Kinda of a baby Marxist so I only recently learned of him and also about his death. I just wanted to ask you all what you think of him and his books? Should I bother reading them after I finish capital ( which will not be this century at my pace). Thanks in advance for your answers.

i am not sure if that is the right place to ask this but i have been thinking about this and this sub is where i have found most knowledgeable comrades for my previous questions

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Might be an unorthodox question, but do any of you know of any correct interpretations of communism in media that aren't liberal concoctions? I know not to expect anything remarkable from capitalist-produced entertainment, but there's sure to be at least one gem in the ocean of coal.

The Philistine’s Question

Look at the numbers, the Philistine says! How on earth will our tiny party ever hope to catch up to these relative Goliaths of opportunism? By avoiding the sordid activist rat-race to begin with. We can, with absolute certainty, state that it is only our current which remains not only authentically communist but genuinely anti-capitalist; therefore, it is only our party which truly represents the interests and historical aims of the proletarian class in today’s society, no matter how small we may be. Where is the proletarian? It only appears and expresses itself as a class, here in our party. Outside it, it is merely individual workers scattered to the wind. Therefore, there is no competition to be found. The Marxist doctrine of social crisis guarantees the restoration of a mass proletarian movement, and it is on these historical grounds, not on the passing fashions of bourgeois politics, that our Party has systematically and patiently carried out its work of revolutionary preparation. Within the all-consuming bourgeois world, countless imposters have come and gone, each demonstrating an immature and spurious understanding of the revolutionary social science of Marxism. When the next social crisis once again compels the working class masses into struggle, these programmatic fictions will be brushed aside by the proletariat with no greater effort than that required to flick an ant from one’s skin. Behind the aesthetics and the game of appearances played by these Stalinist parties, lies not a proletarian program but a program of a radicalizing petit-bourgeois middle class.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation ran a national ticket in 2024 that outperformed every prior self-proclaimed “socialist” presidential campaign in decades. The Communist Party USA’s membership rolls are climbing for the first time in a generation. A brand-new American Communist Party is finding an audience before it has finished writing its own founding documents. Each presents itself as a more hardcore alternative to the Democratic Socialists of America, yet each alleged break turns out, on inspection, to be almost entirely rhetorical. What we have is not a movement of the proletariat but the continual downward spiral of the American middle class, disillusioned and reaching for answers to questions which the existing political establishment cannot give, yet still unwilling to give up their childish attachment to the fairytale of bourgeois democracy hoping deep down to fix and right the wrongs of the bourgeois world they desperately want to preserve so they can continue to live their comfortable individual bourgeois lives filled with all its personal interests, hobbies and shopping habits. Our Che Guevara t-shirt wearing heroes have arrived once more! So for the activist intelligentsia it is out of the fryer and into the pan.

The PSL and CPUSA co-organize with the liberal DSA sects, endorse the same Democratic candidates, and converge on the same liberal demands, progressive taxation, expanded voting rights, government budgetary reform of the military, reached by the same petitions, performative protests and canvasses, so-called "organizing". The ACP leans elsewhere: less ballot line, more podcast promotionalism, and leader-worship, plus an open nationalism its own program calls "socialist patriotism", what members and critics alike call "MAGA Communism” filled with its petit-bourgeosis nostalgia for the traditional nuclear family. It is hard to imagine a more repugnant distortion of communism than reading these groups’ so called programs which reek of the most turgid liberal nationalism and reformist drivel. It is no wonder they repel the actual proletarian like noxious bile despite all their attempts to appeal to the “masses” and to “meet them where they are at” by spewing abject ignorance and stupidity. Each group waving its own large red flag, competing with each other to catch the eye of the latest generation of organizational window shoppers and weekend warrior radicals, to herd the imagined masses into their respective tiny corrals and bleed their membership dues for their petit-bourgeois political ends: DSA’s dead end cul de sac fenced by the Democratic Party, or PSL’s and CPUSA’s and the ACP’s boosteristic "Marxism-Leninism".

Underneath the differing veneers, lies a single convergence: everything these organizations offer, the marches, the branded merchandise, the uninspired activist mantras parroted in the streets, is theater performed by imposters who have stolen the costumes of communism and Marxism while repudiating its script. None of these groups are ahead of the organic party at all, because the thing they are growing is not a real party, something they have no comprehension of.

History has run this experiment before: these are typical bourgeois party machines, built to contain and administer a layer in motion, and machines of that kind are no match, over time, for the one thing they cannot manufacture, an organic party welded to an invariant program that is defended and prepared for the true resurgence of the proletarian masses to social struggle. It does not herd the declassed middle classes toward itself to cobble together some sort of engine to prevent the social catastrophes capital promise, it is constituted by the same historical process that produces that very crisis in the first place, and will be there, unchanged, when the machines built to contain that crisis have each in turn been ground up by it. We weathered the counter-revolution. They perpetrated it.
All these groups owe their basic orientation to the same unresolved question: what to make of the Soviet Union, in its time, and China today. Stalinism and its Maoist descendants treat one or both as viable "socialism"; Trotskyism has held the former USSR, and China today, to be a degenerated workers’ State worth defending.

They’ve all abandoned the real communist program, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the abolition of wage labor, mercantile exchange, and the profit-driven firm as the actual content of communism. No, they worship the State owned enterprise and the proliferation of reformist pandering. State capitalism as socialism, as a guarantee on a future job for the middle classes and their radicalizing parties.

Full article here:

http://www.international-communist-party.org/English/TheCPart/TCP_070.htm#MACHINES

Under the long counter-revolution, every generation has produced its own batch of modernizers, fixers and updaters of Marxism. Unable to explain the defeats of the proletariat through the objective course of class society’s development, due to their position outside the party as small circles of individual critical "thinkers", they have one after another, in their personal genius, decided that, in order to save humanity, they must take the Marxist doctrine, "back to the drydocks", fixing what appears broken to their discerning academic minds. Yet, isolated as they are, they can never conceive of the doctrine in its entirety, and always repeat errors they cannot see, errors already surgically treated by our Marxist forefathers long ago.

It is the recurring social position from which the deviation is generated: declassed intellectuals, students, and professionals formed by the individualist culture of the bourgeois academy, claiming Marx as one of their own while moronically dismembering his work. To the relativist philistines, Marxist theory is merely the construct of a few great “thinkers,” one opinion or perspective among many, a “grand narrative” in need of improving if not deconstructing altogether since it’s all a product merely of its time and all men being equal they only need to treat Marx with the same mediocrity that permeates their every fiber, the dialectical and materialist worldview essentially inconceivable by brains which have been thoroughly blended, shaken and stirred by the bourgeois academy. They serve up a theoretical cocktail filled to the brim with different ingredients that refreshes and brings relief to all those troubled with the heavy weight of the moral and social responsibilities that come with holding a true revolutionary Marxist materialist praxis. Who needs systematic historical evaluation of the complex real events of the counter-revolution when you can selectively pick and pull facts to establish theoretical platitudes based on bourgeois common sense which professes to know all to well the lessons and consequences of the Russian Revolution? This is the essence of the historical mutilation that is “When Insurrections Die” by Dauve in End Notes 1. You know what the revolution really needs? Supposedly another hack to fix the errors of the Italian Communist Left.

The reductive conceptualization of “value-form” critique, “real subsumption”, a-political anti-“work” refusalism and "anti-programmatism" merely conceals an old proposition: that capitalism can be abolished without the conquest of political power, without the dictatorship of the proletariat, without the communist party, and without the historical continuity of the programme. It is the immediatist and anarchist refusal of political mediation updated with the appropriation of select positions long defended by our tradition in order to create a blase demoralizing theoretical corpus to convince its readers against all of Marxism’s essential conclusions, prognosticating their adherents return to the nihilist and defeatist bogs from which these petit-bourgeosis vitalists have emerged baptized and born again.

Read full article at the link http://www.international-communist-party.org/English/TheCPart/TCP_070.htm#COMMUNIZATION

This is a sort of open ended question/discussion topic that I’ve been thinking about the past couple of days. That is how we can educate workers on the basics when denialism is so thoroughly entrenched into the so called “common sense”. Many workers not only have a wrong idea about socialism, but even capitalism. And most have no desire to learn.

It’s a frustrating thing and I’m wondering what those more well versed in theory and experience might have to say on the topic. It’s of course possible my entire approach to this is misguided. And if it is I’d want to hear what course should be taken instead. I’m simply overwhelmed by the degree to which anti Marxist propaganda has permeated itself into the thoughts of almost every working class person I see.

Thank you all in advance

I get the feeling they were doing their own thing separatedly. Did Pannekoek never polemicize against Bordiga (or the reverse) for example? If not, why (language barrier?).

We know what labour vouchers are so I won't get into them. I've heard varying opinions about this. We know we can't have the vouchers be accumulable or transferable, as it would be a problem if someone has saved 10,000 hours over years and spends them all at once as now society needs to produce enough goods to accommodate such an unexpected spike.,

But how long should vouchers last? What is the logic to determine how long it should last?

I feel like the latter makes more sense because US labor movements have never been that strong. I might be wrong though.

Probably the main reason why I still wouldn't consider myself a marxist it's because I can't understand his views on peasantry. Considering peasantry as a reactionary class just doesn't coincides with reality, because the most prominent revolutionary movements which can be considered socialist or left communist were led by peasants such as makhnovia or zapatistas. But I haven't read Marx that much except communist manifesto (I want to read das capital but now I'm reading some anarchist theory), so I think I could misunderstand him or even get caught in right communist propaganda. I'm asking that on this subredit because it seems like the most educated on Marx.

Are there any book shops that sell Left Communist literature that ship globally? I can find most of the texts online , but reading on a screen fries my delicate eyes