cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12421194

Continuing a discussion on an old thread, perhaps we can ask: "Will there be police and prisons under socialism?"

I'm sure there will be a number of different answers from socialists, but this is c/abolition, so of course the answer would be no.

But wait, one might say, weren't and aren't there police and prisons in "actually existing socialism"? Yes, but for varying reasons, the "socialism" of these projects was merely the political ideology of their ruling parties, not in terms of their mode of production. All of these countries had wage-labor, proletarianization, money, commodities, et cetera—all features of a capitalism. Because they had these features of capitalism, these state socialist projects necessarily needed police and prisons to enforce the rule of state capital.

When Marx talked about socialism, he most clearly outlines it in his Critique of the Gotha Program where he uses the term "lower-phase communism" that Second International Marxism and later pre-Bolshevized Comintern Marxism interpreted as "socialism." In socialism or lower-phase communism, the state is already abolished because classes are already abolished. In doing so, we can necessarily expect the cruelest features of the state like police and prisons are necessarily also abolished.

Police and prisons are historically contingent to class society. They serve as a mode of upholding class society. Across Europe and North America during the development of capitalism, police and prisons were used to enforce the rule of wage-labor and force previously non-proletarian peoples into proletarianization. These institutions would drive people off their land, enclose the commons, and then impose regimes of terror to enforce class society.

But how about, a socialist might ask, the enforcement of class rule of the proletariat? The dictatorship of the proletariat? First, it is important to note that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not yet socialism. It is the transition period to socialism. Second, the dictatorship of the proletariat is indeed a class dictatorship, just like the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we currently live under. Third, the class dictatorship of the proletariat cannot look like previous modes of class dictatorship because it is a class dictatorship for the transition from a class society to a classless society, not a transition from a class society to another class society. Previous modes of class dictatorship used the terror of police and prisons to transition from a monarchist system to a republican system, or the class dictatorship of the aristocracy to the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian class dictatorship is different in that it is a class dictatorship that abolishes class distinctions, the most important of which is proletarianization. Logically, if proletarianziation needs police and prisons to be enforced, then the class dictatorship to abolish proletarianization likewise does away with police and prisons, simply because one cannot use the enforcement of proletarianization to do away with proletarianization.

However, the crucial feature of class dictatorship is its dictatorship, the ability for a class to enforce its will on all other classes. We have previously noted here that previous modes of class dictatorship does this using police and prisons. How is proletarian class dictatorship supposed to do this without police and prisons? Very simply, the power of a proletariat as a class-for-itself does not come from the barrel of a gun or a ballot box, but by their ability to subvert what they are as proletarianized beings. This does not mean that there will be no violence, far from it, but that this violence is ordered towards subversion of class society rather than reproducing it. Commonly, Second International Marxism, especially as embodied by Lenin in State and Revolution, advocates for a whole armed proletariat as opposed to special bodies of armed force (e.g. police and prisons). For whatever reason, Lenin disregarded this when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, thus reproducing class society and all that that entailed, leading the Soviet Union down a path of an unambiguous class society where the proletariat continued to be proletarianized.

Abolition communism means moving beyond this failure to abolish police and prisons under a transitional period and forwarding abolition and communization in its place.

So no, there would not be police and prisons in socialism nor in the transitional period to it, unless of course that transitional period was not transitioning to socialism at all but back to capitalism.

It is obvious that under a society based on freedom a system of production that in itself results in mental or emotional slavery cannot be allowed to survive. In an anarchist society there will no longer be any place for men to waste their lives in the monotonous performance of a single function. Life will become many sided. Men will no longer be industrial or agricultural workers, urban or country dwellers. The barriers between town, and country, between factory and farm, between manual and intellectual work must be broken down, and men’s experience of life must be as complete and varied as nature will allow. No class of workers can lead such a society. The industrial proletariat, as such, must be eliminated along with the bourgeoisie and every other class of the old state society. The individuals who comprise it will be able to reintegrate themselves in freedom into the whole men of the new society of anarchy. In the words of Kropotkin, ‘We maintain that the ideal of society — that is, the state towards which society is already marching is a society of integrated, combined labour. A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work; where each able-bodied human being is a worker, and where each worker works both in the field and the industrial workshops.’

As a class the proletariat has no future. When economic exploitation dies, the class of the exploited will die. Life and the future belong to no class, but to mankind.

The essence is this: what system of administration in a workers’ republic during the period of creation of the economic basis for Communism secures more freedom for the class creative powers? Is it a bureaucratic state system or a system of wide practical self-activity of the working masses? The question relates to the system of administration and the controversy arises between two diametrically opposed principles: bureaucracy or self-activity. And yet they try to squeeze it into the scope of the problem that concerns itself only with methods of animating the Soviet institutions.

Alexandra Kollontai was a leading Bolshevik during the Russian Revolution that led the Workers Opposition within the Bolshevik party. She opposed bureaucratization in the early Soviet government.

Her ultimate fate was to be non-violently purged by Stalin through exiling her as part of an obscure diplomatic mission. Compared to the fate of the other old Bolsheviks who were outright murdered, her fate was a mercy.

From Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg

Communism seems a dim prospect today. The concept of surplus humanity has achieved a dreadful clarity in the present assault on Gaza. Yet, despite becoming a flashpoint for unprecedented waves of global solidarity actions, the situation in Gaza reveals not the unification of revolutionary activity, but its necessarily fragmented character. On many other shores, the popular blockade has returned in the form of protests by small farmers who seek to defend their livelihoods (and property) against the diminishing possibilities of social reproduction. This is in part conditioned by realities of climate change, and in part conditioned by state planning for a “green transition.”1 Ecological crisis is a harbinger of reaction and social disaster, rather than a unifying force of social upheaval.2 In the United States, in the long retreat from the George Floyd Rebellion, new ostensible unities present themselves in contestations over the future of humanity, over competing visions of crisis and disaster response that are entirely incompatible. The paradigmatic case remains the struggle to Stop Cop City (SCC) and Defend the Atlanta Forest (DFA). This is not simply because so many continue to constantly assert its paradigmatic status, but because it has become a real representation of strategic possibilities and outcomes in our era of uncertainty and utter bewilderment. This seems an unfair burden, given the rather specific character and conditions from which the initial movement spread. But as plans for “cop cities” are supposedly cropping up everywhere,3 and with them organizational forms that must confront the inheritance of SCC/DFA and its strategic offerings, it seems prescient to review the core elements, concepts, and presuppositions that have percolated through the messiness of struggle, repression, and polemics. To this end, we must abstract from SCC/DFA proper to examine what we believe has become the organizing principle of many “non-movements” today, particularly in periods of general reaction and degeneration: the problem of composition.

Taken from Aragorn Eloff's Facebook:

I'm busy reading Foucault's recently translated Japan Lectures and I've come across perhaps the most substantial articulation of his critique of Marxism in the 'Methodology for a Knowledge of the World: How to Get Rid of Marxism' chapter, which captures a conversation with the Japanese New Left philosopher Ryūmei Yoshimoto. Foucault, from the vantage point of 1978, makes some pretty damning and insightful observations that resonate with the popular image of him as a quasi-anarchist figure (indeed, many anarchists were making these critiques long before the 1970s). Reading stuff like this it's no surprise the orthodox Marxist left are so anxious to disparage him as some kind of counterrevolutionary, liberal reformist or even CIA stooge.

Some excerpts:

“[W]hen it comes to political imagination, we have to acknowledge that we are living in a very impoverished world. When we look for where this poverty of imagination on the socio-political level in the 20th century comes from, it seems to me, after all, that Marxism plays an important part. That’s why I discuss Marxism. So you can see that the theme “How to get rid of Marxism”, which serves in some sense as a connecting thread for the question you have asked me, is also fundamental for my thinking. One thing is certain: that Marxism has contributed and continues to contribute to this impoverishment of the political imagination. This is our starting point.

“Marx is unquestionably a human being, a person who unerringly expressed certain things, in other words he is an undeniable being in terms of historical event… To transcend him would be as senseless as denying the Naval Battle of the Sea of Japan. The situation is totally different as far as Marxism is concerned. That’s because Marxism is the cause of the impoverishment, the desiccation of the political imagination that I was speaking about a moment ago. To really reflect on this, one must bear in mind that Marxism is nothing other than a mode of power, in an elementary sense. In other words, Marxism is a sum of power relations or a sum of mechanisms and dynamics of power. On this point we should analyze how Marxism functions in modern society. This is a necessary task, just as for past societies one analyzed the role played by scholastic philosophy or Confucianism. The difference being that in our case Marxism was not born of morals or a moral principle like scholastic philosophy or Confucianism. The case of Marxism is more complex, because it’s something that emerged, within rational thought, as a science. As for knowing what types of power relations a so-called “rational” society can assign to science, this cannot be reduced to the idea that science functions only as a sum of propositions taken for the truth. It is at the same time something intrinsically linked to a whole series of coercive propositions. Which is to say that Marxism as science—to the extent that it is a science of history, of the history of humanity—is a dynamic of coercive effects, concerning a certain truth. Its discourse is a prophetic science that diffuses a coercive force over a certain truth, not only in the direction of the past, but toward the future of humanity. In other words, what’s important is that historicity and the prophetic character function as coercive forces concerning truth.

“…Marxism as scientific discourse, Marxism as prophesy, Marxism as State philosophy or class ideology—are inevitably intrinsically linked to the whole set of power relations. If the problem of knowing whether or not to get rid of Marxism is raised, is it not at the level of the power dynamic formed by these aspects of Marxism? Marxism, viewed from this perspective, is today going to be called into question. The problem is less about telling ourselves that it is necessary to free ourselves from this type of Marxism than of throwing off the dynamic of power relations linked to a Marxism that performs those particular functions.

“…In defining the problem, an essential one for me, of how to move beyond Marxism, I have tried not to fall into the trap of traditional solutions. There are two traditional ways of confronting this problem. One is academic, the other is political. But whether it is from an academic or a political point of view, in France the problem unfolds broadly in the following way. Either one critiques the propositions of Marx himself, saying: “Marx puts forward such and such a proposition. It is true or not? Contradictory or not? Is it premonitory or not?” Or else one develops a critique of the following sort: “In what way does Marxism today betray what would have been reality for Marx?” I find both of these traditional critiques ineffective. In the final count they are points of view that are captive of what we can call the force of truth and its effects: what is true, and what is not true? In other words, the question “What is the true and authentic Marx?”, the kind of perspective that consists in wondering about the link between truth effects and the State philosophy that is Marxism, impoverishes our thought.

“…It seems to me that what we find in Marx’s work is, in some sense, a play between the formation of a prophesy and the definition of a target. The socialist discourse of the epoch was made up of two concepts, but was unable to distinguish them sufficiently. On the one hand, a historical consciousness, or the consciousness of historical necessity, or at any rate the idea that in the future one thing or another prophetically must come to pass. On the other hand, a discourse of struggle—a discourse, we might say, that stems from the theory of will—the goal of which is to identify a target to attack… But the two discourses—the consciousness of historical necessity, or the prophetic aspect, and the goal of struggle—were unable to play out to the end. This can apply to the long-term prophesies. For example, the notion that the State will disappear is erroneous. As for me, I don’t think that what is happening concretely in socialist countries points towards the realization of this prophesy. But as soon as the disappearance of the State is defined as an objective, Marx’s words take on unprecedented reality. Undeniably, we are witnessing a hypertrophy of power or an excess of power in socialist countries as in capitalist countries. And I think that the reality of these mechanisms of power, which are of gigantic complexity, justifies, from the strategic viewpoint of a struggle of resistance, the disappearance of the State as an objective.

“…the Party could always justify itself one way or another, as regards its activities, its decisions, and its role. Whatever the situation, the Party could invoke the theory of Marx as being the sole truth. Marx was the sole authority, and, because of this, it was considered that the activities of the Party had their rational basis in him. The multiple individual wills were consequently sucked up by the Party, and, in turn, the will of the Party disappeared behind the mask of a rational calculation consistent with theory passing for truth. Hence the different levels of will were bound to elude analysis.

“…Since it was believed that the Party alone was the authentic owner of the struggle, and since this Party was a hierarchical organization capable of rational decision, those zones imbued with a somber madness, namely the dark side of human activity or the obscurely desolate zones—in spite of being the unavoidable lot of every struggle— had trouble emerging into broad daylight. Probably only works that are not theoretical, works that are literary, or perhaps Nietzsche, have spoken about it. It doesn’t seem relevant here to insist on the difference between literature and philosophy, but what is certain is that on the level of theory we have not managed to do justice to this somber and solitary aspect of struggle. For that very reason we must increase awareness of this inadequate aspect of theory.

“We will have to tear down the idea that philosophy is the only normative thought. The voices of an incalculable number of speaking subjects must resonate, and we must allow an innumerable experience to speak. The speaking subject shouldn’t always be the same one. The normative words of philosophy should not be the only ones heard. We need to bring forth all sorts of experiences, lend our ear to aphasics, to the excluded, to the dying. Because we are on the outside; whereas they are the ones who confront the somber and solitary aspect of the struggles. I believe that the task of a practitioner of philosophy living in the West is to lend an ear to all these voices.”

Play as the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, and try to stop the NSDAP from taking power. Guide the party through elections and parliamentary politics. Deal with the Great Depression and the spiraling political violence that characterized the late "Weimar Republic".

Anti-Stalinist Communist, intellectual figure of May 68, Henri Lefebvre is re-read today as an ecosocialist thinker. His political quest for a balance between radicalism and mass movement is as relevant today as his thought, which is resistant to dogmatism.

Talking about class in a political sense is not about which accent you have but the basic conflict which defines capitalism – those of us who must work for a living vs. those who profit from the work that we do. By fighting for our own interests and needs against the dictates of capital and the market we lay the basis for a new type of society - a society based on the direct fulfilment of our needs: a libertarian communist society.

One way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. Here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how. In avoiding that, it may be best to recall the Romain Rolland quote so often attributed to Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism—we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas. This is the necessary next step following the dystopian moment, without which dystopia is stuck at a level of political quietism that can make it just another tool of control and of things-as-they-are. The situation is bad, yes, okay, enough of that; we know that already. Dystopia has done its job, it’s old news now, perhaps it’s self-indulgence to stay stuck in that place any more. Next thought: utopia. Realistic or not, and perhaps especially if not.

In immigrating into underdeveloped regions, the revolutionary struggle was subjected to a double alienation: that of an impotent Left facing an overdeveloped capitalism it was in no way capable of combatting, and that of the laboring masses in the colonized countries who inherited the remains of a mutilated revolution and have had to suffer its defects. The absence of a revolutionary movement in Europe has reduced the Left to its simplest expression: a mass of spectators who swoon with rapture each time the exploited in the colonies take up arms against their masters, and who cannot help seeing these uprisings as the epitome of Revolution. At the same time, the absence from political life of the proletariat as a class-for-itself (and for us the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing) has allowed this Left to become the “Knight of Virtue” in a world without virtue. But when it bewails its situation and complains about the “world order” being at odds with its good intentions, and when it maintains its poor yearnings in the face of this order, it is in fact attached to this order as to its own essence. If this order was taken away from it, it would lose everything. The European Left is so pitiful that, like a traveler in the desert longing for a single drop of water, it seems to aspire for nothing more than the meager feeling of an abstract objection. From the little with which it is satisfied one can measure the extent of its poverty. It is as alien to history as the proletariat is alien to this world. False consciousness is its natural condition, the spectacle is its element, and the apparent opposition of systems is its universal frame of reference: wherever there is a conflict it always sees Good fighting Evil, “total revolution” versus “total reaction.”

If you have the time, you can go over this video essay by a Marxist author (he has books to his name) on misconceptions about "lower phase communism" as having a state. If it's already communism, then it's already presupposes classlessness and statelessness. As Lenin equated lower phase communism with socialism, that therefore means that even Lenin agreed that socialism/lower phase communism was already classless and stateless. But what about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet regime in Russia? Well, these were transitional regimes, not socialism or lower phase communism. This video clarifies the difference and corrects the vulgar assumptions common in today's Marxism.

In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.

Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.

“Burden-Stelly is not content with simply contributing to existing scholarship. She shakes things up. And Black Scare / Red Scare hits with volcanic force, sweeping away the prevailing tendency to underestimate the Black Marxist threat to racial capitalism and the embedded anti-Blackness driving state repression. Burden-Stelly details precisely how the ‘political economy of capitalist racism’ played a decisive role in the super-exploitation and subjugation of the Black working class, resulting in a protracted war on Black radical movements. A powerful, pathbreaking work that not only reorients the long history of anticommunism on Black liberation but moves the theory of racial capitalism to an entirely new level.” Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history. Her research pursues two complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression. Her second area of focus examines twentieth-century Black anticapitalist intellectual thought, theory, and praxis. She is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and her single-authored book titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States is forthcoming in November 2023. She is also the co-editor, with Dr. Jodi Dean, of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022).

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

The Society of the Spectacle has a reputation for being a difficult communist text, but hopefully interpretive dance makes it easier to understand!

This is a continuation of a discussion I had with Mambabasa, but thought it would be interesting to discuss the topic here so that others can add their own thoughts.

As the title suggests, I'm curious to learn what aspects that proponents of communism find compelling, specifically, what would an Anarchist find useful or insightful from the various forms of Communism?

Lately, I've been watching and reading into the history of Marxist based communist attempts. After discovering What Is Politics? videos on the subject, such as his video on the history of communist revolutions, and the second part going into why the Russian Revolution failed to produce socialism (Btw, I began watching his vids thanks to your post in BreadTube, Mambabasa. So thank you for sharing! ^^)

What is Politics' reading of history seems to be inline with what I've learned in the past; I.E, that the bureaucracy and centralized nature of the various Marxist ideologies tend toward less than ideal results. This is what generally put me off delving deeply into Marxist derived theory.

However, I try to have an open mind. When Mambabasa mentioned that, had they experienced a different set of circumstances, these other forms of socialism may have been the logical choice, my curiosity was piqued.

So if you have any insight into some aspect or incident of Communism that you believe Anarchists should take note of, I'd very much like to hear it. :)

At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership or control of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit.

While some people own means of production, or capital, most of us don't and so to survive we need to sell our ability to work in return for a wage, or else scrape by on benefits. This first group of people is the capitalist class or "bourgeoisie" in Marxist jargon, and the second group is the working class or "proletariat". See our introduction to class here for more information on class.

Capitalism is based on a simple process -- money is invested to generate more money. When money functions like this, it functions as capital. For instance, when a company uses its profits to hire more staff or open new premises, and so make more profit, the money here is functioning as capital. As capital increases (or the economy expands), this is called 'capital accumulation', and it's the driving force of the economy.

Those accumulating capital do so better when they can shift costs onto others. If companies can cut costs by not protecting the environment, or by paying sweatshop wages, they will. So catastrophic climate change and widespread poverty are signs of the normal functioning of the system. Furthermore, for money to make more money, more and more things have to be exchangeable for money. Thus the tendency is for everything from everyday items to DNA sequences to carbon dioxide emissions -- and, crucially, our ability to work - to become commodified.

And it is this last point - the commodification of our creative and productive capacities, our ability to work - which holds the secret to capital accumulation. Money does not turn into more money by magic, but by the work we do every day.

In a world where everything is for sale, we all need something to sell in order to buy the things we need. Those of us with nothing to sell except our ability to work have to sell this ability to those who own the factories, offices, etc. And of course, the things we produce at work aren't ours, they belong to our bosses.

"When Insurrections Die" is one of the modern classic works on anti-anti-fascism. Normally, when we think of anti-anti-fascism, we think of fascism opposed to anti-fascists. But the left communist opposition to anti-fascism is not fascist, but rather a recognition that an anti-fascist alliance with the bourgeoisie leads to counterrevolution, as what happened in the Spanish Revolution.

Below are some excerpts from the essay.

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts. Soon the working-class “militia man” evolved into a “soldier”.

Formed into “columns”, workers left Barcelona to defeat the fascists in other cities, starting from Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas under Republican control, however, would have meant completing the revolution in the Republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not seem to realise that the state was everywhere still intact. As his column (70% of whose members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the collectivisations: the militias helped the peasants and spread revolutionary ideas. Yet however much Durruti declared that “these militias will never defend the bourgeoisie” they did not attack it either.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it is known in China and by Maoists worldwide, was initiated by Mao as a way of both empowering the Chinese working class and a way to rebuild his support base to combat factions within the CPC he did not like.

Yet Mao “is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” and the Cultural Revolution escaped Mao's control. Multiple factions, though still speaking in Mao's name, sharply developed an analysis of rot in China's bureaucratic mode of development. Mao was both the initiator and ultimate gravedigger of the Cultural Revolution as he directed the People's Libreration Army to crush the ultraleft factions that precisely could have revolutionized China.

As Yiching Wu noted in The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, the defeat of the Cultural Revolution directly led to the defeat of the working class at Tiananmen Square and its resulting capitalist restoration in China.

Below is an excerpt from the manifesto of the Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Committee that called for a “People's Commune of China.” They were crushed and the author of the manifesto jailed for a decade.

The storm of the January revolution was a great attempt by the revolutionary people, led by Chairman Mao, to topple the old world and build a new world. A program for the first Great Proletarian Political Revolution was formulated at that great moment. Chairman Mao pointed out: “This is one class overthrowing another. It is a great revolution.” That shows that the Cultural Revolution is not a revolution to dismiss officials from their office or a “dragging out” movement, nor is it a purely cultural revolution, but a revolution in which one class overthrows another.” Seen from the facts of the storm of the January revolution, the overthrown class is none other than the class of bureaucrats formed in China in the past 17 years. (Chairman Mao’s “Comment and Instructions on Li Cheng-jen’s On-the-Spot-Squatting Report,” January 25, 1965.)

In the struggle to seize power in these units, the Marxist principle of smashing the old state machinery must be observed. Here there is no place for reformism, combining two into one, or peaceful transition. The old state machinery must be smashed utterly. “The old system of exploitation, revisionist system, and bureaucratic organs must be utterly smashed.” The program of the first Great Proletarian Political Revolution was put forward in editorials in an embryonic, not very concrete state in the final stages of the storm of the January revolution. The decaying class that should be overthrown, the old state machinery that should be smashed, and even social problems, in which people formerly had not dared to express a dissident view, were put forward. This great development was an inevitable result of the courage and pioneering spirit demonstrated by the proletariat in the storm of the January revolution.

[…]

There are two essential points in the writings about the army:

1. It is now seen that the army now is different from the people’s army before the liberation. Before the liberation, the army and the people fought together to overthrow imperialism, bureaucratic capitalism, and feudalism. The relation between the army and the people was like that between fish and water. After the liberation, as the target of revolution has changed from imperialism, bureaucratic capitalism, and feudalism to capitalist-roaders, and these capitalist-roaders are power holders in the army, some of the armed forces in the revolution have not only changed their blood-and-flesh relations with the people that obtained before the liberation, but have even become tools for suppressing revolution. Therefore, if the first Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to succeed, a radical change in the army will be necessary. The “ultra Left faction” has found the basis for its thinking in a quotation from Chairman Mao. In the same year after Chairman Mao issued the order for the armed forces to live in their barracks, (they are separated from the masses.

2. It is now seen that a revolutionary war in the country is necessary if the revolutionary people today want to overcome the armed Red capitalist class. The large-scale armed struggle between the proletariat and the Red capitalist class in August and the local revolutionary war in the country bore out the rebel factions’ prediction in August (sic). The experience created by the local revolutionary wars in August is moreover unparalleled in history and rich and great. Contrary to the expectations of the mediocrities in general, history advanced in the direction predicted by the “heretics and evil advocates.” Hitherto unimaginable, large-scale gun-seizing incidents occurred regularly in accordance with the pace of historical development. Local wars in the country of varying magnitude, in which the army took a direct part (in Kiangsi and Hangchow the armed forces were directly involved in the fighting), erupted. The creative spirit and revolutionary fervor displayed by the people in August was very moving. Gun-seizing became a “movement.” Its magnitude and the violence of the revolutionary wars gave the people a deep impression at the time. “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force of the creation of world history.” [Emphasis added.]

[…]

As a result of the practice of struggle having gained rich experience and entered a higher stage, the maturity of the political thinking of the revolutionary people in China has also entered a higher stage. A new trend of thought (called “ultra-Left trend of thought” by the enemy), including “overthrow of the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie,” “abolition of bureaucratic organs,” “thorough smashing of the state machine,” etc. wanders among the revolutionary people like a “spectre” in the eyes of the enemy. The weapon of political thinking with which the revolutionary masses are to win utter victory in the proletarian socialist great revolution has begun to appear in a new form in the “ultra-Left faction.” The thought of Mao Tse tung, which is carrying out a new social revolution in China, will gradually wake up the masses from all contradictions of the past. The revolutionary people are beginning to understand gradually in practice why revolution is necessary, who are to be liquidated in the revolution, and how revolution is to be carried out. Revolutionary struggle begins to change from the stage of spontaneity to that of consciousness, from necessity to freedom.

[…]

The commune of the “ultra-Left faction” will not conceal its viewpoints and intentions. We publicly declare that our object of establishing the “People’s Commune of China” can be attained only by overthrowing the bourgeois dictatorship and revisionist system of the revolutionary committee with brute force. Let the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie tremble before the true socialist revolution that shakes the world! What the proletariat can lose in this revolution is only their chains, what they gain will be the whole world!

Closer to home, desperation even might push us to "envision real utopias" in any marginal glimmer of communality: the noble Wikipedia editor, the worker cooperative competing on the global market, the sharing of food at the protest camp, the persistence of the public library despite the endless assault of privatization, the urban garden tended by the six-figure NGO executive, the sharing of cigarettes near the dumpsters behind the kitchen, or simply the commonplace care work that knits us to family and friends. To imagine that such things are somehow the germ of communism would be a joke if it was not so tragic. Like someone who believes that the window projected onto the wall is the real thing. The bleak reality is that none of us have ever seen even the dimmest glimmer of a communist world—at most we have witnessed a few of those weightless moments when many people realize at once that our world can, in fact, be broken. Ultimately, these are nothing but glowing images best seen from a distance. Reach out to touch them and there is no depth. Just work, survival, desperation. Just the drywall, off-white.

[…]

Below, we therefore offer a practical fiction rooted in a negative critique. Throughout, we will counterpose our account to what we think are common errors that plague the political imaginary while emphasizing the inherent unknowability and dynamic cultural efflorescence of a communist world. While the contrast between practical fiction and negative critique may seem paradoxical—an anti-utopian utopia—such a procedure is the nature of scientific inquiry. As in any scientific inquiry, the models that we pose here are ultimately makeshift. But, without any ability to directly observe or experiment, a certain degree of fictive rigor is essential in their construction. Imagination must be subject to at least a minimum level of real constraints. Among these are the "social forces" and "political, class forces" that have been produced by the course of history, which Lenin emphasizes. In addition, we stress here the equally prominent role of "productive forces" as concrete sites of social power, irreducible to their technical characteristics. In fact, we would argue that the failure of nearly every utopian vision on offer today manifests most strongly in their treatment of the question of production, which is either ignored entirely, presumed to be a purely technical-ecological matter best left to the experts, or viewed as so thoroughly subordinated to capitalist logics that prevailing agricultural and industrial practices must be uniformly and fundamentally replaced—with what, exactly, it is rarely clear, though gestures are often made in the direction of local autarky. Questions of locality and the precise process of production will therefore serve as lenses bringing focus to our own anti-utopian utopia or, more simply, our contribution to the science fiction of communism.

don't get it fucked up. "nice shit for everybody" in that one essay from 10 years ago does mean just that; but the intent of what was written was to link this fucken vibe to an antipolitical communist tendency. the point was that in the extralegal sense (crime!), the pursuit of the commodity, at great risk by the dispossessed, is a part of the forefront of the struggle against the racial regime of Capital today.

but the Leftist sees the looter and sees a prole that can be reformed. They see someone that could be integrated into the project of creating the worker's utopia, but not yet. clearly they got initiative. but the Leftist sees the desire of the looter as somehow deformed or misguided. yes, the Leftist promises heaven on earth but first you must fall in line with the Party, you must submit yourself to experts whose whole lineage is a line of failed parties and/or mass organizations, you must be willing to work EVEN MORE, you must become a cog in the Party Machine. the only difference is this machine promises a collective heaven, not the hyper-individualistic one of the world of capitalism. an inversion that has historically created yet another elite as the rest of us scrape by with shit work, but now we call each other comrade.

on the other page are some words written 54 years ago and yet they are closer to the beat of today than much of the dull Left who have assumed looters in the past few years as either 'police provocateurs' or those simply exploiting a situation (which they are! but they view this negatively). the key here is that the looter does not wait for a call from the Party, or even the Federation. the looter understands even more directly that the parading of affluence while so many are fucking broke is not only disgusting, it is a situation which is worth fighting back against directly and looking fresh while doing it.

"The looter takes the “affluent” society at its word. [They accept] the abundance, only [they don't submit themselves] to the suffering that the society inflicts on those who sacrifice themselves for what it encourages them to want. [They want] to possess the commodities shown to [them] everywhere, in the shop windows, in the media, while rejecting the rules of exchange and the sacrifice they entail. [They reject] the commodity form which encloses goods in its grip and moulds them according to the motives of profit, according to the false needs created by Madison Avenue.

Once the commodity is not paid for, it is open to practical criticism; it becomes a toy, the principle of play takes over. Stealing as opposition to the organization of society is the negation of the rationality of the commodity. The goods can be put to the service of a radical subjectivity free from the sacrifices that perpetuate commodity production and consumption and they Find themselves on a new field, the field of play. The commodity is freed to be used in the destruction of the bourgeois world and ipso facto in its own destruction. Only when the means of production become toys for the manipulation of the proletariat, the class which ends class society, will life be freed from hierarchical subordination to commodity values."

~ "Riot & Representation: The Significance of the Chicano Riot" by 1044 (1970)

part of the difficulty with living with work, as an anarchist, is that persistent refusal to let a day just be Wednesday or Monday. to feel the need to amplify each day as yet another opportunity to engage with the Glory of Life, but the racial regime of Capital instead says excute x, y, z and keep it moving. the reward (a wage!) comes in two-week intervals, but those two-weeks... gone forever. labor time, in exchange for money, is one of the most impoverished way to lead your day, contrary to the high priests of hustle culture. our activity is removed from our daily life, whether commuting to a work site from the exurbs to the city-core to only earn wages enough to maybe report back the next day, or working from home and yet being estranged from the very life one typically enjoys at home. (this is not to say that the home is a neutral place when it comes to work. Marxian Feminists have noted that the home is also a crucial realm within the world of work. But, typically the home is a site for the work needed to return to work the next day, whether for the so-called 'breadwinner' or the 'unemployed' homemakers. Though with working from home, the home becomes integrated into whatever organization one works for.)

the fact is that the abolition of work is not a lifestyle choice among all the other choices to be found on the market: you can go 'paleo,' or be minimalistic but you can't go 'anti-work' alone. it is not another consumption-based identity or mere performance, it's a social thing. why? though we often experience work as a singular drudgery, those of us who are compelled to work also help recreate *the social world of work. *though stating this fact of social life under the racial regime of Capital is not about assigning guilt. proletarians (or those who have been so dispossessed that they need to work for someone else just to get by) are compelled to work in this world under duress: we have little to no choice (even engaging in the black or grey market of labor is no exit. hustle is hustle).

so then the exit? we saw glimpses of this exit during what some called the Great Resignation, or the Great Refusal. during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, proletarians were faced with a contradiction that was difficult to ignore: our work was both "essential" (for the functioning of the capitalist world) and yet our well-being was not. though, what we saw was not so much a move towards the absolute aboliton of work, but rather an important aspect of the abolition of work: the refusal of labor.

as anti-workers, we can help proliferate the tactics of refusal of labor & general work shirking but these are not enough. everyday proletarians, who may have never heard of 'anti-work' or 'the refusal of labor', do their best to do the least every fucking day and they are likely much more numerous than any of us 'anti-workers'. this is just a natural phenomomen for beings who are predisposed to a certain amount of idleness. but idleness alone is not the abolition of work. doing nothing is not the abolition of work. to understand this we need to understand the nature of what work is.

work!?

a common mistake made by some who embrace the abolition of work is the idea that this means nothing will be done, by anyone, for anyone. but this is what the rich do. they do nothing (or close to it, but never as much as necessary to build their wealth to such obscene levels via a direct wage) and live off the work of others. what the abolition of work points to is the elimination of the exploitation of some by others and the elimination of alienated labor / activity.

in practical terms this means that things will still built, food will still be harvested and you may still have some difficult tasks during your day. but the crucial important here is that your activity will be directly lived and directly a part of the life of yourself and whom you make community with. you may sow some chia seeds along a creek so that you, and the rest of our living relatives can enjoy; you may help erect a tent for a communal festival; you may help with child care so that some can go on a retreat; you may help your neighbors push start their car with the starter problem. and when all these acts of communal activity build up, we develop a communal culture of mutual aid: where our activity benefits each other and that benefit is known but exists beyond the constant bookkeeping of capitalist order: for relations without measure.

now will come the naysayers, that say no one will do anything without getting paid: a sentiment which reminds me that capitalist indoctrination runs deep. yes, in this world many of us may not do much *without pay *because we're fucking dispossessed! not only dispossessed of our basic needs, but even of time enough to truly enjoy ourselves or help each other. but when our needs, and our desires, are met; when we are not chronically exhausted mentally, physically & emotionally; when we are not just counting the days to the next payday; you're going to have a lot of time on your hands: or rather, timekeeping will fall as an everyday mental activity. for who needs to count the hours when the breakneck rhythm of Capital is smashed? we associate almost any activity with the world of work. i am not calling for an embrace of 'hard labor' as State Socialist Regimes of the past have done (down with the hammer & sickle!), but that difficult activities feel qualitatively different without the pressures of a boss, the rent, a cop or a teacher hanging over your head. life will continue, with all its hardships, the abolition of work is not a magical wand opening a portal to a pure utopia.

communism as the abolition of work

the abolition of work is either the real movement which abolishes the present state of things or it is nothing. the abolition of work is not a moment, a season or a lifestyle: it is part of the content of communism. by communism, i simply mean a free, classless way of life where what we need and what we desire (absent of capitalist conditioning) can be had and we can live our lives as we see fit. the details of this arrangement would be up to those who live that out, but many radicals have their own ideas (see anarchists). the only way to eliminate work, as we experience it now, is to live in common.

why?

because the very basis of our dispossession is not only divorcing ourselves from our time (labor-time), from our activity (wage labor) but also from each other. this is also a basic need (for lack of a better term) that is stolen from us, day in and day out.

under capitalism, the accumulation of the products of our labor (*commodities *as they are known under capitalism, whether physical or service-based) get whisked away to the market for the highest price and for the lowest possible wages. with communism, the so-called products of labor are no longer destined for the market and because the abolition of work implies the abolition of coercion, the State would also be eliminated from its 20th c. State Socialist role as ultimate arbiter. truly, the metabolism of our post-capitalist communist (or anarchist) activity no longer are products, commodities, nor services: they are just things and activities which we re-create to make life possible for ourselves and those we are in communal association with.

the way back to a world without work is not through a program, a list of instructions or State-mandated policy: it is through each other.

Why communism?

Because our current society is a machine made to create value and spill blood. Communism represents a horizon beyond the current capitalist mode of production for the real history of humanity to start. Our current world is ending and a new one struggles to be born.

Why here?

With the defederation of most Lemmy communities from Lemmygrad and Hexbear, there is a lack of a place to discuss communist politics but without the general toxicity of the terminally online left. This community, founded with the principles of SLRPNK.net in mind, aims to be a place to discuss communist politics without the so-called “tankie” left.

What kind of communism are we talking about?

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. ~ Karl Marx

Communism a rich discipline and tradition. This community aims to cater to as many tendencies are possible. Unfortunately, there is a certain tendency in the “online left” that aims to be contrarian, to win “debates,” to defend past legacies and dictatorships. “Communists” may do these things, but this is not communism. Communism is not some doctrine to be defended (as if not defending Stalin would cause the movement to collapse), but a theory and praxis by which to revolutionize the world. With Hexbear and Lemmygrad defederated, I think this particular community can be a place to discuss communist politics without the spectacle of contrarianship and sectarianism.

That said, all tendencies of the left and post-left are welcome here. What isn't welcome are specific uncomradely practices as outlined elsewhere.

Why not tankies?

State socialism/state capitalism/the bureaucracy has proven itself an effective mode of development—but only up to a certain point. The bureaucratic mode of development is still capitalist in nature, with wages, money, markets, etc. That they are often authoritarian is often beside the point (but for anarchists, it is quite the point on why not tankies). Many on the communist left understand this, from the leftcoms (ICP, ICC, ICT), the council communists, the communizers, the libertarian communists, the anarcho-communists, the autonomists, and so on.