[illlllillllilll]

IMT: Opposing Imperialism by Endorsing Imperialism – armanleftarm – Medium

The right opportunist “International Marxist Tendency”, the party of Ted Grant and Alan Woods whose publication is “Socialist Appeal”…

A polemic I wrote about the IMT specifically and Trotskyists generally and how they hamper the struggle against imperialism. 

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Aleppo, Syria: Massive celebration of the historic victory today at the University of Aleppo. Not one Western camera in sight!

Via Sarah Abdallah

[heteroglossia]

We must emphasize: What Brecht does not want is that the spectators continue to leave their brains with their hats upon entering the theater, as do bourgeois spectators. In order to understand this poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people - “spectators,” passive, beings in the theatrical phenomenon - into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action. Aristotle proposes a poetics in which the spectator delegates power to the dramatic character so that the latter may act and think for himself, often in opposition to the character. In the first case, a “catharsis” occurs; in the second, an awakening of critical consciousness. But the poetics of the oppressed focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the contrary, he himself assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change - in short, trains himself for real action. In this case, perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution. The liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into action. No matter that the action is fictional; what matters is that it is action! I believe that the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should transfer to the people the means of production in the theater so that the people themselves may utilize them. The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it.

Augosto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed

[heteroglossia]

For art to be unpolitical means only for it to ally itself with the ruling group.

Bertold Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre”

[illlllillllilll]

First woman in space Valentina Tereshkova handing a memento to Black Panther revolutionary Angela Davis.

[efghefghefgh]

[antoniogramsci]

Happy Birthday, Lenin.

[drapeau-rouge]

“The Western left too often forgets, in the name of Leninism, Lenin’s own conclusion that the communists in the oppressor nations have different tasks from those in the oppressed nations. In the latter, the communists needed to spearhead the liberation movement, exposing and displacing the collaborating or vacillating bourgeoisie. But this was not the business of the communists in the oppressor countries. The 8th condition for admission to the Communist International (Lenin 1920) states that:

Parties in countries whose bourgeoisie possess colonies and oppress other nations must pursue a most well‐defined and clear‐cut policy in respect of colonies and oppressed nations. Any party wishing to join the Third International must ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the imperialists of its “own” country, must support—in deed, not merely in word—every colonial liberation movement, demand the expulsion of its compatriot imperialists from the colonies, inculcate in the hearts of the workers of its own country an attitude of true brotherhood with the working population of the colonies and the oppressed nations, and conduct systematic agitation among the armed forces against all oppression of the colonial peoples.

This duty is utterly independent of the class character of the liberation movement. Nothing in the heritage of Leninism or Marxism says the western Communists should limit or condition their support, depending on whether it is going in a socialist direction or has a working class leadership. Such conditionality is the hallmark of the nationalist‐sectarian tradition in the Western left. It has seduced layer after layer of once‐revolutionary Western socialists to back intervention against whatever ‘latest atrocity’ serves as an excuse: poor little Slovenia, Milosevic’s treatment of Kosovo, the Taleban, the ‘suppression’ of the Falung Gong, Ghaddafi’s suddenly‐discovered authoritarian practices, Islamic terror in Mali – the list is endless.”

- Alan Freeman, Learning from the makers of history: Bolshevism, Bolivarianism, and the Legacy of Hugo Chavez

[t0kwxmzckcrlkfbfu4o9-deactivate]

Excerpt from http://snylterstaten.dk/english/chapter-iii-theory-unequal-exchange#onex2:

Capitalist exploitation is not exclusively and in isolation connected to production or to the concrete relationship between capital and labour. Under developed capitalism, the exploitation must be seen in relation to the circulation of capital as a whole – i.e. both in relation to production and to the trade in commodities.

Under developed capitalism, value is transferred from undertakings of low productivity to undertakings of high productivity within one line of industry. Value is transferred from lines of industry with a low organic composition to lines with a high organic composition. Finance and trade capital can appropriate value without even being directly attached to the productive sphere. Value is transferred from countries with a low wage level to countries with a high wage level. All these transfers of value – conditions of exploitation – can only be understood, if the capitalist circulation is considered as a whole and not only on the basis of production. The basis of the surplus-value – the surplus-labour – is created in production, the appropriation and distribution of the surplus-value take place in the trade in commodities.

The fact that, technically, a person takes part in production as a wage-labourer does not necessarily mean that he or she is exploited and that he or she cannot exploit other people. Wage-labour is a sine qua non of capitalist exploitation but it is not enough. The exploitation depends on the actual ratio between the “necessary labour” (the wages) and the “surplus labour” (the surplus-value). Thus, if you can secure more value for your wages than you have created, you are not being exploited but you are exploiting.

In principle there is nothing new about this. In Grundrisse, pp. 434-43, Marx deals with the fact that through the determination of prices of production and a national average rate of profit, labourers could benefit from other labourers’ products being sold below their value to the extent that these products were part of their consumption. However, when he wrote Grundrisse in 1857-8, Marx did not regard this as something important. He writes:

As regards the other workers, the case is entirely the same; they gain from the depreciated commodity only in relation (1) as they consume it; (2) relative to the size of their wage, which is determined by necessary labour. If the depreciated commodity were, e.g. grain – one of the staffs of life – then first its producer, the farmer, and following him all other capitalists, would make the discovery that the worker’s necessary wage is no longer the necessary wage; but stands above its level; hence it is brought down….[27]

(Marx, Grundrisse, p. 439.)

Engels did not doubt the possibility of the British’ proletariat exploiting the colonial proletariat.

… the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.

(Engels to Marx, 7 October 1858, MESC, p. 110.)

And in a letter to Kautsky he wrote:

You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, you see, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.

(Engels to Kautsky, 12 September 1882, MESW, p. 678.)

Thus the fact that wages of a certain size can contain more value than the labour performed in order to get the wages is not something new. [28]

It is a question of quantity whether it applies in the case of a managing director with an annual salary of $100,000, or in the case of an assistant manager with a salary of $25,000 – or if it already applies to the skilled worker earning $15,000. It is a question of calculations, not of principles.

[frida-kahlo-love]

[dailymarx]

Who seeks the art of life must look within.

Engels - Book Wisdom 1839 

[illlllillllilll]

Epic theatre (German: episches Theater) was primarily proposed by Bertolt Brecht who suggested that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before them, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage

[fruitsaladchewits-deactivated20]

Iranian women share lunch after planting rice. 

Mazandaran Province. Near the village of Zirab. Iran, 2001.

A.Abbas

[mehreenkasana]

Of the personality disorders [under neoliberalism], the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors – the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us.

George Monbiot, Sick of this market-driven world? You should be. (via lavendergun)

[dailymarx]

The capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments.

Marx - Capital Vol 1 Ch 24 (via dailymarx)

[illlllillllilll]

Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed’. [...] The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.

Karl Marx (Grundrisse)

[drapeau-rouge]

[stalinsociety]

Visit Original Link

Fly, black swallow Along the bank of the Alazani river Hurry and bring a message From my brother at war On the bank of Alazani I saw the grass stained scarlet I went near and tried to gather it Where no one ever walks

One of Stalin’s favourite songs, performed by the famous Georgian tenor Hamlet Gonashvili, known as “The Voice of Georgia”.