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.
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:
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.
To be fair, I found a decently clear person. My point is they typically pump out walls of text.
But, that's not a reason for them to be disregarded. It just means they're bad at explaining themselves.
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.
but most people think WE'RE weird and hard to understand. how are we different?
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, people think that the Stalin era Comintern was some kind of lockstep ideological monolith, when really that was a post 1956 thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Their critiques ignore that modes of production don’t change overnight. There are interregnums, moments of struggle and conflict, and periods where both systems overlap as one makes way for the other.
Look at the death of feudalism. There wasn’t one moment where the merchant class rose up and said ‘aight, you landowners don’t run things anymore. We’re capitalists now’. Rather, there was a transition where political power was steadily clawed from the king/lords, and the feudal mode gave way to the capitalist mode.
Even now, in many capitalist countries, they’re technically monarchies. But those are vestigial at best. No one would say England isn’t capitalist, despite the remnants of Queen Lizzy and her lands.
As someone who would generally identify with the majority of leftcom positions, this is the correct answer. Leftcom theoretical positions on most issues are, in my personal opinion, the objectively/empirically correct ones. But they're often highly inflexible purists who refuse to take into account changing historical and contemporary conditions on the ground, and in turn denounce positions or campaigns that don't perfectly conform to the theory. This in turn leads to the stereotype of leftcoms being armchair leftists who don't do anything.
It also leads to really silly infighting, like how Gramscians and Bordigists mutually hated and still hate each other even though both have valuable theoretical contributions that aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Don't people who follow the Italian leftcoms generally criticize Gramsci's thought for basically toeing the line between materialism and just straight up idealism? I don't think Bordiga and Gramsci are compatible at all really
Not to mention Bordigists generally hate Gramsci's guts because they view him as a Moscow puppet put in place through factional maneuvering so that the Italian Communist Party would be sympathetic to the USSR
Yes. And yes Gramsci's later thought heavily incorporates Italian idealism, but that was precisely what made it stand out from the competing Marxist dogmas that had become entrenched in the early 20th centuries. It doesn't mean his contributions aren't worth considering.
But Bordiga's philosophy was similarly flawed, at least in the way he attempted to put it into practice. His vision for the PCI was hyper-sectarian and rendered it completely isolated from the actual labor movement.
More so than that. Lots of old nobility just turned their power into money and became new nobility under capitlaism
I better example is probably Saudi, since it's an absolute monarchy and Oil Income is directly predicated on Land Ownership, which is owned directly by the monarchy or via a few feudal families, even if they are technically companies for the purposes of trade with capitalists.
Yeah. I’d just add that position differs from mode of production.
Crudely speaking, Feudalism is a mode of production characterised by the bonding of workers to the land, and the extracting of surplus value occurring via an in-kind tax. The political structure that facilitated this was one based around hierarchy of land ownership.
Capitalism saw that mode eroded, with the people involved in maintaining it either marginalised, or transformed into capitalists. Peasants were booted off the land and proletarianised.
Chattel slavery was formally abolished in the USA, but we still have echoes of the positions enforced by that mode of production. The children of slave owners are doing alright, and the children of slaves are, on the whole, not.
The same process can occur in socialist transformation, and was the rationale behind united fronts. A national bourgeoisie, subject to leadership of the proletariat, retains some of its status and privilege. The intelligentsia that managed capitalist production ends up managing socialist production as well. (Of course, this is conditional on actually supporting the new mode.)
We even see it occur in reverse. The socialist managers of the USSR became the capitalists when it disintegrated.
They oppose anti-fascism on the grounds of it being a coalition between liberals and communists as opposed to working class front. This critique showed its value in Spain, but not so much in Italy, and I would prefer it as a word of caution as opposed to a hard critique.
They oppose national liberation on the grounds that it creates liberal states and not communist states. This also played out historically, but it ignores that being a liberal state is much better than being a colony. IMO the direction to take this one is not to oppose national revolution, but to support ultra left and anarchist factions within national liberation movements, and if you're involved in one, advocate for simultaneous social and political revolution.
This critique showed its value in Spain, but not so much in Italy
what do you mean by this?
The antifascist coalition in Spain was ultimately defeated, whereas the Italian antifascist coalition held together throughout the duration of the war until the total defeat of fascist Italy and the expulsion of German troops by force.
There are some key differences here, however. I wouldn't say the situations were equal. Spanish antifascists were a coalition of Marxist and anarchist forces, their opposition included fascists, monarchists, clergy and liberals. The Italians had anarchists, marxists, monarchists, clergy and liberals amongst their ranks (the latter turning against the fascists only as they had failed to uphold the deal of protecting their class interests).
The Spanish antifascists had little to no external support; only the USSR and Mexico supported them, with Western powers at best ignoring and at worst (such as Italy and Germany) openly bombing and supplying the falangists. Italian antifascists were bolstered by allied support and also a literal land invasion in the South.
It's worth pointing out that postwar Italy was ready, of its own free and democratic will, to elect a communist government and quite possibly join the USSR as a soviet republic, only to have the USA meddle in the elections and alter the outcome. The Italian government then kept the population in a state of fear with false flag attacks by the NATO underground army Gladio that were blamed on communists, or they knew about violent assholes planning attacks and let them go through anyway with approval from the intelligence services (see: Tsarnev bros). Better elect those libs, or else you're gonna get it! Oh and allow US to base troops and nuclear weapons on your soil and make you into a target.
A key difference in the Italian and Spanish experiences is that the Italians completely failed to prevent the fascists from coming to power, but once the fascist hold weakened during the war and the stupid factional infighting over party leadership and the dogmatic minutiae of the Comintern line was swept away by harsh repression, they got their act together and became the dominant force in anti-fascist partisan resistance.
The Spanish coalition by contrast held together against the initial Francoist onslaught but over time fell apart due to factional infighting (libs vs anarchists vs Trots vs MLs), lack of external support, and an inability to agree on how to properly fight the war. As defeat loomed each faction started violently backstabbing everyone else in attempts to salvage the war effort and they all ended up collapsing and repressed by the dictatorship Franco erected.
as LeninsRage pointed out, the italian antifascists also failed the task of stopping fascists coming to power---if anything the Spanish were more successful in seizing state power where the nominal alliance of liberals and communists and socialists (anarchists mostly stayed out electorally) controlled the government, were actively if too slowly turning that liberal state on the fascists. one of the major tensions that led to the war was the state secret police, under the direction of the socialists killing a right-winger. of course they didn't manage to get the whole guardia on their side or complete a repression of the military staff, but shit, as soon as the war started the actual head of the fascist party and hundreds of his goons were taken out back and executed.
the outcome of the war was really decided by 75,000 fascisti and 12,000 nazis, there really isn't anything ideological to point out when your only answer to the best the leading fascist nations could field is 50k marxist bookclub members who you can hardly find rifles for. the only thing that could've really done it is the Front Populaire not being english bootlickers, the Soviets somehow sending actual tank battalions (along with more than 150? total tanks they actually sent, there were so many T-26s to spare & they outclassed every other tank in the theater)
I don’t agree with them, I just want to know why I shouldn’t.
:agony-deep:
I don't know any serious answers. As far as I know, the problem is that they read too many books, or not enough books? Not the right amount of books I guess is the point.
I just find the framing of "I don't know about these people except that I know I'm not supposed to agree with them" funny-troubling.
The site is far enough left that it’s pretty easy to forget not everyone has a background dealing with some of the weird pseudo-strains of leftism.
I was covering my ass because I was worried if I asked without that little disclaimer I would get people thinking I'm a leftcom.
fwiw theres one leftcom who comes on here every few months and writes a couple of long and unreadable sectarian wall-of-text screeds about the real movement to abolish the present state of things and ruthless critique of all that exists, calls everyone else fake marxists and then promptly gets banned again. so kinda like a more boring version of bmf but they do liven up the place a bit
That’s called a “shibboleth”, a phrase spoken in an attempt to prove the speaker is on the same side as the audience. It’s a phenomenon that super common in the west.
@Lenin called it: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/
I don't know if you've read the text, because the people Lenin criticizes are not what we commonly refer to as leftcoms nowadays (though that term is already shitty and nebulous and doesn't describe anything). Bordiga for example gets a brief mention and gets criticized for his anti-parliamentarism, but that's about it.
I don’t know what you commonly refer to as leftcoms nowadays. If I had to guess, I’d say probably Trotskyites and some Maoist groups. Anyway, Lenin is pretty clear who he was talking about. The comrades in the PSMLS discussion do try and apply the concept to the present day.
I’d say probably Trotskyites and some Maoist groups
Far from it, leftcoms generally despise those guys as much as Stalinists lmfao, though they might be more sympathetic to Trotsky's criticisms of the Soviet Union. Originally leftcoms referred to a bunch of Marxists who were skeptical of Leninism (but not in a Kautsky succdem way), people like Pannekoek or Pankhurst, who were contemporaries of Lenin and mentioned in the book, but that trend more or less completely died out. Nowadays, post-WW2, most people that would be classified as "left-communists" generally follow or were greatly inspired by the Italian left-communists like Bordiga or Damen, or people who fall closer to traditional council communism like Paul Mattick. Leftcom ideas also had a bit of a resurgence after '68 in France, the Situationists would fall under this umbrella for example. Leftcom is just a shit term really, because we've got Bordigists who are "more Leninist than Lenin" grouped together with anti-Leninist councilcoms and straight-up anarcho-primitivists like Camatte, all under the same umbrella lmao. Bordigists seem to be most numerous, though, and most if not all of the points in the book don't apply to them since they agree with Lenin on pretty much everything.
Could someone briefly define left-communism for me? Sorry, I didn't do the reading.
This helps, thank you. Based on this, and what else I've read, I'm feeling like it could be summed up as "All theory, no praxis," ideological purity to the point where none of the successes of any past Marxist/communist projects have lived up to their standards.
Please correct me if that doesn't sound right.
They don't believe transitional development of socialism is a thing (at least the Dutch ones don't), which kinda begs alot of questions about their fundamental premises concerning practical change, but alot of the critiques are still useful, mostly their critiques on collaboration with liberals and social democrats, but to be fair Kaleckian critiques of class collaboration blows every left-com take on the subject out of the water
My opinion on left communism can be summed up as "Extraordinary theory requires extraordinary practical results"
Just popping in to say that this thread has been great to read, and I learned a lot. Thank you all! :meow-bounce:
If you’re worried that you hurt someone, take meaningful action to rectify it. Groveling doesn’t solve the problem and just attracts sadists who enjoy crushing socially acceptable targets.
That being said, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s good to be informed.
I was joking mostly
Also, apologies are still important where 'rectifying' it isn't really a thing that can be done. Like, say, saying something rude or stupid. In that case, the only way to 'rectify' it is by being nice to whoever got hurt, and apologies are a part of that.
