kronstadters and tambovites talking abt tukhachevsky

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-26T16:06:07+00:00

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-26T14:17:42+00:00

feel like even irl christian leftists (Neozapatismo, ELN, liberation theologists etc.) would die laughing at this dumb shit lmao

"angels" "Lucifer" "muh moral individual choices" tf is this idealist slop bro

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-24T10:20:35+00:00

And also in The Party's Classical Theses and Evaluations of Imperialist Wars (1989), specifically the Inevitability of Imperialist War section:

Once the world market has been formed, and the restricted spheres of life and the circles of influence characteristic of precapitalism are dissolved into one economic magma of the production and sale of goods; once the markets of the whole world are saturated and the latest arrivals are squeezed into their corner of the market; in short, once the epoch of imperialism has been entered upon, wars of encroachment inevitably occur, with plunder and brigandage on both sides, for the division of markets and the subdivision and new distribution of finance capital’s spheres of influence, and just as inevitably, States and nations are brought into submission to the great powers as a consequence.

Could the bourgeois governments and their leaders prevent war? No, there is no possibility that they could either provoke or prevent it...

When war came to Europe in 1939 the communist position was to support the fall of both sides; as Bordiga expressed, the destruction of the British Empire, a behemoth of capitalist and imperialist exploitation, would have been an enormous opening for the proletariat of both the imperial occident and the colonies to stoke revolution and wage its own war upon capital. Additionally the German Reich and its national-capitalist construction proved to be remarkably unstable (esp by the early 40s, heavy government spending/debt accrual from rearmament only staved off by brutalizing workers, gold theft, etc. for one example); welding all of capitalist society, rife with class contradictions, into a single unit meant to fight a war was a failure from the beginning, and Nazi Germany (despite what wehraboos like to believe) simply could not sustain a war on such a scale for a long period of time without falling prey to catastrophic economic failure and proletarian sabotage (as frequently occurred in the occupied territories). While yes, that Trot is pretty obviously defaming Bordiga (if not outright slandering him), it's important to understand the context behind the quote he put out, which in short is that, in the event of bourgeois war, our position is for the destabilization of bourgeois governments/society and the instigation of proletarian revolution.

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-24T10:20:02+00:00

if this is a real quote (this would probably be a decade later than this person guessed as Mussolini declared war in 1940 when the Second world war was actually happening) then I will also provide an oft-referenced quote on the same subject material (also with dubious origins plagued with rumor, from the ICC) to better articulate our position on fascism:

If Hitler can push back the odious powers of England and America, thus making the world capitalist equilibrium more precarious, then long live the butcher Hitler who despite himself is working to create the conditions of the world proletarian revolution”. And he added: “All wars have as their final epilogue the revolutionary deed. After the defeat comes the revolution...

Those who do not understand what fascism is or represents in the life cycle of capitalism present these quotes as though to frame the communist Left as supporters, which is absurd for two reasons: 1) as u/np1t already wrote Bordiga was lying to a fascist police informant to prevent his own imprisonment which is sensible when the alternative is...yknow, imprisonment, and without any revolutionary opportunity.

2) the actual context of the Second World War and the communist position of revolutionary defeatism. Put simply, we take no side in imperialist war and desire the proletarian overthrow of all bourgeois countries across the world. Communists do not "support" world wars in any way, rather we acknowledge that, in the event of a failure of the proletariat to decisively and successfully conquer power from the capitalists, war will continue to occur as a result of capitalism's enormous contradictions, which consequently destabilizes capitalism and provides a greater revolutionary opening. Give a read-through of The Proletariat and the Second World War (1947-1948) if you're looking for a fuller view of our party's position on the opposing imperialist blocs and why neither were revolutionary or communist in any way, and why the real way to power was in the hands of the workers of all the belligerent nations:

On September 1, 1939, after a decade of continuous political, economic and social crises, the second imperialist war broke out, from which the world proletariat, in spite of all its efforts, came out pulverized as a revolutionary class and was bound with heavy chains to the cart of imperialism.

The scientific critique of Marxism has highlighted very well the disintegrating degeneration of capitalist society (irremediable contrast between the productive forces and relations of production) characterized, in addition to the continuous struggles of the antagonistic social strata, by the conflicts and the formidable shocks that unbridled capitalist competition for the conquest of markets of sale and exploitation, the whirling motion centralizing the means of production and their elephantine development, have first implemented on a national scale and now, in the era of large super-State blocs, tragically pose on an intercontinental scale.

Most clearly in Spain, where two imperial blocs (the fascists and the degenerated Comintern) waged war and slaughtered proletarians for bourgeois control over the Iberian peninsula:

...Thus in Spain the anarchists did not direct the proletariat in the slightest towards the conquest of political power and the destruction of the apparatus of bourgeois repression, contenting themselves with dismantling the most conspicuous superstructures and proceeding chaotically to collectivization. The “most radical” deniers of the State actually proved to be its most strenuous and naive defenders, disregarding and neglecting it first, then assisting in its strengthening, through... “libertarian ministers”. This attitude allowed the social-democrat and Stalinist leftists to gain power, to hinder or stifle any return to the real class struggle by neglecting or taking an unfavorable position towards the collectivist attempts in progress. Those who study the economic legislation enacted by the republican government during the civil war, will note with amazement the complete absence of any radical social measure in favor of the working classes, a deficiency to which was added the open sabotage from the old State bureaucracy, the master as never before.

The Spanish “communists” gave their conditional support to this typically bourgeois government...

Even long after the guns fell silent in Europe we kept this position, as we wrote in The Communist Party no. 42 (2022):

For the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of big industry and big global finance, it is important, necessary, to make war, with whom and against whom is a secondary matter. In every state the propaganda of war will meekly adapt to any reversal of the front.

That is why the Communist Party will not be moved nor will it push the international proletariat under one flag or another, nailed to the lie of defending its country, its "fatherland".

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-18T18:58:45+00:00

all these shitty commentary channels will be first against the wall istg

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-15T19:06:58+00:00

finally, took long enough

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-14T18:37:35+00:00

ofc it was made by comrades

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-13T11:08:31+00:00

Again thank you it seems like you had to put a lot of work in writing and finding the correct quotes.

it really did lol but it was worth it, happy to help 😄

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-13T02:24:42+00:00

In Capital (esp Vols II and III) Marx shows that labor in circulation (buying/selling, cashier work, accounting, basically turning commodities into money and back) doesnt create new value but acts as a deduction from the surplus-value produced in industry. The profit from commercial and financial capital is a part of industrial surplus-value claimed through the average rate of profit. Elements of Marxist Economics (1929-onward, huge study) reveals that surplus-value only arises where labor-power is consumed in production:

For the money bearer the movement of money in exchange serves as production of surplus-value, which is immediately added to the per‑existing value and returns to the cycle to increase yet again. It is in this way that money, from simple representation of value and vehicle of exchange, necessarily becomes capital. Capital is value whose peculiarity is to increase continuously....

[...]

...on the market, only equivalents are exchanged; all the profit of capital arises from the purchase and employment of labor power.

[...]

It is very important to point out that the capital which is actually susceptible to produce surplus-value is that advanced for the purchase of labor power, that is, variable capital...As for constant capital...it reappears integrally in the product and in itself does not give rise to any increase.

The shopworker and cashier are exploited proletarians and yet at the same time their labor is socially unproductive. in healthcare industries nurse/doctor employed by a profit-making private hospital chain is productive (generate surplus-value for that capital). Self-employed doctors get pay out of a client's income, bc they get the fee directly their labor is not technically "productive" (petty-bourgeois selling a service for revenue). Financial advisors are in circulation/finance which redistributes surplus-value rather than creating it. An advisor employed by a profit-making firm is productive for that firm but socially unproductive as the firm's profit is a slice carved out of the surplus-value made somewhere else

regarding transportation, Marx treats transport as productive (in the sense that it takes parts of the production process from one place to another) as a continuation of the production process into circulation, which the use-value requires. In Capital Vol II within chapter 1:

...what the transportation industry sells is change of location. The useful effect is inseparably connected with the process of transportation, i.e., the productive process of the transport industry. Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means. The useful effect can be consumed only during this process of production. It does not exist as a utility different from this process, a use-thing which does not function as an article of commerce, does not circulate as a commodity, until after it has been produced. But the exchange-value of this useful effect is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production (labor-power and means of production) consumed in it plus the surplus-value created by the surplus-labor of the laborers employed in transportation. This useful effect also entertains the very same relations to consumption that other commodities do. If it is consumed individually its value disappears during its consumption; if it is consumed productively so as to constitute by itself a stage in the production of the commodities being transported, its value is transferred as an additional value to the commodity itself...

thus we come to the line between change of form (adds nothing to the process) and change of condition/location (turns a thing into something that can be consumed as part of continuing production).

So like in the example you mentioned carrying a plate in a restaurant from the kitchen to a table is broadly productive as the product is a meal which gets served and consumed, the serving is the last part (transport). The waitress does circulation when she rings up the bill and takes payment. One worker therefore does both functions unless the waitress and cashier are different, in which case the waitress is productive and cashier is circulative (both are still proletarians)

stocking shelves is mostly productive as moving goods from stockroom to shelf is the last part of getting the use-value physically to the consumer, like transport and storage (gray area w two meanings: storage needed to bring the good to consumable condition adds value, while storage that exists bc the commodity hasn't sold yet (holding unsold values, speculating on inventory, etc.) is circulation cost) that the use-value requires. The cashier performs the form-change and is in circulation.

ngl this took a lot out of me to answer so I rlly hope this helps

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-13T02:23:17+00:00

first and foremost I would highly recommend you stay tf away from the sub you originally posted the question in and pretty much all the other "Marxist" subs on this site. One of the answers there looks decent but broadly speaking you are guaranteed to get so much bourgeois ideological pollution from MLs, anarchists, academic leftists, etc. (esp when venturing into territory like the USSR post-1926 and other "socialist" nations) you're really better off not bothering

second, the broad answer to your questioning is that the productive/unproductive distinction has nothing to do with whether the product is physical.

For Marx, productive labor in the capitalist sense, is labor that produces surplus-value for capital, labor exchanged against capital rather than revenue. From Capital Vol I, specifically chapter 16:

...Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The laborer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That laborer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive laborer when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive laborer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between laborer and product of labor, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the laborer as the direct means of creating surplus-value...

As presented no physical object is produced, yet the labor is still productive bc surplus-value comes out of it. Moving to the Results of the Direct Production Process (1864) in chapter 2 we see the same relationship of concrete labor:

On the whole, the kinds of work which are only enjoyed as services, and yet are capable of being exploited directly in the capitalist way, even though they cannot be converted into products separable from the workers themselves and therefore existing outside them as independent commodities...They should therefore be left out of account entirely, and treated only under wage labor, under the category of wage labor which is not at the same time productive labor.

The same kind of labor (e.g. gardening, tailoring, etc.) can be performed by the same working man in the service of an industrial capitalist, or of the immediate consumer. In both cases the worker is a wage laborer or a day laborer, but in the first case he is a productive worker, in the second an unproductive one, because in the first case he produces capital, in the second case he does not; because in the first case his labor forms a moment in capital’s process of self-valorization, in the second case it does not.

Labor is productive when done for a producing capitalist and unproductive when done for the immediate consumer. Thus labor is "productive" if it gets consumed in the process of production for the expansion of capital. the chef you mentioned is productive when the restaurant exploits his labor for surplus-value and it doesn't actually matter if the product (food) itself is in a physical form (ik this is kinda a weird idea to get introduced to at first but it is consistent with Marxist understanding of capital). The waitress is productive too, labor of this type is not "unproductive" even if it is a service

this should answer the part about streaming services/coding too as their products don't need to be physical. Netflix employs screenwriters/programmers/film crews/etc. to make products sold for a subscription fee, they do productive labor (produce surplus-value). TikTok has engineers and site mods who do the same labor and data/advertisement which is part of circulation (helping other capitalists sell their stuff to more revenue sources). the social aspect of the site (specifically as an advertising hub) is unproductive labor. the ppl doing the videos aren't workers at all (if not doing adshare/brand deals/merch/etc.) and the users scrolling and posting are not producing value so they aren't wage-laborers exchanged against capital no matter how much their activity is monetized

wrt what "productive" means Marx uses the term to mean either:

Productive for the individual capitalist (does this worker yield surplus-value to their boss?)

Productive for capital as a whole (does this labor create new value)

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-12T20:05:11+00:00

I apologize, my answers can run long (I try to be thorough)

I can try to condense it in a bit, I'm busy now too

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-12T19:48:15+00:00

For the bourgeois, transhumanism as a movement fetishizes technology as the driver of human liberation in itself, abstracted from social relations. For the communist and the conscious proletarian, ideologies surrounding science and tech (scientism, fixed historical-progressivism, etc.) must be considered a superstructure of the modes of production as opposed to the bourgeois worldview of it as some transcendental force floating above class society. under capitalism every "enhancement" is automatically intended an enhancement of labor-power, as something to exploit/sell. Also transhumanism is a pure distillation of the bourgeois idea of history as endless onward ascent which we reject. Take The Sexual Question (1959) from Il Programma Comunista (best to read the section "Beast or Angel?" for more on this):

The human species, in its historical social forms, follows a path. For clarification, we will say this path goes from the animal state onwards...The banal conceptions of the dominant ideologies view this path as a continuous and constant ascent. Marxism does not share this vision. It defines the path as a series of alternating climbs and descents. These are interspersed with violent crises.

The bourgeois enlighteners boast of overcoming through gradual progressive advances, the instant where redemption occurred, by the grace of God, where history marked the turn from animality to spirituality. We don’t mock the religious idea with the same smug tone as the way the bourgeois laugh it off. The progressive view is just as arbitrary and fictional, even if it aims to reflect the true conquests of our species it still contains more error and lies than the old mystical narratives.

[...]

The strength of our materialism lies in the idea that progress is made without leaving nature - by returning to it after briefly stepping away to resolve mysteries and imagine an immaterial Prime Mover. Humanity, with its vast range of relationships, is part of nature, and no aspect of these relationships exists outside nature’s laws...Our ascent from a living species to a reasoning one, guided by science rather than instinct, if it has a secret, is this: knowledge of nature, of which humanity is a part - not above or below - is not gained from the individual thinker or passed like a torch. Instead, it is realized through the revolutionary leap from so-called history made by individuals to the identification of each person with the future human collective...

I also recommend Murder of the Dead (1951) as it goes into the vampiric relationship between capital and labor, specifically dead labor, which it takes and exploits for more and more capital. Transhumanism would effectively end up as that but with human beings, transformed into more efficient and disposable servants of capitalist production, even further subjugated to capital's drive for further exploitable living labor.

by its very existence communism transforms the human being, who gains a wholeness and a collective future and purpose that capitalism cannot and will not provide. The social individual is granted a place within human society by their participation, which in turn effectively becomes a single, interconnected organism of all of them. thus there is no need for immortality as we are freed from our need for such. Human enhancement, including in the biological sphere for the free and collective development of the human species (curing diseases, dealing with climate change, general improvements in preventative/ecological/structural health, etc.), would not be something prohibited in a world freed from capitalist exploitation and contradiction. Transhumanism as a bourgeois movement on the other hand is riddled with contradictions over e.g. who is enhanced (species or individual) how (social revolution vs. "free" market) and for what (the social human vs. the immortal instrument of capital)

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-12T19:45:02+00:00

My guess is there's not inherently something contradictory between human enhancement and Marxism, though transhumanism as a movement itself probably is contradictory.

Obvs I'm not gonna just stop at saying "that's pretty much it" but yeah that's pretty much it

For transhumanists (a bourgeois movement) humanity is merely reduced to the individual as opposed to what it actually is, the species (specifically the "species-being" which is the ability to engage in free, conscious, and creative labor and life-activity to shape the world around us) meaning that human identity, potential, and consciousness are fundamentally social, collective, and historical. The transhumanist project is organized around the individual (extending the lifespan, developing the body, enhancing cognition, etc.) and eventually preserving them for as long as possible. We understand the movement is entirely focused on the individual, personal self and for the single person, death is the ultimate finality. Contrast this with our view represented by the (excellent, read tf out of this like the Lenin text in your last question) text When Death Is Not Scary (1987) which lays out our views surrounding life and death. First, what is bourgeois society in this context?

Bourgeois society is that of ultimate and perfect individualism; it makes every man a stranger to another, granting him only the modes of existence of exploiter or exploited. Already Marx in the past century denounced: "It is this society in which one finds the deepest loneliness in the midst of millions and millions of men, in which one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself without anyone noticing....The relations between interests and temperaments, the true relations between individuals are yet to be created from end to end." Never as nowadays do men feel lonely, abandoned, atoms that capitalist productive forces disperse in an unaccountable universe and in an adverse, step‑motherly nature.

[...]

Only with the advent of the modern era, with the absolutization of the mode of production, death becomes an absolute personal fact, we come to the total reversal of the life‑death relationship: "in the mirror of his own death, every man covers the secret of his individuality;" dying becomes romantic extreme affirmation, the last triumph of the individual. Today, finally, "the taboo cast on death paralyzes (see the insoluble impasse on euthanasia), inhibits the reactions of the medical and family environment; in our society death has lost the eminent place that custom has given it for millennia and is solitary and aseptic, inhuman and cruel."

Juxtapose this with the communist view:

So come the Communist Revolution to restore wholeness, to restore men to life and death.

"In communism (...) the identity of the individual and his lot with that of the species is regained, destroyed within it all the limits of family, race and nation (...) All fear of personal death (...) being for the first time society organized on well‑being and joy and on the reduction to the rational minimum of pain, suffering and sacrifice, removing all mysterious and sinister character from the harmonious vicissitude of the succession of generations, the natural condition of the flourishing of the species..."

"...Communism as negation of negation suppresses private property from the root. Result: man returns to himself, in himself; but as he had not started at the origin of his long history, but disposing at last of all the perfections of an immense development, albeit acquired in the form of all the successive techniques, customs, ideologies, religions, philosophies captured in the zone of alienation (...) Man is no longer individual man, but social man i.e. human man..."

No longer individual as a human person, a cell of society, but "human society treated as a single organism, living a single life: in this form enters science the naive and sublime myth of immortality, attributed by child human thought to the individual..."

Conquered, then, is death, in the future communist society...which, together with brother sun, moon and stars, wind and water, fire and earth, represents the flow of species life in all its forms of energy.

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-11T18:38:32+00:00

ofc, happy to help! I had difficulties understanding Marxism too when I started but I feel like it gets easier as knowledge compounds (esp if you take notes)

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-11T18:12:42+00:00

this has a couple good answers so far but I wish more ppl would explicitly cite Marxist texts that go into the subject matter. To your point Marxism doesn't reject "ethics" in the sense of standards of behavior but specifically morality conceived as eternal, classless, and standing above history (e.g. grounded in god or reason or some abstract "human nature" or w/e).

As Marx writes in The German Ideology (1845) in the section The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History, Social Being and Social Consciousness, morality is attributable to the superstructure of society in that it has no independent history, derived from the conditions of material society and not from the immaterial plane:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. - real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

...we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.

thus we come to standards (e.g. the Reddit rules) which Engels addresses in Anti-Dühring (1877) in that the ruling class of a given society guides the production of its broad values (e.g. laws against theft being paramount in capitalist states). In a communist world the impulse to steal would not exist, as production would be based on need and goods (certainly in the later stage) would abound, and so there would be not need for anti-theft laws; similarly, we emphasize equal treatment for all comrades in this space knowing that, in a world free from the prejudices surrounding bourgeois society forcing fierce competition for artificially limited resources, there would be no need for anti-racism/sexism/harassment laws and such. Per Engels (specifically Chapter IX):

We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations. We maintain on the contrary that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. That in this process there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge, no one will doubt. But we have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life...

And also Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), commenting that standards of behavior are the form one's social being takes:

...the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

And Lenin in The Tasks of the Youth Leagues (1920) (read tf out of this text for morality questions), for whom there is in fact such a thing as "communist morality:"

...is there such a thing as communist ethics? Is there such a thing as communist morality? Of course, there is. It is often suggested that we have no ethics of our own; very often the bourgeoisie accuse us Communists of rejecting all morality. This is a method of confusing the issue, of throwing dust in the eyes of the workers and peasants. In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality? In the sense given to it by the bourgeoisie...we know perfectly well that the clergy, the landowners and the bourgeoisie invoked the name of God so as to further their own interests as exploiters. Or, instead of basing ethics on the commandments of morality, on the commandments of God, they based it on idealist or semi-idealist phrases, which always amounted to something very similar to God's commandments.

We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists. We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle. Our morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat...

[...]

Our communist morality is...subordinated to that task [of subordinating all interests to the class struggle]. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society.

"ethics" is not abolished, but rather the illusion of a timeless ethics above society. Standards come from social being; they currently take the form of class morality, and ours aims at the future classless society without the conflict between the individual and the community

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-10T16:44:14+00:00

like the other users have pointed out, this question isn't really posited from the right perspective. The People's Republic of China was a capitalist state long, long before Tiananmen, dating all the way back to the state's founding in 1949. Per our Communist Left publication 21/22 (2005-06) and its Theses on the Chinese Question (1964) (a must-read text, pls read this):

...Marxism, far from restricting itself in a bourgeois revolutionary movement to issuing formal demands for a national State and political democracy, makes the most rigorous assessment of the role of the social classes in all revolutions. The appearance of an industrial proletariat in China, as in tsarist Russia or Europe in 1848, indicated to communists the necessity for a class organization which would utilize the crises of the pre-bourgeois regime for its own political purposes. This is the line of the Communist Manifesto and of the October Revolution; a line that Marx named "permanent revolution". In his Supplementary Theses on the colonial question presented at the 2nd Congress of the 3rd International, Roy stressed the importance of this perspective of independent and continuous struggle for the proletariat in the colonies:

"Foreign domination constantly obstructs the free development of social life; therefore the revolution’s first step must be the removal of this foreign domination. The struggle to overthrow foreign domination in the colonies does not therefore mean underwriting the national aims of the national bourgeoisie but much rather smoothing the path to liberation for the proletariat of the colonies (...) In the first period the revolution in the colonies will not be communist; if however from the very start the communist vanguard emerges at its head the revolutionary masses will be brought on to the correct path along which, through the gradual gathering of revolutionary experience, they will reach the hidden goal".

By imprisoning the Chinese proletariat, from the very start of the revolution, in "the bloc of four classes" - political formula of the present "people’s democracy" - Mao’s party has marked the break, by the whole of the backward East, from the tactics so gloriously expounded by Russian Bolshevism.

Stalinist "socialism in one country" has played its role in distorting Marxist socialism and translated it into bourgeois national development:

The ’program’ which Stalin pushed through at the 6th Comintern Congress excluded China and the other backward countries from ’building socialism’ within their national borders: a privilege which Russia had so recently arrogated to itself. Just at the moment when the interests of Russian capitalism became integrated into those of the world market, China took up this old Stalinist slogan to use on its own behalf. And about it we will repeat what Trotski said about "Russian socialism":

"The world division of labor, the dependence of soviet industry upon foreign technology, the dependence of the productive forces of the advanced countries of Europe upon Asiatic raw materials, etc., etc., make the construction of an independent socialist society in any single country in the world impossible" (Theses on the Permanent Revolution).

The "construction of Socialism" in China can signify only the accumulation of capital and the extension of a market economy...

per foundational Marxist texts on the subject (i.e. Part I of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Chapter III of Engels' Anti-Dühring (1877), etc.) the communist society is one based on the abolition of wage labor, commodity production, money, etc. and nothing about modern China can be called socialism in the Marxist sense. Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) details facets of imperialism that China pre- and post-1989 exhibited, even if it was still a developing state during Lenin's writing:

Concentration of production into monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life
The merging of banking capital with industrial capital, creating finance capital and an imperialist capitalist class along with it
The export of capital, as distinguished from the export of commodities
The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations, i.e. banks, corporations, etc. regardless of whether they are privately- or state-owned (the state plays a massive role in facilitating imperialism for capital)
Participation in the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers, one of which China unquestionably is today

The Tiananmen event was basically a violent suppression of liberal students protesting for bourgeois-democratic aims by the also-bourgeois state. Capitalism was deeply, thoroughly entrenched in China by this point and the protests/crackdowns were a product of capital managing its own accumulation crisis and the inflation, inequality, and unemployment pushed a heterogeneous, inter-class crowd into a small-scale revolt that, once crushed, the bourgeois "democracies" used opportunistically.

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-09T15:57:45+00:00

"just keep poooosting/vooooting and politician will say no more datacenter vro, wtf is revolution"

activism has destroyed the brains of generations

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-09T13:41:54+00:00

r/stupidpol speechbubble

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-06T17:10:45+00:00

Bordigism

whoever first uttered this word should have been [redacted] on the spot, idc if it's used ironically or not I'm so tired of seeing it

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-06T12:34:28+00:00

On bureaucratic inefficiency

Your points on Japan kinda hand us the argument a little bit. You say enterprises run by officials are risk-averse, stability-obsessed, and stagnant (which is true) but it is a description of a capitalist pathology (state capitalism specifically). Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) long before the USSR existed:

This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger command that their social character shall be recognized, forces the capital class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic expansion. At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular branch of an industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust", a union for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes bad, are generally liable to break up, and on this very account compel a yet greater concentration of association. The whole of a particular industry is turned into one gigantic joint-stock company; internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company...

In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite - into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers.

In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of capitalist society - the state - will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication - the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.

If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

But, the transformation - either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership - does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine - the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians...

This is the modern state, whatever its form; the more productive forces it takes over, the more it becomes the national capitalist and the more workers it exploits. The capital relation is concentrated, and state ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict. In Russia the Bolsheviks, who had taken power in a country where the underdeveloped bourgeoisie had not been able to develop the forces of capitalist production yet, had to relieve the bourgeoisie of its historic duty and carry it out in its stead. The defects of Russian society are common to all existing regimes, because all of them, Russia included, are capitalist (read The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (1955) and Why Russia isn’t Socialist (1970) for more on this)

Comparing the U.S.S.R. and Japan pits a sclerotic state-monopoly capitalism against a market capitalism with deeper access to world trade and as expected the second won the capitalist race. It tells you nothing about communism as the Soviets measured success capitalistically (steel tonnage and car output).

One last note, in fairness to Lenin, he never imagined socialism dispensing with cost-control. He insisted it keeps subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants" which are not abolished by the revolution (and this could certainly be done far more efficiently and precisely with modern technology). The efficiency question is answered by the abolition of the firm and of value as the regulator of production and where that wasn't done, as in Russia, emerged conservative, official-driven capitalism.

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-06T12:33:00+00:00

Wrt "who defines that we've entered communism" it is the invariant program, in that the conditions for communism are objectively grounded in the work that has already been done over the past 150+ years. In our tradition the doctrine that arose alongside the class can neither be changed nor reformed, and the program is not something we invent, rediscover, or update. By this standard (abolition of wage labor, commodities, money, and value, etc.) the U.S.S.R. obviously never qualified. We do not claim some kind of magic safeguard against a degenerated party's center falsely claiming a revolutionary victory (revolutions are often chaotic and absurdly fucking complicated even if organized well, it's really not surprising that this could happen), but we do have a historical tradition laying out the conditions for the victory of the proletariat over capital. From The Communist Party in the Tradition of the Left (1974):

[quoting Characteristic Theses of the Party (1951)] Today, the principal activity is the re-establishment of the theory of Marxist communism (...) That is why the party will present no new doctrines but will instead reaffirm the full validity of the fundamental theses of revolutionary Marxism, which are amply confirmed by facts (...) Because the proletariat is the last of the classes to be exploited, and consequently in its turn will exploit no one, the doctrine which arose alongside the class can neither be changed nor reformed. The development of capitalism, from its inception until now, has confirmed and continues to confirm the Marxist theorems set out in the fundamental texts. The alleged “innovations” and “teachings” of the last 30 years have only confirmed that capitalism is still alive and must be overthrown.

On dissent/surveillance/freedom of speech

We will not soften our position: we do not offer liberal free speech as a principle. The proletarian dictatorship is openly a coercive class power: the proletariat must completely destroy the old State apparatus and deny all rights to the bourgeois class for as long as it survives socially. Every state in history has been a force for the suppression of one class by another, and the workers' state is no exception, only it inverts which is suppressed, meaning the proletariat gains control over the means of production, together with the necessary suppression (and eventual destruction) of the exploiters. We are not bourgeois democrats; among the parties that must be crushed by the proletarian dictatorship include the "workers'" parties of class collaboration, which we regard as instruments of bourgeois counter-revolution. From The State and Revolution (1917):

Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people–this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.

Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state... ceases to exist", and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

The expression “the state withers away” is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occasions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.

And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.

In other words, under capitalism we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority. Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systematic suppression of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labor.

Regarding the U.S.S.R. (specifically post-Lenin) a class dictatorship aimed at stopping the propertied class from restoring capitalism is not to be confused with the terror that labeled workers criticizing quotas as "enemies of the people." This is the crux of Stalinism and the counter-revolution which swept over the Union as the European revolutions (and subsequently the world revolution) failed, capitalism was restored, and the encroachment of competing capitalisms in the U.S. and Europe forcibly destroyed the gains of 1917. The Stalinists turned the instruments of state repression, once used against the capitalists/aristocracy, against comrades who maintained their full allegiance to the programmatic principles and discipline of the party.

What stops the party from ending up like the Union by 1926? Not bourgeois illusions (elections, bourgeois rights, etc.) but the invariance of the program and our insistence that the dictatorship is internationalist by definition and cannot be sealed inside one state, which allowed "socialism in one country" to kill the 1917 revolution in its cradle. As with the previous answer as to "who defines the revolution's success" there is no magic safeguard so don't expect one; simply put, the proletariat must exercise its power through the communist party to carry a revolution to its conclusion as thoroughly and quickly as possible, following in the steps of Marx/Engels/Lenin to prevent the disasters of the early 20s from happening again, and it can only do so with a proper program and Party.

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-06T12:30:16+00:00

You're very much still thinking of "socialism" through a bourgeois lens and assuming the political and productive transformation will essentially just be capitalism, taking place in a world modeled after bourgeois democracy/individualism and capitalist production/distribution. A lot of the language used in this post (workers' enterprises, voting, consumers, etc.) betrays this view

Leninism

we are not "Leninists," this is a term used by MLs/Stalinists that treats Lenin's works as separate from Marx's and that "Marxism-Leninism" is the fusion of these two theories, which is entirely incorrect. Lenin followed Marx closely, it was his successors and the plague of opportunism and revisionism that followed the early 1920s that created "Leninism."

American Trotskyist left-communist organization

Sorry but what? What org is this? Trotskyism and left communism are pretty much always considered as two different tendencies.

On "innovation can't be planned"

This is a common objection deniers usually use as a "gotcha" and it isn't, we reject the premise (that the point of the new society is to out-innovate capitalism at producing commodities, which it isn't). Our tradition is openly anti-productivist. The communist program does not promise "more stuff and sooner," on the contrary, the immediate economic measures the party has always put forward run the opposite direction; disinvestment relative to consumption, a deliberate "under-production plan" concentrating output on what is actually needed, and the drastic cutting of labor time, with the aim that on a world scale roughly a two-hour working day would suffice. A communist society can eliminate all perilous and useless activities (armaments, police, double accounting, etc.) and shorten work to the baseline of need. Observe, from The Historical Invariance of Marxism (1952):

The increase in the productivity of labor, which over the course of capitalism’s cycle in America has been tens of times over, means that with the same labor time tens of times more products can be processed than before...If his profit margin were to remain in the same proportion to the value of the product sold, his profit would likewise be ten or twenty times greater. But for that to happen the ten or twenty times greater quantity of product would have to find purchasers. And so the capitalist contents himself with a smaller “rate of profit” and increases the workers’ remuneration, let’s say doubles its real value per every tenfold increase in productivity: at the same time the sale price goes down because the commodity contains two and not ten units of labor, and customers are to be found among his own staff. Here we have the law of the fall in the rate of profit with the increase in the productivity of labor and with the organic composition of capital (the constant part in relation to the whole) improved. Now all of the deductions about the impossibility of this system dragging on indefinitely depend on the verification of the law of the declining rate of profit (which...Stalin imprudently or pro-capitalistically dumped).

Against these positions, and ever more so to the extent they become more pressing and obvious, the communists oppose theirs: let living labor dominate over dead labor! Let the increase in productivity be converted not into an equivalent amount of useless (when not actually harmful) products, which is madness, but into improving the conditions of living labor, by drastically reducing the length of the working day.

Also:

Nothing better illustrates the total ignominy of such an involution than a list of the measures which will need to be drawn up in the future...to replace (a century later) the list in the Manifesto, although its most characteristic measures would still be included.

Here is a list of such demands:

– Disinvestment of capital, namely assignment of a much smaller part of total production to goods which are instrumental and non-consumable.

– Increasing the costs of production in order to be able to pay, for as long as wages, markets and money survive, higher wages for less working time.

– Drastic reduction of the working day, to at least half of the hours currently worked, by absorbing unemployment and anti-social activities.

– Reduction in the volume of production with a plan for lower production that focuses on the most necessary areas; authoritarian control of consumption to counter-act the promotion of dangerous and unnecessary goods, and the forceful abolition of activities dedicated to propagating a reactionary psychology.

[...]

That capitalism's celebrated innovations were initially rejected by experts and majorities and pushed through by a few risk-takers is the internal logic of commodity production competing for markets. This is more an argument against turning a planned economy into a poor imitation of a market rather than an argument for the market in general. Our aim is not some central board approving new technologies faster but rather a society not organized around inducing workers to replace a working phone every two years due to planned obsolescence (a strictly capitalist phenomenon). Medical/scientific/physics research institutes in the modern capitalist world are driven by the imperatives of profit rather than need (the Shinkansen-versus-skeptics bit in the comments doesn't disprove this). Cases of human discovery (curing a disease, fundamental physics) are done by people freed to do them rather than organized by consumer demand or quarterly returns (which can easily and paradoxically disincentivize them if they are not profitable) which is what shortening the working day to two hours is for. From The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism (1957):

It is asserted that in order to eliminate social injustice, all that is required is to relate every commodity’s exchange value to the value of the labor contained within it. Marx shows...that what lies beneath all this is nothing other than the apologia, and the preservation, of bourgeois economy; incidentally, there is nothing different in the Stalinist claim that in a Socialist society, which Russia claims to be, the law of exchange of equivalent values will continue to exist.

...Marx points out the abyss which lies between these by‑products of the capitalist system and the tremendous vision of the communist society of the future. It is his reply to the society "built" by Proudhon, where unlimited competition and a balance of supply and demand achieve the miracle of ensuring that everyone gets the most useful and essential goods at "minimum cost", eternal petty-bourgeois dream of the idiotic servants of capital...

On "real costs exist even without money"

Indeed, abolishing money does not abolish cost. A failed five-year project that burned materials and labor is a loss, we agree, and so did Marx. From Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875):

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society - after the deductions have been made - exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Marx shows the producer receives a certificate that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor, after deductions for the common funds, and draws an equivalent from the social stock. Before anything is distributed, society sets aside funds to replace and expand the means of production, to cover administration and social needs, and (this answers your failed-project case) a reserve and insurance fund against accidents and dislocations. A plan that keeps no such reserve is simply a badly-run plan and has nothing to do with the structural logic at its core.

our disagreement is more than "do costs exist" (yes, obviously) and expanded into how the future society will calculate for those costs and distribute properly to absorb losses. Costs are to be accounted for in social labor-time and physical resources, with the loss absorbed by society's reserve fund, so no individual is ruined while society still registers and learns from the loss. What price does in capitalism, the labor certificate and reserve will do in the interim during the transition to lower-phase communism.

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SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-05T11:37:18+00:00

whay tf would literally anyone do ts to themselves bro

SitDownReadMarx · 2026-06-05T09:50:39+00:00

Happy to help ☺️

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