“History is not going to make our revolution an easy matter like the bourgeois revolutions in which it sufficed to overthrow that official power at the center and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority. We have to work from beneath, and this corresponds to the mass character of our revolution which aims at the foundation and base of the social constitution; it corresponds to the character of the present proletarian revolution that the conquest of political power must come not from above but from below. The 9th of November was an attempt, a weak, half-hearted, half-conscious, and chaotic attempt to overthrow the existing public power and to put an end to class rule. What now must be done is that with full consciousness all the forces of the proletariat should be concentrated in an attack on the very foundations of capitalist society. There, at the base, where the individual employer confronts his wage slaves; at the base, where all the executive organs of political class rule confront the object of this rule, the masses; there, step by step, we must seize the means of power from the rulers and take them into our own hands.”
— Rosa Luxemburg (Our Program and the Political Situation, December 1918)
Lenin called his approach to electoral politics “revolutionary parliamentarism”, according to Nimtz. The purpose of counting votes and running campaigns and candidates was always connected to exposing more and more people to the contradictions of Tsarism and bourgeois democracy. The point of participating in parliament was not to convince people that all they had to do was elect more Bolsheviks. The main goal of such electoral campaigns was to expose the limits of the system in delivering true democracy and freedom, as well as expose the other political parties in their failure to represent the material interests of the working classes.
Sudip Bhattacharya, Socialists and the defense of voting rights
From the ’60s New Left to the persistence of a mass-membership Communist Party today, Marxism has had a huge impact on Japanese politics and culture. Japanese Marxism is a highly creative tradition that deserves to be better known and understood outside Japan.
In 1907, Eugene Debs waxed poetic about the red flag, calling it “a sign of terror to every tyrant” and
The red flag is an omen of ill, a sign of terror to every tyrant, every robber, and every vampire that sucks the life of labor and mocks at its misery. It is an emblem of hope, a bow of promise to all the oppressed and downtrodden of the earth.
The red flag is the only race flag; it is the flag of revolt against robbery; the flag of the working class, the flag of hope and high resolve — the flag of Universal Freedom.
Understanding China’s role in American empire reminds us how urgently we must confront the capitalist world system in its entirety.
China is complicit in and, in some ways, responsible for American imperialism. The CCP picked the side of capital in the Cold War, doomed the international communist movement in the process, and continues to fund American imperialism to this day. But to simply claim that both states are bad, is to miss the point. Imperialism in its modern form is a product of capitalism. Capitalism is a world system, not merely the product of the decisions of individual countries. Replacing one capitalist empire with another is futile. Any form of anti-imperialist politics that focuses on nations invariably arrives at pitting one of the faces of capitalism against another, which can only ever reproduce the very system it claims to fight. Only through a confrontation with the entire capitalist world system, no matter the color of its flag, can the nightmare of empire end.
The man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
In an oligarchic system, there are few better predictors of how a president will govern than where they got their money. Here’s who’s funded both the Biden and Trump campaigns.
The 2020 contest is poised to shatter campaign spending records, with $14 billion projected to have been put on the table by the time the dust settles — more than double the last presidential race. It looks like the infection of the political sphere by big money will be as widespread and pernicious as ever for the foreseeable future — and it pays to understand where it’s coming from.
At the heart of Marx’s Capital is a simple, powerful model: in production and exchange, capitalists combine labor power, machines, and raw material. The resulting commodities are then sold for money. If all goes well, there is a profit, which needs then to be reinvested into yet more labor power, machines, and raw materials. Neither commodities nor money is capital. This circuit becomes capital when money is sunk into commodity production, in an ever-expanding cycle. Capital is a process in which money flows through nature. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion within a finite web of life.
Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
Doug Enaa Greene on the Hungarian Soviet Republic and its tragic defeat.
On March 21, workers’ revolution had come to Budapest and Soviet power was proclaimed. The Soviet Republic of Hungary joined with Soviet Russia in attacking the bastions of bourgeois power and showed the possibilities of a new socialist order. Unfortunately, Soviet Hungary did not last long and was toppled after only 133 days by the armed power of the internal counterrevolution and imperialism. Those were not the only causes of Soviet Hungary’s defeat. Poor Communist leadership and rash policies made Soviet Hungary’s loss swifter and more certain by alienating many potential supporters. Even though the Hungarian Soviet Republic provides many negative examples of how to make a revolution, they deserve to be remembered for their boldness in attempting to accomplish the impossible in the worst conditions.
In addition to the chiefly "oppressive" apparatus—the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy—the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates, an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and registration work, if it may be expressed this way. This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and the wires they pull must be cut off, lopped off, chopped away from this apparatus; it must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide.
Vladimir Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?
Le jeune Karl Marx (The Young Karl Marx) [2017] Dir. Raoul Peck
Saying “there’ll always be” is a bourgeois notion. Capital wants us to think that. But everything moves. Everything is subject to change. Nothing lasts. All Social relations–slavery, serfdom, salaried work–are historical and transient. The truth is, current conditions must change. The bourgeois is still free to hire labour, the worker still forced to sell it. The bourgeois loves talking of liberty but that liberty is for him, not for you, as you know.
by Owen Hatherley // At a public lecture at the LSE, Sheila Fitzpatrick lamented that the end of the Cold War meant that there was little energy in the commemoration of the two Russian revolutions of 1917.
In a huge country that was rapidly industrialising under the rule of a medieval autocracy, the First World War exacerbates long-standing grievances both in an industrial proletariat concentrated in large high-tech factories, and in a land-hungry peasantry scattered across the Eurasian expanse; an unorganised insurrection in February brings to power a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists but fails to quell discontent, and after an abortive right-wing coup, the most extreme group on the left, the majority (Bolshevik, renamed Communist in 1918) wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party builds enough support in the democratic councils (Soviets) of the factories and the army to take power in October.
For Andreas Malm, we need to stop seeing climate change as a problem for the future — and use state power now to impose a drastic reordering of our economies.
State power should definitely be used to prevent luxury emissions perpetrated by the rich — private jets should be banned outright, as should SUVs and other vehicles that consume completely indefensible amounts of fuel. This is low-hanging fruit for the climate justice movement, as these sources of emissions are among the least socially necessary. The situation is completely different when we consider, for example, methane from rice paddies in India, where the problems caused by the emissions have to be weighed against the necessity to produce food to sustain populations. A successful transition away from fossil fuels would not entail the complete planning of the economy in the sense of having states plan and ration individual consumption — far from it. But some forms of consumption will indeed have to be limited or abolished outright — this cannot be done through markets or appeals to ethical consumption, but only through state regulation.
Such an increase in state power brings with it the danger of bureaucratization and authoritarianism. Indeed, there is already a trend in this direction, with Hungary, for example, using the pandemic to undermine democracy and increase state coercion. Nevertheless, if you have an energy transition brought about by popular forces from below, with social movements having power over the state bodies driving the transition, then this danger can be held in check. While it may seem utopian at this stage, it is important to make the proposition of closing down institutions designed to survey and control populations and repurpose them to attack capital, closing down the sources of global warming and zoonotic transmission.
The long read: The Communist Manifesto foresaw the predatory and polarised global capitalism of the 21st century. But Marx and Engels also showed us that we have the power to create a better world.
For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.
No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill.
As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”), have a Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?”
For Marx and Engels’ immediate readership, this was not an academic dilemma, debated in the salons of Europe. Their manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation often meant persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment. Today, a similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together? Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence.
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