Left communism: actually understanding it

It's ridiculous how little Zig Forums actually knows about the communist left, or rather, how much it thinks it knows about it while really only having an incredibly memetic and shallow conception of it.

To start one should know where the term actually comes from, which is neither in Germany or Italy, but in Russia. The first 'communist left' was spearheaded by a fraction within the early RCP in opposition to a dominant trend of parliamentarism and politicism, key figures being Nikolai Bukharin and Alexander Bogdanov. The biggest point of tension was the Party's signing of the Brest-Livotsk treaty, which they effectively saw as a halting of the communist movement's upsurge, turning class struggle into (once again) a struggle between national capitals. That's that in short, but this text goes into the question in depth: libcom.org/history/1918-treaty-brest-litovsk-curbing-revolution-guy-sabatier. This 'communist left' as it calls itself was not formally opposed to Lenin. In fact, it was Leninist and fully convinced in the primary importance of the Party for the workers' movement. Another fun fact: Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is in fact an outline/summation of Bukharin's much more thorough Imperialism and World Economy (a text Lenin entirely approved of). Also, as per people's usually poor and selective reading skills, both texts if actually read and understood properly conflict incredibly heavily with the Stalinist twist on attitudes towards imperialism, and if actually studied I am convinced comes actually almost lines up entirely with the ultra-leftist attitude (ultra-leftism is whole other can of worms, though, and it is also both misunderstood as well as used improperly as an identifier as a consequence, so I won't go through it unless anyone insists).

In the rest of the Europe there were also 'lefts' within the communist movements and parties. A problem arises when trying to unite them under an umbrella, which will always fail because in reality they differed widely, and many weren't even anti-parliamentarist unlike the most notorious Dutch-German and Italian lefts (the left communist WSF in England was not just parliamentarist but also activist). Even outside of Europe there were lefts; in China the early CP was derided as 'ultra-leftist' for opposing Comintern demands to collaborate with the nationalists, during the CR arguably the biggest alternative workers' movement was left communist and it formed many communes most notably in Shanghai (later to be suppressed by the Maoist CPC, even though the communist left there considered itself Maoist), etc.
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Other urls found in this thread:

sinistra.net/lib/upt/comlef/ren/renegadeae.html).
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1888
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm
libcom.org/library/fundamentals-revolutionary-communism-amadeo-bordiga
libcom.org/history/german-dutch-communist-left-philippe-bourrinet.
libriincogniti.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/martin-axelrad-auschwitz-or-the-great-alibi-what-we-deny-and-what-we-affirm/).
international-communist-party.org/English/TheCPart/TCP_001.htm#AReport.
leftist.site/index.php?t=msg&th=65&start=0&
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

The Italian left is just Leninist. Full stop. While it later split on the question of unions (into 'Bordigists' and 'Damenists', though both would reject such personalising/idolizing titles in the spirit of communist anonymity and rigor), it completely remained Leninist, and at the onset of Lenin's critique of the communist left (LWC: An Infantile Disorder) not only was the Italian left spared of any critique, one of the leading figures, Amadeo Bordiga, even wrote a text admiring it (sinistra.net/lib/upt/comlef/ren/renegadeae.html). Where the early Italian left (until the '50s, where it actually matters w.r.t. disagreements in Comintern policy) actually disagreed was on the question of unions, frontism (class collaboration as a strategy against 'common enemies') and parliamentarism. The Italian left was the first and largest mass communist movement in the country in the early Comintern period (until Stalin's Third Period era started, at which point any Party contesting its demands was culled and 'Stalinized', that is, moulded into the vision of the Third Period). An important thing to note is also that the Italian left not only otherwise mostly agreed with the (early; Lenin's) Comintern, but that it also opposed virtually all other 'lefts', and in its language used 'ultra-left' as a derogatory term. This is why the 'ultra-leftist' is a confusing term that should be avoided unless properly understood in all its contexts and perspective. What do you think of the fact that, for Bordiga, Mao was an 'ultra-leftist', and in what sense do you think he meant it?

The Dutch-German left was also Leninist, up until the mid-'30s, at which point it theoretically shifted towards an anti-party stance. The fact that it was Leninist before should be evident to anyone reading early texts, though it was actually oppositional to many early Leninist Comintern's policies, especially w.r.t parliamentarism). 'Council communism' is a term that only surfaced post-hoc to the theoretical shift in the left there, and a significant amount of communists one would qualify as such did not identify with the term at all. 'Councilism' is also not a shorthand for 'council communism'; it's a derogatory term communists used to disparage the council communists as fetishists of spontaneity. A commonly held belief is that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were left communists, but the communist left in fact arose in opposition to them within the KPD, disagreeing with positions such as 'peace without annexations' on how communists should proceed in the Great War, and they accused the 'right' of the KPD of being theoretically weak for its underconsumptionism (the belief that the primary cause of crisis in capitalism lies in the fact that commodities are overproduced and cannot be sold, rather than that competition for valorization leads to a downward spiral of the law of value, and that labour ceases to be sufficiently valorizable).

I've hit on probably the biggest misconceptions, which you can all easily verify by just reading left communist texts, though there's way more to go into. While it's conflicting because I just made an attempt to explain and clarify left communism, don't, for the love of Marx, substitute random internet users' posts for actually going out there and reading texts yourself. In fact if you want to understand left communism at all before living on talking about it with cognitive bias, go and read left communist texts right now to see if I'm talking shit or not.
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Good post. There's always been a lot of understandable ignorance of most marxist tendencies and the history of the communist movement in the interwar period on Zig Forums and worst of all a lot of reinforcement of that ignorance through a rather dumb-and-proud dogmatism and dismissiveness.
Its important to be familiarised with the history of the Comintern and of the tendencies within the CPSU and that of other countries' communist parties.

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Though you could just go out there and find reading lists and texts for the communist left, I can recommend a few lists or texts dealing with specific issues and how the communist left (specific branches and tendencies within it) viewed this or that matter. This is important, as to name an example what the Italian referred to as 'activism' is much more specific than 'when anyone but the working class entirely on its own does things', as is commonly believed by the average memetard FDCK.


Thanks user. It is indeed important to have threads like these where the primary objective is just getting the correct image of a certain subject. Disagreements can only be hashed out and debate is only really debate when people actually know what they're talking about it.

How did the Brest-Livotsk treaty halt the communist upsurge?

There used to be lots of leftcom posters on this board, they all just got banned or left years ago.

What exactly are you referring to here? I assume by "Stalinist twist on attitudes towards imperialism" you are talking about national liberation movements. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding ultralefts either completely reject national liberation movements in opposition to imperialism or only support those movements which also have a communist character, which seems to be a criteria nobody ever meets. How is this in line with Lenin? (Not that Lenin's agreement matters for the validity of the ultraleft stance on national liberation, I'm just curious.)

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It was expected to smother the communist movements and their revolutions in western Europe (especially in Germany, Austria and Italy where hope was high), and ultimately those revolutions did get suppressed because of lack of support, and the communists were all rounded up and jailed or murdered en masse.

It's important to note that the communist left (on the whole, including Bukharin's Russian left communists) were the same who had supported the successful strategy of forcing a revolutionary defeat of both the Tsarist and provisional governments, which is what opened up the space for the Bolsheviks to come to power in the first place, and they were defeatists there precisely to give the communist movement power (a movement that until that point had no real power, but was boiling more and more). They were in support of signing the treaty to end the Great War in 1917, but only on terms favourable for the workers' movement, which is why they did want annexations for the workers' movement unlike as I said in the OP the other half including the Luxemburgists in the KPD of the Second International at the time. They understood communist movements as necessarily momentum-based; you can not compromise with movements and governments that are bourgeois, for their demands for peace are, just like for the workers' movement, ultimately only to regain their strength and ultimately crush the workers' movements.

By signing the Brest-Livotsk treaty the communist movement was now not just relegated to itself, but also forced to, should it want to compete, more and more enforce private property because only capitalist production can compete against other capitalist production. Hence why the communist left at no point believed in the notion of 'socialism in one country', or believed the RFSFR (and later the USSR) were in any way socialist. The situation the Brest-Livotsk treaty engendered is also what made Bukharin abandon the communist left and start the 'right opposition'; he essentially believed the revolution was fucked, and only an as centralized and controlled as possible capitalist productivism was the worthwhile path to take; to safeguard the Party's influence while developing to have the republic survive and arm itself so that it may later once more take the revolutionary road. In their view the Stalinist turn the USSR took was at once a reflection of the revolution's degeneration; a reflection of the ever-increasing need for productivism and a sign the revolution had turned to counter-revolution, as well as a political defeat that may have been averted had the right opposition been more keen on maintaining dual power with the proletariat and peasantry to prevent such a radical change in policy through the faction members that stood for it.


I stopped coming here like a year ago, but I know a few other posters who left not just because the board's climate was hostile to left communists but they also just 'got a life' and couldn't be arsed to waste their time on a place they had always just seen as just a social hub for communists.

I've been actually pretty interested in Left Communism recently are there any contemporary left communists? theorists and movements?

Where should I even start with getting into "left communism"

Support the Ethopian Empire or write an article where you implicitly deny the Holocaust. Make sure to make lots of references to the real movement (italics are important!) and instead of writing "communist" you write kommunist and so on.

Leftcom effortposting on Zig Forums? It's like I've travelled back in time.

Also: what is your personal take on unions? Which tendency within the broader communist left do you place yourself?

For Lenin and Bukharin imperialism is like every other process of the CMP an 'impersonal' one in that it is first capital and its demands that reign, then whatever human agent assumes the role of bourgeoisie (administrator and manager of capital; national or otherwise). Imperialism in their texts is exporting unfruitful capital to where it can be more productive (there where capital and labour-power can be exploited in return for less; to valorize more). As I said the process is impersonal; capital makes demands to labour, the bourgeoisie either follows them or loses ground to the bourgeoisie that does not, and if all that fails there is crisis (labour-power can't be valorized anymore, or there is an over-presence of variable capital versus constant capital). There is thus no taking sides between two faces of capital when both are bourgeois since capital will always send them at each other, and to do so will quell those workers' movements that oppose the process or threaten revolution, which would destroy capital. National liberation, if we may even call it that at that point, is then only fruitful for the aims of communists if it is indeed communists and the proletariat which seize force, and their objective is an internationalist one that aims to ultimately end capital worldwide. This is in contrast to what left communists see as the Stalinist path: one of forming political allegiances along nominally communist lines and having productivism and centralization by themselves ultimately result in the disappearance of private property and thus wage labour by gradually reducing work hours.


A left communist would first tell you to just read Marx and Engels, as they are fundamental, and all left communist while ultimately conflicting considered themselves nothing but loyal to Marxism as per Marx. I would go with these in this order just for introductions, though ultimately tackling Capital (something I have yet to fully do; I've only read the first two volumes, and can only confidently say I grasp the first at least decently):
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ (also read the preface to the later editions, very important: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1888 !)
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm

For the Italian left especially but also the early Dutch-German left reading essential Lenin texts is important. I can only suggest reading on the Italian left, because that's what I'm most familiar with and have read in full, e.g.:
libcom.org/library/fundamentals-revolutionary-communism-amadeo-bordiga (the 'Bordigists'), though I've read a good history text on the Dutch-German left which you can find here, that also elucidates its positions: libcom.org/history/german-dutch-communist-left-philippe-bourrinet.

Surely the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty was vital to the survival of the USSR though? Or?

I'm glad you enjoy shitting up threads.

Never knew why Pankhurst did that. At any rate, she had moved on from the communist left by then and became an activist (suffrage movement, mostly). I do suppose making allegiances with the Third Reich is a much more noble endeavour and the fact that it has come to that point is not reflective of anything but a genuinely revolutionary path.

Which one, Auschwitz or the great alibi? Or the Vieille Taupe negationist stuff? If it's the former I have bad news: the Alsatian Jewish communist who wrote it does not deny the holocaust, nor excuses it (libriincogniti.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/martin-axelrad-auschwitz-or-the-great-alibi-what-we-deny-and-what-we-affirm/). If it's the latter I'm afraid they had already a decade before dissociated themselves from the communist left.

I agree with Lenin: they are the necessary primal form of the workers' movement and communists should stand by unions as they strengthen the collective bargaining power and organisational strength of the class, but they do not make the proletariat a class for itself. It takes a revolutionary party to unify the proletariat under a program, in its unions and elsewhere.

Today unions and the proletariat itself have largely been integrated into the State, at least in the democratic world: they are a tolerated, even welcomed (legal) organisations, and they often act more as stultifiers than as strengtheners of the workers. It's necessary to transform existing unions which stand for nothing but emancipating labour democratically to the detriment of any revolutionary aims, into unions that focus on the content of class and stand for the class. In Italy the ICP has noted that workers are already busy doing this in e.g. the SI Cobas 'base union' or 'class union' unions, see: international-communist-party.org/English/TheCPart/TCP_001.htm#AReport.

None. I'm interested in the communist left only historically; to see what may be learned. There is a reason these movements died out, just like Stalinism did: they lost their place in either capital or the class struggle. I would just consider myself a Marxist communist, or just communist (without adjectives), or maybe a Leninist. But to say 'I'm a left communist, look at me' is as ridiculous as saying 'I'm an anarcho-communist, look at me'; where is this -ism you speak of; where is it in the struggle? Where is it, but in the minds of various individuals, workers or not? That is not a movement; it does not describe anything actually reflective of what is happening in the class struggle. There is a reason all historical movements are generally named this or that already after they have come to be.

So how doesn't any movement (be it bourgeois, feudal or otherwise) that opposes this exportation of capital create more favourable conditions for revolution in the imperialist core? You yourself wrote:
Doesn't such a crisis provide fertile ground for revolution?

Sure, but at that point what has it become? What must it become to survive? Can you reason with capital? 'Stalinism' refers to the counter-revolution with Stalin's name on it because it turned out to be Stalin, but whatever you would call it would likely have reared his head regardless of who it was. The point is that for left communists whatever or whoever it was, it was counter-revolution, and decidedly a sign of the fact that the USSR was doomed to obey capital and mirror the process of state-led primitive accumulation the western world, where capitalism first developed.


Because all that would do is improve the situation of one national capital versus the other. The proletariat is still suffocated under the bourgeois state and cannot organise. It does not matter whether its oppressor is a local or not. Why should communists favour one nation be more well-off than the other; excuse the (increased) brutality with which the weaker nation must act to exploit its proletariat just to 'get on foot'? It assumes a) that the national bourgeoisie ultimately really cares about its proletariat, and would have let it topple itself as bourgeoisie if there were peace and bread, and(/or) b) that, regardless of whether there is an imperialist war or not, the proletariat should not (as historically it always has) seize power through civil war; against its own (bourgeois) government, and strive to support the same process wherever and whenever possible in all other bourgeois societies.

Of course. The Bolsheviks were thankful for WW1; this is precisely why they were revolutionary defeatists, and what got them the space to usurp their own governments, so as to also do the same elsewhere and achieve world communism. In contrast a lot of anarchists essentially played the 'anti-imperialist' game Marxist-Leninists only started playing a decade later, and decided the way to proceed was to support one side of the imperialist war over the other; the weaker versus the stronger. They did not want the proletariat to be victors; they wanted the weaker nation to be.

That's my whole point though. Let Khamenei, Putin, Assad, Xi, Kim, Castro have their national capital as long as this means foreign capital is unable to valorise itself, leading to crisis in the imperialist core.

So how long does it take for Leftcoms to denounce a revolution? A year? There will always be a phase of consolidation after a revolution, this idea that revolution must happen everywhere at the same time is completely delusional. Leftcoms fail to explain why Russia was doomed after Brest-Litovsk, because I simply do not see it. Russia has all the resources necessary to be self-sufficient and big enough for huge internal development (which was exactly what happened during the "Stalinist" industrialisation). Why is suddenly the inevitable development of capital if it is still a dictatorship of the proletariat?

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Ismail has responded to you.
>>>/marx/13501

The person on that picture was in favour of centralizing all capital in the hands of the state as a transition to socialism.

All that time passed by is time in which not only the proletariat not in the 'imperialist core' has had to endure the most brutal exploitation of contemporary times; in which it has not even been able to organise.

Look back at Tsarist Russia, early 20th century. Was it a powerful nation? It was barely even growing out of feudal social relations, starting its (usual) capitalist process of emancipating peasants into proletarians, creating a modern state, etc. At no point did the Bolsheviks consider: 'we should let this continue; the western world have their revolution if we modernise'. No; the class struggle finds victories, and in the openings of an imperial war, where even in the case of Russia it can be seen as the victim (the Entente, of which Russia was a part of, was not the one to declare war; it was the Alliance), it can obtain power.


This is not contested.

Is not implied.

What is contested is the idea that a 'phase of consolidation' does not have its own implications; that the capital one is left with can be tamed for long. That by pure willpower of a State its demands (which are, for as long as there is capital, tantamount to sating in order to reproduce daily life) can be curbed.

What is implied is that if revolution is left to its own devices it will not just suffocate, but will have to revert to utilizing capital, and capital will use it in turn. Revolution opens up the space for a radical transformation of social relations. For Marx and Lenin it is clear that the proletariat needs to be united under a party, and that, indeed, the centralization of the means of production under a revolutionary state is step one.

Because the rest of the world is not a dictatorship of the proletariat. So in turn the dictatorship of the proletariat will have to play truce with the demands of the dictatorships of capital around it (also keen on taking it over, again for no reason besides securing the continued valorisation of capital), and ultimately also the demands of capital itself. You cannot tame capital; only destroy it.

Doomed may be a large word. Severely hampered and endangered, for sure, with high risks of being doomed. Bukharin's right opposition shift was one of pragmatism in the fate of that reality.

Wasn't Bukharin a social Democrat though?

He was the theorist behind 'Socialism in one country'.

Communists called themselves 'revolutionary social democrats' before they started calling themselves 'communists', after the fall of the Second International, precisely to differentiate themselves from the ones who still held on to the 'social democrat' label, now seen as traitors to the proletariat for n.b. their positions during the Great War.


I don't have the time to respond to much more, but one thing caught my eye which I can quickly respond to is:
Bordiga merely uses the term 'organic centralism' for the same thing Lenin means with 'democratic centralism'; which is/was not at all principally democratic, but definitely centralised. He simply considers the term more apt. Look for any text in which he uses the term and you'll find that it's defined exactly the same as what Lenin called democratic centralism. Only the name is original. For Bordiga, just like Lenin, democracy is not a principle but a consideration for the party.

Bukharin was actually the person closest to Lenin's plan for the RSFSR at the point of his death.

Yes. It was a major imperialist power of the world.
First off, there was no comprador bourgeoisie in Russia, rather, Russia exported capital itself into its periphery - which independence (national liberation!) movements Lenin and the Bolsheviks supported. Stalin was a bit more rigid, but you guys just smeared him as a Russian supremacist when he did that.

Also, may I remind you that the interests of the liberal intelligentsia and the Bolsheviks did align in fact in the struggle against Tsarism, and, just like it happened in Korea, China or Vietnam, the communist as the staunchest and most uncompromising fighting force in combination with the liberal ineptitude to deal with the situation had them coming out of top. Leninism doesn't mean armchairism, what it means is to preserve organisational independence from progressive bourgeois organisations: At no point dissolved a communist party in the Stalin era of the Third International into a SocDem party, even when they were working with the SocDems (Spain) or fighting them (Germany). Strangely enough, Leftcoms hate both approaches. How do you even argue against the ultimate BTFO by the Italian police when they stopped observing Bordiga because he was doing more harm than good?

Exactly the position that Lenin and Stalin took. Against left-deviationism (Trotsky) and right-deviationism (Bukharin after his right turn) - consolidate after a revolution (NEP), and then abolish capital by collectivising. How did capital and the bourgeoisie permeate the DotP? You may argue it did so in Vietnam and China, after they have let their "NEP" run for decades now under the mantra of developing productive forces, but this didn't happen in the USSR or in other socialist states.

The state also doesn't have "willpower", are you believing in magic? The state has institutions and guns. I'm not physically obstructed by a flash of lightening if I rip a $100 note apart because I was acting against the law of value.

True, but there is also the material reality of production, you can't have socialism with cavemen. This is what the Soviets said about the Maoist communes which were trying to put the cart before the horse:

They can fight it. The capitalist world was so hostile to the USSR till 1941 that they practically had no choice anyway.

Bullshit. While this is a factor the bourgeoisie faces an existential threat due to a socialist great power. The bourgeoisie was fighting the USSR primarily because it was socialist, not because they were trying to invest in Russia, that only started to play a role when Perestroika began.

He was pretty disconnected with reality then considering the scissor crisis already implies that the NEP must end because it doesn't really work. The only reason China has such economic growth with their model is because they already built their industrial base under Mao.

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Are you really trying to use the United Front in the USA as an example of "preserving organizational independence from progressive bourgeois organizations"? The period where CP members were joining the Roosevelt administration, the unions, the army, and allowing suppression of independent labor and a massive expansion of the state in order to "fight fascism"? The CPUSA being independent and maintaining a revolutionary line in theory is irrelevant if in practice they advocating such a massive strengthening of the bourgeois state. So much for revolutionary defeatism, I guess.

For people who claim to know so much about Lenin they really have conveniently ignored his views on revolutionary defeatism.

Oh gee that was a messy breakup

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this is ridiculous bullshit. socialist and communist production are better than capitalist. Marx repeatedly says capitalism is holding back the MOP.

Only capitalist production can compete with capitalist production when it comes to war, armaments and geopolitical conflict, which is what the USSR had to do against the West. Socialist production is only superior at realizing human freedom and emancipating people from toil and alienation.

This is a view that breaks from Marx though, every mode of production was both more productive and expanded human freedom than the one before it, why does socialism break this pattern?

I wasn't even talking about the USA. I'm not knowledgble enough on the labour movement in the US to comment on this issue.
Revolutionary defeatism was applied in inter-imperialist wars, not when some great power fucks a smaller nation three times over. Marx himself supported the US against the CSA and the German revolution of 1848.

So Tsarist Russia in 1914 was imperialist but Russia in 2019 isn't. Got it, lad.

Russia now is skinny wiener dog imperialism compared to America's Englidh Mastiff imperialism

I'm still waiting to see what was the leftcoms' plan to fight the German imperial army

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what did lenin man do

factory revolts

No, that is still complete bullshit. The USSR was able to "compete" against a much larger enemy (Nazis, NATO) precisely because of socialist power. Same for the DPRK and Cuba today. Any capitalist country would have collapsed in their situation.

I smell a Utopian who doesn't understand militias and armies are just as effective as each ohter and instead becomes an idiot ideological sectarian

That would have gone about as well as the Warsaw ghetto

That's not exactly true, Iran is very much a capitalist country and they're under US siege just as much as Cuba and the DPRK and they haven't collapsed

militias and armies
sounds like hierarchical structures which are antithetical to communism

how are you going to defend the revolution if not with armies and militias?

How are you any different from an anarchist?

autonomy


Well Communism is stateless its just how to get there is debatable

What the fuck does autonomy mean?

What does Bordiga mean when he says "activism"?

I may be incorrect, but I believe Ultra Leftism is friendly towards anarchism.

Leftcoms make fun of anarchists all the time but never really explain the differences - for instance, Leftcoms believe socialism to be stateless, I think they are just not opposed of scrapping the state from the start in a traditional DotP phase. But it's true that most of the arrogance Leftcoms display towards anarchists is often just posturing.

I think practically, the biggest difference is that anarchists are more likely to turn into radlib activist types, that get mad at you if you don't want for the Democrats if the Republican candidate is Trump, which is what Leftcoms obviously hate.

vote*

What did he mean by this?

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Every time.

I still dont get what the difference and huge debate between Marxist-Leninists and left communists is. How can the workers unite when even communists cant?

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...

www.leftist.site

it's easy to have a division when one of the sides (left communism) is intentionally retarded

nice joke and essay

hello Ismail, how is /marx/ doing

Just another day in Zig Forums, garbage board.
I'm beginning to think this is a fucking honeypot or something

In case you wanted to see Ismail from /marx/ take:
"In the first post, the person points to Bukharin's "communist left" faction within the Bolshevik party (which was real enough) and emphasizes it "was not formally opposed to Lenin. In fact, it was Leninist…"

It was precisely because it was not Leninist that Lenin struggled against it. The poster isn't revealing some sort of suppressed history; everyone who knows even a little of the first decade of soviet power knew Bukharin leaped from the ultra-left to the right.

In addition, far more left-communists today are influenced by "council communists" like Gorter and Pannekoek, who started off as supporters of the Bolsheviks only to declare that party "state-capitalist." Not to mention other left-communists who (however wrongly) counterpoise Luxemburg to Lenin and claim the former as their own. Obviously what Lenin derided as "left-wing" communism is going to look different in 1918-1922 than it looks a century later.

Lenin did indeed praise Bukharin's 1915 work on imperialism, although in that same 1915-16 period he was arguing against other positions held by Bukharin. But to say Lenin's own work on imperialism was merely "an outline/summation of Bukharin's" work is asinine; when Lenin wrote the prefaces to his own work, he tipped his hat to J. A. Hobson, not Bukharin. I also don't see how all this is relevant, considering that by the poster's own admission there was as yet no "communist left."

As for the second post, Bordiga certainly claimed to uphold Lenin, but practice showed he was no Leninist, precisely due to his sectarian position on the unions, toward parliaments, and on various other issues where Lenin's own writings (as well as Marx's and Engels') can be shown to be in blatant contradiction to Bordiga's.

Claiming that the "Italian left was the first and largest mass communist movement" in Italy is misleading (Bordiga circa 1919 had not yet fully developed his ultra-left views, and he was just one of multiple leaders of the party) and irrelevant. When (for example) the American Communist movement was formed it largely subscribed to the IWW's dual unionism strategy as well as a belief that revolution was imminent and the communist party ought to operate underground. It took the Comintern to overcome these views, just as it helped overcome ultra-leftism in Italy. When Bordiga was left with his own devices, rather than belonging to a party larger than himself and which came to reject his increasingly sectarian positions, he ended up creating an irrelevant sect (just as there were a few American communists who defied the Comintern and continued leading an underground existence, fading into obscurity.)

Attributing this process of overcoming such tendencies to Stalin and the Third Period is erroneous; as early as 1924 there was a campaign within the Comintern for the Bolshevization of its member-parties, struggling against traces of social-democratic, syndicalist and other deviations. Bordiga himself was removed from the PCI's leadership in 1923.


I think it's a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Not a unique phenomenon in history.

That the "Dutch-German left was also Leninist, up until the mid-30's" seems wrong as well. As early as 1923 Gorter was claiming that the peasantry "made the whole Bolshevist party its tool. It was like an elementary power which forced the Bolsheviks — even men like Lenin — to stand against the class from which the Bolshevists had sprung. . . . Communism vanished like a ghost into the background, and capitalism re-appeared, even stronger, in the foreground." He further complains that "Lenin and the Third International have talked the proletariat into a combination with the capitalist nationalism of Asia" and that, "Many fake principles have penetrated from Moscow to Western Europe and North America. This has been largely through Lenin’s book called The Infantile Diseases of Left Wing Communism."

In other words, just because these people didn't view Lenin as a wicked evildoer doesn't make them Leninists.

I give credit to the poster for acknowledging Liebknecht and Luxemburg were generally at odds with left-communist positions. But again this is no suppressed history; "Stalinists" have been pointing this out since forever."

Did you guys even see the other guy's posts? He was saying factory revolts would've stopped the German army. Pure retardation.

Still that's no reason for banning or even deleting their posts. Are people not allowed to be wrong anymore? What is this madness? Even if what they said is retarded it would be a thousand times better to just make a response stating how retarded they are.

I know, I agree with that

Another leftcom thread:
leftist.site/index.php?t=msg&th=65&start=0&

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thanks anons for a good effortpost thread that deserves a second chance.

based

Wasn't the Lenin's critique of Leftcom mainly against the Councilcoms?

Also, that's interesting about Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

What do you think about calling Deleon as a Leftcom? I've seen some people do that, but to my knowledge he predates the split. I'm not sure if his later followers aligned with them or not.

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LEFTYPOL IS NOT A CREDIBLE SOURCE ABOUT COMMUNISM LEFTYPOL IS NOT A CREDIBLE SOURCE ABOUT COMMUNISM LEFTYPOL IS NOT A CREDIBLE SOURCE ABOUT COMMUNISM LEFTYPOL IS NOT A CREDIBLE SOURCE ABOUT COMMUNISM LEFTYPOL IS NOT A CREDIBLE SOURCE ABOUT COMMUNISM

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