Damn, I don’t know what you’ve started here but the number of presumably white people coming up with all sorts of reasons to argue why black people shouldn’t have reparations is… is it a white settler moment? Then to follow this up with ‘you need to include white people or they’re not going to like it’ is… maybe Malcolm X was onto something about white liberals.

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Marxists aren’t, or shouldn’t be, dogmatic. It’s the method that they uphold. Plus, Marx didn’t live to see the USSR, China, Cuba, etc, so it’s not possible to know whether he would maintain that position (taking your claim at face value).

You’re a fount of knowledge, new (to the grad) comrade. Keep it coming.

Essentially, it means fascism is the method by which liberalism defends itself in the face of progress and revolution.

By your definition, every community is a tankie because every communist rejects idealism. If these are the only two options, the only option left is to choose a team. But that can’t be right because you imply that some communists aren’t tankies.

Further, does it count as a definition if other people use the term in different ways?

If so, how do you know who is a communist and who is a tankie without asking them how they decided to show (critical) support for XYZ?

By your definition, you must first know whether someone has strong reasons to support XYZ before being able to decide that they really decided because XYZ was on the right team. That would be exhausting and fraught with the problem that nobody is going to say they didn’t do the reading; if they give an argument, how do you determine whether it’s valid or a cover for ‘choosing by reference to team’?

I’m unsure if it’s possible to define ‘tankie’ by reference to ‘communist’ without also defining the latter and showing how they’re different.

Reducing all the nuance of Marxism, socialism, and communism to

“from each according to his ability to each according to his need”

is problematic.

It’s not going to lead to much explanation and it ignores the hundreds of thousands of other words that Marxists have written.

This is in addition to the problem that “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” is the goal of communism and you’re arguing with someone who (rightly) says communism hasn’t been reached.

socialism with Chinese characteristics

is the answer…

There are some good arguments for a wealth tax (without distinguishing land from other assets, which would be easily avoided via financial arrangements):

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9l7AYl0jUE (and see his other videos)
• Gary Stevenson’s website: https://www.wealtheconomics.org
• UK Patriotic Millionares, which Gary Stevenson is part of: https://patrioticmillionaires.uk/the-problem
• Similar org, in the US: https://patrioticmillionaires.org

This is a promising idea. Ultimately, it won’t work.

Landowners raise rents and business owners keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. Land-holding capital is only one piece of the puzzle. As promised, I wrote something longer about this topic, here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1052415

One solution is to tax imperialists, rather than the ‘landowners’ and ‘speculators’, but they won’t allow it unless the alternative is revolution. This is how the US got its New Deal. The organised unions, socialists, and communists and offered an ultimatum: New Deal or what the Russian’s had.

The US bourgeoisie bent over backwards, increasing taxes to almost 100% above a threshold to stave off a domestic revolution. (In foreign states, they backed paramilitaries, etc, to stave off revolution). Then they spent the best part of a century rolling back those taxes and the welfare services they were spent on.

You can read about this in:

• Hayek, for a right-wing liberal perspective, called ‘conservative’ in the US today,
• Piketty, for a left-wing liberal perspective, called ‘liberal’ in the US today, or
• Richard D Wolff, for a Marxist perspective, called any number of foul names in the US today – see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlhFMa4t28A&t=3901s from ~33:00.

The lesson is, you can argue for higher taxes on the bourgeoisie if you like, you may even get them to agree, but they will connive until you are complacent and then betray you.

I’m using the definition of commodity explained in chapters 1–3 of Marx, Capital, vol I.

Capitalism is commodity-producing society. In this political economy, the means of subsistence – things we need to survive – are produced for their exchange value and their use value. Socially necessary labour time is the only source of this value. This roughly coincides with your definition, that a commodity must be manufactured in some way.

But the Wikipedia definition is incomplete. At some point in the history of capitalism, humans come to fetishise commodities. At this point, even things that are not produced as commodities, such as land (including their minerals, trees, etc) are treated as if they have value and, from then on, are commodified.

It is the same process that commodifies women, meta data, etc. These things are not produced as commodities, yet they are treated as having a use value and an exchange value. One of the ways that this occurs is through financial derivatives, such as potato futures. This allows someone to buy and exchange something that does not yet exist: hence the commodification of everything under capitalism, even things that aren’t ‘produced’ or aren’t yet produced.

This is favourably referred to in the Wikipedia article that you referred to, under ‘commodification of labor’. A direct reading of Marx and an analysis of the implications of his work reveals the additional argument that I provided about the commodofication of land.

This ‘commodity form’ is the root of the problem that you identified to begin with, about rent/wages. I have prepared something about that, which I will post soon.

Land, as all else, is commodified under capitalism.