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.
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.
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More so than that. Lots of old nobility just turned their power into money and became new nobility under capitlaism
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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.
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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.
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.