Left-Wing Discussion Thread III

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Left communism is usually used to describe the semi-anarchist and trotskyist ideologies within Communism.

Left communism is almost never used to refer to Trotskyism. It generally refers to council communism or, as proto-left communism, to Luxemburgism.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Modern trots don't adhere to the principles of the revolutionary vanguard party, nor to the concept of the possibility of revolution within one state, which are basic Leninist principles.
Many aren't even supportive of basic Marxist tenets such as the dictatorship of the proletariat anymore.

Which parties are you referring to? Most Trotskyists I know support a revolutionary vanguard.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

If you define fascism as authoritarianism, then every form of revolutionary communism is fascist, because every form is authoritarian. Subjecting people to punishment without due process, is innately authoritarian.

As I suggested earlier, authority and authoritarianism are not the same. Revolutionary left communism stands for emancipation. That is diametrically opposed to all forms of authoritarianism.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Left communists are not "Orthodox Marxists", though we do stress the fundamentals in Marx and Engel's critique of political economy, something that has historically been either misinterpreted or wilfully obfuscated, as in the case of Stalinism.

IMO, left communism continues the legacy of orthodox Marxism.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

How were the Purges lies?

Good question.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

How were the Purges lies?

It's not a purge if they're all crypto-trots, NKVD was an anti-terrorist force

So you are saying that no purges occurred because the people purged did not subscribe to your tendency?

[Kubra]

It's not a purge if they're all crypto-trots, NKVD was an anti-terrorist force

So you are saying that no purges occurred because the people purged did not subscribe to your tendency?

er, I was joking

[Alsheb]

If there is no money in "real" socialism, how does grocery shopping work? Or clothing shopping? Also how do scarcer occupations provide higher incentive?

There is money in Socialism. Claiming differently is insane leftcom nonsense.

[Alsheb]

If you define fascism as authoritarianism, then every form of revolutionary communism is fascist, because every form is authoritarian. Subjecting people to punishment without due process, is innately authoritarian.

As I suggested earlier, authority and authoritarianism are not the same. Revolutionary left communism stands for emancipation. That is diametrically opposed to all forms of authoritarianism.

Then how are you planning to defend the revolution and destroy the counterrevolutionary elements if not with a modicum of authoritarianism?

[Bakery Hill]

So here's an x-post from the fem thread, reading this article, I wonder what left feminists think of it.

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/handmaid ... -theocracy

As an active supporter of the pro-choice movement I regard family planning in all forms as one of the great human advancements. But new problems call for new ideas and women face many today. As with so much progressive discourse, we still talk as though it were the 1950s, the nuclear family was still intact, and an ultra-traditonalist, tyrannical patriarchal order reigned. We like to imagine ourselves fighting the simpler battles of the cultural revolutionaries of the sixties.

What has happened instead, a half century on from the sexual revolution, is something more complicated — a total hegemonic fusion of the corporate and the countercultural, of progressivism, modernity, and the market. It is pregnancy, not birth control, that burdens our current system with awkward unprofitable human functions and needs.

The mythologies of our age in the West are not enforced by repressive theocratic regimes, but by the market command to be free, to be creative, to be flexible, to love what you do for even the most uninspiring of jobs. Work flexibility and freedom from ties to family duty and hierarchical institutions promised by the corporate-counterculture that reached its zenith in the 1990s has turned out to mean increased precarity and a race to the bottom in living standards. The promise of this vision has become, for those who can’t enter adulthood but are edging closer to natural infertility, a permanent CV-building career ladder leading to nowhere.

Trump’s courting of anti-abortion conservatives and the fervent anti-feminism of his online traditional wife-seeking male fans certainly suggest a worrying turn but we are still far from Gilead. The real material unfreedom women experience today is a product of the subordination of everything to the market, not to traditionalism. Indeed, the rightward turn represented by the emergence of the youthful Trumpian right may be in part a product of the failure of progressive movements to diagnose our new problems of loneliness and atomization with calls for more of the sixties — individual freedoms, self-expression, and non-conformism.

[...]

Pretending we live in a perpetual 1950s is not going to help us to think through our new problems, let alone solve them. Childlessness, just like childbearing, is not a freedom unless it’s a choice. The traditionalists who wish to take away women’s reproductive rights are a real threat that we should continue to fight. But the much greater yet more inconspicuous dystopia all around us today remains the pressure of the market to make profit for others and call it freedom, to remain ideal employees even at the expense of life itself.

[Mattopilos II]

Well, I certainly agree with it. One needs to look at more possible causes of our lack of freedom, living standards, etc. than just what we used to think it was. We must always look, question, and discuss what is happening around us, not stick to older and more "trusted" stances on what causes what in the social sciences. Much like the natural sciences, social science too marches on. We know more than we did, so we need to use more than we did to understand what we actually want, and how we are going to get there.

[Bakery Hill]

The implications from all this are really quite intriguing.

It suggest that many leftists need to rethink and really nail down the relationship between gender roles and capitalism properly, because there seems to be a real trend where many leftists fail to properly factor in the monumental shifts that happened in that relationship in the post 60s West. And this isn't just restricted to gender roles, standing where we are now there's been massive changes in how society frames individual freedom and our social purpose compared to say the pre-1950s industrial society. And these changes haven't destroyed capitalism instead the growing material trends of automation and transnational finance have worked with that cultural libertarianism to enslave us more in our economic lives. Failure to really sit down and have a think about this really means we can't understand the times we live in.

[Mattopilos II]

The implications from all this are really quite intriguing.

It suggest that many leftists need to rethink and really nail down the relationship between gender roles and capitalism properly, because there seems to be a real trend where many leftists fail to properly factor in the monumental shifts that happened in that relationship in the post 60s West. And this isn't just restricted to gender roles, standing where we are now there's been massive changes in how society frames individual freedom and our social purpose compared to say the pre-1950s industrial society. And these changes haven't destroyed capitalism instead the growing material trends of automation and transnational finance have worked with that cultural libertarianism to enslave us more in our economic lives. Failure to really sit down and have a think about this really means we can't understand the times we live in.

It leads to trends where we think reform is making us more free, when the opposite can be the case - those in power can use this illusion to exploit you further, while you believe you are the one choosing to do so.

[Trotskylvania]

If there is no money in "real" socialism, how does grocery shopping work? Or clothing shopping? Also how do scarcer occupations provide higher incentive?

There is money in Socialism. Claiming differently is insane leftcom nonsense.

More proof that you never bothered with the "Marx" part of Marxism-Leninism. Here's Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it.He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

This also should handily answer Parkus' earlier question about the allocation of goods in lower-stage communism, or socialism if you prefer. Apportionment of the social product according to labor time is one possible system, and one that makes intuitive sense. Though, as Marx here notes about deductions, meaning the proportion of labor time that must be spent towards maintaining or expanding tools of production, infrastructure etc. And it would also include, as Bordiga notes in his Dialogue With Stalin, some allocations would be made according to need even in socialism, such as the apportionment of quinine to those in an area afflicted with Malaria.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Then how are you planning to defend the revolution and destroy the counterrevolutionary elements if not with a modicum of authoritarianism?

Simple, revolutionary liberation is radical democracy, not authoritarianism.

[Alsheb]

There is money in Socialism. Claiming differently is insane leftcom nonsense.

More proof that you never bothered with the "Marx" part of Marxism-Leninism. Here's Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it.He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

This also should handily answer Parkus' earlier question about the allocation of goods in lower-stage communism, or socialism if you prefer. Apportionment of the social product according to labor time is one possible system, and one that makes intuitive sense. Though, as Marx here notes about deductions, meaning the proportion of labor time that must be spent towards maintaining or expanding tools of production, infrastructure etc. And it would also include, as Bordiga notes in his Dialogue With Stalin, some allocations would be made according to need even in socialism, such as the apportionment of quinine to those in an area afflicted with Malaria.

You're talking about Communism, i.e. the ultimate goal of Socialism, to be achieved in a far future. We were talking about the immediate, Socialist society that comes after the Revolution.

[Trotskylvania]

More proof that you never bothered with the "Marx" part of Marxism-Leninism. Here's Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it.He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

This also should handily answer Parkus' earlier question about the allocation of goods in lower-stage communism, or socialism if you prefer. Apportionment of the social product according to labor time is one possible system, and one that makes intuitive sense. Though, as Marx here notes about deductions, meaning the proportion of labor time that must be spent towards maintaining or expanding tools of production, infrastructure etc. And it would also include, as Bordiga notes in his Dialogue With Stalin, some allocations would be made according to need even in socialism, such as the apportionment of quinine to those in an area afflicted with Malaria.

You're talking about Communism, i.e. the ultimate goal of Socialism, to be achieved in a far future. We were talking about the immediate, Socialist society that comes after the Revolution.

Marx used the terms "socialism", "communism," "cooperative society" and "free association of producers" interchangeably, making no distinction. Marx makes this clear soon after:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (emphasis mine)

By implication, Marx was referring to the lower phase of communism or socialism earlier, or else he would not distinguish here.

Elsewhere in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx states "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."

The dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the state, classes, property, and money all persist, is clearly treated as distinct from socialism. Conflating the two is semanticly useless. You fall right into the liberal trap that "socialism is when the government does things, and the more things the government does, the more socialist it is."

[Nature-Spirits]

I recently came across this video which lays out very well what a society organised according to anarcho-syndicalist principles would look like. It's well worth a watch.

Tangentially related, what do people here think of De Leonism? I'm more and more finding myself agreeing with De Leon's proposition that the working class needs to use the legal methods of seizing political control currently available to us before dismantling the state. I think that that's especially true in the modern world. I've come to believe that violent insurrection -- although it certainly has a time and a place -- is not a viable tactic in current Western society. Although the general strike is still, I think, something to aspire to, and I remain a staunch syndicalist (of one stripe or another), using bourgeois elections to wrest control of the state and gain legitimacy (in the eyes of both the people and the world) makes a lot of sense. As long as no one tries to cement state/party power -- which would go against De Leon's teaching -- I think it would work out fairly well.

[Ostroeuropa]

I recently came across this video which lays out very well what a society organised according to anarcho-syndicalist principles would look like. It's well worth a watch.

Tangentially related, what do people here think of De Leonism? I'm more and more finding myself agreeing with De Leon's proposition that the working class needs to use the legal methods of seizing political control currently available to us before dismantling the state. I think that that's especially true in the modern world. I've come to believe that violent insurrection -- although it certainly has a time and a place -- is not a viable tactic in current Western society. Although the general strike is still, I think, something to aspire to, and I remain a staunch syndicalist (of one stripe or another), using bourgeois elections to wrest control of the state and gain legitimacy (in the eyes of both the people and the world) makes a lot of sense. As long as no one tries to cement state/party power -- which would go against De Leon's teaching -- I think it would work out fairly well.

Anarchism...
https://youtu.be/i2q0T7QXETs

(Replace the nationalities with the various forms of left politics, and scots with "Syndicalists.")

De Leonism is good in that it's syndicalism that isn't necessarily hostile to the state, I support the state existing with a syndicalist economy.
However, Sorel was right in that a strike is a destructive act. I don't support de leonisms stance on strikes being a tool for syndicalism.

Strikes should be used when capitalists try to push back on gains without the approval of the workers, they are not a viable method of gaining ground, only defending.
If you use strikes all the time, you just fuck your economy, fuck your workers, and get the capital to leave the country.

Gains should be achieved through negotiation, communication, deal making, elections and laws, etc. Because there's LOTS of gains that need to be made, and perpetual strike action is economic death. There will always be another thing to demand, right up until the abolition of capitalism. those who support strike action as a means of gaining ground seem, to me at least, to imply perpetual stasis and lack of production, whereas the socialist society can only be brought about meaningfully in an environment of abundance.

When the capitalists try to REPEAL a gain, then strike action is viable.

As for "One party."
It's possible for there to be a libertarian syndicalist economy, and a social democratic syndicalist economy, a nationalist party and an internationalist party, a socially conservative party and a socially liberal party, etc.

For example, I am a Nationalist and a Syndicalist, a social democrat, and socially liberal while being opposed to progressivism.
I would presumably be a swing voter in a syndicalist system. I almost am already, but right wing capitalism is anathema to me.

[Dejanic]

More proof that you never bothered with the "Marx" part of Marxism-Leninism. Here's Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it.He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

This also should handily answer Parkus' earlier question about the allocation of goods in lower-stage communism, or socialism if you prefer. Apportionment of the social product according to labor time is one possible system, and one that makes intuitive sense. Though, as Marx here notes about deductions, meaning the proportion of labor time that must be spent towards maintaining or expanding tools of production, infrastructure etc. And it would also include, as Bordiga notes in his Dialogue With Stalin, some allocations would be made according to need even in socialism, such as the apportionment of quinine to those in an area afflicted with Malaria.

You're talking about Communism, i.e. the ultimate goal of Socialism, to be achieved in a far future. We were talking about the immediate, Socialist society that comes after the Revolution.

You're conflating and confusing the dictatorship of the proletariat with Socialism. There's 4 stages in mind.
Capitalism>Dictatorship of the proletariat>Lower stage of Communism (Socialism)>Higher stage of Communism (Communism).

The idea that if a Socialist party or vanguard party or whatever were to instantly take over the stage, it were to become "Socialist" is pretty false. This is going to depend on what angle you take and obviously you're a Marxist-Leninist so you believe in SIOC, but I agree with Trotsky's analysis and see no way in hell that genuine Socialism is going to exist if not on a mass international scale, preferably global. If the means of production, distribution and exchange are all held socially on an international scale then it isn't "Left Com nonsense" to see money either lose value and be transformed into something else (labour tokens) or wither away entirely.

I don't see Socialism as an entirely fluid means of production like Communism mind you and I do think that money definitely could exist under Socialism, but not to the same standard as it does now; also I'm a Democratic Socialist not a Marxist so I don't follow Marx to the T but 4 stages are his works.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

er, I was joking

Cool. A lot of people around the Internet actually believe that the purges never occurred. It is perhaps not as bad as being a Holocaust denier, but it still fails to respect the struggles of legitimate revolutionaries who disagreed with centralism.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

There is money in Socialism. Claiming differently is insane leftcom nonsense.

Where's the money? College professors do pretty well, but if I could make even more marketing socialism, I might give it a go.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

You're conflating and confusing the dictatorship of the proletariat with Socialism. There's 4 stages in mind.
Capitalism>Dictatorship of the proletariat>Lower stage of Communism (Socialism)>Higher stage of Communism (Communism).

The issue of stages has been debated over and over again. Marx and Engels discussed this issue very little, and, even when they did, they often did not use the same terms. My own view is that they referred to two stages (state communism/dictatorship of the proletariat and stateless communism/administration). However, I never insist upon it, since the evidence can point in different directions.

[The Parkus Empire]

If you define fascism as authoritarianism, then every form of revolutionary communism is fascist, because every form is authoritarian. Subjecting people to punishment without due process, is innately authoritarian.

As I suggested earlier, authority and authoritarianism are not the same. Revolutionary left communism stands for emancipation. That is diametrically opposed to all forms of authoritarianism.

"[A] dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants."

-Alexander Hamilton

[The Parkus Empire]

There is money in Socialism. Claiming differently is insane leftcom nonsense.

More proof that you never bothered with the "Marx" part of Marxism-Leninism. Here's Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it.He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

This also should handily answer Parkus' earlier question about the allocation of goods in lower-stage communism, or socialism if you prefer. Apportionment of the social product according to labor time is one possible system, and one that makes intuitive sense. Though, as Marx here notes about deductions, meaning the proportion of labor time that must be spent towards maintaining or expanding tools of production, infrastructure etc. And it would also include, as Bordiga notes in his Dialogue With Stalin, some allocations would be made according to need even in socialism, such as the apportionment of quinine to those in an area afflicted with Malaria.

The sole use of "quantity" as a reference, without a reference for quality, is an issue here. Not just with Marxism, of course, but with all internationalist-progress ideologies. Liberalism certainly does it as well, since it facilitates making things fungible.