It's a moot point to ask 'what is to be done' if the intellectual question is not adressed first. By intellectual I just mean someone who specializes in mental work.
If we are Leninists in any meaningful sense, then we know that the working class can only get to trade-union consiousness and that it needs and outside actor to link up the movement with communism. This actor historically speaking is usually the petty-bourgeois intellectual. But let us consider the question now in say the 'west'. Can you identify a (petty-)bourgeois intellectual or a group of them, someone with enough free time on their hands that has contributed theoretically and organizationally to the movement, someone who elaborated on the nature of our movement, who wrote our Credo? No.
But what you probably can imagine is the student intellectual, which is a weak surrogate of the actual communist intellectual, because a student is usually only a free intellectual for a limited time and then they either get a good paying job (if they are in STEM) and have the same material interest as imperialism (all techincal advancment is for the war machine) or are forced to reproduce bourgeois ideology (if they are in the humane arts) after they finish their studies.
There is 1) no actual communist intellectual worth their salt that can put into words what communist demands are and 2) there is absolutely no organic working class movement against capital that can link up with these communist demands, at some point. Criticizing the movement is useless because everything that has been criticized has been done so millions of times. Talking about organization now is talking about a student communist movement with ambigious demands, a tragical kind of '68, without a semblance of an working class movement in the background.
Sproadic political terrorism, historical nihilism, a general spirit of collapse, yet the machine goes on. We need a transitional programme. We desparately need a Plekahnov for the west, someone to elaborate Marxism to us. Without commited communist intellectuals we will just go blindly and fail again. Our movement demands firm basic theory, and I hope I don't have to convince you that eclecticism, anarchism and revisionism are to be found everywhere.
>>2526929> The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System's trick. Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today. As a result, their impulse to rebel is particularly strong. But, because they are incapable of independent thought, real rebellion is impossible for them. Consequently they are suckers for the System's trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System's basic values. Another day, another thread where leftypol posters try to anachronistically graft 19th century conception of intellectual onto modern post-industrial economy.
>>2526929>>2527616compare how retarded these posts sound to marx & engels tackling the same issue lmfao
>Ad. 1. To my mind, the so-called “socialist society” is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change. Its crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production. To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible. That our workers are capable of it is borne out by their many producer and consumer cooperatives which, whenever they're not deliberately ruined by the police, are equally well and far more honestly run than the bourgeois stock companies. I cannot see how you can speak of the ignorance of the masses in Germany after the brilliant evidence of political maturity shown by the workers in their victorious struggle against the Anti-Socialist Law. The patronizing and errant lecturing of our so-called intellectuals seems to me a far greater impediment. We are still in need of technicians, agronomists, engineers, chemists, architects, etc., it is true, but if the worst comes to the worst we can always buy them just as well as the capitalists buy them, and if a severe example is made of a few of the traders among them — for traders there are sure to be — they will find it to their own advantage to deal fairly with us. But apart from the specialists, among whom I also include schoolteachers, we can get along perfectly well without the other “intellectuals.” The present influx of literati and students into the party, for example, may be quite damaging if these gentlemen are not properly kept in check.
>The Junker latifundia east of the Elbe could be easily leased under the due technical management to the present day-laborers and other retinue, who work the estates jointly. If any disturbances occur, the Junkers, who have brutalized people by flouting all the existing school legislation, will alone be to blame.
>The biggest obstacles are the small peasants and the importunate super-clever intellectuals who always think they know everything so much the better, the less they understand it.
> Once we have a sufficient number of followers among the masses, the big industries and the large-scale latifundia farming can be quickly socialized, provided we hold the political power. The rest will follow shortly, sooner or later. And we shall have it all our own way in large-scale production.
>You speak of an absence of uniform insight. This exists — but on the part of the intellectuals to stem from the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie and who do not suspect how much they still have to learn from the workers… https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_21.htm >>2527010Why are you such a sad loser
>>2527639To annoy you. It's my only purpose in life.
>>2527629huh is that why educated professionals still can only demand at most petit-bourgeois reform even today LOL
The Left(tm) usually has its ranks filled by the middle class who get into politics at college, through some sort intellectual process, and not through any sort of pressing need
>>2527653>educated professionals=intellectualWhat did I say about anarchronisms? Back then there were basically no working class intellectuals because being a person with good education, formal or informal, pretty much guaranteed middle class job. There days it does not. Are you in any contact with any communist orgs? Pick whichever you consider the "real" communism, doesnt matter, because it is going to be filled with shit payed highly educated people.
This is just M3W garbage.
>If we are Leninists in any meaningful sense, then we know that the working class can only get to trade-union consiousness and that it needs and outside actor to link up the movement with communism. This actor historically speaking is usually the petty-bourgeois intellectual.
Class collaboration. Ironically the same type that restricts the viability of trade unions as a revolutionary organ. It's what people rebel against Bernstein and Kautsky for.
>But what you probably can imagine is the student intellectual, which is a weak surrogate of the actual communist intellectual, because a student is usually only a free intellectual for a limited time and then they either get a good paying job (if they are in STEM) and have the same material interest as imperialism (all techincal advancment is for the war machine) or are forced to reproduce bourgeois ideology (if they are in the humane arts) after they finish their studies.
Here we got some Pol Pot. Students are in training for the working class because the developed world values highly skilled labor over menial labor, if even just to afford a basic living. Your wage being higher than someone in Haiti does not make you a labor aristocrat or petit-bourgeois. That's Settlers bullshit that Sekai made up due to his hatred towards whites. "Bourgeois ideology" is not isolated within universities, it's implanted on children from the second they're born.
Students tend to have a higher chance of giving a shit about socialism because they are in the environment and have the free time for exposure to socialist literature. The working joe is exhausted after a day of work to support their family and favor passive consumption of entertainment (youtube video essays included) since it's "predigested" for them, not requiring any intellectual engagement. Students are encouraged to engage in intellectual activity, so you are bitching about them for doing the same fucking thing you're doing, which is studying (through twitch streams and image boards) socialism.
>There is 1) no actual communist intellectual worth their salt
Again, what is a "communist intellectual" that's so radically different from a normal intellectual?
>2) there is absolutely no organic working-class movement against capital that can link up with these communist demands, at some point.
No, you just are looking for Leninist (larp) vanguard parties which have achieved nothing because that only worked in backwards feudal countries (to achieve capitalism). This is the thing that creates "post-leftists" where some Leninist gets mad the working class won't promote them to their leader, so they take their ball home and tell people to go to church and stop caring. Meanwhile, the working class had no idea who they are. I saw Italian left-coms here try to claim responsibility for the recent general strikes in Europe and their party is less than 7 people isolated to a website that gets 4 clicks a year. It also just split again and they don't even know which one is the "real" party anymore.
An organized working class would undoubtably be "stronger" but that comes with the inevitable consequence of some idiots in org promoting themselves to absolute leader. This happens 100% of the time. It then loses its status as a "proletarian" organization and instead is just subservient to a class leading it. I don't have a solution because if there was one, we'd be in communism right now.
Your whole final appeal is for there to be a "Marxist" celebrity, who will be the Taylor Swift of communism and spread it to everyone. That's idealism and it also runs counter to your point about the "dangers" of intellectuals. No Leninist can claim they dislike intellectuals, as the "professional revolutionary" is intellectual leadership. This leads to social democracy, which sublimates working class agitation into harmless political reformism, which ultimately preserves capital, like how the USSR did with State capitalism.
>>2526929Politics is just aesthetics and rhetoric, the one who has better aesthetics and rhetoric ultimately ends up taking over.