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.
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.