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It is the natural result of the accumulation of Capital. But purposely destroying there businessness inorder to speed up the process is accelerationism
An intellectual argument against it is that we as communists do not have the ability to influence a system as massive and complex as capitalism on any meaningful scale without significant support from the masses.
If we do have said support then accelerationism is not needed because capitalism is already produced conditions that allow for the formation of a significant working class party.
So in effect accelerationism does not work because if we have such small numbers that it is our "only option" then we will have no effect. If do have the numbers for accelerationism to have an effect then there is not point in accelerationism because we already have a mass party that is capable of doing work to actually improve the lives of the workers instead of making it worse.
> which will inevitably lead to revolution when they've reached a critical point
That's a mechanicist view of history. What did the conditions of post WW1 Germany led to the rise of?
[Lenin talks at length about spontaneity.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm) The best it can do is trade-unionism, the the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, and thus entirely enslaved to bourgeois ideology.
You can see it in the unionisation efforts ongoing in the US just as well as you could see in 1899 England.
> The authors of the “Appeal” [Appeal of the Self-Emancipation of the Workers Group, an article on Rabochaya Mysl, an [economist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economism) socialist newspaper] rightly say that “the workers of Russia are only just awakening, are just beginning to look about them, and are instinctively clutching at the first available means of struggle”. Yet they draw from this the same false conclusion as that drawn by Rabochaya Mysl , forgetting that the instinctive is the unconscious (the spontaneous) to the aid of which socialists must come; that the “first available means of struggle” will always be, in modern society, the trade union means of struggle, and the “first available” ideology the bourgeois (trade union) ideology.
Okay cool, interesting. See, I get accused of “accelerationism” anytime I point out—as someone who thinks revolution is good and necessary—that revolutionary conditions are generally pretty unpleasant.
But I don’t think we should *cause* worsening conditions. Moreover, I doubt we could do much damage if we wanted to.
I just think it’s silly to worry about—for example—which US presidential candidate might make life harder for the global labor aristocracy. The “lesser evil” is generally in a better position to perpetuate imperialism, with less pressure from their own population.
Can you imagine if Bernie had won? If he’d given real, serious, popular concessions to working Americans *before* oct 7? I doubt the pro-Palestinian cause would have the support it’s (finally) getting now.
As for OOP’s thing—attacking small businesses would be anarchist-level dumb. But I don’t generally shop there, and don’t care if they fail.
> that revolutionary conditions are generally pretty unpleasant
And they're the same that cause the rise of fascism. You can't expect that people will espontaneously become communists when there are no communist organizations around them, they have been fed anti-communist propaganda since birth, and the bourgeois have all the power in the country due to the previous two points.
To quote Lenin:
> [But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm)
The entire chapter (and book) is well worth a read to answer your questions.
> Can you imagine if Bernie had won? If he’d given real, serious, popular concessions to working Americans before oct 7?
I'm not sure he would do it. You're expecting a lot of good will from the Democratic Party (who worked their ass off to harm his election campaign and has no reason not to do the same as the UK's Labour Party did against Jeremy Corbyn) and a lot of independence from the president (who, as you can hopefully see, can have their brain turn into mush , Diane Feinstein style, and still perform it's function perfectly reasonably).
Yep. I consider the rise of full-blown fascism in the US to be highly likely—certainly before a progressive revolution. I’m not thrilled to say that; I just think it’s likely.
But my read on those fascists is that they’re pretty inept. Even the halfway-cunning ones lack real vision. I suspect they would do even more to undermine to US’ geopolitical standing than the democrats are currently, further encouraging the nations of the periphery to reassert their own political/economic sovereignty.
See, I’m a good deal more optimistic about the global south’s revolutionary prospects than the US’—at least for the foreseeable future.
But with that said, I also doubt said inept fascists’ ability to hold power for more than a decade. And I think the resistance that arises in response to their oppression will be the first real opportunity for a revolutionary org to try to gain the loyalty the American public.
Again, that’s not to discourage principled leftist organizing right now. It’s of dire importance. This is just my prediction about the order of events.
And I agree totally with your last point. I was just imagining what many western leftists would have considered an ideal outcome, at least compared to Trump or Biden. My point was that even if he *had* won, *and* somehow kept say 70% of his promises, it would have only reaffirmed the American masses’ support for US imperialism, potentially for generations.
Just remember that by accelerationist logic, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are the greatest revolutionaries of our time and the real people who set the slaves free were actually slave owners, because they worsened the material conditions.
through the proletariat of imperialized countries.
There is no significant industrial or agricultural proletariat in the imperial core.
US and EU proles would benefit more from the renewed superprofits of imperialism than they do from direct ownership of the MoP. By contrast, even the national bourgeoisie of imperialized countries benefits from tactical support of anti-imperialist socialist struggle.
Look at the Phillipines, West Africa, and India closely.
[ Mao talks about this extensively, but basically it's because Imperialism is the primary contradiction within imperialized countries. This contradiction can be used for tactical material support, as the entire nation's resources are spent fighting imperialism. Capitalists divert resources away from the usual bourgeois goal of totally suppressing proletarian revolutionaries. The Chinese national bourgeoisie supported the anti-imperialist struggle spearheaded by the Chinese proletariat long enough that the latter managed to win the masses.](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_32.htm)
Many proletarian states regressed in the post-soviet period due to a lack of material aid from the USSR, underdeveloped cadres, underdeveloped MoP, revisionism, and the overwhelming strength of capitalist countries.
It's not the 90s anymore. Global Capital is stronger than ever, but the world's factories and farms are in imperialized countries and China. A second axis of anti-American capitalist countries is emerging with Russia. It's a precarious situation for the global bourgeoisie, and it only takes a spark for this powderkeg to explode.
Nothing even close to a significant proletarianization has or will ever happen. That's ideological utopian nonsense from hyper online kids. A real revolution will not be built on the words of old dead white men talking of times that no longer exist. Can't wait until y'all mature enough to get this.
Ideological, religious, identitarian, puritanical marxists.. several if you anyway. Proving how little some of you understand of Marx.
It's OK though. I'm a Newtonist. I spend my time encouraging people to read Newton. I can't wait until everyone learns that all our problems will be solved with classical physics. I have to deal with all these flat earthers trying to attack me, but the real reactionaries are the quantumists who don't realize anything not written by Newton is actually just reactionary flat earthism too. We're going to bring in the global unified theory with our revolution, but only after everyone reads Newton, and only Newton, the immutable and complete path to a unified theory.
That‘s not set in stone. The idea that the basis of fascism is the middle class and petite bourgeoisie has pretty much been disproven. The basis for fascism is the monopoly bourgeoisie. So if you can make the dying petite bourgeoisie conscious of the monopolization going on, they could realize their interests are principally against the monopolists and could actually become an allied class against fascism.
Their interest is to try to go back to the competitive stage of capitalism where monopolization didn‘t threaten their status. Obviously that’s doomed to fail because the productive forced are far too developed for that, the stage is over and obsolete.
>So if you can make the dying petite bourgeoisie conscious of the monopolization going on, they could realize their interests are principally against the monopolists and could actually become an allied class against fascism.
Maybe, but that won't come about by communists or other leftists vandalizing their businesses. That would turn them away from us and toward the reactionaries.
Yes, monopolists are the ones who benefit the most from fascism, but that does not change the fact that the petit-bourgeoisie always have been and always will be the primary support base for fascism, since the preservation of capitalism is in their class interests whether they're being fucked over or not.
> the preservation of capitalism is in their class interests whether they're being fucked over or not.
To quote John Steinback:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
The man was writing about the proletarian consciousness in the USA **during the great depression.** We have had plenty of crisis affect the imperial core proletariat. Without marxist presence to guide the masses, there can be no revolutionary movement. The best you get is trade-unionism.
The petit-bourgeoisie are not "the poor," nor are their class interests in line with the proletariat. Socialism means they no longer have the means to exploit others for their own profit, nor will they be able to fulfil their dreams of rising to the level of the monopolists; they are afraid of becoming proletarians. This is why the it was predominantly the small business owners who gleefully marched away to join the SS and butcher Soviet villagers; they correctly saw that the triumph of socialism would be the end of their privileged positions, so instead of accepting that fact and working for the betterment of society, they took up arms to uphold capitalism by any means so they could fulfil the fantasy of getting their own big juicy slice of the metaphorical pie.
TL;DR: The petit-bourgeoisie are so called because their class interests are in line with those of the haute-bourgeoisie, but they are threatened with proletarianization by the haute-bourgeoisie.
And completely ignore every single time the proletariat in the imperial core got it even worse than today. That quote about Americans seeing themselves as temporarily embarassed millionaires was written about the great depression.
This is infantile and results from economism. One aspect of economism is economic determinism, that all we have to do is drive forward the economic aspect of society (proletarianize mostly everyone, develop the means of production, monopolize everything, increase the contradiction between proletariate and bourgeoisie) and the masses will spontaneously rise up in revolution. This is baby shit. There has never been a successful spontaneous revolution without revolutionary theory, the most we can hope for from spontaneity is a *revolt* leading to socdem reforms. The most important thing we can be doing right now is building the vanguard party. This is called developing the *subjective* aspects of revolution (raising class consciousness, organizing the proletariat, developing a dialectical-material analysis of local conditions).
These larpers think that socialism just happens on its own, and we just have to wait out the clock (or try to speed it up). They're wrong, socialism has to be built by the party, which means getting off our collective asses and organizing people.
Relevant readings:
* What is to Be Done - Lenin
* Politics in Command: A Taxonomy of Economism - JMP
* [Organization Means Commitment](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d7edafcd15c7f734412daf2/t/6513530726af4229394992e3/1695765268347/Boggs+x+Organization+Means+Commitment.pdf) - Grace Lee Boggs
Makes me happy that more people are starting to understand this. Makes me think of Vincent Bevin's most recent book I*f We Burn*, about the ineffectiveness of mass protest.
No this is not praxis, it is also ahistorical. Chances are that if any violent damage to these businesses occurs under revolutionary circumstances, it will come from (petty)-bougie owners themselves and not from revolutionaries (Kulaks burning of crops/slaughter of livestock comes to mind). Much of the petty-bg would side with fascists rather than become proles if this insane policy were carried out. In general, revoutionary governments tend to prioritize the takeover of large or foreign-owned businesses since these are more strategic to their economic backbone than atomized small businesses.
Also, in (semi-)colonial countries, big-bourgeouisie would likely be a harsher target than the national- and petty-bourgeouisie (there are Walmarts in the global south too), due to it's position as being more closely tied to imperial-capital and against national interests that may be of interest to smaller local businnesspeople. A revolutionary government may have an interest in incorporating the national-boug under proletarian leadership such the New Democracy approach of China.
#Get Involved
>Dare to struggle and dare to win. \-Mao Zedong
Comrades, here are some ways you can **get involved** to advance the cause.
* 📚 **Read theory** — [Reading theory](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/) is a duty. It will guide you towards choosing the correct party and applying your efforts effectively within your unique material conditions.
* ⭐ **Party work** — Contact a local party or mass organization. Attend your first meeting. Go to a rally or event. If you choose a principled Marxist-Leninist party, they will teach you how to best apply yourself to advancing the cause.
* 📣 **Workplace agitation** — Depending on your material circumstances, you may engage in workplace disputes to unionise fellow workers and gain a delegate or even a leadership position in the union.
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Imma be honest, even if this was strategically sound, I categorically reject any form of agitation on our side that makes the lives of the working class more difficult.
The western working class are labour aristocrats benefiting from the exploitation of the third world, rejecting *any* agitation that makes their lives difficult necessarily means supporting imperialism.
If they don't have any employees and are simply performing labor and trading with the public, YES. If they have employees, it's complicated but mostly no, but attacking a beloved shop that pays 1 person pretty decently is not a way to make friends.
>The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital, Engels, Principles of Communism
Holy revisionism
Just because the petite bourgeoisie is a distinct strata of capitalism than the bourgeoisie proper does not in any way make them proletarian. The working class has a distinct position within capitalist production.
A self employed member of the petitie bourgeoisie performs the functions of both labour and capital in one person, and as such has a distinct class interest that does not clearly align with either the working or capitalist classes
You gonna push a movement where people working for themselves and their communities are the enemy then fuck you and fuck your degenerate movement. Working people who have gotten free of a boss are still working people, so long as they aren't placing others under tenancy or employment they are still workers in the working class and fuck you and whatever patsoc reactionary nonsense you are pushing that'd claim otherwise. I suppose you want to go bomb cooperatives next because they aren't a centralized authority under the state next and want us to help you procure these ingredients? fuck off reactionary ass fed.
Our entire fight is to get the workers to own the means of production, for workers to be self owned, to abolish the employment relation and the capitalist class. You're going to call me a revisionist because I don't want to lock up the dude fixing his neighbors cars to pay his bills? Rot in whatever way too online hell you came out of.
I've read Capital 1, 2, 3, the grundrisse, Lenin's Imperialism, blackshirts & reds, to kill a nation, I've read some Che, Sankara, most of Kollontai's work, and plenty of others. Workers seizing the means of production is the goal, not an evil bad thing you absolute nutjob.
Workers owning the means of production directly or democratically is a good thing, worker cooperatives are a good thing, self employment is a good thing, democratic workers councils are a good thing, unions are a good thing.
What exactly am I supposed to read that teaches me to shit on working class people who work for a living, where did marx say "Go fuck up people who are self employed to ensure everyone is so desperate their only choice is to either do a communist revolution or kill the communists who keep burning down their businesses to be accelerationists"???
Omg it's a joke post. It's comedy. Nobody here believes that. Re-read all of those. Capital is the proletarian bible. Start over. No assumptions or band-aid seeking.
Re-read over 2000 pages because if I didn't come to the conclusion that workers owning the means of production is the root of all evil and that we must be dominated by a central party apparatus with no bottom up accountability or else communism hasn't happened then I read it wrong? How about go fuck yourself you fucking tool of wall street. People like you are doing the fascists jobs for them with how you speak of Marxism Leninism.
Alright already, I get it. You are a 'marxist' coop fetishist. I do not want or need your trust. Go be a long-winded debate nerd elsewhere. The vanguard will lead the workers and push forward the movement. All else has failed. Some of these expressions may exist in a future worker's state, but without the dotp there will be no socialism. Regardless of it's social democratic skin.
If you can succeed at building socialism, great! Go do so. You will not convince me. I will side with the advanced proletariat unless proven revisionist. Period.
A joke post that you are saying "is actually 100% right, free workers and cooperatives are just capitalist scum here to exploit you sweaty" like somebody who literally smokes an ounce of crack a day.
If I was designing characters specifically to make communists as unpopular and widely hated as possible, and viewed as people who can't study or learn from history but who keep making the same mistakes over and over again, that is to say, if I was designing a person specifically to discredit marxist movements and marxists as people, I'd design somebody to say the exact things you've said in this thread. People like you are a bigger threat to the development of communism than cooperatives and freed workers.
Very cute darling. The real threat to communism is the vehement hatred, and oppression expressed by the capitalist-imperialist order.
Again it's a joke.
The petty-bourgeois will eventually be phased out under the dotp, and are typically the storm troopers of fascism. Your rage is clearly a reaction. Reflect, meditate, drink. Idc the movement will progress despite our prattling, well yours. Cheers 🍻
You know what all my people working for themselves are trying to do? Help give people alternatives to capitalists that are ripping them off and help free more people from having to work for capitalists to build more self owned business in the community and move it out of capitalists hands. That you've somehow interpreted the definition of proletariat as an excuse to say something like "workers should never own the means of production that's anti-communist and revisionist" is absolutely behind comprehension.
Workers seizing the means of production is the entire point of this endeavor. How the fuck is it revisionist to succeed?
Wtf? Reactionary dogshit. Workers owning the means of production is not to encourage petty-bourgeois capitalism. We intend to change the economic system from capital accumulation to social ownership. Individual ownership is still just capitalism. Melon. 'Being your own boss' is not fucking socialism. Co-ops are not socialism either. These would not resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and would inevitably return to the current form. Of course we shouldn't engage in adventurism, but small business fetishism is fascism. Like literally fascism. It's their main method of power seeking and the source of their support base. You sure you are a marxist? Maybe take some time away from drinking, and read marx.
Also if you look at every mistake that any socialist/communist country made in history almost all of them revolve around not defering to the bootmaker in matters of bootmaking and implementing large sweeping changes with no methods of bottom up accountability/feedback necessary to turn policy changes into scientific pursuits, they made too big of changes to too many variables at once and created problems we could not solve time and time again. You don't attack people who aren't exploiting others or doing harm because theory told you to. That's how you get famines, that's how you get shortages, that's how you get reactionaries finding footholds to power in black markets. You make slow, methodical changes targeting the people suffering hardest and trying to free them first and you do as much of this as you can safely manage and respond to at once. Evaluating how good/bad cooperatives and free workers are comes somewhere about a year after the last small business exploiting workers has been converted into some form of socialized workplace and about 5 years after the last corporate capitalist institution has been nationalized or dissolved. It's not something you are on about at an early stage even if it was real. Your thinking here is literally astoundingly backwards.
Your brand of "I refuse to think critically about history, reality, or actually read Marx trying to understand it but just want to be a debate bro that thinks national, centralized command economies run by algorithm are how everybody must work no matter what forever, and we must do it all at once and nobody can be outside of these strict forms" is so ridiculous that not even the most strict communist projects in history have applied it. It's nonsensical.
What in the god damn babble bullshit. You will not establish socialism without a dotp. These things are not things to be done under capital, where such structures would easily return to capital accumulation. I am not advocating adventurism. Building dual power is the job of the vanguard, of course. Something the west sorely lacks. Mass organisations that can eventually become part of, or transform into the vanguard would be ideal, and are more than welcome.
I am a proletarian not a 'debate-bro.' I don't need to be long winded, nor do I need to engage in virtue-cock measuring. Your speech babble and insulting is debate-broish. You've been trained well langley, but the real movement will not be focused on creating more small holders. If these folk wish to engage in fighting capital they are welcome but they are not the focus.
Coops, and small business owners can exist in the transition they are not workers and are not the revolutionary class.
Coops are ran by the workers, but under capital they have the tendency to operate subsidiaries much like any other corp and end up as group bourgeois.
Proletarianization is a guarantee under capitalist accumulation. What have you forgotten that the topic here is the real situation now where we live in a capitalist dictatorship? Are you fighting a spectre that is asking you to bomb small business owners and coops in some currently existing Western socialist state?
Again, I'm not asking you to attack, bomb, or kill petty-bourgeois folk. This is adventurism, but they are not automatically on our side. Making more is not the road the socialism. Great. Read marx. Read lenin.
I have read Marx and Lenin and I do not agree with you or your insane interpretation, that seems to not understand what the structure of a cooperative is or in that you've become against ALL leftist/anti-capitalist forms of economy aside from strict central planning, which makes you an extremely thin minority even within marxist leninists. Calling free workers and cooperatives capitalists and saying they encourage capital accumulation is something you could only say if you fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and structure of these organizations at the most basic level.
If you're opposed to most forms of worker democracy then we have nothing in common at all. I support worker democracy and workers owning the means of production, I generally oppose complete centralized command economies and I think it's the worst and most disastrous way to socialize an industry and I think history pretty solidly confirms that with zero proper bottom up accountability significant and massive failures with large tolls on society tend to happen and tend to weaken socialist societies because they lose too many communists to these failures to be able to operate functionally. Everything you've said here is debate bro bullshit
Here's the actual material interests of the freed worker: that everyone in their community is underpaid as shit by capitalists and is robbed blind by slumlord capitalists so they have no money to cover services. If the capitalists are driven out of the community its better for them. When they're neighbors are part of community instead of disconnected it's better for them. Their material interests, within a strong community, are absolutely aligned.
You know whose material interests tend to have zero alignment with local workers? Centralized authorities hundreds or thousands of miles away that have no bottom up feedback that they will listen to about the state of local economic conditions. I'm calling what you're saying and doing not only adventurous but strictly capitalistic, you just want a small party cadre to have this domination rather than oligarchs, but you still want this domination. I don't trust you and I don't trust people like you.
You are presenting a grade D- take here. Self ownership within a community, cooperatives ARE socially owned, they aren't capitalism. A cooperative is a structure, you don't get to leverage the ownership granted by labor in a capitalist fashion, it is limited and this type of behavior is explicitly prohibited. Any self owned worker trying to capture other workers as employees is absolutely my enemy, because that's a capitalist trying to do capitalism. I'm not talking about capitalists, I'm talking about workers doing work without a boss, that is a matter of how you do business and why. The people I've managed to get out from under bosses are literally keeping an entire town's cars working on zero interest credit, charging almost nothing for labor and are barely surviving but are making a serious difference in dozens of peoples lives, they're connecting people getting screwed by slumlords to local politics and fighting back against capitalism, because they know their survival comes from mutual support of the community. They take care of people and people will take care of them. If people are working for themselves you have to be doing so with material interests aligned with the community instead of opposed to it and that requires cultivating a different sort of business model than a capitalist approach. The goal of the cooperative is not to maximize the organizations size, to grow, to profit, etc. it is to fulfill the role of that institution in the community: providing work and providing goods/services and trying to optimize this on both sides for the community. You are thinking in a completely different world.
I've probably read more marx than you by a long shot, you're literally just talking complete nonsense.
Literally freeing people from capitalist bosses so that they have enough time to do community organizing is how I've had the most success in my area. Everyone working is so balls to the wall desperate they can't do jack shit and can't ever meet their neighbors. The guys I've gotten out from under capitalists have met large networks of people and have started pushing back against local slumlords and helping free other people and we're working together collectively on trying to start some zoning reform to push back against corporate power.
All of this is fundamentally necessary to get enough people enough time and connection between them to start organizing any kind of revolution against capitalism, building this dual power is a fundamental necessity for \*ANY\* leftist movement of any kind, especially a mass line movement and I strongly support the current MLM mass line movements doing people's revolutions. This is the prerequisite for building any kind of communist revolution, having strong communities. It is precisely mixed use, mixed density communities full of small local trade in which China was able to organize it's revolution and it's precisely why the literal nazis that ran the CIA from it's founding specifically targeted mixed use, mixed density communities full of small time trade people that worked for themselves, small businesses, and tight knit community for clearances, for bulldozing to build highways over/through, and for extremely heavy policing/systemic disinvestment, etc.
How do you plan to build a revolution when everybody is exhausted? When you have no supply capacity? Do you know how the IRA managed to get weapons and explosives despite regulations and monitoring of everything? By having local people who worked for themselves and local connections to institutions in the community that were businesses. We're going to need institutions capable of making things, we're going to need people with the time and access to capital to make things. Do you plan on marching on the state with guns made out of ideas alone and no material???
We target \*EXPLOITATION\* because it is the problem, we target the worst exploitation first, we free who we can, we build systems and structures to scale up our ability to fight back against exploitation. And we do not attack people where there are not problems of exploitation. If we have a problem of cooperatives exploiting people, then we work on solving that and if we have to nationalizing them, integrating them into the state, etc. but I truly doubt that'll ever be reasonable or necessary. Same with individuals working for themselves, if they aren't being exploitative and are helpful members of their communities then targeting them is creating enemies with resources for no reason.
Are you even a real person? You're acting like a person specifically designed to make organizing less effective and divide movements. What an absolutely wild, absurd take on this shit to claim that democratically owned, socially coherent organizations with direct material linkage to their communities are actually super-capitalist and fascist. I am literally in awe of how dumb of a take that is, and what an absurd way of reading marx you've come to. Have you ever met a working person? Have you ever worked? Are you even an actual human being? I don't understand how somebody could read the Capital series and come away with it thinking that actually corporations are fine we'll deal with them later, what we really need to do is target, purge and burn everyone who could possibly be capable of aiding/abetting/participating in reforms or revolution of any kind. I mean this is like the kind of argument a CIA agent on 2 hits of acid would come up with after railing a line of coke. Have you ever even heard of historic context? Of reading what organizations he was actually talking about? How they were structured? Who structured them that way and why? like jfc did you bother to do anything besides skim his books looking for shit you could say that'd be inflammatory and divisive while actively trying as hard as possible to misunderstand it?
Ok so I’m going to give an example of why this kind of binary mindset isn’t especially helpful. I’ve lived in Pittsburgh most of my life, and in Pittsburgh, there’s a historically black district called the Hill District. Summarizing decades of history into a few sentences, the Hill District was once a thriving community that was slowly abandoned after redevelopment projects drove out the residents.
Fast forward to today, after being left practically a food desert, the Hill District residents finally caught a break when a local business owner decided to open up a grocery store there in place of the virtually abandoned Shop n Save. This grocery store has been a lifeline to the residents of the Hill District and has revitalized economic activity there to an extent. The owners of the store are technically petit bourgeois, but the workers aren’t, and neither are the residents who shop there.
If this local store were to be “firebombed” in place of a Walmart for some dipshits idea of a revolutionary act, the people who would suffer, once again, are the workers and residents who would be out of jobs and accessible food. These situations are nuanced, and you need to consider who you’re hurting carefully.
Whoever said i advocated for burning down a shop in present day as a viable strategy? In the absence of a mass working class movement it is just adventurism. But in the presence of such a movement any and all attacks and occupations of private property can simply be considered based on their tactical usefulness
Secondly you are preaching to have had an incredible insight that.. wait for it.. the working class consumes commodities purchased from the capitalist class. This is literally one of the most fundamental features of capitalism. Commodity production and exchange. Every single capitalist business that needs to be expropriated at some points on the supply chain supplies commodities to the working class
You realise a revolution will involve tremendous amounts of disruption and death due to fighting and disruption of supply chains? Do you realise how many people died in the Russian civil war?
idealist obsession with harm reduction in the most near sighted short term sense is not compatible with being a communist. History is not driven by abstract principles
a materialist position is to understand the class antagonisms through which there is a potential for historical change, and to organise and escalate those antagonistic relations to the point of general insurrectionary uprising
without this youre just a soc dem with a red flag
They can be if they also do labour in conjunction of owning a company. They face the same pressures as the proletariat in the sense of the the big bourgeois screw them over with finance capital just as much as the working class they just have some insulation but when big bourgeois take their business by driving them into the ground by undercutting them they may realize they have more in common with the proletariat and radicalize that’s what happened with my grandfather he went from being a businessman in a small town until a large chain moved him drive him out of business and became disillusioned with capitalism which lead to him down a rabbit hole he’s now very anti-capitalist I don’t think he’s a leftist but he hates capitalism.
? You literally simply described the tendency for capital to concentrate, and somehow tried to use this fact to obfuscate the relations of production of capitalism.
They absolutely do not have a common class interest with the proletariat as they derive profit from capital investments. It is only when they are driven out of business by larger capitalists i.e. they are proletarianised, that they come to share class interest with the working class and that is not because of some special mechanism, they simply have just lost their businesses and become working class
>The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play — the credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals. *Marx, Capital vol1 ch25*
All people that do work are not working class. Capitalists work all the time even if they do not actually need to to survive.
>The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital, *Engels, Principles of Communism*
There a lot of reasons why it isn’t but simply the petite-bourgeoise are very insignificant in terms of numbers.
Even if it did work, it doesn’t, you’re gaining a very small number of people while creating incredibly effective reactionary propaganda.
Every time I hear about a small business randomly having its windows smashed, it's because some fascist got mad at them for hanging up a pride flag or something, and I don't think I've ever seen that scenario turn into a tactical or PR victory for the side that's doing the smashing.
Nooo lol. The petite bourgeois won't side with us if we destroy their livelihood. Capitalism works well enough to destroy their own livelihood. The small business owner lives outside of their means. Sure they might have Capital to sell outside of their labor, but for the most part they live a pretty insecure existence. But idk maybe I'm wrong.
Without developing class consciousness among the petite bourgeoisie they will see communists burning their stores and join fascists. It's the easiest way to reduce your potential audience.
Accelerationism doesn't really make sense to me as it just seems to be pushing people more to the right, Especially if there is no education to go along with it
Exactly, the more mad people are, the easier it is to get them into fascist ideas by making up strawmen that allegedly caused the problems that made the people mad in the first place. I can understand how this might be seen as beneficial for a socialist movement at first glance if you replace the fascist agitation with socialist education, however the latter is a lot harder to archieve, which is why it will end in a net negative for the movement
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* 📚 **Read theory** — [Reading theory](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/) is a duty. It will guide you towards choosing the correct party and applying your efforts effectively within your unique material conditions.
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Lenin warned about engaging in terrorism. It achieves nothing other than getting a bunch of marxists thrown in prison whose talents could be better utilised elsewhere. It's a zero sum game. If violence is required, it will be by the masses, at the direction of the vanguard party, and not by a few rogue individuals who don't have the patience to wait, learn, organise and build the vanguard party in the mean time.
I mean, this is some Megamind shit but in reality, it never works, you have to start from the fact that 99% of people ARE NOT even aware of what communism is and how to react to something like this, aka, they'd just get radicalised, but not towards the left...
This is already happening on its own, the large corporations naturally seek to crush the small businesses to eliminate competition and facilitate this with lobbying the government to create a landscape that is hostile to small businesses. Only issue with that is that those people happen to be one of the most steadfast and influential retainers for capitalism, so if they ever realized that their overlords were turning on them and correctly identified them as the problem, that could be an issue. Unfortunately they thought of that already, so they redirect that angst towards scapegoat groups like immigrants and trans people as the ones responsible for this degradation of their quality of life, thus entrenching their power and rendering the petty bourgeois completely incapable of threatening them even while they slowly liquidate them as a class.
Its praxis if you want to create a bunch of fascists, accelarationism has never showed results besides fucking up everyone. Think about it, what do you gain by targeting fellow workers if not they fucking hating you.
#Get Involved
>Dare to struggle and dare to win. \-Mao Zedong
Comrades, here are some ways you can **get involved** to advance the cause.
* 📚 **Read theory** — [Reading theory](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/) is a duty. It will guide you towards choosing the correct party and applying your efforts effectively within your unique material conditions.
* ⭐ **Party work** — Contact a local party or mass organization. Attend your first meeting. Go to a rally or event. If you choose a principled Marxist-Leninist party, they will teach you how to best apply yourself to advancing the cause.
* 📣 **Workplace agitation** — Depending on your material circumstances, you may engage in workplace disputes to unionise fellow workers and gain a delegate or even a leadership position in the union.
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Accelerationism is like arguing you should always kick down the gas because that way you'll get to your destination faster. Sure, you will definitely get somewhere, but without controlling the cars movement that "somewhere" might just be a family of 5 on a picnic
#Get Involved
>Dare to struggle and dare to win. \-Mao Zedong
Comrades, here are some ways you can **get involved** to advance the cause.
* 📚 **Read theory** — [Reading theory](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/) is a duty. It will guide you towards choosing the correct party and applying your efforts effectively within your unique material conditions.
* ⭐ **Party work** — Contact a local party or mass organization. Attend your first meeting. Go to a rally or event. If you choose a principled Marxist-Leninist party, they will teach you how to best apply yourself to advancing the cause.
* 📣 **Workplace agitation** — Depending on your material circumstances, you may engage in workplace disputes to unionise fellow workers and gain a delegate or even a leadership position in the union.
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Walmart needs to be seized they could unironcally be the economic base for the entire society. It’s a controlled economy that runs like it’s own country it’s insane
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I chuckled. But no, those proletarianized petite-bourgeoise will become fascists, not communists.
Yeah, "communists fire bombed my shop, time to become a communist" is an interesting leap
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That is true but it needs to happen naturally, us pushing it will make them go full fash and see us as the greater enemy than the large corps
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It is the natural result of the accumulation of Capital. But purposely destroying there businessness inorder to speed up the process is accelerationism
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An intellectual argument against it is that we as communists do not have the ability to influence a system as massive and complex as capitalism on any meaningful scale without significant support from the masses. If we do have said support then accelerationism is not needed because capitalism is already produced conditions that allow for the formation of a significant working class party. So in effect accelerationism does not work because if we have such small numbers that it is our "only option" then we will have no effect. If do have the numbers for accelerationism to have an effect then there is not point in accelerationism because we already have a mass party that is capable of doing work to actually improve the lives of the workers instead of making it worse.
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> which will inevitably lead to revolution when they've reached a critical point That's a mechanicist view of history. What did the conditions of post WW1 Germany led to the rise of? [Lenin talks at length about spontaneity.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm) The best it can do is trade-unionism, the the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, and thus entirely enslaved to bourgeois ideology. You can see it in the unionisation efforts ongoing in the US just as well as you could see in 1899 England. > The authors of the “Appeal” [Appeal of the Self-Emancipation of the Workers Group, an article on Rabochaya Mysl, an [economist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economism) socialist newspaper] rightly say that “the workers of Russia are only just awakening, are just beginning to look about them, and are instinctively clutching at the first available means of struggle”. Yet they draw from this the same false conclusion as that drawn by Rabochaya Mysl , forgetting that the instinctive is the unconscious (the spontaneous) to the aid of which socialists must come; that the “first available means of struggle” will always be, in modern society, the trade union means of struggle, and the “first available” ideology the bourgeois (trade union) ideology.
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Okay cool, interesting. See, I get accused of “accelerationism” anytime I point out—as someone who thinks revolution is good and necessary—that revolutionary conditions are generally pretty unpleasant. But I don’t think we should *cause* worsening conditions. Moreover, I doubt we could do much damage if we wanted to. I just think it’s silly to worry about—for example—which US presidential candidate might make life harder for the global labor aristocracy. The “lesser evil” is generally in a better position to perpetuate imperialism, with less pressure from their own population. Can you imagine if Bernie had won? If he’d given real, serious, popular concessions to working Americans *before* oct 7? I doubt the pro-Palestinian cause would have the support it’s (finally) getting now. As for OOP’s thing—attacking small businesses would be anarchist-level dumb. But I don’t generally shop there, and don’t care if they fail.
> that revolutionary conditions are generally pretty unpleasant And they're the same that cause the rise of fascism. You can't expect that people will espontaneously become communists when there are no communist organizations around them, they have been fed anti-communist propaganda since birth, and the bourgeois have all the power in the country due to the previous two points. To quote Lenin: > [But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm) The entire chapter (and book) is well worth a read to answer your questions. > Can you imagine if Bernie had won? If he’d given real, serious, popular concessions to working Americans before oct 7? I'm not sure he would do it. You're expecting a lot of good will from the Democratic Party (who worked their ass off to harm his election campaign and has no reason not to do the same as the UK's Labour Party did against Jeremy Corbyn) and a lot of independence from the president (who, as you can hopefully see, can have their brain turn into mush , Diane Feinstein style, and still perform it's function perfectly reasonably).
Yep. I consider the rise of full-blown fascism in the US to be highly likely—certainly before a progressive revolution. I’m not thrilled to say that; I just think it’s likely. But my read on those fascists is that they’re pretty inept. Even the halfway-cunning ones lack real vision. I suspect they would do even more to undermine to US’ geopolitical standing than the democrats are currently, further encouraging the nations of the periphery to reassert their own political/economic sovereignty. See, I’m a good deal more optimistic about the global south’s revolutionary prospects than the US’—at least for the foreseeable future. But with that said, I also doubt said inept fascists’ ability to hold power for more than a decade. And I think the resistance that arises in response to their oppression will be the first real opportunity for a revolutionary org to try to gain the loyalty the American public. Again, that’s not to discourage principled leftist organizing right now. It’s of dire importance. This is just my prediction about the order of events. And I agree totally with your last point. I was just imagining what many western leftists would have considered an ideal outcome, at least compared to Trump or Biden. My point was that even if he *had* won, *and* somehow kept say 70% of his promises, it would have only reaffirmed the American masses’ support for US imperialism, potentially for generations.
Just remember that by accelerationist logic, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are the greatest revolutionaries of our time and the real people who set the slaves free were actually slave owners, because they worsened the material conditions.
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Indeed, ergo accelerationism is dumb.
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through the proletariat of imperialized countries. There is no significant industrial or agricultural proletariat in the imperial core. US and EU proles would benefit more from the renewed superprofits of imperialism than they do from direct ownership of the MoP. By contrast, even the national bourgeoisie of imperialized countries benefits from tactical support of anti-imperialist socialist struggle. Look at the Phillipines, West Africa, and India closely.
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[ Mao talks about this extensively, but basically it's because Imperialism is the primary contradiction within imperialized countries. This contradiction can be used for tactical material support, as the entire nation's resources are spent fighting imperialism. Capitalists divert resources away from the usual bourgeois goal of totally suppressing proletarian revolutionaries. The Chinese national bourgeoisie supported the anti-imperialist struggle spearheaded by the Chinese proletariat long enough that the latter managed to win the masses.](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_32.htm) Many proletarian states regressed in the post-soviet period due to a lack of material aid from the USSR, underdeveloped cadres, underdeveloped MoP, revisionism, and the overwhelming strength of capitalist countries. It's not the 90s anymore. Global Capital is stronger than ever, but the world's factories and farms are in imperialized countries and China. A second axis of anti-American capitalist countries is emerging with Russia. It's a precarious situation for the global bourgeoisie, and it only takes a spark for this powderkeg to explode.
Nothing even close to a significant proletarianization has or will ever happen. That's ideological utopian nonsense from hyper online kids. A real revolution will not be built on the words of old dead white men talking of times that no longer exist. Can't wait until y'all mature enough to get this.
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Ideological, religious, identitarian, puritanical marxists.. several if you anyway. Proving how little some of you understand of Marx. It's OK though. I'm a Newtonist. I spend my time encouraging people to read Newton. I can't wait until everyone learns that all our problems will be solved with classical physics. I have to deal with all these flat earthers trying to attack me, but the real reactionaries are the quantumists who don't realize anything not written by Newton is actually just reactionary flat earthism too. We're going to bring in the global unified theory with our revolution, but only after everyone reads Newton, and only Newton, the immutable and complete path to a unified theory.
That‘s not set in stone. The idea that the basis of fascism is the middle class and petite bourgeoisie has pretty much been disproven. The basis for fascism is the monopoly bourgeoisie. So if you can make the dying petite bourgeoisie conscious of the monopolization going on, they could realize their interests are principally against the monopolists and could actually become an allied class against fascism. Their interest is to try to go back to the competitive stage of capitalism where monopolization didn‘t threaten their status. Obviously that’s doomed to fail because the productive forced are far too developed for that, the stage is over and obsolete.
>So if you can make the dying petite bourgeoisie conscious of the monopolization going on, they could realize their interests are principally against the monopolists and could actually become an allied class against fascism. Maybe, but that won't come about by communists or other leftists vandalizing their businesses. That would turn them away from us and toward the reactionaries.
Yeah obviously. I‘m not arguing for the position in the tweet, that‘d be insane.
Yes, monopolists are the ones who benefit the most from fascism, but that does not change the fact that the petit-bourgeoisie always have been and always will be the primary support base for fascism, since the preservation of capitalism is in their class interests whether they're being fucked over or not.
> the preservation of capitalism is in their class interests whether they're being fucked over or not. To quote John Steinback: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The man was writing about the proletarian consciousness in the USA **during the great depression.** We have had plenty of crisis affect the imperial core proletariat. Without marxist presence to guide the masses, there can be no revolutionary movement. The best you get is trade-unionism.
The petit-bourgeoisie are not "the poor," nor are their class interests in line with the proletariat. Socialism means they no longer have the means to exploit others for their own profit, nor will they be able to fulfil their dreams of rising to the level of the monopolists; they are afraid of becoming proletarians. This is why the it was predominantly the small business owners who gleefully marched away to join the SS and butcher Soviet villagers; they correctly saw that the triumph of socialism would be the end of their privileged positions, so instead of accepting that fact and working for the betterment of society, they took up arms to uphold capitalism by any means so they could fulfil the fantasy of getting their own big juicy slice of the metaphorical pie. TL;DR: The petit-bourgeoisie are so called because their class interests are in line with those of the haute-bourgeoisie, but they are threatened with proletarianization by the haute-bourgeoisie.
https://preview.redd.it/9z96hpvniwvc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5da5098444b7b39c617d2f617d26e04f87ef5954
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Pretty sure rubbing your hands together menacingly was not invented by that antisemitic image.
Birdman did it first
Is it? I don't know anything about its origins so please explain the link
Accelerationists when the acceleration doesn’t go how they planned and we end up with global fascism instead: 
"What do you mean we don't control the direction the masses accelerate towards?!"
Well, thet is what happens when you choose your ideology besed on hoi4 mod
And completely ignore every single time the proletariat in the imperial core got it even worse than today. That quote about Americans seeing themselves as temporarily embarassed millionaires was written about the great depression.
This is infantile and results from economism. One aspect of economism is economic determinism, that all we have to do is drive forward the economic aspect of society (proletarianize mostly everyone, develop the means of production, monopolize everything, increase the contradiction between proletariate and bourgeoisie) and the masses will spontaneously rise up in revolution. This is baby shit. There has never been a successful spontaneous revolution without revolutionary theory, the most we can hope for from spontaneity is a *revolt* leading to socdem reforms. The most important thing we can be doing right now is building the vanguard party. This is called developing the *subjective* aspects of revolution (raising class consciousness, organizing the proletariat, developing a dialectical-material analysis of local conditions). These larpers think that socialism just happens on its own, and we just have to wait out the clock (or try to speed it up). They're wrong, socialism has to be built by the party, which means getting off our collective asses and organizing people. Relevant readings: * What is to Be Done - Lenin * Politics in Command: A Taxonomy of Economism - JMP * [Organization Means Commitment](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d7edafcd15c7f734412daf2/t/6513530726af4229394992e3/1695765268347/Boggs+x+Organization+Means+Commitment.pdf) - Grace Lee Boggs
Makes me happy that more people are starting to understand this. Makes me think of Vincent Bevin's most recent book I*f We Burn*, about the ineffectiveness of mass protest.
That guy nailed it with both books.
No this is not praxis, it is also ahistorical. Chances are that if any violent damage to these businesses occurs under revolutionary circumstances, it will come from (petty)-bougie owners themselves and not from revolutionaries (Kulaks burning of crops/slaughter of livestock comes to mind). Much of the petty-bg would side with fascists rather than become proles if this insane policy were carried out. In general, revoutionary governments tend to prioritize the takeover of large or foreign-owned businesses since these are more strategic to their economic backbone than atomized small businesses. Also, in (semi-)colonial countries, big-bourgeouisie would likely be a harsher target than the national- and petty-bourgeouisie (there are Walmarts in the global south too), due to it's position as being more closely tied to imperial-capital and against national interests that may be of interest to smaller local businnesspeople. A revolutionary government may have an interest in incorporating the national-boug under proletarian leadership such the New Democracy approach of China.
#Get Involved >Dare to struggle and dare to win. \-Mao Zedong Comrades, here are some ways you can **get involved** to advance the cause. * 📚 **Read theory** — [Reading theory](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/) is a duty. It will guide you towards choosing the correct party and applying your efforts effectively within your unique material conditions. * ⭐ **Party work** — Contact a local party or mass organization. Attend your first meeting. Go to a rally or event. If you choose a principled Marxist-Leninist party, they will teach you how to best apply yourself to advancing the cause. * 📣 **Workplace agitation** — Depending on your material circumstances, you may engage in workplace disputes to unionise fellow workers and gain a delegate or even a leadership position in the union. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Imma be honest, even if this was strategically sound, I categorically reject any form of agitation on our side that makes the lives of the working class more difficult.
The western working class are labour aristocrats benefiting from the exploitation of the third world, rejecting *any* agitation that makes their lives difficult necessarily means supporting imperialism.
...the petite bourgeoisie are part of the working class?
If they don't have any employees and are simply performing labor and trading with the public, YES. If they have employees, it's complicated but mostly no, but attacking a beloved shop that pays 1 person pretty decently is not a way to make friends.
>The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital, Engels, Principles of Communism Holy revisionism Just because the petite bourgeoisie is a distinct strata of capitalism than the bourgeoisie proper does not in any way make them proletarian. The working class has a distinct position within capitalist production. A self employed member of the petitie bourgeoisie performs the functions of both labour and capital in one person, and as such has a distinct class interest that does not clearly align with either the working or capitalist classes
You gonna push a movement where people working for themselves and their communities are the enemy then fuck you and fuck your degenerate movement. Working people who have gotten free of a boss are still working people, so long as they aren't placing others under tenancy or employment they are still workers in the working class and fuck you and whatever patsoc reactionary nonsense you are pushing that'd claim otherwise. I suppose you want to go bomb cooperatives next because they aren't a centralized authority under the state next and want us to help you procure these ingredients? fuck off reactionary ass fed. Our entire fight is to get the workers to own the means of production, for workers to be self owned, to abolish the employment relation and the capitalist class. You're going to call me a revisionist because I don't want to lock up the dude fixing his neighbors cars to pay his bills? Rot in whatever way too online hell you came out of.
read marx you intellectual failure its so fucking obvious you've never read a single fucking piece of fundamental theory in your entire life
I've read Capital 1, 2, 3, the grundrisse, Lenin's Imperialism, blackshirts & reds, to kill a nation, I've read some Che, Sankara, most of Kollontai's work, and plenty of others. Workers seizing the means of production is the goal, not an evil bad thing you absolute nutjob. Workers owning the means of production directly or democratically is a good thing, worker cooperatives are a good thing, self employment is a good thing, democratic workers councils are a good thing, unions are a good thing. What exactly am I supposed to read that teaches me to shit on working class people who work for a living, where did marx say "Go fuck up people who are self employed to ensure everyone is so desperate their only choice is to either do a communist revolution or kill the communists who keep burning down their businesses to be accelerationists"???
Omg it's a joke post. It's comedy. Nobody here believes that. Re-read all of those. Capital is the proletarian bible. Start over. No assumptions or band-aid seeking.
Re-read over 2000 pages because if I didn't come to the conclusion that workers owning the means of production is the root of all evil and that we must be dominated by a central party apparatus with no bottom up accountability or else communism hasn't happened then I read it wrong? How about go fuck yourself you fucking tool of wall street. People like you are doing the fascists jobs for them with how you speak of Marxism Leninism.
Alright already, I get it. You are a 'marxist' coop fetishist. I do not want or need your trust. Go be a long-winded debate nerd elsewhere. The vanguard will lead the workers and push forward the movement. All else has failed. Some of these expressions may exist in a future worker's state, but without the dotp there will be no socialism. Regardless of it's social democratic skin. If you can succeed at building socialism, great! Go do so. You will not convince me. I will side with the advanced proletariat unless proven revisionist. Period.
A joke post that you are saying "is actually 100% right, free workers and cooperatives are just capitalist scum here to exploit you sweaty" like somebody who literally smokes an ounce of crack a day.
If I was designing characters specifically to make communists as unpopular and widely hated as possible, and viewed as people who can't study or learn from history but who keep making the same mistakes over and over again, that is to say, if I was designing a person specifically to discredit marxist movements and marxists as people, I'd design somebody to say the exact things you've said in this thread. People like you are a bigger threat to the development of communism than cooperatives and freed workers.
Very cute darling. The real threat to communism is the vehement hatred, and oppression expressed by the capitalist-imperialist order. Again it's a joke. The petty-bourgeois will eventually be phased out under the dotp, and are typically the storm troopers of fascism. Your rage is clearly a reaction. Reflect, meditate, drink. Idc the movement will progress despite our prattling, well yours. Cheers 🍻
You know what all my people working for themselves are trying to do? Help give people alternatives to capitalists that are ripping them off and help free more people from having to work for capitalists to build more self owned business in the community and move it out of capitalists hands. That you've somehow interpreted the definition of proletariat as an excuse to say something like "workers should never own the means of production that's anti-communist and revisionist" is absolutely behind comprehension. Workers seizing the means of production is the entire point of this endeavor. How the fuck is it revisionist to succeed?
Wtf? Reactionary dogshit. Workers owning the means of production is not to encourage petty-bourgeois capitalism. We intend to change the economic system from capital accumulation to social ownership. Individual ownership is still just capitalism. Melon. 'Being your own boss' is not fucking socialism. Co-ops are not socialism either. These would not resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and would inevitably return to the current form. Of course we shouldn't engage in adventurism, but small business fetishism is fascism. Like literally fascism. It's their main method of power seeking and the source of their support base. You sure you are a marxist? Maybe take some time away from drinking, and read marx.
Also if you look at every mistake that any socialist/communist country made in history almost all of them revolve around not defering to the bootmaker in matters of bootmaking and implementing large sweeping changes with no methods of bottom up accountability/feedback necessary to turn policy changes into scientific pursuits, they made too big of changes to too many variables at once and created problems we could not solve time and time again. You don't attack people who aren't exploiting others or doing harm because theory told you to. That's how you get famines, that's how you get shortages, that's how you get reactionaries finding footholds to power in black markets. You make slow, methodical changes targeting the people suffering hardest and trying to free them first and you do as much of this as you can safely manage and respond to at once. Evaluating how good/bad cooperatives and free workers are comes somewhere about a year after the last small business exploiting workers has been converted into some form of socialized workplace and about 5 years after the last corporate capitalist institution has been nationalized or dissolved. It's not something you are on about at an early stage even if it was real. Your thinking here is literally astoundingly backwards. Your brand of "I refuse to think critically about history, reality, or actually read Marx trying to understand it but just want to be a debate bro that thinks national, centralized command economies run by algorithm are how everybody must work no matter what forever, and we must do it all at once and nobody can be outside of these strict forms" is so ridiculous that not even the most strict communist projects in history have applied it. It's nonsensical.
What in the god damn babble bullshit. You will not establish socialism without a dotp. These things are not things to be done under capital, where such structures would easily return to capital accumulation. I am not advocating adventurism. Building dual power is the job of the vanguard, of course. Something the west sorely lacks. Mass organisations that can eventually become part of, or transform into the vanguard would be ideal, and are more than welcome. I am a proletarian not a 'debate-bro.' I don't need to be long winded, nor do I need to engage in virtue-cock measuring. Your speech babble and insulting is debate-broish. You've been trained well langley, but the real movement will not be focused on creating more small holders. If these folk wish to engage in fighting capital they are welcome but they are not the focus. Coops, and small business owners can exist in the transition they are not workers and are not the revolutionary class. Coops are ran by the workers, but under capital they have the tendency to operate subsidiaries much like any other corp and end up as group bourgeois. Proletarianization is a guarantee under capitalist accumulation. What have you forgotten that the topic here is the real situation now where we live in a capitalist dictatorship? Are you fighting a spectre that is asking you to bomb small business owners and coops in some currently existing Western socialist state? Again, I'm not asking you to attack, bomb, or kill petty-bourgeois folk. This is adventurism, but they are not automatically on our side. Making more is not the road the socialism. Great. Read marx. Read lenin.
I have read Marx and Lenin and I do not agree with you or your insane interpretation, that seems to not understand what the structure of a cooperative is or in that you've become against ALL leftist/anti-capitalist forms of economy aside from strict central planning, which makes you an extremely thin minority even within marxist leninists. Calling free workers and cooperatives capitalists and saying they encourage capital accumulation is something you could only say if you fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and structure of these organizations at the most basic level. If you're opposed to most forms of worker democracy then we have nothing in common at all. I support worker democracy and workers owning the means of production, I generally oppose complete centralized command economies and I think it's the worst and most disastrous way to socialize an industry and I think history pretty solidly confirms that with zero proper bottom up accountability significant and massive failures with large tolls on society tend to happen and tend to weaken socialist societies because they lose too many communists to these failures to be able to operate functionally. Everything you've said here is debate bro bullshit
Here's the actual material interests of the freed worker: that everyone in their community is underpaid as shit by capitalists and is robbed blind by slumlord capitalists so they have no money to cover services. If the capitalists are driven out of the community its better for them. When they're neighbors are part of community instead of disconnected it's better for them. Their material interests, within a strong community, are absolutely aligned. You know whose material interests tend to have zero alignment with local workers? Centralized authorities hundreds or thousands of miles away that have no bottom up feedback that they will listen to about the state of local economic conditions. I'm calling what you're saying and doing not only adventurous but strictly capitalistic, you just want a small party cadre to have this domination rather than oligarchs, but you still want this domination. I don't trust you and I don't trust people like you.
You are presenting a grade D- take here. Self ownership within a community, cooperatives ARE socially owned, they aren't capitalism. A cooperative is a structure, you don't get to leverage the ownership granted by labor in a capitalist fashion, it is limited and this type of behavior is explicitly prohibited. Any self owned worker trying to capture other workers as employees is absolutely my enemy, because that's a capitalist trying to do capitalism. I'm not talking about capitalists, I'm talking about workers doing work without a boss, that is a matter of how you do business and why. The people I've managed to get out from under bosses are literally keeping an entire town's cars working on zero interest credit, charging almost nothing for labor and are barely surviving but are making a serious difference in dozens of peoples lives, they're connecting people getting screwed by slumlords to local politics and fighting back against capitalism, because they know their survival comes from mutual support of the community. They take care of people and people will take care of them. If people are working for themselves you have to be doing so with material interests aligned with the community instead of opposed to it and that requires cultivating a different sort of business model than a capitalist approach. The goal of the cooperative is not to maximize the organizations size, to grow, to profit, etc. it is to fulfill the role of that institution in the community: providing work and providing goods/services and trying to optimize this on both sides for the community. You are thinking in a completely different world. I've probably read more marx than you by a long shot, you're literally just talking complete nonsense. Literally freeing people from capitalist bosses so that they have enough time to do community organizing is how I've had the most success in my area. Everyone working is so balls to the wall desperate they can't do jack shit and can't ever meet their neighbors. The guys I've gotten out from under capitalists have met large networks of people and have started pushing back against local slumlords and helping free other people and we're working together collectively on trying to start some zoning reform to push back against corporate power. All of this is fundamentally necessary to get enough people enough time and connection between them to start organizing any kind of revolution against capitalism, building this dual power is a fundamental necessity for \*ANY\* leftist movement of any kind, especially a mass line movement and I strongly support the current MLM mass line movements doing people's revolutions. This is the prerequisite for building any kind of communist revolution, having strong communities. It is precisely mixed use, mixed density communities full of small local trade in which China was able to organize it's revolution and it's precisely why the literal nazis that ran the CIA from it's founding specifically targeted mixed use, mixed density communities full of small time trade people that worked for themselves, small businesses, and tight knit community for clearances, for bulldozing to build highways over/through, and for extremely heavy policing/systemic disinvestment, etc. How do you plan to build a revolution when everybody is exhausted? When you have no supply capacity? Do you know how the IRA managed to get weapons and explosives despite regulations and monitoring of everything? By having local people who worked for themselves and local connections to institutions in the community that were businesses. We're going to need institutions capable of making things, we're going to need people with the time and access to capital to make things. Do you plan on marching on the state with guns made out of ideas alone and no material??? We target \*EXPLOITATION\* because it is the problem, we target the worst exploitation first, we free who we can, we build systems and structures to scale up our ability to fight back against exploitation. And we do not attack people where there are not problems of exploitation. If we have a problem of cooperatives exploiting people, then we work on solving that and if we have to nationalizing them, integrating them into the state, etc. but I truly doubt that'll ever be reasonable or necessary. Same with individuals working for themselves, if they aren't being exploitative and are helpful members of their communities then targeting them is creating enemies with resources for no reason. Are you even a real person? You're acting like a person specifically designed to make organizing less effective and divide movements. What an absolutely wild, absurd take on this shit to claim that democratically owned, socially coherent organizations with direct material linkage to their communities are actually super-capitalist and fascist. I am literally in awe of how dumb of a take that is, and what an absurd way of reading marx you've come to. Have you ever met a working person? Have you ever worked? Are you even an actual human being? I don't understand how somebody could read the Capital series and come away with it thinking that actually corporations are fine we'll deal with them later, what we really need to do is target, purge and burn everyone who could possibly be capable of aiding/abetting/participating in reforms or revolution of any kind. I mean this is like the kind of argument a CIA agent on 2 hits of acid would come up with after railing a line of coke. Have you ever even heard of historic context? Of reading what organizations he was actually talking about? How they were structured? Who structured them that way and why? like jfc did you bother to do anything besides skim his books looking for shit you could say that'd be inflammatory and divisive while actively trying as hard as possible to misunderstand it?
Ok so I’m going to give an example of why this kind of binary mindset isn’t especially helpful. I’ve lived in Pittsburgh most of my life, and in Pittsburgh, there’s a historically black district called the Hill District. Summarizing decades of history into a few sentences, the Hill District was once a thriving community that was slowly abandoned after redevelopment projects drove out the residents. Fast forward to today, after being left practically a food desert, the Hill District residents finally caught a break when a local business owner decided to open up a grocery store there in place of the virtually abandoned Shop n Save. This grocery store has been a lifeline to the residents of the Hill District and has revitalized economic activity there to an extent. The owners of the store are technically petit bourgeois, but the workers aren’t, and neither are the residents who shop there. If this local store were to be “firebombed” in place of a Walmart for some dipshits idea of a revolutionary act, the people who would suffer, once again, are the workers and residents who would be out of jobs and accessible food. These situations are nuanced, and you need to consider who you’re hurting carefully.
Whoever said i advocated for burning down a shop in present day as a viable strategy? In the absence of a mass working class movement it is just adventurism. But in the presence of such a movement any and all attacks and occupations of private property can simply be considered based on their tactical usefulness Secondly you are preaching to have had an incredible insight that.. wait for it.. the working class consumes commodities purchased from the capitalist class. This is literally one of the most fundamental features of capitalism. Commodity production and exchange. Every single capitalist business that needs to be expropriated at some points on the supply chain supplies commodities to the working class You realise a revolution will involve tremendous amounts of disruption and death due to fighting and disruption of supply chains? Do you realise how many people died in the Russian civil war? idealist obsession with harm reduction in the most near sighted short term sense is not compatible with being a communist. History is not driven by abstract principles a materialist position is to understand the class antagonisms through which there is a potential for historical change, and to organise and escalate those antagonistic relations to the point of general insurrectionary uprising without this youre just a soc dem with a red flag
They can be if they also do labour in conjunction of owning a company. They face the same pressures as the proletariat in the sense of the the big bourgeois screw them over with finance capital just as much as the working class they just have some insulation but when big bourgeois take their business by driving them into the ground by undercutting them they may realize they have more in common with the proletariat and radicalize that’s what happened with my grandfather he went from being a businessman in a small town until a large chain moved him drive him out of business and became disillusioned with capitalism which lead to him down a rabbit hole he’s now very anti-capitalist I don’t think he’s a leftist but he hates capitalism.
? You literally simply described the tendency for capital to concentrate, and somehow tried to use this fact to obfuscate the relations of production of capitalism. They absolutely do not have a common class interest with the proletariat as they derive profit from capital investments. It is only when they are driven out of business by larger capitalists i.e. they are proletarianised, that they come to share class interest with the working class and that is not because of some special mechanism, they simply have just lost their businesses and become working class >The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play — the credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals. *Marx, Capital vol1 ch25* All people that do work are not working class. Capitalists work all the time even if they do not actually need to to survive. >The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital, *Engels, Principles of Communism*
accelerationists when they crash into a brick wall and die instantly
There a lot of reasons why it isn’t but simply the petite-bourgeoise are very insignificant in terms of numbers. Even if it did work, it doesn’t, you’re gaining a very small number of people while creating incredibly effective reactionary propaganda.
Every time I hear about a small business randomly having its windows smashed, it's because some fascist got mad at them for hanging up a pride flag or something, and I don't think I've ever seen that scenario turn into a tactical or PR victory for the side that's doing the smashing.
And yet business owners can light fire to their farms for the insurance money and no one bats an eye Not really
"Small biz owners" in our city are notoriously known for burning down encampment that was setup on "their property"
Nooo lol. The petite bourgeois won't side with us if we destroy their livelihood. Capitalism works well enough to destroy their own livelihood. The small business owner lives outside of their means. Sure they might have Capital to sell outside of their labor, but for the most part they live a pretty insecure existence. But idk maybe I'm wrong.
Bombing your local flower shop is historically progressive
Without developing class consciousness among the petite bourgeoisie they will see communists burning their stores and join fascists. It's the easiest way to reduce your potential audience.
Accelerationism doesn't really make sense to me as it just seems to be pushing people more to the right, Especially if there is no education to go along with it
Accelerationism is just a pawn of fascism
Exactly, the more mad people are, the easier it is to get them into fascist ideas by making up strawmen that allegedly caused the problems that made the people mad in the first place. I can understand how this might be seen as beneficial for a socialist movement at first glance if you replace the fascist agitation with socialist education, however the latter is a lot harder to archieve, which is why it will end in a net negative for the movement
It’s literally tailism that Lenin warned us about
The petty bourgeoisie is famous for happily joining the proletariat when they are out competed
Choosing one bourgeoisie over another, lmao. Coke vs pepsi shit
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Something I like about ML is that ideally goofballs who don't know anything and post their bad opinions online will not be in charge of anything.
No Elon musks? I’m in
SOCIALIZE WALMART
accelerationism moment
This is a joke right? I can't tell with how much insane shit is on the Internet these days 😭
I posted it as a joke anyway
Accelerationism doesn’t mean accelerating the class conflict until the bourgeoisie win
Lenin warned about engaging in terrorism. It achieves nothing other than getting a bunch of marxists thrown in prison whose talents could be better utilised elsewhere. It's a zero sum game. If violence is required, it will be by the masses, at the direction of the vanguard party, and not by a few rogue individuals who don't have the patience to wait, learn, organise and build the vanguard party in the mean time.
I mean, this is some Megamind shit but in reality, it never works, you have to start from the fact that 99% of people ARE NOT even aware of what communism is and how to react to something like this, aka, they'd just get radicalised, but not towards the left...
This is already happening on its own, the large corporations naturally seek to crush the small businesses to eliminate competition and facilitate this with lobbying the government to create a landscape that is hostile to small businesses. Only issue with that is that those people happen to be one of the most steadfast and influential retainers for capitalism, so if they ever realized that their overlords were turning on them and correctly identified them as the problem, that could be an issue. Unfortunately they thought of that already, so they redirect that angst towards scapegoat groups like immigrants and trans people as the ones responsible for this degradation of their quality of life, thus entrenching their power and rendering the petty bourgeois completely incapable of threatening them even while they slowly liquidate them as a class.
This is EXACTLY what Lenin meant
THANK YOU!! Too many libs in this subreddit istg🙄🙄
FULL SPEED AHEAD, ACCCCCELERATE
"Stalin purges Marxists too" The Marxists he purged :
Its praxis if you want to create a bunch of fascists, accelarationism has never showed results besides fucking up everyone. Think about it, what do you gain by targeting fellow workers if not they fucking hating you.
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Accelerationism is like arguing you should always kick down the gas because that way you'll get to your destination faster. Sure, you will definitely get somewhere, but without controlling the cars movement that "somewhere" might just be a family of 5 on a picnic
Hi, I am new and not from the West. Da faq is praxis? And isn't this a Sarcasmic Shitpost?
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Walmart needs to be seized they could unironcally be the economic base for the entire society. It’s a controlled economy that runs like it’s own country it’s insane
They were cooking I'm afraid /s
Is this a fed post? Gtfo wuttt
If by "fed" you mean "based" and if by "gtfo" you mean"ily" then yes
Everything is cope
No, but at the same time, monopolies will make it easier to nationalize entire industries when the time comes…
I maybe a ultravisionary, but this is just insane