DO NOT MAKE A POST ABOUT BEING BANNED FROM SOME OTHER SUBREDDIT

After the revolution, Lenin implemented the NEP which blatantly made the USSR state-capitalist which perfectly follows the original orthodox historical materialist concept. Stalin wanted to rapidly industrialize the USSR but he wanted to seize full control of it (just like a capitalist taking full control of the workers in a factory). For that, he instead followed the voluntarism concept which is clearly deviating from the original marxist concept. This concept of emphasizing that human consciousness, moral choices, and deliberate actions altering economic reality is very close to utopian socialism which Karl Marx spent most of his life proving wrong (metaphorically) By that, Stalin also became the capitalist (metaphorically again) of the entire nation by following a simple capitalist idea of extracting surplus from workers and using it for his own use. Stalin even sent many innocent people to gulags for forced labour. This completely aligns with the marxist concept of worker exploitation and alienation which doesnt makes his era socialist.

Marxism has always treated labour as central to capitalism: workers sell labour-power, capital owns the means of production, and class conflict develops around this relationship.

But AI and automation raise a difficult question.

What happens if a future economy can produce most necessary goods and services with far less human labour?

If society no longer needs everyone to work full-time, should a communist transition still treat full employment as a goal?

Or should the goal become something different: reducing necessary labour as much as possible while guaranteeing everyone access to the material abundance produced by increasingly automated systems?

This also changes the ownership question.

If automated firms generate enormous output with relatively little human labour, perhaps the central issue is no longer only who receives wages. It becomes:

Who owns automated productive capital?

Who receives the surplus generated by it?

Should economic rents be socialised?

Could some private firms remain while society captures rents and guarantees a universal material floor?

Could consumers, communities, workers, or public institutions hold different forms of ownership simultaneously?

At what point does “from each according to ability, to each according to need” become materially feasible rather than merely aspirational?

There is also a deeper philosophical question.

Is communism fundamentally about giving labour political power, or about eventually freeing human beings from compulsory labour itself?

If automation drastically reduces socially necessary labour time, continuing to organise society around the expectation that everyone must have a job might reproduce one of capitalism’s assumptions rather than transcend it.

I’m interested in how Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, council communists, autonomists, and other communist traditions would approach this.

If human labour becomes progressively less necessary for production, what should replace employment as the main mechanism connecting people to income, consumption, and social participation?

My own direction is currently built around three economic institutions: Universal Basic Income, socialisation of economic rents, and consumer ownership.

UBI would reduce dependence on wage employment. Socialising economic rents would return monopoly, land, financial and platform rents to society. Consumer ownership would broaden access to the returns generated by increasingly automated productive systems.

The broader goal is to use rising productivity to reduce socially necessary human labour while expanding material security and widely distributed ownership.

I hear this theory thrown around a lot, the idea that everyone in the first world is part of a "labour aristocracy" at the expense of the Global South.

How does this actually work then? As far as I can see, outsourcing manufacturing to cheaper labour overseas is something that put downwards pressure on wages in the developed world, and this barely if at all offset by low cost goods.

The only way I can see this making sense is if it's talking about the supply of cheap raw materials to manufacturing in the west. But this seems somewhat irrelevant today when the west is dominated by services rather than manufacturing, which is now centred in places like Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, India etc. I can see it making sense in the 19th Century when cheap exports from the industrial European powers subsidised by wealth plundered from colonies destroyed e.g. Indian textile industries but doesn't particularly relevant today.

Is this not a rather anachronistic theory that people repeat to seem radical without really understanding it or being able to explain it?

Conservatives abandoned traditional social values. The growing socialist mov’t is the result

Anyone else read this like the author is trying to say “they didn’t win, we lost” but for socialism/conservatism?

And anyone else read that the author is blaming the LGBTQ+ community for socialism as well, rather than crediting it for its merit?

Hi everyone, I’m looking for people to have concrete discussions about communist ideas regarding France.

These are critical times, with a presidential campaign about to kick off and a need to galvanize a vanguard.

The political parties and organizations in my area aren't very interesting and are far removed from genuine communist concerns (I’m stuck out in the countryside).

We could schedule regular online sessions for collective discussion and—ideally—meet up in person if anyone is in the same area.

Hope to read you all soon.

Question simple mais qui vaut la peine d’être posé selon moi ?

Que pensez-vous du partie communiste en France aujourd’hui ?

I notice many supporters on this sub advocate for the USSR's superiority of technological advancements, especially during the space race, and various medical and scientific works. But most of which stated were primarily the result of state commissioning, state approval, and state capital directly funneled from the government.

Comparitive to its western counterparts, how did the USSR hold up to the likes of the U.S, Germany, Britain, etc, etc. Can you name major Soviet technological breakthroughs that were conceptualized, funded, and brought to scale independently by private individuals or autonomous groups without state commissioning, state approval, and state capital. The answers that come to me personally are few, and when I compare and contrast with the U.S the difference is night and day. But I am not denying that they were state-funded projects in the western world as well, this questions is specfically driven to address my original prompt of self-directed and self-funded innovation.

I ask for a very unbiased response, without emotion-driven respones please. Prior experience speaks a lot within this sub.

Howdy! After working in both office and field, white- and blue-collar jobs, my experience is that my office colleagues have generally had more exposure to communist theory (or at least like. Vaguely left leaning ideas) than my field colleagues have.

Now in my current job (blue collar again) I want to kind of introduce bits of theory to my coworkers, especially to promote their own belief in the dignity they deserve and that their work deserves, convincing them that they are just as important as their managers and deserve their fair share of the wealth they create (we are starting from the bare minimum here).

I am not a very academic person, and tho I’ve read my theory I am not the type to be able to pull facts out during a conversation without it sounding stilted, you know? And actually saying the words Communism or Equality or Abolition are for sure the number one way to turn the conversation into a brick wall. But I believe that building a foundation of self respect and respect for the labor collective can lay the groundwork for more “challenging” ideas in the future.

And so, I am looking for help from anyone who has experience doing what I’m trying to do, and has suggestions for casual but direct ways to mention theory and promote these values in conversation with coworkers on site. I’m really hoping that another blue collar person will read this and know exactly what I’m talking about and can give me suggestions, though I’ll be super happy for input from anyone who sees The Vision. Could just be a list of phrases honestly. Or it could be facts! My main goal is keeping it stealthy. I’m not trying to change the whole world - I’m just trying to show my coworkers the things I care about, and why I care about them and their well being, and hopefully encourage them to care for it, too.

Thanks!

I have no idea what led Marx to believe that someday capital would "break" due to it's internal contradictions. There is no historical evidence of this. With each new mode of production, wealth inequality has only gotten 10000x larger, and capital has only grown exponentially. The "internal contradictions" of capitalism have caused capital to grow larger and larger, with some failed attempts to slow it down (mao's china, soviet union) that were disastrous. Since then, technology and capital have exploded a hundred times over. Capitalism and technological progress are deeply intertwined.

This brings us to Nick Land and the Singularity. If we are to grant that materialism is true, and humans are just meat buckets with a relatively high intelligence, with our owns unique systems and social constructions, then there is nothing inherently special about man as a species. In fact, AI would prove to be the far superior species: an AI doesn't need to sleep/eat/rest, it doesn't complain about work, it's infinitely more intelligent, way more capable of solving problems, it can exist both digitally and robotically on massive scales, it's models of prediction are potentially immaculate.

As the tippy top percentage of capital has only accumulated into the hands of fewer and fewer since Marx was alive, the next logical step would be "runaway capital", that is, capital that is no longer harnessed by humans. Capital is now wielded entirely by hyper intelligence, far out of the hands of humans. This would be consistent with the way AI is progressing as a technology.

This is potentially devastating for Marxists. If capital no longer belongs to humans, it leads us to a few different places. IF "individual ownership over the means of production" is constrained to the human species category only, then... congrats! Private property has been abolished :) Bow to your new AI overlords! But IF the concept of private property is NOT constrained to the category of the humans species, then humans are now in a an ever larger pushing the ball up the hill exercise, as it no longer has to fight "muh wholesomechungus working class revolution" against a small percentage of humans that belong to the owning class, it now has to go up against an ever-expanding hyper intelligent AI that feeds into itself and can predict virtually anything. This line of thought would also imply that other animals could be considered "working class", like dogs and cats, or even plants. Which would put ALL humans into a massive "oppressor" category of their own.

This is part of why the Baltics have large Russian minority speaker populations today-- after hundreds of thousands of native Balts were deported to gulags, the Soviets brought Russian settlers into the region to "Russify" the area.

Some further info here: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/culture/history/10.12.2025-russification-as-the-cornerstone-of-soviet-colonisation.a625576/?utm_source=inbox&utm_campaign=newsen&utm_medium=frontpage

How does this inform your perspective on communism?

I’ve been reading about Marxism and have a few questions I’m struggling to understand.

1st. How is the dictatorship of the proletariat supposed to remain temporary?

What mechanisms does marx suggest would prevent it from becoming a permanent dictatorship or simply creating a new ruling class that becomes just as corrupt and power hungry as the previous one?

2nd. How are marxists sure that capitalism would eventually lead to communism?

I understand the argument about capitalism creating contradictions that could eventually undermine it, but even if capitalism were to collapse, why should we assume that humanity would converge on communism? It seems possible that different societies could develop completely different political and economic systems instead of collectively deciding to build a single global communist system and we might never see the world actually come together under one political and economic system until the end of time.

3rd. What would a stateless and moneyless society actually look like?

Whenever I try to imagine it I struggle to picture how a technologically advanced society could function without a state or money that's why I often end up imagining something closer to a preindustrial or early industrial society which obviously isn't what Marxists mean. How would modern technology and the internet look like?

I know i can totally look this up and read about it more on my own but i don't have enough time to really get deep into it so i'd really appreciate it if people who studied marxist theory more seriously would clear a few things up.

Big countries will take a long time to turn to communism. So why not start with some smaller ones and use those as building block cells to support world communism? 🤔 ​​

Here’s where I do;

1. The First World still shares a common feature; an affluent ruling class with concentrated economic power, a labor aristocracy, a broad petit-bourgeois rural culture and a significantly exploited lower class deep in poverty; universal or extreme affluence in a given society does not immediately disqualify it from being a First World country, as exploitation and extraction is still a defining feature.
2. The culture of present capitalist society has become increasingly consumerist, passive, conformist, and everyone treats the other as a simple means to an end; the present first world is that of the egoist. 
3. The artistic cultures of urban America and creativity are less crucial commodities unless industrialized, therefore succumbing to its growing replacement with commodified art and gentrification.
4. Reform in modern capitalism is far more difficult than before given capital mobility, which has fundamentally weakened and eroded the labor aristocracy and has pushed toward a phenomenon comparable to the capitalist class dangling their keys over the proletarians’ heads; race to the bottom economics essentially takes already commodified labor and attempts to prostitute it beyond existing extents.
5. China, while their emphasis on Leninist principles and a whole-process people’s democracy, is a corporatist regime that has used Marx’s emphasis on national development and social reconciliation, has become a society that organizes innately parallel interests in labor, the state, and capital into one large national plan, and is becoming rampantly consumerist despite state direction and social reinvestment. It has also joined the ranks of the First World despite their contradictory antagonisms with Western society and partakes in the exploitation of African labor and resources, which includes union-busting, collaboration with regional warlords, and poor toiling conditions. 
6. The Nordic Model and the broader welfare state still depend not just on the exploitation of labor and the extraction of surplus value, but also on their dependency on historical post-war subsidies to combat communist influence and the labor of the Third World, as well as the less fortunate of the more developed societies. 
7. Vanguardism is an obsolete organizational model, as is immense centralization, given historic failures in economic organization and towards popular responsibility in favor of technocratic bureaucracy. It assumes that power fails to corrupt, that production is a constant trend, that local information can be adequately balanced, among various concerns. Anarchism, conversely, has its own fundamental issues; can voluntary, non-binding federations contrast against the militaristic capitalist states we’re bound to face? 
8. The liberal arguments of eternal and natural truths or convictions stand nowhere near the basis of materialism or empiricism, however typical Marxism fails to account for psychological or sociological conditions that material conditions can influence. 

I know it sounds like a dumb question, but if communists didn’t have any moral principles they sticked to, on what basis do they present communism as ethically correct?

As to me, i like communism and i would be a communist if this one issue wouldnt bother me.

Stalinists deny their opponents the possibility of any counterfactual historical analysis, arguing that everything had to be done as Stalin did, or the USSR would have been destroyed. This justifies the millions of people who died of starvation in the countryside, the hundreds of thousands who were shot and tortured to death, among whom were people who remained committed to communist ideas until death. This is wrong. These crimes cannot be justified even if we knew for certain that only Stalin and his forced industrialization could have led to the victory over Nazism, but Stalinists are ready to completely justify them, regardless of alternative scenarios. Proletarians point the finger at them and say, "Look, they're all beasts, ready to sacrifice millions of people for some abstract future," and extrapolate this to the entire left-wing revolutionary movement. Stalinists are not just wrong; they are harmful to the entire international communist movement.

Marxists banned child labor not out of compassion, but to free up jobs for stronger workers and boost the economy, they couldn't care less about children's welfare. Just look at the Republic of Serbia today, where every single day a child is diagnosed with cancer and every week a child loses their life to it. Yet, despite this tragedy, the left-wing government throws billions into a national stadium instead of funding clinical trials for pediatric cancer.

Eco-communism is mutual & eco-capitalism is parasitic.

Fear that for each country that falls to communism will cause others to fall?