Does anyone know what makes music and art in general good? Recently I've been feeling very down because the more I think about certain forms of media that I used to love, music and stories that used to drive me at times to tears, the more I begin to despise it all. It feels like something I love was ripped away from me and stolen away. I don't know how to feel about this and I'm both confused and dismal at the same time. I fear I'm being too metaphysical and yet no amount of self-contemplation and criticism has led me to feel any better about all this.

Why is it that I can't enjoy what I used to enjoy? Seriously, what makes art good? If anyone has any thoughts or knows of any books that delve into this more deeply, please let me know. I used to always abhor art critics and hated being told something is excellent by academics if I didn't agree, and so I've never even discussed art on its own merits throughout my whole life. Something was either "good" or "bad", and I didn't care to elaborate— it was obvious to me and if you didn't agree then I would leave in a huff. I hated dissecting art because art is the most human of all labours and shouldn't be subject to the crude autopsy of those snobby academic intellectuals that'll sooner desecrate its corpse, tying it to a chariot and parading it around town than to accept the simple beauty in art that we can all see, no matter how learned we are.

But what I thought was good now seems bad to me, and I have no idea why. All the while I progressively become more and more clinically analytical on the very things I thought should remain isolated from inquisition. I feel this when I read the novels I used to love. I feel this when I listen to the songs I used to adore. I feel this when I see the paintings that used to inspire me. Why?

I am looking for books that discuss how the Soviet Union was organized, i.e. how voting worked, how the Central Committee operated, how the local soviets operated, how did it work in countries like Georgia compared to Belarus (for example), etc.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you!

Being an american communist/socialist, it can be very difficult having political discussions with the general public. No matter how much factual evidence you present, no matter how much you disprove their outrageous claim, capitalism is always the answer. How do you actually break through the blinders and propaganda and get people to start questioning their world view?

I will be very thankful of you guys if you can help me clear my doubts about how come Revolutionary organisation or rebels manage to throw out fully functional(corrupt) governments

1- How these groups create a internal Bureaucracy to manage the organisation how they find smart and qualified people how people agree on doing a dangerous job for a organisation that can't even pay them

2- How these groups with their few mercenaries manage to throw out fully functional powerful armies.

3- why don't people of the respective country retaliate to the revolutionary organisation and how come people that worked for the previous government (the bureaucracy,the police and military and local politicians) agree to work with these rebel groups.

4- How they stop Powergrabs inside the respective organisations.

(English in not my native language so sorry for my grammatical mistakes and my questions arised after reading about the regime change in Iraq,libya, vietnam and the rise of lenin)

I’ve been learning about China under Mao Zedong at college, however after looking at different sources I’ve found a lot of information is omitted from my textbooks, and some of the things I’ve been taught are false or from an incredibly biased perspective. Do you know any good books that look at Mao’s rule more objectively, focusing on the positives as well as the negatives, and the impact he had on China today?

If you look at their history. Manifest Destiny, Treatment of Natives, Slavery, Segregation. Moreover, their crazy imperialistic history. Their involvment in establishing fascist regimes all over the world. The fact that the two party system of the US is a de facto one party system-especially if you consider that the democrats are basically the "liberal" wing of the republicans. It also has to be considered that the president of the US concentrates more power in himself than most if not all leaders of all other liberal "democracies".

Moreover, their insane focus on patriotism and nationalism. Flags, Chants, Symbols, Anthems.

They always have a designated group of hate they have to focus their inhabitants on. After WW2 it were the communists (and pretty sure many minority groups here and then when it was convinient) and after the collapse of the soviet union it became Islam.

Then we have the massive power given to the police. The heavy involvment of religion in politics and everyday life and the way politicans fund their campagne (rich people and companies pay them literally millions).

We cannot forget the massive funding in militairy and the lack of social fundings which is pretty much they since at least WW2.

Would it be correct to say that the US is fascist. It shares some crazy similarities imo.

I’ve noticed that many communists or Marxists online tend to pivot to liberal frameworks when discussing women’s issues. This has come up in their responses to the 4B movement, a Korean movement that is often misunderstood as merely a "sex strike." For example, many online communists respond by saying it’s "misogynistic" to think that women are just used for pleasure, or argue that "sex is something to be enjoyed." But this analysis seems to miss the bigger point: the movement critiques a capitalist system where women’s labor, including emotional and sexual labor, is treated as a commodity.

Suddenly, words like "choice" and "personal freedom" are used as if they’re Marxist arguments—yet in most contexts, these same people reject liberal individualism as antithetical to class analysis. Why is there this inconsistency?

I have criticisms of the 4B movement myself and I understand the limitations of this individualistic approach but I feel many critiques miss the mark. The same pattern applies to issues around kink, pornography, prostitution, and plastic surgery, where the attitude is often, "As long as it’s her choice, it’s fine."

This is just an online observation, as I’m not part of an organization and I’ve only recently started reading Marxist theory, so I admit I’m not an expert—I might even sound like the "liberal" I’m critiquing! But my concern is that these popular online opinions might reflect real-world attitudes among Marxists, too. It’s hard to dismiss this as purely an internet phenomenon when these views are shared by real people with real accounts, not bots.

I hesitated to post this because the obvious answer might be that these people’s Marxism isn’t authentic. As a beginner, I know it may sound presumptuous to question others but it feels off, especially since they apply Marxist thought consistently in other areas. it’s with women’s issues where the inconsistency arises.

So, is this just an online phenomenon, or do these responses reflect real-world Marxist views? How can those who criticize capitalism for commodifying everything defend 'choice' in women’s issues without questioning the structures that shape those choices.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/fundamentals-marxism-leninism.pdf

It was written during krushchovs time towards the end, but what ive read seems to be mostly okay

I was reading through Ernst Mandel’s Introduction to Capital Volume 2, where on page 31, and beyond, he states

In the Soviet Union and other countries where capitalism has been overthrown, Marx's reproduction schemas have bene widely used as instruments of 'socialist planning'. We do not deny that, by analogy, these schemas may be useful tools for studying specific problems of inter-department structure and dynamics in all kinds of society. But it has first to be clearly understood what is being done in such a case. For, we repeat, the schemas refer to commodity production and to dual flows of commodities and money incomes. To extend their use to societies which have transcended generalized commodity production, where the means of production are, in their essential mass, use-values distributed by the state (the planning authorities) according to a plan, rather than commodities sold on the basis of their 'value' - this leads to an accumu­ lation of paradoxes. of which the authors are generally not even conscious.

Did the USSR use the Marx reproductive schemas in a distorted way? If so, from what periods and what consequences do they have? The question was asked in r/communism 12 years ago, albeit without answer

A good example is provided by the late Maurice Dobb. In the fifties, he participated in a 'great debate' among Soviet and East European economists revolving around Stalin's so-called 'law of the priority development of the means of production under socialism' and the establishment of an optimum rate of growth for both departments. Forgetting that what was involved in Marx's reproduction schemas was value calculation of commodities, Dobb 'proved' that an increased rate of growth of consumer goods in the future was 'impossible' unless the

present rate of growth of department I was higher than that of depart­ ment I I . Now, a policy which sacrifices the consumption of four generations of workers and their families merely to increase the rate of growth of thatconsumptionstartingwith the fifth generation has nothing in common with an 'ideal socialist norm', and cannot be rationally motivated except in terms of purely political contingencies.

Here, Mandel seems to be caricaturing the prioritization of means of production over consumption, but he failed to account for the underdevelopment of Russia, instead buying into some form of material incentives; if the party is connected to the masses, they can ask them to withhold immediate rising standards.

When I searched for “social reproduction schema in USSR,” on google the AI quoted a chapter from a book on Marx and Keynes by Paul Mattick published in 1969; the chapter of the title being “Value and Socialism”

He is anti-Leninist, but discussed the use of the reproduction schema by the bolsheviks from early on,

When planning became a possibility for the Bolshevik state, it nevertheless found its theoretical starting-point in Marx, that is, in his idea of social production as a reproduction process. The planners thought Marx’s schemata of simple and enlarged reproduction, which Marx had developed from the physiocrat Francois Quesnay’s Tableau économique, and which he presents in the second volume of Capital, [6] applicable to all social formations and particularly useful in solving the problems of a socialist economy. It was on the basis of these schemata that Soviet economists constructed macro-economic models depicting the feasibility of a balanced planned economy

Which sounds a bit out of place given that according to Andrew Kliman, Lenin, in the Development of Capitalism in Russia, agreed that a corollary of the reproductive schemas is uneven growth in capitalism between department 1 and department 2. And then Mattick goes to say that Marx never meant to talk about equilibrium growth and that his model is for capitalism, etc.

More striking from Mattick’s work is a critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems in the USSR, especially his understanding of the Law of Value

What does it actually mean to take the law of value into account? According to Stalin it means, first of all, “to train business executives to count production magnitudes ... to improve methods of production, to lower production costs, to practice cost accounting, and to make enterprise pay.”[22] Although in Marx’s definition the labor theory of value refers exclusively to capitalist production and the concept of surplus-value to labor exploitation, in Stalin’s definition value theory need not be in contradiction with the requirements of socialism. All that is necessary is to discard “certain concepts taken from Marx’s Capital, such as ‘necessary labor’ and ‘surplus labor,’ ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus’ product, ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus’ labor time.

The confusion which surrounds the labor theory of value does not reflect the theoreticians’ muddled thinking alone; it results from their attempt to describe a non-socialist system of production and distribution as a socialist society. They do so because, by their definition, socialism is state-control over the means of production and centrally-planned determination of the national economy. It seems to them then that planning which fits the social needs and economic necessities, is planning in accordance with the law of value. Under capitalism, it is said, “the law of value acts as an elemental law of the market, inevitably linked with the destruction of productive forces, with crisis, with anarchy of production. Under socialism it acts as a law of the planned administration of the national economy, under the conditions of the development of an economy free from crises.”[26]

To say that the law of value underlies economic processes is to say that there is some definite regulation of social production de spite the lack of concern for, and the practical impossibility of, such regulation under private property relations. The “regulation” is brought about by way of market competition and crises. But if there is no private ownership of capital, no competition, no private accumulation; if production is centrally planned; if prices and wages are regulated, and the expansion of production consciously determined – then there cannot arise those results of competition and crises which manifest the operation of the law of value. To apply the law of value “consciously” in socialism could only mean to incorporate the effects of competition and crisis into the p fling mechanism – in other words, to re-institute the market and private property, which is obviously nonsense

It is perhaps for this reason that Stalin spoke of a law of value “strictly limited and placed within definite bounds,” i.e., one which fully operates only in the sphere of circulation confined to personal consumption, and which “influences” the sphere of production only because the latter cannot disregard the principle of profitability, even though this principle is modified by conscious decisions on the part of the planning authorities. But even though the “modified” law of value presumably affects production and regulates distribution, Stalin saw no social division between value and surplus-value, and none between necessary and surplus labor, because by definition the whole social product belongs now to all of society.

Forced industrialization by political means proceeded from government direction to direct government control and, in the process, created the conditions for a planned economic development. The plans reflected the general backwardness; they could not be any better than the conditions they tried to alter.

Essentially, it is saying that planned economy as it existed in the USSR was implicitly a stepping stone towards capitalism for all its capital accumulation in underdeveloped countries. The whole article is worth reading, especially the critique of USSR. What parts of the critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems relevant, which can be considered the fault of Mattick’s interpretation of Stalin’s text?

Since it was published in 1969, I’m not sure what period of the USSR he was referring to or that for him it was always this way ever since Lenin, and markedly under Stalin. However, I’m aware that Che Guevara himself made a similar critique of USSR in mid-1960s relying on capitalist relations/categories for its planning, concluding that it was moving towards capitalism at that moment.

The problem seems to be the definition of socialism itself, where Mattick views it as having abolished law of value completely, whereas Guevara believe the law of value still exists, but is trending towards 0.

We made this because Reddit's algorithm prioritises headlines and current events and doesn't allow for deeper, extended discussion - depending on how it goes for the first four or five times it'll be dropped or continued.

Suggestions for things you might want to comment here (this is a work in progress and we'll change this over time):

• Articles and quotes you want to see discussed
• 'Slow' events - long-term trends, org updates, things that didn't happen recently
• 'Fluff' posts that we usually discourage elsewhere - e.g "How are you feeling today?"
• Discussions continued from other posts once the original post gets buried
• Questions that are too advanced, complicated or obscure for r/communism101

Mods will sometimes sticky things they think are particularly important.

Normal subreddit rules apply!

[ Previous Bi-Weekly Discussion Threads may be found here https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3AWDT ]

I've seen decolonial marxism/communism mentioned in a discussion thread a few months ago but I'd be interested to see more thoughts on this trend.

I'll provide some of the quotes from Rick Tabenunaka and associated people (https://twitter.com/PostScarcityPod) which might be a good basis of discussion:

The salvageable aspect of Marxism is its analysis of what was at the time an emerging industrial economy in the euro-colonial world. However, Marx/Engels' social theories were based on european episteme of thought: race science and the racist "discipline" of anthropology. Lenin added an analysis of imperialism, but even his analysis is tainted by colonialist euro episteme(Hobson's framework for analysis of imperialism). European theorists lack the consciousness necessary to deal with the primary contradiction, european colonialism. Hence, Fanon.

...

USSR collapsed under the contradictions of Russian colonialism that Korenizatsiia didn't resolve. There will be no "proletarian state power" for settlers on turtle island, only Native and Black nations

...

No white "communist" theorist who has ever existed outweighs non-european revolutionary thinkers such as Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, or Lwazi Lushaba. White/europeans lack the sensibilities, cultural proclivities, and general consciousness to dispel their chauvinist colonizer delusions.

...

Marxism =/= all forms of communism. Marxism is communism imbued with european episteme, the "civilizing" mission, race science, the historically racist "discipline" of anthropology, notions of "progress/modernity."

In addition to these another point I have seen raised by proponents of decolonial marxism is the claim that the theories of European marxists are entirely (or at least mostly) superfluous outside of Europe since non-europeans "already know how to do collectivist governance" in the vein of the Inca and other pre-colonial polities.

Broadly it raises many points I am in agreement with regarding settler colonialism and the national question in the US, but also undermines/attacks aspects of Marxism from an angle which I feel is not totally correct but simultaneously one I am unable to provide a satisfying critique of.

The CPA, ACP, and CPA-ML, all self describe themself as ML parties.

The CPA generally accepts market socialism, and has been accused of being Labor shills, the ACP is internally undemocratic (so ive heard them been accused of) and do many soup kitchens, and the cpaml is an underground org mainly.

The ACP and CPA have past beef which lead to the ACP's creation, but the two generally cooperate with the cpaml (im unsure about each other).

What I dont know is whether these parties, all of which have their own CC, general programs, etc, are actually ML parties. Does/can the CPA change their stances, or is the party just an australian cpusa, a radical liberal org. Is the ACP just a quirky CPA? Is the cpaml actually doing anything, united and coherent?

I ask because there are many folks in ALL 3 that do good work. What is stopping these supposedly ML parties from merging? Stubborn individualism? Dogmatic sectarianism? Severe revisionism? Short sighted 'careerism'?

To me it feels like the cpa is stuck in social democracy trying to support AES, the acp is stuck doing charity since thats their signature thing that the cpa-acp beef centered around, and the cpaml is stuck being careful trying to protect its members.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxhU5FhATIc

I want to focus on organizing in the community right now and obviously education is a factor in that. What do you think it wiser/generally preferred, physical media or ebooks?

I’m generally a huge proponent of physical media since it can’t be lost in the way that digital can, but there’s also that: it can’t be lost in the way digital can. I feel like the acquisition/ownership of nonphysical media that could be viewed as questionable by the powers that be would be easier and smarter, since it can be torrented/downloaded from free PDFs and it can be easily disposed of.

From what I have gathered so far I realised that the capitalistic cycle (rise,plateu, fall, catastrophe) is sth that is doomed to repeat itself.

Imo the cycle works like this and is thus doomed to fail.

In capitalism the sole purpose of a company is growth. New markets, more sales, more money in the pockets of the Bourgeois. While the economy of a society is able to grow, to gather new markets, bigger spheres of influence, new consumers, new products to throw at the people and is undisrupted in a sense, libertarian policies are allowed to endure (at least in the imperialistic core, at the same time "these new markets" and "spheres of influence" are stomped by the foot of imperialism.

Now there is a point where no more growth is possible. There are no new markets to gain, at least not without open war against another strong power. There are no more new people to enslave. At least not profitable.

Now what is the best option to first broaden the imperialistic sphere of influence and second anwser the question "How could we still increase our productivity, how can we increase our profits without overflowing markets with already existing products?"

The anwser is war. How can such a war be started? Fascism. Fascism arises when a capitalistic state is weakened.

In this case-> Overproduction. Fascism is the answer to how to create a "stable" capitalistic state in unstable times and how can we justify war and war is the anwser to the need of rising productivity and profits.

After the next great war breaks out, million people are crushed, minorities killed, enslaved and robbed the winning imperialistic states can broaden their spheres of influences. The capital of the former states and the victims of the imperialistic winners gets concentrated into fewer and fewer Bourgeois.

The rebuilding of the economy controlled by fewer people. The ability to ascend to new markets and so on guarantee times of rising productivity and profit and the capitalistic hegemonoy is once again secured until overproduction, saturation of markets and expansion has once against reached its limits and it explodes once again.

Fascism is imperialism turned inwards.

I know that this analysis is formulated roughly and it is probably at least discusable but I want to know what you think.

I'm weighing up parties to join which operate in NYC. I haven't been able to find much third-party information about them.

.

Obviously, a lot of military shooters are typically propaganda and specially imperialist propaganda for the United States, such as call of duty battlefield and so on. But there are obviously some games out there that try and do more critique of America, such as spec ops the line.

And the way that halo is treated it really does feel like it’s trying to be sincere about its message of humanity and not trying to be propaganda but at the same time, I wouldn’t also be surprised if it was

Something so heavy in lore usually doesn’t tend to be able to be flexible enough for propaganda. Unless you’re (from an outsider perspective) Tom Clancy is presume.

If you are and have been looking for socialist/communist rap, give Dead Prez a listen, surely you wont be dissappinted. Been listening for 15 years now.

"I take a slug for the cause like Huey P."

"Bring the power back to the street, where the people live."

"Organize the wealth into a socialist economy. A way of life based off the common needs and all my comrades are ready, we just spreading the seed."

Any reccomendations???

Basically the title. Or did he expect life would get worse and worse for the workers in the capitalist countries? I'm asking because I couldn't find the answer on google.

Edit: I mean the western capitalist countries.