Left communists love to slander the USSR, Stalin, and Marxism by claiming we haven’t read enough theory to know that commodity production cannot exist in socialism. This work is dedicated to showing that left communism is what happens when you don’t read carefully enough.

• Marx explains what necessitates capital
• Engels explaining he sees the cooperatives as a viable transition
• Engels explains neither him nor Marx ever doubted use of cooperatives in societal transformation
• Lenin’s equation of capitalist Agriculture
• Lenin intended for cooperatives to exist all along
• Lenin even calls it socialism (not transitory phase, but socialism)
• Lenin calls for exchange of commodities
• Stalin’s Justifications
• Conclusions

Marx explains what necessitates capital:

First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.2 ' Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, "Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river".3 ' Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River! For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks:

We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital, only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer.

But this capitalist soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their material substance, that he christens them capital Under all circumstances, even when they are its exact opposite. Thus is it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production into the individual property of many independent labourers, working on their own account, he calls equal division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law. "If," says Wakefield, "all the members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital ... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire." ''

So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself— and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production— capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible.

The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting. How, then, in old Europe, was the expropriation of the labourer from his conditions of labour, i.e., the co-existence of capital and wage labour, brought about? By a social contract of a quite original kind. "Mankind have adopted a ... simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital," which, of course, since the time of Adam, floated in their imagination as the sole and final end of their existence: "they have divided themselves into owners of capital and owners of labour. ... This division was the result of concert and combination." 2; In one word: the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honour of the "accumulation of capital".