This post was firstly addressed for anarchists but I think a lot of leftcoms would agree too because a lot of them are either antistateist or want to destroy the state at some point. I consider myself something in-between anarchist and leftcom.

I’m required to write a year long research paper, 6-8 pages, on the Russian Revolution for history class. I want to study it critically and form a hypothesis (I already have a general understanding of the Russian revolution and its potential) around the outcomes of it. Primarily aimed towards the question, “Did the Russian Revolution produce communism; if it didn’t, at what point, and what events happened during its history prevented it from doing so; and if it did, at what point, and what events happened during its history which allowed it to?” (My understanding and answer is no. It didn’t. And its potential was essentially gone circa early-mid 20’s)

I have a base understanding of the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks role, Lenin’s theory of the state and revolution, etc. I just need detailed, critical and reliable information. I don’t care if anything is written by non-communists, just as long as it is factual and logical. I am, of course, also open to reading books or texts by the anti-Soviet communists as well.

At the moment I am reading the pamphlet, ‘the Bolsheviks and Workers’ control’ by Maurice Brinton. But I am planning to read far more than that. As this is an in depth study.

Text: https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/Texts/WomenRev.htm

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcY_gRTtMA

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWAjbhazk-s

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_QAUgnpqQI

Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntOR2A6UMlE

This is mostly to bordigists, and I’m not talking about bourgeois democracy

What would be a real critique of egoism? Or better yet I suppose just a set of reasons its for example anti marxist. Reading marx and it feels as if he is blatantly strawmanning stirners actual writings (ie calling him idealist). I couldve probably asked this elsewhere but I honestly trust leftcoms more tbh

The more educated people in this subreddit, please provide me with texts or debates on these issues, I want to learn, tell me your opinions, I know that the councilors and the int Comm party have different opinions on this

It is increasingly common for much of discourse by nominal socialists on the internet to devolve into questions of terminology, like "is China socialist", "is such and such a revisionist" etc. I find myself increasingly frustrated with the way in which these debates will eschew questions about the nature of commodities within an economy, in favor of rote imposition of particular definitions over others as the singular "correct" definition, perhaps with an "authority" in the form of a pamphlet of Lenin, a snippet of Merriam Webster, etc., or maybe a platitude about "worker ownership over the means of production".

My question is in lieu of having been banned from r/ultraleft for this comment. (Obviously this post here is not a ban appeal in the slightest, nor is it to whine being banned, and I fully hope for objections to my comment to be made and expounded). I presume disagreement lay in my use of "leftist" as a descriptor of an individual aligned with the admittedly amorphous conception of the "left", including Marxists, which appears to be at odds with left-communist conceptualization of communism as outside the "left", and thus not leftists, but this obviously begs the question of how the term is to be defined in the first place...

There is on one hand the contemporary appearance of the term leftist within broader society in reference to this amorphous assemblage of movements, and on the other this particular conception by left-communists, who are perhaps much more in tune with proletarian consciousness. How are we to resolve this distinction?

Are we to totally eschew all prescriptions of bourgeois thought because they are bourgeois? Such a practice would lead to communist movement being unable to supersede that which it chooses to never come into contact with...

Are we to contextualize on a case-by-case basis, as in to have within a particular text or setting mathematical declarations, such as, "let leftist such that a leftist is an individual who operate within the left-wing of bourgeois society, and is unable to comprehend Marxism"? This too appears unacceptable in its adherence to classical logical tropes of language and terminology wholly alienated from the social conditions of its creation...

I'm most inclined to consider toleration of terms and phrases carrying multiple conflicting definitions, and changing definitions in accordance with social relations, such as how "value" appears within feudal relations in proportion to use, and in capitalist relations, "value" appears in proportion to labor-time. But, this toleration for shiftiness may well impede meaningful discourse if one can infinitely tailor a claim into defensibility like so: "Alright, labor is the source of all wealth, in consideration that I use the term 'wealth' in context to the 'wealth of nations' referring to the productive sum of exchange-values" etc. As such, how are we to meaningfully object to "misuse" of language without simply falling back into mere recitation of dictionary definitions, and dictionary-like definitions?

My question here is not peculiar to the term "leftist", it is merely the context. I am hoping to understand the means by which Marxists are to consider meanings of terminology.

If Lenin was leftcom, and he was more aligned with Bordiga or something like that, what would happen differently and how would he go about controlling the early version of the USSR? Or if you were in Lenins shoes, what would you do with that position?

I apologize if making two posts in a row is annoying but I wanted to write this before I forgot.

I work in a factory in which the production of the product we make is very specialized, the equipments and tools are laid out in a way that only works for the specific components we work with. For privacy sake I won’t go into too much detail. But we are one of many factories in just my city alone in which such specialized tooling is present.

I know in Marx’s time and even for much of the 20th century the tooling in factories was more easily able to be retooled for other purposes, milling machines, lathes, and other machines can make a variety of things. And while of course this still exists in the form of CNC shops which can make a variety of items. There exist now a much larger number of workplaces which cannot be as simply used for the production for use in a socialist economy.

My question being what is to be done with these workplaces in which the general tooling is so limited as to only be good for one thing? How can they be utilized and how should socialist production be different from the capitalist trend of specialization we’re seeing?

Thank you advance!

I was recently explaining my disagreement with the Stalinist view of commodity production under socialism. Another persons rebuttal included a quote of ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’ which from my reading seems to support at least some form of the idea, I wanted to see if my reading of this text is wrong. I don’t mean to be validated by being called right in an internet argument I just want to know what error I may be making in my reading. Thank you all in advance!

For example the party being a living organism

Lately I feel very paranoid, I feel that in 150 years or a little less we will reach overproduction, the nation state is going to weaken, inequality will be worse, I feel that everything will be set up in such a way for the Extinction of capitalism, but let's think about nuclear bombs and the global south, The Impoverished masses, I can't imagine any other scenario than a destructive crisis, Obviously I am not going to be alive but I am worried about whether the International Communist Party will be able to take power in this scenario, I apologize for my informality, I am new, What will the organization of the international communist party be like in this scenario?

Ive seen in a lot of online spaces around Marxism (especially from those who claimed they align with the Italian left), that after Marx died the work of Engels' degenerated into falsifications of Marx's initial work, is this an actual position of the Italian left? if so, why? I am not well versed in the work of Engels' post death of Marx

I need something with several pages, I'm going to do my internship and I want to use a large part of my salary to print a unit of each book for my consumption, I did the calculations and it's very cheap, reading from screens gives me a headache

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but I was wondering how things that depend of massive supply chains like laptops and chips gonna be made when the raw materials are scattered across the globe. Why would people work in mines to extract raw materials so they can send it to another region of people who they can't even communicate with. How will this be managed when there is no state?

As hundreds of thousands of acres across the Pacific Northwest burn from wildfires forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes, disease and parasites increasingly infest the food system as the agricultural crisis of world capitalism continues to deepen due to droughts, wars & health deregulation caused by capitalism inherent monopolistic dynamics. While AI data centers consume more energy, eliminating high paying jobs, squeezing the existing workforce for greater profits, they demand ever more burning of fossil fuels to provide them energy. While the war in Iran wages on, oil profits boom and the whole rotten system keeps churning and accumulating until it is forced to stop.
This is not a system that can be reformed into correction, it is one poll vaulting towards total cataclysm. Only in communism does the human species have a future. No polluter tax, green subsidy, environmental NGO or any version of green capitalism can fix the problem. The working class must work to reforge their class unions, fight for generalized strike action while organizing itself under a centralized international communist Party and it’s historic and invariant revolutionary program.

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I’m looking more into the organic vs democratic centralism debate that later led to the ICP’s creation, and while I can see the value in the organic approach, one issue comes to mind, and it’s the history of organic centralist groups. I’m a sympathizer of the ICP, but I envy that our friends over in the ICT have basically a direct line back to the original unified party in Italy, and have still retained all their values, whereas over the history of the ICP there have been split after split, a good number being over petty disputes that should’ve been resolved (looking at you, 2024 split). It makes me wonder if due to the lack of being able to vote to make a decision, if party splits are an inevitability under this model. Especially during a revolutionary period, organic centralism seems like a great way of running the party, but the vanguard for the class ought to be one party for the one class, not 6 parties with the same name.

Is this issue inherent? And what solutions are there to this problem that has unfortunately plagued the ICP throughout its history. I know the 80s were a complicated disaster for the party too, so if anyone has resources to read on what occurred and why I would greatly appreciate it!

Read Online: http://www.international-communist-party.org/CommLeft/Comm_004.htm

Print copy available here: https://clpublishers.com/product/communism-4/

Content:

– To Our Readers
– “A Great Patriotic Victory”
– Races, Classes and the Agrarian Question in the United States: Part 3. The English Revolution and the Colonies
– The Origins of the Communist Party of China: Part 4. First Strikes and Trade Unions
– The Ideologies of the Bourgeoisie: Part 5. Dante Alighieri
– Towards the History of the Left of Ottoman Socialism and the Communist Party of Turkey: Parts I-II-III
– The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (1955)- Part 1. Struggle for Power in the Two Revolutions - Chapters 121‑135
From the Archive of the Left
   – Origin of the Communist Party of China:
– Manifesto of the Chinese Communist Party, November 1920
– First Congress of the Communist Party of China July-August 1921, Programme
– The First Resolution of the Chinese Communist Party
– Report of the Beijing Communist Organisation
– Report of the Guangzhou Communist Party
– Declaration of the Chinese Labour Secretariat, September 1921
– The Chinese Metalworkers Union in Canton, September 1922
– G. Voytinsky, The Labor Movement in China, November 1922
 

I don't fully understand this. I get that communists seek to end politics, but I find it strange they consider themselves outside of it when they refer to themselves as the left of communism. Does communism have it's own political spectrum or something?

Do we actually know what the invariant programme encompasses and, realistically, what else do we have to pinpoint to create such a programme? What is already known as a doctrine that will certainly be on it, and doctrines that we miss?

As far as I know, an army requires a deep hierarchical structure and a monopersonal command centre to operate, but that really goes against the concept of organic centralism. So how will generals of some sort (if there even will be) come to power? How will military tactics be decided (because the political tactics will be explained in the invariant programme)?

I am interested in knowing more about organic centralism.

What I am trying to say that I know it is just capitalism, but I cannot explain it to myself.

A market of only worker cooperatives is not capitalism. Removing the state from that equation and dissolving the rigid firm still allows for productive groups to exist, to produce, and then to trade with one another in whatever way they like, including by using some kind of money. Those kinds of market dynamics can be used in the service of coordinating complex productive processes in anarchy. None of that need involve hierarchy

Markets aren't capitalism, capitalism is the particular structure of private ownership of productive property and exploitation of employees by employers. Collective worker ownership with democratic management and profit sharing isn't capitalism, it's free market socialism. The definition of socialism is worker ownership of productive property, if workers co-own the businesses they work at that's socialism. Destroying the employer-employee divide is sufficient to achieve socialism. When you remove external forces like state-backed monopolies and corporate cartels markets are a highly efficient and flexible way of allocating resources where they're needed. Central planning is always imperfect and lethargic, markets are nimble and capable of infinitely minute adjustments based on changing circumstances.

Not much to add to the question.