What do you believe class is? If ownership of industry and its control is all owned by the same class, and everyone belongs to the same class, then there is no class as such and class struggle dissolves.
I really am just concerned about whether collective ownership is really achieved. Something can look collectivized just because it is controlled by the state, but without a radical democratic apparatus you will never see the dissolution of class.
You’ve not produced any argument as to why you think so in all your arguments. Most of your messages are abstract and purposely avoid making a point. What are you trying to accomplish here?
A dubious nomination process for political officials
Together, this doesn’t give me confidence that the Proletariat has seized power, but instead there has emerged some kind of Platonic state with a permanent political class.
There’s no such thing as a “political class,” and you’re still repeating the Bordigist error of using mere fears based on your own unfamiliarity to oppose a proletarian state. Class is not merely a sub-category, it’s specifically related to production and distribution. All of what you said is either sensible given the DPRK’s existence as a country in siege, or is a misunderstanding on your own part, a misunderstanding that can be alleviated through study.
As I already explained, class is not merely a sub-category, it’s specifically related to production and distribution. The DPRK’s economy is overwhelmingly publicly owned, there’s nearly no private ownership. Administration is not a class by itself, but a subset of a larger class, in this case the proletariat. Government employees have the same relations to production and distribution as other workers, just with different responsibilities in the production chain.
Classless society will still have administration and management, as is necessary for large-scale production and distribution. This future communism will also be stateless, as administration is not the same as a state.
Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear they might slip into opportunism; there are insufficient guarantees against this; etc. His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative: they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their own point of view and their solutions. They end up spreading doubt and distrust without offering anything constructive.
You haven’t given me the opportunity to propose a positive argument for anything. I believe that the primary goal of the Left should be to develop radical new forms of horizontal collaboration, in order to promote class solidarity and revolutionize forms of production in a democratic manner.
You have described an aspiration, not yet an argument. What are the actual mechanisms here? What institutions would embody this horizontal collaboration, how would they be built, and how would they survive internal and external threats? Why should this model be preferred to Marxism-Leninism as it has existed in practice in countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and China? More specifically, in the case of the DPRK, how would it be workable, and why would it be preferable to Juche given the country’s political and economic position as a state under siege?
If we look in history, we see major changes in class antagonisms and productive forms following breakthroughs in physical and social technology. The end of the trans-atlantic slave trade and guild economies coincided with the first industrial revolution. The Roman Licinio-Sextian laws that saw a gain in political power for Plebians came after great increase in transportation capacity, connecting members of that class, such as the completion of the Appian Way. Feudalism collapsed with the rise of corporations. The french revolution was possible partly due to the printing press.
The shared interest of the Proletariat or any large class exist only in a latent form, unless the capacity exists to collaborate in its realization. No amount of pressure or destitution will force a group into collaborative action; political capacities are necessary. Existing representative democracies succeed in mobilizing groups, but fail in mobilizing toward their collective interest. Any representative put in a position of power over others loses a personal material interest in pursuing class solidarity.
What are the actual mechanisms here?
Democracy by design. A method of organizing that provides large groups with the ability to reach broad consensus and act upon it. There is a growing body of research coming from Chinese universities about LSGDM (Large Scale Group Decision Making), which is very relevant. I propose that leftists pursue this kind of research. More crucially, a horizontal solution to the collective action problem is needed.
What institutions would embody this horizontal collaboration
All institutions.
how would they be built
Their invention can be done by anyone, and their application can be seen in any institution, capitalist or not. The availability of these tools will spread if they are effective, and eventually provide the masses with the tools for their emancipation.
how would they survive internal and external threats?
The increase in productive power scales exponentially with the size of a collaborating group. If a majority of people participate in such a system they will overpower their opposition in collective intelligence, manpower, etc.
Why should this model be preferred to Marxism-Leninism as it has existed in practice in countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and China?
Because those projects dubiously represent the collective interests of their citizens, and economic achievements aside, have failed to move convincingly toward communism. The use of delegation and vanguardism create the conditions for the development of a Red Bourgeoisie, which appears to be exactly what emerged.
In the case of the DPRK, how would it be workable, and why would it be preferable to Juche given the country’s political and economic position as a state under siege?
As you have seen, I am still learning about North Korea, and I agree with the sentiment that every country’s transition toward communism will look different. With that in mind, I will not speculate on how this would work in that country.
Your opening argument is an extremely long-winded way of saying that you do not understand how democracy functions under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so you universalise the defects of bourgeois representative institutions instead of applying class analysis to explain why representatives under bourgeois rule do not, in fact, represent the oppressed classes. Every state is an instrument of class rule. Under capitalism, the representative system is embedded in a total structure of bourgeois domination: property relations, the press, the courts, the civil service, the officer corps, the educational system, the party system, and the international order of capital. In that context, representatives are not corrupted merely by the psychological fact of holding office; they are integrated into a machinery whose material logic is the reproduction of bourgeois social power.
Your whole argument displaces the problem from class power to institutional design. You treat the problem as though the main obstacle to emancipation were inadequate coordination procedures, insufficiently horizontal structures, or the lack of a technically sophisticated mechanism for large-scale consensus. But class society is not primarily a design failure. It is a relation of domination rooted in property, force, ideology, and institutional continuity. A better preference aggregation model does not answer the question of which class rules. It does not answer who controls the means of production, who commands the armed bodies of men, who suppresses sabotage, who plans investment, who disciplines hostile classes, or who withstands imperialist encirclement. A decision procedure is not a theory of power.
That is why, even after all the rhetoric about “democracy by design,” you still did not actually describe any mechanism by which your vision could come into being. You named an aspiration, not a path. Referring to LSGDM or other large-scale deliberative techniques is not a mechanism in the political sense. At most, it is a possible technical supplement to administration or consultation. It is not an account of revolutionary transition. Marxism-Leninism is not simply saying “let a few people decide things vertically.” It is a theory of how a politically organized proletariat, through its vanguard and mass organizations, contests for power, smashes the old state machinery where necessary, establishes new organs of class rule, reorganizes production, and conducts socialist construction under conditions inherited from capitalism and imperialism. Whether one agrees with every historical application or not, that is at least a theory of movement, force, contradiction, and institutional reproduction. Your framework remains at the level of procedural idealism.
When I asked what institutions would embody your model, “all institutions” was not an answer. It was a dodge. The issue is not whether, in some abstract sense, every sphere of social life should eventually be transformed. Of course it should. The issue is which institutions first, in what order, under what constraints, and through what political line. Are we talking about the workplace, local committees, militia structures, planning bodies, the judiciary, schools, ministries, party structures, neighborhood assemblies, agricultural cooperatives, trade organs, popular congresses? How are contradictions between them mediated? What is their relation to central coordination? How is minority obstruction handled? How are class enemies excluded from using “horizontality” as an opening for restoration? Unless you specify institutional form and relation, “all institutions” is just a way of avoiding concrete politics.
You evaded the next question in the same way. How would these institutions be built? Your answer was essentially that they can be invented by anyone and will spread if they are effective. That is not a theory of construction. That is passive technological diffusion dressed up as politics. History does not move that way. The ruling class does not step aside because a more elegant collaborative form appears. New institutions are built through struggle, through organization, through coercive and ideological contestation, through line struggle within the revolutionary movement, and through the seizure or creation of durable organs capable of displacing the old order. Socialist institutions do not “spread” in the same way a useful software platform spreads. They are built in and through class struggle. They require cadre, discipline, program, mass line, material resources, and the capacity to suppress organized opposition. Without that you have no institution-building.
Your answer to the problem of counterrevolution makes the weakness even clearer. Boiled down, your position is that if enough people participate in the system, then collective intelligence and manpower will overpower the opposition. That is not material analysis. It is fantasy. It ignores the actual historical means by which threatened ruling classes respond: economic sabotage, capital flight, hoarding, black markets, assassination, propaganda warfare, infiltration, terror, sanctions, coup plotting, proxy warfare, diplomatic isolation, technological denial, and direct military violence. Imperialism is not simply an external “opponent” that can be outvoted by a larger collaborating network. It is a global system of organized force. It has intelligence services, monopoly media, financial chokepoints, military alliances, comprador strata, NGO networks, and centuries of experience in destabilizing states that attempt autonomous development. Any serious theory of socialist transition has to account for repression and defense. Marxism-Leninism does. Your model dissolves those problems into the hope that cooperation at scale will become so efficient that antagonism loses efficacy. That is not how class enemies behave when their power is threatened.
Your critique of Marxism-Leninism also never rises above the level of impressionistic moral suspicion. You say projects such as China “dubiously represent” the collective interests of their citizens and have not moved “convincingly” toward communism. But what is the standard here? If your standard is immediate abolition of contradiction, then you are not criticizing Marxism-Leninism from a materialist standpoint; you are comparing historical transitions to an abstract ideal. Marxism has never held that socialism abolishes contradiction overnight. On the contrary, socialism is the historical period in which the proletariat holds power but inherited inequalities, technical backwardness, uneven development, remnants of class society, and international pressure persist. This is precisely why Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh and others treated socialist construction as a prolonged and conflictual process rather than as instantaneous harmony.
The line about a “red bourgeoisie” especially shows that you do not grasp the transitional period in any serious way. Of course there is a constant danger of bureaucratic degeneration, class recomposition, and bourgeois restoration under socialism. Marxism-Leninism has never been blind to that danger; it has treated it as one of the central contradictions of socialist development. The question is not whether such a contradiction exists. The question is how it is fought: through party rectification, anti-corruption struggle, ideological education, mass supervision, public ownership in command of key sectors, state planning, control over finance, discipline over private capital, and the preservation of political power in proletarian hands. You cannot simply point to the danger of restoration and infer that centralized socialist state power is the cause of the problem in the abstract. The alternative is not some contradiction-free horizontal commons. The alternative, if proletarian state power is abandoned, is generally the far more rapid and open restoration of bourgeois rule.
And your claim that it only “dubiously” represents the collective interests of its people is weak as it does not engage reality in class terms. I’ll talk specifically on China as it’s what I’m most familiar with. One can debate many concrete questions about line, policy, market reforms, contradictions between public and private sectors, rural-urban inequalities, and the risks of revisionism. Those are serious debates. But it is not a serious debate to ignore the fact that the bourgeoisie in China does not rule politically in the same way it rules in liberal capitalist states; that capital is subordinated to a state led by a Communist Party; that the commanding heights remain under public control; that anti-poverty and development gains have been enormous; that capital can be disciplined, broken up, redirected, or punished; and that the overall trajectory is not reducible to the simple liberal formula of “officials got power, therefore they formed a new ruling class identical to the old one.” A Marxist analysis has to examine which class holds state power, how surplus is allocated, what the development line is, how contradictions are managed, and whether socialist construction remains the principal direction despite concessions and tensions. Your response does not do that.
Most importantly, you still dodged the DPRK question. I did not ask you to indulge in empty speculation. I asked for a material analysis. The DPRK is a country formed through anti-colonial revolution, devastated by genocidal war, left in a permanent armistice system rather than a peace settlement, surrounded by hostile powers, subjected to sanctions, military pressure, ideological warfare, and continuous threat. If your theory cannot tell us how a state in those conditions could survive without centralized authority, disciplined organization, strategic planning, and a unified defense apparatus, then it is not even worth consideration.
I’m curious to see how they respond. Because I’m thinking the answer to these questions is basically “I’m an ultra/anarchist who hasn’t thought this out at all and I’m being contrarian with no substance so I can feel like I’m contributing without doing anything”
“I’m an ultra/anarchist who hasn’t thought this out at all and I’m being contrarian with no substance so I can feel like I’m contributing without doing anything”
Feels almost like interacting with the reincarnation of Bordiga himself. Nothing is convincing and thus nothing is worth supporting.
What do you believe class is? If ownership of industry and its control is all owned by the same class, and everyone belongs to the same class, then there is no class as such and class struggle dissolves.
I really am just concerned about whether collective ownership is really achieved. Something can look collectivized just because it is controlled by the state, but without a radical democratic apparatus you will never see the dissolution of class.
You’re worried far more about the possibility of imperfection than what’s actually happening on the ground, and what can best be done to achieve that.
I’m not concerned with imperfection. What I know about North Korea that concerns me goes far beyond imperfection.
You’ve not produced any argument as to why you think so in all your arguments. Most of your messages are abstract and purposely avoid making a point. What are you trying to accomplish here?
I don’t think you’ve established that beyond your current belief that universal conscription during war time is equivalent to slavery.
I am also very concerned with
Together, this doesn’t give me confidence that the Proletariat has seized power, but instead there has emerged some kind of Platonic state with a permanent political class.
There’s no such thing as a “political class,” and you’re still repeating the Bordigist error of using mere fears based on your own unfamiliarity to oppose a proletarian state. Class is not merely a sub-category, it’s specifically related to production and distribution. All of what you said is either sensible given the DPRK’s existence as a country in siege, or is a misunderstanding on your own part, a misunderstanding that can be alleviated through study.
Do you have a reason to claim that there is no such thing as a political class?
As I already explained, class is not merely a sub-category, it’s specifically related to production and distribution. The DPRK’s economy is overwhelmingly publicly owned, there’s nearly no private ownership. Administration is not a class by itself, but a subset of a larger class, in this case the proletariat. Government employees have the same relations to production and distribution as other workers, just with different responsibilities in the production chain.
Classless society will still have administration and management, as is necessary for large-scale production and distribution. This future communism will also be stateless, as administration is not the same as a state.
You haven’t given me the opportunity to propose a positive argument for anything. I believe that the primary goal of the Left should be to develop radical new forms of horizontal collaboration, in order to promote class solidarity and revolutionize forms of production in a democratic manner.
You have described an aspiration, not yet an argument. What are the actual mechanisms here? What institutions would embody this horizontal collaboration, how would they be built, and how would they survive internal and external threats? Why should this model be preferred to Marxism-Leninism as it has existed in practice in countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and China? More specifically, in the case of the DPRK, how would it be workable, and why would it be preferable to Juche given the country’s political and economic position as a state under siege?
My argument:
If we look in history, we see major changes in class antagonisms and productive forms following breakthroughs in physical and social technology. The end of the trans-atlantic slave trade and guild economies coincided with the first industrial revolution. The Roman Licinio-Sextian laws that saw a gain in political power for Plebians came after great increase in transportation capacity, connecting members of that class, such as the completion of the Appian Way. Feudalism collapsed with the rise of corporations. The french revolution was possible partly due to the printing press.
The shared interest of the Proletariat or any large class exist only in a latent form, unless the capacity exists to collaborate in its realization. No amount of pressure or destitution will force a group into collaborative action; political capacities are necessary. Existing representative democracies succeed in mobilizing groups, but fail in mobilizing toward their collective interest. Any representative put in a position of power over others loses a personal material interest in pursuing class solidarity.
Democracy by design. A method of organizing that provides large groups with the ability to reach broad consensus and act upon it. There is a growing body of research coming from Chinese universities about LSGDM (Large Scale Group Decision Making), which is very relevant. I propose that leftists pursue this kind of research. More crucially, a horizontal solution to the collective action problem is needed.
All institutions.
Their invention can be done by anyone, and their application can be seen in any institution, capitalist or not. The availability of these tools will spread if they are effective, and eventually provide the masses with the tools for their emancipation.
The increase in productive power scales exponentially with the size of a collaborating group. If a majority of people participate in such a system they will overpower their opposition in collective intelligence, manpower, etc.
Because those projects dubiously represent the collective interests of their citizens, and economic achievements aside, have failed to move convincingly toward communism. The use of delegation and vanguardism create the conditions for the development of a Red Bourgeoisie, which appears to be exactly what emerged.
As you have seen, I am still learning about North Korea, and I agree with the sentiment that every country’s transition toward communism will look different. With that in mind, I will not speculate on how this would work in that country.
Your opening argument is an extremely long-winded way of saying that you do not understand how democracy functions under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so you universalise the defects of bourgeois representative institutions instead of applying class analysis to explain why representatives under bourgeois rule do not, in fact, represent the oppressed classes. Every state is an instrument of class rule. Under capitalism, the representative system is embedded in a total structure of bourgeois domination: property relations, the press, the courts, the civil service, the officer corps, the educational system, the party system, and the international order of capital. In that context, representatives are not corrupted merely by the psychological fact of holding office; they are integrated into a machinery whose material logic is the reproduction of bourgeois social power.
Your whole argument displaces the problem from class power to institutional design. You treat the problem as though the main obstacle to emancipation were inadequate coordination procedures, insufficiently horizontal structures, or the lack of a technically sophisticated mechanism for large-scale consensus. But class society is not primarily a design failure. It is a relation of domination rooted in property, force, ideology, and institutional continuity. A better preference aggregation model does not answer the question of which class rules. It does not answer who controls the means of production, who commands the armed bodies of men, who suppresses sabotage, who plans investment, who disciplines hostile classes, or who withstands imperialist encirclement. A decision procedure is not a theory of power.
That is why, even after all the rhetoric about “democracy by design,” you still did not actually describe any mechanism by which your vision could come into being. You named an aspiration, not a path. Referring to LSGDM or other large-scale deliberative techniques is not a mechanism in the political sense. At most, it is a possible technical supplement to administration or consultation. It is not an account of revolutionary transition. Marxism-Leninism is not simply saying “let a few people decide things vertically.” It is a theory of how a politically organized proletariat, through its vanguard and mass organizations, contests for power, smashes the old state machinery where necessary, establishes new organs of class rule, reorganizes production, and conducts socialist construction under conditions inherited from capitalism and imperialism. Whether one agrees with every historical application or not, that is at least a theory of movement, force, contradiction, and institutional reproduction. Your framework remains at the level of procedural idealism.
When I asked what institutions would embody your model, “all institutions” was not an answer. It was a dodge. The issue is not whether, in some abstract sense, every sphere of social life should eventually be transformed. Of course it should. The issue is which institutions first, in what order, under what constraints, and through what political line. Are we talking about the workplace, local committees, militia structures, planning bodies, the judiciary, schools, ministries, party structures, neighborhood assemblies, agricultural cooperatives, trade organs, popular congresses? How are contradictions between them mediated? What is their relation to central coordination? How is minority obstruction handled? How are class enemies excluded from using “horizontality” as an opening for restoration? Unless you specify institutional form and relation, “all institutions” is just a way of avoiding concrete politics.
You evaded the next question in the same way. How would these institutions be built? Your answer was essentially that they can be invented by anyone and will spread if they are effective. That is not a theory of construction. That is passive technological diffusion dressed up as politics. History does not move that way. The ruling class does not step aside because a more elegant collaborative form appears. New institutions are built through struggle, through organization, through coercive and ideological contestation, through line struggle within the revolutionary movement, and through the seizure or creation of durable organs capable of displacing the old order. Socialist institutions do not “spread” in the same way a useful software platform spreads. They are built in and through class struggle. They require cadre, discipline, program, mass line, material resources, and the capacity to suppress organized opposition. Without that you have no institution-building.
Your answer to the problem of counterrevolution makes the weakness even clearer. Boiled down, your position is that if enough people participate in the system, then collective intelligence and manpower will overpower the opposition. That is not material analysis. It is fantasy. It ignores the actual historical means by which threatened ruling classes respond: economic sabotage, capital flight, hoarding, black markets, assassination, propaganda warfare, infiltration, terror, sanctions, coup plotting, proxy warfare, diplomatic isolation, technological denial, and direct military violence. Imperialism is not simply an external “opponent” that can be outvoted by a larger collaborating network. It is a global system of organized force. It has intelligence services, monopoly media, financial chokepoints, military alliances, comprador strata, NGO networks, and centuries of experience in destabilizing states that attempt autonomous development. Any serious theory of socialist transition has to account for repression and defense. Marxism-Leninism does. Your model dissolves those problems into the hope that cooperation at scale will become so efficient that antagonism loses efficacy. That is not how class enemies behave when their power is threatened.
Your critique of Marxism-Leninism also never rises above the level of impressionistic moral suspicion. You say projects such as China “dubiously represent” the collective interests of their citizens and have not moved “convincingly” toward communism. But what is the standard here? If your standard is immediate abolition of contradiction, then you are not criticizing Marxism-Leninism from a materialist standpoint; you are comparing historical transitions to an abstract ideal. Marxism has never held that socialism abolishes contradiction overnight. On the contrary, socialism is the historical period in which the proletariat holds power but inherited inequalities, technical backwardness, uneven development, remnants of class society, and international pressure persist. This is precisely why Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh and others treated socialist construction as a prolonged and conflictual process rather than as instantaneous harmony.
The line about a “red bourgeoisie” especially shows that you do not grasp the transitional period in any serious way. Of course there is a constant danger of bureaucratic degeneration, class recomposition, and bourgeois restoration under socialism. Marxism-Leninism has never been blind to that danger; it has treated it as one of the central contradictions of socialist development. The question is not whether such a contradiction exists. The question is how it is fought: through party rectification, anti-corruption struggle, ideological education, mass supervision, public ownership in command of key sectors, state planning, control over finance, discipline over private capital, and the preservation of political power in proletarian hands. You cannot simply point to the danger of restoration and infer that centralized socialist state power is the cause of the problem in the abstract. The alternative is not some contradiction-free horizontal commons. The alternative, if proletarian state power is abandoned, is generally the far more rapid and open restoration of bourgeois rule.
And your claim that it only “dubiously” represents the collective interests of its people is weak as it does not engage reality in class terms. I’ll talk specifically on China as it’s what I’m most familiar with. One can debate many concrete questions about line, policy, market reforms, contradictions between public and private sectors, rural-urban inequalities, and the risks of revisionism. Those are serious debates. But it is not a serious debate to ignore the fact that the bourgeoisie in China does not rule politically in the same way it rules in liberal capitalist states; that capital is subordinated to a state led by a Communist Party; that the commanding heights remain under public control; that anti-poverty and development gains have been enormous; that capital can be disciplined, broken up, redirected, or punished; and that the overall trajectory is not reducible to the simple liberal formula of “officials got power, therefore they formed a new ruling class identical to the old one.” A Marxist analysis has to examine which class holds state power, how surplus is allocated, what the development line is, how contradictions are managed, and whether socialist construction remains the principal direction despite concessions and tensions. Your response does not do that.
Most importantly, you still dodged the DPRK question. I did not ask you to indulge in empty speculation. I asked for a material analysis. The DPRK is a country formed through anti-colonial revolution, devastated by genocidal war, left in a permanent armistice system rather than a peace settlement, surrounded by hostile powers, subjected to sanctions, military pressure, ideological warfare, and continuous threat. If your theory cannot tell us how a state in those conditions could survive without centralized authority, disciplined organization, strategic planning, and a unified defense apparatus, then it is not even worth consideration.
I’m curious to see how they respond. Because I’m thinking the answer to these questions is basically “I’m an ultra/anarchist who hasn’t thought this out at all and I’m being contrarian with no substance so I can feel like I’m contributing without doing anything”
Feels almost like interacting with the reincarnation of Bordiga himself. Nothing is convincing and thus nothing is worth supporting.