Leftcoms, Assemble!

lmao

Ultra's tend be weird.
Besides, "Leftcom" isn't really a well-defined theory or ideology anyway.

Well I'm a leftcom because of my very critical view on the ussr before that I was an ancom but then I read Marx and various different articles of his thought and I got redpilled on him. My Ideology specifically? Well I'm just a marxist with ultra-leftist views and I'm pretty much at the center of the libertarian/authoritarian scale. I'm basically advocating for a one party state where all the delegates of soviets are from the communist party, but the workers are also able to vote on things directly, It's called liquid democracy. I also have sympathies for Leninsm, if there is any way of organizing my party it would be through democratic centralism.
They should read some fucking marx.
…
Good goal bad methods
Both are pretty much the same, you just can't bring socialism through liberal democracy eveything is going to end up either in chaos or just some little social reforms.

Is just Marxism sufficient? I don't like tying myself down to an ideological identity. But, I overall agree with lots of aspects of Bordigism.

I went from democratic confederalist to Marxist.

It's not the right way to go, it's the only way to go. It's the only ideological tradition that is committed to the original goal of Marxist socialism, the negation of capital, that is.

Mostly miss-informed guys that browse websites like stalinsociety.org, some are pretty intelligent, so I'll give them that.

Hit or miss, mostly miss, I like Trotsky though

If we're speaking about 3rd worldists, I really dislike them. They're usually just drenched in (the bad kind of) idpol, but they're also quick to neglect fundamentalism and fascism of third-world 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧anti-imperialist🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 movements.

Dumb larpers.

Literal fascists

Irrelevant. AnComs are the least bad, but I really dislike Syndicalists, Mutualists and Municipalists. Mostly because they aren't focused on capital as much as they are on hierarchy, which in my view isn't 100% a bad thing. Most of them would agree, but they are pretty incoherent with their legitimate/illegitimate thing. It's like saying that you're pro-good and anti-bad. Power has to flow both ways, it'll never be perfect.

Shit, but I'll give them that they are the best at organization.

I like them, but only because I personally benefit from social-democratic programs. I am also not an accelerationist, capitalism is doomed to fail, but I like my free healthcare in the mean-time.

You just sound like a Marxist-Leninist who's critical of the Soviet Union. Believing the Soviet Union was perfect is not the definition of Marxism-Leninism you know (neither are any of the internet tankie stereotypes you probably associate with ML). Do you agree with Lenin on the vanguard party? Do you agree with Lenin's analysis of imperialism? I would guess you don't agree with socialism in one country which is also a part of Marxism-Leninism.

Why do leftcoms keep spouting this shit? You must be aware that there are tons of ML's, MLM's and Trots that are infinitely more well read than you. Reading Marx doesn't automatically make anyone a leftcom. Stop this dumb meme please.

Only misreading him doesn't

Marxist-Leninist-Maoists (MLM) and Maoist-Third Worldists (MTW) are two different things. MLM's are like ML's but put a lot of emphasis on Mao's contributions to it. Cultural revolution, new democracy, protracted people's war, the mass line and some weird shit about Mao's dialectics that I'm not educated on (I think that's pretty much it). MTW's are the ones who believe first world workers aren't proletarians, that the first world has no revolutionary potential, etc, etc.

ok fam

This is objectively wrong. Syndicalism is literally about workplace and radical union struggle against capital.

Have you read Luxemburg? Also Proudhon and Bakunin but no Kropotkin but you call yourself a communist? Wut

LeftCom here. I started off as a DemSoc when I first read the Wikipedia page for Karl Marx when I was like 15 yo. I then started gravitating towards anarcho-communism a few years later. Eventually, what shaped my political evolution the most is the realization that the biggest problem we're facing is not so much something wrong with labor but rather "labor" itself as a specifically capitalist social category. I believe the reduction of working hours and eventually the abolition of work itself should be the chief task of socialism. My worldview is mostly influenced by council communism, individualist anarchism, situationism, autonomism and value-criticism.

You are by far the most obnoxious avatarfagging cunt I've ever encountered. Please cease to exist by any means.

Communism, or Marxist communism. OTI I largely affiliate myself to and consider myself a left communist when pressed on it, but only to make it easy to be identifiable to a particular position, even though I think I actually far from share even close to all of the general left communist positions (and left communism in and of itself is very broad and even conflicting). Also, while I really like the various communization journals, I'll never "be a communizer" in the sense that to me, at least as far as my understanding goes now, the period of transition, the program and the party form are all part of the revolutionary movement, but I'm starting to like Dauvé's writings more and more.

I started with a local Trotskyist organization, which furnished me with a lot of references to reading material but mostly pushed its own and I saw a lot of inconsistencies between the two. I grew disillusioned in this organization when I noticed how much it relies on inculcating; delusional notions of "convincing people into communism" through it, rather than trying to be a platform that helps already-existing workers' movements become stronger (I guess the left communism was already in me then). Then I just became a lurker on forums (between 09-10 I was on RevLeft a lot, then various Facebook groups, I talked to some Platypus Society people at the university here also, was on various Marxist IRCs) until I stumbled on a guy called C. Derick Varn who basically blew my mind. I then found out that he was heavily inspired by some key left communist theorists (Gorter, Bordiga, Pannekoek), who I read upon and got instantly hooked.

I'm in a few tenant organizations now, trying to help force them to be more accomodating to existing struggles rather than being groups that try to stand ahead of the working class with a bunch of moralistic and nostalgist positions which otherwise just makes them become nothing more than NPO fronts with red flags. I in this way, with some others, helped support a zero-fare project here (ended up getting established!), helped organize some yellow unions to strenghten their demands, supported and covered a recent strike at a car manufacturing plant facing cutbacks, etc.

Quite frankly, there currently is no "right way to go". I think today the left hasn't realized that it's dead, or even that the workers' movements are dead. If there's one thing I like about left communist theorists today is that they're one of the few to realize this, but even moreso that really all truly subversive forms of activity are dead. Among them, people like Bordiga, Pannekoek, Debord, Camatte, Dauvé, etc. were the first to notice that workers don't really know to instinctively rebel along class lines anymore; even trade union consciousness is a completely dead thing today with no signs of revitalizing itself (where trade unions exist, they do not acknowledge even the most primitive notions of class; they just serve as collective bargaining units against capital). The death of the traditional factory unit has completely annihilated the easily noticeable dichotomy of "us in blue working hard, he in the top hat above counting stacks". Capital's new trajectory very well implies that the old workers' movements are a thing of the past. Of course Trotskyists or MLs (unless they achieved control off of the old movements) were never effective at anything whatsoever in spite of all the energy they spent, but 50 years ago they could still maybe win an election, or be highly popular in the working class. Today they're deader than the historical projects they stem from, and that's because they can no longer find any actual connection to the current movements again. This begs the question: where is the revolutionary subject today, now that we no longer have strong industrial proletariat, now that the most disenchanted are largely students, service workers, and so on? Now that it's becoming clearer than ever that capital's functionaries are truly but functionaries, and that the utopians of our time already instinctively seem to go to post-money schemes, and so on? Left communists were some of the first to ask these questions, and many had different answers, though I think they're all useful for our time.

There's a whole lot to say about all these. My suggestion would be to search around with key words on the marxism_101 reddit (the left communist 101 sub), which is a pretty good place for all questions for left communists.

For MLs for example:
reddit.com/r/marxism_101/comments/5j2svv/why_are_rcommunism101_and_this_subreddit_two/dbdlbi1/
Or this thread for anarchism:
reddit.com/r/marxism_101/comments/5o4i85/anarchism_mirrors_dominant_capitalist_ideology/

Rosa didn't like unions?

Are you u/ehrnio?

Pick one ya paradoxical couch humper.

marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch07.htm

No.

This is the wew-tier shit you get from militant shopping sessions at the supermarket of ideology.

So, am I missing something?

I'm not asking rhetorically, I know nothing about Rosa.

Keep reading.

Labour unions are solely defensive, not offensive.

A union by it's very mlnature can't move beyond capital as it's merely a mediator between capital and labor. It's not a revolutionary vehicle.

Incoherent and name dropping with no real idea of what's going on as per usual. You probably haven't read most of those people you referenced. What a fucking dumb hipster

I used to see responses like this in threads like this and think they were dumb as hell but then I actually read books. Now this is almost verbatim what I was about to post.

She liked them about as much as she liked co-ops, hilarious tha leftcom like one and not the other basically because of butthurt Holla Forums politics

Chomsky is a fucking liberal showing the true leftcom crypto liberalism masked as ultra radicalism

Leftcoms don't like Chomsky, this person is clearly uneducated.

Maybe brainlets should stop using the "I am very smart and have read Marx" flag

This isn't a Luxemburg thread, it's a left communism thread (and Rosa wasn't a left communist FFS, see pic related). What happened was that someone asked what she thought of syndicates so I linked to the chapter of a text I know in which she gives her views on them, so that's the least I'll do here.

Let's make it about the left communist perspective of trade unions instead, for example: marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/union.htm. I am then more than willing to discuss this and its conclusion ITT with actual depth (that trade unions are inherently limited to being conservative organs and are in no way anti-capitalist).

Funnily enough I agree, that's annoying about leftcoms.

And yet you're still a fucking moron, unable to recognize your own ideology. Any critique you can make of politics is inherently ideological.

I hate that the leftcom flag has attracted this connotation, or smugness and trolling. It's why I stopped using it frequently months ago and only use it in threads like these where left communism is a specific topic.

Kek k

The term "ideology" has distinct connotations. Many here will use it in the Althusserian-Zizekian way: ideology as the imaginary relationship(s) between humans and their conditions of existence, or the social relations that form the basis for these conditions. In this sense, everything ever is ideology. It's also how people like Eagleton use the term.

When Marx used the term though he referred to something different. For Marx ideology is a specific category of thinking; one that refers exclusively to that set of thinking based on positionalism and rigidly stays in the realm of theoretical explanations that do not inform themselves through investigating the material world. The important point Marx makes is that aspects of the social life process, the social and productive relations of our society are transformed into a category or concept of itself (examples in the German Ideology include 'ego' 'man' etc.). So the theorist (the Young Hegelians & True Socialists in this case) can then only deal with these concepts and solve social problems in the realm of theory, i.e. in abstraction from the real social relationships. Their main concepts usually express their own position in society, they are an abstraction from what they experience in their own life-activity. Through this lens they can only see the world, not just through abstractions, but through their peculiar standpoint within this system of abstractions - the True Socialists for example express a petty bourgeois position. The reason for this is, as Marx explains at the beginning of the German Ideology, the fragmentation of society that comes with private property. That is to say ideology is based on the division of labour, especially the division between mental and manual labour. The 'Ideologists' occupy the mental or bourgeois side of this root division. You will notice that the theorists of 'Ideology' talk little about the division of labour and often claim that in any case everyone suffers ideology - perhaps especially the unintellectual manual labourers. This is more ideology, and they will always remain that way unless they reflect on what Marx was actually doing by explaining the development of society within the division of labour and the other related issues he sketched in those manuscripts.

The glossary section on ideology on MiA explains these different notions quite well: marxists.org/glossary/terms/i/d.htm#ideology.

That critique of Rosa in regard to the Russian Revolution is fucking retarded.

Let us look at the actual history of the russian revolution. We can't forget that Lenin ultimately had to suppress the soviet's too in order to maintain the revolution, in order to bring the economy back from the brink of untold destructive chaos. The Soviets were indeed a dictatorship of the proletariat, but they were unstructured, and couldn't have been used to create an industrialized economy. A national democratic body would have been the only method for democracy to exist after the revolution, but that was out of the question as Lenin did not want to give too much power to the peasants, as they would need to be expropriated in order to fuel industry, even though it was only by their graces that the revolution persisted.

So yes, the dissolution of the national assembly preserved the revolution, as did the dissolution of the soviets, that is, they preserved the power of the bolshevik party, not much else.

More people need to read Rosa and take her theoretical points seriously instead of putting her on a pedestal, sure, but you're not helping either.

The point being that what happens after the few years of historically the first real relevance of the workers' councils is largely to do with the conditions of the time; the revolution died in Germany, neighbouring bourgeois regions were preparing military assault on Russia, etc. She died before you could see that there was almost nothing political about what then forced the hand of Russia to essentially mass-industrialize in one form or the other, laying the basis for regular capitalist development; the only thing that could secure some type of long-term vision, even it meant through counter-revolution and shifting right. You basically say it yourself:
>Lenin ultimately had to suppress the soviet's too in order to maintain the revolution, in order to bring the economy back from the brink of untold destructive chaos.
I think it's hard to entertain the validity of her arguments when Lenin went on to do this with as many attempted measures as possible to keep things proletarian, like how he noted Stalin's and "right" commnists' reactionary character and wrote a secret letter to have Stalin (and also Zinoviev) expelled from the party, to have the Red Army commanders (who were relatively independent of Lenin's
influence) tolerate the Makhnovschina, to convert the councils into factory committees (i.e. still keep some form of viable dual power structure), and so on.

Do you seriously think that simply keeping things as they were would have preserved more instead? I look back and see one of the most arm-forcing scenarios ever there: unless Lenin had pushed for what he had done, or had done something similar, we would be speaking of the end of the RFSFR and all communist activity related to it (including at the very first the weakest Soviets, when independent, as before) as completely dead by 1921 already. Better to preserve communist organization through counter-revolution and hope that maybe this can be redressed towards something properly revolutionary than to delude oneself into thinking this isolated scenario would last in any way.

The realm of leftcoms is still the realm of ideology. One only needs to look at Bordiga's ideas of the party, and his own misguided beliefs that COMINTERN had an international character and wasn't dominated by russian state power.

You think you can free yourself from ideology by just critiquing everything around you, that this is a revolutionary activity in of itself, that by this critique you make yourself the movement abolishing the present state of things. Talk about the division of labor all you like! Talk about private property, commodity production, but god forbid you ever do anything about it!

He thought precisely that the organization called Com*intern* was dominated by Russian State power, an essentially bourgeois one, and that one of the first steps towards improving things would be to make it an international organ again, one represented internationally, rather than nationally (and n.b. through very Russian chauvinist principles, which again Lenin already noted before the Stalinist faction's established as he tried to combat them: leftcom.org/en/articles/2008-09-01/georgia-on-his-mind-lenin’s-final-fight-against-“great-russian-chauvinism”).

I don't. I adhere to the mentioned Althusserrian notion of ideology; we can never be free from it; we cannot reach a wholly "objective", non-ideological interpretation of what we perceive, since we are always informed by externalities. Marx critiqued ideology with a notion of ideology described as a particular mode of thinking, but ideology is the prism through which we all infer into reality, because it's the only way.

To that first part, this was the sentiment raised by Marx several times, most famously in his third letter to Arnold Ruge ("there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be").

This is all just a bunch of projection based on I don't know what. You don't and can't know what I do IRL based on your obsessive biases against me. My first post ITT will give you a glimpse into a few things if you'd like:

There is one single leftcom on this board who actually knows their shit and isn't just a hipster looking for the snowflake/I have read more than Marx himself flag, and even that guy is totally insufferably dogmatic

Her argument was exactly that Lenin had to do it, but that what he had to do out of necessity shouldn't be taken as revolutionary goals!

Well, it WAS dead by 1971, and the preservation of the communist left in 1921 did not yield communism then either! one of the greatest successes of the bolshevik revolution was the hardening of the capitalist countries to all communist descent, the focus of massive resources of propaganda and military against communist movements, the likes of which had never been seen before. The exact problem was the bolshevik revolution itself, and this is exactly what Rosa's critique shows us in hindsight, that they may have doomed communism for a hundred years by their zealousness and confidence that theirs was a socialist country and movement, not a capitalist one. The most optimistic scenario with the bolsheviks in control would have been Bukharin having his way, and adopting the slogan of "get rich", so they may have actually embraced capitalist development.

She is simply factually incorrect. She repeats this over and over again like it is true when it simply is not, it forms a key part of her argumentation in reform or revolution. Weak theorist even if I do agree that we should have revolution and not reform. Really don't get the butt tounge love she gets here

If he actually thought that, he should have realized then his efforts to sway its members to turn against stalin were futile.

Yes, I'm aware, that's also marx at his most self contradictory, as if critique can be separated from material conditions, social interests and agendas.

And regardless, I'm not talking about you as a person, but the leftcom movement as a whole, which has historically been just as impotent as anarchists.

stfu faggot if you're not looting the supermarket of ideology ur doing it wrong

What do you mean by this, and why do you think it's a bad thing? I am principled. I don't support things to retroactively do the thing you find insufferable about "every other leftcom" flag as you put it (being there to fit in). My position is my position because I think it's the correct one.

Yeah, agreed. Why does it seem that you didn't get this agreement in my previous post already?

That's a very optimistic date for the death of the revolution, especially coming from a guy building from his agreements with Luxemburg (she said the revolution was already dead when it happened; remember that the German social democrats thought it was a bourgeois and peasant revolution, not even a proletarian one, then her commentaries in her critique basically say all was fully lost the second the councils started getting transformed or their power substituted with the party).

Again, where is this implied, or where does this impression come from? The exclamation part especially here seems to signal that it's a "gotcha"; a sort of excitement at the fact that this one particular revolutionary tendency didn't, as every other tendency, help achieve the transcendence of the capitalist mode of production.

I don't know how a subscriber to Luxemburg's critique can think it's a good thing that the ultimate result of the historical events the Bolsheviks were involved with was creating an emcumbering bulwark of red capitalist states against the other capitalist states.

This was something all opposition to the Comintern posed. This broad characterization of the turn it took is an accurate one also found in Gorter's texts on the October revolution, in Bordiga's (see: Lessoms from the Counter-revolution), Pannekoek's and Rühle's, etc. Even non-dissenters like Rubin (not even a left communist) posited this until Stalin had him killed (and others).

Bukharin did have his way. The NEP was established with all of hist architectural contributions to it in it, and the NEP was continued until it, too, ran into the ground as a limited mode of capitalist management. A funny thing about Bukharin is that he started out on the communist left, then swung to the right near the end of the second half of the NEP period, but the NEP was ultimately a total failure, as is all capitalist production. The Stalinist Comintern's 5 year plan economic was quite ironically one of the most effective. So effective that, and this may surprise many ITT, South Korea after the war in the military dictatorship became huge using Stalinist 5 year plans it studied out of Russia, and one of the most booming economies and success stories of capitalist development, Singapore, through the leading People's Action Party, only up until relatively recently stopped using 5 year plans and then laxed State interference.

It was one of the only things one could do when still having dialogue with the Comintern, as well as advise and given one's two cents on what would best be done.

The same text says that ruthless critique must be predicated on these things.

I wanna something on Bukharin, since you mentioned him, as I really liked his work, and since this is a leftcom interest thread I might as well share what that is.

In the text with Preobrazhensky, Bukharin masterfully does away with later notions of "socialism" like they were put forward by Stalin:
marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/03.htm#019
[…]
It's not surprising that is understanding of socialism would be so historical and based on the late Marx's wertkritik (Capital-era) angle since he was originally a member of the Russian left communist group, and the opposition to Stalin's and Zinoviev's right, but that's a good occasion to illustrate that our understanding of "left" and "right" opposition might be a problem, because we tend to look at it from an ahistoric angle. This text explains it well:
libcom.org/library/trotsky-left-opposition-rise-stalinism-theory-practice-john-eric-marot

I don't mean Russia, I mean the global communist movement.

I'm just saying it wouldn't have been so bad if the Bolsheviks had failed instead of succeeded, for the communist movement as a whole. \

I was using the word success their ironically.

So?

He proposed that slogan in 1925, several years after the NEP was created. He and most others were opposed to it at the beginning. Lenin, however, was quickly forced by the political realities of the situation to institute it as the peasants were not about to tolerate war communism after the war ended.

The NEP would have functioned a lot better if the state didn't demand to buy grain at lower and lower prices, and force state produced goods to be priced lower and lower. The NEP was not a failure because it was capitalist, it was a failure because it was not capitalist enough at a time when Russia desperately needed capitalist development to industrialize.

Yes, Stalin's 5 year plan achieved a lot, and it was only able to achieve so much because of the mass expropriation of the peasants. Something that wasn't possible under the NEP because they refused to allow the Kulaks to develop as a class.

That doesn't make it any less self contradictory.

You can either have

Anarcho-Communist with ultra left sympathies.
Not a leftcom, but I agree with most of their analysis (especially about capital being impersonal and thus BTFOing left wing capitalists like MLs, market socialists and mutualists). I can't say I necessarily like Bordiga or Pannekoek (don't know enough about them) but leftcoms have a way better understanding of Marx than MLs and most anarchists. I'm still ancom but consider myself a lot closer to leftcoms than anti-communist and anti-marxist anarchists.
Holla Forumsack -> apolitical (got burned out, it's unhealthy to be a Holla Forumsack tbh) -> socdem -> generic socialist -> ancom
To quote a leftcom post I saw a few days ago, "anti-revisionist MLs often apply a left communist critique". Some MLs are salvageable, and for some reason I can't explain unironic hoxhaists are very well read. I think the main problem is that MLs are quick to see left critics of the USSR as anti-communists or people who reject violent proletarian revolution.
Some are ok, but there are better options if you wanna be an anti-stalinist communist.
garbage
cancer
meme
I find myself in disagreement with other anarchists more often than with other ideologies because of various tendencies. You'll find a lot that basically fit the stereotype: lifestylism, anarcho-liberalism, rejection of organization, smashie smashie, anti-communism, "fuck you mom I do what I want" etc.
Anarchism without communism is pretty shitty. But despite of all this I still call myself anarchist and associate with anarchists over communists irl. I read more communist theory than anarchist but don't tell anyone
Hearts in the right place, brain not so much. Need to be shown the light of how you cannot vote away vested interests. See pic related. Also, demsocs are often just socdems. Yes, socialism must be democratic, but you cannot push for socialism through liberal democracy.
Meh.
This doesn't say anything. I know a lot of people who call themselves socialist but are anti-communist (that is to say, they're socdems)

Dogmatic as in, a slogan parroter who refuses to believe any of the theorists they have a particular attachment to could be flawed, and thus only ever enter into stunted dialogue, refuses to accept or entertain new or different ideas
Oh yeh, what are those principles exactly? On the one hand I've got leftcom telling me that leftcom isn't an ideology, but now we have a principled leftcom somehow. Lmao

You mean the established, "represented" communist movement? Hard to say that communism could ever be dead so long as there is capitalism. Still I'd like to know why 1971 is your key date here.

Why would their failure have changed anything? I'm talking likely to a guy who took the communist left's critique of anti-fascism to totally mean "just lay over and die to it", but also one who would want a counter-revolutionary communism to just die?

Ironically? Uh, alright. It's not that I don't believe you on being ironic there but that just makes me wonder why you even added that to the argument at all; it would only support the original Leninist notion of socialism being state capitalist monopoly, and that his intent to do with what he had to at least fully develop a backwards region of the world into a modern capitalist society had succeeded at least, in spite of it going through Stalin, and that this success isn't in essence ensuring one of the main arguments many had about the failure of the Russian Revolution: that we now have eliminated yet another place on earth where, should revolution happen, it at least won't be in an underdeveloped place (i.e. it won't depend on the success of revolutions elsewhere). Lenin also made clear that that was one of the biggest stumbling blocks as he wrote in the fabled 1918 congress: if the revolution in Germany fails, international revolution will fail and regress.

No dude, the NEP was really a failure. It worked wonders to establish the modern capitalist division between city and countryside, the basis for modern capitalist industrial production, but you have to give me some pretty good arguments to when looking at pic related go and think "damn, collectivization and 5 year plans grew the GDP way faster than the NEP ever did, even in its mid-early best stage. I mean this is a matter we can just settle empirically by looking at the statistics. The efficacy of Stalinist production propelled Russia to a top 3 economy; made the Rouble one of the strongest currencies, and that little factoid I mentioned before (that the two strongest Eastern Tigers, RoK and Singapore, became the economic monsters they are today on a foundation of decades of Stalinist 5 year plans) gives us several more case examples of just how well it functioned at developing.

This is just more projection and honestly some of the things you're implying here are contradictory to what I've said.
[citation needed]
My first post ITT says the contrary from the start.
I said the opposite ITT; that left communism, as well as everything else, belongs in the realm of ideology. I've explicitly said that I adhere to the Althusserian notion of ideology.

I don't very much feel like discussing things with people who are so disingenuous.

Nice to see a non-ML say something slightly positive about us. As someone who leans towards ML, I feel like I'm going mad browsing this board sometimes, when people constantly assume that all ML's are mentally ill twitter tankies that have never read Marx, attack retarded strawman ML's, etc. The few ML's that post here seem to be very well read.

Well, you do know that "Marxism-Leninism" was coined by Stalin, right? It's an euphemism for stalinism. It's not marxism and leninism combined and if you like marx and lenin you should stay away from ML.

There's the hoxhafag and the vanished tripstalin who are well read, but some of the tankies and hapastalin make that statement false. If it makes you feel better I'm an anarchist and black flags make us look bad so I can relate.

Yes.

You could put it like that, but Stalin wasn't huge on theory like Lenin and Marx. There isn't a lot of stuff by Stalin you need to include in an essential Marxist-Leninist study guide or whatever. I've heard Foundations of Leninism is a good introduction (haven't read it). Maybe some of his writings on the national question and also Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. My point is, ML's read mainly Marx and Lenin, not much by Stalin (regardless of how much you wanna pretend that's not the case), so I think that it would be more accurate to say that "Stalinist" is a word of abuse thrown at ML's to separate them from Marx and Lenin.

Lenin didn't call himself a Marxist-Leninist of course, but neither did Marx go around calling himself a Marxist, so I don't think that on it's own is a good argument for the view that ML has absolutely nothing to do with Marx and Lenin.

What exactly does "Marxism-Leninism" mean to you? Could you give me your definition of it?

Jesus dude.

I mean the 70's more generally, as popular communist movements declined, as did the eastern bloc and the non-aligned movement. You said 1921, I was just citing the one again for rhetorical purposes.

For one, the cold war wouldn't have been fought as a battle over communism and capitalism. The fascists would have died one way or another, if not to a stalinist russia, then to a social democratic russia, or a bourgeoisie dictatorship russia, ect.

Let's remove the word socialist here, as it is too charged in debate. What Lenin was talking about was a transition to communism. Indeed, Marx and Engels also saw state capitalism as a means of transitioning to communism as well. But if we look at Russia, we see the obvious folly of Lenin's logic here. State capitalism was used not to transition from capitalism to communism. But from pre-capitalism to capitalism! In this sense, yes, any backwards place can use similar methods to the soviets to develop themselves, indeed the soviets practically invented developmental economics. The success of the revolutions, however, as communist in form, only hurt both the development of capitalism in that country (as the enthusiasm of war communism in Russia deluded economic policy going forward) and the causes of the communist movement, as it brings more capitalists forces in opposition to communism where transitions to communism are possible and also forces communists to defend capitalist relations.

The NEP greatly increased agricultural production and allowed industry to rebuild after the war. That was its purpose after all. It was an attempt to improve living standards from famine level conditions. To that extent, yes, the NEP had slower growth than the 5 year plans, but that's only because investment was supercharged under the plan, and consumption greatly suffered, and the stringent price controls and attacks on capitalist accumulation. Was this investment necessary, yes. There were, however, great excesses, clumsiness, and unnecessary suffering along the way.

Yeah, I feel kinda bad, but I have read more Communist theory as well. It kinda sucks that Anarchism is a little light on writers. It means that we have to read Marxist's and take their opinions under advisement. Like, I read Luxembourg, and she made some good critiques of reformism, but then she has a couple articles where she's like "Bakunin thinks only the mass strike will work, they are utopian, anarkiddies BTFO." It does kind of annoy me when my black comrades are so virulently anti-commie that they act like "Das Kapital" is radioactive or something. There are things to take from Marxist writers. I am also suspicious of non-social Anarchists. I remember I was listening to an episode of Crimethinc's podcast, and they interviewed a former Marxist turned Anarchist. He said the term ancom is kind of redundant, as an ancom and a just-plain-Anarchist both want the same endgoal, and generally the same strategies for achieveing it. "Ancom" just shows that you aren't one of the Anarchists that are scared of the commie label. Basically, most Anarchists are ancoms anyway. It seems like ancom is certainly the most common tendency, to me at least, even if they do still talk about the "red facists" and stuff like that.

I explicitly said 1921 for the Russian revolution; that with the accumulation of incredibly disencouraging impulses like Brest-Livotsk, the formal suppression of the supreme Soviets implementation of the NEP, etc. the revolutionary character was gone and Russia would then merely start to go on its merry path towards regular capitalist development, with no more interest in actually undoing any property relations central to capitalism or any move towards communism. Only a real effort to change this could make a difference in that. I was wondering what the '70s have to do with that as a date for counter-revolution.

How can you take on the talking point that it was a battle between communism and capitalism, when you've all along expressed ITT that there was no communism in Russia or elsewhere at all, and that they were all, especially the leader of the so-called communist side, essentially just counter-revolutionary red capitalist States? The battle was, beyond the nominal realm, a great imperialist war of attrition through proxies and threats between two capitalist factions. You'd need to believe that history is a process of the battle of ideas to think this is what crucially killed revolutionary activity. As I've pointed out ITT, capital's developed trajectory has all by itself killed the way communist movements express themselves; workerism is basically a thing of the past century now. And the weirdest suggestion here is that what we call "communism" is now dead, not what it really is (workers resisting capitalism). It doesn't need to be called communism to be there, yet regardless it isn't; we don't see proletarian militancy that much anymore, even things pre-Marx or even pre-notion of communism like trade union consciousness are basically dead. You can't explain that by saying communism is a discredited word; you have to look at the developments of capitalism and its influences on what being proletarian implies today are. If this discussion with you ITT has anything to do with left communism anymore, I'd say that's where one of the core values of left communism are: it's basically its most unique trait, in all left communists from Bordiga to Pannekoek to Debord to Camatte to Dauvé, to look at where revolutionary activity is, or why it isn't.

How do you know this? Again, the gigantic productivity of Stalinistic collectivization is what historically produced the most productive period of economic growth in the whole of history, and that from an incredibly backwards Russian economy. The social democrats, biggest names Kautsky and Plekhanov, both advocated for systems of gradual industrialization that were if anything completely obviously even less productive and explosive than even the NEP, by a lot. Look at what they suggested (e.g. marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/socrev/pt2-2.htm#s6) and it pales compared to what Stalin's Comintern suggested and what monstrous economic and military development that ended up producing.

Again, this is a strong claim to make, because it basically says that the most productive overseer(s) of an economy in history that isn't Stalin's Comintern would have also been Russian and would have been formally bourgeois. Unless you want to say that the Allies were looking hot against the Germans or that the Chinese and British were doing well in Asia against the Japanese, the Axis were done away with most primarily by the Russian Zerg rush, enabled by Stalinistic 5 year plans.

No, Lenin literally said, and was completely honest and outward in this, that he redefined the schema of historical economic states necessary in Marxist theory, and I quote: "socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly", i.e. socialism is a separate, non-communistic society that precedes communism, in which the legal personified capitalist is done away with by being made impossible, and is replaced by a proletarian State managing capitalist production.

The NEP is to Russian capitalism what the post-mercantile process of enclosure and gradualist privatization was to early industrial capitalist societies emerging from feudalism. Tsarist Russia already was a capitalist society, it was merely primtiively capitalistic, still had a non-liberal form with Okhrana units enforcing private property's legitimacy, and so on. When I say it was a failure I say that it was a failure at doing anything more than completing this process of established a proper, modern capitalist society with generalized productive relationships (as I said before, again, fully establishing the distinction between countryside and city was here a very big symbolic thing showing it was complete; the establishment of a a full-fledged urban proletarian class, piking against the remaining peasantry now no longer dominant). I still don't know how you can uphold the NEP beyond this achievement compared to such a colossal success of production as the Stalinist Comintern's collectivization and 5 year plans, which I repeat again was the big inspirational foundation of two top 10 economies today for decades.

itt tankies in denial that hierarchy leads from socialism to fascist/capitalist revisionism

sorry what

Remedy this. Any unread Malatesta and Invisible Committee as a priority, as well as anything red or from the first grey you haven't already read.

The coming insurrection is shit.
It's like crimethinc on speed

When I said there was one decent leftcom I did not mean you. Pretty fucking typical you would assume that though, given the abject arrogance of every leftcom, who reject actual reality in order to stick to an abstract theory, this is the essence of dogmatism

To the extent revolutionary character and a dictatorship of the proletariat existed in Russia, it was incompatible with its further development towards communism. It was destined to be destroyed either by the Bolsheviks, as was the case, or by the peasants, or by the bourgeoisie. But I agree to the extent it existed, it was destroyed with the suppression of the soviets. This was the revolutionary dictatorship of war communism, a communism of necessity, and thus one of famine, chaos and ultimate destruction. It could never have lasted.

Perhaps if, after the period of emergency, there had been democratic reforms that gave authentic power to the masses, we would have seen that the later collapse of the USSR not as the self preservation of the nomenclature, but a movement towards actual communism.

The 70's is a very important period, however, in the disintegration of the USSR and the strength of the global communist movement. The US and its allies, via diplomatic and trade alliances, effectively outmaneuvered the USSR and broke up the alliances of the non-aligned movement. It was at this point that the economy of the USSR began to stagnate, as it's methods of planning proved obsolete to handle the challenges producing more complicated consumer goods, and could no longer efficiently extract resources from its client states.

You're not thinking geo-strategically here. From the point of view of the western capitalists states, what did it matter to them if the USSR was counter-revolutionary or not? If a communist movement took power in a western state, they'd have no were else to go but make an alliance with the USSR. No, the cold war was largely not a battle of ideas, but the propaganda leg of that was was exceptionally important.

First of all, we are seeing an excellent resurgence of "vulgar workerism" in all its forms across the west. Here, you are almost talking as if capital is itself the subject of history (something leftcoms have never ceased to accuse me of!). If we look superficially at the world around us, we can see resistance to capitalism everyone, from identity politic movements such as BLM, the student movements, or even local self management movements in Rojava, Mexico, et al. None of these movements can attack or destroy global capital. The reason we focus on workers so much is because only they are central to capitalism. Indeed, there are only two ways capitalism permanently destroys itself without outside intervention or ecological catastrophe: either labor becomes worthless through automation, or capital becomes worthless through a general zero rate of profit. Hell, it wasn't even too long ago that we saw the biggest strike *in all of history* in India.

Well, no one can know it for certain. But lets say for example that the civil war ended much sooner, with a faction more tolerable to the European imperialists coming out on top and consolidating control. Most of Russia's industry and infrastructure was destroyed in the war, without that destruction, industrialization would have been a much easier task. But regardless, let's assume that the fascists win in Europe, either Hitler pursues the battle of Britain with more conviction, or attacks Russia far earlier in the year. They are suddenly faced with two forms of resistance, the social-democratic American empire externally, and the communist partisans internally. To the Americans, the communists remain allies, and the clampdowns of the cold war never occur, at least to the harsh extent they did.

Yes, I know he redefined it, that's whats controversial. Many marxists reject that revision, and many leftcoms I've seen as well.

I uphold the NEP, not as it existed, as there were many malformations and party interventions that made it ultimately unworkable, but a general capitalist system where consolidation and accumulation were possible, (i.e. the workings of the law of value). It should be recalled that even under the NEP, nearly all capital was under the control of the state, and state planned investment had already begun in the later years of the NEP.

In all of this, we shouldn't forget the failures of collectivization, agricultural production, production that required skilled labor and planning in general (which sowed the seeds of its own destruction in its inability to effectively coordinate appropriate amounts spare parts, consumer goods, maintenance ect).

Does communisation theory count as "leftcom"?

Yes. Communisation has an anarchist side (Tiqqun, Invisible Committee, etc.) and Marxist side (Endnotes, Troploin, etc.) but both developed from the shortcomings and as an evolutuion of Situationism and post-Situationism, which were both left communist. If not necessarily left communism (esp. anarchist side might not be), it is at least definitely ultra-left.

I see. I'm more of an ancom than anything, but there's really not all that much I can disagree with regarding what I've read about communisation theory except maybe some of the ideas about "dropping out" of capitalism that seem to come from the anarchist side.

Are you me?!

Like I said, it's an euphemism for stalinism. It's an ideology that only served to justify whatever the USSR was doing at the time.

Yeah, I agree. I often see anti-communist anarchism being praised by black flag posters but glad you're an exception.

Already got a huge reading list, but it does include some of these. IDK why post-leftism, transhumanism, nihilism and "green anarchy" (AKA primitivism while it should include eco-anarchist works instead) are in that list

I liked the bit about how you need guns to be a pacifist

No I'm not you, wtf user

You are pretty new to imageboards aren't you?

its a joke

What would be great is if a leftcom could explain communisation theory without saying "well it's basically a fancy term for just make communes lmao"

I'm not a leftcom, but my understanding and TL;DR of communisation would be the process of turning property into non-property, meaning without going through the fabled "lower phase" of communism which still has defacto forms of property that operate differently. The various communisation journals believe that this is now possible with the levels of productivity and concentration already bringing capital to high levels of socialisation, where it's just a matter of turning these into freely accessible use-values through revolution.

I found this text pretty clear for the idea: libcom.org/library/communization-theory-abolition-value-form-internationalist-perspective.

As I understand it, it advocates for an immediate shift to communism without a "transitional" phase in the traditional sense of the word in which things are "communised", i.e. made communist - instead of a period in which society is neither capitalist nor communist but is building the preconditions for communism, immediate measures are to be taken to both restructure society to implement communism and destroy the bases of reaction - for example the immediate destruction of the state and its organs and the replacement of said by communist forms of organisation, immediate abolition of private property, production for exchange, the value form etc. and the transformation of social relations and processes into communist forms, e.g. removing the distinction between "learning" and "doing" through the abolition of education as something done through a specialised institution separate from a person's life outside of it.

I've been awake for way too long and this is probably barely coherent and full of errors because of that, so I apologise if I'm misrepresenting anything here.

Any ex-leftcoms here?

Definitely grew out of the label when it became clear that "leftcom" isn't a coherent unified stance or a movement, but rather a critique. Compare Bordiga with Pannekoek for example.

what would you call yourself now?

Can someone give me a brief run down on Left communism?

It was made on /anarcho/ after n1x took over and drove it into the ground. Still has a lot of good works and I'm too lazy to make a better one.

Leftcoms were invented by me, Bob Leftcom. One day I woke up and asked myself how could I become even aidsier than a trot turning neocon. Thus, the leftcom "movement" was born, where all the righteous student kids of the ruling class can tell the workers how much they suck, draining energy from the left while also claiming to be more revolutionary than anybody else. Leftcom praxis consists of three pillars:
1. Using only liberals and literal neonazis as sources when talking about the USSR.
2. Telling workers to stay the fuck away from unions.
3. Jerking off into a mayo glass five times every day.

bump

Check this butthurt tankie.

Communist/Anti-Capitalist. But you can't really be an idealogy. It makes more sense to me to associate with movements rather than particular ideas that themselves have various different interpretations.
I take inspiration from everywhere, not just what is typically understood as the leftcom/ultra sphere. Really anything that 'activates your almonds' and makes you wonder what the hell you're reading.

So it's just the same as the conquest of bread

Who does the communising? How are they organised

In a sense (that there's no transitional state DotP nor a distinct "lower" stateless socialist phase envisioned in the process), but also no. In the early 20th century the traditional class party movements could have worked and would have been the most pragmatic. Communisation theory is bourne from the belief that it is no longer the most pragmatic, or that this is even viable anymore, with the death of the industrial proletariat, the death of instinctive workerism in the proletariat, the ultra-commodified trajectory of capital, etc. making worker party politics a delusion only upheld by Leninist nostalgia goggles. And even though the general concept of a revolutionary path might be seen as similar to anarchist communism, the content thereof is wildly different. As Troploin says, you can't solve the issue of power by spreading little bits of it around everywhere as the Kropotkinites have suggested, and they also raise the fact that the anarchists' hypothetical vision of communism is not backed by 4000 pages of critique of political economy the Marxist side had and relied on, usually leaving their visions as essentially just being collectivistic and communal modes of commodity societies based on horizontalistic principles (which commodity production will always ignore and push its interests through).

Do it, faggot.

Why would you not want publicly funded healthcare and education? Anyone that works in the interest of the proletariat is a good person as far as I am concerned.

The idea that we can skip the transitional phase altogether is nonsense and a mischaracterization of communization theory. There will inevitably exist a time in which there will be some worker controlled institutions must exist alongside capitalist institutions. Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme is still correct to the full extent of its assertions.

What will not exist, is the kind of transitionary phase imagined by the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, or syndicalists, in which a democratic organization (be it the bourgeois state, a workers state, or workers federations) is able to engineer a socialist society.

Bolsheviks, mensheviks, and other alleged socialists have taken Marx's description of stages of communism as a recipe or formula rather than a description of one particular aspect of the communist movement, the same way they so often take the dialectical form as a recipe or formula rather than a description, ending up with: "dialectics = thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis" and "communism = revolution -> workers state -> withering away of the state -> communism".

For myself, communization theory is simply the following of Marx to his logical conclusion. It is an understanding of communism not as an ideal to be strived for, but rather as the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. We must relinquish the notion that any sort of social democracy can instiute communism. Communism can only arise out of the unrelenting struggle of the workers themselves to establish a dictatorship of their will upon the rest of society, not as a social democracy, but as a ‘’class’’. The proletariat will take from the bourgeoisie the means of sustenance, and whatever else they may desire–not just private property, but personal property too!–not because a social democrat or theorist told us too, nor for reasons of justice defined in terms of bourgeois morality, but because we can.

That which we produce, we shall lay claim to by whatever means are available to us, and with our fellow proletarians we shall give it freely. That which we do not consume, we will sell on the bourgeois markets. Markets–and consequently: the value form–will exist for as long as there is a bourgeoisie, because they will constitute the means of oppressing the bourgeoisie. This process will occur on local, national and global scales, and once lower phase communism is established in any given nation, it will continue to take place within the context of global markets.

Just because I like a theorist, doesn't mean I like everything they stood for. I could spend just as much time criticizing ‘’every’’ single author on that list as I could explaining what I like about them. Chomsky's work in linguistics, and his research and criticism of US foreign policy are absolutely essential for understanding the world we live in, even if his ideological stances are underdeveloped and wrong.

The ideological super market–just like the real supermarket–is only fit for looting.

Leftcoms are brainlets

...

Is this real?

At least the market socialists liberals have been dying out.

Fugg that looks comfy.

yes.

That is abolition of value numb nuts. So it's the same thing but with "but it's Marxist tho" tacked on. It's Marxists admitting that ancoms were right all along. What a great ideology. Seems like you don't need 4000 pages Kropotkin did it in about 200

And who does this and how is it organised

ITT anarchist leaning leftcoms are just pretentious ancoms

In other threads we have seen tanky leaning leftcoms are just crypto leninists

What leftcoms do not realise is that there is virtually no difference between an ancom/synd/ communalist and a Leninist revolution in practice, so to place yourself between them is completely pointless. It might be good if you were offering something entirely new, but it's always just some hack job of one or the other presented like the word of God. At least the co-op fags actually have a new take on things

This is true, only because it is impossible. Marx was very clear about communism coming about when the current material conditions make the current political state of things impossible. The material leads the political, not the other way around.

This is one of the sillier slogans to come out of Marx. Leftcoms will complain all day long about how the USSR and China aren't socialism/communism, and then say this bullshit. By this definition, communism becomes almost meaningless. It's literally a "you tried" sticker, and Stalin could fall under it just as much as Mao and the rest. And even as you critique those two, the next Stalin could and probably would adopt such a slogan to fit their needs.

To say, however, that the working class will expropriate the capitalists of all their belongings regardless of what the theorists say can hardly be construed as a critic of theorists! It's literally just a descriptor of behavior, nothing more. It also presumes a post-ideological character to the working class, that is that they won't justify their expropriation (which they almost certainly will, as all expropriators have done before them!).

To say markets exist to the extent they are needed to liquidate bourgeois property doesn't explain why markets would stop there, why the development of communism would in any way correlate with this liquidation is beyond me. A means of distribution must be developed that does not involve exchange value, this method must exist whether it is for goods continually reproduced or not.

You can either believe, as almost all leftcoms here believe, that commodity production is not communism of any stage, or you can believe that statement. Assuming that this country is engaged in international trade, it must therefor produce commodities to be sold abroad so long as global markets exist. Hell, I'm not a leftcom, and even I think that's bonkers.

On your critique of social democracy. I believe there is an accelerationist heart to the social democratic system, it was exceptionally good at aiding the rate of profit in falling, while neo-liberalism was used to keep it steady. Certainly one way to force an end to capitalism is to approach a general zero rate of profit, and thus force the bourgeoisie to confront the proletariat in an existential battle.

this

Why was my post deleted?

U N I O N S A R E A N O R G A N O F C A P I T A L I S M

God I hate LeftComs

My ideology is council communism, with some syndicalism, At first i was a Democratic Socialist, after that i became a Marxist-Leninist, i became an Anarchist for a while but now i am a Leftcom/Ultra
I think leftcommunism is the most democratic version of marxism we can apply today, it can resonate with normies who are too afraid of the soviet union
As for my opinions on the ideologies OP listed:
Great revolutionary praxis, flawed government execution, all the party infighting was one of the many things that caused the fall of socialist nations
Really annoying people, usually new leftists, most of them don't realize that they are right in some aspects.
Better than regular ML, i support them to an extent
Trash
Just memes
I still like them because i used to be one, i understand their struggle but anarchism would be really tough today, eventually they end up forming a dictatorship of the proletariat to protect themselves anyway,
Usually former socdems, doesn't work because you have to destroy the state machine and create a new one, Allende was good enough but who knows, no Demsoc has ever succeded in making a proletarian state
Class traitos, apologists, fools
Usually the best people around

Aren't leftcoms all about not fetishising democracy?

you're right that guy is just an avatarfag, ignore him