Another Communization Theory thread because why not?
Talk about anything relating to Communization Theory! Talk about how Communization Theory is great or how its shit!
Texts regarding Communization Theory and its many sub-sects will be attached in the replies.
[NOTE: Not every Communizer believes in the same things, e.g. some emphasis class struggle while others don't]
explain to me in one sentence that a child could understand what is communization theory and how is it different from communism, marxism, marxism leninism, marxism leninism mao zedong thought, maoism third worldism, and so on
>>2890552communization theory rejects the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition stage towards communism, and sees communism itself as a means to combat capitalism; this will be done through "communist measures" (
https://www.sicjournal.org/communist-measures-2/index.html) which are communist social relations implemented within the areas under revolutionary control.
>Let’s not get rid of the bourgeoisie: a thread
Great
Why do ultras hate communizers to the point of hounding you out of their image board? Feels like some real friendly fire shit.
>>2890578sounds cool although from my understanding this debate between if the transition stage should exist goes back to the 1st international. tbh based on previous periods of transition between one mode of production there a ton of geographic variation where historical circumstance and material conditions can produce sudden sea changes and slow trickles and just about everything in between. This is why the debate has struck as pointless since trying to copy and paste shit across time and space strikes me as a doomed to fail.
>>2890662>pointless since trying to copy and paste shit across time and space strikes me as a doomed to failyou are talking about people unironically citing value form theory 100 years after lenin's writings on imperialism. seems like a regression to stirnerite voluntarism but now with a theoretical apparatus that comes as close as possible to say that capitalism subsumes everything and therefore efficacious communist praxis is impossible
>>2890652>Feels like some real friendly fire shitIt’s not. Ultras don’t like idealism. They may sympathize with the communizers potential passion for living in a communist society as soon as possible, but they’re still at the end of the day idealists who ultimately ignore the threat the bourgeoisie poses against said society.
the outcome of every kind of struggle is determined by which side has the greater force and force is a function of mass and speed. thus, for a smaller force to overcome a greater force it must either increase its mass or increase its speed. the system we live under is incomprehensibly massive, it's not just the elite minority we are up against, it is the system that they have built around themselves which is much bigger than all of the people in the world put together. therefore, we need to forget about strength in numbers, that's off the table. no matter how effectively we organize, no matter how big of an army we manage to amass, we will never outmass the system. so that only leaves speed. speed is what allows a smaller mass to overcome a greater mass, what allows a tiny pellet of lead to destroy a full grown human being, what allows alexander and his small army to conquer all of the greatest empires in the known world - speed. speed of hand and speed of mind. so how do we obtain speed?
human thought is not one thing, the brain is a fundamentally dualistic system, all the way from the lowest level - its actual physical structure, to the highest level - the way it thinks and processes information. cognition can thus be divided into two basic kinds, the slow conscious deliberate predictive kind, and the fast reflexive instinctual reactive kind. one is not better or worse than the other, they are equally important and essential when it comes to general action. some situations call for slow cognition, like a chess move where the player must plan and predict and consider all of the possibilities. other situations call for fast cognition, like a baseball swing where the player has no time for conscious deliberation and must empty their mind and be one with the moment and feel it out. the ruling class operate solely on slow cognition, scheming and predicting and building a huge elaborate system that accounts for every possible eventuality. they are not stupid. there is no such thing as stupid. every chess move you can possibly think of, they have already thought of it and amended their system to account for it. so you can't beat them at chess, you have to play a different game, you have to adopt a totally different mindset, you have to rely on fast cognition that cannot be accounted for by any system, something the ancient chinese would call "wu-wei" which is very difficult to even explain because western language has no words for it, but the closest approximation is "action through inaction".
the revolution, the true revolution that actually succeeds and destroys the system rather than being crushed or undermined or perverted into another iteration of the system, is something that cannot be planned or structured or even talked about. it just happens automatically when the moment is right. it has no leaders or followers, nobody has a job, nobody tells anybody what to do or when to do it. there simply comes a moment where everyone just knows exactly what needs to be done and they all do it, fully autonomously. for this kind of revolution to be possible, everyone must be in a state of constant readyness. not waiting, not anticipating, not planning, just ready, like the baseball player watching the pitcher and ready to swing the bat, totally immersed in reality and free of all abstractions and distractions that slow them down and trip them up and divert them from the true objective. nobody knows anything about what they are about to do, nobody knows about any plans or secret meetings or leaders or any kind of knowledge that could be a liability, that could be extracted by an interrogator or an informant, everyone is a good obedient conformist as clueless and harmless as a baby. then when the moment finally comes and they all stop what they're doing and make their move, the ruling class and their system are completely unprepared and they are utterly destroyed in the blink of an eye. that is speed.
>>2890632Communist measures are obviously generalized, i.e. practiced in other regions and countries. If communist measures are not generalized then they fade away and the revolutionary struggle ends. I didn't mention this in the original reply because I didn't know how to mention it.
>>2890646that is not what we mean retard
>>2890708>that's not what you think it meansI know the exact definitions.
>>2890706That’s exactly what you mean, unintended or not.
>>2890578>>2890707>communization theory rejects the dictatorship of the proletariatThe imposition of communist measures
is the DotP and vice versa
>>2890707how do they get generalized without central organization or some other system of propagation? you could easily also say socialism in one country must get generalized by having socialism in different countries
>>2890701You are basically adapting Kahnemann's "Thinking Fast and Slow" to explain class struggle dynamics. While I agree in-part with Kahnemann's observations, they also show an endemic loyalty to discrete states that is widespread in most of pre-contemporary thinking. There is no discrete category of fast and slow thinking, there is a continuos quality of speed. And this sort of loyalty to discrete states seems a big wedge in your ideas. The ruling classes are just as dynamic and prone to spontinaity as the opressed, the difference is just how the flow settles - usually in some distribution where both enter into a lul thay will be inevitably interrupted by permanent internal contradictions which may or may not destabilize the system to become fluid again (and which may or may not be revolutionary), at which point dynamics shift unpredictably. Eg, quick on their toes elites or middle managers that felt disgruntled by the old order can attempt their own fast powerplays along with the proletarian upsurge which subvert it. Groups with pre-established capital (economic, social, structural, human) can come out winners automatically by the sheer aspect of being the first to mobilize this capital to establish their presence. There is no clean short vs long term planning hear, but a mess where every faction will try to improvise according to their habitus, which will fall everywhere and in between the fast and slow.
I guess ultimately my point is this - I entertain your idea of speed - it is indeed an important factor for a revolution - but I think your ideas underscore the importance of structural readyness that can only be achieved by some kind of pre-revolutionary organizing that would provide the necessary platforms for the actual moment of crisis (what that organizing should be is another question, one that likely has the answer of "it depends")
>>2890578How is this meaningfully different from Anarchism?
>>2890938It is anarchism but Marxist the difference is that it rejects the formalism of the party or councils or any other speculation on how the people will organise themselves. That's not the only difference apparently they have some issues with Marx's labour theory.
>>2890341I really like
d Rojava due to focus on communes and confederations of communes. The commune should be the political unit everything else is built on. When it comes to economics use smaller cooperatives where commune owner enterprises fail.
>>2891023Oh you like the anarchist open sky squat with Proudhonist economics and friend of the US armed forces?
>>2890632>but when communizers start talking about fully abolishing the value form in one locality, as though you do not need to interface with the global capitalist system that has subsumed everything, everyone takes them seriously[citation needed]
>>2890552>>2890578Relevant Phil Neel quote:
>I actually do not think most “communization” thinkers argue for “immediate abolition of the value-form” in the temporal sense of, as soon as the revolution begins, you will stop using money, stop treating things as commodities, have no wages or alternative means of remuneration, etc. If you read what they write, it’s usually a bit more of a philosophical sense of “immediacy,” as in operating without the “mediation” of either a revolutionary workers’ state or without the specific hybrid stage of socialism in which the conditions for abolition are first put into place. So the point is more that the abolition of value doesn’t require these forms of mediation which pose intermediate goals that then become ends in themselves. In the temporal sense, we could say that the difference is simply that communism can immediately become the end goal of proletarian organizing. The transition can begin on day one, rather than first requiring the construction of some intermediate society.
>I’m not sure if it’s an intentional or malicious misreading, if people just don’t actually read the theory, or if they have problems with reading comprehension, or maybe it’s just the poor philosophical writing, but you do see this common confusion where people pretend that what is meant is “immediate” in the temporal sense and use that to criticize a strawman argument that doesn’t really exist. If we compare the process of social transformation to the process of an unhealthy person wanting to get healthy, for example, people imagine that communization is saying that we will go from unhealthy to healthy overnight. And they’ll counter that of course this is a fantasy, you first have to have initial steps toward healthy living, that these need to be incremental, etc. But the communization critique is that these incremental steps, as “stages” mediating the process, tend to become ends in themselves. In fact, the critics are like those people who are continually saying that they will get their shit together and start working out, but they need to wait for certain conditions to be met. Once they move to a new apartment, once the new year starts, once they switch jobs, etc. Or, if they do start working out, they just sort of do the same basic things without progressing: they get on the treadmill for half an hour, they lift the same weights and go through the same motions without variation, they add some salad to their diet. So the communization people would say something like: stop focusing on the initial steps and indefinite preparation and instead focus on actually progressing toward the end goal. Stop talking about getting into shape and actually do it. Begin the transition now, don’t defer it via endless intermediate stages. >>2891032>Oh you like the anarchist open sky squat More like Paris Commune.
>with Proudhonist economics Economics that works and doesnt collapse society.
>and friend of the US armed forces?Couldnt care less.
>>2891032>anarchist open sky squat with Proudhonist economicsAs if. The Rojavites renounced class struggle and refused to expropriate the local bourgeoisie, instead opting to include them as partners in the co-ops and giving them a cut of profits in exchange for generously leasing land. The "anarchist" signalling was just a larp: just look at the international volunteer martyr videos where avowed anarchist YPG volunteers were forced to proclaim themselves democratic socialists or social democrats and express gratitude for "ideological training"
https://libcom.org/article/rojava-reality-and-rhetoric-gilles-dauve-and-tl I agree with Alice in Monsterland for the most part, unironically.
I just realized that I forgot to name the thread, fuck.
>>2890934western language is based on discrete binary thinking and describes things as "this" or "that" and gets very clunky and wordy when it comes to describing holistic interwoven dualities, and english is the only language i know and i didn't want to veer any further from the main idea into the complexities of neurology than i had to, so i simplified it for the sake of clarity.
the kind of readyness i was talking about isn't structural readyness but individual readyness, every individual person having a genuine, intuitive, autonomous understanding of what it's all about, without the need for any authoritarian cognitive shortcuts like groupthink and coercion and propaganda, without any of the "you must do the following because we said so and you don't need to know why", without any of the ends-justify-the-means irrational bullshit that plagues every kind of political movement.
>>2891489Okay, point taken, but what about that structural readyness, and more importantly, how do you see the rise in the individual readyness? Because both are intrinsically linked and both, likely, can only be developed through a repeated forging of a communist movement. I don't see how this feigned innaction you propose achieves this, as the only thing that we can be guaranteed of is the eventual rise in subsistance struggles of people who are more or less forced into revolt when the system contradictions put it into a moment of crisis. However, nothing guarantees the readyness and eventual success of these struggles - that cannot be taken for granted. Most likely they will fail after which, hopefully, their failure will be used to strengthen and evolve the movement for the next crisis.
>>2891070Anybody who finds it scandalous either didn't understand it or is a moralfag. Not that it's a particularly good text. He name drops Reich but the essay could have been much further enriched by including Reich's theories about the social consequences of child sexual repression for example.
Also it was a little cringe when he writes that "crime" isn't only a result of class society (um hey there existential alienation didn't see ya) and it will always exist to some degree even in communism. What actually is crime anyway? What use do we have for that concept as communists who understand the laws of the bourgeois state to be the terms of the usurpation of our personal autonomy and collective means of sustenance? Just like "democracy", idealist concepts like "crime" and "justice" are malignant vestiges of bourgeois ideology within the Movement and they must be thoroughly critiqued and thrown to the dustbin.
>>2891530>the only thing that we can be guaranteed of is the eventual rise in subsistance struggles of people who are more or less forced into revolt when the system contradictions put it into a moment of crisis.Not eventual but exponential.
>Most likely they will fail after which, hopefully, their failure will be used to strengthen and evolve the movement for the next crisis.To win the game we need to uphold and nurture militant proletarian cosmopolitanism and from that distill the invincible globohomo proletariat as a positive negation of itself. Ever their own gravediggers, the bourgeosie are driving us there. Trust the plan. Globalists in control.
>>2891037Thanks for the quotes, they're very informative. Where did you get them?
>>2891530we've already seen the repeated forging of communist movements throughout contemporary history and they've all failed to achieve what they were supposed to achieve, because the whole ideology suffers from a fundamental flaw that i described earlier, adopting the same playbook as the system it is meant to replace, speaking the same language of authoritarianism and top-down hierarchy and nationalism/imperialism/social centralization that got us into this mess to begin with. people need to realize that the root of all of our miseries is much deeper than just a structural problem, it's not just a problem of bad leadership or inadequate dogma, it goes all the way down to basic human psychology and our linguistic and epistemological frameworks by which we understand and describe reality, our arrogant anthropocentric teleological thinking that makes us believe that we know what is best for everyone and everything in the universe. if we as individuals figure out how to address the problems of our own psychology then as a society we won't need to draw up any blueprints or appoint any representatives or adhere to any dogma, the structure will emerge organically from the bottom up, as systems in nature do, with a level of pluralism and complexity that makes it extremely resilient to any kind of usurpation or central governance. nothing is more resilient or efficient than an organic system that builds itself autonomously from the bottom up; a single human brain achieves with 20 watts of energy what all of the hundreds of terawatts of manmade computing power in the world cannot achieve. the authoritarian thinker dismisses self-governance and autonomy as inefficient and unpredictable, but what they really mean it is that it is inefficient and unpredictable for them and their personal agenda. in the grand scheme of things, the self-governing autonomous system that grows out of foundational chaos is the ultimate ideal, the fundamental structure of the universe itself and no conceivable anthropocentric top-down model can ever even come close to that level of perfection - the real dilemma is whether the average human being would rather be the god of a shitty false reality that falls apart or be a humble participant in the real one that endures forever.
I dont get it, council communism just sounds like anarchism with extra steps
>>2891649How is it like anarchism
>>2891037ok but how is this non-immediate immediacy supposed to look like when you are in lenin's shoes? if it doesnt mean stopping using money immediately, then lenin would still have had to have established state capitalism, but i guess now the idea to spend time creating some communes here and there?
>>2891661I *think* (not that anon, but familiar with Neel's work) the idea is that you just have to never stop trying to take it as far as it can go and let it die. I am quite possibly missinterpreting, but the takeaway I get is that it would have been more productive if Russian revolution died a bloody death trying to push it forward than for it to re-constitute itself as a self-protecting project. Idea being that in its death, it would have contributed to building the movement by creating more hardened remnants. He talks about it in his Theory of the Party that the worst thing an ephemeral communist party could do is to become obsessed by its own survival or to glorify itself as the be-all end-all of the communist project. Basically, I think he envisions it as a recurrent tide that grows stronger or weaker that at some point will be strong enough.
>>2891570Worth noting that the exponential aspect can be reset, as it was over our last century. We are now among the wreckages of the movement, about in the same place as in pre-Marxian times.
>>2891640Interview he did here
https://terrabayt.com/dusunce/english/crisis-capital-and-hell-on-earth-an-interview-with-phil-neel/>>2891661Phil acutally gives a bit of Leninist critique in the next paragraph:
>That said, I’m not a communization theorist. I do not like the framework or the term. I do not think there is anything special about our era that makes us any more (or less) prone to building communism today than we were in the past, though perhaps the possibility becomes more clearly visible or more necessary. I certainly draw a lot of influence from theorists associated with the current, but that’s simply because they are good, interesting, and rigorous Marxist thinkers. As for myself, I consider myself an entirely orthodox communist. That includes both the Marxian aspect, as well as the sequence of practical lessons learned in the long history of struggle and elaborated in theories of revolutionary organization. In this respect, I think many within the communization current do not focus enough on the frictions that arise in the pragmatic process of building power in a hostile world, even if they do a great job of symptomatizing the limits faced by existing uprisings and relating them to large-scale, structural trends. In other words, while they’re very good Marxists, they’re often not very good Leninists.
>It is necessary to think quite hard about the likely sequence of social transformation, the forms of revolutionary organization that would be needed to channel that process, and the geopolitical, administrative, and economic demands placed on any revolutionary force that emerges and holds any territory. In this regard, we still do not have any better living examples than the saga of the Soviet Union, the protracted people’s war in China, and the struggle for survival by isolated revolutionary states like Cuba. These are also case studies in the extreme ways that revolutionary societies can degenerate, either into bizarre chimeras like North Korea or, more conventionally, by melting back into the liberal order, as in Russia and China. Similarly, in both the far hinterlands of capitalist society and in the deindustrialized, metropolitan cores, very rudimentary issues of access to basic social infrastructure remain primary. These are, classically, questions of “development” and even “(re)industrialization.” Liberals are essentially the only ones able to even broach these questions, and the currently ascendant current of liberalism (which describes itself as “socialist” or even, sometimes, “Marxist”) at least offers an attractive idea of what this process might look like, with case studies in places like China and Vietnam. >>2890768When has a centralized form of organisation led to the propagation of communist measures? When has it led to communist measures at all? Your second point contradicts itself, also
Le ICP status?
>>2899827From what I've heard from they're involved with the union movement and usually pull them towards "the communist programme," or at least towards their interpretation of it.
>>2891851Currently reading through the crisis theory part of the interview, it's a very informative article. I might read "Hinterland" later on, when I have the chance.
>>2891545Reich was a retard whose only real contribution was being the first to try doing marxism and psychoanalysis at the same time. Žižek solos.
>>2891851> As for myself, I consider myself an entirely orthodox communist>That includes both the Marxian aspect, as well as the sequence of practical lessons learned in the long history of struggle and elaborated in theories of revolutionary organization>In other words, while they’re very good Marxists, they’re often not very good Leninists.A Leninist is a Leninist
Unique IPs: 26