#struggles of the proletariat

[lasttarrasque]

Friendly reminder that today is not Labor Day, instead it is the day arbitrarily picked by the United States and attempt to obfuscate the real Labor Day, May 1st. May the first celebrates the achievement of the 8 hour work day and honors the sacrifices made in the workers struggle for it. May first is Labor Day, not today

[connorthemaoist]

"To make revolution and build a socialist society, a communist vanguard party, based on the principles of democratic centralism, is necessary to lead the entire process. The main purpose of the OCR is to build such a Party, by recruiting and training a critical mass of dedicated and disciplined communist cadre and developing a Party Programme with a class analysis of US society, a strategy for revolution in the US, and concrete policies to be implemented after the revolutionary seizure of power and with the onset of the socialist transition to communism. The requisite cadre and Programme that signal the foundation of a Party can only be built through developing deep ties among the masses, most especially the lower and deeper sections of the proletariat, and through leadership of the class struggle."

[bklynmusicnerd]

All I can say after watching that episode is that it's been clear all year that this show is feeling the loss of Cam, after downplaying his value and acting like he could be easily replaced with a sex robot.

As a fan of the working class king, the struggle to fill the void created with his absence has been amusing.

[misty1111]

The prices of groceries are absolutely insane. And it’s all because of corporate greed! I’m so poor right now that I’m really struggling to just stay fed and to pay my basic bills. I fucking hate this country sometimes. They don’t protect us from the corporations and their greed at all. They just work us to the bone and exploit us constantly and it’s the status quo so it’s rarely talked about, let alone criticized, but I’m at my wits end and am so frustrated it hurts.

I’m too disabled from the abuse that I survived while being in the Navy to work a traditional job and my 100% total and permanent service related disability pension doesn’t come close to covering all the expenses that I have. And I’ve cut out damn near every expense that I don’t absolutely need and I’m still so poor that at the end of every month I’m broke for days. And that’s assuming I can even pay all of my bills as some are late right now because I just didn’t have the money to pay them.

I’m feeling so sad and defeated. It’s hard to not feel like this is some personal failure but I know that this goes way beyond just me.

To everyone else trying to survive until their next pay day, I see you, I love you, and we’re going to get through this somehow. It’s going to get better. At least I need to believe that. Fuck man.

[ceoandslutler]

sebastian is literally "eat the rich" personified, he will eat the oligarchs literally (and mayhaps figuratively too*)

[displaced-space]

Class Struggle

While Oscar the Grouch may not have been intentionally designed as a symbol of the proletariat struggle, there are some aspects of his character and circumstances that can be seen as representative of the challenges faced by the working class. Here are a few ways in which Oscar can be seen as a good example of the proletariat struggle:

Living conditions: Oscar lives in a trash can, symbolizing the poor living conditions often experienced by the working class. His home represents the struggle for affordable housing and the lack of resources available to those in the lower socioeconomic strata.

Social status: As a "grouch," Oscar is often seen as an outcast among his peers on Sesame Street. This can be interpreted as a metaphor for the social stigma and alienation faced by the working class in a society that values wealth and success.

Limited opportunities: Oscar the Grouch does not appear to have a stable job or career, which might be seen as a representation of the limited opportunities and economic instability faced by the proletariat.

Resistance to change: Oscar's grouchy demeanor and resistance to change can be seen as a reflection of the frustration and hopelessness experienced by the working class as they struggle to break free from their oppressive circumstances.

Solidarity: Despite his grumpy personality, Oscar has moments of camaraderie and solidarity with other characters on Sesame Street. This can be seen as a nod to the importance of collective action and mutual support among the proletariat in their struggle for a better life.

It is important to note that Sesame Street's primary goal is to educate and entertain children, and the creators may not have deliberately designed Oscar the Grouch as a symbol of the proletariat struggle. However, the character does provide an interesting lens through which to view and discuss issues of class, poverty, and social justice.

[sunset-synthetica]

stalin rpf bloggers at it again smh. this is why westerners will never truly understand communism /j

HELP ME

[jingerpi]

i know it sounds made up but studying Marxism will save you. like, understanding how and why society works the way it does and being able to have the knowledge that it wasn't always like this and one day this too will be surpassed will do wonders for your mental health. not to mention the tools for analysis and understanding can give you insight into yourself, because it does also do that, it's just that the knowledge and understanding that comes from studying socioeconomics derived from class struggle (rather than bourgeois intellectualism) recontextualizes so many of our issues and struggles that things no longer feel like they're explicitly you're fault nor do they stretch beyond our imagination infinitely into the past and beyond our futures. If you feel hopeless or confused, reading theory can genuinely help. it will solidify your understanding of the world and how to move forward, rather than simply pointing out all the problems (as many social media posts tend to) the answers are in theory.

the crazy thing is it's not just beneficial to our mental health but to our external, physical health too. learning these things can uplift the Proletariat as a class and start to bring us closer to those futures you'll become able to see. theory is a map to a better future, not only is it relieving to see there is one out there, we can actually follow it, and that's the best part.

[txttletale]

that post complaining about how first world communists want communism to improve their lives rather than being communist out of a selfless desire to improve the lot of the third world is very very silly. socialism isn't about some abstract principle of selflessness, it's about organising the proletariat in class struggle. thinking socialism would improve your life as a proletarian is called "class consciousness" and it's good.

[appalachianpirate]

One Piece is special because Oda will introduce Bozo McStupidface, former chief chucklehead of Weird Freak Island and make you cry uncontrollably over their tragic backstory of family, genocide, disease and proletariat struggle.

[determinate-negation]

"Jewish Marxists have always rejected Zionism. In 1906, a leading member of the Bund published this polemic in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy. "A national economy would mean a territory where the Jewish people — and in the capitalist mode of production: the Jewish bourgeoisie — form the majority and oppress peoples who are in the minority, just as they have been oppressed until now." "Do the Zionist socialists intend to introduce … exceptional laws for immigrant, non-Jewish workers?"

Many people claim that Zionism and Judaism are identical, as if the Jewish people, for thousands of years, had obviously longed to return to Jerusalem. Yet Zionism is a relatively new political movement — a product of the era of bourgeois nationalism and colonialism. Theodor Herzl's programmatic manifesto only appeared in 1896, at a time when Jewish socialist groups had been active in London and other cities for more than two decades. Long before anyone thought of colonizing Palestine, Jewish revolutionaries had been fighting for socialism.

Zionism was far from hegemonic among Europe's Jews. In the largest Jewish communities, in the Pale of Settlement on the western edge of the Tsarist Empire, far more Jewish people were drawn to socialism. The most important organization of the Jewish proletariat was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, or the "Bund" for short. The Bund opposed the Zionist program of emigration with a program of class struggle and "doikayt," or hereness.

Herzl's Zionism was bourgeois, and he sought support from the Tsar's antisemitic ministers, the organizers of terrible pogroms — he saw they had a common interest in getting Jews to leave the Empire and stay away from revolutionary organizations. After the 1905 revolution, the rise of class struggle in Russia and the radicalization of Jewish workers led to the emergence of various hybrid forms of socialism and Zionism. "Socialist Zionism" was founded by Ber Borochov, and its most important organization was Poale Zion (The Workers of Zion).

Poale Zion had a contradictory program: sometimes it said that Jewish workers should focus on emigrating to Palestine in order to build a socialist society there; at other times its emphasized class struggle, while the construction of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land was declared to be a goal for the distant future. Due to this contradiction, Poale Zion did not last long; after the Russian Revolution, the left wing joined the Communist International, while the right wing became a reformist and colonialist party that founded the State of Israel.

In this 1906 essay, Chaim Yakov Gelfand, a leading member of the Bund, explained why socialist Zionism was a reactionary utopia. Socialism and Zionism were fundamentally incompatible: the former depended on the political independence of the working class, whereas the latter required long-term collaboration with both the Jewish bourgeoisie and with the imperialist colonial powers. This text appeared in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy, edited by Karl Kautsky. In his own book on the question from 1914, Kautsky also declared that oppressed Jewish workers should aim for a "revolution in Russia" instead of emigration to Palestine.

Gelfand's essay is tragically prophetic. Even in 1906, it was clear that Palestine was far from uninhabited, and that the establishment of an exclusively Jewish nation-state would inevitably lead to conflicts with the indigenous population. Marxists understood that colonization would create new forms of oppression and also new hatred against Jews. Gelfand made clear that a Jewish state could only be built in cooperation with imperialism and would therefore never be socialist.

It's interesting to read about the progressive ideals of sections of the early Zionist movement, prior to the foundation of the State of Israel. The contradictions of this "socialist" colonial project proved to be insurmountable. Over the decades, numerous young Jewish activists turned away from socialist Zionism and joined the Trotskyist movement — in some cases only after arriving in Palestine.

The most famous of them is undoubtedly Abraham Leon, a scholar-warrior who wrote a Marxist history of the Jewish people while leading the underground fight against the Nazis in Belgium, before being murdered at Auschwitz at 26. Left-wing Zionists from Berlin such as Martin Monath and Rudolf Segall also became Trotskyists — the former in exile in Belgium, the latter while working at a kibbutz in Palestine. Both, like many other former Zionists, became leaders of the Fourth International.

Today, the internationalist traditions of Jewish revolutionaries are being erased. This text, in its first English translation, is a reminder that Zionism is only a small and controversial part of Jewish history. Jewish-led protests against the war in Gaza are reviving these internationalist traditions."

[apas-95]

I get the rhetorical purpose of the whole 'your tax dollars' argument, in connecting the international struggle to the local struggle, and demonstrating that the proletariat of an imperialist nation do not have common interest with 'their' bourgeoisie, but also

you should all kill yourselves

[mesetacadre]

(sorry in advance for the more personal ask, you're the most intelligent person i know of when it comes to these things)

genuinely, how are we supposed to find the strength to go on? it feels like capitalism has won. only a few decades ago my country was openly and proudly socialist, and now we're nothing but an american military base with an economy. everything's been privatised, the unions are broken, the people are starving, and we keep voting for more of this! people are gleefully begging for yet more exploitation! sometimes it feels there's not a drop of class consciousness to be found in the entire country, and that it's pointless to even hope for change. how can i stay sane?

The class struggle is not a team sport which either side can win or lose. It is a historical and economic process, one that's inevitable. As long as capitalism exists, there will be a social majority of workers it must exploit, alienation will still happen, and a portion of these workers will be aware of this fact. The class struggle is also a long process, one that, most of the time, is imperceptible to the individual in physical and time scale. Only sometimes, it accelerates to dizzying speeds and the conditions necessary for taking power are met. We can talk about victories and defeats, but we can't lose sight of the fact that those "only" are points in time, momentaneous advances or retreats in the process that is the class struggle, but they never mean the paralization of this process.

We can only really talk about the bourgeoisie taking power and creating the first properly capitalist states in the late 18th century and early 19th, but the bourgeoisie had lead or taken part in attempts at or glimpes of revolution as far back as the early 16th century. The bourgeoisie never really had an unifying theory of the class struggle, most were never really fully conscious of it. But they still eventually took power, once the development of the national economies advanced so far that it forced the replacement of the feudal mode of production, the bourgeois revolutions became inevitable. Marx and Engels only ever saw one real attempt at the proletariat taking power, in the Paris Commune of 1871, but it only ever lasted a few months. They both were long dead when the first actually (relatively) long-lasting instance of the proletariat in power broke the oppressor classes' veneer of invincibility.

When Marxists talk of inevitability it is not in a conspiratorial manner, or an expression of satisfied optimism, we never mean that "one day the capitalists will get what's coming to them", in a vague way. We mean that, only if communists continue to work towards the revolutionary organization of our class, is a complete overthrow of capitalism inevitable. We should all do an exercise is historical perspective when it comes to analyzing progress, take the Marx and Engels example from the previous paragraph, they never got to see an effective application of their theories. Class consciousness will fluctuate continuously, it always has. The bolshevik party in 1913 had nothing to do with the party that lead the October Revolution, and 8 years after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, I bet many felt like their work was hopeless. My point is that, while the borders of the Communist Party may shrink, grow, or even disappear, and while we might be savagely oppressed, no system of oppression has ever lasted forever.

When it comes to revolutions, there are objective and subjective conditions. The objective we can never control; it's the stability of capitalism, the characteristics of its suprastructure, if there is a crisis or not. The subjective is what's under our control; our own work as communists, the state of the revolutionary party, the degree of influence of communists at the core of the working class. These two sets of conditions interact with one another, with the objective conditions influencing the possibility of development of the subjective conditions much more than the reverse. What makes you hopeless is in part the objective conditions. Capitalism is quite stable right now (though not as much as it ever seems), and, for now, we can't do much about it, because the subjective conditions, the other part of your homelessness, are also very delayed. But these we do have control over, at first very little, but as they improve, the control we have over them also increases. Essentially, friend, all we can do is prepare our class, do our best to gain more workers to our cause, bit by bit, so that once capitalism shows one of its cracks, we can be ready to pry those cracks open and bust the whole system. The Russian soldiers in WW1 were already discontent when the bolsheviks began to agitate up to the trenches, Mao's guerrillas grew to an army taking advantage of the deep fragmentation China suffered throughout the first half of the century, etc.

Once again, class struggle is not a straight line that we move in two directions. It is a complex space. The overthrow of the USSR was a very profound blow to revolutionary organizations all around the world, of course, but the state of communism in general in 1995 was still in a much better position than it was merely 90 years prior. Every defeat also sharpens the tactics and strategies we use. Eastern Europe (where I assume you're from) did use to be socialist, and those worker's states were overthrown. But you are still in a better position than a communist in the interwar period, facing borderline fascistic dictatorship and a future of Nazi-Fascist occupation. They did not have any precedent or much practical experience to learn from, but you do. Every day that we delay work, even in the most hopeless of contexts, is a day more that our grandchildren will have to bear in capitalism, and a day more they're deprived of true freedom and self-government

[hellsitegenetics]

Marxism, Ideology and socioeconomic theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The fundamental ideology of communism, it holds that all people are entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labour but are prevented from doing so in a capitalist economic system, which divides society into two classes: nonowning workers and nonworking owners. Marx called the resulting situation “alienation,” and he said that when the workers repossessed the fruits of their labour, alienation would be overcome and class divisions would cease. The Marxist theory of history posits class struggle as history’s driving force, and it sees capitalism as the most recent and most critical historical stage—most critical because at this stage the proletariat will at last arise united.

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Closest match: Thelaira solivaga genome assembly, chromosome: 2 Common name: Fly

[handweavers]

"Those who point to the lumpenproletariat as the revolutionary vanguard disregard the objective laws of historical development. In pre-capitalist societies, poverty and oppression were even greater than under capitalism. But oppression in itself, no matter how great, does not create the basis for the struggle to abolish oppression.

Because of the specific nature of exploitation under capitalism, the working class, which collectively operates the mass production process of the privately owned monopolies, is transformed into the gravedigger of the system. That is why Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”

No fundamental change—or even a challenge to the monopolists—can occur without the working class. And today the proportion of Black workers in basic industries such as steel, coal, auto, transport and others is transforming the prospects for the class struggle and Black liberation.

The degree of exploitation of Black workers is clearly much greater than that of white workers. Nevertheless, the collective form of exploitation in the decisive mass production industries is suffered by all workers. This creates the objective basis for solidarity, for their unity and leadership in the struggle against the monopolist ruling class.

At the same time, history has assigned a doubly significant role to Black workers—as the leaders and backbone of the Black liberation movement, and as a decisive component of the working class leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle as a whole.

It is the monopolists’ fear of Black, white, Brown, Yellow, Red and working class unity, which in turn can form the basis for still broader people’s unity, that is behind racism and anti-Communism, the main ideological weapons of the ruling class.

Leninism, the Marxism of the imperialist epoch, is the ideological weapon of the working class. It is the scientific guide that enables the working class to combine its struggle with national liberation movements against imperialism.

No other theory has served to free a single working class, a single people, from imperialism anywhere in the world. Beginning with the October revolution, only those guided by Marxism-Leninism have been able to free themselves from class and national oppression and take the road of socialist construction."

— "Objective Laws of Development" Henry Winston, The Crisis of the Black Panther Party (1971)

[reddest-flower]

We believe that alliances with social democracy are an opportunistic manifestation of class collaboration and a serious obstacle to revolutionary struggle; the conformation of fronts of that nature will always be a liquidating element of the Communist Party; and the absence of a communist party is the biggest attack on the working class and its immediate and historical objectives.

There are, for example, expressions of those alliances that have no justification, and one of them is support for the Democratic Party of the US Communist Party. And it is that when the perspective of the interests of the working class is set aside and the logic of the “lesser evil” is placed even the imperialist policy of the Democratic Party may seem better to the imperialist policy of the Republican Party. Thus several communist parties justify their support for bourgeois policies under the pretext of struggle against the "ultra-right" and fascism.

We have great respect for the communists' policy against fascism during World War II, but we cannot deny that some elements of that policy are connected to browderism, to the opportunist platform of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, to Eurocommunism, and in some way they form a platform of certain similarities to that of opportunism in the II International.

It is a paradox that those who oppose the elaboration of a unified revolutionary strategy hold a common opportunist strategy on the grounds that the generalization of experience excludes the importance of national struggle, the specificities, the particularities; as a contraband they have a general strategy based on the possibility of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism - which has already demonstrated its unfeasibility in Chile and in the strongholds of Eurocommunism (Italy and France); in national ways to socialism, all of them with the same components: denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat, alliance with social democracy, pluriclassist political formations, capitalist management of economy, elevation of bourgeois democracy to absolute value, or if to put it roughly, that the communists manage the governments of capitalism.

Communist Party of Mexico (PCM), Our Tribute to the Communist International: Keeping the Flag of Proletarian Internationalism High, 2020