Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 26, 2022 2:34 pm

On Progress and Barbarism
October 26, 11:41 am

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On Progress and Barbarism

One of the main symbols of the most shameless manipulation - almost on a par with "human rights" and "democratic values" was the concept of "progress".

It is interesting to recall now how yesterday's opponents in the Cold War (which for the peoples of the Third World was quite hot and hybridly wandered from continent to continent) coincided in their understanding of progress. It was argued on both sides that the competition between systems would be won by the one who produced more material goods for his citizens and thus allowed society to progress. Yes, under socialism the goals of spiritual and human development were proclaimed, and under capitalism - individual freedoms alone at the cost of the wild exploitation of entire continents, but in both cases the development of the material technological base was considered an indisputable priority and the basis of any spiritual and cultural superstructures.

Was this not the first original mistake of our civilization? Shouldn't the technological process always lag behind the spiritual?

The European barbarians, who destroyed the once great empires and mastered their technologies much more firmly than all the non-applied sciences, cultures and arts, built their religious dogmas as a reflection of the vertical of monarchical power, conquered the wealth of overseas lands to create the material basis for the transition to capitalism, swept away others that interfered to their myths of civilization today, through financial speculation, the undivided power of corporations and their subordinate governments, parties, authorities, oppositions, the press, science and culture, they are increasingly successfully continuing their only professional activity - robbery. "Progress" in their understanding remains a quantitative indicator of the accumulation and production of material values, in order to distract us from understanding the meaninglessness of life within this social paradigm.

What about cultures that have considered human progress synonymous with the growth of our knowledge of ourselves and our understanding of the world? What happened to the ancient scientists who observed the stars and performed complex brain surgeries, not for someone else's power or their own career and salary, but because they were looking for and finding meaning in something completely different?

Why do we so rarely remember that our entire history, economy and everything else is the result of the work of our consciousness, like a telescope, deliberately directed in one direction or another of the search. And everything we create is not a mechanical result of our unchanging nature, but a dynamic product of our thoughts, feelings and desires, and therefore, all this can be changed, corrected or completely destroyed.

(c) Oleg Yasinsky

https://t.me/olegyasynsky/573 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7937224.html

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 21, 2022 3:41 pm

Social Democracy Will Not Save Us
Benjamin Woods 16 Nov 2022

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Image: Poster for Communist Party USA candidate William Foster, ca. 1932 (detail), Public Books

The author makes the case that liberalism is a dead end and that socialism is the only tool for Black liberation.

The Black Liberation Movement in the United States has reached an almost unprecedented level of ideological confusion. Unlike in the 20th century, significant sections of the contemporary Black Left openly embrace an understanding of ‘identity politics’[i that is based in philosophical idealism.[ii] A somewhat resurgent US Left has, correctly, begun to critique these perceived political errors. Unfortunately, social democrats such as DSA, Jacobin and Cedric Johnson in his award-winning article[iii] add to the ideological confusion. This essay asserts that contrary to the claims of advancing democracy and freedom, social democracy has consistently undermined the struggle for national liberation and socialism.

In 1896, Eduard Bernstein, the leading theoretician of social democracy,[iv] wrote that the 2nd or Socialist International[v] should adopt a pro-colonial policy. Under the banner of social democracy, Bernstein boldly proclaimed through colonialism the “savage races” can be “compelled to conform with the rules of higher civilization.”[vi] Fortunately, other, more principled socialists won the debate and the 2nd international officially espoused an anti-colonial position.[vii] Although this isn’t the first time that Western ‘radicals’ have betrayed colonized people,[viii] several leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, saw this as a complete betrayal of the ‘national question’ and international socialism.[ix]

Lenin theorized that in the late 19th century, capitalism entered a new phase that he referred to as imperialism or monopoly capitalism.[x] Under imperialism, “capitalists can devote apart of these super profits to bribe their own workers to create something like an alliance between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries.”[xi] In short, the capitalists use their extreme profits to create an aristocracy of labor in North America and Europe who sellout and look down upon workers in the global south. By the start of WWI, the process was complete: the Social Democratic Party of Germany and others had rejected their anti-colonial positions and voted to enter the war on the side of their own national capitalist class.[xii] In one of his most influential works, Lenin clearly demonstrated WWI was fundamentally a war to determine which colonizer would control what part of the world. He called these opportunistic social democrats, “social imperialists, that is, socialists in word but imperialists in deed.”[xiii]

A year before Lenin’s seminal work, WEB Du Bois in the “African Roots of War” contends that the African continent was the ‘prime cause’ of WWI. Similar to Lenin, Du Bois states:

“the white workingman has been asked to share the spoils of exploiting ‘chinks and niggers.’ It is no longer simply merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic union composed of capital and labor.”[xiv]

According to Du Bois, white workers condoning, if not outright, support for lynching, legal segregation, poll taxes, and racist politicians had a material basis in the imperialist system. Dubois claimed that African America was a semi-colony[xv] with, more in common with other Black and colonized people in the rest of the world than US white workers. Preceding Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s call by thirty years,[xvi] Du Bois believed Black people must practice a form of voluntary segregation[xvii] for at least a short period, then, unite with white workers. To be clear, like all the theorists discussed in this essay, Du Bois believed that the primary motivations for colonialism were economic.

In the early 20th century, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) began to accept the reformist, racist conclusions of Bernstein’s social democratic opportunism. Hubert Harrison, one of the leading Black organizers in the SPA, opposed ‘evolutionary socialism’ and the explicitly racist voices in the party. For instance, Victor Weyland, editor of the largest and most influential SPA publication, was a strict segregationist.[xviii] On the so-called Left of the party, Eugene Debs, the most well-known socialists US politician, said ‘class struggle was colorless’ and “we have nothing special to offer the Negro.”[xix] After resigning from the SPA and moving to Harlem, NY, Harrison wrote “We say Race First, because you have all along insisted on Race First and class after when you didn’t need our help.”[xx] Using a materialist analysis, he concluded the racism of white workers makes independent Black organizing a political necessity. In 1924, prior to the Communist International or Comintern,[xxi] Harrison founded the International Colored Unity League. Demonstrating clarity on the national question, a central objective of the ICLU was the creation of a “Negro State.”[xxii]

Harry Haywood was a leading theoretician of the “National Question”[xxiii] in the Comintern. Haywood began organizing as a member of the African Blood Brotherhood, an underground, Black Nationalist and Socialist organization founded in 1919.[xxiv] In 1928, at the 6th Congress of the 3rd International or Comintern Haywood successfully lobbied for the adoption of the Black Belt Thesis.[xxv] The BBT asserts Black America, particularly in the American South, constitutes an oppressed nation with a right to self-determination.[xxvi] Comintern’s line rejected the social imperialism of the 2nd International and accepted the revolutionary potential of the Black Liberation Movement in the fight to end imperialism. While social democrats claim nationalism homogenizes whole groups of people, Haywood showed that Black National Consciousness was, to a large extent, a product of class struggle.[xxvii]

Although it is often portrayed as narrow nationalist, the Black Power Movement (BPM) was, in fact, an international phenomenon.[xxviii] One example of the global scope of the movement was Marxist and Black Power advocate Walter Rodney. Rodney was an academic and organizer in the US, Canada, Caribbean, and Africa. Rodney, along with several US Black Power organizers, participated in the debates on race and class leading up to the pivotal 6th Pan African Congress in Tanzania.[xxix] While Great Society programs had some influence on Black Power leadership as Johnson claims,[xxx] they were primarily influenced and shaped by the Pan Africanist, Third Worldist, and Socialist movements that were prominent during the era. The Black Power Movement was a continuation of the Old Left’s ‘national question’ and a domestic expression of the post-WWII national liberation movements.[xxxi]

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin are two examples of the moderating, anticommunist, and social imperialist politics that the BPM rejected. For example, during the anti-communist Red Scare both of these ‘Leftists’ actively worked to distance and isolate fellow travelers and communists party members from mainstream civil rights organizations.[xxxii] Rustin even advised the USA against supporting liberation movements in Africa because they had communist leadership.[xxxiii] By the 1960s, Rustin argued that Black people should move away from militant, mass movement politics and instead enter the imperialist Democratic party.[xxxiv] On the other hand, the radical sectors of the BPM advocated for an anti-imperialist, socialist politics in solidarity with revolutionary movements in Cuba, Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, and China.

Rustin’s similarity to Bernstein’s revisionist ‘evolutionary socialism’ sixty years earlier is glaringly evident as is the BPM’s Leninist revolutionary influences. Contrary to Johnson’s assertions, it was following Rustin’s strategy of electoral politics that facilitated the transition of Black America from domestic colonialism to a form of domestic neo-colonialism.[xxxv]

While Johnson and others are correct to critique the idealist, liberal politics emanating from some quarters of the Black “Left,” they ultimately add to the ideological confusion by stating we should “support Democratic candidates in specific locales.”[xxxvi] This a continuation of the revisionism of Bernstein, Browder[xxxvii], Rustin, Bernie Sanders[xxxviii], and other social democrats who promote reformism and social imperialism. A word to the Millennial and Gen Z Left: what historically distinguishes the US Black Left is our position on anti-imperialism and the ‘national question.’ That is one of the main reasons why DSA, even after a surge in membership, remains, a disproportionally white, middle-class organization.[xxxix] Our generational mission[xl] is clear: To build a revolutionary, Pan-African working-class organization and unite with the international working class.

Down with Social Democracy!

Forward to Socialism!

Its NationTime!

Free the Land!

Izwe Lethu I Afrika! (Africa is Our Land)

Economic Freedom in Our Lifetime!

(and last, but certainly not least,)

Black Power!!!

Benjamin Woods is an organizer in Washington D.C. He is originally from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Endnotes

[i The first known usage of the term ‘identity politics’ in text was the Combahee River Collective Statement. “Combahee River Collective Statement” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Ed. Taylor, Keeanga Y. Haymarket Books: Chicago. p 20. The CRCS was grounded in Marxist theory or dialectic materialism. In their own words… “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources…. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.”

[ii] Tse-Tung, Mao. “On Contradiction.” 1937. https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... wv1_17.htm

[iii] Johnson, Cedric, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now”, The Catalyst, Vol. 1, No. 1

https://catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/pa ... ic-johnson For an extended conversation see ibid. The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now. Verso: New York. 2022.

[iv] Bernstein, Eduard. Evolutionary Socialism. Social Democracy is the idea that society can transition from capitalism to socialism through ‘evolutionary’ or nonviolent, parliamentary means. Bernstein wrote the “task of social democracy is to organise the working classes politically and develop them as a democracy and to fight for all reforms in the State which are adapted to raise the working classes and transform the State in the direction of democracy.”

https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... reface.htm

[v] The Second or Socialist International was an organization of organizations from around the world committed to building a socialist society. The First International was established by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels in 1864. For more information see Foster, William Z. History of the Three Internationals. USA. 1955. “The congress which established the Second International opened in Paris on July 14, 1889, on the 100th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille in the great French Revolution. Called by the German and organized by the French Marxists, it brought together 391 delegates from 20 countries, four of the delegates being Americans. It was by far the largest international gathering in world labor history. The congress was held amid a great blaze of enthusiasm.”

[vi] Bernstein, Eduard. “Amongst the Philistines: A Rejoinder to Belfort Bax ” (November 1896) Justice, 14 November 1896.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /reply.htm

[vii] Foster, History of the Three Internationals.

[viii] Horne, Gerald. “Against Left-Wing White Nationalism,” Monthly Review. 2017 Horne asserts “the attempt to build “class unity” without confronting these underlying tensions often has meant coercing oppressed nationalities—Blacks in the first place—to co-sign a kind of “left wing white nationalism,” as reflected in the lengthy attempt to convert slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, into a unifying symbol. Black failure to do so leads to our denunciation—in today’s terms as “identitarian” [sic], in previous decades, as “narrow nationalist.” Actually, the class collaboration embodied in “whiteness” was seeking to impose “class collaboration” on the descendants of the enslaved, inducing us to align with enslavers and their descendants. And given that pre-1865 U.S. history—and to a degree the era thereafter—involved deputizing Euro-American settlers as a class to patrol and coerce the Indigenous and the Africans, this too involved an often undetected class collaboration. It also involved often lush material incentives for those settlers who complied and harsh disincentives for those who did not.”

https://monthlyreview.org/press/gerald- ... g-upgrade/

For a more in-depth materialist analysis of settler colonialism and class collaboration See Horne, Gerald. The CounterRevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York University Press: New York. 2014. Horne, Gerald. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy and Capitalism in Seventeenth Century North America and the Caribbean. Monthly Review Press: New York. 2018. Horne, Gerald. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Monthly Review Press: New York.

[ix] Lenin, V.I., "The collapse of the Second International" (1920). PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements. p. 62 “The collapse of the Second International has been most strikingly expressed in the flagrant betrayal of their convictions and of the solemn Stuttgart and Basle resolutions by the majority of the official Social-Democratic parties of Europe. This collapse, however, which signifies the complete victory of opportunism, the transformation of the Social Democratic parties into national liberal-labour parties, is merely the result of the entire historical epoch of the Second International—the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The objective conditions of this epoch—transitional from the consummation of West European bourgeois and national revolutions to the beginning of socialist revolutions—engendered and fostered opportunism. During this period we see a split in the working class and socialist movement in some European countries, which, in the main, was cleavage along the line of opportunism (Britain, Italy, Holland, Bulgaria and Russia); in other countries, we see a long and stubborn struggle of trends along the same line (Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland).”

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewc ... text=prism

[x] ibid. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin states Imperialism has 5 characteristics: “(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... c/ch07.htm

[xi] ibid. “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”, Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No. 2, December 1916

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... ct/x01.htm

[xii] Luxemburg, Rosa. “Rebuilding the International.” Die Internationale, No. 1, 1915

https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemb ... ld-int.htm

[xiii] Ibid. Imperialism

[xiv] Du Bois, WEB. “African Roots of War”, The Atlantic, May 1915.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ar/528897/

[xv] Pinderhughes, Charles. “21st Century Chains: The Continuing Relevance of Internal Colonialism Theory”, Boston College, 2009. p. 20. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151481277.pdf

[xvi] Hamilton, Charles & Ture, Kwame. Black Power the Politics of Liberation. Random House, New York, 1967. “The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks”

[xvii] Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. Voluntary segregation, ca. 1935. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries

[xviii] Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. Columbia: New York. p. 143.

[xix] Debs, Eugene. “The Negro in the Class Struggle” International Socialist Review, Vol. IV, No. 5. November 1903.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/w ... /negro.htm

[xx] Harrison, Hubert. “Race First versus Class First” from A Hubert Harrison Reader Ed. Jeffrey B. Perry. Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Connecticut. p. 109.

[xxi] Benjamin, Jesse & Kelly, Robin D.G. “Introduction” in The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World. Verso: London. p lvi “Founded in 1919, the Comintern played a pivotal role in promoting revolution and Communist parties not only throughout Europe and the United States, but around the world. Unlike the Frist International (the International Workingman’s Association, 1864-1872) and the Second International (the Socialist International, 1889-1916), the Third International included ‘colonial and semi-colonial” people in its ranks and helped to promote and coordinate anti-imperialist movements.”

[xxii] Harrison, Hubert. “The Program and Principles of the International Colored Unity League,” from A Hubert Harrison Reader Ed. Jeffrey B. Perry. Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Connecticut. p. 402.

[xxiii] Stalin, Joseph. Marxism and the National Question. Prosveshcheniye, Nos. 3-5, March-May 1913. https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... 13/03a.htm

[xxiv] Kelly, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press: Boston. p. 45-6

[xxv] Haywood, Harry. Negro Liberation. Liberator Press: Chicago p. 205. Haywood recalls “In 1928 an historic turn was achieved in the scientific understanding of the Negro question in the United States. In that year, the Communist Party adopted a program which clearly placed the Negro problem as a question of an oppressed nation suffering from an especially oppressive form of subjugation. The program pointed out that in the Black Belt all the objective prerequisites exist for a national revolutionary movement of the Negro people against American imperialism. It established the essentially agrarian-democratic character of the Negro movement, which under conditions of modern imperialist oppression could fulfill itself only by the achievement of democratic land redivision and of the right of self-determination for the Negro people in the Black Belt. Thus the new line of the Communist Party brought the issue of Negro equality out of the realm of bourgeois humanitarianism, where it had been the special property of bourgeois philanthropists and professional uplifters who sought to strip the Negro struggle of its revolutionary implications and to make it a feeble adjunct of safe and sane reforms— all obtainable presumably within the confines of imperialist law and order.”

[xxvi] Ibid. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Liberator Press: Chicago. 1977. p. 232 Haywood writes “Under conditions of imperialist and racist oppression, Blacks in the South were to acquire all the attributes of a subject nation. They are a people set apart by a common ethnic origin, economically interrelated various classes, united by a common historical experience, reflected in a special culture and psychological makeup. The territory of this subject nation is the Black Belt, an area encompassing the Deep South, which, despite massive outmigration, still contained (and does to this day) the country’s largest concertation of Blacks. The imperialist oppression created the conditions for the eventual rise of a national liberation movement with its base in the South. The content of this movement would be the completion of the agrarian democratic revolution in the South; that is, the right of self-determination as the guarantee of complete equality throughout the country.” Also see Jones, Claudia. “On the Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt,” in Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays, and Poems.. Ed. Carol Boyce Davies. Ayebia Clarke Publishing. 2011. p. 60-70.

[xxvii] ibid. “The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States” The Communist, September 1933. Herbert Aptheker, ed. “These struggles have led to a growing class consciousness of the Negro working class and its emergence upon the political arena as an independent class force in the Negro liberation movement. In the course of these struggles the Negro working class is rapidly liberating itself from the treacherous reformist influences. Thus the characteristic of the present stage of development of the Negro movement is the maturing of this most important driving force of Negro liberation — the Negro industrial working class. The Negro workers, in close organic unity with the white working class….is the only force capable of rallying the masses of Negro toilers in a victorious struggle against capitalism.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/haywoo ... 09/x01.htm

[xxviii] Swan, Quito. “Caveat of an Obnoxious Slave: Blueprint for Decolonizing Black Power Studies From the Intellectual Governors of White Supremacy” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.6, no.2, July 2013. p. 55-63. “While several works critically address the inherent transnational dynamics of Black Power, a growing body of literature collectively demonstrates that Black Power globally was more than just a sidebar of Black activism in the US.” https://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol6no ... 0Quito.pdf For more info on Black Power in the United Kingdom see Egbuna, Oba. Destroy this Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain. William Marrow & Company Inc.: New York. 1971. Also see Ed. Kate Quinn. Black Power in the Caribbean. University of Florida Press: Gainesville. 2014. Also see Ed. Nico Slate. Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement. Palgrave Macmillan: New York. 2012.

[xxix] For an example of these debates see Rodney, Walter. “Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America,” April 1974.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa ... ruggle.htm

[xxx] ibid. Johnson p. 22

[xxxi] Dawson, Michael. Blacks In and Out of the Left. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass. 2013. P 47-8. Dawson writes “there was less continuity between these periods of Black radicalism than one might expect largely due to what I call the ‘sundering’-the decade between 1945 and 1955, in which Black racial activists became isolated from other activists in variety of domestic and international domains.” Anticommunism had a detrimental impact on the Black Liberation Movement, but it did not completely break the movements continuity. Several Old Left activists mentored the New Left such as Jack O’Dell, William Patterson, Ella Baker, Richard Moore, Harry Haywood, James Boggs, and Audley ‘Queen Mother’ Moore.

[xxxii] Anderson, Jervis. Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen. University of California Press: Berkeley. 1998. p. 205. Rustin “realized you couldn’t really build a mainstream democratic left in this country with communists in it.”

For Rustin’s views on fellow traveler Paul Robeson see D’Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 2003. p. 179.

For Randolph’s views on Communists see Anderson, Jervis. A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait. University of California Press: Berkeley. 1986. p. 372. In a 1940 New York Times article Randolph is quoted “The Communist party is not primarily, nor fundamentally, concerned about the Negro or Labor in America but with fulfilling and carrying out the needs and demands of the consolidation of the foreign position of the Soviet Union in world politics.”

[xxxiii] Rustin, Bayard. “Africa, Soviet Imperialism, and the Retreat of American Power” Commentary October 1977 https://www.commentary.org/articles/bay ... can-power/

[xxxiv] Ibid. “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement”, Commentary, February 1965.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/bay ... -movement/

[xxxv] Allen, Robert L. Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History. African World Press: Trenton, NJ. p. 194 “The American capitalist, the American businessman…deeper interest is in reorganizing the ghetto ‘infrastructure,’ in creating a ghetto buffer class clearly committed to the dominant American institutions and values on the one hand, and on the other, in rejuvenating the Black working class and integrating it into the American Economy.” Also, for an explanation of neocolonialism see Nkrumah, Kwame. Neocolonialism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism. PanAf: London p ix. “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” Others have argued that the US government used a Velvet Glove/Iron Fist strategy to maintain its oppression of the Black nation. See Bush, Rod. We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the United States. New York University Press: New York. “The repression of the radical wing of the Black Power Movement was accompanied by the cooptation of its more moderate elements, who were opposed to the system’s racism but thought the system could be reformed if Blacks were admitted to the system.”

[xxxvi] Johnson p. 174.

[xxxvii]Foster, William Z. “The Struggle Against Revisionism”, Report to the Special Convention of the Communist Political Association, held in New York City, July 26-28, 1945, which reconstituted the Communist Party of the U.S.A. https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1945/07/28.htm Also see “Discussion Article by Claudia Jones,” Political Affairs (August 1945): 717. Claudia Jones believed that Browder’s line was “based on a pious hope that the struggle for full economic, social, and political equality for the Negro people would be ‘legislated’ and somehow brought into being through reforms at the top.”

[xxxviii] Greene, Doug. “Not On Our Side: Bernie Sanders and Imperialism” Left Voice, June, 18, 2019. https://www.leftvoice.org/not-on-our-si ... perialism/

[xxxix] Du, Charles. “How to build a multiracial DSA” December 11,2019. “Within DSA, many members feel that our organization is “too white,” a shorthand that includes many different diagnoses of and solutions to the problem. And although DSA members of color have striven to achieve a nuanced balance between developing separate networks (such as the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus) and involving themselves in the general work of their chapters, these efforts have not yet brought working-class people of color into the organization at the scale needed to qualitatively change the makeup of DSA.” https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/ ... acial-dsa/

[xl] Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. Grove Weidenfeld: New York. p. 206 “Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”

https://www.blackagendareport.com/socia ... ot-save-us
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 08, 2022 5:36 pm

On the issue of cooperation
No. 12/76.XII.2022

It happens that under the pressure of the "charms" of capitalism, the layman discards the typical scenarios for achieving the "American dream" (hit the jackpot in the lottery, receive a large inheritance, find a "diplomat" with a currency unit, or, having torn off the hip area from a soft furniture product with a back, found powerful corporation) and begins to wonder if private property is really irrational, and does collectivism have undeniable advantages over individualism? He starts ... but due to a severe degree of naivety - a natural product of bourgeois social relations - instead of conscientious research, he rests on "being that determines his consciousness", asking the following "tricky" questions.

What prevents wage-workers who are dissatisfied with "exploitation" from gathering under capitalism into a production cooperative, chipping in and jointly acquiring the means of production? Do they really not have enough money even in this case? If nothing stands in the way, how is it that production cooperatives (for example, those who install windows or make furniture) offer their workers lower wages than similar enterprises that have a capitalist owner?

Why do production cooperatives (with a collective form of ownership of the means of production) lose rather than win in competition with private enterprises both in the commodity market and in the labor market?

In its most general form, cooperation is a voluntary association of people to achieve a common goal. Imagine that those dissatisfied with the operation organized the Prosvet cooperative for the production, sale, and installation of windows. Firstly, how voluntary it is, given that a person in conditions of private property has to enter into a competitive = irreconcilable struggle with his own kind (including in the form of cooperation) for the means of subsistence, and secondly, what is the goal is in the first place among cooperators in a market economy?

A production cooperative as a formally voluntary, legally registered association of citizens for joint production and other economic activities is a commercial enterprise, therefore, its goal is profit. So, in this it is identical to a private enterprise. Where identity is sameness, because Entrepreneurs "undertake" for the sake of profit, and in this they are the same as cooperators. The difference between cooperators and private entrepreneurs is not that the former, having changed the form of labor organization to a collective one, changed the content of market relations, i.e. stopped fighting for a place in the sun, but that a cooperator is a larva of an entrepreneur who was forced to unite with other “future millionaires” for the sake of the prospect of increasing their well-being or because of forebodings, or even practical experiences of its decline.

In a word, there is no need to talk about any free cooperation under capitalism, because a forced content is visible behind the voluntary form: rivalry and the pursuit of profit. Although it is precisely from these social relations that employees try to hide in a cooperative, cherishing a dream, if not to acquire start-up capital in order to become an “effective owner”, then at least hold out as long as possible, keeping what they have acquired. These aspirations naturally lead to a deepening of the market, petty-bourgeois consciousness of the proletarian class and the strengthening of market life through the subordination of public interests to private ones.

If we imagine that for those who have united in the conditional “Prosvet” free labor and equal relations are above all, then we have to imagine that under capitalism there is still really free labor with results that are inalienable from the worker, and equal relations, contrary to reality, rise over commodity-money.

Considering the issue of cooperation, it is necessary to take into account that any organized production, including homeworkers, united by the will of the organizer of this production, including the will of the capitalist, are historically consistent FORMScooperation, which was positively assessed by Marx, as an objective movement towards the socialization of production, i.e. to his socialization. The diamatic here is such that, pursuing his subjective parasitic goals, the capitalist, for the sake of improving the quality of exploitation and competition, but objectively forms the means of his negation, including cooperation, i.e. the concentration of production and the centralization of financial management in an ever-growing volume. Therefore, not only popular cooperation, but also capitalist cooperation objectively moves society towards communism, and another question is which cooperation is a more dynamic form of movement towards communism, especially if the left would spend more energy not on organizing window replacement cooperatives, but on introducing full-fledged Marxism into the consciousness of the proletarians of industrial enterprises and members of people's cooperatives.

Many do not understand that the movement towards communism is synonymous with the movement FROM the commodity-money form of relations. And for a prosperous people's cooperative, as long as there are good financial indicators, there is no need at all to move towards communism. On the contrary, the cooperative will do everything to increase its monetary income, and will not mind if a competing people's cooperative of a similar profile ceases to exist, freeing part of the market from its presence. So the periodic appearance of figures who assure that it is easiest to come to communism through people's cooperatives is another edition of Gapon utopianists, especially if we take into account the scale of modern industries and their dependence on fundamental and applied sciences, on their specific production, on the scale of concentration of production and centralization of control.

In short, just as the strike force of 100,000 boats is not equal to the force of one aircraft carrier, similarly a society with 100,000 people's cooperatives has nothing to do with communism. And no other system of people's enterprises will give such a concentration of production, such a degree of its socialization, as state-monopoly capitalism. But, since in these phrases: "people's enterprise", "people's cooperative" - ​​there is a lot of warm, family, patriarchal kindness, to the extent that this direction is being intensively used by convinced opportunists, paving the road with good wishes in ... the opposite direction from communism.

Thus, the desire of the ruling class to strengthen the existing system through the introduction of cooperation comes into conflict with the objective law of social development, according to which objective processes do not depend on the subjective will of people. And if the ruling class proceeds from a subjective interpretation of reality for the sake of weakening the active role of society and man, then the subjective errors of the idealistic worldview necessarily lead to the strengthening of this role. This, of course, does not mean that since human consciousness has historically emerged and developed in the process of social practice—cooperation—that its further evolution will automatically put an end to capitalism. That, for example, right-wing revisionism, the so-called. the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (emphasized favoring "people's enterprises" *), which is based on bourgeois reformism, which counts on the slow development of capitalism into a communist society, is feasible in practice. In practice, without a real communist party of a Bolshevik style, based on the principles of Scientific Centralism, without class struggle, without establishing the dictatorship of the working (working) class, the only thing left for the cooperators will be to adapt in various ways in the world of capital, instead of destroying it.

So, answering the question, what prevents people from uniting for the progress of the whole society, where the free development of each will become a condition for the development of all, we fix - capitalism . In view of the fact that the relations of purchase and sale, the relations of value lead to conscious competition, when the issue of the reproduction of society is replaced by the “progress” of clashes of its individual representatives (even if united cooperators) for the sake of gain, which necessarily rejects the meaningful rallying of people, turning love into hatred, camaraderie into fraternity, and lofty, noble intentions into semi-animal interests.

Now let's figure out why the "voluntary" association of representatives of the "middle class" for joint production activities under the dictates of the bourgeoisie loses in competition with a private enterprise.

In order for the association of former employees to be able to make ends meet, profit must come first for them. And the main factor of competition in the window market is the price. Hence, "Prosvet" is obliged to offer its products and services in terms of price / quality ratio no worse than competitors. But only those who have lower costs can offer a better price. For this reason, the value of the cost per sale, installation of a window becomes a comparative indicator of the effectiveness of this business. What costs will take the lion's share in the cooperative? Staff costs. After all, the former hired workers united in order not to give the surplus value to the owner and to improve their position.

How does the capitalist owner of the conditional IP "Eurowindow", competing with the "Prosvet" association, reduce costs, if salaries **, social contributions, costs of organizing labor and creating conditions for work occupy a special place in their expenses? In the bottom line - by redistributing responsibilities between employees, i.e. strengthening exploitation. And those who do not want or cannot "carry their cross" of increased workload, the owner will fire. After all, any downsizing in the presence of a reserve army of labor from the unemployed and underemployed does not threaten him with anything.

However, the co-operators divide the surplus value so diligently that the further development of the enterprise, which requires an increase in investment in the business, is far from being in the first place for them. In addition, a cooperative in most cases is a small handicraft, procurement or trading enterprise, inferior to a larger business simply in terms of its capabilities due to the scale of its activities.

Here they may object: well, let the costs be higher. It is right that the cooperative will not save on its members, but it is possible to increase labor productivity! Indeed, the value of costs is inversely proportional to labor productivity. But what can be done to increase it? How to make the sale or installation of a window faster, better and cheaper than competitors? Again, an increase in the burden on employees, which does not go well with the motivation for creating cooperation.

But let's assume that Prosvet expands its staff by accommodating others who are dissatisfied with capitalism, and thereby expands production, raising labor productivity.

Here you need to understand that each additional unit of costs is expedient only if it provides not even more (in comparison with expenses), but constantly increasing profits. Attracting additional labor ****, the costs of the enterprise will immediately increase, and whether labor productivity will increase is written with a pitchfork in the water.

Another circumstance is that each member of the Prosvet cooperative is obliged to see the rest as equal comrades, and the head of the Evrookna IP - on the contrary. The more a capitalist distinguishes a person in a hired worker, the less he exploits him, which means that he receives less surplus value, which is why he loses his competitiveness and often turns into a hired worker himself. Equal relations in the Prosvet cooperative do not allow arbitrarily increasing the intensity of labor, sweeping fines or dismissing employees unreasonably. Because of this, those who are inexperienced in administration believe that each cooperator, having realized the level of relations in his team, will be extremely motivated for exemplary performance of duties. He will start working in a Stakhanovite way, which is why the labor productivity of the entire team will increase. But in this case, it is not productivity that grows, but the intensity of labor, i.e. there is a wear and tear of the labor force of the entire cooperative and, consequently, a drop in the quality of labor. In addition, given the human factor and taking into account that people tend to indulge their weaknesses, to indulge their loved ones, over time, not having a common goal that goes beyond human life, they will a priori begin to shirk honest work. After all, only communists are capable of sincerely living by public interests under the conditions of the dictatorship of capital.

It is also necessary to keep in mind that the capitalist-owner is free to make decisions, guided by albeit distorted, but at least some scientific views on the organization of the business, and the cooperators have to put them into practice through the "collective mind", when the achievement of the result is made dependent on the will the majority. Unfortunately, centralism in governance is still being tied to democracy, without taking into account that if you know how to do it, the problem of choice disappears.

In addition, if in a class society the vast majority of enterprises necessarily have double-entry bookkeeping, then the individual (as a set of social relations) is necessarily inherent in duplicity. He approaches himself with one measure, and another with another. The existence of enterprises in the Russian Federation without violating the current legislation is an exception to the rule ***, and bourgeois laws are deliberately drafted in such a way that they have loopholes for big business. After all, the bourgeois dictatorship guarantees the expression of the interests of the entire people only on paper. In fact, the state is an apparatus that expresses the will of the ruling class - the will of capital.

An admirer of market values ​​may notice that in “civilized” countries business is not forced to break laws, that the investment and business climate there is milder than in Russia. So we, they say, need to improve the culture of business relations. In fact, the propaganda of “good” capitalism is a smokescreen of bourgeois domination. All capital requires growth, and in order to survive, any capitalist will behave according to the laws of the market - strive for maximum profit at minimum cost. And since the market exists only expanding, capturing the countries of the "third world" (non-equivalent exchange with "developing" states + the use of force against them), and has already embraced the entire world economy, then there is simply nowhere to expand further. Therefore, the next global crisis is followed by another wave of local wars between different detachments of the bourgeoisie,

In other words, the owner of the IP "Evrookna" will save on costs - intensively exploit, fine, fire his employees, increase sales through marketing (cunning and deception of customers), eliminate competitors, up to contract killings - but do this not because he a born scoundrel and scoundrel, but because it is dictated to him by the logic of capitalism. And having embarked on the slippery path of searching for a "business vein", it is easier to roll downhill. It is this path that turns a person into a capitalist, forcing him to pursue profit and set its increase as the main goal of his existence. After all, the more honest the business, the closer it is to ruin. The more an entrepreneur follows moral principles in building a business, the more he deviates from the norms prescribed by the invisible hand of the market, the higher the risk of bankruptcy.

Here patented idealists may be indignant, they say, how is it possible, reduce everything to profit, when the goal of most entrepreneurs is business, the realization of talent!

Indeed, many young smart people from all over the world dream of working in a team of like-minded people, developing and implementing unique ideas, methods, technologies. And capital in many ways draws them into "small business" and cooperation to serve ... monopolies. And now the lion's share of the failed Mendeleevs, Lomonosovs and Tsiolkovskys, entangled in market snares, acquires a syndrome of inflated expectations. Their “positive thinking”, based on the belief in an imaginary world where there is no exploitation (it was not for nothing that the questioner put this word in quotation marks), and the engine of progress is competition, democracy and the plurality of truth, breaks into reality. But a person no longer leaves the obsession that he a priori deserves the best. Then the subject makes excessive demands on himself and those around him, which often ends in failure for him. Disappointed in rainbow dreams, the outsider descends to intellectual, and sometimes physical self-punishment. Bourgeois psychology, in view of the impossibility of hushing up such facts, introduced the concept of the so-called. midlife crisis, draping it over the inevitable cannibalism of market relations.

Of course, the initial goal of an entrepreneur can indeed be self-expression, where money is a means, but not a goal, however, the natural abominations of market realities, expressed in accumulated everyday and professional mistakes, at best radically change the priorities of the individual, at worst - break her psyche.

But are all business people a total scoundrel?

Questioning for everyone, it is necessary to remember: man is a contradictory creature. The famous Renaissance wordsmith Giovanni Pico della Mirandola expressed this truth this way:

“By absorbing everything, a person is able to become anything, he is always the result of his own efforts; while retaining the possibility of a new choice, he can never be exhausted by any form of his present being in the world.

Those. having free will, a person forms his own destiny (based on the opportunities given to him by society) and can either rise to a conscious fighter for progress, or descend to a humanoid state. A typical man in the street, who does not care about anyone before himself, yesterday could have done a bad deed, and today a good one. Likewise, a businessman who has a fortune squeezes surplus value out of a hired worker with one hand, and donates to the temple with the other. With one hand he does everything sufficient for unemployment, homelessness, fatherlessness to exist, and with the other hand he donates a penny for a rooming house, an orphanage, etc. It is clear that bourgeois charity is a trivial deception of the senses, since it forces the individual to do at least something in order to "repay sins", but in most cases not what society needs. However, there are entrepreneurs who understand, even on an emotional and sensory level, that justifying their activities by helping a sick child, even if not just one, is not the same as changing that ugly state of society, when the society does not have enough knowledge to organize real cooperation, for example, for the treatment, and even more so the prevention of childhood diseases. And if their business brings funds directed to the revolutionary reorganization of society, where there will no longer be a need to live under the dictates of the market, these people are worthy of respect.

Another question is how much their being is attached to wealth. How much they are drawn into the business, how passionate they are in the ongoing struggle for sales, for income, for status, for opportunities. How strongly the principles of this struggle are woven into their lives and how blurred their moral criteria are. One must think that business people are not the backbone of society, as bourgeois propaganda likes to portray them, but citizens who are in a difficult situation of moral uncertainty, at a crossroads: either they finally place themselves in the context of buying and selling - the irreversible commercialization of their own undertakings - or they come to the realization that without the scientific resolution of social contradictions, they and humanity as a whole have no future...

Returning to Prosvet, it should be noted that a truly effective employee/manager must live by work, since other interests sooner or later come into conflict with it. And shifting life priorities not in favor of business = wars of all against all, where emergencies are almost an ordinary phenomenon, means inevitable disagreements in the team, developing according to a typical pattern: discord, discord and collapse of the business. In other words, a good employee/manager, based on the values ​​of the team, is obliged to work overtime, come on as a substitute, be on duty on holidays, go on business trips, while not forgetting that he cannot dissociate himself from sales, competition, or the seduction of wealth.

Also, we must not forget that the enterprise of equal owners will not be able to avoid the potential difference of the founders. And although they have a common goal (to raise the standard of living, the amount of consumption, that is, to climb the social ladder, while maintaining comradely relations), to achieve it in the conditions of the hegemony of the petty-bourgeois ideology, when the puppetry of the layman in the world of base ideals of a market society is a sad reality , without conflicts, splits and litigation is almost impossible. Therefore, sooner or later, members of the Prosvet cooperative will face a choice :either they resign themselves to the fact that their association is dying, or they increase the degree of exploitation, customer focus and other aggressive methods used by their competitors in the team. It is important to remember that the focus on the client has a very flexible border, beyond which it turns into servility and, accordingly, infringement of the rights of employees in favor of consumers. At the same time, the owner of IP Eurowindows will motivate employees to servility in order to please the customer here and now, at the same time carry out manipulations that run counter to the long-term interests of the buyer. This is unfair advertising, and outright fraud, and skillful identification of "hidden" needs of the client, which in practice comes down to an increase in either the number of transactions or the amount of the check. That is why salespeople are always pushy. And if the Prosvet cooperative behaves differently, it will simply be squeezed out of the market, because the total supply always exceeds the total purchasing demand. In other words, if Prosvet wants to offer a lower price, it is forced to adopt the same methods as its competitors.

Apologists of the market may argue that the described situation is being treated by increasing the level of corporate culture, increasing the motivation of employees, for whom new values ​​are being formed, new horizons are opening up. For example, the international luxury hotel chain Ritz Carlton generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually under the slogan for staff: "We are ladies and gentlemen who serve other ladies and gentlemen." However, it is known that the horizon, obvious to everyone, is an imaginary line, so one can only imagine that there will be some " ladies and gentlemen" to serve solvent ladies and gentlemen in the role of doorman, cook, waiter, maid and "master of cleanliness".

So, answering the question why co-operators cannot successfully compete with private enterprises, we can diagnose that the reason is capitalism, which excludes real equality of opportunity, reproduces the ignorance of the masses by covering them with petty-bourgeois ideas. Moreover, the idea of ​​creating independent production societies has existed for a long time, but not a single "island of socialism", i.e. not a single part of society that decided to live within the market element according to the principle “ from each according to his ability, to each according to his work” could not fulfill his plan. I couldn't because good intentions and humane ideas are not weapons. It failed because the part cannot defeat the whole without entering into a political struggle with it. Not fighting. Not showing their superiority over the enemy. Without dragging the masses along!

But what then to do? Is cooperation really an absolute chimera?

The thing is that the petty-bourgeois consciousness of the layman does not take into account the difference between the capitalist and socialist conditions for the functioning of cooperatives. After all, if cooperation under capitalism is an association for the sake of profit, no matter how the certified lackeys of the oligarchs interpret it, then a cooperative under the conditions of the first phase of communism is an association for the sake of increasing the welfare of the whole society. It is the subordination of private interest to public interest. A transitional form from private to public property, allowing people to get rid of bourgeois vestiges, having taken an important step from competition as a principle of organizing society to joint action in the field of abandoning commodity-money relations as the natural product increases and the highest moral values ​​rise throughout society.

Propaganda of cooperation against the backdrop of private property is a conscious narrowing of social consciousness by the ruling class to the diameter of the "consumer basket". Bourgeois cooperation does not make citizens the real owners of production, the so-called. "Third alternative" because they depend in one way or another on big industrialists, speculators, bankers and officials. It does not contribute to the development of creative thinking in people, and therefore does not increase the economic efficiency of society as a whole. It only with greater or lesser success allows the electorate to adapt to the inhuman market realities, forcing them to vegetate in the relationship of venality = self-sufficiency, to drag out a miserable existence of a working appendage to the “powerful of this world” who have “correct entrepreneurial thinking”, when a person is a wolf, a nit and creditor.

D. Nazarenko
6/12/2022

* The slogan about promoting "people's enterprises" is harmful in that it replaces the understanding of the people's, i.e. public, production on a planned, scientific basis by competitive cooperation. After all, even the “Stalinist” collective farm competed with the neighboring collective farm in the sale of surpluses. This was a disadvantage that had to be put up with at a certain stage of the movement towards communism due to the need to concentrate forces and means to create the material and technical base of communism.

** Wages under the dictatorship of capital are the price of labor power. Those. the amount of money that allows an employee to have a minimum of necessary commodities to support his own life. At the same time, the proletarians employed in the most technological and science-intensive industries, which bring the owner a higher profit, receive a higher price of labor power.

*** Hired workers working for cooperators is a standard practice reflected in the Federal Law of the Russian Federation “On Production Cooperatives”.

**** Proposals to soften the criminal legislation of the Russian Federation on economic crimes only emphasize the criminal nature of business .

https://prorivists.org/76_cooperatio/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 19, 2022 3:38 pm

About party membership of scientific pop
No. 12/76.XII.2022

The difficulties in assimilating Marxism, especially dialectical materialism, are largely due to the fact that the positivists have "worked" well on the minds of the majority. The worst thing is when people reproduce various idealistic nonsense, being completely convinced that this is materialism. On the other hand, there are cases when dialectical materialism comes into conflict with the “scientific picture of the world” drawn by positivist scientists, and young people begin to “adjust” materialism to this “picture”, while appealing to a picture taken out of context and misinterpreted. Engels' quote that "for dialectical philosophy there is nothing once and for all established, unconditional, holy." In fact, Engels wrote about Hegelian philosophy, and not about Marxism, and even more - he wrote about the Hegelian method, in isolation from his philosophy.

In general, the power of the oligarchy, the system of capitalism, together with all its misery and ugliness, rests not only on the strength of the repressive apparatus of the state, the army of policemen and soldiers, but also on the ignorance of the masses, which develops into mass idiocy. The ruling class of social parasites quite consciously holds back the intellectual development of the masses with the help of the "education system", "culture", religion, TV, and so on. As a result, we seem to be living in the information age, and the quality of consciousness of the masses sometimes turns out to be no higher than the consciousness of medieval peasants. Although formally all are educated, and many also have diplomas of higher education.

Although this may seem paradoxical to inexperienced readers, science, or rather, bourgeois “science,” is a powerful brake on social progress today. “What are you talking about! exclaim indignant adherents of science pop. How can scientists slow down progress if science is the engine of progress! Yes, there are unscrupulous researchers and all sorts of freaks who distort the facts, but they are exposed by the scientific community itself! Here, look at the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience at the Russian Academy of Sciences!”

First of all, it should be clarified that we use the expression "bourgeois science" in an institutional sense, that is, everything that is formally considered science in bourgeois society - a professional community of scientists supported by the capitalist class and the results of its activities. And sometimes this activity has little to do with science.

Let's take, for example, the notorious figure Stanislav Drobyshevsky, Ph.D., Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Moscow State University, editor of the Anthropogenesis website. This gentleman undertook to refute Engels, namely his work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State." In one of the videos, he says the following:

“In the 19th century, there was such a Morgan, who was an ethnographer, studied some other Indians, there Iroquois, all that. And I discovered that their woman is not so directly humiliated, maybe even a leader, and wrote his ethnographic notes there. Engels read this case, some thoughts were born in his head, he dashed them off in the form of the concept of matriarchy, but at the moment this is the history of science.

Let's start with the fact that Engels did not roll any "concept of matriarchy". If you open "The Origin of the Family ...", you will find that the word "matriarchy" is never used there. Drobyshevsky confuses two concepts: matriarchy, i.e. the power of women, and "mother's right", when the family was from the mother and the inheritance of property went through the maternal line. The classic of Marxism did not insist that it was women who ruled the primitive community, he stated that the social status of women in the "savage" society was much higher than in the contemporary "civilized" society.

Drobyshevsky furiously refutes the "concept of matriarchy", using such expressive expressions as "bullshit", "glitch", hinting in every possible way that the anthropology of the 19th century, in general, is not a science, because then they could not extract isotopes from the bones of Australopithecus ! From the point of view of this, so to speak, educator, digging with the dead remains of ancient people is many times more valuable for anthropology than the study of living representatives of tribes that have preserved the primitive way of life to a greater or lesser extent, because:

“The fact that the Indians of some tribe had something there doesn’t mean anything, what happened thousands of years ago, as Engels sounded, that at the level of the primitive communal herd of the mythical ...”.

Let us leave on the conscience of Drobyshevsky the fiction about the “primitive communal herd”. So, refuting a coherent and convincing theory, supported by numerous ethnographic and cultural-historical data, Drobyshevsky and other anthropologists offer ... nothing. Literally nothing. They simply postulate that everything that Morgan and Engels wrote is “bullshit”, “some kind of hypothetical constructions”, deny the gradual change in the forms of the family in mankind.

Excuse me, gentlemen, scientists, but you can’t just take and reject any theory - you must instead propose a new theory that, with its impeccable logical construction, confirmed by socio-historical practice, will refute the arguments of the old theory. Isn't that how science is supposed to work? From the point of view of Drobyshevsky and Co., apparently, no.

They, of course, have not read The Origin of the Family, but they are ready to refute this work with foam at the mouth, agreeing that there are societies that, you see, do not have a tribal system! Particularly magnificent are the moments when Drobyshevsky begins in all seriousness to compare matriarchy in humans with "matriarchy" in animals. This is such a degree of methodological ignorance that there is nowhere else to go. “Matriarchy” in animals is when there is a dominant female in the pack, which alone has the right to give birth, and all other females raise it. In human society, is a situation conceivable that only one woman has the right to give birth, and all the others are no-no? A rhetorical question. In no case should human society be equated with a flock of monkeys, for they are phenomena opposite to each other. Man, to stand out from nature, just needed to overcome the herd organization. Engels, whom the anthropologists so famously "refute", wrote about this:

“The jealousy of the male, which at the same time binds and limits the family of animals, brings it into conflict with the herd; because of this jealousy, the herd, a higher form of communication, in some cases ceases to exist, in others it loses cohesion or breaks up during estrus, and at best is delayed in its further development. This alone is enough to prove that the family of animals and primitive human society are incompatible things, that primitive people who got out of the animal state either did not know the family at all, or, at the most, knew one that is not found in animals.

... Mutual tolerance of adult males, the absence of jealousy were the first condition for the formation of such larger and more durable groups, in the midst of which only the transformation of an animal into a man could take place. And indeed, what do we find as the oldest, earliest form of the family, the existence of which in history we can undeniably prove and which can still be studied here and now? Group marriage, a form of marriage in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women mutually belong to each other and which leaves very little room for jealousy.

Since an important element for overcoming the herd was a radical weakening of jealousy and smoothing out the rivalry of males, initially indiscriminate sexual intercourse, including incest, was practiced in the tribes. But gradually the realization came that incest threatened the family, so the first form of the family arose, where marriage ties were divided by generation. Then the consanguineous family died out, it was replaced by the so-called punalual family (when communication between brothers and sisters was forbidden) and, finally, the paired family, when, under the conditions of group marriage, a separate couple was united for a more or less long period. Since it was impossible to establish paternity under such conditions (which, however, was not required, because all children were considered common), the clan was conducted along the maternal line, which is denoted by the term "maternity right".

The need to accurately identify the father of a particular child could arise only when children ceased to be considered common, and this, in turn, did not happen until the moment when the community itself began to break up into separate families and clans. The reason for the collapse of a single community was a significant property stratification associated with a sharp increase in labor productivity. Why was mother's right replaced by father's, and the social role of women began to decline? The reasons for this lie also in the economic plane.

Man owned slaves and herds, and the very reason that ensured the dominance of woman - the restriction of her labor to domestic work - this very reason made the domination of man inevitable. The craft of the man was everything, the craft of the woman was only an appendage.

“This autocracy was confirmed and perpetuated by the overthrow of maternal right, the introduction of paternal right, the gradual transition from pair marriage to monogamy. And this created a crack in the ancient tribal system: the individual family became a force that menacingly opposed the clan,” writes Engels.

The family destroyed the clan, became the main economic unit and gradually turned into that ideal of the modern tradesman, which is a combination of sentimentality and domestic squabbles.

It is interesting to hear what the gentlemen of modern anthropologists, boasting that they can extract isotopes from bones, are able to object to this? How exactly, from their point of view, was the separation of the human community from the animal pack "not according to Engels"? What does the genetic analysis of Neanderthal skulls say about this? ..

In order to understand what is generally going on in the minds of anthropologists from Anthropogenesis, I will give a couple more quotes from Drobyshevsky:

“These here are the universal social laws of nature to a large extent turned out to be nonsense. Because society is what is in our head, and the head is complex, and it is not even possible to artificially sharpen the brains of thousands of people to the same standard...

... It's too complicated, and, at least with our own brain, we are technically not capable of comprehending this pattern [of the development of society]."

In these phrases, as they say, everything is fine. I will not even analyze the passage that it is impossible to "sharpen the brains" of thousands of people to one standard - Dr. Goebbels, together with the ideologues of the BBC and CNN, would notably laugh at this, - such naive stupidity can be forgiven to the scientist, but the fact that in the definition of society, he proposes to "dance" from the content of the skull of individual individuals, their subjective perception - this is already a disaster.

Let's start with the fact that society is primary in relation to a person, an individual, because it is society that gives rise to each individual person. It is easy to see this in the example of Mowgli children: if a child was torn away from society and fed by animals, then he grows into an inferior creature, completely incapable of integrating back into society. The anthropologist must certainly be well aware of this, but for some reason this fact does not lead him to the right line of thought. If society is primary, and a person is secondary, if society is an objective factor for him, which he himself cannot influence, then it is society that shapes each individual person, or, as Drobyshevsky puts it, “sharpens his brains.” But with the YouTube educator, everything is turned upside down.

He says: they say, all people are different, everyone has their own cockroaches in their heads, someone else's soul is dark, and if so, then what kind of study of the whole society can there be, as well as many different ancient tribes, and how to build a theory on this basis, after all (I quote) “it happens very differently among different peoples at different times”! These arguments testify to the complete methodological illiteracy of Mr. Drobyshevsky. Does the difference make comparison impossible? Everything is exactly the opposite, completely homogeneous IMPOSSIBLEcompare. It compares exclusively unique, unique and diverse. This is the essence of the mental act "comparison". What does this “illuminator” (or rather, a blackout) teach the young people who listen to him? His comparison, therefore, is the equating of the equal, the same! And laughter and sin! I am not saying that he uses comparison not as a subordinate act to establish the stages of the DEVELOPMENT of society (which he just denies), but independently, in isolation from this fundamental approach to the social form of matter.

Everything that is voiced in the quotes I have cited is a wretched, stinking moldy positivism bordering on agnosticism. Drobyshevsky almost directly postulates that society is virtually unknowable (“our own brain is technically incapable of comprehending this regularity”)! By the way, all scientists who preach agnosticism should be driven with a filthy broom, because why the hell are they, parasites, needed at all if the objective laws of motion of matter, including its social form, are unknowable!

And although Drobyshevsky himself was severely criticized by colleagues for his three-volume book on paleontology, among his colleagues there are plenty of those who think in the same wretched positivist spirit. For example, Drobyshevsky's friend, Sokolov, is broadcasting:

“The line between science, non-science and pseudoscience is not something given to us from above. It, this line, strongly depends on what the scientific community will consider science and what is not. The criteria of scientificity are not unshakable, but represent a kind of modern consensus.

Those. he sets out a purely corporate approach to the definition of scientific criteria. Science for him is what scientists have agreed among themselves to consider science, so also in the form of consensus, i.e. mutual concessions!

So scientists agreed among themselves that, for example, ether dynamics is unscientific, because, they say, the ether "was not discovered", but string theory is quite scientific, although no one has proved the existence of "quantum strings" and has not even set such a task, because for them detection, "it is necessary to build an accelerator whose size would exceed the galaxy." I read on a student site: “So far no method has been found for detecting strings, but by means of mathematical formulas it is possible to infer some of their basic properties.” Just think about it: scientists are quite seriously describing the properties of an undetected phenomenon! And they defend academic degrees on this! But this is not “obscurantists-ethereers” for you, this is real science!

So, what should be the true definition of science? It is impossible to identify it with the totality of specialists, the community of scientists, as they themselves often do. Science is a developing system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and their stable relationships, called laws . Consequently, the task of science is to search and formulate the laws of being, nature, society and thinking, to reveal the essence of a particular phenomenon or law and its relationship with other laws, while relying not on empiricism, not on bare experience, but on a solid methodological basis, without which any experiments are attempts by blind sages to "study" the elephant.

Truth is always concrete, objective and confirmed by the entire socio-historical practice of mankind, and science is a system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and the laws of being, nature, society, thinking.

Bourgeois "science" is, in fact, pseudoscience, because its task is not to establish the truth, but to conceal it, not to serve progress, but to serve the interests of the oligarchy. Scientists and "scientific pop educators" are directly supported by the oligarchy in the form of grants from all sorts of non-governmental foundations. For example, the “Dynasty” fund of the oligarch Zimin operated in the Russian Federation until his fund was recognized as a foreign agent in 2015 and it was closed, which caused hysteria among intellectuals. And even Wikipedia, albeit in a tiny paragraph at the end of the article, admits that this foundation gave out prizes to those scientists who professed certain views, namely market and ultra-liberal ones. And it's natural.

We live in a capitalist world, where everything takes the form of a commodity and scientific activity also turns into a special kind of commodity-service. Scientists sell their intellectual product and capitalists buy it, and of course they buy what suits their interests. Objective knowledge is the thing that social parasites don't care about the least if it doesn't make a profit. Moreover, in certain areas it can be dangerous for them. After all, if scientists begin to study society with its laws, which means they take positions of at least spontaneous materialism, then the absolute uselessness of the oligarchs, the perniciousness of capitalism, including for these scientists themselves, will quickly be revealed.

In general, it would seem that researchers should be the main revolutionaries, because they have all the necessary conditions for this: a high level of education and a sufficient amount of free time to study Marxism. But at the end it turns out that scientists are perhaps the most reactionary part of the proletarians of mental labor, very often voicing such a primitive naivete in political and socio-economic issues, that you are amazed! What is the statement of the leaders of the Russian Academy of Sciences of February 2021, where scientists stated that in Western countries the authorities do not use violence against peaceful demonstrators. And, of course, a statement in connection with the beginning of the NMD, where all the blame for the outbreak of a military conflict is assigned to the government of the Russian Federation ...

Is it any wonder now why young people learn dialectical materialism with such difficulty? If until the 20th century religion served to stupefy the consciousness of the masses, today it has been replaced to a certain extent by the “scientific community”; preachers in black cassocks were replaced by preachers in white coats. And they all preach the same thing, only in different terminologies: capitalism is natural and eternal, while communism is an invention and utopia that is contrary to human beings. Yes, of course, there are also left-wing scientists among scientists who, as it were, are against capitalism. But since they are also guided by positivism, they do not go far from their liberal colleagues and still turn young people away from diamatics.

The entire payroll of the “enlighteners”, including the left segment of YouTube, denies the partisanship of the sciences, at least the “natural” ones. Say, what kind of politics can be in mathematics or physics, because mathematical formulas do not express anyone's interests. And meanwhile, it is mathematics, or rather the mathematization of science, the reduction of scientific research to mere thoughtless quantitative description, that hinders the development of people's thinking worse than medieval scholasticism. For example, physicists do not care at all about the question of HOW space can be curved, but they can “beautifully” describe this with formulas and, from their point of view, everything turns out harmoniously and logically. The categorical unwillingness to perceive diamatics and even more so to be guided by it makes scientists bourgeois, i.e. serving the interests of the bourgeoisie, for which it is beneficial,

That is why it is necessary to fight against positivism, i.e. another form of idealistic (anti-scientific) thinking. That is why it is necessary to ruthlessly expose any manifestation of positivism, because any tolerant attitude towards it inevitably leads to a "failure" in the brain, to distortion and perversion of the diamatic, truly scientific worldview.

R. Ogienko
12/12/2022

https://prorivists.org/76_antidrob/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 27, 2022 3:42 pm

American biologist about modern science (review of Comrade Ogienko's article)
No. 12/76.XII.2022

Comrade Ogienko wrote an excellent article challenging scientists and exposing the failure of the narrative of modern bourgeois "science".

I think that the author is right about the reactionary and unscientific nature of modern scientists. Comrade Ogiyenko's article should help some who already have doubts about the cult of modern "science" to join our ranks in the struggle for a new society and for real science.

Some reasons and individual observations why scientists became reactionaries:

(A) Of course, the lack of dialectical thinking is the main problem that leads to the widespread notion that capitalism is correct and eternal. The dominance of positivism displaces dialectical thinking. With the current prevalence of nonsense spread by the media and the bribing of the proletariat with social benefits and other handouts, the importance of dialectical thinking has only increased. After all, how can anyone fight capitalism if, deep down, they believe at least partially that capitalism is morally acceptable, eternal, and needs to be reformed in order to iron out some sharp corners? However, a scientist must mentally jump over quite a few obstacles to reach this basic but no less important stage of understanding.

(B) Adaptability . To succeed in modern "science" one must be able to adapt, to emulate the way science teachers and professors think. As a general rule, if someone wants to get a PhD, they have to mimic the mainstream liberal narrative for at least ten years. The problem with this kind of mimicry is that science turns into opportunism and scientific creative thinking dies out.

(C) Careerism . Scientists are not only not immune from it, but they are especially absorbed in it, since changing a profession / specialization in modern conditions takes a huge amount of time. And many simply do not have such an opportunity to learn from someone else, so many prefer to simply adapt. Besides, who knows what letters of recommendation your boss is going to write that could ruin your ten-year career. In the West, a doctoral student is always viewed as a child (a cultural result of distorted capitalist thinking), so the child tries to grow up quickly at the expense of his intellectual development. No money - failure. Nobody wants to be a failure, so let's just be "worldly" and adapt to what we have.

(D) Primitive thinking . Here in the United States, if you are not a Democrat (Liberal), then you are a Republican (Conservative) and no other answer is possible. In other aspects of life, if you are not a religious fanatic, then you are a scientist or a supporter of science. When it comes to real science versus pseudoscience, then this is a completely different story and, in general, it is not customary to touch on this.

(E) Liberalism . All ideas are true for those who have them. Nobody has the right to say that other people are wrong. Marxism is the opposite. Dialectical materialism asserts that truth is always concrete and cannot be for everyone their own "truth". Instead, modern science works by consensus! Theories are only true because UNTIL we have agreed that they are true. Or, for example, I personally know many "scientists" who believe in God and go to church.

(F) Serfdom . Scientists: “We work for the government. The revolution? You are crazy?!"

(G) Positivism . "Marxism is not a science because I can't measure anything the way I can measure the intensity of a protein band on nitrocellulose." I find it amusing that this requirement only applies to Marxism and not to anything else in academia or democracy.

(H)Again, positivism and agnosticism. “Society is too big for us to study. Society is too "chaotic" for us to study. We cannot have any social laws or any scientific understanding of social processes.” Bourgeois scientists cannot consider Marxism correct, because it is easy for them to imagine some fact or historical event that contradicts Marxism in their head. This is dialectical thinking's deadliest enemy, because scientists say you can't rely on thinking in general (let alone dialectical thinking!), instead you have to focus on experience and empiricism. "We just can't say anything about nature in general." Moreover, great change necessarily leads to great suffering, so it is always better to follow the path of reform.

(I) Arrogance. If you talk to a person with a PhD, you can see how elitist his education has made him. Dr. Drobyshevsky, speaking about Engels' work without reading it, is a case in point. Whatever Engels is, he is nothing compared to such a "genius of thought."

(J)Scientists do not need revolution(J) and they do not care about the reasons why some peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries rebelled against exploitation. Such limited thinking has no place among reasonable people. Other versions of the same approach: “I'm only studying this particular protein, some remote village or some other little corner of scientific research, I don't know anything else! Don't expect me to put two and two together! I'm too busy! In addition, I went to school and university for a long time, so now I deserve to think less. Don't expect me to join a trade union, let alone fight for socialism! None of my teachers ever demanded that Marxism be part of the curriculum, I don't see why I should understand it! Besides,Fedotov about a crazy version of world history), so don't pester me with your questions about socialism!"

(K) Intellectual cowardice . It is not necessary for me to elaborate on this matter. It's just that intellectuals are cowardly and neglect their duty to society to lead the masses. Another version of this is that they are hiding behind democracy: people should decide political issues collectively! Since the bourgeois ideology is ingrained in the minds of the exploited population, and the bourgeoisie can literally buy votes with their stolen wealth gained through exploitation, this is essentially no different from saying that the bourgeoisie should decide and govern.

In other words, most scientists are products and lackeys of the capitalist dictatorship. No more, no less.

As for having the tools to rise above the environment and create a new society, there is no excuse for the fact that we are doing so badly in science and philosophy.

Comrades! In my ten years of experience as a student and researcher, I have never heard the words "materialism" and "idealism" used in any context!

The style of thought in modern science is: “Think of a model that fits some of the facts already known, then do an experiment to confirm it. If the experiment confirms your model, then your model is correct for now, then let's try one more step. If the experiment does not match your model, then run a few more experiments or discard the model.” There is no need to discuss idealism and materialism. No philosophy is required. In fact, I would say that I discuss more philosophies of science in one day with my comrades than in ten years of study and work in academia.

According to bourgeois science, social progress can only be achieved by conducting experiments aimed at advancing the understanding of humanity 1-2 cm at a time. Good scientists are those who can apply their knowledge to create products that are then marketed. This is how scientific success is defined. What if the problem lies outside our careers, such as the fact that the benefits of scientific progress go to the very rich and powerful in the first place? Well, out of luck, that's not our problem as scientists!

While we are tolerant of this kind of slow "progress", there is no doubt that our current social system is simply not up to the level of technology (I refrain from using the terms "productive forces" and "relations of production" because they conjure image of Marx, and, as we know, Marx had nothing but his personal opinions to stir up the poor people). Apparently, scientists are not tired of their own money problems, inequality, rotten health and education systems, a monstrous penitentiary system and huge daily human suffering around the world, etc.; they don't care that their "theories" and "democracy" are absolutely powerless , at least for the last many decades.

For honest people, almost every social problem points to capitalists as the main culprits and private property, but somehow "scientists" great and small still say, "More research is needed!" — and this whenever they are not engaged in the most direct defense of capital and the status quo.

Unfortunately, we - modern scientists - are objectively useless idiots living in conflict with our conscience, since hardly any scientist will even dare to say: "Hey, something is wrong here" - not to mention trying to find a solution with scientific point of view . Is it tough? Not in the least, as we scientists claim to have mastered the science, but our records stink of mothballs and formalism. If we scientists collectively go out to the public and say that although we are studying something, we are absolutely bankrupt in matters of social development and someone else should give answers instead of us, then there will be no need for me to be so harsh.

Direct consistent idealism has become too easy to debunk in the 21st century, even for bourgeois "scientists" who are forced to be spontaneous and inconsistent materialists. Professor Drobyshevsky is not alone in his combination of ignorance and arrogance, believing that just because he cannot deduce some law of the development of society from the apparent "chaos", no one else can discover such a law.

In the East, more than two thousand years ago, Taoist philosophy developed a dialectical worldview, expressed in the “Tao” or “path”, along which human efforts should be directed. In Sun Tzu's The Art of War, for example, when drawing up plans for battle, the still elusive "Tao" had to be taken into account first. In the West, already in the 17th century, there were observations of the general model of development among different peoples around the world and attempts (including successful in the case of Marx in the 19th century) to discover the scientific law of the development of society without involving God or ideas that would be local products of the corresponding era . These earlier idealistic attempts were futile and often turned into hocus pocus. Then, from the still idealistic attempts of Giambattista Vico to that of Lewis Henry Morgan and subsequently to the theory of the dialectical materialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it was possible to comprehend the acquired knowledge using the proper method in order to finally formulate the scientific law of social development. Of course, if one were to place these attempts and theories in a textbook with the names of these people in bold type under the heading "theories of the general development of society", then Professor Drobyshevsky would probably be aware of them and perhaps even begin to at least consider them as "legal theories". True, this would have been possible if he had not been so heavily infected with positivism and anti-communism.

One cannot help but be amused when he imagines Lao Tzu's enthusiastic reaction if we told him that, using more than two thousand years of historical data and development, Karl Marx was able to formulate the law of the development of society, or the "Tao" of society, which was to a large extent elusive in the time of Lao Tzu; and also Lao Tzu's disappointment if we told him that our best intellectuals chose to spit on Marx and ignore Marx's theory and that Lao Tzu himself was turned into the philosopher who first put forward the "theory" of "Hakun Matata".

In the end, like what happened with the economy, the bourgeoisie paid off anthropology and academics, castrating science. Is this assessment fair? Yes, because we do not see anthropologists entering the movement of the working class as conscious Marxists, although their science should have put them at the forefront with an understanding of the law of the development of society.

As for economists, we should probably be glad that not all of them are in favor of abolishing the minimum wage and that they are able to use a knife and fork while eating.

But even some sophisticated scientists may find Professor Drobyshevsky's statements ridiculous. However, as long as they themselves do not courageously break out of their framework and begin to change their own fabrications, these scientists are practically equal to Professor Drobyshevsky in terms of their social usefulness. Even bourgeois television sometimes puts forward this concept: do you want to do what is right or live a life full of regrets? That is the question, and it is a decision that everyone, including scientists, must make.

Volume
26/12/2022

https://prorivists.org/76_science/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 28, 2022 3:37 pm

What can we hope to grow in the US? / What kind of qualitative growth can we expect in the US?
No. 12/76.XII.2022

Amongst leftists, including those who mistakenly call themselves Marxists, the outlook on social progress in this country is universally dismal. The task of uniting the disparate elements of American society into the fighting working class is entirely abandoned, and instead they hope to unite various subcultures as pockets of resistance against capitalism. The strength of American capitalism and the degree of popular reaction demoralizes them and crushes their hopes to mount even that futile form of resistance. A conscious materialist can only laugh at this.

Conditions for the development of genuine Marxists could not be much better. Ideological pluralism is the policy of the ruling class, and there is no official prohibition on the study or even propaganda of Marxism, only a historical lack of competent Marxists who could take advantage of our own "hothouse conditions." Access to information via the internet is practically universal. Widespread idleness in the wake of the export of most productive labor provides free time that can be devoted to the study of theory. The fraud of the "land of opportunity" can be grasped immediately.

With objective barriers generally out of the way, the main obstacle for Americans is subjective barriers, which are constantly reinforced by the menagerie of junk ideologists spawned from the policy of ideological pluralism. This is not a concern for us either — sincere seekers of communism will ultimately recognize the deception and opportunists will be hopelessly mired. The machinery of bourgeois ideology functions for us as a sieve for idiots.

The main deficiencies here are in the availability of quality supporting materials for the study of Marxism and the isolation of spontaneously developing Marxists who make compromises and join opportunist organizations to avoid being alone. The propagation of the materials of the Prorivists and truly scientific positions address both of these.

The work here is thus quite possible.

To work comrades!

R. Turner
12/28/2022

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Among the left, including those who erroneously call themselves Marxists, the prospects for social progress in this country seem bleak. The task of uniting the disparate elements of American society into a struggling working class has been completely abandoned, and instead the left hopes to unite the various subcultures and subcultures into pockets of resistance to capitalism.

The strength of American capitalism and the general degree of reactionary consciousness of the broad masses demoralizes and destroys the hopes of the left for any organization of the disparate sections of the proletariat, even for such useless activities as actionism and economism. A dialectical materialist can only laugh at this, because the conditions for forging genuine Marxists are now more than ever suitable. The prevailing pluralism and, as a result, the absence of an official ban on the study and propaganda of Marxism are a very favorable factor for the deployment of a full-scale propaganda of Marxism. The problem lies mainly in the total lack of competent Marxist personnel who could take advantage of the current "hothouse conditions". The majority of the population has access to the Internet, which only simplifies the task of spreading the ideas of Marxism.

Unlike the past two centuries, most proletarians in the United States have the necessary amount of free time to study theory. Almost everyone can allocate at least a couple of hours a day to read the works of the classics. This is due to the fact that most of the hardest work was given to the "outsourcing" of the proletarians in the third world. Most also do not need to be told how bad life is under capitalism, since many have already experienced all this in their own skin.

Since objective barriers are usually eliminated, the main obstacle for Americans is subjective barriers, which are constantly reinforced by the menagerie of garbage ideologues generated by the politics of ideological pluralism. This does not bother us either, since those who conscientiously approach politics and the search for a way out of the established "market paradise" will eventually recognize the deceit and come to the true understanding - to Marxism, while the opportunists will hopelessly get bogged down in the swamp of their own delusions. The mechanism of bourgeois propaganda functions for us as a kind of sieve from idiots.

The main problems now are the extreme lack of quality auxiliary materials for the study of Marxism and the problem of isolating spontaneously developing Marxists who compromise and join opportunist organizations in order to avoid loneliness and feel part of the team. The dissemination of breakthrough materials and truly scientific positions will address both of these aspects.

Thus, the work of Marxists in local conditions is quite possible.

Get to work, comrades!

https://prorivists.org/76_what-can-we-h ... in-the-us/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 07, 2023 3:46 pm

Socialism Is Not a Utopian Ideal, but an Achievable Necessity: The First Newsletter (2023)

JANUARY 5, 2023

Image
Philip Guston (Canada), Gladiators, 1940.

Dear friends,

New Year greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In May 2021, the executive director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and the UN high representative for disarmament affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, wrote an article urging governments to cut excessive military spending in favour of increasing spending on social and economic development. Their wise words were not heard at all. To cut money for war and to increase money for social development, they wrote, is ‘not a utopian ideal, but an achievable necessity’. That phrase – not a utopian ideal, but an achievable necessity – is essential. It describes the project of socialism almost perfectly.

Our institute has been at work for over five years, driven precisely by this idea that it is possible to transform the world to meet the needs of humanity while living within nature’s limits. We have accompanied social and political movements, listened to their theories, observed their work, and built our own understanding of the world based on these attempts to change it. This process has been illuminating. It has taught us that it is not enough to try and build a theory from older theories, but that it is necessary to engage with the world, to acknowledge that those who are trying to change the world are able to develop the shards of an assessment of the world, and that our task – as researchers of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research – is to build those shards into a worldview. The worldview that we are developing does not merely understand the world as it is; it also takes hold of the dynamic that seeks to produce the world as it should be.

Image
Marcelo Pogolotti (Cuba), Siglo XX o Regalo a la querida (‘20th century or Gift for the loved one’), 1933.

Our institute is committed to tracing the dynamics of social transcendence, and how we can get out of a world system that is driving us to annihilation and extinction. There are sufficient answers that exist in the world now, already present with us even when social transformation seems impossible. The total social wealth on the planet is extraordinary, although – due to the long history of colonialism and violence – this wealth is simply not used to generate solutions for common problems, but to aggrandise the fortunes of the few. There is enough food to feed every person on the planet, for instance, and yet billions of people remain hungry. There is no need to be naïve about this reality, nor is there a need to feel futile.

In one of our earliest newsletters, which brought our first year of work (2018) to a close, we wrote that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than to imagine the end of capitalism, to imagine the polar ice cap flooding us into extinction than to imagine a world where our productive capacity enriches all of us’. This remains true. And yet, despite this, there is ‘a possible future that is built to meet people’s aspirations. … It is cruel to think of these hopes as naïve’.

The problems we face are not for lack of resources or lack of technological and scientific knowhow. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we believe that it is because of the social system of capitalism that we are unable to transcend our common problems. This system constrains the forward movement that requires the democratisation of nations and the democratisation of social wealth. There are hundreds of millions of people organised into political and social formations that are pushing against the gated communities in our world, fighting to break down the barriers and build the utopias that we require to survive. But, rather than recognise that these formations seek to realise genuine democracy, they are criminalised, their leaders arrested and assassinated, and their own precious social confidence vanquished. Much the same repressive behaviour is meted out to national projects that are rooted in such political and social movements, projects that are committed to using social wealth for the greatest good. Coups, assassinations, and sanctions regimes are routine, their frequency illustrated by an unending sequence of events, from the coup in Peru in December 2022 to the ongoing blockade of Cuba, and by the denial that such violence is used to block social progress.

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Renato Guttuso (Italy), May 1968, 1968.

In his introduction to philosophy in 1997, the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, ‘I am. But I don’t have myself. And only therefore we become’. This is an interesting statement. Bloch is reformulating René Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’, an idealist proposition. Bloch affirms existence (‘I am’), but then suggests that human existence does not flourish due to forms of alienation and loneliness (‘But I don’t have myself’). The ‘I’ – the atomised, fragmented, and lonely individual – does not have the capacity to change the world alone. To build a process towards social transcendence requires the creation of a collective ‘we’. This collective is the subjective force that must strengthen itself to overpower the contradictions that stand in the way of human progress. ‘To be Human means in reality to have Utopia’, Bloch wrote. This phrase resonates deeply with me, and I hope that it touches you, too.

In the new year, we at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will reflect at length on the pathways to socialism and the barricades that seek to prevent the world’s billions from going beyond a system that extracts their social labour and promises greatness while delivering the barest minimum of life’s possibilities. We walk into this new year with a renewed commitment to the simple postulate, socialism is an achievable necessity.

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Milan Chovanec (Czechoslovakia), Peace, 1978.

As we begin the new year, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who works at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a team that is spread across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Shanghai, from Trivandrum to Rabat. If you would like to assist our work, please remember that we welcome donations.

We urge you to share our materials as widely as possible, to study them in your movements, and to invite members of our team to speak about our work.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... necessity/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 19, 2023 3:58 pm

Consciousness barriers. On accelerating the cultivation of true comrades-in-arms
No. 1/77.I.2023

It is interesting to observe the depth of the abyss that lies between people from the same community - "the community of language, territory, economic life and mental make-up, manifested in the community of culture." It manifests itself especially vividly when Marxist agitators communicate with ordinary people, with representatives, as they say, of the popular masses. “This is a catastrophe of the thought process, an intellectual disease,” the agitator turns to emotions, receiving in response to a detailed disclosure of the essence of capitalist relations something like “our president will deal with the situation, and you are rocking the boat.” The opposite is also true: in the phrase “the production of the means of life is primary in relation to all other phenomena and processes in society,” the representative of the masses hears only a set of alien sounds and proceeds to insults.

Something similar could be observed in a conversation between an astronaut explaining the principles of rocket operation and a representative of an ancient civilization who considers the sun to be a kind of lantern on a thunderer's hat.

In the meantime, the conversation is not going on with the ancestor: you and your contemporary are looking at the same phenomenon and sometimes understand diametrically opposite things about it. Because one of you has a clear glass between your eyes and the phenomenon, and the other has a wall with an illusion painted on it. In other words, the gulf between you lies between different levels of scientific knowledge: from complete ignorance on one side to a holistic Marxist worldview on the other. The task of overcoming it cannot be solved by one conversation, even the most measured one.

It would not be superfluous to repeat for the hundredth and thousandth time that the main nerve of today's problems is concentrated in the fact that, according to the apt expression of A. Redin,

“The dominance of the bourgeoisie rests not on violence in the literal sense of the word, that the armed bourgeoisie is capable of suppressing the proletariat, but on the ignorance of the proletariat, since only subjective delusions allow the gigantic material force of the majority of society to exclude itself from the objective process of the class struggle.”

How is it going now?

A favorable situation for communists has arisen in the world, when the invisible leg of the market is giving ever more sensitive kicks to the petty-bourgeois proletariat in its mass, which is pushing more and more people out of ever less comfortable holes to begin to take an interest in the structure of the world around them. The painstaking work of Marxist agitators in such conditions leads to the fact that more and more ordinary people turn to Marxism. It is regrettable that a significant part of them are weeded out over time: either they are eliminated from the Marxist movement, or they settle in opportunist swamps. "Lantern from the Thunderer's hat" turns out to be more familiar and attractive.

The rest comprehend Marxism in its entirety through conscientious self-education ([ 1 ])([ 2 ]) and, upon reaching the required level of competence, may in the future join the vanguard of the working class. Unfortunately, not everyone will cope with the task, and some will drop out again and follow their “flashlight” to nowhere.

Of course, the editors of Proryv and the future party of Scientific Centralism do not aspire to mass character in itself, because the point is not at all in quantity, but in the fact that we need personnel with the highest degree of competence and conscientiousness; cadres capable of leading tens of thousands tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow millions. In the end, how will this very mass character help if "the reason for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR was the incompetence of the members of the CPSU, especially in its leadership, in matters of practical construction of communism ."

However, if the mere increase in the number of cadres of the vanguard of the working class cannot be the necessary aim of the party of the working class or the press organ, then the qualitative quantity, that is, the quantity of competent cadres, plays an enormous, if not decisive, role in the victory of the revolution. As well as the speed with which such frames appear. Therefore, it is necessary to combat the above attrition through the development of new approaches to learning. Such a task, like any other task, lends itself to planning and implementation.

As V. Podguzov writes ,

“The most complex and so far the least developed, least detailed issue of Marxist theory is the question of bringing individual and social thinking, i.e. thinking of the entire population of the globe, to the scientific and theoretical level, when only that which serves the cause of building communism on the planet is recognized as moral. Therefore, the most difficult task in the chain of tasks facing the communists is the task of theoretical modeling and practical implementation of the CULTURAL REVOLUTION, which is by no means equal to the ability to read, count and write, and certainly not identical to universal satiety and the ability to dress in fashion.

What needs to be done in order to increase the speed of forging competent personnel? First of all, for this it is necessary to increase the number of such candidates who, being pushed out of their holes by social circumstances and the efforts of Marxist agitators and becoming interested in Marxism, could go so far as to engage in full-fledged conscientious self-education.

To do this, in turn, you need to understand the essence of those barriers in the mind that make the average person return to their "flashlights" and look for ways to overcome them.

Part I. Barriers
Our potential staff is all of humanity. At the same time, as one agitator who actively communicates with the population says, “no roasted rooster will force an idiot to use his brain.”

Let's think: why is that?

To answer, first of all, it is necessary to understand which aspects of the individual's consciousness need to be paid attention to. We already know that a Marxist sets the laws of social progress as the criterion of conscience, which in turn requires a certain quality of worldview acquired through diligent self-education, and social practice that follows these laws. Consequently, two essential characteristics are subject to consideration: the ability to reflect objective reality without distortion and the ability to direct one's thoughts and actions not only at oneself. In other words, the level of conscientiousness in theory, that is, the quality of the worldview, and the level of conscientiousness in practice.

The very essence of the answer lies in how these characteristics are affected by the capitalist formation with its absolute economic law - the desire for maximum profit.

1) The worldview of a modern person in quality can vary from drowned in ignorance, opportunism and illusions of a deeply petty-bourgeois consciousness to a high-quality holistic Marxist system of views. Under capitalism, the whole system of personality formation is aimed at rooting idiocy in all social science issues.

It is known, for example, that in most bourgeois countries the profession of a school teacher is literally trampled into the mud: lined with bureaucracy, poorly paid, limited in its educational function, which means that the task of forming a high-quality system of views is deliberately profaned. Leaving school, a person falls into the tenacious clutches of the market media, which generate information and propaganda chaos 24/7. Political propaganda in a class society is aimed at hiding the essence of social relations, replacing them with national-religious-democratic haze. It's hard to put it better:

“We see distorted facts, not knowing the context, background and perspectives, we get mostly interpretations, the so-called analytics, which simply terrorize thinking. Shrinking from the onslaught of nonsense, eclecticism, superficial nonsense, the mind is attached to fragmentation, forcibly pushed into emotional priorities over rational ones. The brain learns to think in a gag, not bothering to work out the details, sides, developments, not even bothering with a banal fact check. The brain comes to binary, simple black-and-white and intensely emotional schemes that envelop any information. Such a mind easily accepts any duck that has even a modicum of plausibility, even if the whole situation is surreal and absurd.

Both specialists in idealism of a religious persuasion, who are trying to “dress up in a scientific toga”, and representatives of bourgeois science , whose picture of the world is not much different from the biblical scriptures with creation from nothing, miracles, dark matter and the transformation of motion into matter , are involved in the cause of fooling the masses .

This means that the first barrier in consciousness is the barrier of a poor-quality worldview, the barrier of illusions.

Despite this, progress in terms of increasing the number of educated people is still observed, because capitalism, due to the development of the means of production, can no longer completely get rid of professions related to mental labor. However, this progress is relative, because this growth is significantly limited, and the intellectual workers themselves, as a rule, develop one-sidedly, growing into professionals in one business. At the same time, for the masses of people who graduated from school with grief in half, the limit of mental stress is watching an educational Internet video and studying history using the example of a Hollywood movie. What kind of self-education can we talk about here if the habit of intellectual work is not instilled from childhood?!

This means that the second barrier in consciousness is the barrier of complexity, the difficulty of independent reading and assimilation.

2) The level of conscientiousness in activities varies from philistinism, cherishing animal atavisms of the bearer, to extremely impartial and self-critical Marxist social practice, carried out in accordance with the laws of social development.

The first thing to note is the path of becoming a person, the path passing through an intense struggle.

This struggle of contradictions is well understood , the struggle between the social principle of man and his animal atavisms:

“Man, indeed, is doomed to resist them with almost the same force that it took tens of millions of years of natural selection, when the ability to will was formed, acting as a bridge between reason and social life. Any renewed need of the body is non-progressive. Including sleep or nutrition, including everything that comes from mental desires of the “I want” level, which can be considered grassroots, due to the hormonal, nervous system. When such needs become decisive, they become clearly reactionary, since they take on a role that is opposed to higher forms of human motivation.

There is a wide range of characters that overcome the animal principle to varying degrees: this is a man-stomach (he is also a classic tradesman), a family man, a guardian of a group (classmates, friends, an interest group, an artel, a volunteer group), a public person ( “I will equip my native city”), a man-lover of the motherland (“I will give my life for the motherland”), an ascetic and, finally, a communist.

The second thing to note is spontaneous selflessness.

In those who have gone further in development than the human stomach, it is important to see the existence of spontaneous, that is, unscientific, inclinations of conscientiousness, and what else! For example, in our time one can observe the activities of a significant number of religious ascetics and nationally oriented volunteers who are ready to give and are giving their lives in the rear and on the front of the war against imperialism. Of course, the illusions in their heads significantly limit their ability to achieve real victory, and on the side of the imperialist enemy there are many selfless people who sincerely believe that their actions contribute to the establishment of peace.

The third thing to note is the biological mechanism that is affected by capitalist society.

One way or another, the human brain, when interacting with the surrounding reality, receives some feedback, reinforcement, informing it about the success of the action performed. How does the human stomach work? And he simply enjoys his petty-bourgeois swarming: first, education and culture fill his head with capitalist consciousness, and then he realizes it through competition with his neighbors: he goes over the heads, perhaps becomes an entrepreneur, steals and, along the way, in every possible way delights the flesh. Knowing no other reinforcement and having years of successful animal reinforcement, such a person has no idea that life can go on in any other way. You can blame him for not spontaneously becoming different, but you can equally blame the circumstances themselves. Meanwhile, reinforcements are stronger the more it comes from social and the more from necessary and conscious activity. But the blind man does not understand the reasoning about red and white.

This means that the third barrier in consciousness is the barrier of animal atavism.

Part II: Exposition. Potential personnel
From the point of view of these three barriers - illusions, complexity and animal atavisms - let's look at the conditional "map of potential personnel".



The detailed statement of the problem considered in this article follows from the above illustration. If the goal of Breakthrough is to ensure that potential candidates (category 8) through years of conscientious self-education become worthy members of the vanguard of the working class, then the purpose of this article is to start a conversation about how to effectively move the remaining seven to category 8 and how to help them overcome three the aforementioned barriers.

For clarity, consider a few characters from the illustrated categories.

Category 8: a ready candidate who develops his competence.

Category 3: the most classic tradesman - in the head a picture from the media, relies on everyday "reason", or the so-called. “the ability to think” , adapts to the prevailing environmental conditions, that is, socially mimics . When getting rid of a number of capitalist illusions, it is easily reforged into a conscious pest from category 1.

Category 4: for example, a priest, a small businessman or a representative of a national social movement, completely sincerely and selflessly giving all of himself to some good cause, the same war against imperialism.

Category 6: There are two examples here. Here is the notorious I. Strelkov. Yes, Kornilov's laurels haunt him somewhere; yes, beyond the external (albeit true) assessment of phenomena in form, he can in no way penetrate into their essence. But who can say that such a person is not capable of education, and who can doubt that today he is ready to lay down his life for his ideals, albeit distorted, but undoubtedly directed not at himself, but at the whole of Russian society in his understanding. ? Or V. Grubnik, who went through the anti-Maidan Odessa underground, betrayed by the authorities of the Russian Federation; endured years in the SBU-Gestapo; returned after the exchange to the ranks as the organizer and main engine of the humanitarian volunteer movement from the beginning of the NWO; perfectly understanding the helplessness of the current ruling regime; offering as a global solution ... self-organization of conscious Russian people in the style of the people's militia during the Time of Troubles. It can be said that the more highly intelligent a person is, the more difficult it is to overcome the barrier of his illusions. But exactly "such guys need to reveal the class content of the state, showing that on the one hand a handful of "effective" privatizers who plundered the USSR, and on the other, the working masses, brought by the market to a state of steady extinction .

Category 5: a kind of Professor Preobrazhensky, but let's remove the extra grotesqueness to penetrate the essence. Such a person can have a high level of intelligence, can work hard all his life, not be a hedonist, be able to manage teams, be able to sincerely care for a whole group of people (from family and friends to a group of, for example, volunteer interests) and have decent results in practical activities. (scientific, entrepreneurial, professional, etc.).

Observing the surrounding inequality, it naturally adapts to this risk through the constant accumulation of a “financial cushion”. Firstly, it gives the illusion of control, the illusion that the impending catastrophe can be avoided, secondly, it still provokes consumerism, and thirdly, it encourages cooperation with the oligarchy of the most obscene spill for the sake of one’s own well-being.

He considers the prospect where society develops according to plan an idealistic utopia, since such a device requires abandoning all his previous experience (the barrier of animal atavism does not allow thinking in categories of necessity on a universal scale!), First of all, from a financial pillow, than to put yourself at risk. Proceeding from this, our "professor" declares the current course of things "natural", and all crises - insignificant in the historical perspective, as humanity continues to grow in spite of them. The quantitative factor here determines his thinking, and the quality of life of these millions is insignificant.

The deaths of millions in wars and the threat to the family personally because of the wars that flare up nearby are perceived with fatalism as a natural injustice within the framework of the general historical process. Fatalism suppresses the ability to fight. He declares the revolutionaries to be fanatics, especially since their asceticism conflicts with the personal habit of redistributing part of the public goods in their favor.

To summarize the worldview of our "professor" can be this: "I work productively and diligently. I get a well-deserved reward, and to give it up for the sake of perhaps understandable, but, in my opinion, untested communist ideas - let the passionaries do this; and if the war still comes and affects us, then this is the fate of such, on the scale of humanity, judging by its quantitative growth, this will not affect.

It is easy to imagine the reaction of representatives of different categories to how the market economy with its growing crisis disturbs their peace.

Firstly, “ to the extent of the politicization of the consciousness of the majority of citizens, the growth of their social, incl. and rally activity, the preconditions for the next major social changes are being formed. Those. there is a gradual, spontaneous convergence of the content of the fundamental theory of social development and mass consciousness .

Secondly, the work of Marxist agitators pushes people to the very initial, superficial understanding that their worldview is somehow flawed and this needs to be corrected. In this sense, propaganda work is a huge step towards getting people from any category to start moving towards Marxism.

However, this is not enough, because only candidates from category 8 are able to respond correctly and educate themselves. The rest will do it differently. Representatives of category 1 will begin to defend the usual philistine world order and will not overcome the barrier of animal atavisms. Category 2s will not break the difficulty barrier and will quit reading shortly after starting. Representatives of categories 3 and even 5 will start reading and also quit, but already because of the barrier of illusion. For example, they will hold on to a religious picture of the world or to anti-Soviet myths hammered in from childhood, and even the war going around will not be able to drown out the “horrors” of the late Soviet era, like queues for toilet paper. And despite the intelligence, many representatives of category 6 also cannot resist changing the usual illusory world order.

Can we just forget these people and drop the conversation with them? Can not! But we need an increase in the backbone of the cadre, that is, a significant number of people involved in self-education - mass category 8. To create and multiply such a soil - this is how the author sees one of the current tasks of the avant-garde.

You will have to work with different categories in different ways: representatives of categories 1 and 3 will be forced to train and introduce them to practice, but in the future; with representatives of category 7 - fight, and with representatives of the remaining categories 2, 4, 5, 6 - help overcome barriers and bring their condition to category 8.

Part III: Breaking Barriers
The struggle for minds takes place in theoretical and practical planes.

On the theoretical plane, it is necessary to continue the line of self-education, avoiding simplification for the sake of simplification. At the same time, the author proposes to set an additional task to create a self-study program built on the principle from simple to complex.

Within the framework of the self-study program, the fight against the barrier of illusions should be carried out according to the principle of the widest possible blow to the unscientific picture of the world, while not sliding into depth on individual aspects. It is extremely necessary to convey a broad, holistic picture of the world, indicating the failures of the most widespread illusions.

Why is that? The wrong picture of the world is replete with logical inconsistencies, and the task is not, for example, to tire the intelligent person from category 6 with deep arguments about the correct use of Marxist categories, but to give him the opportunity to plunge as quickly as possible into a coherent and consistent picture of Marxism. This requires materials written in easy language, covering issues of methodology, philosophy, the connection between the general and the particular, economics, history in a diamatic key, etc. The author made an attempt to create such material, but the desired lightness due to lack of experience has not yet been reached. Seeing the logical failures of his worldview, our potential comrade-in-arms will be able to make a further choice: either come to full-fledged self-education, or continue to live in his illusions. There should be several materials: from the lightest to the most detailed, but each of them should contain the maximum range of issues raised by Marxism.

Within the framework of the self-study program, the fight against the barrier of complexity should be carried out through the creation of a self-education school. It is known that, in themselves, simplified materials on the exposition of Marxism are harmful; however, they become a force if they are built into a coherent, multi-level structured system in which the big picture deepens with each new stage of training. So for years the school leads a person from the elementary concept of the oral calculation of prime numbers to the highest mathematics of the most serious level through a phased immersion in complexity. At the same time, such a training system lends itself to temporary planning.

Why is that? The spectrum of knowledge is too wide to master in Marxism, and there are too few people who are accustomed to the discipline of self-education and are able to systematically cover such a spectrum. Here, at least every day, talk about conscientiousness: a person will either not physically pull out without a phased introduction to the course of the matter, or he will drown in any particulars without knowing the whole teaching.

Let's take the "Science of Logic" (hereinafter - NL). Those who have studied it will confirm that the difficulty barrier is high here. There is no doubt that in the end you will have to study it from cover to cover, but you can also help in this matter with the method proposed above. What narrative elements can be seen in NL? The transition from category to category is carried out through reasoning, built according to a certain methodology. In the process of reasoning, axioms are sometimes introduced (as, for example, about the leading role of infinity); also sometimes there may be excessive reasoning and even idealistic errors (as, for example, the derivation of objectivity from subjectivity in the study of the concept). Some categories in their sublated form fall into diamatics and become diamatic categories. It is easy to imagine a system of phased learning:

* Level 1. Broad coverage of diamatic teaching. We can cite as an example the guide material from A. Redin and an essay on NL in relation to diamatics and the need to develop a correct system for reflecting the world around us from the author.

* Level 2. Basic axioms and methods of reasoning of the NL.

* Level 3. Acquaintance with the categories and axioms of the NL, a slightly more detailed consideration of the principles of reasoning of the NL.

* Level 4. A full study of the principles of reasoning of the NL, as well as consideration of the errors of the NL.

* Level 5. The use of NL in the works of the classics (for example, in "Capital"): diamatic categories, Hegelian categories, principles of reasoning, as well as consideration of the limitations of formal logic.

* Level 6. Free swimming, that is, independent reading of NL with the use of auxiliary materials.

And, finally, within the framework of the self-study program, the struggle against the barrier of animal atavisms cannot be conducted otherwise than through controlled involvement in broad social practice so that a person in a team of like-minded people receives real “social reinforcement”.

Why is that? The spectrum of activities is too wide, and therefore it is too easy to start doing the wrong thing, especially when Marxism has not yet been mastered. One could spend a million hours digging into the untimely aspect of a theory; one can write an infinite number of articles, even formally correct from a Marxist point of view, about politics, but at the same time act purely within the framework of the capitalist “agenda”. In other words, the newcomer has plenty of opportunities to act extremely inefficiently both for himself and for the entire communist movement. At the same time, a party activist can develop a series of tasks that will consistently, from simple to complex, enable potential cadres to join the cause of communism. Such tasks can be both in the field of agitation and propaganda, for example, criticism of certain capitalist or leftist publications,a list of problems in the construction of communism that require immediate scientific and theoretical study, and make them a number of less general, simpler and more detailed subtasks.

Ya. Dubov
18/01/2023

https://prorivists.org/77_prorivists/

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blindpig
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 30, 2023 3:37 pm

To the attacks from the anti-party
No. 1/77.I.2023

There is such a movement , the founder, leader and inspirer of which is P. Balaev, strangely named after the “anti-party group of 1957”. In fact, this is a group of faithful readers and comrades of Balaev, fascinated by his talent and trying to build an organization around several ideological positions.

Firstly , this is the exposure of the myths about the Stalin era, secondly , criticism of the helplessness of the left movement and its infection with Trotskyism, thirdly , the theory of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR (you can read more about this here ), fourthly , support for socialist China and The CPC, fifthly , the recognition of the priority of legal work in the current conditions, sixthly , the understanding of communism as a society in which "a person's free choice of profession, sphere of activity, not related to dependence on wages, earning a living" is carried out. All these ideas, concepts and approaches are formulated and developed by Balaev himself.

Unfortunately, it happens that a person undertook to substantively and talentedly defend Stalinist historiography and, having achieved certain results, became a little starred, deciding that he was a theoretician of communism on an all-Russian scale. Indeed, against the background of most writers and figures of the left movement, Balaev stands out for his charisma, his ability to work with historical material, and his realistic approach. However, he is poorly versed in the theory of Marxism-Leninism, therefore he is forced to compensate for his illiteracy with impudence and observations from personal experience. From a methodological point of view, Balaev is a pragmatist, a vulgar materialist. On the whole, he scorns the need to develop theory, he believes that he is able to solve all political, economic and organizational issues that have arisen as a result of the collapse of the CPSU and the USSR, on the basis of worldly wisdom. Yes, Balaev claims not only that no development of the theory is required, but that the whole theory has already been developed by the classics and he is the only one who is its true interpreter. However, his "interpretations" are more like stories, anecdotes and student jokes. And what is stated in the programmatic publications of the Movement is not devoid of opportunism.

The ideology of the "Movement", expressed in the corresponding document, contains flirting with petty-bourgeois ideas. So, there, for example, it is said that " society consists of individuals, and public interests are made up of the individual interests of members of society ." This, of course, has nothing to do with Marxism. Everything is just the opposite, individual interests in all their diversity arise only in so far as production relations, the nature of the basis of society, allow.

It is noted below that the Movement does not stand for hedonism and permissiveness and that

“The needs in a communist society, for quite objective reasons, will have to change. And these objective reasons are not at all in the regulations and laws that regulate all spheres of human activity, but in the change in living conditions, the change in social life.

This is the fallacy of the position, if only because the practice of building communism in the USSR showed that the change in the conditions of life and social existence did not in itself lead to a fundamental change in needs. And even more, there have been no trends towards this. This idea is a product of good old economism: it is necessary to build factories, develop infrastructure in the absence of exploitation (objective side) and production, including distribution, relations will become communist by themselves. Without the participation of the subjective factor, to which the authors attributed only prescriptions and laws. This is wrong theoretically and turned out to be wrong in practice.

In addition, the history of the introduction of communist production relations under Stalin in the form of subbotniks, the Stakhanov movement and labor mobilization during the war years directly contradicts this provision of the Movement, since it refers to the subjective factor of the impact of party propaganda and the influence of the party and Marxism as a whole.

In general, the propaganda and agitation of the Movement, not connected with the historiography of Stalinism, often revolves around the problem of distribution, although the understanding of the Marxist theory of distribution relations is not found in the materials of the Movement.

The contradictory position of the "Movement" on this issue is as follows. Communism, according to the "Movement", is a society of consumers, but at the same time, these consumers will not be like the current ones. Their main need will be labor. Generally speaking, if the main need of a person is to work, then he can no longer be called a consumer, he is just a producer, or, as Balaev ironically puts it, “a highly spiritual creator.” But the most important thing, as was said above, is that the opportunist line prevails in this inconsistency. In their opinion, today's consumer into tomorrow's "consumer", communist objectively, that is, without the participation of conscious activity and influence, will be transformed by being itself. In other words, the lack of exploitation, the development of the means of production and the subsequent changes in everyday life.

All this is the product not only of ignorance, but also of flirting with the petty-bourgeois illusions of the proletariat. Balaev, it seems to him, came up with a brilliant move: tell the layman, they say, do not worry, dear proletarian, communism will open the way for you to the most complete and rich consumerism, support us. And then you yourself will not notice how you will become a "consumer" of communist society and you will not have to endure and do anything for this.

This position is not much different from the approach of the priests from the RPR, who for thirty years have been luring the industrial proletariat into their organization with stories about the value of unpaid working time in rubles.

An echo of the same approach took root in the general theoretical ideas of the Movement, already indicated in their program.

“In the middle of the nineteenth century, the brilliant scientist Karl Marx discovered the objective laws of the development of human society. Marx was the first to see that the development of productive forces always in history outstrips the development of production relations, and established that it is precisely the contradictions generated by this that are the engine of the development of society. We subjectively perceive these contradictions as oppression, exploitation. But these contradictions exist objectively and inevitably grow.

The result is the accumulation of contradictions and the resolution of the conflict by bringing production relations in line with the level of development of the productive forces.

At present, the resources and development of productive forces are quite sufficient to meet the growing needs of all the inhabitants of the Earth. The only obstacle to this is the capitalist nature of production relations, namely the absence of effective demand.

Tolerantly painted, but to the last tail: "namely, the lack of solvent demand." But in this ponytail lies opportunism.

It turns out that the claims of Marxism to capitalism are not that the level of development of the productive forces requires the scientific organization of production relations and all social relations in general, but that capitalism is not capable of providing solvent demand. The theory and practice of Marxism assert and confirm that the lack of effective demand is the main cause of crises of overproduction in capitalism, and not the only obstacle to the implementation of communism. On the contrary, this is not an obstacle, but an objective factor paving the way for an intensification of the class struggle in society and the collapse of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This ponytail turns the whole theory on its head.

One might consider this an unfortunate caveat, because below it is correctly said that communism will liquidate the market, but it is said exactly in the same spirit:

“The market eliminates communism, that is, it eliminates the main and only obstacle to the development of production and the productive forces. Man, as an economic unit, ceases to be a buyer. He becomes a pure consumer. In addition, the elimination of the market leads to the elimination of the possibility of consuming without producing anything. The capitalist and the whole mass of people serving him, defending him, disappear. Naturally, not physically, but by changing occupations, becoming part of the productive forces.

When all the material needs of a person are satisfied, then his most important need becomes the need for self-realization, which he can satisfy only by engaging in creative work, to which he has an inclination.

The Movement program puts the cart before the horse, consumption before production, needs before ability. The elimination of the role of the buyer turns a person into a pure consumer, who is credited with an objective transformation into a working creator. Practice has repeatedly confirmed, firstly , that all the material needs of a person as he understands them (namely, the ideology of the "Movement" insists on this and castigates everyone who does not agree) cannot be satisfied in principle, and secondly , that if the basic man's material needs are satisfied even under the conditions of the first phase of communism; by himself he does not turn into a communist, into a member of communist society.

If everything were as simple as it is assumed in the program of the Movement, then in small rich rentier countries we would already observe communist societies in a local form.

This also includes the rejection by the program of the Movement of the formula of Marxism "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", which they offer the reader in the form of criticism of the third program of the CPSU. What should be criticized in this opportunist document is not the formulations of communist society, which repeat the classics, but the ways and means of building communism. But since Balaev has his own private ideas about communism as a society in which "a person's free choice of profession, sphere of activity, not related to dependence on wages, earning a living," he attacks the CPSU as follows:

“It turned out that, in their view, the free labor of a free worker requires from this worker to become disciplined and aware of a social duty, i.e. a conscious slave with "reasonable" needs.

As a result of this, the idea was born that communism requires a “new man”, the requirements for which the CPSU formalized in the form of the “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism”, which finally formed the opinion of the people about communist society as a utopian idea, completely discrediting it.

The problem, as can be seen from a comparison of the various provisions of the program and the ideology of the "Movement", is not in the "new man" as such, because the Balayevites themselves recognize the inevitability of the formation of that very pure consumer (new man), whose main need will be labor, but precisely in subjective factors of its formation.

We have repeatedly written that the CPSU after Stalin, with its "Moral Code", fell into god-building, and we agree with Balaev that this became a discredit of Marxist science. But instead of raising scientifically the question of ways and means, that is, subjective factors, of the conscious introduction of communist production relations, the growth of the quality of consciousness of workers and the transformation of all people into communists, Balaev, as a vulgar materialist, generally denies the need for any impact on society. except for the objective. Tools and material-object factors of production will develop, along with them communist production relations will spontaneously form, the essence of which, according to the logic of the Movement, is the free choice of profession.

The program of the movement refers to a quote by Stalin, which is correct, but is given out of place, as it refers to the period of preparation for the transition of Soviet society to mature communism. Moreover, above Stalin's quote and below in his work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR", he supports the idea of ​​the need to move to the formula "to each according to his needs."

In addition to flirting with petty-bourgeois illusions, the source of this opportunism is the orientation of the movement towards the modern ideology of the CCP.

The breakouts support the CCP and the dictatorship of the working class in China and defend the Chinese Communist Party from the Trotskyist attacks on the left. We do not consider ourselves entitled to engage in criticism of CCP policy while power in China is in the hands of the working class, simply because of the insignificance of our own practical results. However, at the same time, we are aware of the complexity of the Chinese conditions and the vicissitudes of the intra-Party struggle in the history and present of the CCP. It makes no sense to consider the program and policy of the CPC in the form in which it currently exists as a guideline for us Russian communists, because our country under Stalin, in terms of building a communist society, stepped a step further than today's China. That is, we theoretically and historically have richer material for developing our position, which, of course,

The “movement”, however, insofar as it is guided by the rather simplified and vulgar ideas of its leader Balaev, does not simply support the CCP, but blindly adopts the most controversial aspects of its policy as guiding ones.

Approximately the same thing is observed in relation to the so-called anti-party group of Molotov-Malenkov. If we give credit and respect to the representatives of the Marxist anti-Khrushchev line in the party after the death of Stalin, however, being aware of their insufficient theoretical and organizational training, then the Balayevites considered themselves their faithful followers and even named their organization in their honor.

The ideology and program of the Movement also contains other opportunistic flaws, petty and not very contradictions and distortions of the theory of Marxism-Leninism. But these two opportunist twists - the concept of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and the erroneous understanding of distribution relations - are the main, most significant shortcomings of their theory.

As for the organizational principles by which they are guided, there is a lack of understanding, typical of all leftists, of the viciousness of inner-party democracy. Balaev's rejection of scientific centralism is completely meaningless and childishly stupid. The reason for it is the reluctance to even delve into the essence of what democracy is and what role it has played in history.

The product of the democratic organizational practice of the Movement was a series of publications by a third-party, anonymous author against the Proryv. These are mostly delusional texts filled with misunderstandings, distortions and falsifications of our position on a number of issues. They simply disgrace this very "Movement" and its printed organ. These publications saw the light only because of the shortage of their own authors and the irrepressible thirst for "exposing" the breakthroughs, even if in such an absurd form.

A. Redin
29/01/2023

https://prorivists.org/77_antibalaev/

I like these 'breakouts' for their serious focus on the necessity of having competent party leadership and that now is the time to build that leadership while the Russian capitalists tolerate them. Their realistic appraisal of the Chinese Communist Party and the Ukrainian conflict are also welcome. However, despite their disdain for other at least nominative communists in Russia the folks at RotFront, with their emphasis upon building political labor power and even the degenerate reformist approach of the CPRF with their mass membership will have their place in the re-establishment of socialism in the once and future Soviet Union.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 02, 2023 3:15 pm

Marxism and mass action: Strategies for the struggle ahead
February 2, 2023 Sam Marcy

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Members of the LGBTQ+ community marched on the White House in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on June 13, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

Sam Marcy, a leading Marxist thinker and fighter of the second half of the 20th century, died 25 years ago on Feb. 1, 1998. To mark the occasion, Struggle-La Lucha is publishing a selection of Marcy’s articles that demonstrate the breadth and depth of his analysis and strategic thought on behalf of the workers and oppressed, while also providing insight into today’s struggles.

Dec. 15, 1994 — The movement of the working class originated more than 150 years ago. We are the inheritors of not only the ideology but also the traditions of revolutionary Marxism.

Our basic aim since the formation of the party has been to resuscitate, revive and continue under new conditions the struggle against capitalism and imperialism.

In this historic struggle for socialism, there have been two great and undeviating tendencies. They become evident, in one form or another, in every continent and every country.

This struggle is over what tactics and strategy to employ. In Europe, one tendency in the socialist movement was led by Auguste Blanqui in France. The other was carried out later and with great success by Karl Marx.

The proletarian movement has to review its historical heritage and go back to its roots to understand the complexities of modern imperialism.

There are new forms of colonialism, a new rise of all sorts of oppression under capitalism, and a growing inevitability of imperialist conflicts, not only against the proletariat and oppressed peoples, but also among themselves.

Theory and action

Blanqui, unlike Marx, believed it wasn’t necessary to theorize. Theoretical conceptions are fine, he said, but are not the motor force of the struggle. He stood for action — not by the masses but by a small group of knowledgeable, dedicated and revolutionary leaders intent on overthrowing the capitalist system.

His view was that all the workers’ struggles, some of which Marx had already explained and written about, ended up in failure because of the leadership’s lack of determination and ability to master the art of conspiracy against the capitalist class.

The masses are great, he said, but need leaders. Sometimes what has to be done to overturn the capitalist class need not necessarily be explained to the masses. Small groups of dedicated and revolutionary leaders must be educated and prepared; and it is they who, by their vision and ability, will overturn the capitalist system.

This view is sometimes popularly known as “getting a few good men together” — never even thinking of mentioning women. The view may sound archaic, but nevertheless, it has prevailed for a long time. Think of the many coups d’etat of both a progressive and reactionary character that have taken place in our epoch.

But even progressive coups, with all their fervor, their dedication, have been unable to overturn the capitalist system in any modern capitalist country.

Blanqui would have been regarded as ridiculous were he not such a capable organizer. His “man of action” became a symbol for struggle rather than for prayer or theorizing.

Lenin on Blanqui

It was in the struggle between Marxism and Blanquism that Bolshevism was born. The old socialist movement had completely discarded any aspect of Blanqui’s teaching on organizing smaller groups or differentiating between the great mass of the people and the more educated, developed smaller groups.

In the old socialist and working-class parties in Europe, there was no clear-cut difference between the leadership and the masses. The leaders were selected from the masses. Blanqui’s view was that it was a task of the small group not only to give leadership but to do it with firmness, not to hesitate.

Blanquism was the theory of readiness, the vision of overthrowing capitalism not by legal or electoral means but by conspiracy.

Any number of conspiracies took place in old Europe. They overturned this or that government. But they didn’t overturn the system.

Marxism had to take from Blanquism everything that was progressive and necessary and discard what was not useful. At the same time, it had to discard what was old and inapplicable in the old socialist movement.

This was the task of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. They took the theoretical basis of Marxism and used it to educate the masses on the necessity for insurrection.

Before Lenin, insurrection was not regarded by the socialist movement as either necessary or desirable. The social-democratic parties were dependent exclusively on the electoral process.

Blanquism has to be distinguished from the old utopian movement, which was also fervently for socialism and for the masses — but had no vision of how it could be won, except by convincing the individual capitalists of the need to discard the system of capitalist oppression and institute the socialist system.

The ideas of the old utopian socialists were not practical. The ideas of Blanquism were more attractive to the young. But at the same time they could not overturn the capitalist system.

We have to bring this up because of the way the modern capitalist system is developing at this time.

What’s next in the U.S.?

In the modern-day U.S., what prevails is not the ideology of Blanqui or of Marx, but outright bourgeois ideology.

But the system is rapidly coming to a point of great crisis, and it is necessary for us to review our heritage to understand the forthcoming period. It is necessary not merely to anticipate a revolutionary struggle but to prepare for it.

In Marx’s time, and even in Lenin’s, the trade unions were considered the fundamental organ whereby the working class could organize itself. But the intervention of the world war showed that the slow process of winning the allegiance of the working class was illusory.

No matter how dedicated or strong, a party like the German Social Democratic party would fail in the end, unless it had a revolutionary perspective of overthrowing the capitalist system, not hesitating to use force and violence when that became necessary. That aspect was not well understood by the other European parties in Lenin’s time — only after the October Revolution in Russia.

Today, many of the ideas proposed to solve capitalism’s ills sound utopian in the old sense. They cannot overcome the system.

It is quite likely that as soon as a struggle breaks out, it will produce a modern version of Blanquism, not only among the youth but in major organizations of the working class. One must consider the devastating and annihilating violence the state could conduct against the working class, and most often against Black and Latino and other oppressed nationalities.

Our movement has to go back somewhat to an earlier epoch in order to understand what is developing in capitalist society today. We are witnessing a slow and gradual development. It seems that the revolutionary struggle is distant.

But we know that a capitalist crisis, especially a severe one, immediately brings into being dozens of organizations with the most fantastic ideas on how to undo the capitalist crisis. Some lead to attempting a violent overthrow without the necessary preparation of the working class as the principal instrument for overcoming capitalist exploitation.

In the coming struggle, we would have to pay attention to a possible Blanquist variant. But we would not be able to influence it unless our party itself is most vigorous, most relentless and most uncompromising in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism, of which, of course, racism is such a fundamental aspect.

We have to prepare ourselves not only in the sense of gathering more forces but seeing what the future may hold ideologically. Our party has to restudy the basic classics of Marxism and go back to the theory and tactics that Lenin employed.

What to do next

The art of revolutionary politics is knowing what to do next. It is okay to theorize about fascism or the strength of the right-wing. But our organization differs from a debating society. We must take a firm, indeed revolutionary, stance.

We are faced with the growing prospect of right-wing conspiracy on the part of big business and multinational corporations. They have taken the first step. This Rep. Newt Gingrich is a representative of it, and there are others — but that’s not the main thing.

Individuals can change, but the ruling class’s trend is toward repression, solidifying in the most undemocratic way possible its control over the resources of the country and indeed of the globe. U.S. imperialism is on the march everywhere. The devastating results fall on the backs of the workers at home as well.

What do we do? We know the right wing is moving, and that there is only a thin difference between the right and the ultra-right.

One of the great lessons of the 1930s was Leon Trotsky’s writings on the question of how to fight fascism. He stressed how important it is not to overlook what is happening, how it is possible to lose the historic moment and allow the ruling class to be victorious.

He delineated in a dramatic and readable way the steps that led to the victory of fascism in Germany.

In the U.S. at that time, there were only the beginnings of fascist groupings. No sooner did the wave of reaction sweeping Europe reach these shores than the great sit-down strikes among the workers wiped them out completely.

They were never able to get a foothold among the workers. The myriad of small fascist groups were washed away by the upsurge of the working class.

That is the surest way to end any fascist attempt to establish itself as a political force over the working class.

There’s been no experience here with fascism on a mass scale. So we are basically looking at a theoretical and ideological discussion.

Our task is not to wait until things happen, in which case you can be absolutely sure the liberal bourgeoisie as well as certain sections of the big bourgeoisie will get into it. Right now, the working class is either indifferent or apathetic in this great struggle.

The possibility for the growth of neofascism, if you can call it that, and for political reaction generally is in the soil because monopoly is growing. The contradiction between the forms of capitalist production and the forms of capitalist distribution grows wider and wider.

The struggle among the imperialist nations grows sharper. There is no tendency toward political equilibrium there.

None of the small countries that were actual colonies and became independent has shown any move toward economic independence. They would like to do it but cannot because of the monstrous growth and position of the big banks and corporations over the entire planet.

It is impossible for a small country to attain complete independence and at the same time grow economically strong and powerful. Not even Cuba can do that. We are all happy at the way it has conducted itself and won a position in world affairs and at home, but it is at great economic cost. Trying to get out of it little by little is difficult.

Cuba should be able to look toward an emancipated working class in the U.S. to help it. That’s our job.

Opportunity for a mass struggle

The right wing is on the march in the United States. But we now have a golden opportunity to intervene in the capitalist political process in a way we never have before.

We can become the most formidable representatives of the working class in the struggle against political reaction, if we build beginning with what we have.

A whole world of struggle awaits us. The false opposition, the false messiahs of struggle who are actually capitulators, are not yet on the scene. We have a clear road.

We are on the right path if we undertake a genuine, broad national opposition to the right wing and political reaction in general. It doesn’t mean we leave the liberals off the hook. It doesn’t mean we concentrate only on Gingrich or the others. It means we intensify our theoretical and political work.

We need to show where this country is moving, where the capitalist class is leading it, what the tendencies in it are, what the dangers are. We need an outpouring of the workers and oppressed masses. We need to prepare for that.

And we’re in better shape because the liberal bourgeoisie is asleep and afraid. A part of it becomes ultra-militant and revolutionary after we start doing things, but for the time being they are asleep.

We need to organize ourselves and make this the top priority in the organization and for our party.

We cannot start a serious campaign in the struggle against the far right without funds. We need full-time organizers, foot soldiers who can leave their jobs and go places and do things. The struggle can only come as a result of deeper self-sacrifice. The party needs a fighting fund of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We have to expand before the storm comes. Our own resources are relatively small but will grow as the struggle widens and deepens.

We can go to the masses and promote tremendous activity to challenge the capitalist class. We needn’t be fearful about going beyond the legal limits that the bourgeoisie constrains us to. On a picket line you never know when you’re going to get arrested, but you don’t say, “Don’t have the picket line.” That kind of talk leads to failure.

We are taking on the greatest capitalist enemy. They have a president but they are having second thoughts about him.

Clinton isn’t any different than earlier Democratic presidents. What is different is the situation of the bourgeoisie. They push one right-wing economic and political measure after another. And he is not a president to resist.

Should a capitalist economic crisis break out, it would accentuate the political crisis. If it catches us by surprise and we do not have an apparatus out in the field, then our hopes for building a strong and revolutionary organization will be considerably diminished until the next opportunity comes.

In the 1930s, the Communist Party and other organizations were very conscious of the growth of fascism. But to a large extent they were trying to win the big bourgeoisie to support the struggle against it.

There is nothing wrong with asking them to support the struggle against fascism, but it’s another thing to expect it from them. We have to explain this to the most oppressed and persecuted people, in the Black and Native and Latino districts. Fascism should not be an after-dinner conversation with bourgeois liberals.

The struggle against the far right and the struggle against racism are intimately interlocked.

We have to get our paper and our literature into the hands of thousands of workers. And to do that we need organizers.

We have to counteract the inroads of the capitalist monopolies. We have to support strikes and fight lockouts by employers. We have to redouble our activities on all fronts.

Marxism is as Marxism does. It is not merely an exposition of the tendencies in capitalist society that inevitably lead it to destruction. It is also a means for arming the workers and oppressed people on how to proceed in the next period.

Are we mainly directing our attention to the program of the right-wing Republicans? No. We shouldn’t leave the other Republicans and the Democrats off the hook.

To make it very clear, our struggle against the right wing is an extension of our general program and not some new development on our part. We are going to conduct a revolutionary and working-class struggle in the way we have conducted them before, with greater emphasis on developing an initiative in the struggle against the right wing and the neo-fascist tendencies that may spring up now and then.

Source: Marxists Internet Archive

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... gle-ahead/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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