Why do you hate the wolffian co-op movement? I'm a bit of a newbie leftist and I think it holds a lot of hope...

I'd think the more pressing problem with the """""communist""""" movement is their apparent inability to do anything but sit on their asses and talk shit. But I guess there's just not enough revolutionary potential floating around. :^)

Unless you fit the same leftist tendency as the post-leftists/work abolitionists, I probably haven't.

How do you figure we're similar? Left communists very much advocate for the communist movement to adopt an, at its most basic, Marxist communist revolutionary programme. The contemporary slumber of the communist movement (or any serious anti-capitalist political movement) is just what's kept our tendency's influence on it so yet to be relevant or flat-out unheard.

We are very much in agreement here.

Precisely.

Say it in non theory-speak please

It won't create or incite some revolutionary basis or spirit within its own realm (of muh coops/market 'socialism') for the working class working as the basis for an actually class conscious proletariat with the necessary tools to actually obtain socialism. Case in point: cooperatives have existed for almost a hundred years all accross Europe and they effectively provide little more than a more ethical and democratic experience as wage laborer. They may even achieve disgustingly large sizes like in southern France or Europe, where they effectively hold a regional market monopoly and the horizontal structure gets more and more broken by necessarily needing to reply to market fluctuations to meet quotas, face financial loss or even bankruptcy.

That's literally just what it is. Wolff's push for this literally runs on the platform of 'Democracy at Work', meaning that, to wolf, the problems of capitalism lie not in the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value interacting with capital and market (exchange-value) trade, but in the fact that private enterprise under the current ideology is universally accepted to sit under minority leadership. The Wolffian premise thinks the capitalist in the singular is more of a problem than capital in its entirety, effectively meaning he's more against 'capitalistism' than capitalism.

This is quite simple: the communist movement, since its inception, always opposed capitalism in its entirety (wage labor, property, market exchange/distribution and the value form) because none of its several individual characteristics can exist without the other. The working class must thus stand against all of these things simultaneously, or it will delude itself into thinking there is some 'third way' beyond this (often times being motivated heavily by desperation to be so idealistic).

Surely this would imply you could destroy one of them and topple the system.

Thanks a lot for explaining

If only. The thing is that all of these material elements that define capitalism rely on one another. Without an effective class conscious (titled 'communist' or otherwise) movement to overthrow capitalism and instate socialism, the superstructural dimension of capitalism will quickly reform capitalism (see: 20th century experiments), because capitalism is anything if not merely ductile.

No problem.

What do YOU propose we do then?

I noticed he put the value form last in that order too. Engels argued (correctly in my view) that the value form was universal to systems of commodity production encompassing slavery, feudalism, capitalism etc.

I don't get why some left-coms think that previous communist experiments were not socialist because they had the value form. Until you get to the point where human labor is 1. no longer needed or 2. social labor is so productive that there no longer needs to be any kind of compulsion (whether through need or otherwise) to perform labor then I think the value form will remain. Both of those scenarios would still require a massive cultural revolution tbh especially the second one as capitalists have been very successful at pocketing the gains of evermore productive social labor and saving their terrible market-based pricing system.

I know its not fundamentally central to capitalism as a mode of production but I'm surprised rent and interest does not come up more often in left com discussions of capitalism. But i dunno when most of the board gets their knowledge through memes maybe its important to focus on the basics…

Leftcoms want to go fast as fuck boi and have global revolution and dismantlement of money right after the revolution, and see anything not-revolution as wasted efforts.

But to have a revolutionary movement you need to build a support network and a system within a system, so you can neutralize the control of the bourgeois state over the means of production, transportation and enforcement.