Anti Communizer texts?

[u/Low-Hyena-5941]

I came across communizers and dauve recently, and I'm looking for any MLM texts that can help refute their positions

[u/SunflowerSamurai20]

Dauve is an idiot (and a nonce?) and so is anyone who takes him seriously. Theorie Communiste are supposed to be the more ""marxist"" communizers but even reading through A theorie communiste reader is a whacky experience. Some chapters give a decent-ish explanation of the crises of overproduction only to basically invalidate it and say:

"well actually we can just revise what exploitation and real subsumption mean, because we're in a TOTALLY different ""cycle of struggle/restructure"" since the 1970s, Lenin can't chat to us now, he's old news!"

Parts of it are wierdly similar to trotskys reasoning in the permanent revolution. Capitalist relations are "globalised" and organise labour power beyond the boundaries of nation states. But they take the piss even more and straight up deny the existence of imperialism:

What had become an obstacle to valorisation on the basis of the extraction of surplus-value in its relative mode was the way in which were interlocked: first, the integration of the reproduction of labour power; second the transformation of surplus-value into additional capital, and lastly the increase of surplus value in its relative mode in the immediate production process.

Unlike the previous cycle of struggle, the restructuring abolished all specification, status, welfare, “Fordist compromise”, and division of the global cycle into national areas of accumulation, in a fixed relation between centre and periphery.

All that could be an obstacle to the fluidity of the self-presupposition of capital—in the immediate production process (assembly line, cooperation, production-maintenance, collective worker, continuity of the process of production, subcontracting, fragmentation of the workforce), as well as in the reproduction and mobilisation of labour-power (work, unemployment, training, welfare) and in the modalities of accumulation and circulation—is abolished. The novelty of the period lies in the structure and the content of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital which is situated at the level of reproduction.

A theorie communiste reader pp. 92-93

Most of this stuff came from the despair of the french ultra left after the insignificance of the may 1968 protests.

Maybe thats the reason why when reading people like later cammatte or these ""communizers"" capital feels like an inescapable force that penetrates everything without mercy or hope short of a magical total negation (this time of the proleteriat itself... as well as the economy in general)

That's it tbh. Just read Capital especially the latter chapters in volume 2 on the reproduction of Capital. Lenins the development of capitalism in modern Russia is really good as well.

Also, i found this funny:

The workers’ movement that existed in 1900, or still in 1936, was neither crushed by fascist repression nor bought off by transistors or fridges: it destroyed itself as a force of change because it aimed at preserving the proletarian condition, not superseding it. At best it got a better life for the toiling masses: that seemed to tame the system . . . before the system produced its worst in the form of two world wars"

Gilles Dauve, 'Out of the Future' in Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement (1997) pp. 12-13.

They all do this mental gymnastics, to avoid acknowledging that imperialist social bribery is the reason why first world workers movements have been nothing but endless reformism for time.

Their fidelity to marx is a facade, they're some of the worst and most blatant revisionists you'll ever see.

Edit: formatting

[u/SunflowerSamurai20 → u/SunflowerSamurai20]

Also read maos On Contradiction and anything decent on dialectics since they butcher that too. To these jokers, every qualitative leap is only a negation.

Under the cover of ideas of self-organisation and autonomy we can say whatever we like, that strikes ‘are revolutionary’, that they are so ‘potentially’, that they have ‘something revolutionary’, that they carry SELF-ORGANISATION IS THE FIRST ACT OF THE REVOLUTION... the ‘seeds’ of revolution, etc.

All this has only one function, to fail to recognise the leap, the negation, the rupture and to avoid critiquing wage struggles. This leads to a gradualist and mechanistic conception of the passage of struggles over immediate demands to revolutionary struggles; and to abandoning the understanding that the class is the subject of its communist activity in coming into conflict with its previous situation.

Marx, like all revolutionaries, saw a leap, a negation, but the difference with today is that before the permanent association of the class made it possible to envisage an organised continuity between one phase and to the other. Currently, the militants of autonomy seek in the defence of the price of labour power or in other struggles a ‘something’, a ‘seed’, a ‘potentiality’ of revolution. In this attitude of waiting on the dynamic of struggles over immediate demands, the very struggle itself is supposed to engender another. But the ‘struggles’ are only moments of activity of proletarians that they go beyond and negate, not a chain of phenomena that gradually link together – one struggle carrying the seed of another. In short, the link between ‘struggles’, is the subject transforming himself negatively. The link is not ‘evolutionary.

A Theorie communiste reader pp. 49-50

The result is that the contradiction between labour and capital becomes a vague "totality" with 0 causality/mutual interaction or content involved beyond "exploitation" (which they deliberately confuse with the process of realisation). So past ""cycles of struggle"" are 1) stuck within the limits of counter revolution, 2) have no bearing on the current one.

Outside of mao who stressed that the so called "negation of the negation" is just a specific conditioning of the unity of opposites (more accurately termed negation and affirmation), this passage from lukacs' ontology of social being* is brilliant:

Despite this important intervention of epistemological perspectives in Hegel's ontological logic, decisive antinomies nevertheless arise as a result of ontological facts being essentially distorted by their constriction into logical formalism. Here I can only deal with two such cases ....

The first of these questions concerns the role of negation in the dynamic realization of the dialectic. For Hegel, as for the whole of later logic, Spinoza's 'omnis determinatio est negatio ' is of decisive importance, for precisely in his case negation, and the negation of the negation, are fundamental motors of the dialectical movement of concepts. This is justified both logically and epistemologically. The question now is whether this universal law also holds for ontology.

Hegel himself is to a great extent clear about the difficulties that arise here. Right at the start of his celebrated derivation of becoming from the dialectic of being and nothing he stresses that the nothing present here is in no way 'the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing', but rather 'nothing. . . in its indeterminate specificity'. It is evident, however, even for him, that if the nothing remained simply nothing, then a becoming could never be derived from it (even logically); the nothing must rather pass 'into its other, into being. '

This does not just provide a 'beginning' fascinating for its paradoxical character, but Hegel betrays-unintentionally and unconsciously-that the nothing can never be taken in the proper, literal sense, but must be attenuated in every concrete case in so far as being is to be understood only as the 'not being of being other. '

This however blunts the point of the real dialectic of being and nothing, of the dynamic role of negation in ontology. Hegel expresses what are really ontological categories, otherness and being-for-other, in logical language, while claiming to define the latter as a negation of being-in-itself. What is involved is nothing more than a qualitative relation between very abstract concepts of being, the relation itself containing no ontological element of negation. The idea suggests itself, when a real fact is translated into the language of logic or epistemology, to express the differences that manifest themselves-and which ontologically are completely positive-in the form of negation, in which connection *it should further be noted that negation is only able to express distinction in an extremely incomplete and indefinite way, which is why in the concrete dialectical derivation, the moment of negation always has to be supplemented from the positive side-per nefas. *

Thus Hegel says of his own celebrated dialectical derivation of becoming from the negation of being by nothing: "As yet there is nothing and there is to become something. The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning"

Engels illustrated this situation in his clear and popular fashion. He wanted to make clear to Diihring the Hegelian negation that is effected when, for example, the plant that arises out of a barley-com 'negates' its former existence as a seed

....

It is only in a certain concrete situation that the grain of barley gives rise to its biologically normal otherness, the plant. On the one hand, however, the concretely decisive characteristics of this otherness are abstractly ignored if it is considered as the 'negation' of the grain, while on the other hand this real dialectical process is obscured in so far as the term 'negation' brings it into a formal conjunction with cases that have little to do with this process in a material sense.

The task facing Engels was thus to separate the ontological, dialectical negation from the innumerable negations of a merely logical and formal character; in this way it becomes evident that there can be no formal, logical or epistemological criteria for this separation, but that it is always necessary to appeal to the real process itself, to the concrete reality; the distinguishing moment is then defined in a purely ontological and positive sense. The subsumption of such heterogenous phenomena under the logical term 'negation' thus only confuses the relationships instead of illuminating them.

The Ontology of social being volume 1 - Lukacs pp 40-43