resistancemarxistblog - Tumblr blog

[resistancemarxistblog]

They weren't allies, but that pact still involved the USSR helping Germany by funneling supplies and war materiel to it. It was absolutely just Stalin and the Comintern throwing Europe's working class (and Jews, gays, communists, etc) under the bus, sacrificing them to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, &c, just to buy time for themselves.

Keep in mind, the Comintern was expelling people throughout the 30s for "alarmism" because they were highlighting the danger of Nazism and Fascism. August Thalheimer comes to mind. Under M-R, the USSR deported exiled German communists back to Germany, which obviously was a death sentence.

[resistancemarxistblog]

Catholics pointing out the 'evils' of the Aztecs is just pot calling kettle black. Sorry buddy, but Aztecs didn't construct a global church of child rapists, wife beaters, gay bashers, and all around thugs and goons.

Something genocide enjoyers don't get is that I will never support their genocide because it's a genocide. It's also something a lot of people who try to UwUify genocide victims don't get.

I don't care if the majority of Palestine is horribly bigoted.

I don't care if the majority of Palestine supports far right extremists like hamas.

I don't care if Palestine struck first.

This genocide isn't wrong because it hurts a culture I like, this genocide is wrong on the basis of it being a genocide. It is not that Palestine didn't deserve it, it's that nobody deserves that. Human rights are not privileges.

This isn't even just Palestine. Genocide enjoyers who are tankies will mention Ukrainian nazis, or genocide enjoyers who are catholic will mention Aztec human sacrifices, and these are not things I care about. They are not arguments I care about, because they presuppose there is a case where genocide is justified.

You have to look beyond the small scale case of not supporting a single genocide, and move to not supporting genocide as ever being an acceptable action.

[resistancemarxistblog]

[resistancemarxistblog]

4th National Conference of the Socialist Workers Party (Australia), 1976. Not sure who the speaker is.

[resistancemarxistblog]

[resistancemarxistblog]

The Nazis rejected Marxism and Communism but sections of the early Nazis were functionally 'reactionary socialists', they supported Socialism that replaced class struggle with national struggle, that's what's meant by 'National Socialism'. Early fascists (in Europe) in part came out of the workers movement (e.g. the Cercle Proudhon & Mussolini) but were a deeply reactionary and right-wing section of it, they eventually split from it when they make their pushes to seize power off the back of restoring class rule.

Most of the modern rightwing are not fundamentally the same as the Nazis, that's just reducing fascism to bad vibes. Plenty of rightwingers are willing to make concessions to Nazis (who, for the record, constitute a marginal section of the rightwing in most places with only a few exceptions - like Greece, Poland, Germany and France &c) because all they really care about is maintaining strict class rule, they don't really care who is the one wielding the stick as long as the stick is wielded.

Nazi occultism was fringe at the time (1920s-1940s), but sections of the early NSDAP came from the occultist Thule Society. Nazi occultism is mostly a product of neo-Nazi revival groups in the 60s and 70s which yes had overlap with neo-Pagans (Rodnovery for example was pioneered in the 50s by a Russian neo-Nazi, Alexey Dobrovolsky. It turns out when you frame your religion in terms of being a "native faith" or "ancestral traditional whatever" it really lends itself well to fascism!) and Satanist types.

Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

Referring to things as "leftism" is a pretty recent thing. Socialists 100 years ago didn't really view themselves as being "a form of leftism", or referred to "leftism" as a thing at all. They viewed themselves as "The Left" in the classical French Revolution way. The Nazis didn't sell themselves as being "anti-leftist" they sold themselves as being anti-communist, anti-Jewish, pro-German, pro-Christian, etc.

But yes, pop culture depictions of anything aren't indicative of reality. The point of it is to standardise culture, mass produce it as a product, and to hammer people into believing certain things in a certain way.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

-Society of the Spectacle

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.

-Enlightenment as Mass Deception

also:

What is National Socialism?

Fascism: What it is and How to fight it

Report on Fascism

Thalheimer: On Fascism

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[resistancemarxistblog]

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)

[resistancemarxistblog]

"Late stage capitalism" and Imperialism as Capitalism's "highest stage" are unrelated concepts.

Read Adorno: Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?

"late stage capitalism"?

You mean imperialism?

[resistancemarxistblog]

'15 minute cities' as a concept are just urbanist rubbish that exist solely to restructure capitalist society and it's propose as a 'false alternative'. it may be a 'leftist idea' (what even is a 'leftist idea'?) but it certainly isn't one worth investing much effort in.

developers are capitalists. urban planners are bureaucrats in the capitalist system. none of this is beneficial to people. it is solely a scheme to streamline consumerism.

the solution is easier said than done and is historically controversial: abolish cities. stop the consolidation and centralisation of people into increasingly cramped, over-sized urban metropoles.

The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically then Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this. When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis. And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own filth for at least thirty years.

On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of the means of communication — presupposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production — would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished; the utopia begins when one undertakes "from existing conditions" to prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of present-day society is to be solved.

On the abolition of the antithesis between town and country, F. Engels

Also read: The human species and the Earth's crust, A. Bordiga

Eco Modernism, 'Left Urbanism', &c are at best misguided attempts to maintain urban society at the expense of the climate/&c and at worst it is selling the false hope of some "solarpunk" utopia where you have your cake and eat it too.

I don’t want to start an internet fight with that OP or anyone in the comments agreeing with that OP on this post:

But I also don’t want ppl to think that I uncritically reblogged this post. So, I’m posting my tags in my own post:

#Then that’s not a fifteen minute city#the workers in a given area would live 15 mins from where they work too#it’s about multiuse/mixed use buildings and zoning#‘My hot take on 15 minute cities is I don’t actually know what a 15 minute city is…#…but I assume it’s something for them uppity kids rather than something that is centering the living conditions of the worker.’#NYC is not a fifteen minute city. Even if a rich mega-millionaire can reach his Pilates and fancy coffee 5 mins from his house#most cities aren’t 15 min cities#most cities rn operate as the Twitter user assumes 15 min cities operate#It’s a climate solution that’s MEANT to cut down on commuting#if the barista has to commute far and unnecessarily then it’s not a 15 min city#in a 15-minute city a person can access key things in their life#— like work. food. schools and recreation —#within a short walk. bike. or bus/metro ride of their home#the whole IDEA is that WORKERS should be able to access their WORK w/in a short time w/o a lengthy and consuming commute#🤦‍♂️ this is what happens when decent leftist ideas get co-opted by conspiracy theorists

15 minute cities require a wealth of housing to be effective. Because that’s the whole point. People LIVE closely to their lives, like work and school and stores and recreation. Don’t let people convince you that environmental justice is at odds with worker’s rights. They *are* compatible. Climate justice includes job justice and labor rights.

Also, pretty sure Gareth Klieber is not a real person and this is not a real quote. But that conclusion is based on a very cursory search as I was double-checking whether this Gareth character is, like, an economist or urban developer or something as opposed to an influencer or something. This name has no publications or articles on urban planning, no credentials, and no anything really associated with it except this meme.

[resistancemarxistblog]

"Why Communism and Religion are incompatible"

Religion is the opium of the people,' said Karl Marx. It is the task of the Communist Party to make this truth comprehensible to the widest possible circles of the labouring masses. It is the task of the party to impress firmly upon the minds of the workers, even upon the most backward, that religion has been in the past and still is today one of the most powerful means at the disposal of the oppressors for the maintenance of inequality, exploitation, and slavish obedience on the part of the toilers.

Many weak-kneed communists reason as follows: 'Religion does not prevent my being a communist. I believe both in God and in communism. My faith in God does not hinder me from fighting for the cause of the proletarian revolution.'

This train of thought is radically false. Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically.

Every communist must regard social phenomena (the relationships between human beings, revolutions, wars, etc.) as processes which occur in accordance with definite laws. The laws of social development have been fully established by scientific communism on the basis of the theory of historical materialism which we owe to our great teachers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This theory explains that social development is not brought about by any kind of supernatural forces. Nay more. The same theory has demonstrated that the very idea of God and of supernatural powers arises at a definite stage in human history, and at another definite stage begins to disappear as a childish notion which finds no confirmation in practical life and in the struggle between man and nature. But it is profitable to the predatory class to maintain the ignorance of the people and to maintain the people's childish belief in miracles (the key to the riddle really lies in the exploiters' pockets), and this is why religious prejudices are so tenacious, and why they confuse the minds even of persons who are in other respects able.

The general happenings throughout nature are, moreover, in no wise dependent upon supernatural causes. Man has been extremely successful in the struggle with nature. He influences nature in his own interests, and controls natural forces, achieving these conquests, not thanks to his faith in God and in divine assistance, but in spite of this faith. He achieves his conquests thanks to the fact that in practical life and in all serious matters he invariably conducts himself as an atheist. Scientific communism, in its judgements concerning natural phenomena, is guided by the data of the natural sciences, which are in irreconcilable conflict with all religious imaginings.

In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith. The tactic of the Communist Party prescribes for the members of the party definite lines of conduct. The moral code of every religion in like manner prescribes for the faithful some definite line of conduct. For example, the Christian code runs: 'Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' In most cases there is an irreconcilable conflict between the principles of communist tactics and the commandments of religion. A communist who rejects the commandments of religion and acts in accordance with the directions of the party, ceases to be one of the faithful. On the other hand, one who, while calling himself a communist, continues to cling to his religious faith, one who in the name of religious commandments infringes the prescriptions of the party, ceases thereby to be a communist.

The struggle with religion has two sides, and every communist must distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have the struggle with the church, as a special organization existing for religious propaganda, materially interested in the maintenance of popular ignorance and religious enslavement. On the other hand we have the struggle with the widely diffused and deeply ingrained prejudices of the majority of the working population.

N. Bukharin & E. Preobrazhenky, ABC of Communism, Chapter 11: Communism and Religion

[resistancemarxistblog]

they're mostly going after tiktok because it's foreign owned. if they were going after social media platforms for being pro palestine, they'd also target youtube, twt, tumblr, &c.

won't deny that tiktok being permissive abt palestine content is part of it, but the main motivation is just that tiktok isn't owned by american capitalists.

would be very funny to watch the US state try and ban youtube, or facebook, &c.

All this really proves is that Communists need to stop relying on corporate platforms, stop staring at their screens 24/7 and get out there.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[resistancemarxistblog]

not that i enjoy nitpicking like this but the HRE was basically a moribund entity past the 17th century, that's why it basically folds over and abolishes itself by the time of napoleon (early 19th century). by the 1700s (at least the late 1700s) "feudalism" was functionally dead in europe although there was still of course widespread absolutism

capitalism was already on the way to becoming well established by the 1700s. should've just said 'late 1500s voice' instead. there

[person in the late 1700s voice] and just when are you going to end feudalism? the holy roman emperor will just send hundreds of thousands of troops to quell your rebellions. we aren't getting anywhere like this, and haven't you heard the monarchs are adopting enlightened ideas anyway? there have been no successful capitalist states, all of the attempts have turned into failures or have installed a new monarch

[resistancemarxistblog]

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[resistancemarxistblog]

During the Spanish revolution and the ensuing civil war, Spanish workers and peasants engaged in anti-clerical violence against the Church that spent centuries raping, molesting, murdering, beating, abusing, and oppressing them.

[resistancemarxistblog]

[resistancemarxistblog]

realllll as hellllll