"Communism sounds great on paper - it just doesn't work in reality!" = most tedious line of conversation EVER?

Hm, well, the distinction between liability and opportunity doesn't seem insignificant to me.

the idea is that the state will be functionally democratic, and collective worker decision-making will happen fractally, all the way from the factory floor to the ministries.

Where did Marx state this?

Good points about early capitalism. I agree that the agrarian-to-communist leap was not what Marx had in mind but the fact that communism did not catch on in the most advanced countries itself seems to disprove the theory - surely the immiserating cycle of capitalist production and alienation of labour should have organically led to revolution?

it did! the manifesto is written from the middle of it; that's why it sounds so confident. then it was defeated. turned out capitalism wasn't old, but young. no doubt many hard lessons to be learned from 1848 but "this will continue forever" is not one of them, especially in our world where it seems yet another longstanding liberal safeguard against an event like 1848 is trashed every day.

my description of the worker-council model there is probably slipping forward into 1871 (or into 1905), whoops-- tho i'd be surprised if you couldn't find marx talking about something like it somewhere. in general tho you already know this is always the argument, even under a totalitarianism like stalin's where it is a transparent fiction: that you and your fellow workers are the ones who control the state.

Ha, OK, I wasn't remembering the context of the 1848 revolutions.

Yes, worker rule is always the argument, even, as you say, in the most authoritarian communist regimes, but nothing in the Manifesto really gives me an impression that Marx was mapping out some decentralized, democratic system, as opposed to the authoritarian versions that occurred irl. If anything, centralization seems pretty key.

The southeastern Indian state of Kerala is probably the most successful irl application of Marxist socialism. It actually puzzles me that it doesn't get more discussion among Western leftists.

I've been trying to think if there's /any/ system or principle about which this couldn't be said. Doesn't everything ever sound good on paper but run into problemos in real life?

Lots of things don't sound good on paper!

hugely relieved to scroll up itt and not find myself. now i will rob future-me of the same peace.

i feel like this should be the prologue to every post on ilx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_Kerala

Sund4r otm - this is pretty astonishing and underrated. Well I've never seen it mentioned before.

*southwestern

Kerala is awesome

also a long history of matriarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marumakkathayam

I fear that the absolute control required for the dictatorship of the proletariat attracts fucked up authoritarian people like Stalin.

It wasn't a case of attracting Stalin - the dictatorship within a dictatorship was his very own marvellous pièce de résistance!

although i know you on 2nd read of your post you aren't saying it wasn't tbf!

The southeastern Indian state of Kerala is probably the most successful irl application of Marxist socialism. It actually puzzles me that it doesn't get more discussion among Western leftists.

― One must put up barriers to keep oneself intact (Sund4r), Wednesday, January 15, 2020 3:31 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

their economy is not particularly socialist

"Sarcasm doesn't really translate over the internet".

It's almost as if sarcasm has existed in written form for centuries and you're just shit at parsing it

tedious argument i've been seeing everywhere lately, any time someone brings up billionaires having billions of dollars: "net worth isn't the same thing as liquid capital though"

guess a lot of people just learned that jeff bezos doesn't literally have a hundred billion dollars in a capital one account

a lot like the "communism sounds great on paper" and "the truth is somewhere in the middle" lines, half the time i think people just say these things because they heard other people say them and they want to say something, not because they're actually trying to make an argument

my fault for hanging around reddit/twitter

Love this essay (Tronti died a couple of weeks ago).

"Speaking for myself, I know that I would never have the freedom that I feel, inside myself, without having passed through, in my thought and my life, the historic experience of communism."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/a-message-from-the-emperor

admittedly I didn't know he was still alive, but I'm surprised I'm only hearing of his passing now

RIP

I don't have time to read this right now, but the Marx/Kafka thing is so perfect I can't believe I haven't encountered that before! thanks for posting this

Yes was laughing at the Marx-Kafka observation earlier. Great essay.