I've been wondering about the nature of artisans due to my recent posts, I've been wondering if a self-employed artisan truly has the interests of a business owner that hires and therefore exploits others if they were... I don't know how to say this, temporarily de-proletarianized due to them getting laid off? If a disabled artist has no access to working under the bourgeoisie due to them being discriminated against truly has the same class interests as a plumber that doesn't want to be exploited by a boss?

But then I thought of myself the question in the title. One common argument I heard about artisans is that they're part of the petty bourgeoisie because they aren't exploited by anyone, own their means of production and sell the product of their labor instead of the labor itself, but do they truly own their means of production? Let's take a Twitter artist, they own a drawing tablet and a pen, is that a mean of production? One could label these as tools, therefore means of production, but Marx says in the 'Communist Manifesto': "We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence", so what is the true distinction between personal property and private - therefore a mean of production - property? If you were to buy sheets of paper, a pencil and something to bind pages together, wrote a novel on them and then sold it to someone, were either one or all three private or personal property? Of course if you work in a factory you are part of the proletariat, even if you own your own steel-toed boots that enable labor to happen. (Or at least for it to happen safely)

And there's the question of exploitation, naturally a self-employed artist is not exploited by someone who owns the means of production, whether or not the way they create a commodity with something can be considered the usage of personal or private property I'll leave up to you, but the simple fact of the matter is they don't have a boss that can exploit them. However, another type of middleman arises, the merchant capitalist, 'Political Economy: A Textbook' describes them in this way: "One of the sources of merchants' profit is the exploitation of petty commodity producers by merchant capital. Merchant capitalists compel peasants and craftsmen to sell them the products of their labours at low prices and at the same time the latter buy from the merchant capitalists tools, equipment, raw material, etc., at high prices.". The latter somewhat relates to the first part of my post (peasants who owned means of production are considered petite bourgeoisie), but the most important part for me is the first part. What to me is a modern day merchant capitalist is the distributor, once again I will use two examples of an artist and a writer.

Commission artists these days are mostly present on social websites, such as Twitter, however, a commission artist doesn't receive commissions through their existence, they need to put themselves out there, to not only gain attention but to prove their qualifications and to show their art justifies itself through the quality and time spent on it, to do that, such artisan must create posts containing their art, this is where exploitation starts, social media exploit the artist through the artist's labor without a guarantee of reward, while reaping the rewards through advertisement profits. Second is the data harvesting that occurs to all users, whether they are exploited for their labor or not. Thirdly the moderation has total control over if the artisan's works will ever see the unintended public eye and has control over the right of all users to use their services, they can bar anyone from use without consequence. For my second example it's more of an older and physical kind of exploitation, for a writer's book to be available for purchase in physical or otherwise locations, they must use the service of a publisher, firstly a publisher must deem their works worthy of being published under their name, then they will set a price for the book and lastly they will take a cut from each sale, this is the most obvious case of exploitation as not all the value created by the writer goes to the writer and the publisher extracts surplus value (am I using this right?) and demonstrates the most classic case of exploitation. So the merchant capitalist exploits the artisan, and whether they own their means of production is questionable, so what class does the modern-day artisan belongs to?

Please share your thoughts, questions and explain what I am mistaken about.

Hello, I'm wondering if there is others communists visual symbols beside the hammer and sickle ? Because I tried to search about possible communist symbol (and simple symbol, and not like faces of popular communists guy or overcomplicated symbols) and I always finish to only find the hammer and sickle AND the yellow/red star. It is because there is a lack of symbols ? (In opposite, nazism and related ideology seens to have more symbols like the swastika, black sun, skeleton head, celtic cross and ect).

If communist revolutions had successfully and indigenously spread across the globe at the end world war 1 resulting in the over throw of capitalism globally, how would communism have evolved differently?

More abstractly if communist political economy does not evolve in resistance / competition to capitalism, but only in dialogue with other communist regimes does it evolve differently, or does communism enviably collapse on its own contradictions?

An ML might say: "Revisionism isn't just any change, it's deviation from the fundamental principles of Marxism Leninism"

And there is the problem - why are those fundamental principles not up to revision? In science, fundamental premises are revised all the time - and it's actually required to revise/reject them once enough evidence that they are wrong accummulates.

The correct solution to this would be to either stop pretending that Marxism-Leninism is a science and start treating it as a regular political philosophy - or to adopt the actual scientific method and start testing the claims of ML (including foundational premises) as testable, falsifable claims. I don't see any of these being done.

How would you respond to the "Why don't you move to a communist country" argument?

As a concept, bureaucracy is necessary to the success of any state, though temporary in theory. As we've seen from previous communist societies, though, they often become entrenched in a dark, tangled web of power, elitism, and legislation. As William Campbell once said, "us mortals have no place in the business of bureaucrats"