Dear Anarchists: The DotP is not a traditional state. Dear tankies: kill yourself

The state can do nothing but degenerate into a bourgeois state, if that's what you're after, if the proletariat does not advance in transforming the relations of production.

You can't "not have a state". Any apparatus which empowers the working class and facilitates its reorganization of society is a state.

i fucked up the post number, sorry

was meant for

Ahhh, I see.
Well, you can't not have capitalism.
Anything that produces a commodity is capitalism and we'll always need commodities.

See, I can spew non-sense too.

Is a union a state now, for example? Absurd.

This is by your dogmatic definition, and ultimately it doesn't contribute anything to the discourse. You're arguing semantics instead of demonstrating how marxist praxis is superior to anarchist praxis.

If by "follow the Path Of Light" you mean "transform the relations of production" and by "believe REALLY hard in it" you mean "demand all of society and overthrow all of bourgeois society"… then, yes?

lol wut m8?

Also what he said

And by the way, the state, in Marxist revolutions have never degenerated into bourgeois states.
The bourgeoisie was eliminated. The workers in the USSR were not so much wage-workers as they were slaves, themselves being property of the state, and thus the state had not become bourgeois.
It was it's own very unique thing that hadn't been seen while Marx was still alive.

The state does exactly that.
Regardless of how much the people believe in the revolution.
Therefore it is in the interest of the state to consolidate power so it may exploit.

I'm arguing that praxis doesn't matter if the working class doesn't continue to transform the relations of production and spread the revolution.

OK? This is directed at anarchists why?

we won't always need commodities.

It isn't a tool for working class power.

Also, isn't the means by which revolution is spread and the relations of production changed a part of praxis? Unless your theory doesn't cover these things :^)

Okay.

I guess we need no organization whatsoever, because that is arbitrary anyways, and so all we really need to do is want the revolution very hard and then the organizational method literally doesn't matter.

Whatever asshole, production.
Please it is capitalism because it has production.

A union of working class people organizing is not a tool of working class power, but the state that exploits labour is?

You have the patience of a god.

Anyway, can you explain why Lenin seems so despised among leftcoms? Forgive me for being a noob.

Please, the people putting up with this dogmatic dribble are the ones with the patience. A dogmatist loves nothing more then to spread his dogma, after all.

He just said a union is not a tool for working class power.

I doubt he'll tell you anything valuable.

I'm trying to clarify that Marxists don't advocate any kind of "state capitalism, which only a cretin would call state socialism". We don't advocate taking over a state in the traditional sense of the term.

Yes, but the point is what the working class "does". Socialism is impossible regardless of the most perfect theory if the activity isn't engaged in by the working class as a whole. Praxis on the level of the individual revolutionary is next to irrelevant in that context.

how did "transform the relations of production and spread the revolution" turn into "all we really need to do is want the revolution very hard"?

It does, because certain forms might facilitate certain activites better in certain contexts (I would argue that soviets will be the most likely form, but without any specific concrete context I can't give a one-size-fits-all form of organization.) Form is not independent of content.

A "union" is not "just any time proletarians organize"

It depends on the tradition, the Italian tradition sees more in Lenin than the German-Dutch tradition. But most leftcom's don't despise Lenin, so much as we don't see him as a flawless revolutionary. I see him as a flawed (largely because of context), but still invaluable revolutionary until about 1921, where he became the leader of the counter-revolution.

*when he became the…

Who here is advocating lone-wolf revolution?
Left-Communism is not the entirety of marxism, for one, and what makes your method superior to anarchism?

To be fair to that guy, you said that Union, as to imply all unions, were not a tool of the working class when indeed they can be. Also, you never addressed his central point.

This makes sense. However, I do wonder about the union thing. How exactly are they not a tool for working class power?

Indeed. It does.
And this is why we need an organizational method that ensures that a figure like Lenin does not take power again.

You know something more than "the proletariat has just got to really want it, that's all".

They aren't.

"But in the early 20th century, bosses and the state began to react to the gains of the CGT with a more conciliatory attitude. This increased the space for reformists to operate, as class collaboration could be seen to bear fruit. By 1909, the growth of the union had put the revolutionaries in the minority (the CGT grew from 100,000 members in 1902 to 700,000 in 1912, out of a population of 7 million). Victor Griffuelhes resigned as general secretary amidst machinations against him, and Émile Pouget left the union, disillusioned. The slide into class collaboration, reformism and bureaucratisation was crowned by the CGT’s support for the national war effort in 1914. This was the most decisive break with its revolutionary, internationalist origins. Although revolutionaries remained inside the CGT to try and pursue an anti-militarist agenda, following the First World War it increasingly fell under the sway of political parties, leading to a series of splits as revolutionaries and others left the organisation. The CGT still exists today, and even maintains elements of the Amiens Charter in the constitutions of many of its member unions. But in practice it has become almost indistinguishable from other modern trade union federations, with all the pitfalls that implies"
- SolFed ("Fighting For Ourselves" [selfed.org.uk/read/ffo])

Remind us of any particular "socialist" International?

Being triggered by certain words having actual definitions in a corpus of theory is not an argument.

...

Are you talking about NEP?

Isn't Bordiga's entire argument that there was simply no other way and that the national (I think he uses romantic) revolutions and industrialization in the colonial states where a necessity for a latter possibility of communism?

...

Not by itself

I'm not Bordiga, but no, he thought communism was possible everywhere with world revolution

You're just cherry picking examples. Just because some unions aren't tools of working class struggle doesn't mean they all aren't, and again you fail to address his central point.

That's weird, I thought the state was a tool of class warfare by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. I wonder who said that…

Oh right, every leftist ever.

In that case I really want an explanation for why you consider Lenin a "counter-revolutionary" that late in the process, since most just refer to "decrees", Kronstadt or Makhno to claim he was somehow secretly a "red fascist" all along.

Yeah, like fighting against a developing bureaucracy class in the party and Stalin's conspiracy, what a fucking dickhead.

"With the coming of World War II, the divergence between unions and workers' own action deepened. When the United States entered the war, the leaders of both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations pledged that there should be no strikes or walkouts for the duration of the war. Thus, at a time when profits were "high by any standard" and a great demand for labor meant "higher wages could be secured … and a short stoppage could secure immediate results," the unions renounced the principal method by which workers could have gained from the situation. Instead, they took on the function of administering government decisions affecting the workplace, disciplining the workforce, and keeping up production.1 "To cease production is to strike at the very heart of the nation,"2 proclaimed the AFL. The CIO announced it would "redouble its energies to promote and plan for ever-increasing production." Over the radio, Philip Murray of the CIO urged labor to "Work! Work! Work! Produce! Produce! Produce!"3

Interestingly, the unions with Communist leadership carried this policy furthest. As Business Week noted,

'A more conciliatory attitude toward business is apparent in unions which once pursued intransigent policies. On the whole, the organizations involved are those which have been identified as Communist-dominated…. Since Russia's involvement in the war, the leadership in these unions has moved from the extreme left-wing to the extreme right- wing position in the American labor movement. Today they have perhaps the best no-strike record of any section of organized labor; they are the most vigorous proponents of labor-management cooperation; they are the only serious labor advocates of incentive wages…. In general, employers with whom they deal now have the most peaceful labor relations in industry. Complaints to the union's national officers usually will bring all the organization's disciplinary apparatus to focus on the heads of the unruly local leaders.'"

"the trade unions played an essential role in forestalling what might otherwise have been a general confrontation between the workers of a great many industries and the government, supporting the employers. The unions were unable to prevent the post-war strike wave, but by leading it they managed to keep it under control."
from pdf related

Being reactionary is inherent to unions in the imperialist stage / decadent phase of capitalism.
Unions have been incorporated into capitalism, the bourgeois state itself no less, they exist to control the working class and limit its action to, at most, acting as simply variable capital trying to realize its full value. Zero perspective of the political, and, overall, social nature of the proletariat's tasks

I highly reccommend:
pdf related
leftcom.org/en/articles/2015-05-19/auto-struggles-in-turkey-we-don-t-want-any-unions-we-have-set-up-workers
leftcom.org/en/articles/2012-10-29/unions-and-the-labour-movement-the-enemy-within
leftcom.org/en/articles/2010-03-01/unions-whose-side-are-they-on

A good summary of a class perspective on unions:
"Despite their occasional use of strikes, the unions always have their own agenda that is to completely control workers' struggles. Over the years, they have fine-tuned the art of supposedly promoting workers' rights, while in effect wrecking any possibility of real success. Though open participation in state and class-collaborationist structures and overt betrayal of strikes are the most flagrant aspects of the unions' anti-working class policies, the real betrayal starts inside the workplace itself by the establishment of the whole codification and recognition of management rights and the practice of contractual mediation rather than the promotion of class struggle.

'By splitting up strikes section by section or industry by industry; by defusing and confusing the struggle through hour long 'stoppages' or 'days of action'; by using ballots as excuses for cooling down periods; by looking after their funds rather than acting outside of the law to defend their members; by preventing mass meetings and by isolating struggles and condemning solidarity action the union apparatus tries to ensure that the working class doesn't put up a serious challenge to the bosses' attacks.'

Confronted with nearly a hundred years of treason, the usual leftist argument is to recognize some of these flaws while advocating either a 'democratization' of the present unions or the creation of new progressive or revolutionary ones. The leftists just don't want to admit that it is the function of the unions today rather than the present leadership or organizational affiliations that determines their reactionary policies. Every attempt at democratization through changes in leadership has gone down to defeat or worse: the transformation of the alternative leadership into a new bureaucracy. In the same way, recent attempts at building 'radical' unions in Europe and elsewhere have clearly shown that they very rapidly bow to the logic of contractual mediation, i.e., become what they used to denounce. Clearly, the unions have become tools of capitalist rule."
leftcom.org/en/articles/2002-11-01/what-s-the-deal-with-the-unions

"Here though the unions so often prove their worth for the bosses. Take last year’s battle of building site electricians when the leading construction companies suddenly announced they were no longer keeping to the established wage agreement and thought they would impose a pay scale with much lower wages. Rank and file militants from Unite immediately decide to organise a fight and did not wait for the union negotiating machinery to trundle into play. They organised flying pickets, instant walk-outs, as well as public meetings outside of union control to gather support and publicity. In the end the bosses backed down, even if only for the time being. Undaunted though Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite and member of the Coalition of Resistance, now claims the struggle as a shining example of how a rank and file movement can be linked to the official union. In other words, a possible breakaway, more difficult for the bosses to deal with, has been diverted back into the TUC safety valve.

A growing number of grass root militants are sickened by all this. But the answer is not to form new unions… Any union, once established, has the job of negotiating with the bosses on behalf of its members. This is in the midst of the worst capitalist crisis since the 1930s. Despite all the good intentions of the new union it will come up against the reality of the capitalist crisis and the conflicting interests of the bosses who, faced with declining profits and shrinking markets, are desperately looking for ways to reduce costs and increase ‘productivity’. (Wage rates, shifts and work patterns, jobs? ) ? New unions, old unions, one big syndicalist union, every union must come up against the glaring fact that the interests of the bosses and the interests of the workforce are entirely opposed."
leftcom.org/en/articles/2012-10-29/unions-and-the-labour-movement-the-enemy-within

STAY DISORGANIZED
DON'T JOIN A UNION
THEY HAVE NEVER EVER GOTTEN US WEEKENDS OR ANYTHING

Holy shit.

Being against unions =/= being against any organization ever for always

also:

Oh yeah, I forgot. You think the state is good :)
Yes. That has never gone wrong. In any way.

kek,

gee, does anyone remember anything about the CNT-FAI helping the republican state crush the revolution?

t. Anarchists, right before they are crushed by the bourgeois state

the CNT-FAI may have been dragged along into the revolution, but it made damn sure that it was drowned in blood

...

I've been watching you, leftcom poster.
You think that SU was on the wrong track almost from the beginning, even though what you propose partially was implemented in the SU under Stalin.
In other words, I find you inconsistent.

So this proletarian state differs from burgeous state in that it's transforms relations of production further to communist ones? That's too vague. Be more specific.
Relations of production depend on the ratio of property types in the economy. What ratio do you propose, leftcom poster?

In other words, bureaucratic apparatus will be there. I find it rather hypocritical that you reject SU experience of managing economy, while propose planned economy yourself.
Next, putting "new human" consciousness aside, administration implies discipline, which in turn implies enforcement. Until there is no more need for discipline, means until there's no more need for people to take part in production process, means until there's full communism, this semi-state of yours needs body of enforcement.
So this semi-state already have administrative and enforcement bodies. Just don't call it a state, call it a semi-state.

It's all cool and romantic, but again, cut phylosophy and be more specific. The Devil is in the details.
What changes are we talking about? Already under capitalism we have free software, does this counts as change of production relations?
Plus, concentration of capital leads to phenomenon of vertical integration and introduction of plan as a regulator of production (in the context of one corporation or whatever).

Plague of leftism is that it's more phylosophy than anything else.
Cut the bullshit, leftcom poster. Talk to me about economy.

Not OP here.

"SU experience of managing economy" was based on market and it has a name: capitalism.

No trade. No money.

You're asking the wrong question. The question isn't "what did the SU do wrong?", the question is: "what was the movement of the world proletariat?"

The movement was one which was confined in the bourgeois state and its appendages: social democratic parties (then the bolshevized "communist" ones, unions, etc.).

Russia was doomed to the wrong track not because (although their mistakes helped) of this or that strategic decision by this or that actor in isolation, but because the world communist revolution failed. The world proletariat failed to establish its dictatorship and transform the relations of production. There is no magic form of organization which will not fail when the proletariat does not engage in practical revolutionary activity (especially once, like in Russia after the civil war, there was hardly left any proletariat). If the working class delegates its tasks to anyone but itself or trusts any surviving bourgeois institution because it believes they have already uprooted the "main" power (the state, bosses, etc.), there is no working class revolution, or it at least ceases to be such. Period, end of discussion.

3 things right off the bat which make what you say categorically wrong:
1. I don't "propose" anything isolated from the development of the revolutionary proletarian movement (the material movement of communism).
2. It therefore cannot be "implemented".
3. The aforementioned proletarian movement is necessarily an internationalist one which especially cannot achieve its program in one country (the "SU")

Besides the barebones necessities for the communist negation of capitalism we get from just a cursory understanding of the material dialectic (what I have described in the original post), I have my guesses of what might happen, but none of this is the program itself, organizational questions are ones which can only be decided by particular circumstances so specific that it would be Utopian to create an in-depth plan around.

No, It is the political superstructure of the transforming relations of production. The state is not what itself transforms the relations of production, the working class does. The proletarian semi-state is the apparatus which co-ordinates and maintains their revolutionary activity and power over the bourgeoisie. The DotP is the political manifestation of the proletariat's reorganization of society.

I have no idea what you mean… Like, the ratio of communist relations to capitalist ones? They don't exist at the same time. It's 1-0 to 0-1. Dialectics, motherfucker. Qualitative jump during a period of flux.
Because the proletariat does not have its own form of property to base the new society on, it cannot emerge within an intact capitalism (part of the reason socialism in one country is an oxymoron, a particular outburst of the revolution in a particular area can take steps, but that's it, it is stuck within capitalism until socialism can emerge as a whole).

No, not in other words. It is, by necessity, an open, transparent, mechanism.

The "planning" of the economy in russia was at the behest of the law of value. There is nothing in the soviet economic experience to learn from about socialist planning, except what it isn't (e.g. quotas for industrialization).

(cont)
no, and no.
people are not being administrated, things are. Use-values are being kept track of, recorded, etc.
We are used to thinking of the administration of products, as revolutionaries are well aware, in such a way so that we are sneaking in the administration of people. We do this all the time, we speak of relations between things instead of people and attribute powers to those things, commodity fetishism. When abstract labor has been abolished (which comes with the self-abolition of the working class), there is no longer the "value" side of the use-value - value contradiction which makes up the dialectic of the commodity. In the communist mode of production, an association of free and equal producers, having transparent relations, these relations are not hidden behind the relations of things, thus planning the production of things does not require "enforcement". neither does discipline even enter into the picture.

people still take part in the production process in communism. Work is abolished, not labor.

Are you one of those backwards "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" motherfuckers?

That is a mistake. There is very much a new consciousness, not in the trans-humanist techno-mystic-fetishistic sort of way you are implying, but in the sense that social being determines consciousness, a change in social relations (read "revolution") creates a change in consciousness.

The semi-state is the "body of enforcement" of the working class' revolutionary activity (my guess, not guaranteed in any way, is a centralized network of armed soviets). Let me clarify: the working class does not delegate its tasks to its state, the apparatus that results from the political dimension of its activity (it carrying out its tasks) is the semi-state.

Is it beginning to make sense why when the proletariat ceases, slows down, or doesn't go far enough with its revolutionary activity (a.k.a. the revolution degenerates), the semi-state will necessarily degenerate? The economic and political are not separate. If the social revolutions' process of changing the social relations (the transformation of the base) ceases (it stops being revolutionary), the superstructural reflection of this activity will also cease (the semi-state stops the process of its disappearance, it cements and "statifies" itself, and it necessarily loses its proletarian character [as it can only be proletarian so long as it is the reflection of the process of the proletariat's destruction of capitalism]). If something stops being revolutionary in nature, so, by necessity, will its political dimension.

Okay we just need everyone to rebel in the entire world to rebel within a short time span and we can't organize in unions or parties.
If you're right it means socialism can be nothing but a thought experiment.

Man, the lengths that Marxists will go to before they admit that maybe - just maybe - their sweet prince was wrong about something

Where the fuck did he write that?

The part where it had to happen at an international scale without losing momentum, and parties and unions are an appendage of bourgeois society.

The movement was one which was confined in the bourgeois state and its appendages: social democratic parties (then the bolshevized "communist" ones, unions, etc.).

I can't tell you how naive a relatively fast world revolution is considering that has never been the way classes siezed power in the past.

OP: Believe it or not, your post has actually helped to solidify my transition towards a (Libertarian (duh)) Marxist identity. The Marxist understanding of the state is more in line with actual political theory and the realities of external threat and internal disorganization thwart most efforts at forming communes. I think an effective leftist identity under most circumstances can be summed up as thinking like a Marxist and acting with the spirit of an Anarchist. Anarchists shouldn't be faulted for their eagerness to revolt when most Marxists are (as we all know) stoic stiff-asses who're completely unable to relate to others, speaking purely in forms of dogmatic identity here.

All that said, I think that my boy Bookchin does the best job of bridging the gap between Marxists and Anarchists. I wish we could discuss him more here even if the discussion would potentially end with me losing respect for one of my heroes.

Left Communism does not support National liberation movements of oppressed nations which is why Left communists exists mainly in only countries in the centres of capitalism and imperialism (Western countries). This opposition to national liberation is the chauvinism of white men living in the first world having the muh privilege to type comfortably in their first world homes without needing to think about the struggles for life and death on a daily basis.

One example is leftcoms chauvinism is their position on their Kurdish freedom movement masqueraded behind their supposed opposition to inter-imperialist war.

roarmag.org/essays/privilege-revolution-rojava-solidarity/

kropotkitten.tumblr.com/post/129565513843/kurdish-feminist-dilar-dirik-on-the-white-lefts

marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/05/think.htm

Piss off Gilles Dauve
Gilles Dauve is a pedophile moufawad-paul.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/gilles-dauve-should-join-sparts.html

Not in the way you are thinking. It will probably start as a minority, but it must expand. as more and more are thrust into practical revolutionary activity, class consciousness spreads like wildfire.

In the end, though, yes, socialism requires the active participation of the great great majority. That doesn't mean the revolution will start as a great majority though, it will probably start as a minuscule minority.

Not in the social-democratic or Leninist sense, no, but I didn't say "no parties" period.
I think we need an internationalist communist party, a world centralized organization of revolutionaries. But it isn't a "party" in the Leninist sense (it isn't separate from the class and its role isn't to act as a substitution for the class and establish its own dictatorship, but to fight for the continued engagement in class struggle, to clarify the program and fight for the adoption of the internationalist communist program in the class wide organs), and we can't just "construct" it out of sheer willpower, it can only be the result of a sharpening of class struggle and the crystallization of lessons of the struggle in the form of the proletarian vanguard organization.

My guess would be that central organs of revolution are the soviets and the party, the soviets arising out of the centralization of strike committees, other committees of struggle associations, etc. And the role of the party being to fight for the development of practical activity organized by these bodies in a communist direction and the adoption of the class program by these bodies.

Can these class wide organizations be permanent? No. Just look at how much the movement in russia was weakened by the Mensheviks making the soviets into permanent organs. Permanent mass organizations in the imperialist stage of capitalism cannot maintain their revolutionary content, because they will eventually be forced into a position of attempting to mediate the contradiction between labor and capital and we all know what that means.

But then again, new forms of organization may very well be forged in the struggle!

To address what I think is your main idea here: Communism is the revolutionary movement of the class to negate itself, communism has a program, and class conscious proletarians must organize to maintain and clarify the program in light of the development of the struggle by the class as a whole. We must also tirelessly fight for the development or organizations of struggle outside and against the unions and leftist parties so the class can engage in struggle against capital and its state to the fullest extent.

tl;dr: >>713243

You never actually attacked my argument in any other way than a glorified >but I don't like it when things are different than I thought they were.

pics related

Why hasn't there been left-com movements in the regions of the world most exploited and oppressed by capitalism and imperialism?

Cool!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism_in_China

We don't support nat lib movements because in the imperialist stage of capitalism there is no such thing as national "independence" and supporting bourgeois nationalist movements means supporting the proletariat subjugating their movement to the movement of the national democratic bourgeoisie.
We support the proletariat putting the interests of no class ahead of its own. The proletariat must struggle relentlessly against the bourgeoisie. No form of nationalism is compatible with the interests of the the proletariat. It can do nothing but inhibit the proletariat in its struggle against capital.

That wikipedia article has nothing to do with the Left-Communist tradition you identify with but everything to do with the GPCR, which is very much within the confines of Maoism.

We support the proletariat putting the interests of no class ahead of its own. The proletariat must struggle relentlessly against the bourgeoisie. No form of nationalism is compatible with the interests of the the proletariat. It can do nothing but inhibit the proletariat in its struggle against capital.

So the Kurdish freedom movement is actually an reactionary force to socialist revolution in the middle east?

kek

yes

Is the Kurdish freedom movement's goal global revolution?

why do people use word when they do not know what they mean?

...

Many unions at least in the Americas have been completely co-opted by the leadership and corporate management or in the case of Mexico for example are a component of the state and only serve to prevent the formation of an actual union.

The UAW is a major culprit in selling out its workers. The fat tub of shit shaking the Ford exec's hand literally said "striking won't do any good" right before forcing through contracts that thoroughly fucked every single auto-worker.

So what?

You are ok from time to time, leftcom poster.

Our opposition to natlib is based on an analysis of the current conditions of capitalism and the conclusion is that every war is of imperialist and thus capitalist nature. There is no "progressive" national liberation in decadent capitalism. National liberation is merely the struggle of various ascending national bourgeois factions wo seek to seize territory and its working class. The function of the working class in such a struggle is merely that of a pawn. For the proletariat there's nothing to gain from supporting one faction of the bourgeoisie against another.
You on the other hand base your support for national liberation on orientalism and romantic views of the noble savage. You just can't think of the capitalist class in the imperialist periphery to be as anti working class as our domestic capitalists. This isn't just totally opposed to marxism but it's racist hogwash as well.

there is no "left-com" movement; there's only the international proletarian movement which is communism without adjectives. We leftcoms merely provide answers to questions that have been obscured by stalinists, social democrats and bourgeois enemies for the last 100 years.

Yeah Bookchin was like anti-Marxist. What are you talking about?

Sorry none of them read Pannekoek, Bordiga or whatever. Though I find it odd considering Leftcoms don't like the Chinese revolution that one mentions this.

If you actually read and watch people involved they often mention that Democratic Confederalism is not just for Kurdish people but for everyone so yes. Furthermore there have been attempts to connect with other struggles such as the Philippines and Nepal.

I'm not a tankie thank you

So Rojava is a bourgeois national liberation movement despite collectivizing property, setting up co-ops (not communism I know, inb4 co-ops aren't different from an capitalist enterprise), and implementing a direct democratic structure?

Are the PKK representatives of the Kurdish national bourgeoisie?

No I'm just following the Leninist line on the right of nations to self-determination.

Yes I can, for example the comprador Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan (Barzani & Talabani groupings) who want their own independent state from Iraq and have supressed worker movements in the past, for example

campin.me.uk/Politics/10days.html

Theres something very wrong I think if you treat what's happening in Iraqi Kurdistan as the same as what's happening in Rojava.

One more question, how does a left-com relate to LGBT and feminist struggles? Is it approached in the same way as the national question?

Of course the proletarian movement is global, I mean't why aren't there are no left-coms in the global periphery?

yes, exactly. Collectivization doesn't imply socialism, as the other user said socialism is going to rise from the ashes of the global revolution. In a way you are a tankie, for you seem to believe that socialism confined to a certain area is possible. Tanks might call it socialism in one country, for you it's socialism in one mountain range. Communism is the movement for the abolition of the current state of affairs, which is necessarily happening worldwide. So them setting up coops (exactly, they aren't different from a capitalist enterprise) and a direct democratic structure is nothing more than cosmetically applying a socialist mask to their nationalist struggle. They might not represent the whole kurdish national bourgeoisie but surely the petit bourgeois who are more than happy that their big brother is getting collectivized.

Unlike le leftypol memester anti-sjws leftcoms generally view the daily reproduction of capitalism to encompass not only the class structure but race and gender as well. This doesn't mean that leftcoms engage in politics of identity, as we believe that capitalist opression can only be overcome by overcoming capitalism.

Besides some ultraleft campus commies and the various leftom orgs (most prominently the ICC, which is more of a sect tbh) even here in the West a leftcom movement is virtually inexistent. While there might be more leftcoms in the West than in the periphery of imperialism this doesn't mean that the difference in numbers is huge.

cont.

and to be honest, our task shouldn't be to popularize leftcom positions. We aren't trying to establish a club, a cadre of theory nerds who will then guide the working class through the revolution. Instead the task of leftcoms (and every communist as well) should be trying to raise class consciousness and helping to build the global working class party which isn't a "leftcom" party.

What is the left-com position of the nature of the peasantry? Does the peasantry have any revolutionary potential for example in an alliance with the proletariat? A Worker-peasant alliance?

"Have"? You probably mean "had".

the rural bourgeois? no.
The rural workers and impoverished substitution peasants? Yes.

there are three of us here

He was a Stalinist and then a Trotskyist during his early years and incorporated Marxist ideas in his libertarian municipalist program, a part of the greater Communalist philosophy, decentralizing power down to the level of confederations of, well, he prefers the Greek term polis but let's not kid ourselves here – in the short term they'll effectively be (highly democratic) city-states.

social-ecology.org/wp/2002/09/harbinger-vol-3-no-1-the-communalist-project/

History has proven that

Is just a meme. The USSR was terribly disorganised, both which the military and with industry.
Performance wise decentralisation and and democratisation has always meant higher efficiency meaning that on the subject of defending yourself against external threats, having a state makes you less likely to win.

But I suppose meme-based political theory feels a lot better.

At no point did I mention efficiency. The USSR was inefficient, though, yes, but that has more to do with Russia having been a backwater shithole before its revolution and a pariah within the global capitalist community during/after when the (undemocratic, murderous) Bolsheviks seized power than the USSR being a state. Marxist-Leninists seize power at such a scale with such uncompromising impatience that they are doomed to fail and this failure has warped anarchists' understanding of what a state could be if we follow the example of Rojava and, as best as we can, acknowledging their circumstances to be uniquely permissive of overtly revolutionary activity, work to take back our communities. Anarcho-syndicalism is/was the best program that anarchists have to offer and it most made sense within the context of early capitalist (the period) states such as Spain. Revolutionary Catalonia is as good as it will ever get for self-identified anarchists and, having studied abroad in Barcelona myself for 4 months, I do believe it to have been a uniquely revolutionary atmosphere the likes of which we have not seen before or since in the capitalist era. Unfortunately, full-blown worker self-management does not lend well to the sort of defensive flexibility that wartime demands, hence its failure to align itself with the Republican government even when Fascist intervention made it clear that the Francoists had the upper hand. Outside of this industrialized context, "anarchist" programs have only succeeded in places like the Chiapas, which is little more than a tourist attraction for leftists (and I do want to visit the Zapatistas, don't get me wrong).

What Bookchin envisions is not the destruction of the state but the replacement of it as we, through grassroots politics as opposed to institutional statecraft, establish our own states, staying true to the anarchist vision of building a new society within the shell of the old. Bookchin uses the term polis to describe these metropolitan-based polities with the intent of illustrating the Athenian character of these delegate democracies. This time, though, given our level of technological development, we wouldn't need a slave underclass to support our political involvement quite so much.

Basically, I think that Left Communists understand the big picture and that Bookchin should guide how we engage in revolution. We do genuinely need to deconstruct the Marxist/Anarchist binary because if we only follow the examples of each tendency's respective ideologues then you'll find that Marxists will think too much and act too little while their equally stubborn Anarchist counterparts will think too little and act too much.

I don't normally argue with people on the Internet so if I'm unclear then let me know. At a glance, it looks like the diagram in is useful here. I see myself occupying the space where (real, non-individualist/mutualist) Anarchism overlaps with Left Communism. I don't know much about council communism so I plan on reading up on that sometime soon.

Definition of state: a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory; especially one that is sovereign. The state holds a monopoly on violence over a given territory.

And a DotP lacks which of these qualities?

Nice arguments comr8

Can you be a bit more concrete?

You don't think the important part is "of what".
Adding more democracy to, for example, a union, doesn't solve the problem. In many instances it can exasperate the problem by making them appear to be neutral entities.

The revolution is one from below, for sure, but it doesn't necessarily start democratic and decentralized all at once, the working class will organize and re-organize itself as it goes along.

When the revolution first breaks out, mass democratic organs (unions, councils, parties), will probably be filled with reformists, tied to the capital and its state.

Insurrection may not be initially be headed or even backed by democratic organizations, (I would imagine only the vanguard / most class conscious will be leading it, not necessarily grouped as a single organization though, there might simply be multiple pockets of activity), only as the revolution goes on will more and more workers be thrust into activity where they must find some organization (I assume councils, with a party organization leading it). Democracy may sometimes inhibit revolutionary activity, and sometimes be the only suitable form for it.

*the important part is "of what"?

See, shitters like you are why I'm starting to drift away from Marxism. The further we move towards the future and the more capitalism changes, the more that Marxist-Leninists look like historical reenactment societies and the more that orthodox Marxism resembles obscure religious practice, treating Marx and Engels as prophets communicating a revelation rather than humans. This isn't an embrace of liberal ideology, but it shows the total detachment that people like OP have from reality. At least Holla Forumsacks have crawled out of their basement and are influencing the real world.

Yes.
Democratic unions never had any power at all.
The CNT never happened, the weekend isn't real, and we don't have 8 hour work-days.

The unions you keep complaining about are all top-down and thus their leadership may be corrupted, the exact same problem with a state.

From Marxism or socialism in general?

already been addressed:

...

...

kek

Over and over we are told how "new" conditions require a change in the science, rather than the results:
"However, what is brought forward here as an argument against Marxism is in reality only another confirmation of it. Certainly, the Russian state-capitalism, in which class relations are continued, cannot employ the Marxian science, for this science consists of nothing but the critique of those selfsame capitalistic conditions, which characterize Russia and every other capitalistic country. For the purpose of justifying the exploitation of the workers, the inequalities of income, and the accumulation of capital that exists there, the Marxian economic theories are certainly useless."

Marxist theory isn't wrong, it just isn't being applied, so the Social Democrats can continue on with their program which leaves abstract labor intact, and thus dead labor the ruler over the living, just with a tweak here or there on the kind of organization with which to keep the working class tied to capitalism (unions, parties, parliament, etc.).

There can be no substantial change in theory at the time, because to do so would break the whole reason it is a science: there is no movement of the working class (communism) on which to base a change in its scientific doctrine.

When the working class rises again to assert its revolutionary character (from its inherent interests in and ability to abolish itself): then a change in revolutionary theory is immanent (if it is to not lose its status as a science).

When it comes to the state, though, the essence of the state has not changed, so neither should the core of the theory of it in the doctrine of the revolutionary proletarian. In fact, the only change in the state has been its further subjugation to capital, its increasing role in the stabilization of capitalist social relations, and its incorporation of permanent "workers'" organizations. The contradictions which gave rise to (and continue to necessitate) the state have grown in intensity, the state is going to be harder to get rid of than ever before.

savingimage.exe
name field related

Meaning the state claims that it has the right to control people and the power to do so (think Stirner's argument that power to possess = possession). A DotP, of course, is quite useless if it doesn't have the power to acheive it's goals or the will to do so.

Ok, that's a bit easier to grapple with:
So, the proletarian semi-state / DotP does not satisfy those conditions in a standard and meaningful way.

The DotP does not have the "right" to control people, nor does it try and convince people it does, nor does that make it "useless". The working class becomes the ruling class only as it abolishes itself. Its semi-state is simply the political dimensions of the structure with which it does this. As socialism emerges, there is no more a reason for the repression of an enemy which no longer exists by a class which no longer exists, and there is no such thing as "political" anything. Because the working class can only free itself by it freeing itself from itself (workers can only be liberated by being liberating themselves from work [the dialectic of capital and labor is one which can only be solved by the negation of capital by labor {proletarian revolution, DotP} via the self-negation of labor {reorganization of society, dismantling economy, abolishing work - the destruction of abstract labor, which destroys value [whose essence is abstract labor], which obviously negates the value side of the dialectic of the commodity, leaving only the production of use-values - subjugating labor to the rest of life, rather than the other way around}]), communism can only emerge as the conscious reorganization of life, the proletarian dictatorship can only be such by being open and reserving nothing about its nature, it is the political expression of the revolutionary self-abolition of the proletariat. Unlike the bourgeois state which must convince the masses that is a neutral entity which comes from above and is natural and necessary, and during the periods where capitalism is most stable it is most democratic, and pretends to be the most open, the proletarian semi-state never pretends to be anything else but the expression of proletarian rule (which can only exist as the political expression of the proletariats' self-abolition). It need not convince anyone that is just or necessary, because precisely through the working class' actions of creating change does the DotP operate. The worker who, instead of spending his or her time revolutionizing productive relations, spends it trying to convince others of the "justice" or "right" of the state is worse than useless, they are part of the counter-revolution!

If you think real Marxists would ever speak of the "rights" of the state to do anything, please read Critique of the Gotha Program (excerpts related).

(cont)
The state is what keeps society together in epochs where it is torn apart by classes. The bourgeois state keeps society together by preserving the rule of capital. But the rule of capital is negated neither simply by the workers smashing of the current state machinery, nor their seizure of the workplace, nor even both together. What matters is what they do. As the working class abolishes abstract labor and puts labor under the control of the rest of life (ceasing to be "workers"), as the class contradiction in society is being negated by communism (the working class' self-negation), there is a period of flux between the capitalist mode of production and the communist one. During said period flux, while the class contradiction is being resolved, those contradictions still exist until they don't, obviously. This means that until the contradictions which tear apart bourgeois society are completely overcome, they will still give rise to a state. So, if you merely smash the current state, but create no change in the productive relations (or not enough; read: "the revolution ceases to go on"), a new state machine will develop to stabilize the rule of capital, or the remnants of the old state machinery will regain "power". It should be of no surprise either that this bourgeois state may even arise out of the remnants of the proletarian semi-state from a defeated revolution.

"The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'.

"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

Is it starting to make sense why the question to which the DotP is the answer is not one of tactics/strategy/etc. but of the essence of the (necessarily withering) political sphere during the proletariats' reorganization of society?

But the state is in competition with the bourgeoisie, just look at how much businesses fight regulations!

They love regulations, they just want regulations that help them line their pockets. If there is any regulation in a capitalist state that hurts profits that will typically be a result of certain industries attacking others, but it can also come about from a legitimate attempt to improve the lot of working people. This reform will always be top-down and the proletariat will have no leading role but sometimes is has historically come about from a real disagreement between between the rich on how badly they should treat the poor.

The only real exceptions to these rules are brief examples like the last few years of the Third Reich. Bureaucracies can act on their own for a while, but ideology is a weak motivation for state power and said state muster either return into the hands of the proletariat or bourgeoisie at some point. No state can just perpetually act on it's own, that's ridiculous. A politician's power isn't enough, if he really wants to abuse it and enrich himself he has to side with business elites.

has a democratic socialist republic even been tried though?
Like a representatve democracy (proportional, with preferential voting, and direct democratic legislation like the swiss i think) that literally nationalized all industry
yeah I know democracy isn't some magic bullet but fuck
it should be fucking tried
like fucking norway. they could do it

The Stalin-era USSR was actually on-par with Western "democracies" in terms of popular participation, so that should give you an idea of how difficult a representative-democratic system is to maintain. Elections to the numerous local committees gave more direct control to workers, but candidates for the state legislature were presented by the party and people just had the choice to elect or reject them. The multiple candidates and multiple parties present in Western oligarchies are just a formality with no real value, their systems are a lot more similar to the Soviet one than they'd have you believe. I'm actually apologetic for soviet democracy though, the Stalin constitution was a step in the right direction and some officials really did lose their positions because they were just voted out. But with this flawed system the USSR was only able to retain communism by regular anti-opportunist purges within the party and, of course, it didn't last forever.

Say one of those arguments then? Every time someone posts this "we need to update Marxism" (somehow implying Marxism has been engaged and developed at all in the last 100 years) it always ends up being the most shitty arguments like "the proletariat doesn't exist any more bc factories are gone" or "tendency of rate of profit to fall isn't real, companies make millions".

The only people who say Marxism is "outdated", simply hasn't read enough Marx (and then I'm courteous enough to imply they've read any).

...

Yep, Marxism and communism are as much the doctrines for human emancipation as they were a century ago. The movement has just lost what it had as a result of violent repression. I'm actually ML but I've grown sympathetic to left-coms like the OP (in spite of their near-religious paranoia of the tankie menace) because of people like that clown you replied to. Marxists have pretty much got the entire world figured out, we don't have to make any concessions to anyone.

Yes, regulations written by the representatives of businesses in other industries who have interests in them.

You misspelled "capitalism bringing out its left wing to stabilize itself and prevent revolution"

What do you mean, "on their own" from what?
Like, completely independent from capital?
Fucking kek, bureaucratic state planning is just as much determined by the rule of capital. The state is not an entity separable from capital.

It isn't a "weak" one, it isn't one. The state never rests upon ideology as a foundation. The contradictions which necessitate the state for society to reproduce itself are not contradictions within ideology, but within the material forces of society.

A state cannot "return" into the hands of the proletariat. The bourgeois state apparatus is never in the hands of the proletariat, most especially in the epoch of imperialism (not to say they were before). The bourgeois state apparatus is the apparatus needed by society to reproduce itself (i.e. maintain the rule of capital), the state can not be used for any other purpose. The state does not change masters like it is some kind of pet who simply has to be trained to serve its new master. The master of the bourgeois state is and always be capital.

You are missing the point, it isn't a bullet at all.
pic related
Again, the question is not "how to organize 'x'", but "what is the 'x' being organized"?
If it is a bourgeois state, then what is being organized is the rule of capital.

this, except minus the whole last half.

Depends what you mean by "Marxism and communism", if you mean "the doctrine of those who claim to be Marxist" then no, it never was a doctrine for human emancipation, but for the bourgeois revolutions led by the proletariat in the imperialist epoch where the bourgeoisie is too weak to lead its own revolution. And even if you are talking about real Marxism, rather than Marxism as the aformentioned ideology for bourgeois revolutions in the imperialist epoch, this still does not follow:
Marxism is necessarily an open living system, it is a critique. It is by necessity an open moving doctrine which reflects the real movement of communism. If someone who claimed to be a Marxist actually did have the whole world figured out, then Marxism as a science of critique from the perspective of the movement of the proletariat would actually be disproven. While this does not mean "revision", it means constant critique from the perspective of the movement of the only revolutionary class.

Just because revision is not needed or justified does not mean "Marxists have everything figured out". This is the anti-thesis of Marxism. Anyone who espouses that Marxists understand everything is actually ''revisionist".

Especially by those who claim to be "Marxists".

Tankies are only one component of the counter-revolution.