/r/communism101
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Communism: A term describing a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production. "Communism" can also describe the revolutionary movement to create such a society.
Socialism: An umbrella term used to describe social ownership of the means of production. Social ownership can include common ownership, state ownership or collective ownership. "Socialism" can also refer to an intermediate and transitional form of society between capitalism and communism featuring a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (sometimes referred to as "lower" or "the first phase of" communism).
Means of Production: An all-embracing term that describes every non-human material factor involved in the process of socially useful production.
Bourgeoisie: The capitalist class; the ruling class in capitalist society. The social class which owns the means of production and exploits hired labor. The buyers of labor power. This class is made up of a very small minority of the population.
Proletariat: The working class; the class of people in capitalist society who, deprived of any ownership of the means of production, must sell their labor power to the capitalists in order to survive. The exploited class; the producers of surplus value.
Exploitation: Exploitation is making use of some vulnerability in another person in order to use them to attain one’s own ends at their expense. Marxists specifically use the term to refer to the expropriation (theft) of the labor of a worker (via the extraction of surplus value) by the owners of the means of production. Capitalists make their profit from exploitation.
Dictatorship of the Proletariat: A state of proletarian rule where the working class organizes to democratically control the means of production, defend against bourgeois reaction, and create the material basis for a gradual transition to communism. "Dictatorship" in this sense does not mean rule by one individual; Marxists view any state as being under the "dictatorship" of a class. This term is the antithesis of the "Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie" that exists under capitalism where the minority class rules society.
State: The state, in Marxist terminology, is a mechanism for class rule. It is the primary instrument of political power in class society, consisting of organs of administration, and of force. A state of one kind or another will exist as long as social classes exist.
For more definitions see the Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism or the Marxist Internet Archive Encyclopedia. Thank you for visiting!
/r/communism101
Specifically regarding Official Sinn Fein. I've partially read up on the history of Official Sinn Fein, which saw itself as a Marxist-Leninist party and had the support of the USSR, and their role in The Troubles. They held an ''anti-sectarian'' position on the conflict, believing that republicans must reach out to the Protestant working class and organise them against capitalism; that didn't exactly work out however, the ''Protestant working class'' started joining death squads to terrorise Catholics and nationalists who felt like they were abandoned by the Officials as they basically gave up armed struggle in the early 70s, leading to more militant splinter groups to form, mainly Provisional Sinn Fein and the IRSP. Today, Official Sinn Fein exists as the Workers' Party of Ireland but they are completely irrelevant.
Their ''anti-Sectarian'' theory reminds of how parties like the CPUSA advocate for ''colourblind'' politics and to basically ignore white supremacism, hoping it disappears, not realising that there are class incentives for white Americans to oppose the end of white supremacism as a settler population. The Unionist/Protestant Ulster Scott population in Northern Ireland are basically settlers too, as they were sent by the British crown during the Ulster Plantation in the 17th century to seize land from the native-Irish.
I am wondering how best to deal with the legacy of settler-colonialism in Ireland today. The situation seems different from Palestine because, despite the partition, Ireland has become a semi-peripheral country in the EU that benefits from the superexploitation of the third-world. And even in Northern Ireland, the Catholic/Nationalist population benefit from first-world privileges too, but armed ''dissident'' groups still exist amongst these communists with an anti-imperialist orientation. There is also immigration which has lead to an ever-larger population of migrants from the third-world who have worse conditions than both native-Irish and Ulster Scots.
There's a popular study the CIA did where they found that the USSR ate the same amount of food as the USA.
Now, I've seen people say it was actually just a press report, the full study found that it was actually worse:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00313R000300140006-0.pdf
Any opinions? I've cited the study more times than I can count so I was interested to find this.
Share with me the aesthetics of communism in your country, what clothes, dances, songs, words, or turns of phrase were developed by communists in your homeland or that of your ancestors. I adore this stuff so go all out, pictures, attach videos if you like, or just describe them!
What are the best resources on the reactionary uprising in Hungary in 1956?
specifically in this country in the current time, does anyone know? I been folding the internet for answers but nothing yeat
Does anyone know if anyone has written anything about the structures and development of how communist parties are organised?
As in: What a Politburo and CC are, how they are formed, what the different departments so, what the overall science of organisation of a party is, and maybe most interestingly, how they form overtime.
Historical accounts as to how the RSDLP(b) or the Communist Party of China formed, developed and formalised their structures overtime are welcome too.
I posted this last month but the responses got deleted, so I'm posting again.
I'm reading the Foundations of Leninism and on pg 25 Stalin wrote:
The front of capital will be pierced where the chain of imperialism is weakest, for the proletarian revolution is the result of the breaking of the chain of the world imperialist front at its weakest link; and it may turn out that the country which has started the revolution, which has made a breach in the front of capital, is less developed in a capitalist sense than other, more developed, countries, which have, however, remained within the framework of capitalism.
Is there any recent analysis of this that I could read online?
Hello everyone
I had a question on what everybody thinks about tipping culture (particularly in the USA).
I’m currently a server at a chain restaurant and have been in the restaurant industry for four years.
I was scrolling through the tipping subreddit and how prevalent anti-tipping is becoming. One of the main points is that a customer should not be responsible for tipping the worker to compensate for the low wage they’re paid by their employer.
As a communist, I have never had a problem with tipping well as I’ve always empathized with my fellow worker, and think every person is deserving of a more livable wage. I have never had a problem with paying a little more, even in places that do to-go orders or like frozen yogurt places (which have been under fire for asking for tips, even by many servers). I just simply don’t mind! However, I do see the point in that anti-tipping subreddit. Workers DO need to unite and demand higher pay from their employers; employers should not be hoarding all of the profit. I understand how it shouldn’t be the responsibility of customers to pay service providers’ salaries.
My questions are: as a communist, how do you feel about tipping culture? Do you tip at restaurants? How much do you tip? Do you think that as a communist you shouldn’t mind helping others, or should you push them to organize against their bosses for higher pay by not tipping them?
I'm currently reading Towards a new socialism by Paul Cockshott, and he's brought up the theory that in order to rid the workplace of exploitation, instead of getting paid by value a worker would get to "purchase" one hour of someone else's labour for every hour of labour they perform. So if a box of cereal took 10 minutes to make an hours work would buy 6 boxes. I'm curious how this would work. If two people spend 4 hours together working on something is it worth four or eight hours? How could you buy a house when it takes a year to make?
I've seen people talk about "lack of class awareness" among queer and poc people and got curious if it's just a saying or if people's identity and culture really connect to communism (besides being oppressed in our world), and if yes then how.
Genuine question. Also not a us-centred question.
Edit: How would culture and identity be treated in a communist world?
I feel like most of the Marxists I see discussed on this subreddit actually came from reactionary nations and bourgeois academia, or at least they are the main ones spoken of. That makes sense in the cases of leading figures such as Stalin, Lenin and Mao, but whenever people discuss Marxist psychology or aesthetic theory, they are always discussing Lukacs or Adorno or Benjamin... where also are those theorists who were taught under the early soviet and Chinese education systems?
Edit: spelling.
What are some good readings for a Marxist view of decolonizing the America’s? Or some good resources of any type?
What advice would you give to someone who is interested in learning Marxist dialectics? (without large financial cost) What would you do, avoid, which things would you recommend reading, watching, ect...
When I was younger, I believed that capital was just a pile of money stored in a vault. Today, I know that Marx’s description is much more complex than that. I tried reading the first volume of Capital, but I gave up because I found the book quite difficult to understand. I don’t have any background in economic studies, but I think it’s important for me to at least understand what capital means, because I’ve been in discussions where I was asked this, and I didn’t know how to respond.
Hi comrades,
I'm asking if anyone knows if there are any organisations in countries like the Britain, Germany, France or anywhere else that are worth researching?
I feel extremely lost, and although I can spend time reading about theCPPh or CPI(Maoist), and trying to building support for their struggles, at the end of the day we need to be building parties in our own nations to succeed in making revolution.
The only organisation I can think of in recent years is the PCR-RCP in Camada, but sadly this has collapsed without any summation for us to draw lessons from.
Could comrades here point me the right direction? Or give advice on what a better question I ought be asking myself here, instead of dissolving into a puddle of self-indulgent Maoist angst.
I'm not terribly familiar with with the separatism of Catalonia or the Basque country but from my limited knowledge I'm not sure how they constitute separate nations from Spain. I know they're causes many communists support, with some of the largest and most active groups that have supported these causes being Marxist led, so I would like to know what the basis for these are and why they're causes championed by Marxists in those regions.
I have read on Marxist texts that capitalism finds its first origins in Europe, specifically the Low Countries and Northern Italy in the 15th/16th centuries before developing into the fully industrial capitalism of the United Kingdom. I was wondering why these places specifically and not somewhere else? Was it because they were the most advanced in terms of productive forces? If so, why? Many technological advancements came from outside Europe like in China, India, etc.
I wanna read more about this topic, any books/article suggestion would be great.
Thank you.
I use the following definition of speciesism from Google (Oxford Language): ‘view that humans are superior to all other species and therefore entitled to treat their representatives as they see fit’
If it's speciesism, but also if it's anti-speciesism, or even if it's nothing of these two: What implications does this have for animal and nature conservation endeavours under communism and the consumption of mass-produced animal products?
Looking to learn more about the emergence of the automobile industry and car culture (particularly in the US), its connection to the military industrial complex, and related themes like suburbanization, the fossil fuel industry, petrodollar hegemony, etc. Are there any good marxist sources on this stuff?
I'm reading through the first chapter of Capital Vol. 1, and I'm very confused about how to understand the quantity of total value that's generated by an individual producer during a given period of labor (e.g. an 8-hour day). The more I try to wrap my head around it the more the concepts get tangled in my head, so now I can't see the forest for the trees.
On one hand, the value generated by an individual producer could potentially be understood with the knowledge that each commodity is valued at the socially necessary labor-time needed to produce it. Let's say that the socially necessary labor-time required for the production of a single chair is 1 hour. Does this mean that the value generated by an individual chair producer on a given day is equal to the socially necessary labor-time required to make one chair (1 hour) multiplied by the number of chairs that producer actually ends up producing during that day? So for example, if the producer works for 8 concrete hours, but only manages to produce 6 chairs, will they have only done 6 hours of abstract labor during those 8 concrete hours (1 hour of SNLT × 6 actual chairs), thus generating 6 hours of value in the span of 8 real hours?
Or is it instead the case, assuming all the chairs end up being exchanged, that the 8 concrete hours of labor that the producer expends in a day automatically equates to 8 hours of abstract value-producing labor, such that the 8 hours of value generated is distributed among however many chairs that the producer happens to make in that day?
So I guess part of this question is about the nature of abstract labor-time, and in the ways in which it represents concrete labor-time in production.
Let me know if what I'm asking doesn't make sense and I'll do my best to clarify.
Thanks!
I understand that it was a major undertaking by the USSR, and at the time it was considered a major achievement. I also know it has it's critics (Che being one of them). Has anyone here read it? Would you consider it worth the time to read?
Honestly the term bonapartism is really confusing for me just because the transition from landowning-dictatorships to Bourgeois-dictatorships confuses me, and the French revolution, reign of the original Bonaparte, restoration of the bourbons, the citizen king, and then the 1848 revolution is a chain of events that confuses me with traditional class analysis.
But anyway, it feels like the two are fairly similar. An emphasis on class collaboration, autocratic dictatorial leaders put in place in the aftermath/prelude to revolutionary activity, and militarism. So is one just the original Marxist described term and the other a modern endonym or do they have extra, differing qualities?
I am a spanish reader but the spanish version was more confusing that the english version. Still, I'm struggling with some aspects of this passage (i added some indentation for my personal clarity, but it's a single paragraph)
Here's the passage:
"Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a whole, now distributes its various phases simultaneously over the different spheres of production.
In some spheres a change in the composition of capital occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple centralisation;
in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour power absorbed by it;
in others again, capital continues growing for a time on its given technical basis, and attracts additional labour power in proportion to its increase,
while at other times it undergoes organic change, and lessens its variable constituent;
in all spheres, the increase of the variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of labourers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and transitory production of surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of the repulsion of labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less real form of the more difficult absorption of the additional labouring population through the usual channels. ^([14])
With the magnitude of social capital already functioning, and the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale of production, and the mass of the labourers set in motion, with the development of the productiveness of their labour, with the greater breadth and fulness of all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of labourers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion; the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of spheres of production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now alternately.
The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. ^([15]) This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits and only in so far as man has not interfered with them."
Thank you!
Are there any good books/articles/videos on it, for beginners?
Asking about famous ones because details about them will likely be better known.
Had seen a video briefly talk about Lenin and Stalin, their similarities and differences on the basis of their material origins.
Wanted to know about it and also compare it with communism and major communist leaders in my country/state(India/Kerala)
Would it be too reductive or a waste of time to think about such stuff?
I want to learn more about the 2021 reforms and the trend of allowing more private enterprise in cuba. Why is this happening? Is Cuba just going to gradually liberalise more and more until they operate there economy like china? I'd like a book on this from a marxist perspective if possible. Thanks.
Bonjour je cherche un livre pour initier un enfant de 12 ans aux concepts et à l'histoire du communisme en France et ailleurs. Il est lecteur et amateur d'histoire.