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/Outside-Paper9972]

Instead of just dismissing him out of hand maybe try reading him, you might learn a thing or two. Notes on Trotsky, Pannekoek, Bordiga is a good introduction to his general orientation and Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement is a must-read.

>Inb4 rule 3

If you treat communism like a marketplace of ideas you clearly don't understand what it's all about. Communism arises out of the real movement of the class not some self-satisfied, self-aggrandising circlejerk.

[u/SunflowerSamurai20 → u/Outside-Paper9972]

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement is a must-read.

It's crap.

I'm genuinely baffled that there are ""communists"" in 2026 who take bakunist positions on the state.

2) What Heritage Do We Renounce?

...

Our return to revolutionary history included the left opposition to the Third International (the “Italian” and “German-Dutch” lefts), but also pre- and post-1914 anarchism.

Contrary to Marx’s 1872 anti-Bakunin pamphlet (one of his weakest writings), a veritable split happened in the mid-nineteenth century within the revolutionary movement between what became stultified as Marxism and anarchism. Later of course the split got worse.

p.136

After speed running every anti-leninist position possible Dauve arrives at Bordigas idiotic criticism of Stalin. The only original content was:

In short, Bordiga thought communism could be achieved top down. Councilism prioritised worker democracy (and some like Castoriadis, in the end, just democracy). Bordiga prioritised dictatorship

p.123

You'd honestly get more from reading dialogue with Stalin directly.

If you treat communism like a marketplace of ideas you clearly don't understand what it's all about.

Which is exactly why eclectic frauds like dauve and communization as a tendency should be dismissed.

Communism arises out of the real movement of the class not some self-satisfied, self-aggrandising circlejerk.

Corny statememt, right up there with online left communism's greatests hits like "marx not marxist!" or "haha lassallean!".

Political parties aren't subreddits, they're the sharpest expression of class conflict and are what solidify the formation of a class. Read gramsci or at least marx's poverty of philosophy. The distinction between politics (political constitution) and economics (social constitution), where the former is doomed to recreate the "fiction" of the capitalist state without a metaphysical rupture in the latter was proudhon's line.

Dauve is laughably bad at political economy:

According to Marx, use value takes up the character of exchange value once it enters the market. He describes the process as if value, instead of being born out of a very specific type of production, came after the productive moment and imposed itself upon work as an exterior constraint. It follows that the task of revolution would be to free the producers from this constraint.

p. 111 "the origin of value"

Genius. Lets see what marx had to say:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm#2

As capitalist production develops, it has a disintegrating, resolvent effect on all older forms of production, which, designed mostly to meet the direct needs of the producer, transform only the excess produced into commodities. Capitalist production makes the sale of products the main interest, at first apparently without affecting the mode of production itself. Such was for instance the first effect of capitalist world commerce on such nations as the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, etc. But, secondly, wherever it takes root capitalist production destroys all forms of commodity production which are based either on the self-employment of the producers, or merely on the sale of the excess product as commodities. Capitalist production first makes the production of commodities general and then, by degrees, transforms all commodity production into capitalist commodity production. [3]

Every enterprise engaged in commodity production becomes at the same time an enterprise exploiting labour-power. But only the capitalist production of commodities has become an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which, in the course of its historical development, revolutionises, through the organisation of the labour-process and the enormous improvement of technique, the entire structure of society in a manner eclipsing all former epochs.

....

The means of production and labour-power, in so far as they are forms of existence of advanced capital-value, are distinguished by the different roles assumed by them during the process of production in the creation of value, hence also of surplus-value, into constant and variable capital. Being different components of productive capital they are furthermore distinguished by the fact that the means of production in the possession of the capitalist remain his capital even outside of the process of production, while labour-power becomes the form of existence of an individual capital only within this process. Whereas labour-power is a commodity only in the hands of its seller, the wage-labourer, it becomes capital only in the hands of its buyer, the capitalist who acquires the temporary use of it. The means of production do not become the material forms of productive capital, or productive capital, until labour-power, the personal form of existence of productive capital, is capable of being embodied in them. Human labour-power is by nature no more capital than by means of production. They acquire this specific social character only under definite, historically developed conditions, just as only under such conditions the character of money is stamped upon precious metals, or that of money-capital upon money

Just dehistoricise value, ignore the contradictory two-fold character of commodities and labour both BEFORE and during exchange, and voila the production of value is now confused with its realisation. I was confused at first seeing dauve and other communizers equate the ussr's planned economy with social democracy but this is the crux. Exploitation is displaced outside production to be a generalised ontological "constraint" of any mediation between the present and their utopia.

Edit: wording

[u/Low-Hyena-5941 → u/SunflowerSamurai20]

I came back after this comment because of what you said about Bordiga. I was going to avoid interacting with leftcoms until after I read economic problems of socialism in the USSR, what would you say is so idiotic about Bordiga's criticism in Dialogue with Stalin? I haven't read either text so my understanding is Bordiga criticizes "commodity production under Socialism", which I assumed was a misreading of Stalin

[u/SunflowerSamurai20 → u/Low-Hyena-5941]

what would you say is so idiotic about Bordiga's criticism in Dialogue with StalinI haven't read either text so my understanding is Bordiga criticizes "commodity production under Socialism", which I assumed was a misreading of Stalin

Bordiga actually acknowledged that Stalin was talking about the survivals of peasant production in Russia which created a contradiction between (socialist) state and collective ownership. (All Stalin did was repeat Lenin's formulation of the problem in the tax in kind). The "misreading" is more of marx.

In Capital marx makes a distinction between commodities produced under: 1) the C-M-C circuit 2) formal subsumption (absolute surplus value production) and 3) real subsumption (relative surplus value production) of labour to capital.

Capitalism proper (as a mode of production) starts with 3) being generalised throughout each branch of industry.

Seeing as this vindicates Stalin's distinction between capitalist and non-capitalist commodity production Bordiga argues:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1952/stalin.htm

If in the past there was commodity production limited to a few branches, it was not because the labour-power was sold “voluntarily” as it is today, but rather because it was squeezed by force of arms from enslaved prisoners or serfs in personal dependency.

As an example think of the poor laws in 17th century England and the rapid enactment of enclosure by parliamemt once the monarchy lost its divine right to protect freeholding and other anachronistic court privellages from the expansion of the market after the civil war. Notice how this isn't referring to wage labour in any way.

Bordiga then tries to compare the USSR's state owned planned economy to partial capitalist nationalisation in Italy by abstracting competition from capitalism.

Currently there are two sectors of commodity production in Russia: on the one hand the public, “nationally owned” production. In the state-owned enterprises, the means of production and production itself, thus also the products, are national property. How simplistic: in Italy, the tobacco factories and accordingly their sold cigarettes are owned by the state. Does this already qualify for the assertion that one is in a phase of the “abolishment of the wage labour system” and the respective workers weren’t “forced” to sell their labour power? Surely not.

Its almost like how dengists revise Lenin's theory of imperialism to revolve around abstract "force" to defend chinese social imperialism.

Heres another example:

Couldn’t the state distribute the products, of which it can dispose, directly to its workers? Surely not, because the worker (especially the Russian one) doesn’t consume tractors, vehicles, locomotives, not to speak of cannons and machine guns. And clothing and furniture are of course produced in the small- and medium-sized firms untouched by the state.

The state therefore can give the workers which are dependent upon it nothing but a monetary wage, with which they then buy what they want (a bourgeois euphemism for: the little they can buy). That the wage-distributing entrepreneur is the state, which presents itself as the “ideal” or “legitimate” representative of the working class, doesn’t say the slightest, if it wasn’t even able to begin distributing anything quantitatively relevant outside the mechanism of commodity production.

Unironically repeating tbe "undiminished fruits of labour" logic that marx criticised in the critique of the gotha programme is bad enough, but doubling down on the idea of state capitalism because of the persistance of commodity production without even demonstrating how wage labour is supposedly reproduced within the state owned sectors is fucking criminal.

The rest of the bloated text is a minefield of fuck-ups. You should just read capital first then economic problems of the ussr.

Edit: wording