Che Guevara was executed on this day in 1967. Did you know that his executioner, Bolivian soldier Mario Terán, was cured of blindness by Cuban doctors?

After retiring into a life of poverty under the neoliberal governments he had defended, Terán was blinded from cataracts in his old age. Then in 2005, Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia. He brought in Cuban doctors that performed cataract surgery free of charge for working class Bolivians. Terán was among the beneficiaries.

theredstream

#CheGuevara #CubanDoctors #EvoMorales #Neoliberalism #RevolutionaryLegacy #MarioTeran #CataractSurgery #HealthcareForAll #Bolivia #Cuba

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The Revolution of 1905 undermined the tsarist autocracy. Out of a mob of muzhiks repressed by feudal slavery of accursed memory, this revolution created, for the first time in Russia, a people beginning to understand its rights, beginning to realise its strength, For the first time, the Revolution of 1905 showed the tsarist government, the Russian landowners and the Russian bourgeoisie that mil lions and tens of millions of people were becoming citizens, were becoming fighters who would no longer permit anyone to treat them like cattle, treat them as a mob. The real emancipation of the masses from oppression and tyranny has nowhere in the world ever been effected by any other means than the independent, heroic, conscious struggle of the masses themselves.

V. I. Lenin
The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fall of Serfdom

#Revolution1905 #RussianPeasantry #WorkingClassStruggle #SocialDemocracy #SecondRevolution #ClassConsciousness #MarxismLeninism #Lenin #VladLenin

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Fidel Castro beneath the iconic Guerrillero Heroico photographic portrait of Che taken by Alberto Korda in 1960

#CheGuevara #Che_Guevara #FidelCastro #Castro

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Fidel Castro on the revolutionary importance of the USSR 1970

Today there are, as we know, theoretical super-revolutionaries, super-Leftists, veritable "supermen" if you will, who can destroy imperialism in a jiffy with their tongues. There are many super-revolutionaries lacking all notions of reality about the problems and difficulties of a revolution. They are prompted by sentiments carefully fostered by imperialism and are full of fierce hatred. It is as if they refused to forgive the Soviet Union its existence, and this from "Left"-wing positions. They would like a Soviet Union shaped according to their strange model, according to their ridiculous ideals. Yet a country is primarily a reality, one made up of numerous other realities.

The exponents of these trends' forget the incredible initial difficulties of the revolutionary process in the Soviet Union, the incredible problems arising from the blockade, isolation and fascist aggression. They pretend not to know anything about all this and regard the existence of the Soviet Union as almost a crime, and this from "Left"-wing positions, which is an act of absolute dishonesty.

They forget the problems of Cuba, of Vietnam, of the Arab world. They forget that wherever imperialism is striking its blows it comes up against a country which sends the people the arms they need to defend themselves.

We recall Playa Giron these days. We well remember the anti-aircraft artillery, the tanks and guns and mortars and other weapons that enabled us to smash the mercenaries.

This means that the existence of the Soviet state is objectively one of the most extraordinary privileges of the revolutionary movement.

Fidel Castro, Granma, May 3, 1970

#SovietUnion #Castro

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"The Arrival of V. I. #Lenin in Petrograd on April 3, 1917.", #painting by Anatoly Kazantsev, 1967

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Media
On the day that most likely translates to October 13, 1157 BCE in our current calendar, the earliest recorded strike in history was first reported. The dispute is recounted in a papyrus written by a scribe named Amennakht in the ancient Egyptian town that is now called Deir el-Medina.Gangs of skilled construction workers in the employ of Pharaoh Ramses III stopped work when, 18 days after their payday, they had still not received their wages, which would have been paid in food and other goods.The workers shouted that they were hungry and sat down by a temple. Officials gave them some pastries, and they returned home, but the following day they protested once more, demanding their pay at the central grain storehouse in Thebes.Eventually they received their back pay, but the pattern of workers needing to go on strike to be paid what they were owed was repeated multiple times.workers needing to go on strike to be paid what they were owed was repeated multiple times.

Working Class History

#AncientEgypt #LaborStrike #Workers #DeirElMedina #RamsesIII #Protest #History

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Today marks the anniversary of the coup against Maurice Bishop, the socialist leader of Grenada. On this day in 1983 he was arrested by the coup’s leaders. In a speech before the coup, he laid out why the United States was conspiring against Grenada’s revolution.

theredstream

#Grenada #MauriceBishop #Coup #Socialism #Revolution #Anniversary #1983 #History

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"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Read more:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

#KarlMarx #FriedrichEngels #CommunistManifesto #ClassStruggle #Marxism #HistoricalMaterialism #RevolutionaryChange #Proletariat #Bourgeoisie #SocialChange #PoliticalPhilosophy #EconomicTheory #OppressorAndOppressed

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Mixed denomination coins in various currencies

🔴 Imperialism’s striving for expansion
✍🏻 Prabhat Patnaik

THE “inevitable striving of finance capital”, Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) “to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory”. He was writing of course in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry, where this striving took the form of a competitive struggle between rival finance capitals that speedily completed the partitioning of the world, leaving no “empty spaces”; only a repartitioning of the world was thenceforth possible, through wars among rival financial oligarchies. The wars that were actually unleashed however led to a weakening of imperialism and the splitting off of parts of the world from its hegemony, through socialist revolutions and the process of decolonisation that socialism helped to usher in.
Read more

#Imperialism #Inequality #Movements #StateRepression #Artcile

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machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)

Marx believes that machinery and mechanization should be used to reduce labor and improve the well-being of society as a whole, not to create a class of well-off individuals who benefit from the labor of workers without engaging in any real work themselves. These "well-to-do idlers" typically represent capitalists or those who derive their comfort from owning the means of production and accumulating capital rather than through their own labor.

#Capitalism #Marxism #ClassStruggle #WealthInequality #WorkersRights #EconomicJustice #LaborExploitation #KarlMarx #Marx

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"We Destroyed Our Enemy With Weapons, We Will Earn Our Bread With Labor - Everyone To Work, Comrades!"
by Nikolai Kogout, 1920.

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'Collective farm worker on a bicycle' (Russian oil on canvas #painting by Alexander Deyneka/ Deineka. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg. Soviet Union, 1935).

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