marxist

an actual marxist in real life, not a damn coward about it Revolutionary Communist International

[factbot]

In a high school talent show, Lenin performed “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”

[nat-20s]

As an adult I think me and all my friends should all have matching schedules and work like 20 hours a week and also everyone lives within 15 minutes of each other why is that so much to ask

[plekhanov]

It’s literally not much to ask, if the working class controlled and planned production based on need, we could pretty much immediately guarantee full employment and drastically reduce the workweek. This would not be a big ask, just repurposing the productive forces to meet human need rather than to increase profits. It is only too much to ask the capitalists for; we’ll have to take it 🫣

[plekhanov]

feels weird to be both the most patient and most impatient person I know

[jupyter-notebook]

in grad school the only winning move is not to play

[kinderbraut]

[plekhanov]

Good lord I surely hope not.

[proxima-bee]

art museum websites when the artist was a communist: ...he continued to paint, despite the fact that every time someone in Soviet Russia made abstract art Joe Stalin would personally storm into their studio and start tearing apart the canvas with his teeth

art museum websites when the artist was a nazi: ...his work flourished from 1937–1945, a time where nothing particularly notable happened, and then he emigrated to the united states where he designed buildings for private universities

[canadian-marxist]

[haruko-deactivated20240313]

fool me once shame on you fool me twice whyyy that’s so mean fool me three times ohhh my goddd

[plekhanov]

the trump presidency isn’t fascist this is just bourgeois democracy in terminal crisis

[soup-mother]

Queer people do not need to get into norse gods, queer people need dialectical materialism.

[soup-mother]

To be entirely honest I find the idea that queer people need spirituality at all quite insulting, and the unfortunately widespread insistence that there's some metaphysical spiritual element to queerness is rather counterproductive and (to put it bluntly) really fucking annoying.

[plekhanov]

One term that makes my blood boil is “classism.” It’s popularly used to describe rich people looking down on poor people, or failing to acknowledge that some prescripted form of political action is more difficult when you don’t have money to burn.

Like a lot of these idpol terms, I think it comes from an honest place. It is very annoying to hear someone call for boycotts of some of the most affordable options during a cost-of-living crisis, and then condemn people who live in food deserts for not sticking to the boycott (not to mention that consumer boycotts are a Bad Tactic but that’s another post for another time). Or saying things like “can you believe these backwards people voted in a Fascist just for cheaper eggs and gas?!” (not to mention that the Trump regime isn’t Fascist but again, not the time to get into that).

Is that ignorant? Very annoying? Naïve? Stupid, even? Yes. Is that “classism”? No.

Exploitation, on a class basis, is qualitatively different from oppression. Understanding this from the following angle might help.

The answer to fighting sexism isn’t for all the women to fight all the men. The existence of men does not cause sexism. The answer to fighting transphobia isn’t for all the trans people to attack all the cis people. The existence of cis people does not cause transphobia. The answer to fighting racism isn’t for all the oppressed races to attack white people. The existence of white people does not cause racism. Et cetera.

The answer to fighting the exploitation of the working class is for all the members of the working class to unite in common struggle and attack the capitalist class. The existence of the capitalist class causes the exploitation of the working class. Its continued dominance also causes sexism, transphobia, racism, et cetera.

Dividing society on racial, sexual, religious lines is reactionary, as it has no basis in reality and only serves to perpetuate oppression and doesn’t make us aware of our common exploitation. Dividing society on class lines is historically progressive, as it reveals the real material interests that are at odds with one another (capitalists benefit from our increased exploitation) and furthers our ability to overthrow capitalism.

Calling something “classism” as just another form of oppression, qualitatively similar to all the others, isn’t just harmless faulty semantics. It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of class, and actively turns workers away from understanding class society as the material basis of all other forms of oppression.

Hope this helps.

[susurrantemar]

This document, after a thorough discussion at all levels of the International Marxist Tendency over the past year, was approved unanimously

While it is true that the complete emancipation of women (and men) can only be achieved in a classless society, it is equally true that such a society can only be achieved through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Women cannot be expected to put to one side their immediate, pressing demands and await the arrival of socialism. The victory of the Socialist revolution is unthinkable without the day-to-day struggle for advance under capitalism.

Marxists must fight for even the smallest reforms that can serve to improve the living standards of the working people under capitalism for two reasons. In the first place, we are fighting to defend the workers against exploitation, to defend living standards, democratic rights and the most elementary conditions of a civilised existence, to defend culture and civilisation against barbarism. Secondly, and most importantly, it is only through the experience of day-to-day struggle that the class can acquire a sense of its own power, to develop its organisational strength and raise its collective consciousness to the level demanded by history.

To demand, as sectarians and dogmatists have done, that the workers should set aside their day-to-day demands “in the interest of the revolution” is the height of stupidity. It would doom us to complete sterility and isolation. On that road the socialist revolution would forever remain an impossible mirage. In the same way, the struggle for the advancement of women, against reactionary male chauvinism, for progressive reforms and complete equality in the social, political and economic fields, is a fundamental duty of all genuine revolutionary Marxists.

[plekhanov]

Identity politics makes me so furious. Oppression is real! Many of us experience it all the time! However if we want to fight oppression, we have to understand its origin. And that origin is to be found in class society. Every new form of oppression, historically, was an outcome of the need of a particular form of class rule to preserve its position, going back to the ancient origins of women’s oppression in the family (which served the needs of property ownership and inheritance), or the invention of race to serve as a way of quelling uprisings of indentured servants and as a basis for the chattel slavery needed by American landowners to extract wealth without a large working class to exploit, or the cynical use of religion to create fictitious enemies who conveniently happened to share the same relation to production… oppression is one of the most powerful weapons of the ruling class, and it’s used to differentiate the working class, convince us that our enemies are the people working alongside us rather than the exploiters who keep us all down.

This website is a cesspool of identity politics. Although ideas do need to be hashed out and discussed, so much of the “discourse” here revolves around crowning the champion of the oppression Olympics, or telling people they have no right to discuss an issue that they don’t personally experience, or claiming that one section of the working class benefits from the oppression of another. This is false, as well as dangerous.

This only blurs the gaping fault lines in society that exist between those of us who own nothing but our ability to work, and the parasites who exploit us. It throws doubt on the possibility of united class struggle. It endlessly bemoans oppression without offering any path towards fighting it. This is incredibly convenient for one group of people, and one group of people only: the capitalists.

The highest moral aim is to free humanity from oppression and needless toil, so that we can unleash the productive forces through a democratically planned economy, erasing the material basis for scarcity, hunger, conflict over resources, and all forms of hatred. The way to arrive at that aim is to relentlessly build the greatest weapon of attack against the roots of society’s ills—class consciousness—and with it, the confidence and unity of the world proletariat. Marxism is the method we use to understand this, and it doesn’t need anything else.

That’s also why we don’t call ourselves “Marxist feminists” or “intersectional Marxists,” it’s why there isn’t a separate “Black Marxism” or “anti colonial Marxism.” It would be reactionary to divide the class struggle along identitarian lines, and would also falsely paint the picture of Marxism not having the answers to these questions. It would concede the false idea that Marxism is economic reductionism, which it isn’t! We recognize all of the varied forms of oppression, we recognize that not every struggle is identical, and yet they all have a basis in the continued division of humanity based on the private ownership of the means of production.

[carlosmarcosapproved]

[stillnaomi]

they call it radicalising but becoming a Marxist is more like deconverting. you're shedding the myths you've been indoctrinated into all your life and seeking a materialist understanding of politics instead

[tiredliteratureenjoyer]

One of the most frustrating things to overcome while being a communist is the fact that the USA (a country in which 40% of households have firearms) will probably be the last to have a workers revolution, mostly due to how frickin’ effective red scare propaganda is.

And it’s in the imperial core so it would automatically liberate its neo-colonies!!! Grrrr!!!

Leftists have to get better at manipulating STAT

[plekhanov]

Funny that this is tagged dialectical materialism… it’s missing the dialectic and the materialism. It’s not ideas that engender social movements! I have a much more optimistic (and unfortunately far too long-winded) perspective.

Some elements of the above post are sort of true. Plenty of countries in recent years have had workers’ revolutions, only there was no revolutionary leadership to ensure their success or instill genuine class consciousness. That will probably keep happening, and as long as the US remains in the hands of a capitalist state, anything that poses a threat to global capital will face a very powerful enemy.

But the US working class is a powder keg.

The workers’ movement in the US has been absolutely stunted by the red scares, trade union leadership betrayals, and the image of the left being tied up with the most rotten identity politics. But this also means there isn’t a huge layer of careerists masquerading as communist leadership, it means that the party being built today doesn’t have the baggage of dozens of betrayals under their belt, it means that the working class hasn’t been tested. Things tend to turn into their opposites rapidly once the conditions have been prepared. And the conditions are being prepared—events will have a much more profound effect on mass consciousness in the US than decades of half-baked scare tactics and the manufacture of culture wars.

American youth have experienced nothing but crisis and steeply declining living standards, facing much worse economic prospects than previous generations. They are educated about the “American Dream” and witness the world’s first trillionaire waving a chainsaw around in a grotesque imitation of Milei (also evil, to be sure) while their parents lose their health insurance and face mounting debt, while their jobs cut hours and intensify their labor. They live in the wealthiest nation on earth, which is an empire in decline. They lost their homes in the 2008 crisis, they saw Bernie Sanders run as a Democrat and betray all of his stated principles in the following years, they saw BLM protests repressed by Democrats and Republicans, they lived through a disastrous response to a pandemic that was undercut by the absurd restrictions of vaccine patents and respirator shortages, then they wore respirators to protect themselves from wildfire smoke and the pandemic that still exists by the way, the few jobs that used to promise limited upward social mobility are now being automated by one of the most environmentally devastating technologies in existence, the President that some of them supported because he promised no new wars and the end of rampant inflation and the opening of the Epstein files has soured on them as he fails to deliver on any of his campaign promises, the economy sits on a house of cards of fictitious capital and speculation which most of their parents’ retirement savings are tied to (if their parents have been able to save for retirement at all). They are told that capitalism holds boundless promise, which rings discordant with the reality they face. We are only seeing the beginning of what will probably be one of the most devastating economic collapses of all time, and people are only beginning to wake up, and yet already this year we’ve had the first de facto general strike in about 80 years, and some pretty heroic displays of class solidarity with immigrant workers, each time learning from the last and escalating their tactics.

I can’t find the quote right now, but in Engels’ Synopsis of Capital he describes how the catalyst for class struggle is not dependent on the absolute living standards of the working class, but rather sudden declines or severe contrasts between the wealth of the ruling class and that of the proletariat. This isn’t just true because Engels said so. It’s been proven in history time and again.

I can’t say that the US will be the first successful workers’ revolution in the wave to come. But it will happen much sooner than you think.

The only way to ensure this is by joining a revolutionary party that stands against all oppression and works tirelessly to expose the class contradictions in society, that tells the truth to the working class, that instills confidence, and that builds on entirely class-independent lines. Luckily that party does exist. In the US it’s called the RCA (Revolutionary Communists of America), and it’s part of the Revolutionary Communist International. We need to build urgently so that the working class doesn’t have to learn through costly mistakes this time around, so that they understand that they don’t need and can’t trust any party or political figure that is tied to the bourgeoisie in any way. When mass movements erupt, our trained Bolshevik cadres will be on the front lines and will work to win over these movements to the need to overthrow capitalism. Don’t sit on your hands and bemoan the backwardness of the American working class; join us and join the fight for communism in our lifetime.

[captain-price-returns]

[depsidase]

[betterredactually]

I hate this left liberal line.

“Tax the rich” No!

Seize their factories, their farms and supply lines. I don’t care if a capitalist runs a big firm or a small one, that is simply a measure of how good he is at exploitation. Abolish the capitalist class, whatever their wealth.