Who leftcom here?
Over the years I've found myself agreeing more and more with the general substance of leftcom theory. The MLs like to present themselves as "anti-revisionist" despite having embraced all kinds of revisionism.
Who leftcom here?
Over the years I've found myself agreeing more and more with the general substance of leftcom theory. The MLs like to present themselves as "anti-revisionist" despite having embraced all kinds of revisionism.
Other urls found in this thread:
marxists.org
marxists.org
marxists.org
marxists.org
marxists.org
marxists.org
marxists.org
partitocomunistainternazionale.org
pcint.org
international-communist-party.org
libcom.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
newsandletters.org
marxisthumanistinitiative.org
internationalmarxisthumanist.org
I've interacted enough here and lurking libcom.org to read their shit and liked some of it enough to consider myself influenced, but I still call myself an anarchist.
I haven't been completely won over yet, but Kropotkin and Luxemburg are two of the greatest thinkers of the libertarian left, and I'm certainly sympathetic to the movement.
Right now I'm very interested in communalism - basically people opting out of the system and joining equitable, egalitarian, intentional communities. If enough of these sprang up, or if they became big enough, I even see potential for them to be revolutionary. I'll probably take some heat for this, but I think it very well may be the winning ticket for the left, if any major economic revolution would happen in our lifetimes.
I don't even know what the hell leftcom is, but I do find their argument about "self-exploitation" fucking retarded.
Could you please explain what a leftcom is then? I never managed to figure it out.
What kind of "leftcoms" are you talking about OP?
I miss all the old leftcom posters on Zig Forums
Me too :'(
I would say I'm leftcom but the council communism/Luxembourgism type, not Bordigism.
I also have a lot of sympathy for our social anarchists comrades.
I find the bolscheviks (including Trostky even if he's right about ML bureaucracy) too authoritarian but I don't disagree with the dictactorship of the proletariat and capturing the state, sorry MLs but I consider the USSR was a dictactorship ON the proletariat.
Lol. I thought only Bordigists call themselves leftcom unironically. Wouldn't calling yourself a democratic socialist make more sense if you are fond of Luxemburg mainly?
Bordigists don't call themselves leftcoms. They don't even call themselves bordigists.
It sounds like social-democracy, most people don't know the difference.
Such as? Leftcoms has developed their own "revisionism" like thinking that the DotP is a "non-mode of production", that Marxism is just analysis social relations and not productive forces, the whole semantics game, in some extreme cases the rejection of class struggle (Wertkritiker), revision of historical dialectics, etc. - the biggest issue with Leftcoms is their defeatism regarding any approach ever despite Marx and Engels supporting increasing welfare and nationalization of industry and the such. They also go on about "Stalinist managerialism" when you do as much as point out that people may have an obligation work in socialism.
t. Marx.
lmao Bordigists are the only ones calling themselves Leftcoms, what the fuck are you on about? Bordigists are unorthodox Leninists who reject the USSR, which is where the name comes from, besides them there are the German/Dutch tendency which is connected with council communism and the Communization people who adhere to Gilles Dauve etc. - the latter is particulary useless and only exists in academia and on Twitter.
Source?
The source is me talking to Bordigists in contrast to talking to the Dutch/German or the communization tendencies. Bordiga's position was explicitely a rejection of the USSR post-Lenin, but his tendency is still officially Leninist, therefore the word "Leftcommunism" to distinguish himself from the Communist International after its second congress 1919.
This is exactly why the German/Dutch and the communization tendencies reject the term, because they don't consider themselves Leninists and think that the term "Leftcommunism" is a historical term that became invalid after 1991. Bordigists are still identifying as Leninists so they continue to use the term to distinguish themselves from Trots, Marxist-Leninists, etc.
Ok.
I gave you an explanation, cunt. If you don't agree with it feel free to ignore or argue against it. There is no entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica or whatever that says "BORDIGISTS CALL THEMSELVES LEFTCOMS".
What about a bordigist publication?
My basic understanding is that the Leftcoms and related communists were opposed to the revisionism of the large socialist parties while also being critical of the Bolsheviks. I'm not an expert, though.
I think these are the most serious "revisionisms" I find among MLs:
Claiming that socialism was possible in a backward peasant country.
Claiming that "socialism is when the government does stuff."
Claiming that the USSR, China, and other 20th century states achieved a "socialist mode of production"
Confusing the lower phase of communism with "socialism" and then further confusing socialism with the transition period.
Being unable to apply a thorough class-analysis of 20th century states.
Turning communism into a cult and canonizing Marx & Engels as "church fathers", likewise with Lenin.
It leads to situations like this:
That's not the impression of left-communism I've gotten, especially in regards to communization.
What are you talking about? Lenin dedicates multiple chapters to the German/Dutch communists and the KAPD in an Infantile Disorder. They were very much a part of the left communist current.
But that's exactly what Marx thought so I'm not sure that's revisionist. Whether you agree with that or not is another issue.
marxists.org
There was no "left communist current". The Italian left on one side, and the German and Dutch (and British) left on the other, had nothing in common, except for their opposition to participation in bourgeois parliament, which happened to be the topic of Lenin's book. Lenin himself said, in this very book, that he hadn't had the chance to read in lengths the Italian left literature.
Marx makes an interesting point in that letter that the widespread existence of common property could in theory be the basis of a new modernized form of social ownership, i.e. communism. He then lists near the end all the problems which the Russian communes faced and pointed out that the introduction of capitalism was chipping away at the commune's existence.
"Simply because the economic facts, whose analysis would lead me too far afield, have unveiled the mystery that the present state of the commune is no longer tenable, and that by the mere necessity of things the present mode of exploiting the masses of the people will no longer be in vogue. Hence a new one is needed, and the new one, insinuated under the most diverse forms, always comes down to this: to abolish common property, to let the more or less well-off minority of the peasants constitute themselves into an intermediary rural class, and to convert the great majority of the peasants into proletarians and nothing more."
So he seems to be arguing that, yes, in theory a peasant country with collective ownership could use those conditions as the basis of a new communist society (by importing modern methods and technology from the West.) But only if some kind of political revolution saved the commune from capitalists attempting to destroy it. This seems to have been the opposite of what the Soviets actually did. Rather than build on the traditional communal structure they decided to collectivize from above and transform large numbers of peasants into proletarians for the new industrial economy. They basically followed the traditional Western pattern but using state-aid rather than slow-acting market forces.
But I would contrast that letter (the long version appears not to have been sent?) with what Marx said in the third section of Critique of the Gotha Program a few years earlier. In that section he criticizes the idea that a country of mostly peasants could use the state to create "socialist organization" when they are not even "ripe for ruling."
marxists.org
Right. There was no self-declared left communist current at the time but they've both been lumped into it contemporarily. They were both pejoratively called ultra-leftists and they both very much made up the "communist left". Seems like you're just splitting hairs by insisting they weren't part of a broad left opposition to the Bolsheviks.
And while the Italian and Dutch/German communist's political programs obviously differed I believe they shared a lot in common from a broader perspective of communism and a general spirit of rigorous critique.
Like what? The Italian left was much closer to Lenin and the Bolsheviks than to the German and Dutch lefts.
Council-com here.
No shit, ever heard of the NEP or New Democracy? Nobody thinks you can have instant socialism when the productive forces are underdeveloped, but does the argument of "backwardness" really apply for the USSR after industrialization or maybe East Germany? Probably not. History is also not that mechanistic, if you think that you have to abandon revolution because the country is not "developed" enough you are a Menshevik and subscribe to their theory of "stageism". Also this user already pointed at Marx's letter to Zasulich where it shows that Marx is not super orthodox about this either. I find this whole argument to be dishonest, when Marxist-Leninist say "we need a bit of capitalism to develop productive forces" Leftcoms accuse us of being revisionist, when we say "we can have socialism now, looks developed enough for me", Leftcoms accuse us of revisionism. You can't win versus a dishonest line of argument from the beginning.
Lenin was literally the one describing state capitalism as being different from socialism, something that Engels never really detailed out (Engel's "Principles of Communism" is literally "when the government does stuff"), Marxist-Leninist argue that state ownership alone is not enough for it being socialism, it's socialism when the law of value does not determine production (planned economy) and the economy is controlled by a proletarian state (not just state ownership per se).
How can you say they didn't when the MCM' cycle was not at all in effect in major sectors of the economy? Are you implying a socialist mode of production can not coexist with other modes of production? If you do, you need to explain why. Lenin pointed out multiple modes of production during the NEP, a socialist one, a capitalist one and a peasant one. The existence of a socialist mode of production does not imply a socialist society - for example, China and Vietnam both still have a socialist mode of production in some economic fields, but are clearly capitalist societies.
First one is literally just semantics and second one is often confused as DotP and socialism being two different things, but due to socialism arising in one country at first, the DotP continues into socialism to continue class struggle on a global scale, the proletarian condition has been abolished domestically but not externally.
It's Leftcoms and anarchists who are unable to apply basic Marxist definitions of class to "bureaucrats", obsfucating the term. At least Trots have the honesty to call it a Chad worker's state or whatever.
You literally just did that by claiming I can't call the lower phase of communism socialism because it's not in the CotGP.
Chad worker's state = de.generate worker's state lmao
I'm not saying these aren't Leftcoms, I'm saying the Italian current is the only one that actually uses that label itself.
Not being able to "build socialism in one country", especially in 1920's Russia, doesn't mean you have to abandon the revolution.
So what do you do after the day of the revolution then? Aerate your balls till world revolution?
Why the quotation marks? Why can't you build socialism in one country when you have the resources?
You think the revolution will take… one day?
Well for 1917 it took about a year, several years if you count the civil war, what's the point? You still havn't answered my question. Porky is gone, workers and peasants have seized the MoP, what you do?
If that's all the contribution you can come up with for the proletarian revolution, then yeah, you may as well do that. That's still better than actively fighting communism worldwide like Stalin did.
Yes
t. Pol Pot gang
You do whatever the International requires.
...
Leftcoms left the International in 1919 and Trots made their own International.
Neither were Stalinists.
epic burn
Please stop with your "leftcoms". That doesn't mean a thing. The Italian left left the International in 1927, after it had clearly turned full reactionary.
Yeah Bordiga left the International to prevent the PCI from joining a united front against fascism which got himself imprisoned, amazing job. But that's okay because something something reactionary out of thin air
You clearly either misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued what was saying.
In any case, read chapter 5 of pic related.
How did Stalin crush them? To my knowledge, Spain was conquered by nationalists.
Did you even spend a millisecond to look at what I suggested to you?
A united front that then became a fight against "social-fascisl", only to become a united front again, and then a non-agression pact… with the fascists, and then a united front in the inter-imperialist war, etc.
All this tat the discretion of the russian state's needs.
Can you answer my question instead of relying on fucking Orwell's anecdotes?
The conditions are different in different countries. A united front made sense in Italy and Spain but not in Germany due to structure of the Weimar state, there was also the chance of a left-wing take over of the NSDAP which was shattered once the Hitlerite wing assumed complete control.
You're dishonest again. The USSR was thrown under the bus by the entire West and was completely encircled by powers that overtly calling for its destruction, how dare they making a non-aggression pact.
1. How was the USSR imperialist?
2. Should they have left Eastern Poland, which was taken by Poland from the USSR in a war of aggression, to the Nazis?
Please stop making a fool of yourself.
I asked you to read that part of "Orwell's anecdotes" because it answers your question, you ignorant jerk. Nowhere did I say that Stalin "crushed them" but it was certainly the policy of the Communists that more or less reported to Stalin which contributed to the downfall of the Republicans. Here's a few quotes from "Orwell's anecdotes" to get you interested in actually reading it for once:
We all either got banned and left or stuck around in a few holes. Most of us formed a discord but idk what happened to it. I occasionally hit up some of the old ones but I deleted all my social media so now I don't.
Take a shit already
Please be here with us and not in some walled garden Dischord server you assholes.
Use this board, write threads. We need content and a lot of people here seems to be interested in left-communist perspectives. To have people who've actually read and accepted the positions of the leftcoms would do a lot in stimulating quality discussions and educative dialogues between tendencies.
I said the discord doesn't exist anymore, leftcoms aren't like tankies we don't all share the same opinions its just an umbrella term. I'm trying to lend to the discussion on this board but its pretty dead.
I consider myself more of a councilist/communizer than a bordigist but I agree with a lot of Bordiga's critiques of the USSR.
obligatory leftcom meme bump
I think that before anything else we should clear up the semantic issue.
This was Marx's outline of future historical development:
1. Capitalism
2. Dictatorship of the Proletariat (transitional period)
3. Lower phase of Communism (labor accounting, production for use, individual income varies based on hours worked, elimination of markets, money, commodities)
4. Higher phase of Communism (no need for labor accounting, no division of labor, no rationing of goods, no "jobs" in the usual sense)
marxists.org
Lenin equated socialism with the lower phase. That's fine. But did the USSR reach socialism? They still had:
a) Money
b) Commodities
c) Market exchange
d) Wage-labor
marxists.org
So clearly the USSR never even advanced to socialism. What the USSR did was to redefine the lower phase to socialism and socialism to the transitional period. They achieved socialism via semantics. Which is why all the talk of the USSR, China, and other countries having a "socialist mode of production" is really quite stupid. Why call oneself a Marxist if one don't agree with Marx's definitions? Why call oneself a Leninist if one don't agree with his?
Because calling oneself a Stalinist is lame, and no one has read Marx an Lenin anyway.
Excuse me in advance but this will probably be the most resilient leftcom thread so this seems fitting:
INCOMING SLEW OF LEFTCOM QUESTIONS
1. In what ways are council communists distinguished from anarcho-syndicalists/+platformists?
2. What is the communist left's critique of 'self-management'?
3. Within leftcom communization: what distinguishes the theory of Théorie Communiste from Troploin (Dauvé & Nesic) enough for them to write heated polemics targeted at each other?
4. Why do leftcoms seem so goddamn phobic to prefiguration (maybe not all?)? If one does not nurture a connection before SHTF then you've practically ceded the possibility of control being taken by 'barbarism'. "Revolution doesn't take a day" they say, yet we're supposed to relegate ourselves to only 'intervene' once positions have been entrenched? The fascists, MLs as well as the platformists/Communalists all have their prefigurative preparation in tact theoretically and practically, what of left-communists? Maybe """opportunism""" is a practical necessity for revolutionary activity?
Those are my questions.
Proceeding from the post above discussing what socialism is, I'll continue.
I would say the first bit isn't really revisionist. If any 20th century Marxist parties had called for lengthy NEP-style development it would have been defensible in theory. But it would also be necessary to clarify that this kind of economic development is capitalism and not socialism. I think that China's introduction of capitalist development is unfortunate but defensible from a Marxist perspective. What makes it revisionist is when they claim to be in the "primary stage of socialism" and that "socialism means developing the productive forces." That is not socialism, it is capitalism.
Engels discusses the idea in Anti-Duehring, albeit without using the name "state capitalism."
marxists.org
They had money, market exchange, commodities, wage-labor, etc. They did not reach socialism.
No, it can't. A socialist mode of production is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.
I think I know what you're referring to. Here Lenin stated that the new system had "elements" of both capitalism and socialism but said that they had yet to achieve socialism itself.
marxists.org
1. Marx's use of the word "class" was flexible.
2. A basic understanding of Marxist theory shows that classes have both arisen and disappeared throughout history.
3. MLs make the mistake of only accepting historical classes.
I've argued with Ismail on this topic here:
>>>/marx/7932
>>>/marx/7949
>>>/marx/7965
I'm going to answer no.1 and leave the other questions for different posters (I'm getting on a flight soon).
Council communism isn't anarchistic because the workers councils' are meant to function as the method for organizing socialist production, they are governing bodies. The councils help facilitate the proletariat's ownership of the means of production. It's the middle ground between the direct-democratic informality of anarchism and the contradictory hierarchy of vanguardism. The councils are not worker syndicates or unions, they function as internal bodies for decision making by the workers in their own respective fields of production, the council puts forth its own workplace production policies that individual members agree on. It is a sort of technocratic arrangement of workers educated in their field managing their own production but its not like a syndicalist union where a representative is elected.
Also platformism is a tactic generally disregarded by leftcom tendencies because it involves allying with Stalinists and SocDems and other groups generally viewed as the left-wing of capital.
Are there any council-coms or self-described leftcoms here who disagree with Bordiga on major issues?
so I'm gonna sound like a retard, but I am coming into here and not starting a new thread because I'm sure it's against the rules. Could someone explain why they think communism is benificial. While I am technically a libertarian I want to understand better so I can be more worldly and eduicated and not just be a close or uninformed person you know. I'd much appreciate it.
So… most Communists see it as something that must happen and not something "that would be beneficial." But it would be beneficial for the majority of people. It would end the boom-bust economic cycles, financial speculation, wage-slavery, etc. People would work to create useful things instead of working for profits. All kinds of social problems would disappear as well.
Also, you could post your questions in the QTDDTOT section.
We've got a thread just for you here , hotpockets aren't too bad regarding new threads so long as you're not obnoxious like "commies btfo".
Communism, "the real movement to abolish the present state of things" or the stateless, classless society after the abolition of capitalism is beneficial because capitalism is a system that benefits very few(bourgeoisie), often at the expense of everyone else(proletarians). The switch from production for exchange to production for use would greatly benefit most people and improve the quality of what is produced, like cars that don't break down after you've finished paying off the loan or food that isn't designed to get you addicted to processed sugars and shit. This doesn't happen under capitalism because it isn't profitable enough to pursue, thus outside of the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Considering you're probably the only read leftcom here in this specific time-period would you have a go with the rest of the questions, now that you're most probably not in mid-flight anymore?
Bump
labor vouchers not money, those are two very different things
poor wording.
i meant that in this phase there is an elimination of markets and money and commodities
Does anyone know of a Marxist/leftcom critique of Cockshott's TANS? I know there's been a few posters who have done so in the past, but having a more detailed examination of the book would be really nice.
honestly from what i do know, all i can deduce is that the form of production in tans generates enterprises which behave internally like capitalist enterprises, in that they have alienation and all of that, and that's because the plan itself prioritises enterprises that have high productivity, and shrinks away the other ones, so every company is in an eternal race to keep itself alive, and to keep themselves alive companies will probably have to recreate a sort of division of labour that decreases hours worked per product produced, and this coupled with the fact that cockshott didn't really got the part about marx where we abolish work, it just creates a hyper efficient tecnocracy where people are still subjugated to the division of labour. this is just my reading though, i'm only a few piles of book deep, so if anyone who knows more than me reads this feel free to correct me
bump!
Two people wasting their lives.
Hmmm
Just because some idiots confuse the name of your ideology with something else that it isn't that doesn't really change the term's validity or thr fact that ot applies to your views does it?
The purpose of "calling yourself" something is to express your views, if the label means something else for most people then it's pointless.
I'm democratic socialist but I don't call myself democratic socialist.
Welp. I guess you have a point there. I still wouldn't just accept all of this so lightly tho.
Well, that's the good thing about Marxism-Leninism as opposed to most other tendencies. Everybody knows what it means right away.
Anarchism, Leftcommunism, Democratic Socialism - they all mean different things to different people. I would assume a Bordigist Leftcom would agree on close to nothing with a Dauveist Leftcom.
I don't think Cockshott's enterprises would function like capitalist ones if only for the reason that they do not accumulate surpluses but rather satisfy consumer demand or fulfill orders from other industries. They are allocated budgets based on plans.
It's true that enterprises will have an incentive to introduce labor-saving technology just like capitalist firms. The difference will be that this no longer creates a conflict with the interests of workers since those workers will see an increase in their share of goods and services.
I don't know if there is a leftcom critique of TANS as such, tho.
Also, posting some Bordiga / Italian leftcom links:
marxists.org
partitocomunistainternazionale.org
pcint.org
international-communist-party.org
libcom.org
As far as I know organizational anarcho-communists don't pretend that what they're doing isn't governing. What they are claiming is that it's not the state, which in anarchist theory is equal to the capitalist hierarchical monopoly on force.
It sounds indentical to direct democracy. And that is not informality. Informality is affinity groups. A direct democracy (which again in organizational anarcho-communist theory is mostly within the context of federalism and delegation) is formal.
Sounds identical to anarcho-syndicalism.
Anarcho-syndicalism does not elect representatives, like status quo labor unions, but instead delegate decisions that have been reached through direct democracy. The delegate is randomly chosen and simply reports the decision that has been reached to the higher level federation, and can be recalled/nullified if it's found to falsify information. The delegate, in contrast to the representative, has no serious power.
what i mean by "division of labour that decreases hours worked per product produced" is not that enterprises automate their jobs, i think that bit is good, but what i mean is that in order to survive the jobs that will stay are going to be reconfigured into a more productive and more alienating way, like in the classical political economy texts.
the most effective thing in manufacturing is just to have a person who isn't trained just do a single repetitive thing, so for exampleif you are making lets say boxes then it's not effective to have a two people that both fold the cardboard and glue it, the most effective thing is to have a person just folding and another just glueing boxes, and this happens with all kinds of profesions, because this trend of reducing the training for a job, and reducing the tasks of this job to repetitive and mindless things is the trend, even in highly advanced and "intelligent " jobs.
and say what you will but this is not abolishing labor, because the kinds of jobs that i've described are naturally alienated, since you are turning everything into instrumental tasks (i think that's how marx put it)
at least this is how i read the situation, i might change my mind after a few dozen tomes more
Ah, yes I understand you.
It's true that specialized labor is the most efficient but in Marx's view the continued development of technology was reducing the labor-time necessary to produce goods and therefore contained the possibility of eliminating the alienation of the assembly line by making it no longer necessary to pursue efficiency for its own sake.
For example, under capitalism the continued development of technology simply subordinates workers to that technology by making them function as appendages of the machine. But in socialism it would be the opposite. Machines would again be subordinated to the workers. In that mode of production the machine will take on the repetitive, hard, and dangerous tasks. The dynamic would be entirely different.
When a capitalist invests in machinery or employs workers he does it to make his job easier. He doesn't want to mine coal or fold shirts even though these things may be integral to his enterprise. The small business owner or self-employed person does these things out of necessity due to lack of capital but once capital is acquired it is used to eliminate their own drudgery and free themselves for the task of managing, directing, thinking, and becoming the master of work rather than its slave. In socialism the workers would do the same.
Would this hurt efficiency? Would it be less competitive than the capitalist mode of production? In the immediate short-term I don't think so, since when taken as a whole a socialist mode of production would no longer suffer from things like financial speculation, mass unemployment, periodical crises, etc. In the long-term it would be a moot point since socialism is not meant to be a competing system but rather the long-term successor to capitalism.
If council communism is government by workers' councils then I would assume they would also steer things like a workers' militia/army? We need to be able to fend off from the attack of the bourgeoisie still. What's the perspective on this, on defense specifically, from councilcoms / leftcom communizers / or just leftcoms in general? (I'm just personally not that fond of Bordigism)
I know anarchists are all about militias specifically, and that MLs are all-in on pompous hyper-centralized professional militaries.
I would assume leftcoms would end up somewhere in the middle?
To make an example of this, the reason why workers engage in these low-skill, repetitive, mindless jobs is due to the fact that labor-power is a commodity in capitalism and often a cheap commodity at that.
In socialism these workers would not just be compensated for their work but also, as "part-owners" in a system of socialized ownership, would have the right to influence decision-making about the means and methods of their own work. They could easily decide to set aside part of the budget to acquire machinery or tools that would reduce the drudgery involved. This often fails to happen in capitalism because those who do the work have almost no say in the decision-making of the enterprise. At best, they can attempt to influence the manager who will attempt to use his influence to acquire better tools, but frankly even this is all-dependent upon upper management and the company's owner(s).
Believe me, I have been in many work situations where I wanted to convince someone to simply do something different so we could work more productively and with less stress, but all I got were blank stares. Capitalist enterprises (at least where I'm from) are simply money-sucking machines and nothing more.
yes this is my point, tans is not "freeing people from labor", tans is about feeing labor from tipical capitalist limits, taking away things like the reserve army of labor, and the paradoxical nature of automation in capitalism. It's a hyper efficient machine designated to outcompete liberal capitalism, but it is not socialism as marx described it, you can really see this by listening to his interviews, he really spells it out there, he says in one ocasion a thing like "socialism is not about abolishing abstract labour is about freeing it"
they could easily decide to do away with the drudgery but in a system that maximases production at all cost, workers will be pushed towards uncomfortable positions if that increases productivity.
so even if they do have decision making abilities in cockshott's world, they still will have to do shit jobs that increase productivity, because enterprises that don't will be shrinked by the plan itself, just out of virtue of being less efficient, and eventually they'll go away.
to get over this it is neccesary to implement a system that doesn't maximise production as a goal, however this is not tans
also i forgot to talk about pic related, this is just an example of what i was talking about, in order to reduce the labor content of manga is neccesary to create individual more repetitive alienated jobs, i.e. have one guy fill with ink things, have guy drawing the lines, have another do the dialogue etcetera
Not the guy you respond but you're not wrong, their "versions" of socialism are not really different between them.
I would say the main difference is the way to reach socialism. Council-communists want to capture the state and get involved in state institutions (such as bourgeois elections) and so may have a party.
Anarcho-communists/syndicalists want to dismantle the state and usually don't participate in state institutions and so are more into platformism and/or syndicalism.
They do?? Have you got a source on that? This would contradict a main tenet of leftcommunism of which councilcom is supposed to be a school of, namely being critical of social democratic strategies.
Also ironically there are a couple of examples of platformists orgs drifting towards electoralism shortly before dismantling due to internal conflicts.
These parties for sure :
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I would say it's a critical participation.
The Luxemburgists were proto-leftcom, closer in their positions to orthodox Marxism. Left-communism as a solid tendency started with the critical opposition within the Third International/Comintern by the Italian left around Bordiga (leftcom-Bordigism) and the German-Dutch left around Pannekoek and Mattick (leftcom-councilism).
Does anyone know about the Marxist Humanists? They seem to say a lot of leftcom-ish things, but don't really get talked about around here.
The "young/mature Marx" divide is arbitrary and both the Marxist humanists and Althusser were morons. Marx wrote of alienation in Capital as well; it's by no means an exclusively "young Marx" thing.
I'm not that familiar with them, but there are at least two organizations in the U.S. that I know of.
The first is the News & Letters Committees, which describes itself as:
"News and Letters Committees is an organization of Marxist-Humanists. It has always stood for the abolition of capitalism, both in its private property form as in the U.S., and in its state property form calling itself Communist, which appeared as the Russian Revolution was transformed into its opposite. That retrogression anticipated the next stage of development—the age of state-capitalism. We stand for a society of new human relations, what Marx called a new Humanism."
newsandletters.org
Then another group, the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, which split from the group above in 2008:
The Marxist-Humanist Initiative holds that an important cause of the failures and incompleteness of past revolutions was the lack of internalization of Karl Marx’s philosophy of revolution. We have constituted ourselves as a new organization in order to contribute to the transformation of this world by projecting, developing and concretizing Marx’s philosophy and its further development in the Marxist-Humanism articulated by Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987).
marxisthumanistinitiative.org
The economist Andrew Kliman is associated with the above group. Their general line right now is that capitalism is undergoing a general crisis in the classical Marxist sense of the term, and that "financialization" is not the cause of, but simply a part of, this general crisis. They reject any attempts to ally with an "alt-left" or any idea of accomodation with Trumpism or its supporters. (I have no idea who on the left advocates this, but they apparently feel its a real danger.)
This is an interview of an MH's idea of communism:
internationalmarxisthumanist.org
I've listened to a lot of Kliman and Peter Hudis and I like what they have to say, but then I went to the IMHO website and saw all the hysterical anti-Trump stuff and it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Someone able to answer these?:
The communist left doesn't care about "self" management because a firm is still a firm even if its run by a co-op instead of a single boss. While worker self-organization was (and remains) necessary, it was (and is) not enough to overthrow capitalism. Instead of perceiving this limit for what it is – a limit –ideology sets it as the objective of the movement. Ideologization is the process by which the whole of proletarian history is re-interpreted as if this limitation was its essence.
"Councilism is worker councils turned into the be-all-and-end-all of revolution."
Self-management is a vague term to begin with and it isn't necessarily anti-capitalist. Leftcoms seek the abolition of the commodity form and the current mode of production, self-management doesn't really challenge production or create an organized system for doing so.
Theorie Communiste and Troploin disagree on some key points, namely the fetishism of the proletariat in communist orgs which Troploin despises because they think working culture seeks to abolish itself. Also I think Troploin takes the bordigist stance on anti fascism, believing that it only serves to protect the liberal capitalist state from violence.
Because leftcoms don't view revolution as coming out of a preconceived ideological narrative but instead as arising out of material conditions like Marx said. it's not that organisation is bad, just that it shouldn't be doctrinal, leftcoms are also guilty of this though. Historically preconfigured revolutionary organizations have been opportunist because they try to use the womb of the old society in creating a revolutionary one t.gothacritik
I interpreted the leftcom critique of self-organization to be a leftcom critique of the Proudhonian current of theory that flows through social anarchism, not councilism. Councilism is a branch of leftcom, so did you give me the Bordigist answer instead of keeping it general, or?
This is a very strange sentence to me since we want communist production for use/need, not to abolish 'production'. With communist production we've transcended commodity production.
This is too limiting though since the struggle neccessarily needs a logic of ideas to take us from a (capitalism) to c (lower phase communism) and d (higher phase communism), not b1 (fascism) or b2 (neoliberal junta). We can't just sit on our asses in moments where we have the possibility to change social conditions, nowhere did Marx say that; he especially vouched for organization of a political party of, by and for the workers, that was not a part of bourgeois democracy. De Leonism is this, council communism is this, networked organizations who communize illegally and produce for use/need is this. Marx died before the 20th century and had no way of predicting that capitalism would get so far as to being able to influence the biosphere and very ecology needed for humanity as a mammalian species being able to survive. The clock is ticking and the very specific strand of orthodox Marxism that hand-waves revolution to some biblical inevitability and pretends that Marxism itself isn't an 'ideology' (logic of ideas, programmatic tasks to be carried out to not be capitalism but communism) is not only limiting but actively dangerous.
Don't take this as a 'case-closed' kind of a response, I'd appreciate a dialog very much.
overlaps with your more libertarian post-capitalist positions, but suffers too much from a tendency to see humans as inherently moral and rational, not just animals with the brain capacity to think we're anything more than that
pretty sure althusser acknowledged this