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.
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.
Fuck the edit glitched and deleted.
Gist: lower phase really is after the abolition of capitalism, it's not the DOTP. The demands made in principles are a snapshot of early Marx where the bourgeois state and the proletarian "state" are not really articulated yet. Those demands are particular ones made to the bourgeois state that help get society on track to further progress to communism and would be significantly adjusted once the idea of the DOTP semi-state is developed. The quote about division of labor is more about how in higher communism we won't divide each other's labor in that someone may be a janitor and someone else is a mathematician, instead someone may be a janitor and the morning and a mathematician in the afternoon if that suits their individual drives and what labor they do does not dictate what they are given to socially reproduce. The full quote is
I'm just harping a bit on this since I think it's very important to keep in mind what is and is not socialism and the DoTP otherwise we can kind of lose the plot of what we are aiming for. It's also important to remember what Marx thinks the forms of the state are and conditions of labor are and how they free us or not. Marx harped on this too, considering his early critiques in works like Private Property and Communism that then persist throughout his life.
Last edit lol: pretty much all this disagreement is from Lenin trying to demarcate the lower and higher phase of communism more clearly than marx did (and then the ussr in the thirties trying to declare what they had socialism, which Lenin would not have done) and from mixing and matching different parts of Marx's work together without looking at context and difference, however by doing this we muddle Marx's own conception of communism. It's fine to take lenin's position, but I think it misses important elements of Marx's conception of communism
That passage right before your one on higher communism. I still really don't see how that's so different. It's ambiguous enough with the labor voucher thing that it could be interpreted as currency backed by labor value and not oil/gold. Which is not totally incompatible with the idea of a centralized bank in the first stage of communism (who distributes and mediates the exchange of vouchers for social product?).
I'm not under any impression that the goal of socializing production is meant to stop at the first phase, but I'm also aware that tools such as a central banking system and post office (even better if they're combined) and public transport are indespesible in the fight to reach a higher stage of development. The people won't accept a complete devaluation of their currency immediately and it will take time to supplant the existing financial systems, better to retool then to serve as more equitable versions of themselves and phase them out immediately.
Once again, at no point does either Marx or Lenin say anything about how long any of these phases will take, there seems to be some people who assume that the first phase is meant to be short, but it could very well be a 200 year struggle as capitalism's was from the mercantilism of the 1600s.
That's a Leninism. Marx defines it differently in the Gothacritik.
I just don't really see the big deal in the difference. Especially because a dotp exists with the goal of creating the conditions for the stages of communism so why is it separate from the stages of communism? Marx wasn't very clear even in Gothacritik about exactly how the lower stages would look, just that they'd "bear the birthmarks of capitalism", "have distribution of resources according to labor value". Also he frequently mentions the importance of an ever expanding democracy, which is primarily the introduction of democracy in production and formation of worker councils.
Again, it feels like this difference is really splitting hairs as the end goal of both interpretations is the same. Hell, even the intermediate goals and initial goals are the same, they just have different terminology being used.
"State capitalism" is just the highest stage of capitalism and is a vector by which Marx saw a transition to socialism happen in the industrialized nations. Lenin skipped that step with the use of peasant coalitions (which Marx pointed out as a viable option in The Civil War in France). The issue being that productive forces didn't exist in sufficient quantity in Russia to implement the lower or higher stages of communism.
So you could say that the industrialization period and NEP/5 Year Plans were not socialism and in fact "state capitalism", but they were in service of developing industry without the massive human cost of capitalist industrialization (which was a success). So whatever they were, they differed from capitalist production in social equity and human cost. They were an example of a just expansion of production that didn't require reserve labor and wage slavery. Calling that "capitalism" would be wrong, it's an entirely different mode of production.