How to get into communist literature? I'm half way through the Manifesto

Marx was an erudite scholar and very serious thinker. The majority of his time was spent in the British library studying and writing. Was involved with the young hegelians, many of whom were educated by Hegel personally. This of course is not an argument in favour of his ideas, but to dismiss him as some sensationalist hack is absolutely ridiculous. He was a serious scholar with serious ideas that can not just be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

>you can orchestrate all of production without a state after abolishing the division of labor entirely so everyone does any job

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Doesn't matter how erudite or smart you are in this context. Human society is the most complex thing in the universe we are aware of, already the individual human brain deserves that description but the constant interaction of these entities since the advent of mankind and the resulting structure is complex beyond belief. So the job of social science is to observe it, try to grasp its mechanisms. That's what you find in Adam Smith or Max Weber. Marx on the other hand looked at this through an ideological lense, a human desire for a different world. Now assuming that I am correct in describing human society as a network of enormous complexity that is beyond the comprehension of the individual mind, what do you think would happen if we'd replace its evolved mechanisms (like law) which allowed human society to develop cooperation across millions of individuals, with the inclinations of a few intellectuals who think they know better how to run the show? Well, I'd predict mass murder, the disintegration of society, totalitarianism and economic ruin. Now what do we find in the history of 'this wasn't real socialism'?

Dude academics will surely push a broom lol

>just doing plumbing for fun for 15 minutes
>now i'm designing a space shuttle
>noon already? *yawns* time to go fishing lmao
this is what marx actually believed

Please actually do the reading. You make actual Marx critics look bad.

But that's the unironic fucking proposal.

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Everyone looks at everything through an ideological lense idiot. Maybe you;'d do better to read about the hundreds of millions killed under capitalism

It's a critique of atomisation lmao, not a literal proposal to force everyone at gunpoint to never hold down a specific job for the rest of human existence.

'...while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes...' - That means it's rhetorical genius

Get a job

T. Pseud

Holy shit this is so bad.
Just go read a few hundred pages of any serious late marx work and you will btfo yourself

Don't read the manifesto, don't read Capital, just read Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and see if you still want to read Marx.

The fundamental criticism is apt and I've studied Marx and socialists into the 1970s + used to be a commie.

Unironically this. Then quit it once you realise just how bullshit it is and how you're alienated. Then, dive deeper into the hole of Marx. I'm not even joking. Working under capitalism is absolute shit. I enjoy working on the neoghbourhood garden, helping others whenever I can, and being able to leave or arrive whenever I want to do my own thing. Actual freedom.

>abolishing division of labor entirely
You retarded bro? Where are you getting this?

read stirner instead

You should read Capital, but if you're high IQ you can just read Engels' synopsis

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/index.htm

based and irrefutable, also everyone itt read Quigley

Don't read, just become an anti-imperialist and promote the CPC instead.

>with the inclinations of a few intellectuals who think they know better how to run the show?
This is what Marx and Engels argue against though. If you'd actually read them instead you'd see they actually follow your (what you think is) criticism.

Skip the rest of the manifesto and read capital. As others have already said it's the only way

Sorry but you gotta start with the Greeks before you can stan Marxism

Based

t. Tranny

You misinterpret my criticism and confuse the conclusions (and jargon) of marxian ideology with its character. If Marx proposes a fundamentally different system of ownership than what has evolved under law then my criticism stands. But Marx of course goes far beyond that. He explains for example that the main function of a state 'as a state' is to enforce an exploitative mode of production. He explains history as 'class struggle', which is such a simplifaction that I don't even know what it means. He argues that through (unavoidable, predestined) revolution (which we should still totally bring about) man (as individual and group) will be able to direct the course of history - again, whatever that means. These are not scientific observations, they're grandiose yet simplistic misinterpretations of what a society is. The concept cannot be understood without an awareness of the state of nature which is total genetic conflict. When we observe society, culture and state we're looking at a miracle of large scale cooperation rising out of the darwinistic chaos. What becomes clear by reading Marx is that he's a dilletante and a radical who created theory to serve his ideological goals.

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished..."

Marx is obscure on the details of full Communism, but it's clear he demands the full abolition of the division of labor. It's not just rhetoric. He didn't think it would be by force but rather just happen organically without a state to coordinate any of it.

Wages price and profit
Condition working class in england
German peasants war
Family, private property and the state

Engelsismus is better.

Practice communism by letting the homeless live with you and take your stuff. No property right?

Building squats is hard. Couch surfers are often the best homeless to build squats with. However the proletarian content is low unless they deliberately repair and improve the property or run a social kitchen or centre.

Good eye for potential praxis, comrade.

What a fucking childish notion of Marxism lmao, no property, nice reading comprehension

Marxists view the state's role as being to uphold class society, not necessarily an exploitative mode of production, because there's still a state in socialism, which Marxists don't consider exploitative.

>through (unavoidable, predestined) revolution (which we should still totally bring about)

'...oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.' - 'OR THE COMMON RUIN OF THE CONTENDING CLASSES' - that's the first chapter of the Manifesto you pseud, revolution is anything but predestined. Maybe try understanding what Marxists think before critiquing them

>the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished...

You do realise that just means that in socialist society mental (ie 'professional') labour won't be valued more than manual ('unskilled') labour right?

>He didn't think it would be by force but rather just happen organically without a state to coordinate any of it

So who cares? Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, I'm open to either possibility. It's not like he's advocating the forcible removal of the division of labour, by your own admission, just claiming it's undesirable.

But ultimately you're still forgetting that 'division of labour' isn't necessarily antithetical to specialisation, just capitalist atomisation

>butterfly hasn’t responded once
*slap slap slap* I am slapping her big, thick well toned ass at the thought of you trying to make threads for her to post in :3

It's one of the few passages where he presents a positive vision for the communist endgame, considering that's the entire fucking point I think it merits close examination.
>You do realise that just means that in socialist society mental (ie 'professional') labour won't be valued more than manual ('unskilled') labour right?
The "antithesis has vanished" suggests to me a stronger claim, that professionals would be laborers and vice versa.
>So who cares? Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong
How can you call yourself a communist if you don't give a shit about what it's going to actually be like? Could it be that it's really about seizing absolute power and once achieved you'd rather that not wither away at all?
>But ultimately you're still forgetting that 'division of labour' isn't necessarily antithetical to specialisation, just capitalist atomisation
My read is Marx viewed specialization as in itself oppressive, his ideal human is a polymath who labors for joy. He also never uses the term atomization.

The theory was that the state would then wither away because without classes there's no opportunity for class exploitation.

Maybe you should read further than the Manifesto. Marx stresses that capitalism is unstable, will produce a disenfranchised proletariat, and when (inevitably) unable to further expand will experience a revolution by the exploited class. Obviously after the predictions didn't really come true mitigating statements were dug up but in reality, projecting the picture of the inevitability of communism was the whole point of historical materialism and capitalism was clearly delineated as the last stage of this historical process before the advent of communism which in a sense marks the end or if you will beginning of history.

Trotsky's "The Russian Revolution, From Petrograd To Brest-Litovsk", Marighella's "Minimanual of The Urban Guerrilla", Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals", Bakunin's "God and The State".

Though, this is more out of appreciation for the Left's revolutionary theory, as part of the Right Wing, myself.

>as part of the Right Wing, myself
cringe and brainwashpilled

>actually like
The entire point is that the end result will be enabled, mitigated, and constrained by PRAXIS, the myriad compromises and adjustments made necessary by a socialism that has to exist in the real world. So yeah it may look very different depending on the circumstances, just as capitalism may look very different depending on the conditions it responds to/is born from. It has nothing to do with me personally accepting some hyper specific endgame state and working to minimise deviations from said state. This is precisely the reason for the scarcity of 'positive visions'.

>professionals would be laborers and vice versa
This is correct, INSOFAR AS their 'value' will both be measured through the same metric: average socially necessarily labour time. Nothing else.

You're free to make whatever assumptions you want about me being some sort of tyrant in waiting, I don't really care either way. Interpret his stuff on division of labour however you want, it doesn't really impact the meat of the theory, you only have to look pragmatically at how every actually existing socialist society functioned to draw your own conclusions, whatever they may be.

Also, while Marx doesn't use the specific term atomisation, he often speaks of labour and social activity in general as 'atomic' - it basically just refers to a form of alienation, but whatever.

Stop acting stupid. We want 90% of the same things. There's just a bourgeois Liberal/Conservative element propped up to drown out revolutionary voices, confounding and obfuscating the goals and world-view of the dissidents. No, I'm sure a horde of mulatto trannies are totally not beholden and reliant to liberal capitalism.

You're correct that Marx wanted to portray socialism as inevitable, simply because, polemically speaking, it's a useful political rhetoric when trying to stimulate action. What it comes down to is that you (again correctly) claim that Marx says capitalism is inherently unstable abd thus will produce a disaffected proletariat who revolt. Which is exactly what happened historically, in Germany, Russia, China, the US, France, Britain, and elsewhere. Most of those didn't succed, yes, which again is a notion concieved by Marx, like in the quote I gave. It's precisely because I've read more than the Manifesto that I claim this.

>The entire point is that the end result will be enabled, mitigated, and constrained by PRAXIS, the myriad compromises and adjustments made necessary by a socialism that has to exist in the real world. So yeah it may look very different depending on the circumstances, just as capitalism may look very different depending on the conditions it responds to/is born from. It has nothing to do with me personally accepting some hyper specific endgame state and working to minimise deviations from said state. This is precisely the reason for the scarcity of 'positive visions'.
If it's such a black box how can you make any claims as to its general feasibility in advance? This is meant to be a (arguably deterministic) science of the future development of history. Based on the predictions of Marx (and Trotsky and others), which you seem happy to shrug off as nothing, it seems on its face infeasible or straight up transhumanist science fiction.

As you say, we can look at actual socialist societies, so where are the Soviet academicians on this? They had 70 years to put together an program for communization and an outlook for the future society. 70 years to propose a mechanism for how exactly the state is supposed to wither away (into WHAT?). Where are they?

Oh please. Nothing happened in most of those countries and in China and Russia we saw peasant revolts. There was no change in life brought about by capital in these situations. China experienced a massive civil war and foreign invasion (not interested in how that was indeed because of capital™). There was a small window of proletarian action and that was when people didn't realize that capitalism didn't make them poorer but instead created a simultaneous wealth and population explosion. After that it was just social democratic action which isn't the same and now practiced by the petit bourgeoisie within the liberal context. That's true even for its most extreme expression in France.

>he just wanted to stimulate action
If it's inevitable anyway why would anyone personally stick their neck out as a revolutionary? If anything trying to force it before capitalism has fully developed risks it being abortively premature.

read settlers by j sakai

readsettlers.org/

Save yourself some time and just read Animal Farm. It shows what innevitably happens when Marx's erudite principles are practically applied.

Reading and analyzing anything written by Marx is intellectual masturbation

The transcendence of the value form is contained in the prefigurative forms of proletarians as they literally don’t even own themselves. They embody the universal negation of property as our relation to production is one of usufruct not possession.

The other option is social collapse

That’s why the slogan is socialism OR barbarism.

Marxists have been well aware of failures in proto-capital. China and The Dutch chiefly.

>The NPC mindset

being a marxist is just NPCism for bigbrained nibbas

>how can i be edgy and intellectual while still being accepted by society...I know marxism
absolutely gay

>Don't read das kapital user, just check out this children's book instead

So you're saying it simply has to be feasible because the only other alternative is collapse? Couldn't socialism sustain itself indefinitely without becoming communism?
If it's wrong to speculate at all why did Marx indulge himself in any of it?
Does it or does it not require us to become superhuman in order for it to work, or is that a side effect? Can you give any specifics of such a transformation in scientific terms informed by the biology of today?
Why are you all, without exception, so slippery on this issue?

Just finish the Manifesto
It's all you need to argue about Marx.

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The manifesto isn't True communism, silly :3

not me.

The Communist Manifesto was intended to be an explanation of Marxist Communism you moron. :3

Because the second they get nailed into a specific position, they are wrong.

The Children book is better written and smarter.

A committee literally authorised it.

t. I acquired my knowledge of Marx through hearsay
>The conditions of this movement [communism] result from the premises now in existence.
>exploitative
A descriptive term, rather than a moralist one (as in exploiting a resource)
>history as 'class struggle'
Only point I agree with. This thought was influenced by the insufficient available historical research done at the time of writing. This point should be (and is) dropped by later Marxists.
>unavoidable, predestined
>he can't tell the difference between teleology and determinism
What becomes clear by reading your post is that you are a brainlet.

read wage labour and capital next

>arguably deterministic
I don't understand why you're having such trouble with this. My understanding of Marxism, and most modern Marxists seem to agree, is that historical progress is not deterministic. Now having said that, I'm sure there probably are 'Deterministic Marxists' out there somewhere, and if so they'll have their own literature and jargon and debates. Find them if that's what you're interested in critiquing. I think what it comes down to is this: you're arguing against an ad hoc group of people on an anonymous imageboard who all (presumably) call them selves 'Marxists'. But there's still so much differentiation there, which is presumably why we seem slippy - because we're all trying to defend this thing without stepping over each others toes and getting caught up in factional disputes, which any group would be averse to when dealing with non-adherents, because it wastes time and risks disunity. Understand this: there are dozens of branches, schools, and strands of Marxist theory, and fields from architecture to aesthetics to applied physics have had scholars and professionals calling themselves Marxist and taking influence from it. There are some who think dialectics is nonsense and should be discarded - Analytical Marxists. There are some who think Marx's early writing should be rejected, downplayed, because they're too Hegelian - Althusserian Marxists. And there are Marxists who argue the exact opposite - Humanist Marxists. And so on and so on and so on. Be more specific in what you're critiquing, and find more concretely organised opponents than just whatever user feels like chipping in on fucking Yea Forums, and you'll have more fruitful discussion. And I'm sorry, but that means you'll have read more than the Communist Manifesto (lol) - even if it's just the critiques of your own side, as long as they've done their reading (sorry Peterson) that's still of some use. Course, you can still try and attack the very fundamental theses of Marxist theory if you don't want to argue specifics, but again, it comes back to reading, because you're not going to get the fundamentals of an ideology that's influenced the lives of hundreds of millions across continents and centuries in one 40 page pamphlet. gl

My recollection has it that Orthodox Marxism in the early-mid 20th century had a strong deterministic bent, then there was a departure from that especially in the West for obvious reasons, but I'm no Marx scholar that's just iirc. I've read Capital and several other key texts.
>p-peterson
lelno. What is your obsession with this two bit hack? Ever hear of Kolakowski? I'm aware of the many schools. I'm just fascinated by the fact I'm never able to get a committal reply out of unironic communists on the nature of higher stage Communism or the mechanism by which the state is supposed to wither away. Every time I get more like apophatic theology than a scientifically informed materialist outlook on the whole goddamn point of the thing.

Again, the Soviet Union gave us many brilliant minds, some of them deeply committed Dialectical Materialists at least on paper. Where was their input on this? What were all these people fighting and dying for exactly, if it was a murky fever dream all along? That's more interesting to me than the idiosyncrasies of all of these rival schools, because as far as I know none of them even try to answer this. Nothing I've read comes close. I was hoping a Marxist could one day show me at least an attempt to elucidate their eschatology but so far nothing but waffling about how we have to do socialism first (for how many centuries?) Perhaps you're right and I should aim higher than imageboards but it's comfy and smart people occasionally do post here

The Peepeestain reference was a joke, my guy. Look, you'll find almost no literature on what higher stage communism will look like because the overwhelming majority of Marxists simply don't consider that a useful or even possible thing to do, at least as far as I'm aware. The state withering away I'm pretty sure has slightly more literature, but it's not a branch of theory I'm all that familiar with, my only real contact with that outside of Marx and Engels themselves is Lenin, sorry. My suspicion once again is that the withering away of the state is considered a problem too remote, anchored in conditions so far different than our own, that we'll have for the foreseeable future no competent ability to predict it. Withering away of the state is the kind of thing that happens when there's some sort of world dominant socialist system, which we're a long way off of. That's when that debate becomes pertinent. I suppose it'll either be some gradualistic thing that people barely even notice as functions once filled by people are increasingly entrusted to algorithms, AI, computer models and the like, or, there'll be some sort of protracted struggle. Perhaps there'll be some tipping point in the transition from a state ruled by people to a world administered by technology/rationality/post-scarcity/whatever that leads to violent confrontation? Perhaps if there was some means by which a world socialist system was to arise, and then suffer an ecological or some other crisis, that led to an increasingly autonomous and entrenched state structure (perhaps people wishing to maintain some sort of privilege that somehow arises?). It's essentially science fiction at this point, which is why Marxists of any kind are reluctant to even commit resources of any serious kind into theorising something that'll happen in ecological, technological, ideological, and economic conditions utterly different, and affected by thousands of potential factors.

You seem hung up on the apparent lack of a concrete vision of what higher-stage communism, as distinct from socialism, looks like, which I kind of get. But it's done that way to leave space for all the changes and problems and alternatives that might arise between Marxism being formulated and the potential rise of a globally dominant socialist economic mode of production. What those people were fighting and dying for, as you put it, is quite simple. They were attempting to improve their lives, and the lives of their children, and so on. What more do you expect of people? It's precisely that process of dealing with concrete problems that'll give way to the future, not abstract philosophising on the exact mechanics of a future that we have extreme difficulty penetrating. which is why Marx didn't really do it.

Just read the capital first, manifesto is a waste of time tbqh

Course I can see room there for a more hostile interpretation, which is just that Marx wanted people to be able to project whatever they wanted onto the category 'communism', and in a sense, that's even kinda correct I think, because the whole point is that the clash between differing interpretations, goals, methods, and so on, is what allows world-history to advance. So there needs to be room for dialectical conflict between people and groups who have their own interests, goals, and understandings to thrash it out in this potential future society that doesn't have things like class conflict or many of the other 'traditional' sources of conflict, but whatever.

I get where you're coming from and thank you for engaging with me. You seem to concede my point that Communism is (and certainly was back in Marx's day) science fiction, but don't consider this to be a fatal flaw. What bothers me in particular, besides my issues with the positive sketch as it exists, is the certainty with which Communists held that such a transition would take place, if indeed all the rest of the details are impossible to know in advance for the reasons you've given.

> It shows what innevitably happens when Marx's erudite principles are practically applied.
I believe Orwell wouldn't agree with you on that

Animal farm was against capitalism. The humans were just as bad as the pigs.

To be clear, what I consider 'science fiction', is the attempt to predict the minutiae of future events without any basis in the current mode of production (except insofar as any event is based on every single event that preceded it, if that makes sense lol). Saying something like, 'Based on current capitalist society, there is the ever present opportunity due to the way it is organised, to reconstitute the mode of production, and that this new mode, socialism, may over time lead to the disappearance of things once necessary for social progress/world-history to advance' strikes me as a plausible theory, in the sense that it's possible. It comes down the distinction between Communism as social movement, mediated by the actions of people and the environment, and Communism as a discrete mode of production. Remember that Marx said 'Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.' I can see this being unsatisfactory and maybe even contradictory, but I believe that to be a basically correct view of things.

If it remains too vague to plausibly theorise not only the next stage of human activity (and I call it plausible because we've seen it in existence in the real world), socialism, but also the one after that, communism, well yeah it probably is too vague if that's what you're after. Maybe there is stuff out there that I'm just not aware of though, my understanding is as limited and partial as anyone else's. Good luck.

Not the guy you responded, but this is a common misunderstanding of what communism is, made by Marxists and non-Marxists alike. What Marx and Engels tried to formulate is the emergence of communism as a movement. This is the part that might look deterministic, but which is actually teleological.
This is neatly captured by this line from the German Ideology:
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
From Red and Black Notes: "In particular [Marx and Engels] sought to establish that socialism was not simply a product of intellectual theories, but a logical deduction from premises apparent in capitalist society. While "utopian" socialists such as Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen, whatever their merits, saw socialism as a "good idea", Marx and Engels tried to prove that their politics and conclusions were rooted in the actual conditions of capitalism."

The communist movement will potentially, as shaped by given circumstances and the conscious interaction with those circumstances, give rise to a qualitatively different mode of production, which would replace capitalism as the dominant form of production.

Excuse me for posting almost the same exact reply

Thanks for the discussion user. I'll add that it is a contradictory formulation because he discusses some specifics of "the Communist society" even right before that quote in the German Ideology.

True enough, I see that as one of the latent tensions of Marxist theory, but perhaps it's not altogether an unproductive one. Anyway, I'll leave it there as well, take care user.

Literally like two pages before this he equally as famously says "... in COMMUNIST SOCIETY ..."

Not him, but I always amend phrases Marx uses like 'in communist society' to something more like 'in society ruled by communists', because it more accurately teases out the distinction between communism as movement and communism as mode of production. It (in my opinion) more accurately formulates that kinda stuff as 'aspirational' or hypothetical. Just me though

Your point of criticism is about the deterministic aspects of communism. Which is answered by pointing out the difference between communism as a movement and communism as a mode of production. The point on the idealistic aspects of communism is the difference of establishing a society from a position detached from already existing society, and one derived from the premises already contained within it. This is what Marx and Engels criticize the Utopian socialists for. The former is not entirely wrong either, since it is the ideal which gives way to the real.

I wouldn't mind reading something that was officially approved by the politburo. They must have written something good about the great patriotic war.

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I am aware of the distinction. My criticism is that Communists by now could have formulated something more concrete from having the benefit of modern knowledge of AI, systems theory, neuropsychology, and so on, but it remains as vague and enigmatic as ever.

Was Trotsky indulging in illicit utopian-idealist speculation when he posited his superman arising from (or perhaps rather as the necessary precondition of) Communist society?

You can read the ever-memed Cockshott book 'Towards a New Socialism' which does exactly that.

I wasn't aware he went further into full communism, I thought it was just about effectively computerizing Gosplan.

Capital is unironically a fun read (at least volume 1). Marx is a pretty good writer.