LilaJuno 🗡️

18y | Communist

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

"The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital. Young people still have the strength to refuse this death; they are able to rebel against domestication."

- Against Domestication, Jacques Camatte

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@bbonjourkitty "The revolutionary despises public opinion. He despises and hates the existing social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way."

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

"The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions."

[amanda ☭⚢ @bbonjourkitty]

a true communist is a communist because they love the world and they love its inhabitants. a true communist wants a better world, not to just endlessly criticize the world but also to improve it.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

Chegou meu livro

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

Both right-wing and left-wing anti-nationalism are correct.

[Lucien IV🌙 @Viotocrat]

“The magical view of life sees the world not as a collection of dead facts, but as a web of living forces that the awakened Self can influence and command.”
-Julius Evola

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@iltarusko_ Right-wing libertarians appropriating mutualism is funny.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

I think I went overboard with Nietzsche, sorry Nietzscheans.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

One of the best texts of political economy critique.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@ActualistAction Or to expand the revolutionary process against their neighbors, as the Bolsheviks did during the civil war.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

Leninists should be somewhat Bonapartist.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@ActualistAction Means that any peace is temporary, and external or internal capitalist forces within the revolutionary process could initiate a new conflict against the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is therefore necessary to maintain a foreign policy of support for foreign revolutions.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

"A classe pressupõe o partido, porque para existir e agir na história ela deve possuir uma doutrina crítica da história e um objetivo para conquistar nela."

- Partido e Classe, Amadeo Bordiga

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@ActualistAction Bolsheviks invaded and overthrew the democratic republics that had been founded shortly after the fall of the Russian Empire, and were expanding Soviet and revolutionary power by force of arms. By "Bonapartism," I was referring to expansionism and revolutionary war.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@ActualistAction The expansion of the revolution through military force and a foreign policy of aggression toward global capitalism—for example, the Bolshevik invasions of Poland and Finland to spread the worldwide proletarian revolution.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@IncipitTragoed2 https://t.co/0wojFgzPrO

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@ActualistAction The expansion of the revolution through military force and a foreign policy of aggression toward global capitalism—for example, the Bolshevik invasions of Poland and Finland to spread the worldwide proletarian revolution.

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@IncipitTragoed2 https://t.co/LbbOLFauAy

[LilaJuno 🗡️ @LylaJuno]

@ActualistAction I was vague in my message; I was not defending populism, nor the political organization of the proletariat around an autocratic leader (as was the case with the populism of Napoleon III). I was referring to the pursuit of the expansion and universalization of the revolution

[Anon @Greynxgga69]

Marxist-Leninists and anarchist communists are incapable of producing robust critiques of one another, because they operate on basically the same registers. Where does this become most apparent? When both of them reduce transition to resolving the technical & pragmatic problems posed with holding (and rescinding) political power.

For the MLs, the communist program becomes a geopolitical game of 'socialist states' competing against capitalist states, by any means necessary. Communism is turned into whatever is directly or indirectly good for the 'socialist states', or bad for the capitalist states. Here the positive side of the program is folded into the negative side, and the ML reduces communism to the motion of struggle itself.

The state apparatus - being the instrument best suited to resolving immediate obstructions to the power of the proletariat - becomes the center of ML politics, and the party is reduced a component of the state which serves to optimize its performance in identifying and opposing class enemies. Proponents of the ML perspective are largely indiffererent to the forms of political (and economic) organization they must take on to undermine their enemies, and many of them rate marxism-leninism above other 'leftist' currents because they believe that it strikes a balance between principle and practical fluidity.

But the logic of MLism is fundamentally divorced from communism because, in effect, this absorption of the party into the state prevents either structure from acting as anything more than a channel for the forces of capital, because the state spontaneously takes on a shape that preserves the forms of production it arises from without counterpressure from the organized proletariat, and a total shift towards socialism is simply not possible within the boundaries of one country. So long as the workers of a particular territory are isolated, and the economic categories of capitalism remain, it is only a matter of time before their political institutions completely and totally take on a shape which is adequate for the reproduction of the economic relationships that they depend on.

A mirror image of a bourgeois dictatorship is not a proletarian one, it could only be a system which develops along the same axis as the rest of the bourgeois world, and this has been revealed countless times in the internal trajectories of every "actually existing socialist" regime to date - the only systems that ML parties have ever lead, or could ever lead, are capitalist from base to center, and this is enshrined in ML doctrine through their blindness to path-dependency and everything that path-dependency entails. Even the ML/Maoist scholars who acknowledged the basic issues with party-state fusion (see Althusser and Balibar) failed to do much more than describe it, and prescribe local remedies (e.g. "rectification" in Maoism) to a disease whose real origins are global in nature.

For most anarchists, the negative side of the program is turned into the defense of positive, pre-given forms of organization that (in the abstract) are either directly free of the basic features of capitalist society, or are functionally the embryo of communism. The communist program is reduced to the design and conservation of organizational structures which can absorb the heat of the class struggle, without taking a shape that is fundamentally altered by the forces that they're opposing.

In their framework, the motion of class struggle becomes the absence of motion - while in word they may oppose utopianism, and recognize the challenges posed by confronting the bourgeosie, in deed 'prefigurative politics' is grounded on a pretension to freeze history in place so that their blueprint of communism can be realized. The anarchists may object on the grounds that they are capable of pragmatism like their ML counterparts, or they may claim to stay truer to communist principles by defending organizational practices that have continually proven to be unsustainable. But the fact that neither of these responses is sufficient should be clear by now.

In both cases the nature of communism is distorted in both theory and practice, it is turned into an abstract ideal which can only be grasped by clinging to the institutions of capitalism. The concrete dimensions of the proletariats struggle against capital, and the contradictions which define that struggle, are replaced with immediacies which (in their respective doctrines) abstractly represent a point of collision between labor and capital, but obscure the refraction of the capital-labor conflict in the forms of organization that they adopt to engage in that conflict.

For marxism proper, the execution of the communist program is a dynamic and conflictual process which is identifiable through points of rupture. Those moments where socialized labor outstrips the shell of capital, and the qualities of capitalism are broken down in discernible ways. This means the end of commercial production, and the beginning of production that is consciously and cohesively planned by society as a whole.

In the marxist perspective, the process of transition - the dictatorship of the proletariat - involves a kind of class dictatorship which is not strictly a state or a non-state. It is a contradiction in process - a zone where the tendency to affirm and deny the state (as a mode of capital) collide throughout the course of the workers struggle against capital. In one sense the anarchists suspicions concerning the state are well-founded - there is no programmatically consistent way for the proletariat to manage a state, because the state itself is effectively a condensed form of reification, it is the 'alienated form of public power', and (left to its own devices) it is antithetical to the conscious/rational control of power and production engendered by communism. But historically, the dynamics that cause the decay of the proletarian dictatorship into a capitalist one, tended to concentrate first within the bodies responsible for performing immediate managerial functions. In the RFSR - which is the last clear instance of the proletariat holding power - these organs were the mass organizations (e.g. councils, unions, etc) that anarchists usually center in their models of transition, not the Party. In the Spanish civil war, when there was no real communist party, the same fate also clearly struck the anarchists, who executed the functions of the state out of necessity.

The importance of the communist party rests in its capacity to maintain a coherent and grounded view of immediate problems without losing sight of the communist program, and intervening to ensure that nothing - even the innumerable painstaking details of everyday administration - snaps the focus of the workers away from the communist program. In an important respect, the internal dynamics of the party also anticipate the dynamics of communism, because it operates on the basis of collective planning and co-operation without coercion.

In light of this, ML intuitions surrounding the importance of a communist party have precedent, but the prefigurative function of the party is totally purged from ML doctrine, and even if it were recognized, in reality the orientation of marxism-leninism towards blind pragmatism - as well as its proponents often dogmatic commitments to party-state models that replicate all of the problems I've described above - prevents "marxism-leninism" from ever being anything more than a petty-bourgeois forgery of communist theory.

The one and only way to avoid the pitfalls of both frameworks is to recognize the necessity of international revolution, the grim prospects of the workers substantially retaining power once a revolutionary wave has receded, and a relative distance between Party and state. The Party must indirectly wield the state through the party's base. Rank-and-file members, who are distinct from & self-subordinated to the center, would act through the mass organizations of the workers, and mediate their activity so that they do not capitulate to the counterrevolution either from outside or within their domain. The centers of party and state - to whatever extent the state manages to recompose itself within the DOTP - must synergize around completing the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat without the former being folded into the latter.