/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>The Far Left is the only political persuasion that insists on people reading and following the secular equivalent of holy texts
OP, what is your opinion on Council Communism

>>2902979
>You will NEVER create any kind of mass movement that way.
mass movements can't be created on will in the first place
>you will not win without copying Lenin and just hijacking a popular movement that was not originally communist to begin with and imposing yourself (and if that's the attitude you come into politics with, you almost certainly do not have the interests of the masses in mind).
good thing communism is about the proletariat and not le masses
0/10 post, I regret reading it

>>2902983
It's not that they can't, but that they won't. If you come at them with the attitude that if they don't they're not welcome that they, well, won't support you because you come off as elitist.

>>2902982
The proles are the masses, there is no situation where most people are capital owners, the existing capital owners will never allow that.

>>2902984
>They just won’t, OKAY!!!!
OP, what is your opinion on council communism

>>2902984
then your gripe is less about the communist movement and more 2026 internet nu-leftcommunists who think they're hot shit for having heard the term "commodity production". with how strapped for members most communist parties are nowadays i havent actually seen nor can i comprehend this attitude

>>2902987
They’re talking about the fabled “normie” dude. What are you on about?

>>2902988
subject of the conversation is "elitist communists who treat texts as gospel", OP makes claim that "if you're x, they will y", i say "your gripe is less with x, more with z" trying to stress that their claim only belongs to a small minority and not the general trend. you've confused the subject of the conversation somewhere down the line

>>2902989
>subject of the conversation is "elitist communists who treat texts as gospel"
And failure to reach out to “normies”.
>if you're x, they will y", i say "your gripe is less with x, more with z" trying to stress that their claim only belongs to a small minority and not the general trend. you've confused the subject of the conversation somewhere down the line
Think you’re one of the guys OP was talking about.

>>2902990
key difference being we're not normies, i can expect you to understand how logic in conversations work. you misread what i was saying and there's no shame in that

>>2902992
>key difference being we're not normies, i can expect you to understand how logic in conversations work. you misread what i was saying and there's no shame in that
Yeah, you’re one of the guys for sure. Leftcoms don’t have that much contact with “normies” on the ideological level by the way.

>>2902986
The fact you insist on me answering this question betrays that you don't care about what I said, you just want your opinion on council communism validated and will dismiss or approve of what I said based not on its own merits but my response to your question. Out of spite, then, I refuse to answer it.

>>2902995
>The fact you insist on me answering this question betrays that you don't care about what I said, you just want your opinion on council communism validated and will dismiss or approve of what I said based not on its own merits but my response to your question. Out of spite, then, I refuse to answer it.
Definitely a Maoist

>>2902996
Mao wrote some good theory but practically speaking was a flop. He didn't really follow the doctrine of the mass line himself and was economically illiterate yet insisted on directing economic development himself as he ultimately trusted no one else to influence China's path to communism, with disastrous consequences.

perhaps it's because there's not really any such thing as intrinsically secular or non-secular texts, there are just books with writing in them and people interpret them however they will. people used to consider the bible as a secular work, they regarded it as scientific fact, the most cohesive and sober-minded explanation of how the world was created and how everything in it works. given enough time, every book humans write will eventually become ancient scripture with little kernels of truth here or there underneath a mountain of speculation and bullshit.

>>2903001
>Mao wrote some good theory
Better poet than theorist.
>He didn't really follow the doctrine of the mass line himself and was economically illiterate yet insisted on directing economic development himself as he ultimately trusted no one else to influence China's path to communism, with disastrous consequences.
Sounds about right. What is your opinion on the implementation of the Mass line in the modern context?

>>2902979
People just pretend to read, it's trivial. Marxism is more and more popular every day despite people becoming less literate in general. (In practice if not statistically: reading for pleasure etc has dropped off a cliff)

In reality modern politics is fundamentally a product differentiated by the personality of the purchaser: leftists as high-agreeableness, high-openness types, Marxists with a higher dose of neuroticism than liberals as a general rule, "patsoc" types lower in agreeableness and openness and closer to the rightoid archetype. The right, meanwhile, are low agreeableness and low openness, with neuroticism varying more widely between obscenely self-confident con-men and little /pol/ freaks. The fundamental appeal for the left is signalling one's pro-social nature and the fundamental appeal for the right is signalling one's anti-social nature and seeing others suffer.

Movements of any real kind are a thing of the past. It's all fandom, religion if you like. The left are certainly tedious pseuds with the particular irony of reading Marx as a theological text (e.g. presented with any real world problem, they'll have a scriptural quote at hand. Analysis of whether the quote really applies, whether something really works as Marx wrote it, never occurs. Marx wrote it, thus it must be true…) and like all signalling games, there is a vulnerability to being more anti-liberal than anti-rightist, since liberalism competes for the same general territory while the right does not, but this is severely mediated by the underlying dispositional thing: Marxists and liberals can get on, on a personal level, in a way that marxists and rightists generally cannot. But this must be weighed against the alternative, which is quite bluntly anti-civilizational.
For all their flaws, Marxists have picked the right broad pathway. Everything else is a minor course correction by comparison.

Mao, for all his flaws, was certainly a force of civilization. India vs China is a beautiful test case in development: Mao made many, many, many mistakes, but the all important things he did were to get literacy rolling and to smash the dead hand of traditional culture and emancipate women. India, being a sort of democracy, allowed social reform to be vetoed and wound up with a more unbalanced pattern of education investment. Maoism is the foundation on which the success of Dengism was built… plus, he had some banger quotes. No investigation, no right to speak! Be sure to make nine hours of sleep a rule!

>>2903005
It's a tricky thing to thread because following it *fully* will just turn you into right wing populists, as that is the default mass line in virtually every country owing to the right being politically dominant. In order to be a socialist movement, you obviously have to have some minimum criteria or the word means nothing. I think the best approach is to have a loose a definition as possible - that is, so long as you support abolishing private capital, what replaces it is up for debate. You can listen to the "mass line" on that, rather than deciding it beforehand and trying to push for one specific kind of collectivisation. Another thing you need a baseline on is general egalitarianism - you don't want a "leftist" movement so permissive on non-economic issues that you let in Strasserites. Ethnic tribalism is a no-no, no matter how racist the masses are. But other things, like whether the movement is exclusively secular or needs to co-opt a religion or two to broaden appeal, to what extent niche gender identities are politically acknowledged rather than just being a private thing, to what extent you are nationalist (in the civic sense - as said, definitely not the racial/ethnic sense) or internationalist, all these things I think are worth bending on in order to actually enact some form of socialism, even if it's not your particular ideal form, because trying to create that will lead you to create an exclusive little club of true believers that will get nothing because nobody else will work with you. The perfect is the enemy of the good, as it's said.

>>2902979
>The Far Left
in for a real treat with this monolithic tripe
>is the only political persuasion
Communism, Social Democracy, Anarchism, etc. are all called "far left" by troglodytes but only the stupidest person would see them all as a unified "political persuasion."
>that insists on people reading
the horror… reading!
>and following
how awful that people should put theory into practice
>the secular equivalent of holy texts
so… "holy texts" minus the supernatural nonsense, unfalsifiable claims, and complete rejection of materialism? How dreadful.
>(ie Kapital + whatever else that person considers essential) and adhering to strict pre-defined doctrine to be accepted as part of their movement.
ever heard of Mein Kampf?
>You will NEVER create any kind of mass movement that way.
A vanguard party and a mass movement are two different things. A communist revolution consists of a vanguard party leading a mass movement, including its working class, its trade unions, its cooperatives, its revolutionary army, and in rare cases even its non-reactionary elements of other classes who choose to side with the revolution. Not every worker needs to read theory for a revolution to be successful, and the broader working class in any mass movement is going to have syncretic beliefs that do not always align with the vanguard party. Membership in the vanguard party is dependent on things like knowing revolutionary theory while membership in the broader mass movement is not.
>You people
Who? Leftypol? Monolithic tripe.
>are the reason Mao even had to articulate the doctrine of the mass line - even if it should be so fucking obvious it shouldn't need to be said and even if Mao himself didn't necessarily follow it - because communists are notorious for devolving into elitism instead of actually being servants of the people (Lenin being the first one to actually succeed as a communist didn't help this whatsoever).
Elaborate on the latter point about Lenin, lol.
>If you're not building a movement where someone who has never read a single line of Marx and never will can walk in and feel welcome anyway, you will not win without copying Lenin and just hijacking a popular movement that was not originally communist to begin with and imposing yourself (and if that's the attitude you come into politics with, you almost certainly do not have the interests of the masses in mind).
You really don't need Marx to understand exploitation.

>>2903031
>A communist revolution consists of a vanguard party leading a mass movement
No it isn’t

Marx was the first Communist of this sort.
Just read Critique of the Gotha Programme:
Endless pedantry and criticism against popuar slogans.
Marxism was never a mass movement; only a Church.

>>2902979
It's not the only political side that puts importance on being educated on specific doctrines and having ideological sources.

It's just that the other more dominant ideologies aren't explicitly centred around revolutionaries;
who by definition, must be
A.Motivated and
B.Educated on their ideas, which shockingly involves reading;
but, the uneducated and easy to manipulate masses are not supposed to be educated enough to formulate complex critiques and form concrete analysis on societal issues.

Because, even more shocking news, class society is notorious in not educating the lower, oppressed classes, because even more shockingly, education/knowledge makes you more likely to critique and try to solve problems present within society. Even if, it was just liberal theory, even that given to the masses in an comprehensive manner, would make them more likely to try to amend and challenge the system, and implement changes accordingly to their new outlook and knowledge.

Worst yet, if you gave them scientific knowledge on their nation's institutions, laws and economy, they may actually formulate sophisticated demands and programs, instead of lack-luster sporadic protests that lead no-where.

Might as well say "aerodynamics" is a religious doctrine and we'll never get a "let's make humans fly" movement off the ground without a "big tent" with proponents of levitation and anti-gravity machine cranks

It's called scientific socialism for a reason, go make your own socioeconomic theory and call back when you have your own succesful socialist experiment

>>2903161
I don’t think that’s quite what they’re saying

The book to read if you want to understand the ML mindset is Blindness by Jose Saramago

>>2902979
So you are denying that the proletarian class should achieve organized political supremacy as a class in its own party and suppress all who deny this. You also deny that other working classes should act only according to what they have in common with the supremacy of the proletarian class, being incapable of independence. You are asking communists to subordinate the theory of scientific socialism to spontaneity.

Let's see with quotes that your opinion goes against scientific socialism:

<Against the collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes.

<This constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to insure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes.

<The combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economical struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists.

<The lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economical monopolies and for enslaving labor. To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes.

<The International Working Men's Association, 1872, Resolution on the establishment of working-class parties

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1872/hague-conference/parties.htm

As you can see, the First International, in which Marx and Engels participated, disagrees with you. Communists must have a workers' party distinct from the parties of the bourgeoisie so that the proletariat can acquire its political supremacy by propagating its ideas to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and so that there is no co-optation of the masses to serve the bourgeoisie.

Another quote demonstrating what a communist is with Marx and Engels:

<The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

<The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

<The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
[…]
<The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

<In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
[…]
<The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

<In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

<In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

<And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

<By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

<But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
[…]
<The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

<Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
[…]
<When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

<In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

<Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

>>2902979
Continuing what I wrote:
>>2903237
You are making the mistake of the so-called "Economists" who worshipped spontaneity and were subservient to it, believing that the masses will supposedly develop revolutionary socialist consciousness spontaneously so that communists remain passive, allowing the masses to be co-opted by the bourgeoisie or have their movement wither away without direction. In this case, you are more wrong than the cautious communists who don't want to do anything because any spontaneous movement would be co-opted by the bourgeoisie. The correct approach is to take advantage of spontaneity to spread communist propaganda, making co-optation more difficult, even if the movement withers because all the media, along with the bourgeoisie and the so-called middle class, become hostile to it due to slogans defending economic sovereignty, the defense of public property, and the democratization of the economy, demanding the participation of the population in everything without any "techocrats." It would also be necessary to beat liberals in the streets until the masses accept that all classes must serve the supremacy of the proletariat to socialize the economy and abolish social classes.

I'll leave a warning quote for those romanticizing depoliticized spontaneity who try to seek an "organic" movement against the "authoritarianism" of building the workers' movement for proletarian domination, defending economic sovereignty, and democratizing with popular councils for greater participation in the economy without letting politicians and so-called "technocrats" negotiate behind closed doors with the bourgeoisie. This is why the workers' movement must be independent of the bourgeoisie without exception and never regress to generic discourses of "corruption" that demonstrate co-optation by the bourgeoisie to privatize and surrender as lackeys to the finance capital of capitalist imperialism.

<Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement,[15] the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, to its development along the lines of the Credo programme; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. The sentence employed by the authors of the Economist letter published in Iskra, No. 12, that the efforts of the most inspired ideologists fail to divert the working-class movement from the path that is determined by the interaction of the material elements and the material environment is therefore tantamount to renouncing socialism. If these authors were capable of fearlessly, consistently, and thoroughly considering what they say, as everyone who enters the arena of literary and public activity should be, there would be nothing left for them but to “fold their useless arms over their empty breasts” and surrender the field of action to the Struves and Prokopoviches, who are dragging the working-class movement “along the line of least resistance”, i.e., along the line of bourgeois trade-unionism, or to the Zubatovs, who are dragging it along the line of clerical and gendarme “ideology”.

<Let us recall the example of Germany. What was the historic service Lassalle rendered to the German working-class movement? It was that he diverted that movement from the path of progressionist trade-unionism and co-operativism towards which it had been spontaneously moving (with the benign assistance of Schulze-Delitzsch and his like). To fulfil such a task it was necessary to do something quite different from talking of underrating the spontaneous element, of tactics-as-process, of the interaction between elements and environment, etc. A fierce struggle against spontaneity was necessary, and only after such a struggle, extending over many years, was it possible, for instance, to convert the working population of Berlin from a bulwark of the progressionist party into one of the finest strongholds of Social-Democracy. This struggle is by no means over even today (as might seem to those who learn the history of the German movement from Prokopovich, and its philosophy from Struve). Even now the German working class is, so to speak, split up among a number of ideologies. A section of the workers is organised in Catholic and monarchist trade unions; another section is organised in the Hirsch-Duncker[33] unions, founded by the bourgeois worshippers of English trade-unionism; the third is organised in Social-Democratic trade unions. The last-named group is immeasurably more numerous than the rest, but the Social-Democratic ideology was able to achieve this superiority, and will be able to maintain it, only in an unswerving struggle against all other ideologies.

<But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.[16] And the younger the socialist movement in any given country, the more vigorously it must struggle against all attempts to entrench non-socialist ideology, and the more resolutely the workers must be warned against the bad counsellors who shout against “overrating the conscious element”, etc. The authors of the Economist letter, in unison with Rabocheye Dyelo, inveigh against the intolerance that is characteristic of the infancy of the movement. To this we reply: Yes, our movement is indeed in its infancy, and in order that it may grow up faster, it must become imbued with intolerance against those who retard its growth by their subservience to spontaneity. Nothing is so ridiculous and harmful as pretending that we are “old hands” who have long ago experienced all the decisive stages of the struggle.

<Thirdly, the first issue of Rabochaya Mysl shows that the term “Economism” (which, of course, we do not propose to abandon, since, in one way or another, this designation has already established itself) does not adequately convey the real character of the new trend. Rabochaya Mysl does not altogether repudiate the political struggle; the rules for a workers’ mutual benefit fund published in its first issue contain a reference to combating the government. Rabochaya Mysl believes, however, that “politics always obediently follows economics” (Rabocheye Dyelo varies this thesis when it asserts in its programme that “in Russia more than in any other country, the economic struggle is inseparable from the political struggle”). If by politics is meant Social-Democratic politics, then the theses of Rabochaya Mysl and Rabocheye Dyelo are utterly incorrect. The economic struggle of the workers is very often connected (although not inseparably) with bourgeois politics, clerical politics, etc., as we have seen. Rabocheye Dyelo’s theses are correct, if by politics is meant trade union politics, viz., the common striving of all workers to secure from the government measures for alleviating the distress to which their condition gives rise, but which do not abolish that condition, i.e., which do not remove the subjection of labour to capital. That striving indeed is common to the English trade-unionists, who are hostile to socialism, to the Catholic workers, to the “Zubatov” workers, etc. There is politics and politics. Thus, we see that Rabochaya Mysl does not so much deny the political struggle, as it bows to its spontaneity, to its unconsciousness. While fully recognising the political struggle (better: the political desires and demands of the workers), which arises spontaneously from the working-class movement itself, it absolutely refuses independently to work out a specifically Social-Democratic politics corresponding to the general tasks of socialism and to present-day conditions in Russia.

[…]

<Footnotes:

<[15] This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge. But in order that working men may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known. —Lenin

<[16] It is often said that the working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory reveals the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory, and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily, provided, however, this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity, provided it subordinates spontaneity to itself. Usually this is taken for granted, but it is precisely this which Rabocheye Dyelo forgets or distorts. The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless, most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree. —Lenin

<Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, BURNING QUESTIONS of our MOVEMENT, II The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

>>2902985
Incorrect. There are situations where a society is formed by a large number of peasants and petty bourgeois; this does not change the fact that it is the obligation of the proletarian class to become the dominant class because it is the revolutionary agent, and other working classes should only act according to what they have in common with the supremacy of the proletarian class.

If you don't believe this, I'll leave you with a quote from Engels proving my point:

<2 . What is the proletariat?

<The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.

<3. Proletarians, then, have not always existed?

<No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions.
[…]
<6 . What working classes were there before the industrial revolution?

<The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes.

<In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United States.

<In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists.
[…]
<9. In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen?

<In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition. But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less communist movement.
[…]
<18. What will be the course of this revolution?

<Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

<Frederick Engels, 1847, The Principles of Communism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

>>2903237
>>2903239
Nobody who works 8-12 hours a day is going to have the energy or attention span to read all that, either adapt to new media or be left behind

>>2903237
>>2903239
This, right here, is exactly what I'm talking about. The fact you don't have enough self-awareness to realise you just proved my point is precisely why you are politically doomed.

>>2902979
I agree with you but the left will never accept this

>having strong opinions and reading books is the same thing as religion
NGMI

>>2903355
That’s what being religious is

>>2903161
Every time I've met someone complaining about ts they just end up shilling something that was already written down in a book hundreds of years ago. ofc they're completely unaware of this century long game of telephone they're participating in since they find reading annoying. This has literally happened everytime irl and online someone bitches about muh reading and muh strong opinions.

>>2903249
I don’t completely agree with this, but I do think the way information is distributed certainly needs changing, and we need to accept that not everyone learns the same way.

>>2903239
> and other working classes should only act according to what they have in common with the supremacy of the proletarian class
"should"
Idealist nonsense. People do whatever the fuck they want. You might as well argue that the capitalists "should" just stop exploiting others.

>>2903249
That is why it is necessary for the intelligentsia to serve the interests of the supremacy of the proletariat by spreading propaganda and encouraging, along with the revolutionary party, the best elements and behaviors of the working class so that the proletariat can acquire its political dominance while the masses can be educated to develop class consciousness with the intensification of the class struggle.

>>2903250
This is irrelevant, the supremacy of the proletarian class has nothing to do with popularity, the defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the overthrow of the bourgeois state also has nothing to do with popularity. Defending co-optation by the bourgeoisie because you are afraid of being hated or feared is opportunism and counter-revolutionary. Your discourse of "success" is irrelevant to me because I will continue to defend the principles of scientific socialism against opportunists, revisionists, and counter-revolutionary class conciliators.

>>2903374
Wrong. All other working classes only act according to what they have in common with the proletariat, or be used as puppets of the bourgeois class and discarded as fools by this bourgeoisie. There is no capacity for political independence among the petty bourgeoisie, peasants, intelligentsia, or the lumpenproletariat because of confusion and/or isolation in relation to the means of production and/or other workers.

Let's look at a quote from Marx about what happens to the petty bourgeois when they go against the interests of the proletariat and facilitate the bourgeoisie attacking the workers' movement:

<No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois – keepers of cafes and restaurants, marchands de vins [wine merchants], small traders, shopkeepers, handicraftsman, etc. The shopkeeper had pulled himself together and marched against the barricades in order to restore the traffic which leads from the streets into the shop. But behind the barricade stood the customers and the debtors; before it the creditors of the shop. And when the barricades were thrown down and the workers were crushed and the shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barred by a savior of property, an official agent of credit, who presented them with threatening notices: Overdue promissory note! Overdue house rent! Overdue bond! Doomed shop! Doomed shopkeeper!

<Salvation of property! But the house they lived in was not their property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they dealt in were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate they ate from, nor the bed they slept on belonged to them any longer. It was precisely from them that this property had to be saved – for the house-owner who let the house, for the banker who discounted the promissory note, for the capitalist who made the advances in cash, for the manufacturer who entrusted the sale of his commodities to these retailers, for the wholesale dealer who had credited the raw materials to these handicraftsman. Restoration of credit! But credit, having regained strength, proved itself a vigorous and jealous god; it turned the debtor who could not pay out of his four walls, together with wife and child, surrendered his sham property to capital, and threw the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had once more reared its head threateningly over the corpses of the June insurgents.

<The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors. Their bankruptcy, which since February had been dragging on in chronic fashion and had apparently been ignored, was openly declared after June.

<Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Part II From June 1848 to June 13, 1849

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm

As you can see from the material conditions, there is no way to deny aligning oneself with the proletariat without being co-opted by the bourgeoisie and eventually discarded as their useful idiot. The defeat of the proletariat only weakens the other working classes, no matter what you think or believe, clinging to your bourgeois individualism.

Therefore, the other working classes "should" act on what they have in common with the supremacy of the proletarian class organized as a class to abolish private property, the anarchy of production, and social classes for the planning of a socialized national economy. If they don't do this, they will be used and discarded by the bourgeoisie and capitalist competition, just like the fools they will be for denying the supremacy of the proletarian class. If they are trying to prevent the proletarian class from acquiring its political supremacy, they will be punished anyway as counter-revolutionaries. Therefore, it doesn't matter what you think.

>>2903424
>MARX SAID IM RIGHT YOU'RE ALL COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES
Holy shit this is amazing. I'm LAFFIN. You are HOPELESS.

i don't know how it is for other countries but america has this thing where people associate reading books with being smart, like if you read enough text in big thick books written by famous people then you are smart. i grew up in the 90s and the education system really went hard with this idea, they thought the key to making kids become smart is make them read lots of books so it was constant book reports in school and reading books in the school library and pro-reading initiatives where kids earn crummy prizes for reading books, and the books were mostly braindead young adult novels full of christian conservative values, and it didn't make any of the kids any smarter. i already knew how to read before i ever went to school because i wanted to learn how to read and my sister taught me, so all of this shit was like torture for me, i knew i wasn't learning anything from reading these dumb books about evil baby-killing communist utopias and heroic southern white people defending helpless uyghurs from racists, and i knew none of the morons in class eating boogers and carving swastikas into their desks were learning anything either, all it seemed to do was perpetuate this idea that reading = intelligence to another generation who are now adults running around telling everyone to read marx or engels or whatever, like it's arcane knowledge that will open your eyes and make you see the matrix and realize everything you believed was a lie and change your politics. i have never read anything that did that for me, books are just a media format to me like any other and my primary source of knowledge has always been reality, what i experience in my everyday life navigating the world and interacting with people and working and solving problems and figuring things out and brainstorming ideas and constantly ruminating about everything, books and media are just supplemental material. even reference books don't really teach me that much, i read books on pascal and c++ back in the day but they didn't teach me programming, they just showed me the basic syntax of the language; writing and compiling and rewriting the code over and over again dealing with errors and figuring out what i did wrong is what taught me programming, the book was just basic fundamental shit that i could learned from countless other sources. with politics, i already know what my morals and values are and i already know how unfair and fucked up the american authoritarian capitalist system is because i've been living in it and having my face rubbed in shit by it every day for my entire life, i've been fucked over by employers, fucked over by the healthcare system, fucked over by the cops, fucked over by the justice system, disowned by my brainwashed family, stomped on by drunken trump supporters, there is no book that could be a louder wake-up call for me than reality is. i enjoy studying history and politics and learning about things i didn't know before and unlearning wrong things that i was made to believe before, but none of this information is revolutionary for me, all it does is further reaffirm my existing views and maybe occasionally teach me a new word or a more succinct way of describing something.

i dont think reading a text is a big deal but i am going to be honest you could probably summarize the basic arguments of capital and distill it down without losing too much. chapter 1 especially was repetitive as shit like who the fuck writes like that? very grating read and this is coming from someone who has read hegel. also i dont think a lot of the stuff in capital can be applied linearly to the present day just like that. it is more of a text to get you to get better at thinking in a way that is along the lines of scientific socialism. you are supposed to take the thought process you get from there and then apply it to our current economy taking into account lenin's observations and seeing how finance capital has developed (most online larpers wont do this)

>>2902979
>The Far Left is the only political persuasion that insists on people understanding and agreeing with it
ok

>>2903031
OP forgot to mention that we'll never succeed because of how insufferable faggots like you are to the general population. Seriously, why do you write like this ? Are you incapable of communicating your points without ressorting to cutting every word in a greentext to have meaningless "gotchas" ?

>"holy texts" minus the supernatural nonsense, unfalsifiable claims, and complete rejection of materialism? How dreadful.
You didn't even respond to what he was saying. You got so lost into this little performative "gotcha" that you literally couldn't reply to the main point lmfao. Why is it so hard to adress his point ?
<communism won't be popular until communists stop acting dogmatic with their main theories

>>2902979
The thing is this is mostly an online phenomenon. You've seen it in this thread, chronically online retards will never be able to drop the larp because it's become infused within their identities.
However, IRL, most movements aren't like that. I've been in multiple orgs and most people there hadn't read Marx, nor ressorted to the autistic drivel you often witness on this site.

The real issue for marxists right now is that they're associated with the puritanist leftist culture and are still associated with the USSR. The former has already been starting to dissipate because it was mostly online drivel, but the latter is still the big plague of any communist movement.

>>2903424
Excellent post.

>>2902979
>The Far Left is the only political persuasion that insists on people reading
yeah
>and following the secular equivalent of holy texts
You can't "follow" economic theory as they aren't instructions.

>>2906791
Why is being associated with the USSR a problem?

>gommunism is le religion
daring today, aren't we?

>>2907008
Not inherently, but a lot of communists do treat it as such, yes.

>>2903361
The vast majority of people don't become religious by reading books.

One problem is Marxism is so radical it makes other "radical" factions look status quo. Marxists want to get rid of nations, the family, buying/selling, division of labor, the distinction between town and country, and religion. The world would be unrecognizable. And it's not clear how to do that, and there's nothing to even say it's possible.

>>2907008
next: atheism is religion

>>2907008
Almost everything is an ersatz religion these days. It's silly to dismiss it just because you happen to like the thing.

Communism, yes, but also social democracy, conservatism, fascism, movie franchises, the furry fandom, and especially video games.

>>2907008
>Has a fixed canon that most followers don't read
>Followers are imbued with moral passions despite the core doctrine itself being amoral
>Constantly shot itself in the foot over sectarian disputes
>Was once a powerful mass movement, gradually retreated to enclosed monastic spaces distant from the masses
Communism is just Buddhism man

>>2907197

this isn't so much "radical" as it is megalomaniacal, one should be wary of any theory which immediately proposes to make top-down changes on enormous scales like entire planets or civilizations. just by making suggestions with such far-reaching consequences, one has already gone off the deep end into unbridled hubris before you even look at what the suggestion is. when faraday and others studied and wrote about electromagnetism they didn't immediately leap into trying to wire up the entire world and build a global electrical grid, they designed small simple devices and circuits and the idea grew from there with lots and lots of trial-and-error and running into all kinds of unforeseen problems that the pioneering theorists never could have imagined. if engineering theory, a model of extremely simple and deterministic systems, is this bad at predicting and accounting for what actually happens in reality then why would political theory, a model of entire human societies, be any more robust or straightforward?

>>2907198
Well even capital itself is called a "REAL GOD":

https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/

>>2902979
>reading and following the secular equivalent of holy texts
As opposed to talking without knowing what the hell you are talking about? Marxism is a precise science

>>2906995
Because the USSR has a negative image of a failed project which wounded up in millions of death and low living standards, which means communism is also associated with that by extension.

>>2907245
This is simply post-Cold War revisionism. When the USSR was around no one gave a fuck about
>le millions of deaths
besides the boomers in America. Everyone saw it as an alternative path towards prosperity, much like how left wing Zoomers treat China today. It was only the USSR committing suicide that allowed America to propagate the image of failure across the world.

>>2907198
>*sniff* well, you know - eh - it's like, zhe athetists *sniff* zhey are the most religious people! more religious than christians!
>and zhe christians zhey *sniff* *scratches nose* - eh - zhey are the real atheists, I think. not literally of courshe
*sniff* zhey still believe in God and Jesus on zhe cross and so on. but zhe christians know zhat what zhey believe in requires a leap of faith *sniff* you know. zhey are aware of the absurdity of zheir belief
>but ze atheists - eh - zhey truly believe what zhey say!
>and scho on and scho on

>>2907241
>Marxism is a precise science
You could grind up every commodity in the world and not not find one atom of "value."

>>2907293
this. for all of Marx' materialism, there's still oodles of metaphysics in Capital, such as the notion that commodities "embody" labour

>>2907273
You can insist it's not a barrier to entry all you want but since no other non-theocratic ideology insists on it, you're inherently setting yourself up to have narrower appeal and thus handicapping yourself for no reason other than to feel superior.

>>2907293
>You could grind up every machine in the world and not not find one atom of "horse-power"
this is his how you sound like btw

>>2907388
but anon, you can measure the amount of power a motor generates. whereas there is no way in general to measure how much labor or value that motor "embodies". you'd know this if you've read vol III, or if you've looked at the literature on joint production

Retards like you is why 'the pipo' should not be 'put in power'.