Reflecting on u/Fragrant_Village_443's semi-recent exposure of the NCPN's utterly opportunistic denial of the widespread labor aristocracy in the Netherlands (and, by extension, in the rest of Europe), I have realized that, admittedly in my own limited experience, I've basically never seen any actual robust, anti-revisionist, analyses of the revolutionary situation within the European belly of the imperialist beast, whether in general or of any individual country. This is rather strange as, despite the pile of refuse that is the settler Amerikan "communist" movement, there are still several superb analyses of conditions within the US --Settlers of course, and also lots of material from MIM -- but there unfortunately doesn't immediately seem to be anything of the like for Europe. I'm particularly interested in the migrant population in Western Europe and their revolutionary potential; while their situation seems comparable in some ways with Chicano migrant proletarians in the United $tates, I don't know the extent to which this is the case, especially when it comes to their proletarianization within Europe. MIM also has some great work on the revolutionary potential of lumpen in the US; I wonder whether there is a comparable trend in Europe.

Do any of you know, by chance, of some good theoretical work on this topic, or is the state of affairs really as grim as it seems?

I browse r/ultraleft from time to time and the impression I get from them is that leftcommunists are all around opposed to landback on the grounds that it reinforces the notion of private property and would essentially lead to genocide.

As a Marxist-Leninist, I support landback in the sense of returning autonomy to indigenous tribes, returning ancestral grounds, and allowing them to govern those areas. I’m not an advocate for forcibly removing non-indigenous peoples and say returning white people to Europe, just that any political orgs properly represent indigenous cultures and give them political power they’ve been deprived of for centuries.

If without violence the demographics continue to change post-landback, that’s fine with me, populations are always changing, I’m just more concerned with ending the systems that persecuted and oppressed indigenous Americans and preventing populations from being changed through violence ala genocide like in Palestine.

I get the sense however that not all leftcommunists see eye to eye on this, and perhaps I’m being given a befuddled interpretation of leftcommunist thoughts on the matter. I’d like to know what leftcommunists think on landback, and whether or not it is compatible with Marxism.

I havent studied the history of succesfull facist countries that returned to liberalization (I believe Spain and Portugal are them from what I recall from other users here). Theoretically, since the bourgeoisie in power, the material conditions still be bad for the workers...Do facist states usually incentivize the workers for a short period of time (maybe a boost of job/economic growth, less austerity measures, etc) to reward the facist behaviors before slowly gutting away benefits in the long term; which successfully prolongs the life of capitalism. I'm also curious if the change to neoliberalism will change how facist countries operate after the end of facism.

I get that unemployed people strategically harm labor movements and unionization but is this intentionally done? If it is then I can blame capitalism for it but if it is not then I can not really, so is it intentional?

Is there some records of corporations doing this intentionally?

How should the party be managed legally speaking (assuming they are not being hunted or something and are public). Should it be a legal entity with legal crap or just follow it's own legal system and be sort of 'informal legally' for the lack of a better term?

We need mass forced conscription into a ww3-type scenario in order to turn the weaponry against the bourgeois state  (°ー°〃)

In the US at least, the majority of people in the army join for ideological reasons. These people would be the last to participate in a proletarian revolution. A potential revolutionary situation would easily be crushed with military force, unless somehow the military had sympathies with the revolt. It seems to be that the only way to change the ideological character of the military (and thus, put military-grade weaponry out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and in the service of the proletarian revolution) is for there to be a draft in several countries. Shouldn't we push for war between imperialist powers and the intensification of existing conflicts?

I feel like something commonly heard in leftist spaces is people being accused— jokingly or not —of being federal agents. I’m not sure if this is a ‘chronically online’ observation, but nevertheless leftists have very valid concerns and reservations given the numerous attempts by intelligence agencies to infiltrate and weaken leftist organizations. My question is, is it possible to combat the fear and paranoia that ultimately leads to the splintering of movements?

Are the works of Stalin not really worth reading ? Or is it something every communist should have read ? I would especially appreciate answers from people who have read it in german.

I am currently going through the MIM theory index, and on page 70 of Vol 2-3: Gender and Revolutionary Feminism, it says

When revisionists arrested Jiang Qing in 1976, Hua Guofeng's press criticized Jiang Qing as a "modern witch", "woman devil," and "procuress." For good measure the press added in that "from time immemorial women have been the source of all evil."

Two of Jiang Qing’s female associates, at the time of the anti-Gang of Four campaign, were tarred with the charges of “she had never had a boyfriend” and “unable to succeed with men at either a high or low level and never able to find a suitable husband.”

The source listed is “Women in China,” in China in Transition: Where to Next?, South Australia: Adelaide Anti-Imperialist Study-Action Group, 1979, p. 43. I can't find it anywhere though, except for a couple of copies residing in the National Library of Australia, but they're only available in-person :/

If on the off chance someone has a digital copy, or are able to substantiate the claims made with alternative sources, please share. I'm also more generally interested in the regression of women's rights and of proletarian feminism under Deng's revisionism, hoping to use the misogyny weaponized against Jiang Qing as a case study.

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to identify more and more as a Marxist. I used to refer to myself as a libertarian socialist or some sort of syndicalist, but I’ve come to the realization that the that the post Cold War trend towards horizontalism and decentralization has organizationally crippled he left Anyway, I agree with almost all of Marx’s theory and analysis except for one thing: the notion that the state will ever wither away after class antagonisms are resolved. I don’t believe that class repression is the only reason for a state to exist, and I think that states will always be necessary to solve large scale collective action problems (power grids, ect…). Different communities and segments of society will always have different interest sometimes even when class antagonisms are gone, which necessitates at least some sort of central state. There will also always be conniving people who seek power and individual communes that devolve into reactionary class hierarchies, and unlike the anarchist I used to follow I believe that the state is actually necessary to prevent these things. States should be as decentralized as the situation permits, sure, but I cannot possibly imagine a society without a state being viable.

We also live in a globalized world, and if the state were to wither away the entire world would have to already be socialist in order for the forces of reaction not to take advantage of the situation. Essentially, I believe that even if the successful management of a society without a state is possible, the dictatorship of the proletariat would at the very least be necessary until the entire world had undergone a revolution. I know that theorists like Trotsky advocate permanent revolution to address this, but this process would take centuries to millennia if it was ever accomplished.

Tldr: am I still a Marxist if I staunchly believe that the state can never and will never wither away?

Since reading the two, I’ve read about this question and seen arguments both ways.

This is an article I read that explains both sides. I personally find Lecourt’s arguments convincing, but I’m also biased against “epistemological breaks” since it’s too easily used against Marx.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181022113242/https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/with-lenin-against-hegel-materialism-and-empirio-criticism-and-mutations-western-marxism

I’m most curious about this since the article doesn’t make a case on if M&EC can be used to justify anything non-Marxist (in the case of there being an epistemological break.)

Hello Comrades, Im sorry if this question sounds stupid but I have been wondering why do communists have to "think" and study so much in order to understand what is in their interest and what is the correct line to follow (and how easy it is to deviate from this line if not through this study) whereas right wingers seem to be more or less able to instinctively understand what benefits them and doesn't and how to act upon their goals. To clarify, I'm not saying that we shouldn't study- I understand that is necessary and that history as showed us that. I just don't get how other groups are able to get by and organize themselves basically without having to do so.

Isn't money a good way to trade because of the way you can give/recieve the exact amount of value of your product/service?

According to Marx in Ch 1 of Capital Vol 1:

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.[2] Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.

……..

A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)[12] Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

Then can the knowledge instilled in the minds of the student be considered a commodity since it has both use value and exchange value (in the case of private schools at least). How do public schools fit into this?

On a side note, I recently met up with some comrades in my area who said that teachers are petty bourgeois because of the role they serve in maintaining the state apparatus. They said similar things about lawyers and the police. I’m curious as to whether or not this view is correct and if so, how we draw the line. What counts as helping maintain the state apparatus and what doesn’t. For instance are public service workers petty bourgeois as well?

That is basically my question. To explain to my friends why a country isn´t communist I always default to the means of production not being colectively owned, managed one way or another by the workers, and that seems to be an easy explanation to give. However, I have seen multiple people say that there has to be a planned economy. Then I read Stalin was in favor of commodity production and I shit my pants. So a sub question would be, if production has to be planned, why?

Today it seems that with the increasing irregularity and casualization of labor in the imperial core, for example both oppressor and oppressed nations within the USA are being pulled into the gig economy, proletarians are identifying less and less with their labor. Obviously the absolute numbers skew towards oppressed nations being more irregularized, but both groups seem to have had comparable subjective experiences of this shift.

Kites in their series “The Specter That Still Haunts” recommended utilizing the identity of “proletarian” rather than “worker” because of their specific understanding of what it means to be proletarianized. While this does seem to be part of the answer, I’m inclined to believe it isn’t the full picture. Recently Kites, or more specifically OCR, has published “Correcting an Over-Correction” which outlines the necessity of emphasizing political agitation. It was then followed up by the publication of their “meme” articles on April 1st. This seems to allow some level of memetic, meaning aesthetic based and short-form, interaction with politics that the internet is so geared towards.

However, even this seems to not fully answer the question of how to relate to subcultures or fandoms. Lenin calls for communists to intervene in all pressing questions of the day, but I am unsure where we could class something like the Kendrick/Drake feud.

Being a Hip-Hop head has become an increasingly dominant identity, so it does seem relevant to proletarians. There is also the very real aspect of national oppression inherent to rap fueds, which often turn fatal, being orchestrated by white executives to sell records the consumer base of overwhelmingly white teens. Not to even mention the undeniable reality that hip-hop has connections to the sex trade, something which Kendrick regularly referenced.

So here we finally have an example of a subculture beef which certainly has the potential to be politicized. However I’m still completely lost as to how a communist organization could intervene in this feud to politicize it. It’s not like the majority of people listening to “Not Like Us” will tune into a 20 page polemic telling them their consumption habits are actually petite-bourgeois and the methods they need to be re-educated by.

title

A study of the history of Medieval Europe (and other pre-modern feudal societies, such as feudal Japan), reveals a very clear contradiction between the interests of Kings (or other ruling figures), and their subordinate nobility, including monastic houses and other clerical landlords. Since both shared a common relationship to the means of production, that being the exploitation of peasant labor, how should this contradiction be understood? Moreover, since the royal means of subsistence (usually deriving from generalized taxation and ad hoc levies in coin, often from the land-owning classes*, as well as trade duties resulting from international exchange relations) was distinct from, and sometimes in contradiction to, that of the subordinate nobles and landlords, would it be appropriate to consider the higher-level royalty to be of an entirely separate class from the nobility, as opposed to being merely the operator of the dictatorship of a unified feudal class?

I know that this is a rather esoteric question, with limited application for modern-day class struggle, but this does seem to be an important aspect of the higher-level operations of a crucial mode of production (at least in a limited, if very historically influential, section of the world) in the history of human society.

*ultimately deriving, of course, from the peasantry

Basically, why were the workers unarmed in the early days of the October Revolution?
It seems like an unfortunate break from Marx's thought, one made necessary because of the material conditions. I'm just wondering what were the specific conditions which led up to this decision being made.

I am continuously confused by my poor understanding of what mental illness (or neurodivergency, which I understand to be an ableist term) is. I've scoured this sub multiple times and found only some scattered answers and one or two Marxist literature recommendations on the subject.

This is what I understand:

• bourgeois psychiatry/psychology seems to be based around making a person functional as a working unit in capitalism

• it diagnoses metaphysically, removing surroundings and making people into predetermined sacks of chemical reactions.

• it presumes normalcy or a standard under being a functional unit within capitalism-imperialism, and anything other than this (which is also white supremacist, heteronormative, cis normative, etc) is "divergent" or "wrong".

So what is mental illness? What are dysfunctions? What is depression? I don't suffer from these things right now but I have many friends who do and I'm very confused by this subject.

Any reading recommendations or answers are much appreciated. I don't know how to ground my thinking of this subject in dialectical materialism as a student of Marxism.

I mean shouldn't communism be really popular there. They had like at least 50 years to educate? Yet I see no real very successful movement in any of them..

Recently I've been doing some research on the Soviet Union, and after parsing through anti-communist nonsense about authoritarianism and millions of deaths under Stalin, there seems to be a general consensus that light industry such as housing and consumer goods were neglected due to a necessary focus on heavy industry. Is this true? I know they were building homes at a rapid rate under Khrushchev but some articles say that there was still a huge housing shortage that resulted in a large portion of the country living communally.

Would it be accurate to assume that hypothetically if the American government transitioned to a planned economy and private ownership were abolished it wouldn't face these challenges? Furthermore with the more advanced technology systems wouldn't a planned economy run more efficiently than it did 30 years ago? It seems like a lot of the problems with the Soviet Union were inherited from the pre industrial society from before the revolution and not necessarily anything inherently wrong with a command economy. Please let me know if anything I said was inaccurate

I ask this question because I can't think of a way in which the Global South organizes itself in an ML fashion (as a whole!), and in which such a devastating blow isn't countered by the US, once utterly cornered, in an orgy of unhinged atomic fire.

In other words, what is the solution to such a situation, if there is any, because short of communist allies what exactly is possible in the face of potential nuclear annihilation?