Communism is neither related to "Leftism" nor "Socialism", in fact these reformist movements are antithetical to Communism.
Before some illiterate dumbass takes this as lazy "sectarianism", this was the key issue the Communist International meant to settle. In fact the entire Comintern was born out of the contradiction between the revolutionary content of Marxism and reformist nature of leftism, the murder of German communists at the hands of their left-socialist "comrades" cemented this seemingly forever (clearly not)
>In this connection all those parties that wish to belong to the Communist International must change their names. Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International must bear the name Communist Party of this or that country (Section of the Communist International). The question of the name is not formal, but a highly political question of great importance. The Communist International has declared war on the whole bourgeois world and on all yellow social-democratic parties. The difference between the communist parties and the old official 'social-democratic' or 'socialist' parties that have betrayed the banner of the working class must be clear to every simple toiler.
<Twenty-one Conditions, Comintern 1919
Going further back to Marx, this distinction was evident (hence the "communist" manifesto)
>in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.
<Preface to the 1872 German Edition
>But why were the terms later used exchangeably by the early days of Lenin?
Simply, they were not. By "social democrats" Lenin was strictly referring to the membership of the SPD and its analogous party in Russia who upheld the doctrine of Marx at the time until the German SPD broke away from it.
>But why did Marx and Engels approve of the name SPD in the first place (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands)?
They did not. Both explicitly called the name unscientific and should always be treated as such by the party:
>The dialectician Engels remained true to dialectics to the end of his days. Marx and I, he said, had a splendid, scientifically exact name for the party, but there was no real party, i.e., no mass proletarian party. Now (at the end of the 19th century) there was a real party, but its name was scientifically wrong. Never mind, it would "pass muster", so long as the party developed, so long as the scientific in accuracy of the name was not hidden from it and did not hinder its development on the right direction!
<The State and Revolution, Chapter 4
They were the ones to re-name the League of Just to the Communist League of that wasn't obvious enough.
>acktuly Marx, Engels and Lenin were wrong. Leftist unity (class collaboration) now!!111
Okay. Just don't name yourself after the movement they represented then.
This is more than enough evidence to convince any serious communist that still using terms such as "Leftist" and "Socialist" or to identify with organisations that do, after this split was officially settled for over a century, has nothing to do with communism. This is not even to touch on the popular front slogan which is laughably opportunist.
>At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner.
<Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, 1850
good post.
if communism is being this linguistically pedantic, then i am not a communist.
"the real movement that abolishes the present state of things" reduced to the editor of a thesaurus insisting that you may not use great as a synonym for grand to a committee of irrelevant anonymous weirdoes so afraid of having an impact on the world that they delete 95% of what they say every 3 months.
>>2611371Then communism is a third position?
"Left unity" (=socdems dominating communists) was pushed by the majority anglo-saxon moderation team for years and vocally opposed by the Marxist minority. You just have to accept that in online spaces dominated by anglo saxon cultural, student, reformist, and labor aristocrat politics Marxist will always be sidelined so that our dear friends can crucify the userbase on the next hottest succdem cross: Bernie's, Corbyn's, Zohran's, AOC's…
>>2611400Communism is not on the bourgeois political compass.
>>2611401>Left unity" (=socdems dominating communists) was pushed by the majority anglo-saxon moderation team for yearsAnd Stalin before them
>>2611371>Communism is neither related to "Leftism"Ok
>nor "Socialism"Another falsifier gem
Remind me, who was obsessed with popular fronts in interwar europe to appease capitalist countries and save liberal democracy?
Shadowboxing thread.
>>2611394Critical support to the US foreign policy for impacting the world (AES)
>U are not right
>U are nor left
Maybe we should all just accept that the political compass is bullshit and that the concepts of left and right were invented to divide people into two groups without alternatives?
>>2611446Who are you quoting?
>>2611400Third position is a 'compromise' between capital and labor (absolute bourgeoisie dictatorship but red)
Communism cannot be positioned in bourgeois politics
Communism is the dream of the bourgeois
"Reform is left! Reaction is right! Revolution is not to the left of reform! It's not to the right of reaction! It's entirely outside the paradigm of politics! Trust me on this! Don't comment on my positions on existing issues! Please don't lump me in with the gays!!!! Please don't apply colloquial definitions of left and right to me!!!!!"
This cope is always funny because you know the nazis are always going to see you as left, correct? And even the gay liberal imperialists you're afraid of being lumped in with are going to see you as "left on labor, right on everything else", correct? It doesn't matter how much you deny being left, you'll be seen as left. It's childish to cry about this on leftypol.org for the 99999999999th time.
>>2611513
>ok then what's your idea of abolishing the existing social structure?
<KILL DAAAAAAA JUUUUICEEEE (with aid of my wholesome war production companies and multinational bankers)
>>2611471>Communism cannot be positioned in bourgeois politicsyou can declare it entirely outside of everything that exists, but that sacrifices materialism. communism clearly has had historical manifestations already that places it in a context. you can say it doesn't represent you, but you can only deploy that cope so many times.
>>2611527Who are you quoting? Doesn't seem like a response to the Marx, Engels and Lenin quotes in OP
Surely they're not the voices in your tiny libtard head :/
>>2611513
>a utopian dream, and the logical conclusion of liberalism and christianity,
that's utopian socialism you're describing, not scientific socialism. the traditions broke up there for a reason
>>2611532I want every factory and every office gone, I don’t give a fuck about your ethnicity, Marx was wrong about workers being able to reshape these things from the inside because he was a bourgeois reformist at the end of the day
>>2611535There’s no such thing as scientific socialism, factories and offices are inherently liberal, physically liberal
>>2611534none of the appeal to authority quotes in OP say anything about whether communism is "left" or not. The word "left" never appears once. So the assertion in the thread title is entirely unrelated to the content of those quotes.
That being said, I have seen the particular form of bait this thread represents hundreds of times, and no amount of crying "you're a radlib!" is going to change the fact that you typed
leftypol.org in your address bar or clicked it in your favorites menu to post it. Pretending proletarian revolution cannot be placed to the left of reform and reaction is delicious cope. You just don't want to be seen as to the left of the people with rainbow flags because you're afraid of being seen as soy. It's a fundamental insecurity. You're also afraid of the real history where Joseph Stalin teamed up with the liberal bourgeoisie to defeat German National Socialism and Italian Fascism, which was a good thing.
>>2611541give it a rest bait boy
>>2611539>>2611541Refer to
>>2607395Read Marx instead of watching YouTube videos on him
>>2611548
the attack on the firm already took the form of the cooperative movement where instead of having a CEO and board of directors, you have a collection of workers who own the firm together. ML criticisms of the cooperative movement notwithstanding, Engels said towards the end of his life that cooperatives were interesting and that their particular manifestation in England was good whenever they weren't getting sabotaged by police.
>>2611573
who should one read?
>>2611543>Marxists: Communism is the real movement, every other movement is conservative and defeatist under the idealist banner of class collaboration >Libtard: This says nothing about excluding the interests of my wholesome small business >"appeal to authority"lmao
>>2611586
be the change you want to see in the world.
>>2611588
Yeah "Marxists" as in Stalin who believes socialism can be achieved in one country with commodity production and wage labor intact (liberalism) and other splendid revolutionaries such as Mao who admitted to never having read Capital in his life :3
>>2611592I've yet to see someone explain to me then, if the USSR had a planned economy, if there was guaranteed employment, hence no labor market, and if the money-form circulating was just a reflection of value (abstract human labor power measured in time crystallized in commodities) and not a commodity you could speculate with, if there was no capitalist class (in the political sense) commanding/dictating the economy - how it was still capitalism.
>national liberation
National liberation ended with colonialism. The conditions that allowed for national liberation made workers revolution fundamentally impossible (feudal, semi-feudal and colonial structures that hampered the development of an independent working class movement). These countries had to develop a working class before they can carry on a revolution. The national bourgeoisie was the historical actor in the progressive transition of these places to capitalist nation states.
Every country in the world today by its very existence as a nation state has gone past that point.
>>2611606>if things the USSR wasn't how was it this thing?The Soviets had production for exchange and their economy relied on the trade of commodities. The law of value persisted. They had a bourgeoisie managing said production and a petty bourgeoisie, private commodity producers in the countryside (kolkhoz).
>>2611653You can say it was state capitalism. Doesn’t make it true, but you can say it. I already went over this in the other thread.
Look, in the USSR there was no private appropriation of surplus by a capitalist class. There was no owning class or its political parties dictating what got produced. Labor power wasn't a commodity. There was guaranteed employment, no labor market in that sense, and money basically functioned as a unit of account, a reflection of average labor time embodied in goods. It wasn't a speculation vehicle. That's just not capitalism.
Even economists like Cockshott who critique the USSR argue it was a form of socialism. Calling it capitalism just because there was some commodity production is pushing it to a silly extreme.
And on that note, people keep quoting Marx saying capitalism presents as an "immense accumulation of commodities." Yeah, but that's an if-then statement, not an "if and only if." He's describing capitalism, not saying that anytime you see commodities you must have capitalism. It's a one-way conditional.
Plus, there's a real confusion between simple commodity production and *generalized* commodity production, where labor-power itself is also a commodity. The USSR didn't have that. So if there was planning, no labor market, no capitalist class running the economy, how exactly was it capitalism? Nobody's given a convincing answer to that.
>>2611658
The west bank is de facto nation state with its own bourgeoisie, etc.
>but Gaza
Gaza was like that before it was annihilated and it will be rebuilt into an seemingly an international investment zone on the backs of Gazan workers with its ruling class serving the same role as that of the west bank.
It's not a semi feudal state in need of bourgeois revolution. It's a micro bourgeois state where workers are regularly slaughtered by imperialists when they're not being oppressed by their capitalist class. International revolution is the only way to stop the genocide.
>>2611371Linguistic autism like this is the exact thing Engels warned against. Definitions follow from common usage, not the other way around. The vast,
vast majority of people in the English speaking world refer to Marxism as leftist and the Soviet Union as socialist. You can sperg out over it until the cows come home, but reality is not going to magically alter itself to fit your whims.
>>2611687Try joybaiting for a change. Tis the season
>>2611696This.
I'm joining the National Socialist German Workers' Party
>>2611706Words are a tool to communicate, they are not things that actually carry substance unto themselves. If you cannot agree with this very basic point, then I can't imagine you'll be capable of accomplishing much of anything at all.
>>2611706But you are not German, esteemed comrade.
>>2611446They were invented by the French in order to distinguish between supporters of the monarchy (right-wing) and opponents of the monarchy (left-wing).
So to be left-wing in its simplest terms is to be anti-monarchist. Which should not be a difficult task for any serious communist.
>>2611931If the CIA is against leftard class collaboration, proletariat genocide and is well-read enough to accurately reflect the opinions of Marx and Lenin, I will fly to the burgerstan rn and join them. Please send instructions
>MUH SEMANTICS
Nice deflection, too bad Marx, Engels and Lenin all made sure to point out the concrete distinction between communism and left-wing of capital movements.
>>2612118None f them are alive continue correcting the record and you will never have their social capital, you lost before this battle ever even started
>>2612125>Marx is outdated because capitalism is dead we live in neoliberal billionaire techno feudalism labubu dubai gold machaHang.
>social capitalStop using terms you don't know the meaning of.
>>2612148Fuck you, I live to spite people like you
>>2611371This would be believable if socialists didn't side with the left on every hot button social issue. Unless you're about to tell me you're anti abortion, anti gay rights, you believe in race science, or you don't care about environemtnalism.
>>2612341What did the homos and women do to you?
>>2611371lol something so basic about communism is getting this shithole riled up jfc
>>2611446>and that the concepts of left and right were invented to divide people into two groups without alternatives?uh no its a leftover from the french revolution and "people" are already divided, its called classes lmfao
>>2612118rofl its not semantics, communism as a movement has nothing to do with leftist ideologies (or any ideology really)
>>2612341>This would be believable if socialists didn't side with the leftAHAHAHAHAH holy shit you actually believe this shit?
>>2612341Communists don't give a fuck about your precious bourgeois rights lmao
>muhhh rightzzZ>muhhh cucktivsmThe legal struggle did wonders in liberating women, black people and stopping the climate catastrophe so far
Bro dropped the biggest labor aristokkkrat coal this year
You right?
Revolution = Left
Reform = Center
Reaction = Right
Bordigists = Cry "noooooooooooo but muh left wing of capital" forgetting that the left wing of capital is just reformism, and revolutionaries are to the left of reformists.
>>2611584<Communism is the real movement, every other movement is conservative and defeatist under the idealist banner of class collaboration conservative? Ah, so on the right. So revolutionaries are on the left, reformists are in the center, and reactionaries/conservatives are on the right? Got it! None of the quotes in OP say "communism isn't hecking left!" you just insist they do.
>>2613431>polsci retardation>>2613433all bourgeois politics are reactionary today imbecile, feudalism isnt a thing anymore
>>2611371All this valid argument just to defend stalinism, aka social democracy at the barrel of a gun
I hope your end is painful, OP
>>2613552>Stalin not mentioned onceu ok?
>>2613554This is leftypol, you know what that man believes in, I know what he believes in
Ah yes, wage slavery with a side of red flags please, ho boy!
>>2612400>Communists don't give a fuck about your precious bourgeois rights lmaoWhy lie? Socialists are the biggest bourgeois right worshipers around, even more than the liberals who will sacrifice yesterday's sacred cow when convenient. Marx praised freedom of speech, said women's rights were indicative of societal progress, and didn't think religion should play a role in whether someone is a citizen. Every socialist state tries to get women out of the home to work.
>The legal struggle did wonders in liberating women, black people and stopping the climate catastrophe so farRight, you don't disagree with bourgeois rights, you just think they're not as effective as you could be. Just like socialists don't disagree with the industrial system, but just think they'd be better managers.
OP is correct
It is a fact
>>2613433The left of capital is conservative. It conserves the status quo.
Stupid burger
>>2613552Stalin was a leftist, just like you.
>>2613597>liberalism is progressive compared to feudalismBig… almost like communism is born out of its contradictions or something
Unique IPs: 27