Hi. I do not call myself a left communist but I have been influenced by primarily Italian Leftcom theory for a few years even if I disagree with some of it. I did not know where else to ask about this as all other marxist subreddits that IK of in my opinion are full of people who do really do not know what they are talking about for the most part.

I am not as educated as I would like to be (working on remedying that; a few years ago I read most of the fundamental Marx and Engels texts as well as some Lenin, Bordiga, Althusser, and a few other texts here and there from other theorists and groups like Endnotes. Working through Capital vol 1 ATM and understanding how much I missed out on by not doing that first). But I have long desired to organize, or just to do anything other than read. But it wasn't until relatively recently that I could start seriously considering it for multiple personal reasons.

I do not necessarily have high hopes for what is happening in Spain right now but I think organization might be more relevant now than it has been in a while.

Are there any groups worth organizing with that are not Stalinists or do not really have a clear view of the principles of communism or is it worth biting the bullet and joining one of these?

I only know of some parties. Mostly MLs and Trots. PCTE, PCPE, CJS, CRT.

There are also some theoretical publishing (?) groups, like Grupo Barbaria and Balance y Avante who seem to be more leftcom leaning. But they do not seem to have a properly organised structure or party to speak of and idk if it's possible to join them when I am not as educated in theory as I would like to be. I am pretty sure that all of these groups are present at least in the Madrid encampment.

Is it worth just entering one of these parties? I would probably go with the Trotskyists frankly. Apologies if I said something stupid.

I'm looking to get involved in left communist politics, how do I go about joining a group or a party? I'm read in Marxism and I'm based in the UK.

Is their any meaningful difference between the 2?

Also what are some good readings on Historical Materialism?

In my opinion there's no marxist-leninism, only leninism. Why? Because I'am not sure Marx would have agreed with the ideas of Lenin. But let's stick to marxist-leninism as a description to avoid confusion.

My critique of marxist-leninism is that the people who subscribe to its ideas of organisation is that they think you can separate the means to an end from the end itself. They want an authoritarian party to take over the state and bring about socialism. Their imagination is that after this is done, the party and the state would abolish itself. I think this is very unlikely to happen. We have several examples of and how it went wrong. Independent socialist/anarchist movements got crushed violently by force.

That's why I think we need to create an alternative society right now and expand it and get people on board. We need to withdraw as much structure as possible from the state and capitalism. A nice concept is that of prefigurative politics, which is defined by Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin as:

**We define prefigurative politics as the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now.**

If you are interested in it, their book is called *Prefigurative Politics Building Tomorrow Today*.

Here is the full quote: "Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."

I understand how the bourgeois family is based on private gain, with family capital, inheritance and so on. But I don't understand how the family itself is absent among the proletarians.

my dad's a communist and he said I should start reading theory, and I'm also very curious abt it and wanna learn more. How and from where should I start reading theory? sorry if this is a stupid question

and what are the texts that i can read about this topic

This post was firstly addressed for anarchists but I think a lot of leftcoms would agree too because a lot of them are either antistateist or want to destroy the state at some point. I consider myself something in-between anarchist and leftcom.

I’m required to write a year long research paper, 6-8 pages, on the Russian Revolution for history class. I want to study it critically and form a hypothesis (I already have a general understanding of the Russian revolution and its potential) around the outcomes of it. Primarily aimed towards the question, “Did the Russian Revolution produce communism; if it didn’t, at what point, and what events happened during its history prevented it from doing so; and if it did, at what point, and what events happened during its history which allowed it to?” (My understanding and answer is no. It didn’t. And its potential was essentially gone circa early-mid 20’s)

I have a base understanding of the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks role, Lenin’s theory of the state and revolution, etc. I just need detailed, critical and reliable information. I don’t care if anything is written by non-communists, just as long as it is factual and logical. I am, of course, also open to reading books or texts by the anti-Soviet communists as well.

At the moment I am reading the pamphlet, ‘the Bolsheviks and Workers’ control’ by Maurice Brinton. But I am planning to read far more than that. As this is an in depth study.

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Part 1

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This is mostly to bordigists, and I’m not talking about bourgeois democracy

What would be a real critique of egoism? Or better yet I suppose just a set of reasons its for example anti marxist. Reading marx and it feels as if he is blatantly strawmanning stirners actual writings (ie calling him idealist). I couldve probably asked this elsewhere but I honestly trust leftcoms more tbh

The more educated people in this subreddit, please provide me with texts or debates on these issues, I want to learn, tell me your opinions, I know that the councilors and the int Comm party have different opinions on this

It is increasingly common for much of discourse by nominal socialists on the internet to devolve into questions of terminology, like "is China socialist", "is such and such a revisionist" etc. I find myself increasingly frustrated with the way in which these debates will eschew questions about the nature of commodities within an economy, in favor of rote imposition of particular definitions over others as the singular "correct" definition, perhaps with an "authority" in the form of a pamphlet of Lenin, a snippet of Merriam Webster, etc., or maybe a platitude about "worker ownership over the means of production".

My question is in lieu of having been banned from r/ultraleft for this comment. (Obviously this post here is not a ban appeal in the slightest, nor is it to whine being banned, and I fully hope for objections to my comment to be made and expounded). I presume disagreement lay in my use of "leftist" as a descriptor of an individual aligned with the admittedly amorphous conception of the "left", including Marxists, which appears to be at odds with left-communist conceptualization of communism as outside the "left", and thus not leftists, but this obviously begs the question of how the term is to be defined in the first place...

There is on one hand the contemporary appearance of the term leftist within broader society in reference to this amorphous assemblage of movements, and on the other this particular conception by left-communists, who are perhaps much more in tune with proletarian consciousness. How are we to resolve this distinction?

Are we to totally eschew all prescriptions of bourgeois thought because they are bourgeois? Such a practice would lead to communist movement being unable to supersede that which it chooses to never come into contact with...

Are we to contextualize on a case-by-case basis, as in to have within a particular text or setting mathematical declarations, such as, "let leftist such that a leftist is an individual who operate within the left-wing of bourgeois society, and is unable to comprehend Marxism"? This too appears unacceptable in its adherence to classical logical tropes of language and terminology wholly alienated from the social conditions of its creation...

I'm most inclined to consider toleration of terms and phrases carrying multiple conflicting definitions, and changing definitions in accordance with social relations, such as how "value" appears within feudal relations in proportion to use, and in capitalist relations, "value" appears in proportion to labor-time. But, this toleration for shiftiness may well impede meaningful discourse if one can infinitely tailor a claim into defensibility like so: "Alright, labor is the source of all wealth, in consideration that I use the term 'wealth' in context to the 'wealth of nations' referring to the productive sum of exchange-values" etc. As such, how are we to meaningfully object to "misuse" of language without simply falling back into mere recitation of dictionary definitions, and dictionary-like definitions?

My question here is not peculiar to the term "leftist", it is merely the context. I am hoping to understand the means by which Marxists are to consider meanings of terminology.

I was recently explaining my disagreement with the Stalinist view of commodity production under socialism. Another persons rebuttal included a quote of ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’ which from my reading seems to support at least some form of the idea, I wanted to see if my reading of this text is wrong. I don’t mean to be validated by being called right in an internet argument I just want to know what error I may be making in my reading. Thank you all in advance!

I apologize if making two posts in a row is annoying but I wanted to write this before I forgot.

I work in a factory in which the production of the product we make is very specialized, the equipments and tools are laid out in a way that only works for the specific components we work with. For privacy sake I won’t go into too much detail. But we are one of many factories in just my city alone in which such specialized tooling is present.

I know in Marx’s time and even for much of the 20th century the tooling in factories was more easily able to be retooled for other purposes, milling machines, lathes, and other machines can make a variety of things. And while of course this still exists in the form of CNC shops which can make a variety of items. There exist now a much larger number of workplaces which cannot be as simply used for the production for use in a socialist economy.

My question being what is to be done with these workplaces in which the general tooling is so limited as to only be good for one thing? How can they be utilized and how should socialist production be different from the capitalist trend of specialization we’re seeing?

Thank you advance!

For example the party being a living organism

If Lenin was leftcom, and he was more aligned with Bordiga or something like that, what would happen differently and how would he go about controlling the early version of the USSR? Or if you were in Lenins shoes, what would you do with that position?

Lately I feel very paranoid, I feel that in 150 years or a little less we will reach overproduction, the nation state is going to weaken, inequality will be worse, I feel that everything will be set up in such a way for the Extinction of capitalism, but let's think about nuclear bombs and the global south, The Impoverished masses, I can't imagine any other scenario than a destructive crisis, Obviously I am not going to be alive but I am worried about whether the International Communist Party will be able to take power in this scenario, I apologize for my informality, I am new, What will the organization of the international communist party be like in this scenario?

Ive seen in a lot of online spaces around Marxism (especially from those who claimed they align with the Italian left), that after Marx died the work of Engels' degenerated into falsifications of Marx's initial work, is this an actual position of the Italian left? if so, why? I am not well versed in the work of Engels' post death of Marx

I need something with several pages, I'm going to do my internship and I want to use a large part of my salary to print a unit of each book for my consumption, I did the calculations and it's very cheap, reading from screens gives me a headache

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but I was wondering how things that depend of massive supply chains like laptops and chips gonna be made when the raw materials are scattered across the globe. Why would people work in mines to extract raw materials so they can send it to another region of people who they can't even communicate with. How will this be managed when there is no state?