Read theory, it's literally online for free. Join a reading group. You spend hours doom scrolling on Twitter to no end. All that's gotten you is deep knowledge of every twitter beef between 400 follower nazbols.
Edit: It’s not an issue with the site but online discourse about the left in general. Why are y'all upset about shoeonhead or black hammer or whatever new group of dumbasses is saying some new dumb shit. I'm talking about how every few days lots of leftists are surprised and upset that their fav twitter personality said something really stupid.
Good deal, definitely start Marx with those ones I mentioned. That's like 400 pages total for all 3 and you'll have a really solid grasp on all the economic stuff as well as the frameworks of communism and how it arises from capitalist contradictions.
I read Lenin first too and going back and reading Marx made me realize that there isn't really a "Marxism" without "Leninism". Like Lenin's whole deal was just doing exactly what Marx said.
That's really not true, there are significant changes from Marx's thought to Lenin's, and substantial (the large majority in fact) amounts of Marx's writing Lenin didn't have access to either. There's also important ideas that just are not Marx's. For example the withering of the state is not from Marx, it's a statement Engels made. Lenin also draws significantly from other Marxists for a lot of his base, especially Hilferding and Kautsky (the point of the renegade Kautsky is after all that Kautsky's earlier writings were very important for Lenin and that he went renegade post war) who are all part of imo a departure (and not a good one, it makes fundamental mistakes) from Marx's political thought and critique that becomes dominant in the SPD and then the Bolsheviks.
I'm just gonna counter the "withering away" point by saying that while Marx may have never said that phrase specifically, it is heavily implied in his definition of state. He frequently mentions that the state is a tool of class oppression and that the workers "seizing the machinery of the state" is more of a destruction of the state machinery and replacement by democratic worker counterparts.
He also asserts many times that the goal of a proletarian revolution is to abolish class, and therefore the worker's state serves as the tool with which to resolve those contradictions.
From these points, you can concluelde that the state must either away, or at least as I believe Engels puts it, transition from an administration of people to an administration of things. Which I would say constitutes a withering away (as without class conflicts, the state has no reason to exist).
Kautsky's big sin was the assertion that the revolution could occur within the framework of the bourgeois state, an idea which Marx heavily criticizes in The French Civil War.
Right, but Marx is still in other places, like the notes on Bakunin, quite ambivalent on how much "state" there is in a worker's state. Like being a workers "state" for Marx still requires things like the destruction the bureaucracy and the army. Furthermore Marx was never completely convinced by the common instrumental view of the state that is attributed him. This period is also still pretty short, and imo from the critique of the Gotha program and some sections of Capital, it's pretty clear that the state does not exist by the time the first phase of communism rolls around (which is really the big change with the worker's state for Lenin since it still exists in the first phase of socialism).
Once again, The Civil War in France is the big turning point for Marx. He described the governing structure that emerged in the Paris commune as the form of the proletarian state. He also makes it clear that the state like that exists until the class conflict doesn't. At no point did he say that the Paris revolutionaries should have disbanded their councils and disbanded their national guardsmen.
He also made it clear that "ideology" plays no part in the formation of the proletarian state as it assumes the form it needs to survive. His evidence being that the main ideologies of the Parisians said nothing about formation of councils and revocable representatives. The workers organized in a way that they needed to to survive the encirclement.
Also I'm calling bullshit on Marx ever saying that the state stops existing before the first stage of communism. He clearly says that the length of the different stages cannot be known and will likely take generations. He also states the role of central banks in the first stage which are absolutely a state appendage.
How can central banks be in the first stage when money has been abolished in the first stage. That's ridiculous, where on earth are you getting that?
The principle distinction between the lower and higher phase of communism for Marx is that in the higher phase "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished". That is the defining feature, not the presence of the state.
Yes really, the state does not exist in the first stage of communism, it is gone. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not exist in either of the stages. The DOTP, which is the only stage with a workers state, is an intermediary stage between capitalism (really the last stage of capitalism while it is being abolished) and the first stage of communism.
Class conflict does not exist in the lower phase of communism, that is very clear. Marx would not have used the word communism if it was still there.
He muses in I think volume 2 or 3 of Capital (I was reading the Borchard edition so I can't remember exactly which, I'll try and find it tomorrow) about how Joint Stock companies would be useful and mentions that the Parisians stopped at the treasury when they should have taken it over.
He was also very clear about how centralization increases efficiency and that currency is fine, but needs to be tied to labor value or be replaced with "labor vouchers" which I think is kinda pointless now as we have a credit system and paper currency that can serve that purpose.
From The Principles of Communism
i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inher- itance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.
But that's all still in the context of the DoTP that is still heavily in the throws of abolishing capitalist society. That's all over by the time the first phase of communism begins (the taking of the treasury part, innovative political forms in the commune system etc).
The labor vouchers (which I think are problematic but that's besides the point) are purposefully something that exist after the above is all over, capitalist society has ended by then. The only thing holding society back is a "bourgeois right" to the proceeds of one's labor according to what one produces that for whatever reason still persists (Marx never really elaborated on this, it's possible it was just to make the program seem reasonable) that necessitate a voucher system, which is not currency.
Also, please don't cite the twelve demands as evidence communism has a centralized bank, they aren't defining a communist society for the mature Marx (or even for early Marx, he's clear in principles that these demands are not communism), like they become a particular articulation of working class demands that help move towards a communist society just a year later (a conception which is still highly in flux when they are written down). They are demands of the bourgeois state fundamentally. Marx and Engel's themselves noted in later editions of the manifesto that the planks would be significantly changed (they would not have changed the demand for the communal bank, however they likely would have changed the wording to make clear it happens under the semi-state that defines the DoTP, and not the bourgeois state that they are still working with in 1848).
I edited my comment with Marx's list of communist principles.
Also, I think we're agreeing, but just have different definitions of the stages of communism.
The "lower stages of communism" I always saw as socialism/dotp/that list. The higher stages would occur after the abolition of class, and the highest stage is the whole intellectual and physical division of labor thing which I don't really know about, because I'd say we're almost there under capitalism, at least with near universal education programs, so I don't really see that as a very uniquely communist thing.