Comment by Edelgard [she/her]@hexbear.net on what's the technical, theory-based issue with left-communism?

Yes, I know from a rhetorical perspective they’re a bunch of jerks who do nothing but complain, but is there an actual takedown of their ideological notions? Because just saying they suck without further explanation makes it hard to dismiss them when they pop up. I don’t agree with them, I just want to know why I shouldn’t. Something about statues and logic and being chained in a courtyard with wind and all that. I’m not sure where to put this, sorry.

I disagree, being unable to clearly communicate is a good reason to disregard them in addition to their total lack of any historical or material wins for the working class.

but most people think WE’RE weird and hard to understand. how are we different?

Problem is: leftcoms failed. They failed so hard that their movements were broken up and diminished before the fascists and neolib war hawks in the 30s-40s could deliver the final death blow. They failed so hard that Stalin had to stop sending them money and restructure the entire ComIntern to focus on Asia where real revolutions were happening.

To put it bluntly: they failed to capture the support of the proletariat by turning marxism into an orthodoxy, and pretty often ignored Engels contributions. And the intellectuals who survived after WW2 set the stage for post-marxist philosophy professors and art teachers to shit on AES states for the next 80 years.

en up and diminished before the fascists and neolib war hawks in the 30s-40s could deliver the final death blow. They failed so hard that Stalin had to stop sending them money

He sent money to leftcoms?

It kinda depends on how you look at it and what year it was, because Euro Communist Parties were a mess and some of their core members were in multiple parties with various beliefs. Some were MLs, some were Leninists but not MLs, some were DemSocs trying to get their parties involved in the bourg govts, some had Anarchist sympathies, some were even Trade Unionists. To give an example: Otto Rühle was a Council Communist who joined the KPD for a year, went to the USSR for a Comintern World Congress, and then immediately split the party.

Thank you for the clarification!

Yeah, people think that the Stalin era Comintern was some kind of lockstep ideological monolith, when really that was a post 1956 thing.

I’m not hard to understand. You can explain communism to a six year old; Big Bird would always share what he has with people who are in need. Big Bird is cool. Therefore sharing is cool. We should base the way we live on sharing instead of keeping all our stuff to ourselves. Even Cookie Monster would share his cookies if he had cookies and someone else did not.

I don’t know how many six year olds you know, but the ones I know will happily club another child over the head with a 2 lb plastic Big Bird and take their cookie. With a big smile.

But that same rhetoric is used by Nazi’s as well, it’s not integral to our ideology, even though it’s what we actually believe unlike Nazi’s.

Doesn’t mean it’s hard to explain. Vietnam and China are both famous for teaching Communist Theory to rural farmers with no formal education in a very short amount of time. The Communist Mainfesto is only 25 pages long and is still snappy and pretty easy to read almost 200 years later. If anything the difficulty is getting through lib ideological programming, not anything complicated about the basic concepts. Yeah, reading Capital is a pain in the ass, but not everyone needs to read Capital or high level theory.

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what's the technical, theory-based issue with left-communism?

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