Left-Pill me

Except several of the largest leftcom tendencies (or at least the ICC) are a synthesis of both the dutch-german and Italian tendencies.

You forgot opposition to national liberation movements, opposition to unions (or traditional unions anyway), opposition to collaboration with bourgeois currents of any kind, opposition to notions of self management and state capitalism, and a strict commitment to internationalism.

This seems so odd though, considering Bordiga emphasized the role of a party form (and to my knowledge called himself a Leninist for that reason), while the dutch-germans rejected it in it's entirety.

Well yes, but most of those things are interwoven with parliamentary politics - I should have been more precise.

What would be your recommended reading for the council communists?

The synthesists advocate both an international communist party and a federation of worker's councils. As did Lenin.

Ask an actual council communist for a start. Also read this:
libcom.org/library/workers-councils-book-pannekoek

Left communism is the most kvlt current in Marxism.

This is what the radical left should have always stood for. No wonder the 20th century communists fucked up so badly. And most of the left is still LARPing Lenin/Mao/Castro's failed methods to this day. Things are not looking great leftcom bros :(

Why?
What's that supposed to mean? You're against workplace democracy?

How come that unlike most of Holla Forums left-communists seem to actually know their theory?

This is full of broken links like marxists.org/archive/…/1920/open-letter/index.htm
Please fix it.

It's cus Holla Forums has a bunch of anarchists and their afraid their ideology won't be cool anymore if people find out about leftcom.

Are you implying there's such a thing as right-communist?

oh I'm sorry, I'll fix it immediately

here it is fam

pastebin.com/N0RfQdnM
pastebin.com/N0RfQdnM
pastebin.com/N0RfQdnM

Thank you

Because modern unions have been co-opted by the state and the bourgeoisie, and serve to settle disputes between workers and employers rather than exacerbate them. This effectively makes them tools of class collaboration rather than class warfare. At best they may win workers slightly higher wages and protect workers from some of the worse abuses, at worst they'll take your money and do nothing/take the side of your bosses (my experience has been the latter).
This doesn't mean leftcoms are opposed to industrial action of course, but we advocate workers forming their own strike organs (worker's councils for example) rather than relying on organisations that will betray them.

Autonomous workplaces are at odds with fully socialised production and are for all intents and purposes a form of defacto property. In order for society to overcome markets and private property all industry must be collectively managed and follow a common plan.

they're useful for getting trade union consciousness, as Lenin would've said. But in the end their function is to serve as a valve for the proletariat's class interest, through which their demands are filtered and essentially made harmless to the bourgeois order up to the point where unionism resembles reformism. Councilists would prefer the workers to organize in workers' councils while italian leftcoms take the leninist stance on this question.

nah, not really. What we're opposed to is titoesque self-management, in which workers are supposed to manage their own exploitation.

and what this user said.
Communism will resemble a even higher form of globalization, autonomous workplaces would vanish, all production will be organized and performed globally.

because left-communists are pretty wary of people who call themselves leftcoms even though they don't know what constitutes left-communism. Would-be leftcoms are because of this kind of compelled to learn more about theory.

libcom.org/library/demise-andy-stern-question-unions-contemporary-capitalism
marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter/ch02.htm
marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/union.htm
libcom.org/library/unions-reading-guide
leftcom.org/en/articles/2002-11-01/what-s-the-deal-with-the-unions
leftcom.org/en/articles/2012-10-29/unions-and-the-labour-movement-the-enemy-within
leftcom.org/en/articles/2002-11-01/what-s-the-deal-with-the-unions
google.com/search?site=leftcom.org&q=unions site:leftcom.org&gws_rd=ssl

bump

some pics that aren't leftcom per se. and have some problems, but get some ideas across.

(I don't myself support the Bordigist fetishism of the Party or the council communist fetish of democracy, but both strains were historically important in fighting the degeneration of the proletarian movement in the early 1900's. Neither do I support the SPGB.)

Notice in the dialectic of the commodity that the two main sides are use-value and value, not use-value and exchange-value.

Is 1 a strange amount?

there's at least three

Unless I've gone full Tyler Durden and are just hallucinating the rest of you…

what's leftcom?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism

Like what the hell is the 'communist left'? This seems to imply you can have a communist right? Aside from squabbling over which old dead white guy to hold in the highest veneration, what are the real differences?

yes, value is the noumenon (Ding-An-Sich) to exchange value.

nah, either you're that serb leftcom or that strayan (?) one. I'd be the third then.

here:
unlike "right" communists. Note that the right-left distinction comes from the bolshevik party, where some were considered to be part of the "leftist" faction and later on of the "left opposition" what was essentially trotsky and other anti-stalinists.
"Right" communists support popfrontism and even supporting bourgeois movements they deem to be progressive, for example the soviet union's support of the KMT in China and some obscure pseudo-socialist natlib orgs in the third world.

Yeah, I'm ausfailian. Where are you from?

Switzerland fam

Leftcoms are some communists that don't wanna deal with the "soveit union is ebil and bad" memes. They are also communists that wanna hang out with anarkiddies

I get called "ebil and bad" (for my actual positions not because of the USSR) by right wingers all the time. We're not against stalinism for public relations reasons but because it's a reactionary distortion of marxism.
Have a read of this:

sinistra.net/lib/pro/whyrusnsoc.html

[citation needed]

That first picture almost made me throw up

shut up

good point

What did the Soviet Union do to pave the way to Communism? Was it even socialist?

To appreciate Stalin, Lenin, Mao etc. as Communists sets one up to defend what they did under the label of "Communism" which leads to defending what appears to be swathes of people dying (genocide or not) and almost every policy, no matter how stupid it is.

I thought most commies were either ML or leftcom. I didn't even know I'm a leftcom until today. Do most people on this board really defend Lenin, Stalin and Mao?

I thought those were just "tankies".

But it's true

The proletarian revolution failed in a matter of years after taking power, so all they really achieved in the long term was developing the means of production.

No. In the beginning it was a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but rapidly degenerated into a bourgeois state due to both the backwards conditions in the early USSR and the failure of the revolution to spread/succeed in the rest of europe. Even if those in charge genuinely believed they were "building socialism", in practice the USSR functioned as a capitalist state, producing and selling commodities and exploiting wage labour.

The number of people killed is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the USSR was socialist. These regimes weren't capitalist because they were "bad" but because they objectively functioned as capitalist states (money, commodities, wages, etc). The so called communist states were effectively transitioning from feudalism to capitalism and the process is never a clean one (just look at the enclosures of the commons in britain's transition to capitalism).

Most communists today are bolsheviks of some sort, in the west the most common are probably trotskyists, though stalinists of all sorts (including maoists) have a larger following worldwide. Left communists are a fairly minor group of tendencies unfortunately.
As for lenin: being a leftcom doesn't necessarily mean rejecting lenin, just the bullshit said and done in his name by so called marxist-leninists (and trots). While some reject him outright, many leftcoms critically uphold lenin as a theorist and revolutionary, and some even regard themselves as leninists of sorts (bordigists for example).

While tankie is sometimes used as a pejorative for stalinist, it's original meaning is a stalinist that supported the USSR invading hungary to crush the 1956 uprising. Basically someone who defends the policies and actions of the USSR and other "communist countries" regardless of how much the deviate from marxist theory.

Thanks for the insightful reply. I learned a lot of new stuff.

I didn't mean anything bad about Lenin, merely saying that he seems to be included along with Stalin and Mao as a figure to aspire to. Not that this makes him a bad figure.

No problem.

It wouldn't have been a problem either way, I just wanted to clarify things. Sometimes people have this misconception that leftcoms hate lenin and then get really bent out of shape when they see a leftcom talking about lenin or the october revolution in a positive manner. I guess people tend to equate us with anarchists, even though there some pretty huge differences between us and them.

If I (a different leftcom) could add some of my own understanding:

Russia was falling apart
The bolsheviks, who were the class party, understood that they were the only group capable of keeping the country from completely deteriorating. They understood that a bourgeois revolution was necessary, but it must be led by the proletariat.

While, at the end of the day, the russian proletariat was establishing bourgeois relations of production, they made many socialist advances, as the revolution was inseperable from the international communist revolution

Unfortunately, the revolution failed, both by the failure of the proletariat to go take it all the way, for the the revolution to spread, and its repression by the ruling class.

In russia, one of the main reasons for the accelerated degeneration was (along with many mistakesby the bolsheviks [especially the separation of the political fro the economic]) the cementing and deproletarianization of the state brought about by its participation in imperialist war (first WWI, then its continuation in the so-called "civil war"), which the proletarian state can not do.

The soviets were for all intents and purposes destroyed, the used-to-be-class-party was stuck at the head of a bourgeois state, spearheading the attacks by russian national capital on the proletariat.

I see the trot flag, if I could offer some good polemics against trotskyism from a leftcom perspective:

Trotsky and Trotskysm
leftcom.org/en/articles/2000-10-01/trotsky-and-trotskysm
(this one is a book/pamphlet, the other sections of the book are linked to at the bottom of the section)

The Lost Marxism of Critical Trotskyists
leftcom.org/en/articles/1999-03-01/the-lost-marxism-of-critical-trotskyists

What distinguishes revolutionaries from Trotskyism?
en.internationalism.org/ir/139/trotsykism
(The ICC, because of their neo-Luxemburgist analysis of the current phase of capitalism, their bureaucratic and authoritarian style of organization, their ridiculous separation of the DotP, State, and workers organs, etc. put them almost completely outside the Left Communist camp. That said, their critique of Trotskyism is good [if I remember it well enough])

yeah the ICC is pretty cultish from what I've heard, essentially the leftcom sparts, without the whole pedophilia thing though.

They are idealist, often thugs (breaking into former members' houses and shit to "retrieve stolen items"), they have a disturbing delusion of "parasitism" (the parasites being other groups and former members), everything is micro-managed by the Paris center, and internal discussion is stifled and the word of the Paris center is treated as holy.

One of my favorite incidences is one of their spasms where they wrote about how the ICT (the organization I like the most [It might've been called the IBRP, I don't remember exactly when this happened]) was under "attack by parasites". The ICT responded by saying that it was just an instance of some group being a bit rude, that there is no such thing as "parasitism". The ICC replied, saying, hilariously, that if the ICT didn't take seriously the threat of "parasites", and they didn't understand they were being attacked, that they risked turning into parasites themselves!
kek!

Leftcoms just make an ideology out of what should be common sense for most of the left.

People forget that leftist philosophy doesn't make it immune to porky appropriating its rhetoric and iconography.

care to elaborate?

also:
doesn't this imply that they don't actually (with an idealist comparison to some better situation you've made in your head)?

Y'all may be joking, but there are certainly more than 3 leftcoms on the board. Polls have indicated as much and I would count myself as one as well.

lmao where can I rad those articles?

and did they really break into someone's house?

collecting them now

libcom.org/history/open-letter-international-communist-current
"First of all there are the, by now ritual, accusations of theft aimed at my (and the CBG’s) head. We have written on this calumny many times before, most notably in the pages of the Communist Bulletin, but you clearly still believe, with Goebbels, that a lie, if shrieked at high volume long enough and loud enough, will eventually be accepted as truth unless it is rigorously exposed at each and every telling.

We stole nothing from the ICC. When we left the ICC we had in our possession internal bulletins which, for clear political reasons, we considered ours and which we told you we would keep. We had collections of publications etc. which we sought to return to you, writing letter after letter after letter to you with no reply. Eventually, and at the instigation of Internationalist Perspective, we packed them off to your Box Number. Some other stuff held by one of our comrades in Edinburgh was only collected by you when he informed you that a house move meant it would be going out with the bins unless it was collected.

That there was thievery, burglary and assault at that time is true but we were not involved in any of it. The main perpetrators were of course the ICC, something you are understandably reluctant to dwell on. While some of your ex members in London took a typewriter with them when they left, you engaged in acts of brutality hitherto unknown in the proletarian movement. You forcibly entered ex-members homes in England, stole personal property such as stereo equipment, destroyed their telephones and personal belongings and, where you found them at home. assaulted them in the process. You even had the audacity to return to one former member’s house for a second bite of the cherry only to find that he had changed the locks. Your internationally gathered collection of thugs. nonplussed at this. were unaware that the ex-member was indeed within, prepared to defend himself against a second looting of his home. On your first successful raid on his home you stole many personal belongings. He belonged to none of the factions that left the ICC in 1981 but was ‘punished’ for his personal association with ICC dissidents.

More. you declared your intention to enact these disgraceful scenes at the homes of every comrade who had left the ICC "the internal bulletins belong to the collectivity". In such circumstances. fearing a repetition of such thuggish behaviour in our living rooms it is not surprising that we in Scotland threatened that we would call the police if the burglars tried to enter our homes by force. Whatever that might have meant in political terms it is difficult to see what other threat at that time would have halted the ICC gangsters. The threat worked. The burglaries ended. No one called the police."

nice try, eternal leftcom

lmao this is hilarious

libcom.org/library/my-experience-icc-devrim-valerian
leftcom.org/en/articles/2002-11-01/the-ibrp-internationalist-notes-and-the-u-s-workers-voice-recent-polemics
leftcom.org/en/articles/2011-04-17/marxism-or-idealism-our-differences-with-the-icc

right?

Sadly, what ought to be and what is are very different things.

Kek. From memory shit like this caused the turkish branch of the ICC to split.

We hivemind now? Where do I get my neural uplink?

Precisely

One of my sources was Devrim's open letter

Ah sorry, I missed that.

No problem comrade!

I knew that the ICC was a joke but this is some nasty shit tbh. And yeah I've read Devrim's open letter. He even posted a few times about the ICC on various discussion platforms.
I second your opinion on the ICT, as far as I can say they seem to be pretty chill.

yeah, revolutionary anonymity. The real figure of leftcoms on leftypol doesn't matter, 3 is merely a number presented to non-leftcoms so they stop asking questions.

Kind of sad seeing an organization like the ICC sucking the energy out of so many left communists. Not like we're a large tendency to begin with. I wonder if it is even possible for them to reform at this point.

bamp

I doubt it

yeah definitely

SYSTEM OF A DOWN
EXACT SAME PHOTO AS EPONYMOUS ALBUM
YES
REVOLUTION
THE ONLY SOLUTION

This fucking talk changed my views so hard when I was leaning Trot. I recently stopped posting in a left-comm forum, and what he talks about is exactly why I left. Got fucking tired of their idealism.

The argument isn't that it wasn't socialist because the workers were not in control, or because it was bureaucratic. It is the other way around.
It was that way because it wasn't socialist. It wasn't socialist because the revolution failed.

You do a great job knocking down an argument that no one made.

This idiot has confused the dictatorship of the proletariat with the socialist mode of production. If you're still in the position where you need to defend yourself from external assault then the revolution is incomplete.
Also worker management has nothing to do with anything.

Are you one of those "socialists" that thinks markets and commodity production are somehow compatible with with socialism?