What is left communism exactly? I hear stuff like they hate any kind of electoral activism. I've become really cynical about that kind of stuff over the past year or 2, am I a left Communist? I say fuck anything to do with the Democratic party, the only chance for any kind of change is outside that shit. Tell me about left communism
What is left communism exactly? I hear stuff like they hate any kind of electoral activism...
Evan Perez
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Adam Sullivan
Not that's just normal communism.
James Thomas
an infantile disorder
Connor Stewart
Tell that to /r/socialism
Lately they've been crazy about working with the Democrats and Cortez and Russia hacking the election and shit. It's really suspicious, I wonder if the sub has been taken over from the top down
Jordan Bennett
First mistake.
Aiden Anderson
Leftcoms are utopian communists. They do nothing but criticize and sabotage anything that deviates from Marxist orthodoxy. Criticized and worked against the USSR despite having nothing to show that their methods worked better.
Justin Turner
It's a derivative of Luxembourgism
Dominic Powell
It’s basically a catch-all term for any ultra-purist Marxist sect, or more specifically, groups and people who criticized Leninist regimes for drifting too far to the right of classical Marxism. It includes such diverse figures as Luxemburg and Bordiga, who, despite being totally incompatible with one another, are both considered leftcoms.
Jeremiah Baker
luxemburg was not a leftcome, she just criticised lenin on one account or two. if she didn't get soc-demmed she might have become one later in her life.
left-communism is the radical idea that capital should be abolished instead of managed by a red cadre. that's it.
Jaxon Fisher
Who is the child?
John Adams
On a somewhat unrelated note, how do MLs refute the leftcom argument that the USSR only achieved socialism because the soviets changed the meaning of socialism to something it wasn't? As in, Marx had said that socialism didn't have money, a state or commodity production (because Marx used socialism and communism interchangeably) and that since Lenin was the first to make the distinction, which was further reaffirmed by Stalin, the true revisionists are MLs, because they don't follow Marxism religiously and how it was meant to be?
Easton Sanders
It's marxist, whereas anarchism, marxism-leninism, etc all aren't.
You obviously don't know what utopian means.
lmao
Brody Brooks
there is no refutation. left communism is the Way, the Light, the Truth
The lord of hosts will do battle for us.
BEHOLD HIS MIGHTY ARMCHAIR
Zachary James
Ian Roberts
Really it's just two sides:
Side 1: Democratic Socialism, ⛏️rotskyism, Anarcho-Communism, Syndicalism, Luxemburgism, Left Communism, Bookchinism*
Side 2: Marxist-Leninism, Juche
Wyatt Bennett
So no maoism or leninism in side 2?
Alexander King
Zachary Hall
what the hell are you talking about?
most of these groups (on side 1) have major gripes with each other
are you insane?
Adam Barnes
every one of those is its own strain of autism
Hunter Rodriguez
If Marx came back from the dead today Leftcoms would say he isn't a Marxist if they just listened to him speak for few minutes
Christian Davis
Nah. He just *really* hates muh ☭TANKIE☭s. Probably one of them touched him as a kid.
Henry Lee
More probably, he would say you're no Marxist.
John Gutierrez
Don't bother. Leftcom doesn't exist.
Caleb Jenkins
While I can say that I've flirted with left communism in the past I have now more and more come to regard it as a weird form of scholasticism. They seem to reject pretty much everything from the actual real world meat and blood experience of the workers movement in a nitpicky perfectionist manner. Both the long reformist struggles of improving conditions under capitalism and the experiences, both positive and negative, of "really existing socialism". This leads them to divorce themselves from the real world and real struggles in a way opposite to Marxism as the fusion of socialism and the workers movement.
As always Cockshott is right about everything, and he shows that you can provide a constructive left wing critique of 20th century socialism that also provides a way forward, rather than a "It doesn't conform to my perfect ideas and is therefore shit and should be rejected wholesale". Left communists throw the baby out with the bathwater more often than not.
Michael Fisher
...
Josiah Cox
It’s crazy stupid idea tbh, no where in history has capital completed it’s historical role. How anyone think you can just abolish capital without extremely advanced productive forces already existing is beyond saving:
Eli Ward
The left com
Jordan Adams
Read Critiwue of the Gotha Programme, ‘birthmarks of the old society’ etc
Thomas Wilson
Wrong. In this book, the child is… the communist movement. You should read it.
Michael Taylor
Just leaving this here:
"Internationalism means breaking with one’s own social chauvinists (i.e., defence advocates) and with one’s own imperialist government; it means waging a revolutionary struggle against that government and overthrowing it, and being ready to make the greatest national sacrifices (even down to a Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty), if it should benefit the development of the world workers’ revolution.
[…]
By now only an utter idiot can fail to see that we were not only right in overthrowing our bourgeoisie (and their lackeys, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries), but also in concluding the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty after our open appeal for universal peace, backed by the publication and annulment of the secret treaties, had been rejected by the bourgeoisie of the Entente. In the first place, if we had not concluded the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, we would at once have surrendered power to the Russian bourgeoisie and thus have done untold damage to the world socialist revolution. In the second place, at the cost of national sacrifices, we preserved such an international revolutionary influence that today we have Bulgaria directly imitating us, Austria and Germany in a state of ferment, both imperialist systems weakened, while we have grown stronger and begun to create a real proletarian army.
From the tactics of Kautsky the renegade it follows that the German workers should now defend their homeland together with the bourgeoisie and dread a German revolution most of all, for the British might impose a new edition of the Brest-Litovsk Peace on it. There’s renegacy for you. There’s petty-bourgeois nationalism.
We, however, say that while the loss of the Ukraine was a grave national sacrifice, it helped to steel and strengthen the workers and poor peasants of the Ukraine as revolutionary fighters for the world workers’ revolution. The Ukraine’s suffering was the world revolution’s gain, for the German troops were corrupted, German imperialism was weakened, and the German, Ukrainian and Russian revolutionary workers were drawn closer together.
It would of course he “nicer” if we could overthrow both Wilhelm and Wilson simply by war. But that is utter nonsense. We cannot overthrow them by a war from without. But we can speed up their internal disintegration. We have achieved that on an immense scale by the Soviet, proletarian revolution.
The German workers would do it even more successfully if they began a revolution disregarding national sacrifices (that alone is internationalism), if they said (and backed their word by actions) that they prize the interests of the world workers’ revolution higher than the integrity, security and peace of any national state, and of their own in particular.
* * *
Europe’s greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like the Scheidemanns, Henaudels, Hendersons, Webbs and Co., and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party.
Of course, a mighty, popular revolutionary movement may rectify this deficiency, but it is nevertheless a serious misfortune and a grave danger.
That is why we must do our utmost to expose renegades like Kautsky, thereby supporting the revolutionary groups of genuine internationalist workers, who are to be found in all countries. The proletariat will very soon turn away from the traitors and renegades and follow these groups, drawing and training leaders from their midst. No wonder the bourgeoisie of all countries are howling about “world Bolshevism”.
World Bolshevism will conquer the world bourgeoisie.”
N. Lenin
Ayden Bailey
Except the "birthmarks of the old society" that marx was talking about was allocation according to labour time, not fucking commodity production.
Easton Wood
This. It's either Marxism-Leninism or liberalism.
Leo Cook
That being said though, did the soviets change the definition of what Marx defined as socialism so it would fit what they had achieved but supposedly, to true marxist standards they hadn't reached socialism?
Ryan Rivera
You forgot about posadist
Ethan Ortiz
Really racks the old noggin…
David Howard
if ☭TANKIE☭s are the people who sit down waiting for ww1 again in order to create new revolutions (the whole purpose of anti inperialism), and anarchists are the ones that just go out in the street just go out in the street acting blindly without care for what works or not and hoping it will bring about a revolution, then leftcoms are the people who just sit down and wait for it to happen magically, by some ideal enlighten worker who will rid himself of decades of ideology, and any other push to improve society different than this is automatically invalid, and worse than liberal democracy
Cameron Baker
this literally doesn't contradict what i wrote in any way, in fact right there it mentions how the role of the party is not to organize, but to serve as ideologue, and that the party sticks to a single doctrine and anything else doesn't matter, the two says i mentioned, so you are literally giving me the reason here
Xavier Wood
Magic would be if a small and divided movement attempted to direct history by itself. Even the victory of the Bolsheviks was entirely contingent on the material conditions of the Russian Empire, its backwardness, the World War, and finally the February Revolution. Only when all of these things had come together was it possible for the October Revolution to happen.
It wasn't really an argument against you, just an addition
Bordiga's main critique seems to be that the most important thing that could be done when he wrote that document was to re-orient the communist party on the basis of a regenerated theory of Marxism. He affirms that communists will need to engage in organization and class struggle but only at the appropriate moments, and shouldn't try to create a revolutionary situation out of thin air. It seems to me that, sadly, we are still in a period of theoretical confusion and even ignorance of basic Marxist theory. Which means that the role of Marxists and Communists, at present, can only be to rectify this situation by correcting theoretical mistakes. There is no point in wasting time forming coalitions with socdems and pseudo-Marxists so long as the end result is simply more capitalism. Nor is there a point in trying to win local elections in countries with stable bourgeois governments. They would simply annul whatever decisions we take, even if we could win elections.
Jayden Moore
Seeing Marx, rather than Lenin or Stalin or ⛏️rotsky, as the Prophet
Jaxon Martinez
you're just promoting them, keep going you dumbass fuckward