UNLOCKED: On The Leftcom Question
Added 2020-10-16 10:00:04 +0000 UTCJamie and Sean continue the discussion of historical and contemporary left communism by addressing listener questions from Discord, Twitter, and elsewhere.
Outro: : Jeff Lewis - Big A Little A
Comments
Hey Ligma. I'm not as knowledgeable about left communist tendencies as Sean is, but I can try to answer some of your questions. The Left Opposition, as I understand it, was basically Trotsky's faction of the Bolsheviks. They were opposed to some of the more internally repressive policies that Lenin and then Stalin imposed upon the soviets and the Bolshevik Party officers themselves during the Russian Civil War and into the 1930s. However, they by and large were still very much in favor of the Bolsheviks' repression of left wing uprisings and movements within Russia and Ukraine. It was Trotsky, for example, who ordered the Red Army to crush the rebellious sailors at the Krondstadt naval base in 1921. The major faction within the Bolshevik Party that was most in line with left communist tendencies was the Workers Opposition faction, spearheaded by Alexandra Kollontai. Workers Opposition had similar views to the council communists, in that they believed the Soviet Union's economy should be run by a federated network of trade union councils. They were still not as much on the "libertarian left" as the Russian and Ukrainian anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists, organized around the Nabat confederation of anarchist trade unions and the "Makhnovist" Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. The latter groups would find more common cause with other revolutionary labor unions around the world at the time of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, such as the IWW in North America and Australia, the CNT in Spain, and the FAU in Germany. In terms of the IWW: While some of my ML comrades may find this fact uncomfortable, the truth is that the IWW refused to join the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU) -- aka the "Profintern" -- along with most of the other revolutionary syndicalist unions at the time, because the Bolsheviks would not allow the unions in the Profintern to remain independent of the Bolshevik Party, and because they refused the Wobblies' and other syndicalist unions' calls to release leftist and trade unionist political prisoners. Subsequently, most of the revolutionary syndicalist unions (with the exception of the IWW) went on to form the International Workers Association (IWA-AIT), which still exists today. The left communist position on revolutionary syndicalism / unionism kind of depends on what specific sub-tendency of left communism you're referring to. As Sean and Jamie mentioned in Episode 115, the council communists in Germany and the Netherlands had very similar views to the IWW and other revolutionary syndicalist unions. Thus, council communist thinkers like Anton Pannekoek and Otto Rühle were likely sympathetic to their contemporaries in the revolutionary syndicalist unions, despite the former's occasional criticisms of the latter. However, the Bordigist faction in the PCI would tend to not get along with the revolutionary syndicalists, since Bordiga very much called for a mass political party that was hierarchically structured, and even the majority of Marxist syndicalists were skeptical of the revolutionary potential of political parties. It's important to remember that, as Sean and Jamie alluded to, "left communism" is really just a catchall term for a group of sometimes competing communist tendencies that are / were considered to the left of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This can be seen even today, with the ideological descendants of these sub-tendencies and thinkers. Speaking as a Wobbly, it's worth noting that those whose beliefs align most with Bordiga tend to represent the more conservative faction of the North American IWW, whereas the autonomists (as descendants of the council communists) are most aligned with what constitutes the IWW's "left" faction. And we haven't even discussed those leftcoms who are into Giles Dauve, the French Invisible Committee, and communization theory! Their ideas are kind of all over the place, but my guess is that they would most align with so-called "insurrectionary anarchists" like those associated with Crimethinc, although their ideas are closest to the Situationists, and in my humble opinion Crimethinc is a poor imitation of neo-Situationism.
Cal Colgan
2020-10-26 20:27:04 +0000 UTCI'm still a bit confused about the relationship between Left Communism and other tendencies. Left Communism and the Left Opposition are not the same thing and I don't think they got along with each other, but it seems like the word "left" is used to describe them for roughly similar reasons. Also, how does left communism compare with syndicalist organizations like the IWW? I think its hard to put American radical groups pre-CPUSA into these European categories, but I wonder about the alternate universe where a revolution happened in America what analogous splits and divisions among revolutionaries would've happened in revolutionary America.
Ligma
2020-10-17 11:03:47 +0000 UTC
