Abandon Leftism, fight for communism (Sanders Edition)

Why not both? We should move to abolish capitalism with all means available, both from within and outside the existing order. The reform vs revolution debate seems retarded to me, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

I guess giving internet support for S█████ counts as activism now?

I don't care, in fact I hope that the bourgeois quail every time they hear socialism

Wow thanks for explaining what socialism is to me

Nationalised services/industry shows people that an alternative to the free market exists, most people can't be convinced only by reading books. Stuff like the NHS and national railways provide an illustration for liberals and even centrist to an extent. People will never follow some obscure doctrine that has totally shunned politics as most people understand it (ie. popular democracy). They may follow people who have shown them they can make their lives better under capitalism.

Exactly how I feel, it's the only sensible position.

Along with everyone else in the world?

The Who campaign? Didn't he endorse Hillary?
No one endorsing Hillary can be even remotely leftist.

Exactly, accelerationism is the only way. What should be done is to sit back and do absolutely nothing, waiting for capitalism to make 99% of the world unemployable through automation.

Hey, guess what? WSWS predicted precisely what would happen. Again.

The S█████ campaign was the Democratic Party preventing independent proletarian action.

And the pseudo-Left is their henchman to make sure that, even if outside the Democratic Party, proletarian activity stays within bourgeois democracy. The pseudo-Left is the major obstacle to the proletariat becoming a class through unified struggle and realizing its historical task to abolish itself, and with it, capitalism.

As usual, and as Marxist science never fails to remind its practitioners, "it is the 'educators' who need educating".

Yesterday:
wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/16/sand-j16.html

Today:
salon.com/2016/08/01/bernies_big_lesson_socialists_should_occupy_the_democratic_party_not_abandon_it/

:^🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀))

What about the proletariat? Do you want them to fear the label also?

Given how nasty the primaries got I seriously doubt that S█████ is happy with the result. In all likelihood he just sees Shillary as a preferable alternative to Trump.

i never said that
rly?

Isn't it so great how now we can talk to the workers about how they must struggle relentlessly so the USA can become like Sweden?!!!

And by "the center" you mean "action within the confines of the bourgeois state". Congratulations?

It was never and has never since been as far away from socialism as in the 40's. If it was understandable to abandon socialism, it was in the 40's.
Social Democracy is fucking cancer.

How did you get that leftism should ever be strong out of anything I said?

I fully support the scientific understanding of the transition period. Communism is a process.

What does this have to do with rallying workers to action confined to the bourgeois state?

I have no preference over people thinking that socialism = social democracy with ballots (Sweden), or socialism = social democracy with bullets (USSR).

Correct.

Pushing workers who might look elsewhere towards faith in the state (rather than themselves), however, is.

Oh my fucking god, why are leftcoms so intolerable

how will we ever recover from such devastating rebuttals?

*if it was ever understandable…

You're perpetually useless to leftism and always will be so why should I try to convince you

...

QED

Thus proving himself nothing more than politico scum.
Another head, albeit shriveled and vestigial, of the ruling class hydra.

everything I have explained has now magically been proven false by the power of you ignoring it

well duh. we've been telling you revisionist anarkiddies for the past year that S█████ is a major sack of shit and will never accomplish shit, but "hurr durr muh interest in leftism".
this is what you get for trusting a falseflagging social democrat, Holla Forums.
will anarchists ever recover?

the only thing rivaling an anarkiddie one in terms of efficacy as a cancer prediction system

LARPers who retain ideological purity by criticizing other left movements as reformist and acting in the interests of capital

LARPers who apologize for the Soviet Union and pretend to be revolutionaries.

LARPers who are actually liberals pretending to fight the power, man

Everyone is a fucking LARPer, as if deep down they know that

How do workers' councils avoid bureaucracy and militancy?

How are workers' councils supposed to coordinate without bureaucracy and militancy?

Leftcoms disdain leadership but expect "the masses" to show it absent education in the goals of communism.

Leftcoms expect workers' councils to be interested in the goals of revolution not their own self-interest, yet their activity is grounded in their particular struggles.

A lot of this seems nonsensical and an asshurt reaction to Lenin and Mao.

"workers' councils" are not the subject, communism, the movement of the working class to abolish the existing state of things is. Workers councils are merely a tool.

...

not true, we disdain self-appointed "leaders". Those who claim to represent labor and thus seek to become the mediators between labor and capital, as that is all representing labor can mean in the imperialist stage of capitalism.

I in fact, think the communist party is absolutely necessary.

Which comes from where? Who sets up workers' councils? Obviously it must be workers who've read some Marx and some leftcoms. But without those people to get the ball rolling it doesn't happen. Even "tools" require leadership to institute.

In case you haven't noticed communism is a really filthy term that causes most people to sneer. Pursuing their own interests spontaneously is definitely possible, getting past the communist stigma absent leadership is not.

So what you're saying is that every workplace on earth is going to have to have a leftcom leadership which then coordinates. I don't see leftcom communism happening any other way.

That's the beauty of them, they aren't the invention of theorists isolated in a room separate from reality, they have historically been set up spontaneously. In fact, a while ago some workers in Turkey set one up to struggle outside and against the major union.

See also: Russian Revolution (soviets), paris commune, hungarian revolution, german revolution, etc. there were soviets set up all over Europe, North and South America and parts of Asia during the international revolutionary wave at the opening of last century.

The communist content is what determines the soviet form. This communist content, of course, is partially a result of the proletariat's organ of self-clarification and unification around the internationlist communist program, the party.

Communist activity is what creates communist consciousness. And "communist consciousness" has nothing to do with "lack aversion to the word 'communism' because of its use by state capitalist regimes in the past". The vanguard focuses on elucidating what needs to be done, not what to call it.

No. The workplace is only part of the battle ground anyway, The streets, the home, etc, all of society will be reorganized during the rule of the class with with the objective of self-dissolution.

I am aware of historical examples, but they haven't necessarily been communist in nature, let alone leftcom specifically. I think the first that really mattered for Marxists was the 1844 weavers strike in Silesia (in modern Poland, then Prussia) which showed Marx spontaneous organization against capitalism was possible. But it certainly wasn't Marxist, and there's no way that particular struggle could have spread beyond the weavers' particular goals.

So this is where the party is supposed to come it. But isn't the party an organ of militancy and bureaucracy? If it is needed to coordinate then won't it spontaneously generate the aforementioned? After all it will become work unto itself, coordinating the spread of workers' councils.

I'm not convinced. What constitutes "communist activity"? Workers spontaneously organizing isn't necessarily communist in the sense they'll automatically commit to communist revolution and see that as naturally in their self-interest.

I thought that was a dirty word amongst leftcoms.

So it's not just workers' councils but communes? There's still the question of coordination on a societal scale.

wsws predicted the exact same thing over a year ago

Why are you posting this on Holla Forums?

This is a board of discussion, not a political organization.

...

I think he is an Italian leftcom.

Nigger, we are the left.

people really seem to be confused as to what leftcoms actually want lol

to be fair leftcoms are too

not really, it's just that left communism is an umbrella term for marxists who follow the tradition of the left-opposition minus trotsky. Bordiga would probably get a seizure if he knew that people put him in the same box as Pannekoek lol

I don't see how this isn't discussion

classes make revolution, not ideologies
There is no such thing as a "leftcom revolution".

So what?

Again, So? you are confusing form with content. non-radical content can still in particular situations take the form of workers' councils.

All we say is that workers council's are the historically discovered form that the DotP will take, not that the moment something is organized as a council it becomes the DotP.

Kind of, the party has a role beyond just that though.

It depends on the content, not the form "party"

It depends what is being spread and coordinated.

Communism refers to more than explicitly communist revolution, it is the whole movement up to that point to.
Movement towards a united class struggle against work and capital necessarily leads to communist consciousness.

It is for the most part, only because of the confusion it creates, we use the word occasionally (the Italian communist left used it a lot more in the past), but we mean something different from what "Leninists" mean by it.

All of life will be re-organized by the DotP, which will probably take the form of soviets.
I'm not against co-ordination, in fact I'm explicity pro-centralization. Only with a unitary organ (the centralized network of soviets) can capitalism be totally destroyed.

A revolution absent a leftcom organization goes nowhere, that much you seem to agree with. Is it really such a stretch to suggest that communist workers' councils, and perhaps communes, comprises both the form and content of a leftcom revolution?

Regarding militancy and bureaucracy, you've just handwaved it away. What I'm concerned with is the institutionalization of a revolutionary "unitary organ" that then guides and shapes the ongoing DotP. As I said before that kind of thing will involve work which is by necessity divorced from particular struggles and concerns primarily the totality of the struggle. The party/organ then has its own objectives that may conflict with the particular goals and struggles of the councils. How do you reconcile this without being charged with leninism?

The irony is that communism is going to take a lot of work to achieve. And who's to say it won't lead to anarchist consciousness instead? Leftcoms seem to have a lot in common with platformists.

It isn't a one-way mechanistic system like that. It isn't as simple as "there is no party to lead the situation, therefore it won't develop towards revolution."
One must ask, "why is there no party there in the first place". The party emerges from communist activity and reflection upon it. If there is no "leftcom organization", this itself shows a lack of communist content in the movement, but it isn't reducible to the the leftcom organization being the content itself. The party of the proletariat is not a substitute for the activity of the entire proletariat, it as an organ of the proletarian movement, not the movement itself.
There is no such thing as a "leftcom revolution", just a communist one. And same thing applies here as before.
Content determines form, and the communist content we believe must take the form of soviets, etc. but this isn't an abstraction we can mechanically implant on every situation and reduce the movement itself to the forms it takes, especially one that isn't currently happening.
Because of the particular tasks (and thus necessarily what communist content refers to) would lead us to theorize that the historically discovered organization, the workers council, is the form the communist movement will take, but this is not the movement itself. It is perfectly possible that councils are established by socdems to inhibit proletarian action, like happened in Germany.

No I haven't. If what is being centralized is a state which protects the law of value, even if the rule of capital is via an economy centralized within itself, then it will necessarily develop bureaucratic forms and instill bourgeois ideology (even if painted red), i.e. leftist "militancy". If, on the other hand, what is being centralized is the revolutionary recombination of the different spheres of life seperated by class society, the collectivization of the home (the destruction of patriarchy included in this, etc.), the destruction of wage labor, the implementation of central planning, and the smashing of the capitalist state (btw, this list is not in chronological order and these things aren't separate), then the state can only be an organ of the self-abolition of the proletariat, and wither away itself.

The unitary organ is the DotP. The class-wide organization which the class uses to destroy capitalist social relations. The party guides this process and eventually fades into the rest of the dictatorship and fully away as there is no longer a "proletariat", nor its party or dictatorship.

Clarification is an act which concerns the whole proletariat, it is not a private act, a social one, which is about the totality of the struggle, as you say, but this doesn't make it divorced from the particular. The questions, what, where, when, and how we do it next are a real part of the struggle towards abolishing capitalism.

(cont)
It depends on the situation. Are the councils developing towards a seizure of power, is the DotP already established, etc. In general though, there may be some conflicts, and this is a tough question. For example, what if a member of the party who is delegated to do something which is purely nationalist in scope, and has no internationalist perspective, the party member is in a situation where he must either resign from the party (or be expelled) or refuse to go through and have their mandate recalled by the workers. Or, let's say one of us is told to oversee the nationalization of industry, with no perspective on socializing them (getting rid of wage-labor, making labor directly social, non-abstract), we would very likely not oblige to go in a state-capitalist direction, and would be pitted against the capitalist actions of the semi-state.
But, with these examples - do you see where I am going with this? - each one of these exposes much deeper problems than simply "role of the party", they show a fundamentally non-communist content (again, where the movement is in its development is important, is this just a step towards communism? Or is this a stable, nationalist movement with no capacity for communist development?).

The problem with these "what if's" is that they posit that the party had no relevance beforehand, and is now just stuck in a position where it is assumed we must try to "fix" everything after-the-fact. This isn't how it works.

By "work", I don't mean anything "everything that takes effort". I mean "work" as in "I am going to work". Capitalist "work". The form of labor in class society, most noticeably capitalism, where it is separated from play the most possible..

This seems to be an arbitrary division, communist/anarchist consciousness, you'll have to be more concrete, communism may very well call itself "anarchist" in many situations, as in, for example, Catalonia in '36. I don't care what they call it. It is the specifics which I care about.

Not really. Platformism is essentially Leninism for anarchists. It doesn't really escape socdemmery.

Kek

Daily reminder that leftcomism is irrelevant, revisionist, and should be ignored

🍀🍀🍀leftcoms🍀🍀🍀

kek

Okay. What is this memery?

Sanders is not Communist/Marxist. Neither are "leftcom", if you want my opinion.

What is 'left wing' politics if not the class struggle?

It's discussion of a course of action.

But Holla Forums can't take a course of action. We're not a political organization.

Leftcoms were a large part of the Bolshevik party, the first congress of the international can be considered leftcom. The KPD was mostly leftcom until the majority were expelled, and they went on to form the KAPD which rivaled the KPD in size, and was in many cases larger. The PCd'I was mostly leftcom until, again, the majority were expelled.

The communist parties in hungary, belguim, netherlands, bulgaria, etc. were largely leftcom until they were dominated by the degenerated Comintern as well

In fact, originally, leftcoms were going to head the european part of the Comintern.

...

Sure is Feuerbach/Young Marx in here

So the content is the particular struggles of the workers and the councils are the form of the communist movement. Out of this arises communist activity and consciousness, and finally the DotP, the unitary organ, which the party guides. Yet none of this can be predicted, as there are no guarantees the workers' councils will actually be communist – their particular struggles may not lead them to conclude that communism is desirable as not only a solution to their particular struggle but the struggles of all.

Don't you think this is a huge problem? What are the chances that workers who've been fed a diet of anti-communism and reactionary bullshit from birth are going to make that logical leap? Very small at best. Especially so when they've probably never even read anything that isn't watered down with liberalism/reformism or outright conservatism. And of course one can't forget unions, which are essentially counter-revolutionary in that they're often explicitly opposed to spontaneous, independent activity like wildcat strikes.

Yes, you have. You're acting as if the DotP is unimpeachable and incorruptible. You're presenting an either/or situation of a revolution – either the law of value remains or it doesn't. If the former, it's bound to develop militancy and bureaucracy, the latter will somehow not. This is not an acceptable answer. The LoV won't be abolished in a single stroke. There has to be some kind of planning, some mechanisms there by design either developed soon after the revolution begins or beforehand theoretically, to counter those developments in the DotP. Has leftcom theory tackled this issue at all?

The party doesn't exist prior to workers' councils, plural, making the logical leap to pursue communism. So the party, by your explanation, is very much after-the-fact, emerging with the DotP. There is no militant vanguard party, in the leninist sense, prior to revolution – it must arise from the councils themselves.

It will be unless its addressed explicitly. The development of party bureaucracy and militancy must be checked, somehow.

It presupposes that anarchists have theoretical differences with leftcoms. I don't see how that's a controversial statement.

FUCK off autism

It's more than that, its also what they are doing in general (what is their revolutionary activity, how are they going about it, etc.)

Not directly, they are the form of certain parts of it in particular historical circumstances.

The forming of councils, depending on context, may itself be communist activity. But, in general, yes.

There is no guarantee there will ever be a communist revolution at all, this doesn't mean we can't know anything about what it will look like if it does.

Same thing as above.

You can say this about science, it's like saying: because you can't know everything, you can know nothing,

Amen. Leftcoms are anti-union.
We are on the same wavelength there!

No, I'm acting as if its form depends on its content. It most certainly is "corruptible", but this is a matter of the revolution itself. If the revolution degenerates, so will the DotP.

The revolution isn't a process that happens overnight, but value must be destroyed entirely within the revolution. If there is revolutionary reorganization of society which gradually destroys the law of value, then the forms taken by the entity that does this (the DotP) will be forms which facilitate the destruction of value. The opposite is also true, if the activity engaged in is activity which stabilizes and develops capital, then the forms will be those which facilitate those tasks and the DotP will become just another bourgeois state.

This is what the whole "transformation of all of life" thing is. It's the core of Marxist revolutionary theory.

Uhhhhh,.. yes it does…

The formation and/or centralization of the councils in the first place may be an action initiated by the party. It can't be done just by the party, as the party is a small minority, but the party may play a large part in their creation.

There aren't magic safety mechanisms divorced from the historical reality of any situation. If the party becomes an agent of capital, then it will likely develop those features. There is no magical constitution which can prevent this. It all depends on the content of the proletarian movement.

My point is that the obtainment of communist consciousness is also a process. I don't care what they call it. The theoretical divisions won't necessarily be relevant.

bump

Leftcom theory seems to be laying claim to anything that constitutes "communist" activity. I.e. it's not just workers' councils, its any kind of revolutionary activity. What in particular distinguishes leftcom theory? What makes a leftcom a leftcom? It must be something I missed.

No, it's not. It's a pretty significant problem that's being dismissed because a communist revolution may happen and, if so, we have a good idea of what it'll look like; however, workers who haven't heard of Marx outside of the 100 gorillion are incredibly unlikely to become communists. The theoretical basis, even at its most simple, is not there. Now –

This is surprising. It's very Leninist. A party existing prior to the beginning of the revolution is a militant element that is, in all likelihood, separated entirely from the particular struggles that (may) spark the revolution. As such it's concerned with that spark becoming a communist firestorm. So would intervene ASAP, if it was not fortunate enough to be in the middle of things right from the start (Lenin and Trotsky certainly weren't). In which case, its role might start small but would grow exponentially with the strength of the DotP, hence why militancy and bureaucracy could be the beginning of the end – the degeneration of the party leading to the degeneration of the revolution. Isn't that what happened over 1917-1923?

And it's incredibly vague until it's actually happening. Even as it's actually happening it'd likely remain impossible to pin down. The problem with the core is that it's a blank slate to be filled by the party, which leads it vulnerable to degeneration.

But your view is that it only happens if the DotP or the party degenerates in the sense it begins to protect the LoV. It's simply not possible for the DotP or the party to degenerate if the LoV is being actively undone. The LoV is, once again, an either/or pivot; perhaps the penultimate.

The divisions are usually there for a reason, back to Marx and Bakunin. It's not just a difference of perspective; it tends to be different praxis as well. Platformists and Leninists are still distinguishable enough for Trotsky and Makhno to start a fight.

How is it surprising?

No. It's the other way around.

I wish leftcoms would spend less time talking about what they think won't reach communism, and more time talking about what we can do during non-revolutionary times to either get to a revolutionary point, or help make a revolution easier. Even something explaining what they consider legitimate class struggle would be more helpful than this

says the guy literally sitting in front of his computer complaining about people doing nothing
lmao

Just want clarification about what leftcoms want to do before the revolution. I'm interested in anything that isn't something dumb, like just waiting or accelerationism. Just explain your position before denouncing everything else

I have a tip, people could study on what the conditions were like before any revolution happend.

B-but, that would require me to read instead of regurgitating other's positions! Impossible!