Ideology

[blindpig]

"gird yer loins..."

"The party is growing, but it is being beaten"
May 4, 13:53



"The party is growing, but it is being beaten"

Enthusiasm is required from every new political party. But other political parties, not only the new one, also have enthusiasm; and if a new party encounters an older one in a political struggle, it is inevitable, or rather, it usually follows, that those who find themselves in the minority will proclaim to the world that the moral victory is on their side. Anyone whose legs are broken by the enemy wins a moral victory. Tolstoy once said that moral victory is something extraordinarily bright. Masaryk celebrated a moral victory. But Tolstoy and Masaryk were never beaten. So, someone who wants to propagate the principles of a newly emerged party usually has to be satisfied with a moral victory and exclaim: “We won!”, while rubbing his back with opedeldok, because opedeldok is an excellent remedy for bruises, abrasions and bruises.

So every new political party, and even more so every apostle of a new political idea, should stock up on opedeldoc in advance. Anyone who wants to convince another political party of the correctness of their political beliefs is advised to always carry a bottle of this mixture with them if there is no medical aid station nearby. Every such political speaker should remember that tumors are cured with Kolar water; when the face swells after a slap, the swelling will disappear if you rub it with a mixture of chloroform and olive oil, adding a little camphor alcohol. This remedy perfectly paralyzes the effect of new political slogans and oratorical techniques.

There is no need to rub the wounds caused by arapnik; it is useful to apply a cold compress to them. As for broken heads, they will be repaired in any surgical clinic, because with the increase in the number of political parties there has been noticeable progress in surgery.

If, as a speaker, they spit in your eyes, do not wipe them with your hand, sleeve or handkerchief: you may get an inflammation of the cornea. In this case, the best remedy is warm water. If a political opponent knocks out your tooth, do not despair: when political opponents knocked out all of Saint Catherine’s teeth, she became a saint. True, these days the church has no use for saints like you, calmly go to the doctor and he will insert a new tooth for you. If those gathered tear off your ear at a meeting, grab it and, without waiting for the end of the meeting, quickly run to the nearest doctor so that he can sew it back on for you. Well, if they tear your head off, God bless you, don’t pick it up: you don’t need a head in politics... These are the principles, undoubtedly very reasonable, with which we, members of the committee of the party of moderate progress within the framework of the law, arrived at the meeting of the National Social Party , held in the dance hall “U Banzetov” in Nusli. We walked there cheerfully, like people who realize that if you sit behind the stove, the world will never know about you. And we wanted to grow like any other party. This is how the Old Czechs wanted to grow up, and meanwhile the Young Czechs grew up. This is how the National Social Party grew precisely at the time when the Young Czechs were about to grow. And the Social Democrats grew while the National Social Party imagined that it was growing alone.

We had the best opinion of ourselves as a political party, because we argued that we would grow: but the greatest victory in politics is the one that has the future.

And we went to the Banzettes with the firm belief that if the National Socialists have a program, then we can have it too. And if one of the points of their program is freedom of speech, then we want to have freedom of speech - that is, they will listen, and we will speak. We owe this memorable evening that we were able to introduce a new point into our program, which we adopted from them: “Down with freedom of speech!”

So, we came to the dance hall "At Banzet's", and I took the floor after the main speaker, who was applauded after every word, every look and wave of the hand; he was applauded when he climbed onto the podium and when he came down from it. But here’s what’s strange: when I climbed onto the podium, only six people applauded, and even then only members of the committee of our party, and the other nine hundred men and young men looked at me with such a menacing expression, as if they wanted to say: “You won’t get out of here in one piece!” »

This is very disappointing. This is offensive to any apostle. This is where I started my speech, you have to be consistently frank! I began like this:

“Dear meeting!”

I am extremely surprised that you did not greet me with applause. How am I worse than the previous speaker? After all, he had not yet opened his mouth, and you had already started clapping...

- You rogue! - a voice came from behind; and suddenly all the listeners seemed to go mad at once and rushed to the podium with exclamations that foreshadowed my moral victory:

“Get out, stink!”

- Get out, you bastard!

- Vaclav, hit him!

- Oh, you're a socialite!

- Why are you staring?!

And some tall, athletic man grabbed me by the collar of my jacket with his muscular hand and carried me through the angry crowd, shouting:

“You came here to disrupt the meeting, so we’ll teach you a lesson!”

A voice came from behind the presidium table:

“Don’t hit him, brothers!”

But this voice was drowned out by a storm of protest against the party leadership:

“Nothing, beat him, brothers!”

I have retained respect for these people to this day.

They beat me, beat the entire committee of the Moderate Progress Party within the limits of the law and, throwing us out into the street, returned back to continue discussing cultural issues. This is the bitter truth...

(c) Yaroslav Hasek

https://kritikaprava.org/library/211/pa ... no_ee_byut - zinc

Somehow I didn’t come across it before. Hasek is wonderful as always.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9135278.html

Google Translator

Toughen up, brothers and sisters.

[blindpig]

Review of the article by V.A. Podguzova “Everything can be solved... but not with any personnel”
No. 5/93.V.2024

Article by V.A. Podguzov’s “ Everything can be solved... but not with any personnel ” helped clarify a number of important points in a seemingly clear and explained topic about the overall strategic task of “Breakthrough” and the direction of activity for supporters.

When answering the question “What can be done?”, it is worth remembering that at one time Lenin considered the strategic task of uniting the proletarian class with scientific theory. Valery Alekseevich explains in the article:

“History needs either the masses, already armed with the knowledge of Marxism, or specific individuals in whom the masses see intelligence, education, conscience and therefore trust the tasks set by these individuals.”

Since the masses themselves are not armed with knowledge of Marxism, then in the most general form the task comes down to building an organization of competent Marxists. If you dig even deeper, you can identify the following elements in the problem.

Firstly, conscientious self-education of future members of the organization (“to be as authentic as possible to Marxism-Leninism”). It is absurd to count on victories without solving the problem of increasing the scientific and theoretical training of the active breakthroughists to the required level. Secondly, the actualization of Marxism (“without any false modesty, to throw new, strong, convincing scientific and theoretical “bridges” from the logic of the times of Marx, Lenin, Stalin into the reality of our days, taking into account the reasons for the catastrophically shameful defeat of the CPSU”), that is, the creation and maintaining an up-to-date victory plan - a theoretical compass for the movement of the organization. Third, the creation of a party of scientific centralism; a party capable of creating a “conveyor belt” for growing full-fledged Marxists.

The formulation of such a task in the most general terms has already been justified, discussed and accepted by the supporters of “Breakthrough”. Difficulties in determining the correct next steps of one’s own activities, especially in the field of agitation and propaganda, begin at an intermediate moment, when the level of Marxist competence is still low, the “victory plan” and the NC party are in their infancy, and outside, capitalist contradictions of a planetary scale are raging with might and main, turning into acute phase.

How to approach the decision correctly?

In the task posed, at least two points should be taken into account: the state of training of personnel preparing to “unite the proletarian class with scientific theory,” and the state of the minds of the proletarian class.

In relation to the class enemy, we can say that the party must surpass the bourgeoisie in terms of organization and competence. In relation to the proletariat, it can be said that the level of competence and organization of the party should be greater, the less scientific the state of mind of the masses.

The ubiquitous vulgar philistine thinking, especially operating in a turbulent global situation, is a difficult obstacle. The easiest way for the masses to become an “authority” now is for swindlers in the service of the bourgeoisie. It is enough to “defeat” the obvious horrors of capitalism, highlight the shortcomings of undesirable domestic and foreign geopolitical entities, and propose a national-religious nightmare as a solution to problems. You can fool the population indefinitely and indefinitely, right up to complete dehumanization in times of crisis.

You can visually smash any capitalist contradictions from a Marxist position, from revealing the essence of liberal fascism to the incompetence, weakness and idealism of the “Russkomirshchiki”, but then the “seeing light” masses will demand actions and decisions and, not seeing them, will happily dive into the illusory nationalist darkness . During the civil war that unfolded after the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, the masses followed the Bolsheviks only because words were followed by deeds. The people received peace, the peasants received land, the workers got rid of the bourgeoisie, and leaders stood at the helm who prevented the country from being divided between interventionists; leaders who introduced electrification, stopped famine, mechanized agriculture, etc.

Consequently, even if the criticism of capitalism is carried out from a scientific position, but behind this criticism there is no “victory plan” and a party capable of taking the next step of criticism, negating the negation of capitalism, making a planned transition from words to deeds, then we can forget about taking the masses under ideological control .

“ Our goal is to prevent the bourgeoisie from lulling class consciousness; this is precisely the primary direction of the struggle ,” K. Semin declares empty well-wishes that make zero contribution to the cause of communism.

In such a situation, access to the masses is not associated with “taking them under control,” as some wish, but with the search for supporters among conscientious people capable of creative mental activity. This requires the widest possible dissemination of deeply researched materials on the theoretical issues of communism and Marxism, as well as on the most pressing policy issues (for example, SVO).

Revealing the details of the incompetence of the bourgeoisie, the nuances of the influence of the confrontation between oligarchic groups or the specifics of the errors of bourgeois-national ideologies (“Russkomirshchiki” of the Russian Federation or the pro-Russian Baltic parties) are quite working topics in the field of current politics and for training the pen in the process of self-study.

Regarding the main focus of theoretical and practical activity, Valery Alekseevich gives the following advice in the article:

- Do not take on specific issues without first solving general ones.

— Formulate and work out timely tasks that correspond to the maturity of objective prerequisites and the subjective factor at a given specific moment in history, that is, implemented by the communists of our time.

— Understand that self-education is primary, literary activity is secondary.

— Introduce into the information space unconditionally scientifically valid materials containing answers to the most important questions of social progress.

- Strive to create works no worse than “Anti-Dühring”, “Infantile disease of leftism in communism”, “What to do?” etc.

— Learn from the classics, relating their works to the historical circumstances in which they were written. Examples:

Point in time: when the communist movement in Russia, like today, was weak. Direction of thought: about building a centralized party in Russia, which was based on a SCIENTIFIC approach to all aspects of party life, CLASS struggle. Result: Lenin’s article “Our most important task”, “Urgent tasks of our movement” and “Immediate tasks of Soviet power”.

Point in time: from 1917 to 1922. Direction of thought: deepening knowledge in the field of the history of philosophy, especially the creative understanding of Hegel’s dialectics, its significance for the development of the methodology of dialectical materialism. Result: “Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism”, “On the slogan of the United States of Europe”, “State and Revolution”, “Marxism and Uprising”, “April Theses” and all subsequent victorious practice.

— Re-read Lenin’s works “Tasks of revolutionary social democracy in the European war”, “Situation and tasks of the socialist international”, “What next? (On the tasks of workers' parties in relation to opportunism and social chauvinism)", the brochure "Karl Marx (A short biographical sketch outlining Marxism)", "The Collapse of the Second International", "On the slogan of the United States of Europe".

— Re-read the breakthrough materials about the tasks and directions of work: “ On the issue of self-education ”, “ What should those who call themselves communists work on? ", " Scientific centralism "

Ya. Dubov
5/05/2024

https://prorivists.org/93_response/

[blindpig]

Overcoming our Sisyphus fate
Originally published: Midwestern Marx on May 20, 2024 by Carlos L. Garrido (more by Midwestern Marx) | (Posted May 22, 2024)

​The principal question for any socialist movement today, be it in the U.S. or outside, is where it stands on issues of war and peace–what will be its position regarding American imperialism. As the great W. E. B. Dubois had long ago noted, “the government of the United States and the forces in control of government regard peace as dangerous.” The foundation of American society, as it exists under the tyranny of capital, is war. They have built up a grand machinery of lies, pumping out through all mediums the twisted facts and invented realities needed to support their topsy-turvy narrative of world events–and thereby, obtain consent for their crimes. They have slaughtered people and allowed whole populations to face the meat grinder of war to defend the right of accumulation for the owners of big capital–the monopoly-finance capitalist class. To defend the ‘rights’ of those who have pillaged the world for centuries. Those who make a killing out of killing. Who trade in the annihilation of life for profit.
​
As everyone knows, wherever there is oppression and immiseration there will be, sooner or later, resistance. This is a universal law of all human societies fractured by class antagonisms. It is this dialectic of class struggles which pushes humanity forward, often producing the births of whole new social systems from the ashes of a previous one. But these moments of societal renewal, where a new class comes into a position of power and creates a world in its own image, are not guaranteed–even if the conditions for producing it are. There is always the possibility, as Marx and Engels had long ago noted, of a general societal dissolution. To put it in terms fitting with the contradictions of the capitalist mode of life, it isn’t only socialism which stands as a possibility within the embryo of capitalism, equally capable of actualizing itself is, as Rosa Luxemburg long ago noted, barbarism.

The human element, what in traditional communist literature is called the subjective factor or the subjective conditions, are indispensable. It does not matter how bad things get, how clearly revolutionary the objective conditions are, without the subjective factor all is nil. It is the organized masses, led by the most conscious within their ranks, that make, out of the objectively revolutionary conditions, the revolutions.

For Lenin and the communist tradition, objectively revolutionary conditions require the presence of a few key factors: 1- the worsening of the masses’ living conditions, 2- their inability to go on in the old way, 3- their willingness to act (and not just passively accept dissatisfaction), and 4- a crisis in the ruling class itself, where even they cannot continue on in the old way. These objective conditions are present, and intensifying daily, in American society. I chronicle them in detail in my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

We are faced with the first generations in American history to live lives worst than their parents. Precarity has become a general reality for working people, the majority of whom are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people. Debt slavery has also become, in our highly financialized capitalism, a generalized reality drowning most working-class Americans. Hundreds of thousands die yearly for lacking the financial means to access medical services or overdosing on opioid drugs pushed by the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex in cahoots with the government, the universities, and NGOs. Social decay is evident as former industrial powerhouse cities are plagued by zombified humans and rusted remains of the industries that once were the basis of decent working-class communities. The American dream has become a joke for working-class people who have more and more come to realize what the comedic-critic George Carlin once said: it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

But these conditions, although functioning as the prime matter for building a revolutionary movement, are not enough. Why is that? I turn to Lenin, who says that “it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”

Like Sisyphus, the left of the last two decades seems condemned to roll the rock up simply to see it fall… rinsing and repeating continuously every few years. Since the protest movement against the invasion of Iraq, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Bernie Movement, to the Black Lives Matter Protests, to the current protests against the Zionist Genocide, the left has seen itself condemned to pull hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions, into the streets to express anger with whatever injustice is latched onto, only to then, after a few weeks or months, have everything return to square one.

I genuinely hope that the protest for a permanent ceasefire breaks this trend.

But if we are honest with ourselves, what fruit has borne out of the last two decades of protests? Did the Iraq protests stop the invasion and further destruction of the middle east? Did the occupy wall street protests stop financial speculation and overthrow the 1 percent? Did the Bernie movement win political power and bring with it the much-promised political revolution? Did the BLM protests actually challenge policing, the prison industrial complex, and the system which has made them necessary? The answer is not only No. The answer is, besides not achieving their desired ends, they have often accomplished quite the contrary. Movements such as Bernie’s and BLM, whatever still remains of it, were clearly just absorbed into the liberal, frankly most dominant, wing of the ruling class. They became what I’ve called a controlled form of counter hegemony, presenting a veneer of radicality on what is essentially a bourgeois politics that serves to reinforce the status quo with radical sounding language.

Giving up is, of course, not an option. The necessity for struggle is in the air. What do we do then?

I think we must start with being open to self-critique. Far too often even the attempt at doing so will receive backlash from those who are more comfortable with continuing the failures. Marxism is to dogma as water is to oil. If one is present the other cannot be, or at least not for long. If the tactics of the past have not worked, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and ask: why have the working masses not been won over to our side? Why have all the movements we’ve led this century ended in disappointment? It is okay to fail, but what is insane is to continue to fail in the same way while expecting a different outcome.

When questions such as these are tackled by the dominant left, the blame is almost always placed upon working people. Working people are not enlightened enough, too brute to realize how bourgeois ideology manipulates them, etc. While components of the narrative are true, the question is, so what? What is the point of communists if not precisely to piers through that, to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people–to rearticulate the rational kernels of the spontaneous common sense they’ve developed within the bourgeois order towards socialism, either producing active militants in the process or the sympathetic mass which it leads. In my view, the chunk of the blame for our failures lies on the left itself. On its middle-class composition and the purity fetish outlook it operates with.

Therefore, while we find objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S., we have a deep crisis in the subjective factor, that is, a poverty of revolutionary organizations and their worldviews. Most of the organizations of the socialist left are governed by the professional managerial class, what in the time of Marx and Engels was simply called the intelligentsia. What were supposed to be working-class organizations, vehicles for the conquest of political power by this class, have become centers of petty-bourgeois radicalism, as Gus Hall used to say. This analysis is not new, many theorists have pointed out how, since the late 1970s, along with the State Department’s attack on communists and socialists in the labor unions, and its promotion, through programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of a compatible anti-communist left, the working-class left has been destroyed and replaced by middle-class “radical recuperators,” as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. The U.S. State Department, as I show in my work, has been effective in creating a “controlled counter-hegemonic left,” a left that speaks radically but in substance always allies itself with imperialism.

This is far from a condemnation of intellectuals in general, but the reality is that, as it currently exists in the U.S., the dominance of the professional managerial class within socialist organizations is deeply alienating to workers, who are less concerned with their middle-class moralism than with surviving in a declining society.

On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from purity fetish, a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support. If something doesn’t live up to the pure ideas that exist in their heads, it’s rejected and condemned. In essence, it is the absence of a dialectical materialist worldview, a flight from a reality governed by movement, contradictions, and interconnectedness, and toward a pure and lofty ideal safe from desecration by the meanness of reality. This purity fetish, I argue in my work, takes three central forms in the United States:

1) Because a bloc of conservative workers are too imperfect or “backward” for the American left, they are considered baskets of deplorables or agents of a “fascist threat.” Instead of raising the consciousness of the so-called backward section of the working population, the purity fetish left condemns them, effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized. This is a ridiculous position which divorces socialists from those working in the pressure points of capital. The purity fetish left, therefore, eschews the task of winning over workers irrespective of the ideas they hold. In doing so, they simply sing to the choir, i.e., the most liberal sections of the middle classes that already agree with them on all the social issues they consider themselves to be enlightened on.

2) The second form that the purity fetish takes is a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads. In doing so, they have often become the leftist parrots of empire, failing to recognize how socialism is to be built, that is, how the process of socialist development occurs under the extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare in a world still dominated by global capital. In its acceptance of capitalist myths about socialism, this left acquiesces to the lie that socialism has always failed, and arrogantly posits itself as the first who will make it work. Instead of debunking the McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people, this left accepts them.

3) The third form of the purity fetish is the prevalence of what Georgi Dimitrov called national nihilism: the total rejection of our national past because of its impurities. A large part of the American left sees socialism as synonymous with the destruction of America. Bombastic ultra-left slogans dominate the discourse of many of the left-wing organizers, who treat the history of the United States in a metaphysical way, blind to how the country is a totality in motion, pregnant with contradictions, with histories of slavery, genocide, imperialism, but also with histories of abolitionist struggles, workers’ struggles, anti-imperialist and socialist struggles. It is a history that produces imperialists and looters, but also produced Dubois, King, Henry Winston, and other champions of the people’s struggle against capital, empire, and racism.

This purity fetish left forgets that socialism does not exist in the abstract, that it must be concretized in the conditions and history of the peoples who have won the struggle for political power. As Dimitrov put it, it must socialist in content and national in form. Socialism, especially in its early stages, must always have the specific characteristics of the history of the people: in China it is called socialism with Chinese characteristics, in Venezuela Bolivarian socialism, in Bolivia it means embedding socialism within the indigenous traditions of communalism. etc. Kim Il Sung once wrote “What assets do we have for carrying on the revolution if the history of our people’s struggle is denied.” This is effectively what the national nihilists, rooted in the purity fetish outlook, do.

Their national nihilism, contrary to their intentions, leads them into a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which holds that while all countries have had to give their socialist content a national form, the U.S., in its supposedly uniquely evil history, is the exception. Like German guilt pride, it is a way of expressing supremacism through guilt.

To put it in philosophical terms, there cannot be–contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy–abstract universals devoid of the specific forms they take in various contexts. On the contrary, as the Hegelian and Marxist traditions (both rooted in dialectical worldviews) maintain, the universal can only be actual when it is concretized through the particular. In other words, if we don’t take the rational progressive kernels of our national past and use them to fight for socialism, we will not only be doomed to misinterpret U.S. history, but we will fail, as we have, to connect with our people and successfully develop a socialist struggle in our context.

In every instance, the purity fetish of the middle-class left forbids them not only from properly understanding the world, but from changing it. It is no coincidence that the part of the world in which Marxist theoreticians find everything too impure to support is also the one that has failed, even under the most objectively fertile conditions, to produce a successful and meaningful revolutionary movement.

In short, conditions in the U.S. are objectively revolutionary. But the subjective factor is in deep crisis. Processes of social change cannot succeed if these two conditions are not united. For the U.S. left to succeed, it must re-centralize itself in the working masses and dispel its purity fetish outlook, replacing it with the dialectical materialist worldview–the best working tool and sharpest weapon, as Engels pointed out, that Marxism offers the proletariat. It needs a party of the people guided by this outlook, what has been traditionally called a communist party. Although some might bear that name today and tarnish it with decades of fighting for the liberal wing of the ruling class, the substance of what a communist party stands for, what it provides the class struggle, is indispensable for our advancement. It is the only force that can unite the people against the endless wars of empire that not only lead to the deaths of millions around the world, but also to the immiseration of our people and cities, who live under a state that always has money for war, but never any to invest in the people. Only when the people actually come into a position of power and create a society of, by, and for working people, can this fate change. For this we need a communist party, a people’s party.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/22/overcom ... phus-fate/

[blindpig]

Study, study and study. Concept of self-education
No. 5/93.V.2024

Introduction
Few ordinary people can boast of a cloudless life: the opportunity to do what they love; excellent relationships with colleagues, partners, family, friends; confidence in the future. And it is very difficult to find a person who would not be familiar with inflation, corruption, crises, manifestations of poverty, terrorist attacks, wars and other everyday events. Among the entire mass of the population, desperately fighting for their interests, people occasionally appear who are able to connect the aggressiveness of the environment not with God’s punishment, not with the invariably dominant animal principle, not with a problem in individual heads, but with the capitalist structure of society itself. A spontaneously awakened conscience knocks on their hearts stronger than the ashes of Klaas on Ulenspiegel; it requires action and immediate benefit to humanity.

However, neither the obvious idiocy of the leaders of the largest capitalist countries, nor the seething indignation can suggest that the effective struggle for the happiness of society is recorded only in the practice of communist movements ; that the successes of the communist parties of the present and the victorious practice of the most authoritative communist leaders of the past, who did not lose a single battle during their lifetime, are associated not with the strength of just indignation, not with faith in a bright future and not with the intensity of activity, but with the fact that they knew exactly how it is necessary to act in a specific situation. Such knowledge is a consequence of a highly accurate reflection of the surrounding reality, which can only be a product of scientific thinking, a product of a mind that has mastered Marxism. And there is no other way to master scientific thinking except the most intense and continuous self-education.

1. Knowledge
It goes without saying that the success of everyday activities, from using household appliances to finding a job, depends heavily on knowledge. However, this connection ceases to be so obvious in broader social issues: political, economic, historical, religious, national and others. Here, among fellow citizens, it is not knowledge that comes to the fore in their discussions, but ideas, faith and opinions. The world turns out to be either completely unknowable, or driven by a mystical force (or even the mind of man himself), or even standing on unchanging postulates such as the innate justice of a nation or the inherent desire of man to destroy his neighbor.

The masses of the population find themselves at the mercy of unknowable ideas, which are supposed to be believed and which are justified by a mass of selective facts, interconnected by means of formal logic. For the non-religious part of the population, such an idealistic construction successfully hides elements of faith and creates the appearance of rational thinking.

And if you tell the average person that all his persistent beliefs in one way or another hide a mixture of his own and imposed primitive interests of an animal nature, he will be very surprised.

Around some of the most attractive types of idealism - religious, national and other kinds - quite stable groups of people unite; the infinity of fantasies around interests and the individual nature of the interests themselves invariably create new groups and split existing ones into warring factions; The nature of faith does not even provide a theoretical opportunity to stop this evil process and reach a consensus among any significant masses of the population. Moreover, you need to understand that the true interests served by one or another idealistic ideology often have nothing to do with the real interests of their adherents.

Thus, it is precisely ignoring the need for knowledge that leads to an infinity of idealistic worldviews that hide only individual and group interests behind a pretentious screen. Representing fantasies, these worldviews do not complement each other, but represent the basis for a conflict society full of contradictory relationships. For every stupid idealistic theory, real life responds with the painful truth of poverty, hunger, ignorance, war and man-made disaster [1].

Consequently, the fundamental, essential basis of damaged social relations is ignorance, and progress in the development of society is based primarily on resolving the contradiction between ignorance and knowledge , that is, on scientific knowledge of the world around us and on the fight against idealism. It is the denial of ignorance that is the first prerequisite for the destruction of social differences of opinion, and therefore for the achievement of scientific unanimity.

Denial of ignorance means the need to descend from the empty clouds of idealism to “our sinful land,” that is, material; the need to recognize that the material world exists outside consciousness, that human thinking is capable of cognizing it, and that the effectiveness of any, not just everyday, activity directly depends on the accuracy and depth of knowledge.

The consequence of the objective opportunity to obtain and verify scientific knowledge is the unanimity of its bearers, and the subjective prerequisite for unanimity is the need for each member of society to impartially and conscientiously obtain and verify knowledge.

Since scientific knowledge does not arise in the head on its own, but through a person’s volitional effort, the first moment of self-education is revealed - the fundamental need for self-education to participate in progressive activities. Anyone who wants to at least understand the essence of the problems of social relations, not to mention correcting them, will first have to engage in self-education and develop scientific thinking.

The verifiability of scientific knowledge allows a beginner not to rush headlong into hectic activity, not to take anything for granted, ignoring authorities; and at the same time imposes upon him the duty of reading, studying and checking. Everything that will be said below can be verified, and the author insists that the reader does not join any organizations until he is convinced of the scientific nature of the knowledge presented and the truth of the theses put forward.

2. High quality knowledge
Since the result of self-education should be an increase in the quality of thinking from non-scientific to scientific, then self-education should not only exist, but also have a scientific quality . Scientific quality is the second point of self-education .

The form of self-education in itself only means the absorption of knowledge of a certain nature. To serve in the fight against ignorance, self-education must receive proper content that accurately reflects the laws of development of the material world. Only such content will make it possible to displace ignorance and progressively apply the acquired knowledge to specific conditions of social life.

Such content can be found in a system of scientific knowledge, the development of which occurs through the establishment of the essence of phenomena and absolute objective laws (interrelations) as a result of the study of socio-historical practice, based on scientific methodology. The criterion by which this or that theoretical scientific knowledge can be considered true , that is, accurately reflecting the surrounding reality, is compliance with all socio-historical practice. This means that theory must be based on socio-historical practice; that a theory must have explanatory power in its field; that the new practice arising from the theory must confirm this theory and be victorious. No objective scientific truth can contradict any reliable fact of socio-historical practice, including the scientific knowledge obtained in its course, be it the laws of physics, chemistry, biology or Marxism [2].

Thus, self-education is the enrichment of a person with the knowledge of science, that is, a developing system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and their stable relationships (laws) . The content of self-education is built around advanced science about the laws of development of the world, society and thinking, which has absorbed the practice-tested results of the most accurate research by the leading minds of humanity throughout the entire period of its existence. Brought together by K. Marx and F. Engels, subsequently developed by V. Lenin and I. Stalin and becoming a support for the leaders of the most progressive of modern countries, this science, known as Marxism , is a synthesis of truths about the most general objective laws of the development of matter and before the entire society as matter of a special kind [3].

2.1. Method
The methodology of Marxism is primarily based on certainty in the ontological (primacy of the material over the ideal) and epistemological (fundamental knowability of the material world) issues already touched upon above. On this foundation, Marxism built a research methodology , a way of thinking used both to understand the world around us and for social practice.

The question of the way of thinking is not simple. The usual maximum that the average person can get out of himself on this topic is reasoning about formal logic, “critical thinking” or “common sense”. Most people have a metaphysical way of thinking , that is, considering particulars without a general picture, exploring any “individuals” outside their universal connection; thus, they lose the opportunity to see real development. Metaphysics is based on the opposition of induction to deduction, analysis to synthesis, empiricism to rationalism. However, before embarking on the most complex studies of society, it is necessary to rely on philosophy - a methodology that includes the most general philosophical categories and a way of research and thinking [4].

The Marxist method - dialectical materialism, or diamatics - did not appear out of nowhere. At the beginning of the 19th century, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, in his work “The Science of Logic,” generalized all the philosophy created before him and thus managed to formulate the most indisputable propositions about the universal, i.e., about what is contained in absolutely all elements of the universe. The main acquisition of Hegelian philosophy is the systematization of the dialectical method, i.e., the method of thinking that considers everything in development, and K. Marx and F. Engels applied this acquisition in a materialist vein: unlike G.V.F. Hegel, proceeded from the fact that the universe is an infinite material world objectively existing in space and time, and all forms of thinking and ideas are properties of highly organized matter [5].

Diamatics as a methodology of thinking is a universal method of cognition . The objective existence of all material formations, including the objective existence of all subjects, is subject to the same laws of development. The laws of movement of thought are a reflection of the laws of movement of the objective material world [2].

Diamatics begins every movement of thought with the fundamental categories of being (“being”, “matter”, “time”, “space”, followed by “quality” and “quantity”, “measure”, “thing”, “property”, “ essence”, “identity” and “opposite” and others [6]), suggesting their strict correspondence with the entire socio-historical practice of mankind. A philosophical category is, firstly, an extremely general scientific abstraction, the richness of its content guarantees the systematization and consistent inclusion of any particular fact or series of facts. Secondly, this is a concept of a phenomenon that does not allow arbitrary interpretation. Thirdly, this is a concept that reflects objective laws, forms or aspects of objective material reality, key points of knowledge. The study of categories is based on the following diamatic principles. The first step is to consider the universe in unity, as a connected whole. This implies an approach to phenomena as organically connected, dependent on each other and conditioning each other. Second, consideration of phenomena exclusively in movement, development, namely from the point of view of their emergence and death. Moreover, development is a sudden qualitative leap as a result of the gradual accumulation of natural quantitative changes. And lastly: the reason for the self-motion of all phenomena of the universe is the internal opposition immanent in them, the obsolete and the developing, the positive and the negative, in short, the unity of opposites [4].

Diamatics recognizes the discovery of absolute objective laws (interrelations) as the highest type of knowledge. The process of cognition is subject to the law of negation of negation, that is, the movement from the truth of the first order to the truths of the subsequent order is carried out through negation, but this negation excludes the abolition or refutation of the previous truth. On the contrary, the negation of the negation means deepening, clarification, continuity [2]. At the same time, creative materialism is the living process of thinking itself, inextricably linked with the existence of the objective world, continuously deepening in the comprehension of its essence and forms of its development, continuously changing society, for thinking cannot be dialectical if it is divorced from transformative social activity [ 7].

2.2. Social studies
The conclusions of Marxism about society are a synthesis of truths about the most general objective laws of social development. Such a science was the result of a clearly defined and formalized logical methodology, diamatics, applied and confirmed its scientific nature first to the universe and nature (through diamatic criticism of famous works in the field of natural science), and then addressed to society (through diamatic criticism of famous works in the field of social science).

Social science also did not appear out of nowhere. Studying the legacy of the founders of Marxism (49 volumes), it is impossible not to pay attention to the list of authors whose works were scrupulously studied by K. Marx and F. Engels. It would not be an exaggeration to say that K. Marx and F. Engels conscientiously studied the works of almost all famous scientists since the times of Ancient Greece in all branches of human knowledge up to and including the 19th century. That is, Marxism has a gigantic base of theoretical sources and is an unsurpassed teaching that diamatically integrates all the scientific wealth developed by humanity during the pre-Marx period. Thus, K. Marx and F. Engels in their works systematized and synthesized all the knowledge that existed before them about the development of the real productive forces of society, about the laws of development of sciences, individual and social consciousness [8]. And most importantly, they made this critical revision on the basis of the only scientific methodology, that is, with an adequate understanding of how the world works and what the laws of thinking are.

The very formulation of the task of social science to study the laws of development of society implies identifying the essence of a number of concepts: society itself, its moments, primary factors of development, stages of development and intra-stage factors of development.

Development of living matter
First of all, human society is one of the types of living matter. There are prerequisites and conditions for the existence of any type of living matter. Prerequisites are biological factors (such as adaptability to the external environment and mechanisms of life reproduction), and conditions are external factors (such as geographic). A variety of quantitative (such as population density) and qualitative (such as the level of development of skills to interact with living and inanimate nature) factors are indicators of successful existence in these conditions. However, prerequisites and conditions only contribute to existence. Existence itself, and therefore development, can only occur in interaction with the planetary ecosystem, in the course of the exchange of substances and energies with nature, in the struggle for life. We can say that this exchange constitutes the existence of living nature, and the identity and unity of opposites - nature and living material objects - is a key factor in the development of these objects.

In the evolutionary process, primates, possessing the ability to reflect and adapting to the conditions of a diversely aggressive external environment, began to spontaneously unite for collective work and thereby began to stand out from the animal world through the creation of a society that served as a catalyst for the development of the human psyche.

This moment marked a qualitative leap in the development of living matter: if earlier individual animals and their groups, in the process of struggling for survival, adapted to changing environmental conditions, then human society itself transforms the habitat and at the same time increases the efficiency of this transformation through the development of social relations as the main factor of labor and its effectiveness.

The development of society cannot be fully studied without understanding what it is.

Concept of society
The very logic of the relationship between the universal, the particular and the individual makes it possible to define society as a socially organized form of living matter, the moments of which man is. Outside of society, a person does not show signs of a rational being, because only a social person can become a rational person - formed by society, being a single manifestation of society, its moment.

Thus, social existence itself - people, their relationships, the results of their practice, in a word, the life of society in all its diversity - has as its moment an active social consciousness influencing the material conditions of life, determining the consciousness of every person who changes social existence [9].

What contributes to the progressive development of society?

Firstly, as something universal and whole, human society is characterized not simply by people as its moments, but by their relationships. The development of society, therefore, depends on the development of each member of society and on the development of relationships between them.

Since members of human society are characterized primarily by the presence of reason, the development of society is associated with an increase in the quality of their thinking. Moreover, the high quality of a worldview does not simply relate to the level of intelligence in a particular work area, since in this case there is no development of social relations, but, for example, a strange order is formed when highly intelligent members of society are looking for more and more sophisticated ways of killing their own kind. A high-quality worldview refers, first of all, to a developed understanding of society, which is the most important factor for the development of social relations.

Secondly, since human society emerged from the animal kingdom and has the distinctive feature of transforming the environment in the process of struggle for survival, the development of members of society and the relationships between them contributes to the life process of society and, therefore, is progressive .

Thirdly, the development of members of society and the relationships between them, in turn, depends on the state of society , that is, on the totality of conditions prevailing in it that influence the development of each member of society. The level of development or quality (condition) of society can be determined through the level of suitability of these conditions for the high-quality development of each member of society. The law of the development of matter allows us to say that society moves from a lower quality state to a higher quality one, from simple to complex, through the creation of increasingly optimal conditions for reproduction through the comprehensive development of each member of society. It is this kind of movement that is progressive .

Thus, society in its life process of active transformation of nature develops progressively only if the quality of relations between members of society develops, which is possible only if there are conditions in society for the development of the quality of thinking of each member of society.

Development of society: principles and key factor
Like any living matter, society develops through interaction with nature, but in addition, being the highest form of matter, it struggles to separate itself from the animal world. Society’s interaction with the external environment has developed to a controlled and goal-oriented exchange of substances and energies with nature with the aim of transforming it [9], that is, to collective labor.

Moments of development characteristic of society (or moments of collective labor) are identified in the course of studying the key moments of society: its elements and the interaction between them.

Productive forces and production relations mutually determine each other. Productive forces and production relations constitute an identity of opposites, called the mode of production . The leading opposition in the method of production is the productive forces, they are primary - the nature of production relations depends on the quality of thinking of people and the instruments of production, the latter can only accelerate or slow down the development of the productive forces. It is the method of production that is the key factor in the development of society , the force of social existence that plays a decisive role in progress, and the productive forces and production relations are its sides [9].

Progress of development of society
Having received this key in their hands, K. Marx and F. Engels thereby localized the field of search for the laws of social development. By combining the acquired knowledge with known historical data, scientists found the following.

Firstly, methods of production replace each other as productive forces develop. The change occurs in a well-known historical sequence from the primitive communal way of life to the communist one, although individual countries and societies may skip stages under external influence. The transition from one mode of production to another occurs through revolutionary changes, but they mature evolutionarily. Evolution is a gradual preparation for a revolutionary leap [10].

Secondly, the method of production underlies the development of social existence and its moment - social consciousness. In turn, production relations constitute the basis of society, on which a superstructure rises: the state, the legal system, a certain ideology. The specific historical unity of the basis and the corresponding superstructure is called socio-economic formation . The era of dominance of a certain method of production is the historical period of this formation [9].

Thirdly, at a certain stage of development, humanity is experiencing a period of dominance of private property relations and exploitative formations.

By the era of the Neolithic revolution, humanity had sufficiently developed the tools of production to transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding. At the same time, it became possible to accumulate and store a significant surplus of production and specialization of labor took place into managerial (mental) and executive (physical). So gradually the elite emerged in society. Due to underdeveloped thinking and dominant semi-animal habits, the emerging leaders used the surplus for private interests . Immediately, in order to protect their property and power, a special apparatus of coercion, violence and deception was required, which was later institutionalized in the form of the state, law and corresponding ideology. This is how relations of private ownership of the means of production arose , which became a class-forming factor. With the advent of a new method of production, all of humanity was divided into antagonistic classes: the owners of private property in the means of production were organized through state institutions into a class of exploiters, which was opposed by the unorganized, and therefore submissive, exploited masses.

Fourthly, K. Marx in his work “Capital. Critique of Political Economy” examined in detail the features of the capitalist mode of production: how and under what conditions the exchange of goods between the wage worker and the capitalist turns into exploitation; what is the mechanism of exploitation - capital, that is, money invested in the means and processes of exploitation; how the endless cycle of accumulation reproduces the conditions of capitalist production.

Practice
All this titanic theoretical work - revealing the research method, finding the key factor in the development of society and discovering the laws of this development - was required by K. Marx and F. Engels in order to answer the question “How to build a society of happy and free people?” So they made the greatest discovery - the proletarians, organized into a revolutionary class, will become the gravedigger of capitalism.

V. Lenin developed Marxism, adding critically revised practical experience of the struggle of the populists and three Russian revolutions, applying it to the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions [11]. Vladimir Ilyich needed theoretical work to clarify and develop the tenets of Marxism for a specific era in order for the organized working class to take power into its own hands.

No less complex theoretical work on clarifying and developing the tenets of Marxism-Leninism was required by I. Stalin for the victorious construction of the society of the first phase of communism in one particular country, for the collapse of the classical colonial slavery of bourgeois democracies, for the spread of communism as a world social system, for the fight against fascism and to create developments in the field of formation of the necessary material factors for the transition to mature communism [11].

At our newest stage of history, there is a need for a theoretical understanding of the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR [13], the main one of which is the insufficient competence of party members - requires the development of the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, in particular in matters of party building, with an emphasis on development productive forces, quality of human thinking. This kind of work has been carried out by V. Podguzov and the editors of the Breakthrough group for decades. The historical task of building a party of scientific centralism [14] is no less urgent right now than at the beginning of the 20th century, and its implementation requires extremely competent Marxists.

3. Competence
Since the world is material, knowable and develops according to objective laws, then the movement towards a high-quality state of society, communism, depends on the objective level of development of the productive forces and production relations, on the corresponding development of social science theory and on the degree of mastery of it by each member of society. At the current historical stage, the theory of knowledge of the laws of social development has become a full-fledged science, known under the name of Marxism, and the degree of mastery of it through high-quality self-education makes it possible to determine a person’s competence . Thus, the third point of self-education is that it is a continuous process extended over time, contributing to the formation of a Marxist, allowing him to raise the level of his competence.

The development of human thinking is determined not only by his biological characteristics, but also by social relations, and in the historical time of exploitative formations, the ruling class is directly interested in ensuring that the masses wander in the darkness of ignorance in matters of social science. This means that the law of uneven development of people's scientific thinking , applied to the exploitative period, states, firstly, about the general low level of scientific thinking in society, and secondly, about a significant difference in the levels of competence of members of society.

Since the scientific thinking of every person is a prerequisite for the existence of a communist society, the task of building progressive relations between people of different levels of scientific competence is an important aspect of the task of building communism.

To approach the solution of this problem, let us identify communities of people who manifest themselves in accordance with the level of competence: first of all, these are groups of carriers of scientific and non-scientific thinking. In the last, non-Marxist group, subgroups of people with an individual (half-animal or petty-bourgeois) and social (religious, national, leftist, etc.) worldview clearly manifest themselves. Marxists, according to their level of competence, can be divided into Marxists in the making, party members and leaders.

Below we will illustrate these levels through the possible evolution of a “good man”, a clean tradesman.

3.1. Unscientific individual thinking. Tradesman
There are good people living in the world - trained, hard-working, moderately honest, good friends, with strong families, almost without bad habits. Good people are surrounded, for the most part, by equally good people, and, one could say, “life is good.” But she wasn't so successful.

Good people from Stepanakert, Donetsk, Tel Aviv and other cities one day discover that rockets are flying into their homes.

Good people from Minsk see armed officers on the streets, twisting peaceful protesters, equipped with fittings and flammable cocktails.

Good people from Ukraine discover Muscovites on the territory, who arrived in tanks under the fictitious pretext of liberation from some Nazis.

Good people from the Russian Federation have been suffering for years from the Russophobia that has unfolded in Europe.

And finally, all these good people notice that life is getting worse: it’s harder to find work, there’s more crime, children are taught worse, food is becoming more and more expensive, normal treatment is becoming more and more inaccessible. And all this against the backdrop of increasingly fattening rich people and increasingly inadequate officials.

A good person knows the reasons: greedy enemy politicians are to blame for the war, and stupid and greedy officials, so wonderfully described by Gogol in The Government Inspector, are to blame for the rise in prices. A good person himself stands for everything good, not just with his thoughts, but with all his actions; and that’s why he doesn’t understand why others shouldn’t act like him.

“Why do I need all this?!” — losing self-control from adversity, any good person asks the ash tree.

Let's help him.

To answer this question, let's break it down into two other implied questions: "Why do such disasters occur in society, despite the fact that I personally do good?" and “Why do social disasters fall on me?”

By asking such questions, a good person discovers a mistake in the very course of thought: ignoring the connection between the individual (individual) and the general (social). It is not difficult to find answers by restoring this connection.

First: the character of social life is not the result of the activity of one person; he is the result of the activities of the whole society, including the good man himself. Therefore, one must be able to distinguish between “I do good for myself without offending others,” “I do good for myself and some others,” and “I do good for the whole society.” These three activities may well be mutually exclusive.

Second: social disasters affect the entire society, albeit unevenly. Consequently, seeking individual salvation from them is an attempt to do “good for oneself,” which, as we noted above, may well contradict “good for the whole society.”

Simply put, a good person has himself to blame for everything. His activities make a significant contribution to the creation of public, including his personal, problems.

How it works?

“World peace,” so passionately desired by a good person, depends on the nature of his personal activity in relation to the whole society, and not to himself or the units around him. And in relation to society, the progressiveness or reactionaryness of a person’s practice is determined only and exclusively by the level of development of his thinking.

Battery effect
A good person is, first of all, a useful employee. No matter what happens to his personal life, he must find a job. From an individual point of view, the conditions and content of work at work, the size of the salary and the amount of free time that he can spend on his personal life outside of work are important to him.

His activity takes on a different aspect when we look at it from the point of view of bourgeois society. The hired worker sells his ability to work, labor power, to the capitalist. He sells it in advance because he receives his salary after working. In paid time, he labors to create some kind of product or service, which appears in the form of value, part of which the capitalist returns to him in the form of wages, and the other part appropriates for himself. Feudal corvee was more honest, because such theft of labor, exploitation, was physically divided: the peasant worked either in his own field or in the field of the feudal lord.

The very state of affairs, where a hired worker cannot live without getting a job, indicates that the capitalist has gained the opportunity to force the proletarian to work for the purpose of profit. The capitalist can dictate working conditions, and his interest is to reduce the cost of working conditions, reduce wages and reduce the amount of free time the worker has. Consequently, from a bourgeois economic point of view, the personal life of a good person is just a cost necessary to restore the “talking tool”, which must be minimized.

In order not to exhaust the population in the pursuit of profit, not to kill each other in competition, and to protect themselves from the business of their neighbors on the planet, capitalists become a class: they are organized in the form of a state that maintains balance with the help of ideological and power tools and structures. Next, states and their blocs enter into a competitive struggle, from economic regulation to military confrontation.

Thus, the best hired worker has a dual nature, individual and social.

As an individual, he is a subjectively good person, because he lives an ordinary, non-aggressive everyday life. As such, he is a tradesman. He spends a lot of time thinking about this side of his life, guided, as a rule, by personal interests.

As a part of society, the wage earner is just a slave; the battery that fuels the capitalist system. As such, subjectively he may remain good, but objectively the nature of his activities is determined by state policy. The proletarian finds himself in this position, firstly, objectively, in connection with his removal from public administration of the so-called. by legal methods, that is, by the will of the ruling class, and secondly, subjectively, due to one’s own intellectual passivity. The latter is expressed in the fact that he is not trained to think about the social side of his life, and spends only as much time on it as is necessary to ensure individual interests, personal comfort and convenience.

It is precisely the low quality of the subjective factor, that is, the thinking of the tradesman, concentrating on his individual side and ignoring the social one, that allows him to be relegated from the pedestal of a thinking person to a man-production function, a “battery” .

Thousands and millions of such “batteries” are concerned only with the quality of energy production and their recharging, but are not at all concerned with the direction of movement of the mechanism that they power. The ruling class chooses the direction for them.

It only remains to add that the bourgeois mechanisms themselves are as mindless as their “batteries”, since they are motivated only by an animal thirst for extracting surplus value. The degree of reactionaryness of bourgeois states varies due to the different degrees of their degradation, and therefore it is a matter of pure chance whether a good person gives his strength to Nazi Ukraine or the average reactionism of the bourgeois Russian Federation.

The irony, then, is that the average tradesman prefers to leave his question “Why do I need this?” without an answer, since he himself is part of it.

3.2. Unscientific public thinking
Some philistines manage to come out of the shell of individualism and begin to become interested in social movements. Sometimes this is a consequence of curiosity, but more often, during a period of social upheaval, anxiety for one’s own safety requires filling the marker “friend or foe” with content, determining the cause and culprit of the unrest. Lacking a strong logical apparatus, citizens observe events, read different opinions on the topic, recall school knowledge in social studies, ask the point of view of loved ones and form their own opinions. The range of non-scientific ideas that promise to deliver humanity from suffering is infinitely wide - from democratic to religious-sectarian and even racial - but in most cases the bourgeoisie comes to a moderate-radical national-patriotic worldview.

The quality of the subjective factor of a national patriot is higher than that of an apolitical bourgeois: his thinking is not limited only to his own interests, but already takes into account public ones.

A spontaneous national patriot, as a rule, supports the “mechanism” of which he is a part. Conscious citizens from conflicting countries - the Russian Federation and Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Israel and Palestine and others - are no different from each other: if they were born on the other side of the conflict, they would support it. Thus, having been born at the beginning of the 21st century in the USA, a national patriot will make every effort to ensure that his country plunders the whole world; having been born in the Russian Federation, he will support the inconsistent national liberation struggle against Western countries. Sometimes a citizen ends up in the cage of a foreign state, like, for example, a liberal in the Russian Federation who has adopted the ideology of the West and works for an NGO.

Having developed from an individualist into a social person, a person of national-patriotic convictions can be active in support of his homeland. Occasionally, he may even completely abandon his personal life in favor of public life.

In this sense, the nature of the activity of an active citizen still reflects the degree of reactionaryness of “his capitalism” and he may well cause more damage to society than if he were just a “battery” tradesman. At the same time, he has a chance to move to the next level of development of his thinking.

Thus, the national patriot is one step further from the animal worldview relative to the philistine and thus has greater potential for mastering science. However, his thinking remains in the non-scientific sphere, which means it has the potential to degrade to the fanatical-dogmatic Nazi level, where the destruction of one part of the population for the illusory benefit of another is considered acceptable.

3.3. Unscientific social thinking. Leftism
Out of faith in their great and invincible nation, fighting against eternal evil enemies, some national patriots make attempts to understand the laws of movement of society. Some of them, having waded through tons of idealistic theories, will approach scientific Marxist works. They will be bored with reading and developing, and, having enriched their vocabulary with a number of catchy phrases, they will become leftists.

Ersatz Marxism is similar to the modern celebration of the ancient Celtic holiday of Halloween. Here you have zombies, mindlessly shouting phrases from Marxist textbooks that are not connected by a general meaning. Here are the werewolves, bringing their texts to solidarity with the bourgeoisie and revisionism. Here are the vampires, turning the proletariat into leftism with their thoughtlessly cheerful actionism and economism. There are also simply storytellers who talk about how a catastrophe will come, will call wizards to life, and a good life will improve on its own. All these characters tirelessly flicker in front of the audience, not forgetting to beg for sweets and donations.

The leftist is twofold. An idle leftist can encourage a tradesman and a national patriot to develop his logical apparatus, which can lead him to progressive scientific activity. But the same leftist can lead a potential Marxist astray from this path with his beautifully presented nonsense. Even worse, he can turn a person against his relatively reactionary state in its fight against the fascist invaders, as, for example, modern leftist pacifists of the Russian Federation do.

And yet, if a leftist’s conscience is not atrophied, the door to Marxism is open to him.

3.4. Unscientific individual thinking
At the same time, the tradesman can choose another way out of adversity - to consciously subordinate public interests to his own, that is, to get as close as possible to the lowest possible level of thinking - semi-animal. In the era of private property relations, we are talking about the desire to climb the bourgeois mechanism, fueled by the energy of the middle-class “batteries”; become a capitalist yourself: a parasite living off the labor of others.

The degradation of thinking has no boundaries: starting with small, fussy business, half-animal man strives to ride the powerful productive forces in order to make a profit; strives to become an imperialist oligarch - a slave-owning dictator, all of whose activities are aimed at strengthening the dominance of its owner through the growth of capital. In its extreme form, such parasitism becomes fatal for society, because maximum profit is obtained not just through exploitation, but also through wars: either local for the purpose of profit, or global with the goals of both profit and the destruction of competitors.

Let us note that neither a high level of intelligence nor a good memory for Marxist quotes in any way prevents non-scientific thinking and does not guarantee scientific competence, since intelligence and memory are only tools that a person uses in practice or for his own benefit (and here he can behave in the most antisocial manner), or for the benefit of society.

The relationship between the bearers of unscientific thinking is as follows: two-legged stomach-oligarchs use all available intellectual abilities to organize such a world order, where ordinary townspeople and small entrepreneurs are the food supply of large capitalists, and non-scientific and ideological citizens become their ideological servants, as a rule, national-patriotic or leftist character.

3.5. Scientific thinking
Fate can imprison a person in any very reactionary country, even in an analogue of fascist Germany itself in the 30-40s of the last century. And as a hired worker, he will still be the “battery” that powers the monster. But if he is a Marxist, if he is motivated to the level of conscious necessity, if his thinking is scientific and his practice is revolutionary, then he has changed qualitatively as a person. He began to live for the sake of the whole society and stopped living only for the sake of its part: himself, his family, a separate country. He stopped asking the question “Why do I need this?” and be a good-person-for-oneself, an active national-patriotic “battery” or an empty leftist. In a word, he has ceased to be a relatively reactionary element of society, leading it to disaster with some speed. This is the only way he compensated for the “battery effect” and set out on the path of progress.

The newly minted Marxist, yesterday's tradesman, understands that his maximum task is to achieve the maximum level of competence, develop a theory and, on its basis, carry out the practical movement of the masses towards communism, the maximum possible under the given historical conditions. That is, to become the leader of the communist movement. On this path, it is necessary, first of all, to embark on the road of self-education and achieve such a level of competence in order to become a communist, a member of the PNC.

(Much more at link and well worth the time.)

https://prorivists.org/93_self-education/

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