Yes, I know from a rhetorical perspective they're a bunch of jerks who do nothing but complain, but is there an actual takedown of their ideological notions? Because just saying they suck without further explanation makes it hard to dismiss them when they pop up. I don't agree with them, I just want to know why I shouldn't. Something about statues and logic and being chained in a courtyard with wind and all that. I'm not sure where to put this, sorry.

  • Edelgard [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Left-communists do nothing. It really is that simple.

    Bordiga refused to get involved in opposition to the fascist regime in Italy, and in fact speculated that it'd be better if the Axis won World War II. Bordiga supported both Mussolini and Hitler in his writing. He also either informed on actual communists or was extremely friendly with fascist police informants, inviting them over to dinner and becoming drinking buddies with them.

    After the war ended Bordiga claimed that the USSR, US and UK would become fascist states, thus "proving" anti-fascism is stupid. Meanwhile the PCI, which played a leading role in the anti-fascist resistance, enjoyed massive popularity among Italian workers and farmers to the extent the CIA intervened to help prevent a Communist victory at the polls

    I can't think of a single left-com who actually did anything besides write, unless one talks about figures like Pannekoek or Pankhurst who were only relevant politically in the 1920s (and of these, Pankhurst later became a publicist for the feudal regime of Haile Selassie.)

    There's a LeftCom comic called "Great Moments in Leftism" whose creator argues that even basic struggles like protesting cuts to welfare are reactionary because what workers should be protesting for is communism. Left-comms are almost always leftist in name only and obnoxiously sectarian to the point their ideologies borderline depend on dismissing other tendencies.

    One can disagree with the Workers World Party, or the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, or the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or even the RCPUSA and CPUSA, but at least they actually have some following among students and/or workers. Anarchists and Trots also enjoy widespread support among the working class as well.

    All left-coms have to offer are snide remarks and whining. Their ideologies are tailor-made to justify sitting on one's ass. They also all seem to write the same for some reason with lots of run-on sentences. The majority are also transphobic and/or class reductionist.

    If you want a good laugh, ask one of them to coherently explain how they propose abolishing the commodity form. They will almost always start talking shit about the USSR instead :che-laugh:

    • Edelgard [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Here’s a comment from a Left-Com on :reddit-logo: trying to explain the core of their belief system. Let me know how far you get before your eyes glaze over lol

      TLDR; Commodity-Capital, or the commodity-form of capital, it is the name of products used to make surplus value. It existed in the USSR. Without it, currency would not exist, and things would be distributed by need, rather than the accumulation of value. ML's say it exists in the lower stage of communism, LeftComs say it does not.

      Wall of Text: I know you know what it is, but I wanted to explain anyway. Just go down a bit for the answer. :) In capitalist production, objects have two values- a use value and a labour-value. The former is easy to explain- is the thing useful? If so, it has a use value. The latter is how much socially necessary labour-time it took to make the object.

      The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

      When supply and demand are in equilibrium, this labor-value is equal to the price of the commodity.

      From now on, I will just call the labour-value value.

      Value used to create more value is called capital, and the director of this capital is a Capitalist. The capitalist wants to create as much Capital as possible, or in other words, wants to accumulate capital.

      Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!

      This is also the inspiration for my username :).

      This capitalist invests capital-value in the form of money into buying labour (wages) the the materials used to create commodities (the means of production).

      The labour and the means of production combine to create new commodities- the value of the total commodities produced is equal to the value of the labour (called variable capital, or v), plus the value of the means of production (called constant capital, or c), plus Surplus Value, or v, which comes from shortselling the worker out of his value-producing labour. In other words, the value of the product is equal to v + c + s.

      This value is all stored in the commodity, and when the commodity is sold, manifests itself in the form of money, or money-capital. Then this money capital is invested back into labour and the means of production, and the cycle begins anew.

      The transfer of Money for Commodities can be simplified as M - C. The purchase of Labour and the Means of Production with Money-Capital can be simplified as M - C(L + MP). The production process can be simplified as C(L +MP) ... P ... C', with the ' next to the C symbolizing the extra surplus value added to the commodities. The sale of the newly produced commodities for money can be shortened to C' - M'.

      In total, the capitalist cycle can be shortened to

      M - C(L + MP) ... P ... C' - M',

      which can loop over and over.

      Every step of this cycle is a form of capital. When capital is manifested in commodities, it is called the commodity-form of capital.

      WITHOUT FURTHER ADO...

      THE ACTUAL ANSWER

      Both Left-Communists and Marxist-Leninists agree that in a fully Communist world commodities would no longer carry this capital-value, and would only contain a use value- meaning, the products would be distributed based on who needs them, rather than who has money. But while Left-Communists claim this applies for every stage of socialism/communism, Marxist-Leninists claim the lower stage of communism follows LTV, and thus contains commodity-capital. If you belive the latter, the USSR was socialist. If you belive the former, it was capitalist.

      Here are the two best examples of evidence for each side:

      From Economic Problems of the USSR, by J. V. Stalin.

      It is sometimes asked whether the law of value exists and operates in our country, under the socialist system. Yes, it does exist and does operate. Wherever commodities and commodity production exist, there the law of value must also exist.

      In the second phase of communist society, the amount of labour expended on the production of goods will be measured not in a roundabout way, not through value and its forms, as is the case under commodity production, but directly and immediately...

      From Dialouge With Stalin, a direct Left-Communist response to Economic Problems by A Bordiga:

      We have explained in various texts (avoiding to say anything new) that every system of commodity production is a non-socialist system; this is exactly what we will reaffirm.

      In the famous Stalin pamphlet one finds these concessions regarding the Russian economy: even if the large firms are socialized, the small and medium-sized firms however aren't expropriated: on the contrary, this would "be equal to a crime." According to the author [Stalin], they should transition into cooperative firms. Currently there are two sectors of commodity production in Russia: on the one hand the public, "nationally owned" production. In the state-owned enterprises, the means of production and production itself, thus also the products, are national property. How simplistic: in Italy, the tobacco factories and accordingly their sold cigarettes are owned by the state. Does this already qualify for the assertion that one is in a phase of the "abolishment of the wage labour system" and the respective workers weren't "forced" to sell their labour power? Surely not.

      We therefore not only haven't got the first phase of socialism in front of us [in the USSR], but also not even a total state capitalism, that means an economy, in which -- even though all products are commodities and circulate for money -- the state disposes of every product; so, a form in which the state can centrally determine all proportions of equivalence, including labour power. Such a state as well couldn't be controlled nor conquered economically/politically by the working class and would function in service of the anonymous and hiddenly operating capital. But Russia is far away from that anyways: all that is there, is the after the anti-feudal revolution arisen state industrialism.

      And, finally, here is a quote from Capital Volume 2, Part 3, Chapter 18, Section 1, by K. Marx, which both sides claim supports them respectively. You can decide.

      Under socialised as well as capitalist production, the labourers in branches of business with shorter working periods will as before withdraw products only for a short time without giving any products in return; while branches of business with long working periods continually withdraw products for a longer time before they return anything. This circumstance, then, arises from the material character of the particular labour-process, not from its social form. In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.

        • Edelgard [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          To be fair, I found a decently clear person. My point is they typically pump out walls of text.

          • extremesatanism [they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            But, that's not a reason for them to be disregarded. It just means they're bad at explaining themselves.

            • Edelgard [she/her]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I disagree, being unable to clearly communicate is a good reason to disregard them in addition to their total lack of any historical or material wins for the working class.

                • Ideology [she/her]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  Problem is: leftcoms failed. They failed so hard that their movements were broken up and diminished before the fascists and neolib war hawks in the 30s-40s could deliver the final death blow. They failed so hard that Stalin had to stop sending them money and restructure the entire ComIntern to focus on Asia where real revolutions were happening.

                  To put it bluntly: they failed to capture the support of the proletariat by turning marxism into an orthodoxy, and pretty often ignored Engels contributions. And the intellectuals who survived after WW2 set the stage for post-marxist philosophy professors and art teachers to shit on AES states for the next 80 years.

                  • aqwxcvbnji [none/use name]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    en up and diminished before the fascists and neolib war hawks in the 30s-40s could deliver the final death blow. They failed so hard that Stalin had to stop sending them money

                    He sent money to leftcoms?

                    • Ideology [she/her]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      It kinda depends on how you look at it and what year it was, because Euro Communist Parties were a mess and some of their core members were in multiple parties with various beliefs. Some were MLs, some were Leninists but not MLs, some were DemSocs trying to get their parties involved in the bourg govts, some had Anarchist sympathies, some were even Trade Unionists. To give an example: Otto Rühle was a Council Communist who joined the KPD for a year, went to the USSR for a Comintern World Congress, and then immediately split the party.

                      • Mardoniush [she/her]
                        ·
                        2 years ago

                        Yeah, people think that the Stalin era Comintern was some kind of lockstep ideological monolith, when really that was a post 1956 thing.

                • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  I'm not hard to understand. You can explain communism to a six year old; Big Bird would always share what he has with people who are in need. Big Bird is cool. Therefore sharing is cool. We should base the way we live on sharing instead of keeping all our stuff to ourselves. Even Cookie Monster would share his cookies if he had cookies and someone else did not.

                  • Dangitbobby [none/use name]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    I don't know how many six year olds you know, but the ones I know will happily club another child over the head with a 2 lb plastic Big Bird and take their cookie. With a big smile.

                  • extremesatanism [they/them]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    But that same rhetoric is used by Nazi's as well, it's not integral to our ideology, even though it's what we actually believe unlike Nazi's.

                    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      Doesn't mean it's hard to explain. Vietnam and China are both famous for teaching Communist Theory to rural farmers with no formal education in a very short amount of time. The Communist Mainfesto is only 25 pages long and is still snappy and pretty easy to read almost 200 years later. If anything the difficulty is getting through lib ideological programming, not anything complicated about the basic concepts. Yeah, reading Capital is a pain in the ass, but not everyone needs to read Capital or high level theory.

      • Hawke [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Out of this wall of text (I skipped the whole math section) and some of the theories they discuss on Swampside Chats podcast, my layman understanding is that they want to abolish money for money's sake and distribute work and resources another way, according to need, directly in socialism, as opposed to having the same mode of production we have right now but with better bosses(DoP) or with worker democracy.

        Some more thought out thinkers propose labour vouchers, or standartized work hours, to replicate the function of money as an accounting measure and exchange, but they all IMO have the problem of not offering a way to get there, you just have a revolution and turn on a switch and now everyone just knows to use labour vouchers.

    • Dangitbobby [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Bordiga refused to get involved in opposition to the fascist regime in Italy, and in fact speculated that it’d be better if the Axis won World War II.

      Wow. Fascinating stuff. He wanted capitalism dead so hard that he was willing to see the Axis win WWII, because if Britain fell then the center of world capitalism would be snuffed out at the same time. Maybe he thought that given time, those national socialists could be made into good international socialists? IDK