In this episode GloboidTV and RedArmyCapybara discuss left-communism: what it is, where it came from, and why it remains influential in online left spaces today.

They also examine some core disagreements between Marxism-Leninism and left-communist tendencies such as council communism, Bordigism, and communization theory. What separates leftcoms from Marxist-Leninists? Where do left-com tendencies overlap with ultra-left Marxist-Leninist currents like Trotskyism, Maoism, and Hoxhaism, and where do they fundamentally diverge?

In this episode we cover

• What left-communism is.
• What the origins of left-communism are.
• The factory/worker committee system in soviet Russia and its absorption into the union system.
• The efficiency of the worker committee system vs a cohesive national economic plan.
• Left-Bolshevism in the early 1900s.
• The problems with leftcoms & what it has to do with dogmatism and purity fetishes.
• Lenin's 'What is to be done?'
• Should communists take part in reactionary unions and Bourgeois parliaments?
• Pragmatism in practical applications of Marxism.
• Left-coms (councilists, Bordigists, communizers) vs ML left-deviations (Maoism, Hoxhaism, Trotskyism, etc). Do they share things in common? Where do they depart?
• State-capitalism and preliminary phaes pf socialism are steps forward not backward.
• Dogmatism among leftcoms and how Lenin criticized dogmatism in 'Left-communism an Infantile Disorder.'
• Dogmatism among Marxist-Leninists.
• The vanguard party and how they function: In response to Maoist critiques of modern Marxists view on the vanguard.
• The function of newspapers in the USSR.
• The election of delegates to people's assemblies in the DPRK.
• Direct democracy is unfeasible and inefficient.
• Practical considerations regarding praxis.
• The collapse of Yugoslavia
• The Unity of Theory and Practice.
• Marx was not a rigid thinker and his views shifted frequently
• The Paris Commune and its failure.
• Bureaucracy and its inevitability.
• Opportunism.
• Maoism vs Gonzaloites
• Is protracted people's war a universal principle of Marxism?
• Have Left-coms ever had revolutions?
• Left-anticommunism and "pure" socialists.
• Why is left-communism relevant today?
• Do leftcoms only exist online?
• Multipolarity
• Can MLs and leftcoms work together?
• Why should we support actual existing socialist movements, despite any flaws they have?

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