Rev Left Radio - Left Communism: Pannekoek, Bordiga, Luxemburg, & Mattick

Episode Date: August 25, 2019

Long time friend of the show, and recurring guest, Brenden joins Breht in the Rev Left bunker to talk about the tendency of Left Communism, the limitations of the term, some key figures and ideas, and much more!  Check out Brenden's podcast, Marxism and Moshpits here: http://marxismandmoshpits.libsyn.com/ Brenden is a member of the Nebraska Left Coalition, which you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/TheNebraskaLeftCoalition/ Outro Music: "Skull Clinic" by No Thanks No Thanks is Brenden's punk band, of which he is the lead singer. Check out and support their music here: https://no-thanks.bandcamp.com/  -------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com   --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have back on the show Brendan Leahy from multiple previous episodes. This time he is going to discuss with me left communism. It's a sort of big umbrella term and it covers a lot of different disparate movements. So we address sort of the complexities and nuances and even failures of the term left communism itself throughout this. But overall, I think it's a really interesting, worthwhile introduction into what is left communism, one of the tendencies that we have yet to do on this podcast. So I'm happy to finally be able to do it.

And as always, if you like what we do here at Revolutionary Left Radio, you can go to Revolutionary Left Radio.com, find our Twitter, find our YouTube page, and even find our Patreon to support us and, in exchange, get some dope bonus content. So, having said that, let's dive into this episode with Brendan Leahy on Left Communism. Hi, I'm Brendan. You may remember me from other episodes or maybe from my podcast, Marxism and Moshbits. Yeah, I can't even, I usually, like, name all the podcasts that you've been on,

but it's too many, you fucking know Brendan, just deal with it. Something about Easter Rising and Frederick Engels and who knows what else. So many, yeah, I can't even remember them all. All right, so Brendan is here today to talk about left communism. It's been a really long time since we've done a tendency introduction episode. That's sort of, you know, what we started doing in the first year of the show. People really loved to have that introductory, but we never got around to left communism. It wasn't for lack of trying. I definitely reached out to a bunch of different people that could be possible guests,

and it just never happened. And we were talking recently and we wanted to make this happens. I was like, Brendan, you're going to be a great guest. Let's do this. So that's what we're talking about today. I myself, and you know, I am pretty up to par on a lot of tendencies. these left communism is one that I haven't really studied in depth. And part of the reason, and we're going to get into that, is the sort of vague ambiguity around what that term exactly means. It's not as sharp as I'm a Marxist-Leninist or I'm an anarcho-communist. It's a little vaguer and a little blurier.

So maybe that's probably the best place to start. So in your own words, I guess, what is left communism? And another way to ask that question is, how did that term arise historically? Yeah, so, um, left communism really just like anything else in political terms comes from left and right in terms of the french revolution the more revolutionary minded people in the national assembly set on the left side so typically when people say left or right in politics it's a like relativistic term left tends to want quicker change be more revolutionary if you will usually more egalitarian and of course that's relative to whatever we're talking about So if we're talking about left communism, it really starts as just being really that, the left wing of communism. Peter Kropotkin said once that anarchism was the left wing of the socialist movement. So we can kind of go even further.

Left communism is the left wing of communism, maybe barring anarchism from that definition. Yeah. People really didn't start using the term in any sort of defined way until probably World War I. World War I's like this huge identity crisis essentially for socialism because a bunch of socialists were like if there's going to be a war, you know, we're not going to support it, no war but class war, et cetera, et cetera. And then when it came to the crunch time, a bunch of the parties, especially in places like Germany and France, ended up supporting the war, voting for war bonds, et cetera, et cetera, some of which were at the height, like in some ways,

the socialist movement was probably never larger than it was before World War I. And some of these parties, you know, the SDP in Germany, for example, actually were big influences on how the Bolsheviks organized. A lot of people kind of gloss over that now because, you know, nobody likes Bernstein or Kautzky or anything. But Lenin studied these people, especially Kautzky, not so much Bernstein. And then when it came to time for it, really the only socialists in Europe that were actually actively opposed to the war

were in Italy and Russia in a big way. But there were minorities in Germany, you know, in France, and in Italy, where they were actually one of the larger socialist groupings that were still opposed to the war. And so those kind of, that's the origins of left communism, really. Yeah, and then the term takes on different dimensions as time goes on. But one way to think about it for somebody who doesn't know anything about this is like it's somewhere in between sort of it's anti-Leninist right the left communism is broadly

seen i think especially like if you look it up like what is left communism sort of thing it would it will present itself as being anti-Leninist but still Marxist right so it's not quite anarchist but it rejects leninism and i think to some degree maybe you can correct me it rejects bolshevism and the Bolshevik revolution i would not say that that's broadly applicable which part um opposed to leninism okay so a lot of what The leftcoms were essentially supportive of most of them, were supportive of the Russian Revolution against the social chauvinistic elements of their party. Some of them were Leninists, really.

Or had most of the same positions as Leninism not really being a distinct ideology so much at the time. But most of them were critical of the direction the USSR went. So a lot of who we would consider left comms were actually some of the first people to join the comm intern that the Bolsheviks started. So the sort of the differences started to become clear during the second Congress, 1920. And there were some critiques, but most of the left comms were supportive of the Russian revolution itself, even if they were critical of Bolshevism. And some of them were very critical to Bolshevism. But the other chunk very much were a fan of Lenin. Yeah.

And that does speak to sort of the complexities here. This isn't one thing. I don't know. Are there people that call themselves today left comms? I'm sure there are. It's certainly used pejoratively by the MLs and MLMs towards certain, you know, non-ML leftists. But it is a term that some people also self-identify with for sure. There's some people self-identify with it.

And a lot of people still identify with some of the. strains of it and then there's in the u.s i think there's like a weird internet presence of left comms that either like operate very ironically like sort of the like weird combination of like accelerationism and borgism which is so it's really funny i love to get into that at a different time um or you know there are a lot of people who i think would consider themselves luxembourgists yeah so you hear that term yeah and that leads well into this next question because you know, under the umbrella term left communism, there are sort of sub-tendencies. So what are some of the predominant branches or sub-tenancies that often fall under the term left-com? And

relatedly, where do some of those splits occur? Yeah. So I think in and of itself, this is kind of showing how difficult this term is, because we can't really call them sub-tenancies because they were never the same tendency to begin with. And so they didn't really split because they don't have that much in common sometimes, except for their support of the Russia. revolution, like let's say critical support of the Russian revolution, and probably their criticisms of the development of the USSR as a state. So, you know, I think the two that I really am the most comfortable talking about, and probably are some of the biggest ones, are the council communists who are very much non-Leninists and proud of it, and then Bordegists,

who in some ways consider themselves more authentically Leninists than MLs. and we can get into that soon. But so I think, like, if we're talking about council communism, the first person we have to look at is Rosa Luxembourg. So Luxembourg isn't, like, 100% a left com, but was very much on the left wing of the socialist movement during, you know, this period we're talking about during World War I. So one of the things they inherit from Luxembourg is her critique of Bolshevik organizing strategy.

She has, like, a Marxist version of a spontaneity, I think, in regards to the role of the masses, isn't actually opposed to party organizing, though, and some critiques of her are that the way she handled the Polish Communist Party or Polish Socialist Party was actually pretty similar to Lenin, and she's a little bit of a hypocrite. People say that.

A critique of her. I'm not claiming this, but read a couple of her biographies and make your own opinion. So Luxembourg is really a super interesting figure. I know you're going to have an episode of her on some point. Yep, very soon. I would really stress, though, really quickly about her. She was very early and vocally committed to combating revisionism

and social chauvinism in the movement. She was one of the biggest critiques of the revisionist trend. I think she tore Bernstein to shreds. She called out Kautzky for kind of his descent into social sovereignism, if you will, well before Lennon did. In fact, Lennon kind of defended Kautzky from her for a little bit. It's one of the few, like, coarse corrections Lennon made, really. Interesting.

I don't think her critique of Bolshevism is very good, quite frankly, but it's a big part of where council communists come from in regards to the USSR, and some of it was that it was going to develop into a bureaucratic state, and even some people who consider themselves supporters of the USSR, like Maoists, for example, agree with that. And I think some of her fears played out. Personally, I don't really think that Bolshevism or Leninism inherently is going to lead to that sort of bureaucratic stuff, but I do think it did. So for people who consider themselves vanguardists, myself included,

we have to really demonstrate that we can do it without falling into those traps. And I think we can. Yeah, I agree with that. She's got a book called The Accumulation of Capital that's pretty decent in it. She kind of has some critiques of marks that I think fall flat. But she kind of does do a good job about showing the crisis cycle of capitalism and how colonialism and imperialism are necessary in order for capitalism to maintain itself. this book came out before, like years before imperialism, it's much larger.

And in some ways, not always, it's a better book than, like, Lenin's imperialism. So, that's a big claim. It's, I mean, it's just, it's just more thorough, I'm sorry. I'll have to check it. I've never read that one. A lot of Lenin's, like, it's essentially a pamphlet what Lenin wrote, like a long pamphlet. Definitely. And he kind of puts it in the context of World War I, which is really, I think, a big part of his

contribution. And he's talking about this economist Hobson, I think his name is. And he's kind of translating that into Marxism. Luxembourg is doing this really on pure Marxist stuff, and it's a lot more of her own research. So I think there are areas in which Hobson's research is more solid than Roses. But in terms of being a Marxist work, I think she uses more Marxist economy than Lenin does,

because Lenin is really translating Hobsant stuff into Marxist terms. So it's good. Like I'm not shit talking to Lenin here. This sort of take two different approaches to it. Yeah, it's less of a, political panflit and more of like a like thick economic book um it's not my favorite by any means but it's pretty good and i think deserves to be paid attention to so her influence on council communism is kind of through those areas uh and then the people we really should talk about are uh antony

panic uh panicoic i'm not panicoic i heard it pronounce that way i don't i'm not super familiar with uh Dutch um before you move on there really quick just um because we're moving on to different people in this realm. I do want to say, like, I want to reiterate what you've said. What Rosa did with Bernstein is often what we think of Lenin doing with Kotzky, right? It's like battling the opportunism and the revisionism within the movement, specifically within her own country, Germany at the time. And also, interestingly, I read this way before I got into, like, Marxism, Leninism, broadly.

So I can't really 100% vouch for how great it is, but I've read by Trotsky hands off Rosa. Actually, it's really, I think it's good. I think it's good. Basically, what I got out of it, if I remember it correctly, was he was defending Rosa as a Leninist against other Leninists, specifically Stalin, I think, who was trying to basically take her and put her down and say that she's not really relevant or that she's, what was it exactly? I mean, I think he was calling her an opportunist or whatever.

I don't remember. And Trotsky basically came to her defense and said why, even though she doesn't agree with everything, she's still a comrade sort of thing. Yeah. Worth a read. There's going to be a couple points where I rag on Stalin here. and this is one of them. He really did a lot of work to kind of demolish

a lot of other theorists from this time period we're talking about to kind of make it seem like Lenin is like the only one that matters. Lenin could very well and I think overall is probably the best theorist, but he isn't the only one and there are certain people who had certain ideas before he did that he ended up holding.

Again, like Rosa was calling out Kautzky before Lennon was calling out Kautzky. I think that's one of the things Trotsky brings up I haven't read it in a long time. It's been a long time. But so it took a little bit longer for Stalin to go after Rosa compared to some of the other people he was critiquing, partially because she was a martyr. But eventually, he did. And yeah, I don't know.

This is like 28, 35. I don't know. Hands off, Rosa is pretty short. It's, you know, you don't have to be a Trotskyist to, like, appreciate the fact that he's defending, you know, somebody who he disagreed with pretty vocally at times. But it was a solid comrade. Like, nobody can look at Rosa. and say she didn't like believe in the thing you can't call her a vizumist you can't call her an opportunist so she gave her life for the cause yeah she died for it um so she's a big influence on

the council communist tradition um and and like a more solid left com tendency so uh panicoic um i'm not super familiar with him so i'm going to kind of speed through this but i think in terms of the area he was in he did a lot of organizing in germany um much like rosa being from Poland, but organizing a lot in Germany. He's Dutch, but he did a lot of organizing in Germany. So I think he was pretty much, I think it wasn't until World War I that he kind of took his leftward shift, but when he did, he was very much a firm defender of revolution. He thought that there needed to be new organs of working class democracy. So the thing that we would say he would have in common with Leninism would be sort of like, in the period that Leninism was

really stressing authentically, the Soviets is around the October Revolution and the years the first couple years after, he was a big fan of setting these up. These are political organs of working class democracy outside of the parliament. So this is, you know, an outside of traditional politics, bourgeois institutions. He thought that the working class needed their own institutions. You know, that's why it's called council communism. Yeah. Someone I'm more familiar with that's pretty important in the council communist tradition who wasn't,

he's more somebody who's established, like around when it's established, who's pretty young. he's very much like a sort of like student of luxembourg in a lot of ways so his political critiques of leninism and bolshevism which he was very vocally against i think are in some ways poor echoes of her critiques um but he was a economist and i think a very solid one and so i think his critiques of the USSR um they're really spot on in a lot of ways he does a really good job demonstrating how the USSR wasn't really economically that different than capitalism this is the sort of leftcom that would use the state capitalism term Yeah, and this is Paniccoic? No, this is Maddoch. Oh, Maddo. You didn't mention it. Okay, so now we're talking about Paul Maddox? Sorry.

So moving from Panicoic, Paul Maddoch, student of Luxembourg. There we go. Sorry. Famous Council Communist, and he's the one that... He's a little bit later than Panic. I mean, like, they were... He's just a little bit younger, so he's more of a contemporary with, like, say, the Frankfurt School. Okay.

He actually was, like, low-key friends with some of them, but he didn't get involved with the Social Institute because he wasn't really interested in getting involved with the U.S., but he spent a lot of, he moved to the U.S. during the age of fascism, if you will, and he spent some of the time trying to get the various disparate, like, German parties involved. But he did a lot of economic research. So he kind of talks about the USSR as being modified capitalism. There's very clear superstructural differences and even, like, political differences that we could consider structural. But in regards to the way production is handled, sort of hyper-focusing on industrial development,

and other factors, maybe commodity production to an extent, it's not really fundamentally different than the way that capitalism functioned. And he would argue that the reason that the crises that the USSR faced weren't the same crises as the U.S. was that the USSR just didn't overproduce the same way that Western powers did. And I think it's very like solid. It's almost entirely based off of Marx's capital, the first and third volumes. I think he goes beyond. and Rosa and understanding how Marx works. And using a similar analysis, he really talked about Keynesian economics. This is the post-war period. This is when Keynesian economics seems to be the thing that's working. And even some Marxists were starting to blend Keynesian economics

with Marxism. He really demonstrated the ways that this post-war prosperity was going to be temporary. It was going to lead to stagnation. And I think that really played out. He also took the time to like critique Hayek before neoliberalism was really big. So, I mean, he kind of saw the writing on the wall, and he had like a good proto-critique of neoliberalism as an economic philosophy. This is before neoliberalism had a chance to institute any sort of policy, so he doesn't, he can't talk about it the same way like David Harvey can. Sure, sure. But so in regards to this sort of critiques, his critiques of like, let's say mixed economies or like state capitalist economies, he uses Marxist analysis. So even if you disagree, you should take it seriously if you take Marxist's materialist conception of history.

seriously. Like, if you really think that there's an economic and social class-based, a society and political superstructures arise from that and reproduce this world order, then I highly advise you take the time to take, at least take it seriously, even if you disagree. Are you talking about a specific text of Maddox? A lot of his stuff. My favorite thing by Paul Maddoch is Marx and Keens, where he's really comparing the two. A lot of his stuff's on the Marxist archives, a lot of it's short. Marx and Keynes, I have a copy you can borrow it. Again, I don't really agree with him when it comes to a lot of those, like, sort of political organization stuff, but he's a really good Marxist economist. And the political organization stuff, specifically, you're talking

he's a council communist. He's an anti-Bolshevik. So he also wrote a really good critique of Herbert Marcuse's one-dimensional man from an economic standpoint. He basically is like, you know, in regards to the sociology and stuff, I think like Marquisé is great. He's smart on like, this is brilliant. But economically speaking, he's wrong from a Marxist perspective, and here's why. And I think Marcuse wrote a letter to him saying it was the best critique. It was the only one that really held up. And he was like, oh, yeah, you know, from like an economic standpoint, here is like why this one dimensional society thing is temporary. Basically, capitalism is going to have crises again. You know, by the time the 70s happened, a lot of his like predictions there played out.

So that's my kind of like quick and dirty guide to counsel. communism and I'm sure that a bunch of council communists are like, that's not right. But on the other side of things, we've got the Bordecus tradition. And so Bordegous they'll sometimes call Bordecus like more Leninist than Lennon or a Leninist before Lenin, which like, Leninists love to mock. But there's some credibility to that because he organically came to some very similar ideas to Lennon before having read Lennon. So like when he became familiar with Lennon, he was like, this guy is great, you know, he pretty. He pretty proves me right. So similarly, we're getting a similar theme here. Bordigo was very strongly in

opposition to the reformist wing of the Italian left, which was much less right wing than most of the European countries we've talked about. He was very convinced there needs to be a revolutionary vanguard. He was very convinced there needed to be a working class party, and kind of very similar arguments to Lennon that the working class is inherently diffuse. There's going to be different needs, you know, someone from Turin or Milan is going to have different needs than someone, you know, from the south of Italy, but there needs to be a group of people who can articulate the overall general needs of the class. I think both of them kind of get, like, they're the hints of vanguardism in Marx. So, I mean, Bordeca took Marx seriously. He read Marx and

and read Marx and he was really committed to the idea that the theory of communism, even if it's not fully developed is in marks and angles, that's all we really need for our program, and we have to be committed to that program. You know, tactically, we might have to do this or that or the other, but the whole time, our strategy is to get to what is laid out in the Communist Manifesto, and what's that the abolition of private property, an international proletarian revolution. So that is, that is number one. Never forget that. If you're a Bordegist, you know, that they call it like the invariate program. So that's kind of like his, big thing. He had some differences to Lenin. He was very much a fan of centralization, but he believed

in an organic centralization other than a democratic centralization. He didn't like the word democracy. He thought it was bourgeois. So some people who aren't really familiar with him kind of think he was like this authoritarian and he ran things really top down. And later there was kind of like a propaganda thing against him through the Italian Communist Party. History tends to remember Bordeca as being like kind of a top down guy. But I think if you really look at it, That's not what organic centralism is because Bordeaux is actually opposed to the banning of factions. I mean, he thinks that if you're a communist and you know the program, you're going to fight for whatever you think is best for the program if you're a real one. If you're not an opportunist, you know, and the Bordegists are always calling everybody else opportunists.

But if you're not an opportunist, you're like, this is communism, right? We're going to get, we're going to abolish capital. You know, we're going to smash the bourgeois state. We're going to have an international proletarian revolution. That's what we need. And we're going to get there. We're going to get there through class struggle, right? We're going to, like the class struggle is central, as Leninists say, that's a central part of it.

So he, you know, for him, that organic centralism is going to happen. You don't need to have a majority vote that everyone needs to agree with, partially because he thinks that sometimes the majority is wrong. And if you are a faction, a faction isn't a problem for the party, it's a symptom of a problem in the party. So if you're really a revolutionary, you're going to leave a party. party that's just completely been corrupted by opportunism if it's no longer a viable vehicle. That's the organic parties. He sort of puts a lot of weight in this idea that it'll naturally occur. These things will naturally purge themselves or work themselves out. They don't need what is the more Leninist conception of democratic centralism where there is this sort of internal

debate and then everybody follows the line that comes out of that debate. Yeah, I mean, because he doesn't think internal debate is bad and like there was a lot more internal debate in the Bolshevik party before they see state power. And then eventually it started banning factions, etc, et cetera, et cetera. All of that stuff, Puerto goes like, that's not necessary. You know, the early stuff, I don't see him having a disagreement with, but I don't think you would agree with the idea that the top-down committee is going to make a rule and every communist needs to do it, because if you have a function, if your job is to say to raise self-defense committees, you have to do the best job that you think you can do as a communist.

So different, like, Bordeaux parties will interpret how to, like, make organic centralism happen anyway. way, but the leadership is supposed to consult as much as possible with the base. And actually, if you look at, like, solid history, Bordeca had a really strong relationship with the base. So there are some ways that there are some similarities between some of the ways these Bordecus parties handle this with, like, a Maoist mass line. And I can't really get into the specifics of that, and they would both probably disagree with me. And not every Bordeca's party functions that way. But there are ways in which, like, you have to go back to the masses, see what they want.

you've got to interpret it in terms of this invariable program you know if the mass is like oh you like like private property you're going to be like in the long run too bad you know yeah so that's interesting his main claim to fame is he called uh Stalin the grave digger of the revolution to his face this is before Stalin had like really consolidated the power but he's starting to and and Stalin to his face how did that in the comment turn like like he was one of the last high ranking or like not high-ranking, high-profile members of the com intern to directly criticize Stalin. So that's kind of his claim to fame. He goes back to Italy.

People like Togliotti and Gramsci have like visit Moscow and before Stalin even. Like there's some people who love Bordeca. Like anarchists have like our, and like Libcoms have a fascination with Bordeca. Not necessarily because they're Bordeca's, but they're really interested in him. I don't know why. You can find like some of them were some of the people who published some of his first work in English. So he was really popular with the base for a while, but not necessarily willing to tow the come intern's lines. So people like Zenevev and Stalin kind of were pushing for people like Togliotti and Gramsci to be in more positions of authority.

It didn't really matter because of this whole organic centralism thing for a little bit. But eventually he gets arrested by the fascists. Actually, he and Gromshi were in jail together at the same time. Oh, wow, shit. And kind of they patched up their differences because Gramsci was part of that sort of like personality smear campaign against him. But they kind of patched up their differences and they ended up holding classes together where Gramsci, who was much more like philosophically trained would teach them like philosophic and like humanity centered classes in Bordeca who was trained as an engineer would teach the more mathematic based stuff. In prison to prisoners. In prison to prisoners. But um, Bordiga didn't die. He ends up like he gets, uh, let out. He gets re-arrested at some point. But so like in the late 20s and stuff. He's in fascist prison, so he kind of gets sidelined

from leadership positions in the party by that point, and then he gets expelled for being a Trotskyist because he, who is not a Trotskyist at all. But he defended Trotsky because he thought that

a lot of the claims being made by Trotsky were BS. But he defended Trotsky because he thought some of the claims by, you know, by anti-trotskyists, by Stalin? Strong people in the commenter. And like, people kind of have this

like, it's Trotsky and Stalin. Yeah, yeah. So the Russians were really concerned about the French Revolution. They thought that the French Revolution was like, you know, in the same way that like nowadays a lot of communists talk about the Russian Revolution. And that's our example. So for a lot of Russians, their example was going to be the French Revolution. And that's why Kratzky has his Bonapartist theories and all of that.

So like everyone was concerned like who's going to be Bonaparte. Like who's the guy who's going to come in who's like going to like very vocally be. for the revolution and then turn it into this like weird class collaborative state and kind of betray the revolution from within. And Trotsky is somebody who's got power bases in specific parts of Russia. He

basically controls the military, super good tactician. So a lot of people in the Bolshevik party who never liked Trotsky to begin with because he was smug as fuck. Pretty arrogant and aloof. The law and Trotsky is tradition. Right. Yeah.

So he so so they thought this week i was going to be bone apart right um and so there was like a lot of people who who started the smear campaign i think xenove is is probably he taught a lot of Stalin in like the dirty tricks that Stalin would do later in terms of character assassination so the first power block was xenavev commonev and Stalin and xenavev and Stalin both were in high positions of the come intern well eventually you know trotsky gets sidelined he actually had a couple years of political inactivity where he wasn't like he was just like they don't want me I'm out then like Stalin kind of made a block with like bucarin for a little bit and this is like his right word shift

um and kind of sidelines xenavev and commonev commonev ends up asking trotsky to be part of this like new combined opposition etc against Stalin yeah so like historically speaking we can't just say Stalin especially in the time period we're talking about the late 20s it's not just Stalin. Stalin didn't really consolidate power until the 30s. So, like, it's not just a Trotsky versus Stalin. But, yeah, so people are character assassinating Trotsky with some historical revisionism. And Bordega, who's not a Trotskyist, has some theoretical differences with Trotsky.

It's like, some of what you're saying is untrue and, like, say what you will about him, but he's like, he, like, fought the revolutionary war. These are people who are around in the late 10s, early 20s. Borgas probably maybe 30 around this time. He's not, he's not, like, 35. He's a young dude, but he was around during 1917. So he's like, yeah, I mean, this dude was doing shit. Stop lying about him.

So, some people really think Bordegists and Trotskyists are, like, can be lumped in the same category. Theoretically speaking, they're very different. But so he gets expelled for being a Trotskyist, kind of like, similar to Trotsky had a couple years of, like, not really doing that much, kind of comes back to theory work. So that's kind of why he's famous. But I think he's, like, economically speaking, a really good Marxist, maybe a little bit rigid and mathematical in some senses, but is actually a good dialectician. He's got this book called Murdering the Dead or Murder of the Dead. It's translated from Italian. It's kind of an

analysis of disaster capitalism. He talks about the way, like, there's environmental effects of capitalism because of this crisis that are going to have, like, huge environmental concerns. This is 1951. Early eco-Marxism. In a way, yeah, and like really bring it. Proto. Yeah. And he's just really, he's kind of got like this, like, we have to understand Marx. mentality that actually makes him really good Marxist. It's hard to nail down some of the specifics of his thought because again there was like this kind of campaign against him. He kind of gets

written out of the history. He was kind of marginalized within the party. He wrote in Italy to begin with. He was never like that famous. He also would like write things anonymously. So there's a lot of stuff that he wrote that doesn't have his name on it because he thought that like he didn't need the credit. You could be a good communist anonymously like name recognition is bourgeois. a lot egoism. You know what I mean? So that makes it. I like that. It makes it hard to talk about him. But those are kind of some of the big names in left communism. Well, first of all, thank you. That was amazing. I learned a lot just listening to that. You covered a fuck ton of ground. Even if people disagree with you on this or that fact, nobody can deny that, you know,

you did a great job sort of covering that complex and multifaceted history. I do know that the friends over at Swampside chats have an episode on Bordeca that I listened to on the way to the Marxist Center. And it was pretty good. Interesting. It's intro to Bordiga. It doesn't go super deep, but it tackles one of his major works, and you can flesh out some of those other ideas. And I'm sure maybe in the future, we have you back on and do a whole episode on Bordeca because it'd be interesting, and I don't know a lot about them. I don't know a lot about Maddick either. I know these people. I know sort of the positions they play on the left, but I haven't directly read either of their work, and I should correct that. But given the fact that

left com is often used as a pejorative, as well as the fact that it is sort of an umbrella term, is the term left communism a useful way to think about certain tendencies on the left in your opinion? Why are why not? What are your critiques of that term, I guess? All right. Dialectically speaking. Let's go. Yes and no.

So I think as a term as it exists now, it's in a lot of ways meaningless and vapid. Leftists use it to critique one another without critiquing policy or substance or theory. Or in some cases, ignoring the very real history behind some of these people, like this idea that, and like, you know, the internet acceleration is sometimes. talking about. They love to make Bordega into a meme of this armchair guy. Part of the reason is because you know, the guy didn't want to be an icon and so there's already a level of irony there. But he actually was a really good organizer. It's hard to like know some of the stuff he did because he got like erased from the thing. But the Italian like left like the left comms in Italy were a major power player. The PSI didn't have the same sort of right wing revisionist Bernstein trend to

the same extent that some of those European parties did. But but Italian left com ishish like proto left com side was so big they're the majority of the communist party when it was founded so like somebody and and like it was a larger group than gromshy's like turin group that you know turin circle and he wasn't organizing the same place musilini did he wasn't part of that old guard because the old guard were maximalists they were like the sorts of people who were vocally very revolutionary and were very serious about their like anti-imperialist war stuff but ultimately really wanted um bureaucratic reforms like Surradi. His followers don't fit into any of those things. They were based in. I think Naples is kind of his like area. So we know those people, there were a lot of them. That wouldn't

have happened if he wasn't putting in the work. There's a like meme there, like an ironic, you know, stuff. And some of his followers, like, you know, some of like there's a degree to which like the whole ultra-leftism for leftcoms things is true. And it comes more true over time, unfortunately, in some cases. But, you know, nobody's actually critiquing the policy. So, you know, some of the people who have been called leftcom in the past include Trotsky, Bucherin, Mao. Trotsky used to, like, Trotskyists, not Trotsky, would call the like, no working with like social revisionist's policy of the common term. They would call it left com. Lukash, who's like most famous work, history of, uh, history in class consciousness,

which both defends the first, one of the first chapters, defends Rosa, one of their last ones, critiques, her critique of Bolshevism essentially. He's called a left com. So like, you know, there's so many differences between all of these people, and I would say none of them are really left-coms. You know, somebody like Trotsky or Mao, you would kind of maybe call center left. So I think that's kind of a mistake. Also using it synonymously with ultra-leftism,

which I think is a real problem, again, the sort of like high horse of purity, but doesn't do anything thing. Like, or the left-communism, or the ultra-leftism, sorry, where it's like extreme terrorist actions that are, you know, kind of similar to the way anarchists used to organize in the 1800s.

or Matt talks about him as like phrase mongerers well their rhetoric will be hyper-revolutionary but their actions don't match or in any case their actions are not at all conducive to where the masses are currently etc yeah and I think like that sort of ultra-leftism is a problem ultra-leftism also has a different meaning in France so like this like I'm not talking about people who describe themselves as ultra-leftists in France necessarily I don't know enough about them caveat there but I don't think using the two terms synonymously is really that useful either Because that is like a legitimate critique. Secondly, some of the people who are actually like left comms are like Bordeca to Luxembourg are really opposed to each other in terms of important concepts like vanguardism. So, you know, it's really imprecise to use. On the other side of the dialectic, it is useful because with dialectics, we understand a lot of things relativistically. So we can look at the left now, no matter when we look at the left, there's going to be a left right and center. that's there's an overton window of the left and it shifts but like anytime we purge a left or a right flank

there's going to be a new left or right flank because it's a relativistic thing and that can be really useful so you know if we're talking about the second international period we could put somebody like luxembourg on the left lenin and trotsky center left kowicek center you know what i mean Bernstein on the right etc etc if we're talking about the period after like lenin's death after the bolsheviks divided you like got rid of factions got rid of the workers on opposition, which after they got rid of the left Bolsheviks, the workers' opposition with the left, so now we've got Trotsky on the left, somebody like Zinovv on the center, someone like Bucharan on the right in terms of things like economy. So Stalin dies, right,

there's kind of a crisis in international communism more or less, or maybe not a crisis, but a lot of people who like didn't have the power to like really fight the common intern and suddenly did. You've got this split where, you know, kind of Mao occupies a left. Somebody like Khrushchev is at a center and people like Togliotti, who I'd mentioned before, and Tito, occupy the right constantly shifting right so if we want to talk about like the overturned window within communism that's useful especially if we're trying to fight revisionism because the revisionists are usually going to be on the right side definitely in my opinion so i think there is a way to use it usefully especially like i think when you kind of put it in this broad thing there's a lot of shifts

to the right that happened in the communist movement that go beyond the simple this revisionist took power that we really need to look at in terms of looking at the history of our movement so let's go on to this next one because, you know, recently on Red Menace, our sister podcast, we did an entire episode on Lenin's famous work, Left Communism and Infantile Disorder. And using the term left communism, given all of the caveats and conditions that you just, you know, put there, can be confusing it in some ways. So just to be clear, and if people want to go listen to that entire text, we explain it and apply it to our current condition. So definitely check out Red Menace if you haven't already. But what was Lenin attacking in that work? And what elements of left

communism do you think survive his critique okay the left communism is one of my infantile the sword is one of my least favorite books by lenin not because it's like bad or he's wrong necessarily but because most of the good theory in there can be found in other places like the whole like we need a vanguard truly articulates that russia has unique historical importance but like you know people like him and trotsky had already sort of been saying that following the revolution but you would definitely agree there's a historical context in which he wrote that pamphlet that was important at the time. And that's what we really need to look at, right? This is, it comes out in 1920. I think so. At this point, people like Lenin and Trotsky are becoming increasingly aware

that the European revolution that they were counting on is not going to happen. And they're essentially under siege by most of the world. Just to be clear, they were hoping that once the Russian revolution happened, that the revolutionary forces and the rest of Europe would sort of come to its aid and uprising in their own countries, et cetera, and really create a global, or at least continental movement. Right. And this is, you know, the treaty of, and they were trying to foster revolution in India. That's kind of like a relatively unknown thing because they thought that, one, because India was like a colonized place and they were very much like anti-colonial. And two, because that would have really put the strings on Britain, which was kind of leading the charge against Russia. Like that big coalition of like 17 countries or something was led by Britain. It was like British politicians that were pressuring the US and stuff to invade Archangel and all of that jazz. So they've got some serious pressure. They're kind of. of earlier assumptions are weakened. They've lost a lot of the popular support they had. The working class has been fighting the civil war. So like a lot of people working class people,

the power base of the Bolsheviks are just dead. You know, peasants, some of the peasants are starving because they were starving during World War I, you know, but like food doesn't magically exist now because somebody switches power. So they're still starving, getting frustrated because where's the bread and the peace? The Bolsheviks tried to negotiate a complete end to World War I. aside and the only person who was willing, people who were really willing to come to the table was Germany with this awful, awful deal that people like Trotsky and Bucharin did not want to take. Trotsky ended up trying to stall for time and ended up having to go for it. Lennon was a fan of it, I think, before Trotsky, Bucharin ended up, like, getting in trouble with

a party for so vocally opposing it for a while. Like, London wasn't really a fan of, he was like a strategic calculation on Lennon's part. It wasn't something Lennon was excited about, but he thought it was necessary. Two shitty options. Right. He thought, thought it was necessary. And they were trying to deliver on their campaign promise of peace. So even though they wanted peace without annexations, they would take peace. You know, like the Tsarist empire isn't really something that communists should be trying to maintain anyway.

So there's, and they're in the middle of a war. It's really complicated situation. They're becoming aware that maybe the revolutionary ebb is happening now. you know they might need to take some strategic retreats they didn't think they had to make at first so they're coming aware of this and the big supporters of the revolution to begin with was the left wing of communism meanwhile you've got all of these people who were kind of in the socialist center who weren't really a fan of the bolshevik revolution but were opposed to the war two they're looking for a new home kowtsky is trying to reform the second international i think not super confident on that fact but there is is like the second international is trying to exist again. Meanwhile, there's already been one Congress, the first Congress ever has already happened, of the Come Intern. They think about starting their own international. They decide it's a bad idea. So now they're willing to maybe come to the table with the Communists and join the Com Intern. But they've just been,

they've been getting hit hard by Lenin and all of these people, you know, philosophically. And meanwhile, the left wing of communism, in Germany especially, don't want anything. thing to do with them. You've got an independent German socialist party, the USPD, is a big part of whom I'm talking about, but you also have two different communist parties. This is really complicated. So there's also a power gap in terms of, like, theoretically speaking, during the Second International, people like Kautzky were very important because they knew Ingles, they knew what they're talking about, they knew their shit, they'd read Marx's notebooks that maybe other people hadn't read yet. Like Kautsky's the person who edited, they did volume of four of capital. I don't

think he did a good job. But that gives him a certain weight and credibility. And he was, not really a revisionist for a long time and like again even when he first started to make that trend lenin was defending him against luxembourg right so there's like an ideological maybe symbolic and like very real political power gap and the bolsheviks think that they're the best ones to do it they're the only ones who had a revolution that went anywhere right there were small attempts at revolution other places but they're the only ones who really got anywhere so they're trying to fill this power center and become the new center like they're trying to make the center left the new center basically shift the overton window left yeah essentially so these people who are

these parties that are thinking about joining the communist international or like the PSI who was already a member like i said the socialists there were anti-war more so than in other countries but they were still not really revolutionaries the way that the bolsheviks wanted were thinking about joining he wrote this this thing in 1920 it's the same year as the second congress to show how important that like to really like hit home that this is part of why he was writing this he like they the bolsheviks gave every person in that conference a copy every person like this is why they wrote this and like we don't talk about it yeah yeah so he's you know he's talking about a lot of different stuff he doesn't he's not right about some of it like especially when he like has little small asides

or like he he critiques sylvia planchrist for a little bit british communist um he gave her advice earlier, like a year before, and kind of like, by the time he wrote this, he changed his mind and is, like, kind of critiquing her for doing something that he thought maybe was a good idea before, Lenin, I mean, complicated. He's got some, like, little one lines about Bordeca. Some of the absenteeists that he's critiquing weren't really absenteeists on principle, right? And so what he's arguing this whole time, and, like, I don't know that much about the German situation. I think a lot of what he's saying there is pretty accurate, and that's what he spends a lot of time talking about. But his little aside's about Italy and

stuff. Some of the people who read the book, some of the people were critiqued in the book, read it, and we're like, oh, you know, like, everything Lenin is saying is right. Like, theoretically, like, this is really smart. This is going to change how I organize. But in the peculiarities of this situation, I think actually absenteeism is still a good strategy. And that was a lot of people's opinion. That was Bordeca's opinion. Like, he was non-plused. He's like, yeah, I mean, you know, like strategically and tactically, I still think we should abstain for these elections. because, like, Bordego's concern was that the PSI were going to win a bunch of elections, but they weren't really going to shift the country to the left.

They were going to shift their party to the right, which is pretty much what happened. They were really distrustful of the center of the PSI anyway, so they ended up splitting into the PCI, the Communist Party. So it's not because it's a bad book by any means, but a lot of what he does in this book is critique dogma, critique doing things on principle, critique people for sloganeering, which are all good points but nowadays when we use this book a lot of the people who are quoting this book are doing the very things he's critiquing that's why this is one of those favorites um even when i read menace episode i think alison talked about how um a lot of people like democratic socialists or like

write ds aers will say like the book by lennon you want to read is an infantile disorder because they think that it supports their electoralism and in a lot of ways it it really doesn't i mean what Lenin is doing is just saying like don't come with a priori commitments without understanding the situation you're entering don't say before anything even happens these are these are things we'll never do in any circumstances right because you know circumstances change and you have to be strategic he's like sometimes you have to make strategic compromises sometimes you have to take part in bourgeois elections right that's what he's saying like the cPS USA uses it to justify because it's like the majority of the u.s working class believes that elections matter so you should

take part in elections so they don't like they're stuck in this two-party system it follows the logic of the book but the thing is is lenin's talking theoretically because he and he doesn't give a this is when you should and shouldn't abstain because there's no real answer exactly and so if he's wrong about certain people like like bordeca it's because the peculiarities of the situation do maybe call for abstention not because lennon is wrong theoretically um and this is a problem with lennon a lot of times because Lenin was an amazing politician, one of the best political minds in communist history, he knew that you can't, there's not a answer for everything. The problem is, is that if you're like, hey, you know, theoretically speaking, there's not an answer for everything.

Anyone can take that and be like, this is, this is, you know, this proves me here and now. There's no way to say what's going on in Russia then is 100% applicable to what's going on the U.S. now or Italy even the same year. You know what I mean? And, and, and, And there's not really a one for one. And me saying it's my least favorite does not mean don't read it. I'm not saying it's bad. I think that you should read anything I talk about. Tell me why I'm wrong or disagree with me or whatever, by all means.

And again, I don't think anything he's really saying is wrong except for some of the people aren't absenteeing on principle. They're doing it for that situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being strategic about it, not being a priori about it. Right, and some of those people. But other than, but what his main argument is, great by all means but i think that it's really misused by people on all sides like you know i think

you know left comms mls mLs social democrats they'll all use that book to argue completely different things and they'll you know he'll they'll they'll sloganeer and they'll be dogmatic which is what the book's arguing against it's the opposite of dialectics right and it's the opposite of what the book argues against he's like don't be dogmatic right all right so you've described yourself interestingly as a left Leninist. And I believe others have described you as different things. Sometimes you have been described as a left com by others. Yeah, I've hit the gamut. You know, I've been called the Trotskyist, a postmodernist, a left com, you know. Have you ever been called a Maoist? I think I have before by an M.O. So, so I guess all of that leads to what is your own tendency and in what ways does it

overlap with what most of us know as left communism or obviously all the nuances we've been talking about this far. Yeah, a lot of my positions would have gotten me labeled as a left com at some point or another. I am very much like a Marxist. This is part of why I like Bordeca, without necessarily being a Bordecaist and not being interested in joining any of the Borgas parties I know about. Because I think that there's value to being like, hey, this is the program, right, abolish private property. So in that sense, like, I'm a left communist. I, you know, I could be like a left Leninist because I, you know, state and revolution, really, really just amazing, really good work, really important to how I think about things. You know, imperialism, I do like materialism and

imperialism. Great one. I've read a lot of his notebooks. But I don't, yeah, I'm just a Marxist. I don't fit into one category because I think that a lot of people have a lot of good points. Like from the Maoists, I think mass line, cultural revolution are really important ideas. The thing is, is I don't like some of the a priori, some of these tendencies come with, right? So I could argue using left communism and infantile disorder against picking one of these tendencies. I think there is a danger for some people. They're like eclectic and they're afraid of conflict. And so they're like, oh, I'm going to take this and this. I like this about anarchists. I like this about the anarchists. But you can also take the contradictions, resolve them,

and say, hey, somebody's wrong here. Right. Like I think Paul Matick, for example, I disagree with his analysis of Bolshevism, I think his political economy work is really strong. His breakdown of why Keynesianism is going to fall short, really played out. And I think that that is actually compatible with a lot of the things I take from Lenin. You can sync, like, you know, Marx is reading people like James Mill, John Stewart Mill, says Monday, like Adam Smith. And he's, you know, in capital, he's saying how wrong all of these people are. But if they're right about something, he's like, and this is where they're right.

You can totally do that. I'm a Marxist. You could call me a left com if you want. Well, it's totally, it's dialectical. There's a difference between being eclectic and subjectivist and just like picking and pulling anything that personally fits your fancy. And there's the difference between being a dialectical thinker on the Marxist side of things, pulling from tradition, seeing how things are in contradiction or have tensions and exploring those.

Even earlier, you answered one question dialectically. You answered it from both sides of the problem. And I think that is a strength. And like I said earlier, the opposite of dialectics is dogmatism. And even Marxist, because it's easier, will rather just, you know, prop up some position as dogma, never having really critically engaged with other works that might challenge it to have a robust understanding of it. And I definitely hate this impulse, which happens in every tendency, of just dismissing all the work by a theorist or a person who doesn't fit your tendency or that you disagree with on some things, right? like this whole Bordeca thing like or this Rosa Luxembourg thing or anything like you could be a

different tendency and then say they fucked up on this this and this therefore there's nothing to learn from them or you can say hey I disagree with a big chunk of this but there's some really interesting things to learn from and to pull from and at least think about even if you walk away disagreeing with it being challenged and having to work through that shit makes you a better dialectical think right if you're if you're a Marxist in Nebraska you don't have to be a Bordegist to read murdering the dead and read about how capitalism is actually exacerbating flooding in the Poe River in Italy and say, hmm, I wonder how capitalism, by its inherent logic, by its inherent tendency for crisis, for its need to grow, for its need to destroy infrastructure in order to have room

to build new things or whatever might exacerbating flooding, like this is something directly materially relevant to how you should be organizing. You don't have to be a word of us to like see something useful there. Exactly right. Okay, so we talked a little bit about some of the left communist tensions with the USSR, the Bolsheviks, etc. Let's actually skip that and just talk about anarchism because we haven't really addressed that yet. So in what ways does left communism oppose or differ from anarchism? And is there a left communist critique of anarchism that differs fundamentally from an ML or MLM critique? Most of the people we would consider left communists, we wouldn't consider anarchists because, and they wouldn't consider themselves anarchists, because usually they're going to have some commitment to something like a party form. You know, even the council communists oftentimes are in parties. So that's, I mean, that's a short answer.

Your USSR question probably has more we can go into. But part of it's also just like a lot of anarchists think there's like a fundamental difference between how Marx views the world and anarchism. Sort of like fetishizing the Bakun and Marx split or something. Something like that. You know, I think communists need the same thing from the other side sometimes. But, you know, I mean, left comms are, for the most part, they're Marxists. You know, they may not be your kind of Marxist, but their starting spot is class struggle in that sense, in that Marxist sense. Okay, so then I guess you want to talk about it a little bit more.

So do you want to talk about what a left communist take on the USSR be or even how it would differ from ML or MLM analysis? The thing I would really stress is like the international perspective. the USSR really dominated the come in turn and the cum intern kind of a lot of its policies were geared towards Russian interests I think that a lot of like Borgas for example really stress like the need for like a way like basically they say the Russian revolution is good

but we ran into a new problem of scale how do we scale it internationally right in the same way that a Leninist would say well you know we we saw trade unions hit a limit and then the Paris commune scaled it up and then the Russian revolution scaled it up from there. So I think that's something to think about. And I don't think very many MLs would agree with these critiques.

Some Trotskyists would consider themselves MLs, and they thought that the international wasn't internationalist enough. So there is agreement there. I think that some left communists and some Maoists, and some Trotskyists, not that many, have similar critiques of, like, say, the way the common turn handled the Khamintang in China. I think that Maoism has a lot in common with, like, left communist critiques of the USSR,

but they got to it separately. They got to it through their own experiences. But like there's a book by Charles Betelheim, who I think was an ML but became a malice later in life, called Class Struggles in the USSR. And that echoes some of the economic critiques of the USSR from like what we would consider a proto-Maoist perspective. In terms of the idea that the economy was set up very like productively, Right. And there was still class struggles that the USSR was denying existed. And this focus on production was like economically speaking bad theory. Like a lot of Maoists would would hold that same critique of the USSR. Yeah, definitely. That Charles Betelheim book, class struggles in the USSR is great. I have Maoist friend recommended it to me. And it's pretty good, especially the first volume. I think that some of their ideas also address some of those critiques. Like the mass line resolves this sort of like bureaucratic thing that happened from some of the parties, and it's designed to do so.

So I think, like, for somebody like Bordeca, and for Lenin, there's supposed to be a dialectic between this sort of top-down and bottom-up stuff. Like, you are supposed to engage with the masses. Maybe you engage the masses through trade unions, for example. So, you know, I think the Maoists actually solve that problem that didn't have to necessarily exist, but nonetheless did through the mass line. So I think there is... And even the cultural revolution to some extent.

Cultural revolution. I think there's some overlap. think like some of the things that would get you label the left communists during the 30s, for example, like believing that like the bourgeois family structure needs to be abolished. It comes from angles. It comes from angles like history, origin of the family. It could get you in trouble in the USSR after a certain period. And I think a lot of, a lot of communists now have reintegrated that stuff. Two of the things that stick out, national liberation struggles. MLs and MLMs definitely support. And I hear often left coms have a different take on that. And then

Stalin, right? Because, like, you know, even MLMs will have some critiques of Stalin and plenty of MLs do as well. But left comms are definitely like, they're with the anarchists and just being like very fervently anti-Stalin. Yeah, and for a lot of left comms, it's not really Stalin specifically. It's something like banning factions, disempowering the Soviets. I think these are very solid critiques.

Like, I think, like, we really need to ask ourselves, how are we building worker power or creating a radically different economy? me after like by disempowering the Soviets that doesn't make sense to me um so i think that like some of those critiques of the USSR would not be shared um national liberation is tricky because uh and like trade unions another thing tricky not all left comms agree and you can get some really extreme examples from some people who identify as left comms that say like no no national liberation struggle is bad some people hate Castro on the like left com side i really like cuba um i do think that like nation states are inherently a bourgeois concept

which I think is kind of where this hits and because we do need like if there's an infariate program or whatever it's gonna be an international revolution that gets us to real socialism that does not mean that we shouldn't struggle nationally

for national liberation in order to get to a less colonial situation like capitalism relies on colonialism to maintain itself and the MLMLM argument would definitely be that in order to make any progress

towards socialism if that's your goal national liberation struggles anti-colonial struggles are a way to sort of clear the board take control of your own country that's the prerequisite to building something else yeah and so i never really understood this anti-national liberation that seems sort of abstract anti-nationalism and not really like strategic thinking yeah and this is where i disagree with some of the left comms that hold that position i don't think that like again left com is so universal so you're gonna yeah you're gonna get some kickback on two ends about this some people are going to be like yeah we don't think that like we absolutely support anti-colonial like national liberation struggles and you've got some other people like oh you're a revisionist and an opportunist

you know blah blah blah blah blah blah because like we're internationalists and the nation state is inherently a bourgeois concept you know what i mean yeah yeah send all your hate mail to brendon at gmail dot com yeah some poor dude in ireland is gonna just get a bunch of left comments screaming at them all right um kind of going towards the end here uh maybe you can address these somewhat quickly if you want and you can take all the time you want you're my guest uh what successes has left communism had historically and what have its failures been because i want to just contextualize this because i think like on the mLMLM side of things we love to point out like look at what the actual success that we've had historically and where is the

you know relevant success from the the quote unquote left communist movements i mean left Coms were some of the first people to support the Russian Revolution. The left communist wing of Russian communists were active people. They weren't kicked out of the Bolshevik Party until after they see state power. So first and foremost, you can't really exclude them from that project. Secondly, it depends on how we define the term left communism, but I do think that some of them have a tendency not to get so much stuff done. I would say the real question is, like, can we look at this materially? Why did that happen? Is it because council, like in Germany is it because council communism is like a bad theory and that's why it hasn't

had any of these successes I think that that's somewhat of an idealistic argument what I would point out is that a big part of the socialist infrastructure was controlled by the SPD yeah yeah they turned on their fellow socialists and they're they you know they essentially let like the bourgeois state murder Luxembourg so it's not because Luxembourg was a bad Marxist or had bad theory it's because of material conditions, you know, the reactionaries had more guns, you know, in the same way that like sometimes people who dislike Trotskyism will point out that Trotskyism has only been like successful really in the Western Hemisphere. It's, you could say it's because it's a bad theory or it only applies to like bourgeois countries, but you could also point out that maybe some of these powerful

nation state structures in the USSR were actively suppressing Trotskyists and they didn't have a material way to win these things. Whereas in Latin America, which is far from, you know, far from like the bourgeois center. It has some successful Trotsky stuff. Similarly like with left comms like they had a like serious working class base in Italy and maybe the reason we don't have a socialist state in Italy right now or like it wasn't a major center for revolutionary activity is because they were like the left comms were sidelined from the party, you know. But I don't think that they have that many successful revolutions if that's what we're looking for. And I do think there is a tendency to be like, oh, you know, this isn't perfect, so I'm not going to do it,

which some left comms do fall into that sort of ultra-leftism. Definitely. Okay, so what critique or set of critiques of left communism would you be the most sympathetic to? Like, what are a couple of critiques that you think are valid? You've already mentioned some, but. Yeah, I think that's kind of the big one. I think it's main success is that it's kept, like, Marxist political economy alive. Its sociology is really good.

So we have a lot to learn from that. When you say kept it alive, you're not saying that the ML or MLM tradition hasn't are you a little bit all right we're going to fight hey david cut this off no i'm just kidding go ahead no i think there are certain elements of like marx's thought that that weren't that didn't make the cut it didn't make the canon you know i mean if we're talking about abolishing like bourgeois family institutions the USSR abandoned that idea that was found in angles they did yeah i'm not i'm not sure the condition i don't know what we would get by pushing that line i mean you know I mean, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, go with what you will there. But I think, you know, I think people like Bordeca, Alexander Colontai, who's not necessarily left com, but was on the, like, left or side of Bolsheviks and stuff, they, like, maintain theories. I don't think, like, even if, like, Lenin or Mao or whoever was the best, they still have blind spots that some of these other people who might have been worse kept alive. And I think, and I think, like, again, people, like, Paulmatic, his economic critiques, as much as I disagree with him in terms of political praxis have a lot of validity and he really

understood volume three of capital in a way that I don't think a lot of these really like existing socialist states are and if you think I'm wrong then point out to me how many states you believe are socialist and you know managed to successfully maintain an international socialist thing I don't see an international socialist non-state you know what I mean like capitalism is still the name of the game. Yeah. It still is. And I think that some of the ideas of Marx were kept alive.

Like the Bolsheviks thought you had to go through capitalism in order to get to communism. Yeah, yeah. You know, sort of mechanistic stages. Like MLs have this critique, or MLMs have this critique of ML like Meadowheim with the productivist stuff, you know. Marx, for the end of his life, said specifically, Russia doesn't necessarily have to go through capitalism, you know. There was a period of time where he did think that places like India had to go through

capitalism later on in his life, he disagreed. Some of these left comms were saying the same thing. You don't have to increase productivity. You don't, in that bourgeois sense, you don't have to increase commodity production. You don't have to engage in weird semi-imperialism that some of these, like, so-called social estates engaged in, you know? And some of those people really did their research in red marks, and they really did. And I think so, like, theoretically, I think that's what's great about them.

I think sometimes they get overly theoretical. they weren't practical. I think these are some very real critiques of left communism and I think you're going to find a lot more practicality from people like Castro, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, who got shit done.

So I think that there's some validity to that. Okay, fair enough. Absolutely. All right, before we go, I want to touch on Marxism and Mosh pitch, your podcast. Now, I know that given your hectic life schedule, you can only put out episodes on a somewhat unregular basis and you also don't have

an active Patreon by choice. You just didn't think that you could really balance, all those things, which I totally understand. But a lot of people love the show and want more out of it. So can you talk about where the show is currently and where you're planning on taking it? So yeah, I think we've recorded two episodes that haven't come out yet. So that's... One, and I'm calling out John the Lickriggrick guy right now.

It's not his fault, but his audiophile fucked up. You did this wonderful episode on Gothic Marxism, and the file was corrupted. And so, God damn it, we're trying to figure that out right now. But go ahead. So, yeah, so, I mean, overall, I'm expecting maybe... to do two a month. I don't know if I'll be able to record anything in August because I'm going on tour with my band.

But after that... The band is called No Things. We will play it at the end of this episode. But I'm hoping to do probably about two a month after that, and I've got two that are coming out. And I've kind of done some prep work for two other episodes, so hopefully I'll get to record them soon. Okay.

So it's not dead. It's very much alive. They're coming out. Great podcast. If you love Brendan and you love whenever he comes on the show, You're going to love that show. It really is. How would you pitch it to somebody?

What is Marxism and Moschpitz fundamentally? What's the theme? Yeah. You know, I don't know if I became a socialist first or a punk first, but I think it was kind of a mutual development. And so I think like Marxism and Moschitz gets to look at working class culture and maybe like countercultural resistance while bringing in some very solid Marxist theory. So we're looking at things like, you know, how is punk rock like a revolutionary? music form. How does it fail to translate into real practice? And so the whole time I try to center it on those sorts of themes. Yeah. You did episodes on like skateboarding or like hip hop.

Those are things you're planning on doing, Gothic Marxism. So connecting these high Marxist theories with some of these sometimes subcultural or pop cultural things that we're all into in different ways. So dope. And it's still going on. We love it. Absolutely. What recommendations would you offer for anyone who wants to learn about the best of the left communist tradition, a couple works or maybe an overall text that you would recommend? Yeah. I know you've mentioned many throughout. Yeah, some history is always valid to kind of conceptualize some of this stuff. A lot of the people I've mentioned have little short stuff that you can find on Marxists.org. So, you know, always use that resource if you like to read. I think that the left comm stuff that I really

recommend, again, Marx and Keynes by Paulmatic, Reformer Revolution. by Rosa Luxembourg is sort of like a good, like, proto, left com thing that I would maybe recommend you read. Murdering the Dead by Borga. Those are kind of my main ones. And then there are some history books. There's one that's definitely not written by someone who's sympathetic to communism, but as historical materialists, we should be able to look at a primary resource that's being,

like, written by someone who's like a bourgeois scientist, and the primary source is a primary source. So one is called the Red Years' Socialism and Communism in Conflict 1919 through 1921 or something like that. But that kind of puts things in that sort of context of like the relationship of like the PSI or the USPD to the common turn during a little bit before and a little bit after that second Congress. And if you're a good Leninist, you should be able to be like, okay, this is a terrible like critique of Lenin and such and such. I. He psychological sense while maybe like looking at some of the things that were going on and actually like being like oh out border go is being an asshole here maybe not as much of an asshole as this like

bourgeois guy thinks you know what i mean or whatever it is sure you know so that's an interesting one all right man well thank you so much for coming on you covered a lot of ground if people want to hear more about this we can do more episodes exploring all the nuances that that you addressed in this episode um i love your mind i love your dialectical way of thinking i love your understanding of history and i love you so now i'm blushing no i love you too bright you're doing great work Oh! Wear a new balance shoes In bourgeois

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