For marxists, communism is the general movement of the proletariat establishing a new mode of production for itself by overcoming the existing capitalist relations of productions (i.e. wage labor, for-profit production etc).
Every mode of production implies the existence of one group (or class) imposing its set of rules and norms upon the fores of production to realize their ambitions.
As such, feudalism emerged from the centralized empires of Antiquity by having familial clans overcome the ancient empire's armies and taking control over the agrarian and territory-based MoP. These clans later dispersed and broke down into hundreds of personal domains belonging to individuals.
The bourgeoisie managed to overcome the arbitraryness of the previous MoP by first fleeing into cities, and afterwards by pushing for the rationalization of the State's institutions to protect their property rights.
But what can the communist movement hope to achieve ? All of the previous MoP could not create to the same degree that capitalism does the fake consciousness. None of the previous bureaucratic-military apparatus could control the entirety of the population through technological means enabling mass surveillance, psychological warfare, complete control over the information etc.
The 20th century had the unique possibility of creating a mass communist movement but failed spectacularly. The average person is incapable of dissociating the worst excesses of ML regimes from the broader communist movement. Economics are completely dominated by implicit bourgeois norms. Firms have been overtaking very slowly the State to be more "efficient" without even having to answer which normative goal they aim to accomplish by being more "efficient". It seems impossible for us to realistically try to recreate the conditions necessary for a revolution. And lastly, all of the alt-left movement like the Zapatistas or Rojava failed because they were incapable of adapting to the modern conditions of the capitalist MoP.
So, what are you guys thought and predictions on the future ? I don't want to doompost but I just don't see a viable alternative for the future than more neoliberalism until firms come to overpower the State and recreate feudal relations with their employees. The 20th century was our only shot and we blew it.
>>2883529>What can communists even hope to achieve anymore ? revolution in the imperial core is and should be the top priority. 20th century communism was doomed the moment the German revolution failed. Anything which accelerates decline of living standards in the imperial core and US hegemony will put the imperial core on the "October Road".
Total proletarianization of the imperial core petty bourgeoisie is needed, since they are too large of a segment of the population. This is why social democracy is toxic, because it seeks to preserve the "middle class" and prevent the polarization of society into proletariat and bourgeoisie which is the precursor and prerequisite of any revolution.
>>2883564You’re not getting proletarianization, you’re getting lumpenization
Rejection of stageism is the only meaningful way to recover the communist project. Theorize what non-capitalist social relations could be under the current level of development, write up a practical program to rapidly put those relations into practice, and then aggressively organize and agitate around achieving it.
The alternative pitfall is the strengthening of national states, which is increasingly argued for by both socdems and Leninists as well as the reactionary right as a means for mediating the crises and inequities of capital. This will lead to naught but the proliferation of regional wars as competing national blocs vie for markets and trade. The nightmare scenario is a repeat of WW2: a massive global conflagration which destroys the MoP and kills off the proletariat to such an extent that it makes industrial growth profitable again, ironically leading to a rejuvenation of capitalist social relations as the world rebuilds itself.
>>2883564So a form of accelerationism in sorts ? The only way according to you would be to proletarianize the imperial's core population in order to generate more acute contradictions ?
>>2883566Society can't run that way. Lumpens will be Clockwork Orange'd by the bourgeois fascist state into being obedient worker bees.
>>2883574I mean yeah. the USA has millions of guys who make like 100k a year and own a house with solar panels on the roof. Proletarianize those guys.
>>2883575No they won’t, proles will be automated away and lumpenized and put into gaza like ghettos to be killed later, that’s the whole AI push
>But what can the communist movement hope to achieve ?
Liberating 70% of productive forces
Ending value chains and establishing cooperation chains
High-speed rails, housing projects, land transformation projects
Demilitarization and denazification in general
>What can communists even hope to achieve anymore
A communist revolution in their lifetime
>>2884008>>2884009With what proletariat?
>>2884012Entirely pacified and integrated into capital
>>2884013So agitate them and no they're not
>>2884014Yes they are, no point in agitation when there’s no material basis for revolt
>>2884022If it were going to happen, COVID would have been the moment
>>2884024>unfalsifiable claimlove me some alt history
>>2884025How many supposedly once in a generation crisis can the “proletariat” keep sitting passively through before you acknowledge finally that Marx was wrong and they aren’t revolutionary? Maybe they were in the past, but in the 21st century? There is no revolutionary class, at best you have ethno nationalist guerrillas that are dying out as counter insurgency has advanced
>>2884026>before you acknowledge finally that Marx was wrongThere it is. Kill yourself, idealist ass.
>>2884026>Maybe they were in the pastit was reformist at best back then too
>>2884027You’re the one treating his thought and axioms like religious truths
>>2883564> decline of living standards in the imperial core will put the imperial core on the "October Road"Nope. Organizing and not compromising with libs and succdems will do that.
Well, first build class conciousness and prevent nationalism, nativism and other reactionary sentiments to grow bigger.
>>2884030The labor aristocrats you’d be organizing
ARE LIBS >>2884026It's not that "Marx was wrong" so much as bourgeois civil society and the state evolved to coopt and defuse the trends Marx and Engels observed within the 19th century proletariat. The task today is to identify how these evolutions are being undermined, and encourage and accelerate that degeneration rather than unintentionally building capital back up.
>>2884034Marx didn’t live in a time of 401ks and suburbia and car dependency, his proletariat were cramped into European capitals where everyone lived and socialized immediately
>>2884031>first build class conciousnessan entire century and counting of parties around the world trying to do this with no significant effects
class conciousness is the weakest concept in marxism
>>2884036That’s fair but I don’t see how you reverse the damage of mass media, avenues of petit bourgeois striving, pensions, and the atomization of the proletarian in both the workplaces and at home
>>2884038>still no answer on what MARX said why the proletariat is revolutionary, just speculation from an amerilard how it is to live over yonderbwhwahahhahwa
>>2884042Yeah yeah proles need higher wages, porky needs more profit blah blah, the fact is having a job means you have more to lose than your chains, every prole has access to debt now which is also another reason people don’t organize.
I unironically I think the failed german revolution was the tipping point for the proletariat, it was from this point on were workers started only asking for treats rather than fundamental change. How do you explain the failure of the german revolution other than material conditions?
>>2884049the workers movement was reformist even before that as Lenin, Kautsky and Bernstein pointed out
>>2884051That’s because a union doesn’t exist to overthrow anything, it exists to get more money and benefits for itself and its members, those got broken along with any and all communist parties in sufficiently industrialized countries. They only managed to pull it off in places with a large peasantry or in the colonies where the bourgeois was either weak or could unite with the communists to cast out compradors and imperialist bourgeois.
2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism>A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems. We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form. The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie. A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations
between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government. Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure
of speech. Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working
class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois – for the benefit of the working class. (fucking hate formatting on phone)
>>2884049and i also forgot to mention that marx already predicted it and its scary how accurate, even though at the time it was represented by a section of the bourgeoisie
>>2884056*only a section
and i fucked up the formatting
I think you're treating capitalism's current strength as if it were a permanent feature of history rather than a historical stage. Marx never argued that capitalism would collapse because people simply became convinced by communist arguments. He argued that every mode of production develops contradictions that eventually become too great to manage. Class consciousness is a product of struggle, not a prerequisite for it. Think about it: the Roman peasant did not wake up one morning as a conscious feudalist, and the medieval burgher did not first write liberal theory and then overthrow feudalism. Material development came first, political consciousness developed through conflict, and only afterwards did a new ruling class consolidate its ideology. Why would socialism be the only exception?
I also think you're giving bourgeois ideology too much credit. Yes, capitalist media, surveillance, advertising, and education are vastly more sophisticated than anything previous ruling classes possessed. But they exist precisely because the bourgeoisie cannot simply rely on naked force anymore. Their ideological apparatus is not evidence of invincibility; it is evidence of constant maintenance. A stable ruling class does not need to spend billions manufacturing consent every year.
As for the 20th century, I don't think "we blew our only shot" is a Marxist conclusion. The Russian Revolution happened in one of Europe's least-developed capitalist countries, after a world war had shattered the state. The Chinese Revolution emerged from semi-colonial conditions. Neither represented the mature capitalist societies Marx expected to become socialist first. Their successes and failures should therefore be analyzed concretely, not mythologized either positively or negatively. People also overestimate the permanence of capitalist legitimacy. In 1900, monarchy looked eternal. In 1985, the USSR looked permanent. In 2005, globalization looked unstoppable. History repeatedly humiliates predictions of permanence.
The real question is not "why aren't workers revolutionary?" but "what objective conditions produce revolutionary organization?" Right now, the working class is fragmented, international capital is highly mobile, unions are weak in many countries, and communist parties are either marginal or revisionist. Those are organizational problems, not proof that capitalism has transcended its contradictions. Ironically, many of the tendencies you describe are exactly the kinds of developments Marx and Lenin predicted would intensify capitalism's contradictions. Lenin described imperialism as the concentration of capital into monopolies, the dominance of finance capital, and the fusion of economic and state power. Those tendencies have not disappeared. If anything, they have become more pronounced.
The task, then, is not waiting for capitalism to collapse by itself, nor imagining that social media propaganda makes revolution impossible. It is rebuilding institutions capable of transforming inevitable economic crises into political opportunities. Revolutions are not scheduled events. They are rare moments when an organized minority can lead a majority whose confidence in the existing order has suddenly broken down. Capitalism has survived every crisis so far, but only by becoming more concentrated, more unequal, more indebted, and more dependent on state intervention. That is resilience, not immortality.
>>2884033>labor aristocratsok porky
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