, but that there are in fact luxury versions of these classes that are not revolutionary because muh net extraction. I would be throwing Marxism out of the window with such a relativistic notion.


I wouldn't refuse to work with reactionary elements to maintain some ideal purism, but to safeguard the interests of the revolutionary working class. Just like allying with the SPD proved fatal, just like allying with the KMT proved fatal, just like allying with the Spanish republic (if we speak of some anarchist example for now) proved fatal, so will any other alliance that is based on the idea that, since there is current weakness, alliance can strengthen it and then dispel itself and take over without alliance. Lenin never really had to do this in Russia (the movement became revolutionary the second he broke down the Russian SocDem coalition, Menshevik alliance and provisionary government) and it's probably his principally sectarian and "purist" adherence to ensuring the victory of the Russian workers' movement that got him where he was, and he helped the workers get the furthest we've ever been as communists in history.

But okay, more hot takes by me on LWC: Infantile Disorder? Essential read anyone must have once read and spread to comrades. Key theme is recognition that in capitalism, communist currents express themselves in many forms. This includes ones that don't seem to be very revolutionary at first inside of them. It's then a matter of tactics for the class-party (or any other communistic organization of the workers at the moment) to notice to take it in its own form and reaffirm it unto itself. It's almost Hegelian-phenonological (unsurprising, Lenin before the revolution fucked off to Switzerland to read Hegel for 4 years); seeing the spirit of the communist movement everywhere and reaffirming it in one developing one. One of my fave lines, destroying the few SocDems remaining:
But honestly, the whole pamphlet is straight fire.

Would you deny that it makes a difference wether you are a worker in Bangladesh or a worker in Switzerland? I mean, you gotta be kidding me. This isn't scientific at all, that is merely hoping that first world workers may suddenly realize their situation despite being wholly embraced by consumerism and spectacle. Marx wrote about the contradictions of capitalism, and by outsourcing precarious labor into the Third World the bourgeoisie found a way to palliate capitalism in terms of human experience, this wasn't foreseen by Marx, he expected capitalism to collapse within its center.

Are you talking about the peasentry? I don't really see how this is bourgeois, considering the mass line also included rigid Marxist-Leninist indoctrination for every party cadre.

So the revolution should be entirely leaderless, how do you see it panning out? Not in a sarcastic way, what would most likely happen?
But there are many instances in history of it being in the proletarians self interest to revolt i.e the very present day and they have not done so. Why is this?
what form will this dictatorship take?
but thats the opposite of what you just said?
then why are leftcoms so autistic about his immortal science?

It really seems like you are trying to be everything and nothing at the same time. You're democratic, but not democratic, decentralised and organic but centralising and unified

1/3 3rd of industry owned by the municipal councils, 2/3rds are co-ops

bump