I listened to the audiobook, and feel I'd benefit from reading the text from a few passages in particular. That said, I think JMP makes a cogent argument that the unspecified "radical" anti-capitalist ideology he calls "movementism," which dared not speak the name "communism" for years, can claim no real-world victories with regard to ushering in a rupture with capitalism, and is a phenomenon peculiar to the disorganized left of the global north's centers of capitalist and imperialist power. Once he has defined movementism and given examples, he moves to argue against the use of a non-specific and ahistorical "communist" ideal (or "hypothesis" or "horizon") gestured at by leftist academics in these regions which shore up, speak to, speak for, or market their work to these movementists who tail the masses during periods of social upheaval.

As a "left communist" with various syndicalist and council communist sympathies myself, the portion of this treatise (as he calls it) that should have offended me most was probably the portion on the "trade-union trap" or "communization theorists," or the criticism of forms of autonomist Marxism and the Situationists, but frankly, I share some of JMP's criticisms and think he is being fairly even-handed. He goes out of his way to separate business unionism/top-first/top-down unionism (though he doesn't use this terminology) and economism from unionizing as a general tactic, which I appreciate. He perhaps paints anarchism with the broadest and most unforgiving brush, but I come from a very anarcho-liberal/ultraleft background and again, I am not unsympathetic to his frustrations.

I appreciate his willingness to sum up his position in the Coda as, roughly, "communism's failures have been catastrophes, but for capitalism, it is its *success* that brings catastrophe" as a way of effectively dismantling the common communism-killed-however-many arguments made by bootlickers benefiting from capitalism's never-ending atrocities in a sentence or two. He concludes by effectively endorsing a historical understanding and contextualization of the communist necessity (if we don't have socialism, we will have barbarism) which includes the failures that are emphasized and often exaggerated by capitalist educational programming, rather than grasping for supposedly "new" radical concepts that rehash older leftist theory or presenting a revitalized notion of communism that dismisses the revolutions of the 20th century and dismisses the people's wars raging in parts of the world today.

To the extent that I don't think it's in any leftist's interest to bury their head in the sand or shy away. from interrogating their understanding of historical attempts at socioeconomic and political revolution, I have a lot to agree with in this book. ("We do no favours to the revolutionary masses’ past sacrifices by acting as if this past is either beyond reproach or utterly reprehensible.") But I do think if JMP is going to critique the three "traps" that he does (the electoral trap, the refoundationalist trap, the trade-union trap) and also dismiss third worldism of the variety that allows leftists in the global north off the hook from any real attempt to organize, he ought to outline at least one or two suggestions for working in the centers of global capitalist power. Perhaps he felt it was outside the scope of the book, but I think the problems he identifies result not just from capitalist propagandizing and the internalization of bourgeois neoliberal ideology, but from leftists in countries like the united states flailing around trying to figure out what to do. This book outlines the problem, one cause, and no real solutions from my standpoint.

Un libro preciso que defiende la necesidad de un comunismo de características marxistas-leninistas-maoistas en contraposición a los “nuevos” comunismos y la nueva izquierda. El argumento principal es que los esfuerzos por alejarse de los proyectos revolucionarios del pasado hace que los movimientos contemporáneos carezcan de estrategias y metas definidas, vaciando el significado del concepto de comunismo. Rusia y China pueden haber hecho a un lado los fervores revolucionarios que les caracterizaron en el pasado, pero esas experiencias siguen siendo las únicas certezas de que cambiar el mundo es posible, y por esas razones los nuevos comunismos deben guiarse por sus logros y resolver sus fracasos en vez de intentar reinventar nuevas utopías indefinidas y abstractas.