Peter Solarz
No title available
shark vs the universe
PR's Tumblrdome
wallacepolsom
izzy's playlists!
todays bird
No title available
Cosmic Funnies
ellievsbear
roma★
No title available
tumblr dot com
pixel skylines
sheepfilms
Mike Driver
styofa doing anything
will byers stan first human second
hello vonnie
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from Indonesia
seen from Türkiye
seen from India
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@spectreofcommunism
Without broad democracy for the people, it is impossible for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be consolidated or for political power to he stable. Without democracy, without arousing the masses and without supervision by the masses, it is impossible to exercise effective dictatorship over the reactionaries and bad elements or to remould them effectively; they will continue to make trouble and may stage a come-back.
Mao Zedong (via its-right-to-rebel)
So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat. If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party? The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists. But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven. That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various “Christians”. But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development.
Lenin-Socialism and Religion
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
The Communist Manifesto
Theoretically, there can be no doubt that between capitalism and communism there lies a definite transition period which must combine the features and properties of both these forms of social economy. This transition period has to be a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism — or, in other words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very feeble.
Lenin Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
The great leap forward Holodomor North Korean starvation Capitalism isn't perfect but it never killed millions upon millions in purposeful famine
Capitalism isn't perfect but it never killed millions upon millions in purposeful famine
What constitutes a mode of production? It is the unity between what Marx calls the productive forces and the relations of production. Thus every mode of production, dominant or dominated, has, in its unity, its productive forces and relations of production. How should we conceive of this unity? Marx speaks of the ‘correspondence’ between the productive forces and relations of production. ‘Correspondence’, however, is just a descriptive term. The theory of the very special ‘nature’ of the unity between the productive forces and the relations of production of a determinate mode of production has yet to be constructed. This first theory commands the theory of an altogether different problem, too often confused with the first: the theory of another ‘unity’ –quite different, because necessarily ‘contradictory’ – between the dominant and dominated mode or modes of production in a given social formation. For example, when we say that the relations of production no longer ‘correspond’ to the productive forces and that this contradiction is the driving force behind every social revolution, it is no longer a question or no longer just a question of non-correspondence between the productive forces and relations of production of one given mode of production. In the great majority of cases, doubtless, it is also a question of the contradiction, in the social formation under consideration, between the productive forces of the whole set of modes of production in that social formation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the relations of production of the mode of production currently dominant. This distinction is crucial. If we fail to make it, we will talk wildly and inaccurately about ‘correspondence’ and ‘non-correspondence’, confusing two very different types of unity: first, the unity, internal to a mode of production, between its productive forces and relations of production, and, second, the (always contradictory) ‘unity’ between the dominated modes of production and the dominant mode of production.
Louis Althusser-On the Reproduction of Capitalism
One thing is certain: one cannot begin with man, because that would be to begin with a bourgeois idea of “man”, and because the idea of beginning with man, in other words the idea of an absolute point of departure (= of an “essence”) belongs to bourgeois philosophy. This idea of “man” as a starting-point, an absolute point of departure, is the basis of all bourgeois ideology; it is the soul of the great Classical Political Economy itself. “Man” is a myth[15] of bourgeois ideology: Marxism-Leninism cannot start from “man”. It starts “from the economically given social period”; and, at the end of its analysis, when it “arrives”, it may find real men. These men are thus the point of arrival of an analysis which starts from the social relations of the existing mode of production, from class relations, and from the class struggle. These men are quite different men from the “man” of bourgeois ideology. “Society is not composed of individuals “, says Marx. He is right: society is not a “combination”, an “addition” of individuals. What constitutes society is the system of its social relations in which its individuals live, work and struggle. He is right: society is not made up of individuals in general, in the abstract, just so many copies of “man”. Because each society has its own individuals, historically and socially determined. The slave-individual is not the serf-individual nor the proletarian-individual, and the same goes for the individual of each corresponding ruling class. In the same way, we must say that even a class is not “composed” of individuals in general: each class has its own individuals, fashioned in their individuality by their conditions of life, of work, of exploitation and of struggle — by the relations of the class struggle. In their mass, real men are what class conditions make of them. These conditions do not depend on bourgeois “human nature”: liberty. On the contrary: the liberties of men, including the forms and limits of these liberties, and including their will to struggle, depend on these conditions. If the question of “man” as “subject of history” disappears, that does not mean that the question of political action disappears. Quite the contrary! This political action is actually given its strength.by the critique of.the bourgeois fetishism of “man”: it is forced to follow the conditions. of the class struggle. For class struggle is not an individual struggle, but an organized mass struggle for the conquest and revolutionary transformation of state power and social relations. Nor does it mean that the question of the revolutionary party disappears — because without it the conquest of state power by the exploited masses, led by the proletariat, is impossible. But it does mean that the “role of the individual in history”, the existence, the nature, the practice and the objectives of the revolutionary party are not determined by the omnipotence of “transcendence”, that is, the liberty of “man”, but by quite different conditions: by the state of the class struggle, by the state of the labour movement, by the ideology of the labour movement (petty-bourgeois or proletarian), and by its relation to Marxist theory, by its mass line and by its mass work.
Louis Althusser-Reply to John Lewis
The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.
Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
The proletariat and its party must unite all the strata that can be united and organize a broad united front against imperialism and its lackeys. In order to consolidate and expand this united front, it is necessary that the proletarian party should maintain its ideological, political and organizational independence and insist on the leadership of the revolution. The proletarian party and the revolutionary people must learn to master all forms of struggle, including armed struggle. They must defeat counter-revolutionary armed force with revolutionary armed force whenever imperialism and its lackeys resort to armed suppression.
Mao Zedong
Before Marx, materialism examined the problem of knowledge apart from the social nature of man and apart from his historical development, and was therefore incapable of understanding the dependence of knowledge on social practice, that is, the dependence of knowledge on production and the class struggle. Above all, Marxists regard man's activity in production as the most fundamental practical activity, the determinant of all his other activities. Man's knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material production, through which he comes gradually to understand the phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature, and the relations between himself and nature; and through his activity in production he also gradually comes to understand, in varying degrees, certain relations that exist between man and man. None of this knowledge can be acquired apart from activity in production. In a classless society every person, as a member of society, joins in common effort with the other members, enters into definite relations of production with them and engages in production to meet man's material needs. In all class societies, the members of the different social classes also enter, in different ways, into definite relations of production and engage in production to meet their material needs. This is the primary source from which human knowledge develops. Man's social practice is not confined to activity in production, but takes many other forms--class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits; in short, as a social being, man participates in all spheres of the practical life of society. Thus man, in varying degrees, comes to know the different relations between man and man, not only through his material life but also through his political and cultural life (both of which are intimately bound up with material life). Of these other types of social practice, class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profound influence on the development of man's knowledge. In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.
Mao Zedong-On Practice
The national revolutionary movements of the oppressed nations are a component part of the world socialist revolution. This is true, first of all, because both the national liberation movements and the proletarian socialist movement have the same enemy – imperialism. Beyond this, the unity of the two revolutionary struggles is guaranteed because only socialism can secure complete national liberation. Stalin wrote in 1921, 'The imperialist war has shown, and the revolutionary experience of recent years has again confirmed that: 1) The national and colonial questions are inseparable from the question of emancipation from the rule of capital; 2) Imperialism, (the highest form of capitalism) cannot exist without the political and economic enslavement of unequal nations and colonies; 3) The unequal nations and colonies cannot be liberated without the overthrow of the rule of capital; 4) The victory of the proletariat cannot be lasting without the liberation of the nations and colonies from the yoke of imperialism.’ [Stalin, Works, Vol. 5, p. 57] The truth of this statement has been reinforced over the last 60 years. The more that imperialism consolidates its viselike economic grip on the most isolated corners of the world, and the more that capitalism develops in the oppressed nations, the more closely connected the national liberation movements become with the struggle for socialism. Nevertheless, the national democratic revolution represents a distinct stage in the revolutionary process that eventually leads to socialism. In most of the oppressed nations, the aims of this stage are: the elimination of the rule of the feudal oligarchy and its remnants; the carrying out of the agrarian revolution; the overthrow of the rule of the imperialists and their comprador bourgeois lackeys; the confiscation of their property; and the establishment of a revolutionary democratic government. These goals are all bourgeois-democratic in nature – they do not touch the capitalist relations of production. However, under the conditions of imperialism, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations cannot completely achieve these goals or defend them. Independent national capitalist development is impossible under imperialism. Only the elimination of capitalist relations of production and their replacement by socialist relations of production can enable a nation to carry out a complete rupture with imperialist domination. The national bourgeoisie is, of course, the mortal enemy of socialism, because it means the elimination of the national bourgeoisie as a class. Hence the tendency of the national bourgeoisie to compromise with imperialism and to join with it against the national revolutionary movement led by the proletariat. The Fourth Congress of the Comintern described this shift in class alliances in the national liberation movement as follows: The objective tasks of colonial revolutions exceed the limit of bourgeois democracy by the very fact that a decisive victory is incompatible with the domination of world imperialism. While the native bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia are the pioneers of colonial revolutionary movements, with the entry of proletarian and semi-proletarian peasant masses into these movements, however, the rich bourgeoisie and bourgeois landlords begin to leave it as the social interests of the masses assume prominence. [Comintern, Theses on the Eastern Question, op. cit. p. 52] The native bourgeoisie is generally divided into two sections. The comprador bourgeoisie is a merchant class which is connected to the import and export of commodities. Its class interests are tied to imperialist rule, and it serves as imperialism’s political lackey. The industrial bourgeoisie, on the other hand, finds itself in competition with the imperialist monopolies for the national market and must resist the imperialists’ efforts to eliminate native industry. Therefore, in the early stages of the national democratic revolution, this sector of the bourgeoisie can play a progressive, and even a revolutionary, role. However, as capitalism and imperialism develop, the independence of this class is curtailed and it is forced to compromise with imperialism. In the end it sides with imperialism and will fight to the death to see that the revolution is stopped halfway. Therefore, the native bourgeoisie is generally the proponent of national reformism, protesting the worst abuses of imperialism but opposing revolutionary change. The petty bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations vacillates between the reformism of the national bourgeoisie and the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Generally, in the end it breaks into two sections – the better off siding with the bourgeoisie and the poorer siding with the proletariat. The revolutionary sections of the petty bourgeoisie, the poor peasantry and the urban poor, can make staunch allies of the proletariat in both the national democratic and the socialist revolutions. They are strategic allies of the proletariat because they too benefit from the establishment of socialism. But the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie can never lead the national democratic revolution to complete victory because they, in and of themselves, cannot break with capitalism, and therefore, imperialism. Only the proletariat of the colony or oppressed nation can carry the anti-imperialist revolution through to the end, because it stands for a complete break with capitalism and imperialism and for the establishment of socialism. Of course, this does not mean that the proletariat will always lead the national revolutionary struggle. In the early stages, the national revolutionary petty bourgeoisie may be in control. But the proletariat will always seek to become the leader from the very outset. The more quickly the proletariat is able to gain this leadership, the sooner final victory will come, and the fewer painful zigzags and counter-revolutions the nation will have to endure.
Revolutionary Political Organization/M-L
We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.
Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 21, pp. 413-14].
The XIth Thesis on Feuerbach proclaimed: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ This simple sentence seemed to promise a new philosophy, one which was no longer an interpretation, but rather a transformation of the world. Moreover, that is how it was read more than half a century later, by Labriola, and then following him, by Gramsci, both of whom defined Marxism essentially as a new philosophy, a ‘philosophy of praxis’. Yet we have to face the fact that this prophetic sentence produced no new philosophy immediately, at any rate, no new philosophical discourse, quite the contrary, it merely initiated a long philosophical silence. This silence was only broken publicly by what had all the appearances of an unforeseen accident: a precipitate intervention by Engels, forced to do ideological battle with Dühring, constrained to follow him onto his own ‘territory’ in order to deal with the political consequences of the ‘philosophical’ writings of a blind teacher of mathematics who was beginning to exercise a dangerous influence over German socialism. Here we have a strange situation indeed: a Thesis which seems to announce a revolution in philosophy – then a thirty-year long philosophical silence, and finally a few improvised chapters of philosophical polemic published by Engels for political and ideological reasons as an introduction to a remarkable summary of Marx’s scientific theories. Must we conclude that we are the victims of a retrospective philosophical illusion when we read the XIth Thesis on Feuerbach as the proclamation of a philosophical revolution? Yes and no. But first before saying no, I think it is necessary to say yes, seriously: yes, we are essentially the victims of a philosophical illusion. What was announced in the Theses on Feuerbach was, in the necessarily philosophical language of a declaration of rupture with all ‘interpretative’ philosophy, something quite different from a new philosophy: a new science, the science of history, whose first, still infinitely fragile foundations Marx was to lay in The German Ideology. The philosophical emptiness which followed the proclamation of Thesis XI was thus the fullness of a science, the fullness of the intense, arduous and protracted labour which put an unprecedented science on to the stocks, a science to which Marx was to devote all his life, down to the last drafts for Capital, which he was never able to complete. It is this scientific fullness which represents the first and most profound reason why, even if Thesis XI did prophetically announce an event which was to make its mark on philosophy, it could not give rise to a philosophy, or rather had to proclaim the radical suppression of all existing philosophy in order to give priority to the work needed for the theoretical gestation of Marx’s scientific discovery. This radical suppression of philosophy is, as is well known, inscribed in so many words in The German Ideology. It is essential, says Marx in that work, to get rid of all philosophical fancies and turn to the study of positive reality, to tear aside the veil of philosophy and at last see reality for what it is. The German Ideology bases this suppression of philosophy on a theory of philosophy as a hallucination and mystification, or to go further, as a dream, manufactured from what I shall call the day’s residues of the real history of concrete men, day’s residues endowed with a purely imag- inary existence in which the order of things is inverted. Philosophy, like religion and ethics, is only ideology; it has no history, everything which seems to happen in it really happens outside it, in the only real history, the history of the material life of men. Science is then the real itself, known by the action which reveals it by destroying the ideologies that veil it: foremost among these ideologies is philosophy. Let us halt at this dramatic juncture and explore its meaning. The theoretical revolution announced in Thesis XI is in reality the foundation of a new science. Employing a concept of Bachelard’s, I believe we can think the theoretical event which inaugurates this new science as an ‘epistemological break’. Marx founds a new science, i.e. he elaborates a system of new scientific concepts where previously there prevailed only the manipulation of ideological notions. Marx founds the science of history where there were previously only philosophies of history.
Louis Althusser—Lenin and Philosophy
Conscientious practice of self-criticism is still another hallmark distinguishing our Party from all other political parties. As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades' minds and our Party's work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing. The proverb "Running water is never stale and a door-hinge is never worm-eaten" means that constant motion prevents the inroads of germs and other organisms. To check up regularly on our work and in the process develop a democratic style of work, to fear neither criticism nor self-criticism, and to apply such good popular Chinese maxims as "Say all you know and say it without reserve", "Blame not the speaker but be warned by his words" and "Correct mistakes if you have committed them and guard against them if you have not" - this is the only effective way to prevent all kinds of political dust and germs from contaminating the minds of our comrades and the body of our Party.
Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government, 1945
World imperialism cannot be overcome by prefigurative isolationism, by technocratic adjustment of the relations of exploitation through the pressure politics of foundation funded, state authorized non-profits and labor organizations or by the electoral maneuvers of the thousand and one rotten variants of social democrats and revisionists. The seizure of the existing capitalist state by the reformist and populist left as evidenced by the experience of Bolivia and Venezuela only provides the foundation for the development of a fascist process of cooption in George Jackson’s sense of the term. Nor will it be demolished by the existentialist thrill seeking of self isolating minorities living out their fantasies of uncompromising negation of the existing order through the hopeless armed struggle of small groups or idealist attempts to “live” communism now. The way forward is the construction of the new power through the destruction of the old-the build up of red power and disarticulation and destruction of the apparatuses of the imperialist state through a protracted process of extra-institutional mass action and development of counter-power based in real material infrastructure a process which over time leads to the emergence of armed struggle on a mass level.
Put World People's War On The Agenda-SignalFire http://www.signalfire.org/?p=17909
Dialectical materialism is not, and never has been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, a dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in time and space and not lose them in utterly idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated". And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent.
Richard Lewontin
Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1849
