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Capitalists: Curing patients not profitable Straight from the mouth of the class enemy without any filtering

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Fake MDGs

From an article “The true extent of global poverty and hunger: Questioning the good news narrative of the Millennium Development Goals“ by Jason Hickel published in an academic journal:

“The final report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concludes that the project has been ‘the most successful anti-poverty movement in history’. Two key claims underpin this narrative: that global poverty has been cut in half, and global hunger nearly in half, since 1990. This good-news narrative has been touted by the United Nations and has been widely repeated by the media. But closer inspection reveals that the UN’s claims about poverty and hunger are misleading, and even intentionally inaccurate. The MDGs have used targeted statistical manipulation to make it seem as though the poverty and hunger trends have been improving when in fact they have worsened. In addition, the MDGs use definitions of poverty and hunger that dramatically underestimate the scale likely of these problems. In reality, around four billion people remain in poverty today, and around two billion remain hungry – more than ever before in history, and between two and four times what the UN would have us believe. The implications of this reality are profound. Worsening poverty and hunger trends indicate that our present model of development is not working and needs to be fundamentally rethought.”

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John Brown / Old Brown

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Socialism in a nutshell

Summary of Marxism, socialism, communism:

The forms of society that currently exist are not the result of “nature”; society goes through different forms of society, with different class relations. There was a feudal class system; that system was abolished by the capitalist revolutions, which established a capitalist class system.

The capitalist class system that we live in, is not a society of equals, but rather is divided fundamentally, between the capitalists, which own society’s infrastructure and large corporations; such as the factories, power plants, railroads, mines, retail centers and so on, on one hand, the workers, on the other hand, who work in these. There are also the intermediary classes, such as small business owners.

The system is set up so that the class composition involves a division between many workers and few capitalists, and this cannot change without the abolition of the system.

Capitalism is, due to the logic of the very system, ruled by an insatiable drive of profit, as well as a chaotic market, in which each business does whatever it wants to increase its own profit without caring for society in general. Capitalist businesses compete with each other. This results in fewer and fewer businesses controlling more and more of the market.

Wealth is held by increasingly few businesses, families and persons; as time goes on, wealth and income inequality gets worse. While the national income of a country might increase, capitalists get more of the share, and workers get less of it.

While capitalism in its initial stage results in large economic growth, it eventually decays; the most advanced capitalist countries experience stagnating economic growth.

In order to keep growing economically, capitalists must find new markets. The competition that occurred between businesses on a national scale now occurs between capitalists, and between countries, on a world scale.

The search for new markets involves all sorts of increased economic exploitation of poor countries. An “imperialist” system of society is formed, where a few countries dominate many countries and exploit them economically.

As the capitalists play around desperately trying to find new markets, war is an inevitable product. War sets up the potential for profit in every way, and capitalists are interested in it, when it seems profitable. Such a war is not the result of “natural” national antagonisms between the people; but rather such national antagonisms are cooked up by the capitalists as a justification for the war.

The state (sum of all government institutions: executive, legislative, police, military, ...), is not neutral, but rather the “executive committee of the ruling class”; it is the capitalist state, ruling in the interests of the capitalists. It cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the workers.

The only way to end capitalism is when the workers seize power, smashing the power of the capitalist state, and substituting it by a new workers state. The workers must associate in local councils, which allow for discussions, voting on daily affairs and elections, and which later become a basis for a national workers state. The national government is elected by the local workers councils. The workers state seizes all industry and large corporations and operates them on the basis of a centralized, coordinated economic plan for the whole nation, drawn up by the government. Just like the capitalists operate planning for one business, so the government plans for the whole nation.

National workers states would eventually unite in an international union of workers states. Workers must search for the highest unity among the workers including at the international level. Capitalism is a world system, and can only be replaced by a new world system. Capitalism cannot co-exist with another system on the world level; eventually, one will fall.

This would end capitalist competition; the economy would be operated for the needs of people as appraised by the workers government. It would end the division of society in classes which has existed in the past, providing for a new equal society. The rules of the new society, where it is the government and not individuals who own industry, would not allow for a new class system. The economy would be run on the basis of a coordinated plan, and not on the chaos of the capitalist market. There would be no drive for profit. As capitalism disappears as the international system, war also disappears.

The economy, up to now, produced enough to fulfill everyone’s basic survival needs, yet it did not do so due to the capitalist system under which fulfilling such thing is not profitable; now it is freed from the drive for profit. Coordinated, international economic plans would allow for massive economic growth. Everyone would be provided with everything that they need, and on top of that, economic growth would allow for providing more. As the living standards of the population increases, crime decreases. Fewer and fewer people see a need for engaging in risky criminal actions when they already have the things that they need for a decent life. Violence starts disappearing. The need for a government to have repressive and violent features disappears. Eventually, only the functions of the government which serve social needs of managing society remains, repression disappears. Suddenly we have a society with no class system, no repressive government. We have communism.

The Russian revolution in 1917 initially established a workers state that later lost its original principles; but it never progressed to socialism or communism. The Russian revolution was only the opening shot of the world revolution to replace capitalism on a world stage.

The experience of the Russian revolutionaries demonstrated that those who are dedicated and willing to work for the revolution must educate themselves in a party of the most advanced and dedicated revolutionaries, the “vanguard party”. Such a vanguard party will seek to gain the trust of the workers and it is a fundamental instrument in leading them to abolish the capitalist state and replace it by a democratic workers state. The vanguard party would function on a democratic-centralist fashion: everyone who is a member has a right to freely debate and vote on things, but once common actions are agreed upon, everyone must carry them out if they wish to remain a member.

The experience of the Russian revolution also demonstrated, that under exceptional circumstances, a clique of people (Stalinists) can seize power, and substitute the democratic workers state by the dictatorship of one clique. This made further progress impossible, until this situation was resolved. However, government ownership of the businesses remained, and was not immediately abolished. Under such circumstances, as communism is incompatible with a dictatorship of one clique, only two things can happen: either capitalist property will eventually return, as it did to Russia in the 1990s, or democracy will return to the workers state, allowing for the opening of a path to progress to communism. In the mean time, this “degenerated workers state” may expand internationally (East Germany, Poland, Hungary...), and be compelled to abolish capitalist relations; the contradiction is extended to more countries.

In such a situation with a “degenerated workers state”, the duty of revolutionaries is to protect the abolition of capitalist property as much as they can, and to support the workers state in any conflict against the capitalists, while simultaneously seeking to establish a democracy based on workers councils. Such was the position of the Trotskyists.

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Look around you...

If a person looks around the U.S., will they see any slaves?

Surely not, since slavery was smashed by the Second American Revolution, also called the “Civil War”. Anti-oppression fighters like John Brown’s actions led to the intensification of tensions which eventually provoked that revolution.

The revolution smashed slavery and therefore introduced a whole new social system, one in which there are no slaves.

The social order of a society is not constant as has been set by some inviolable “law of nature”, but rather the class structure can change, and changes with revolutions, until such a point that class society is abolished.

No matter how much the capitalist ideologues might try to make people believe that the exploitation of humans by other humans is inevitable and that society will always be based on human against human rather than cooperation, such a thing is clearly proven false by the reality around us.

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The Power of Unions (U.S.)

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Capitalism Britain

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STOP USA ATTACK AGAINST SYRIA! STOP USA AGGRESSION AGAINST SYRIA, RUSSIA, CHINA! The USA imperialist warmonger rulers are nothing but mass murdering maniacs obsessed with the despicable action of tearing the blood out of people! For anti-imperialist class struggle! For socialist workers revolution to bring down the imperialist beast from within! Defend China bureaucratically deformed workers state!

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This is great material for explaining the problems with Maoism and why Trotskyism is genuine revolutionary Bolshevik-Leninism.

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Zionist Bloodbath in Gaza (Workers Vanguard)

APRIL 2—The “Bloody Friday” assault by Israeli troops against Palestinian protesters in Gaza has left at least 18 dead and some 1,500 wounded, nearly half of them by live ammunition. Dozens more have since been injured. All the Palestinians killed and wounded were in Gaza, some shot down for simply seeking to plant their national flag on their own land. It was the worst single massacre since the 51-day Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014 in which over 2,000 Palestinians were slain.

The March 30 attack was a pre-planned bloodbath against a defenseless population trapped in Gaza, an open-air concentration camp, imprisoned on all sides by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. In the days leading up to the protests, which numbered some 30,000 Palestinian men, women and children, the Israeli army deployed 100 snipers and several infantry brigades and chillingly made clear that there would be blood. After the massacre, a tweet on the Israeli military’s official account—later deleted—coldly stated: “Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.” The slaughter can be seen on social media: a youth running alongside two others suddenly falls to the ground with the crack of gunfire; a man shot as he prayed. Even before protests began, troops opened fire with artillery shells, killing a farmer as he worked his land.

As usual, the U.S. imperialists backed the Israeli government’s mass murder, including by blocking a token United Nations condemnation. For his part, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu enthused: “Well done to our soldiers.” Several hundred Israelis have protested the carnage. In a piece titled, “The Israel Massacre Forces” (Haaretz, 1 April), Israeli journalist Gideon Levy aptly noted: “The killing of Palestinians is accepted in Israel more lightly than the killing of mosquitoes. There’s nothing cheaper in Israel than Palestinian blood.”

Palestinian organizers set the protests to begin on March 30, which marks Land Day, when Zionist troops in 1976 shot dead six Palestinians in Israel demonstrating against the expropriation of Arab land for Jewish settlements. The Gaza protests, known as the Great March of Return, are set to culminate on May 15, Nakba Day, which commemorates the Catastrophe of 1948 when 80 percent of Palestinians were driven out of what became the state of Israel. Adding insult to injury, the U.S. government provocatively plans to move its embassy to Jerusalem in mid May.

We Marxists fully support the right of the dispossessed Palestinian masses to return to the homes, villages and towns from which they were expelled. For this demand to be realized requires the shattering of the Zionist state from within through proletarian revolution. The Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish nations are interpenetrated peoples, both laying claim to the same portion of land. Under capitalism, the exercise of the national rights of one necessarily comes at the expense of the national rights of the other. Only within the context of a socialist federation of the Near East—i.e., the overthrow of capitalist rule throughout the region—can the conflicting national claims of the Palestinians and Israelis be equitably resolved. Defend the Palestinian people! Hands off Gaza! Down with the blockade! All Israeli troops and settlers out of East Jerusalem and the West Bank!

http://icl-fi.org/english/wv/1131/gaza.html

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Wal Mart corporate totalitarianism

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Pathetic intellectuals and the truth

In this capitalist society, there are people, including “scientists” and “academicians”, who provide ideologization to the effect that “biological realities” supposedly are what make the poor poor, what produce inequalities among men and women, among the races, and so on.

Their aim is but to justify capitalist society as “biologically determined”, and any other form of society as impossible.

These pathetic creeps claim to have “cracked the code”, posturing as high-horse intellectuals, knowing the “truth” of life as determined by “biological” reality. They claim that behind the “behavior” that drives inequalities, such as that between the classes, gender and race, there are “biological truths”, “evolutionary determined interests”, and so on, that make equality impossible.

But there is one interest on Earth that truly determines realities as far as such things are concerned. Such interest is the class interest, the totalitarian dictatorship of capital and the banks, which requires an idea system to promote its rule.

Such intellectuals are then revealed as nothing but scribblers for the ruling class. Their writings are nothing but ex post facto (subsequent) justifications for the tyrannical rule of a rich minority. They will be relegated to the dustbin of history when a new and better society comes, but in the mean-time they can be useful as a reliable laughing stock.

Paraphrasing the mighty Lenin, they claim to be the brains of society but are actually its excrement. They posture as those of highest intelligence, but their method is nothing but that of idealism, thus their “articles” hardly differ from religious ravings when deeply analyzed.

They claim to understand that it is “truths” and “realities” driving behavior, but the reality is that they posture as if it is the idea system of capitalism that determines biological behavior and realities. The fact that they aim to conceal this by claiming to believe just the opposite is nothing but the most thinly veiled excuse. What they say is “biological realities” is in fact derived from the ideas of capitalism; they then proceed to write such ideas as if forming the backbone of biology and life on Earth.

But paraphrasing Marx, “every ruling class believes that its ideas are an eternal truth, an unchangeable law of life”, and the capitalists and their various agents are not saved from this arrogant predicament.

The splendorous working class revolution will prove in reality what the actual truth is just as it has in the past. With the revolutionary trumpets blaring and the glorious red troops on parade on the streets, the truth will then be spoken to the masses through loudspeakers and red posters.

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So, right from the beginning the war was waged under the motto of Russian nationalism. And that hindered the mass desertion of German units going over to fight alongside their Soviet class brothers against the common class enemy, the German bourgeoisie. With this, the Stalinists also managed to displace the October Revolution as the goal the Soviet working class identified with and to replace it with the Great Patriotic War. This went along with the elimination by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the entire layer of Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution. According to the propaganda spread in the Red Army and the working class, the Germans were all fascists, the Wehrmacht was a fascist army, etc. That is why at Stalingrad there were posters and inscriptions in Russian (also documented in the museum in Berlin-Karlshorst) such as: “How Many Germans Did You Kill Today?” and “No German Should Leave Stalingrad Alive.” Later the Red Army distributed leaflets to the German soldiers to get them to capitulate, but the example of capitulation they gave was that of Hitler-loyal, arch-reactionary General Field Marshal Paulus, who had commanded the German troops in Stalingrad. They also founded the National Committee for a Free Germany, with Graf [Count] von Einsiedel at its head, in order to demonstrate, in line with the popular- front policy, that they did not want revolution but a settlement with the bourgeoisie. Other leaflets said that soldiers who did not surrender would be killed. This had nothing to do with revolutionary internationalist propaganda, which would have exploited the fact that the soldiers they faced were German workers who may have been the children of Communists, or perhaps even Communists themselves. There was a big anti-German hate campaign by Ilya Ehrenburg, a Jewish Soviet author, who became the mouthpiece for Stalin’s own nationalist campaign. Although it was dropped after the Red Army reached Germany, the content of the Stalinist policy did not significantly change.

German Trotskyists on World War II German Imperialism and the Lie of “Collective Guilt” The Red Army Smashed the Nazi Regime! Workers Revolution Will Avenge the Victims of the Holocaust! (Workers Vanguard)