The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here. Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment requires many workers employed together in a single building, living near each other and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory. They have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary; handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall, and the immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one. The greater the town, the greater its advantages. It offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments can be built more cheaply, because of the competition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in remote country districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd, and direct communication with the markets supplying raw material or demanding finished goods. Hence the marvellously rapid growth of the great manufacturing towns. The country, on the other hand, had the advantage that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and country are in constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of the town today, wages sink so low in the country tomorrow that new investments are most profitably made there. But the centralising tendency of manufacture continues in full force, and every new factory built in the country bears in it the germ of a manufacturing town. If it were possible for this mad rush of manufacture to go on at this rate for another century, every manufacturing district of England would be one great manufacturing town, and Manchester and Liverpool would meet at Warrington or Newton; for in commerce, too, this centralisation of the population works in precisely the same way, and hence it is that one or two great harbours, such as Hull and Liverpool, Bristol and London, monopolise almost the whole maritime commerce of Great Britain.

Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most clearly observable here. Here the centralisation of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliterateded; here it has gone so far that the name Merry Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more completely with every passing day. Thus the class formerly most stable has become the most restless one. It consists today of a few remnants of a past time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes, industrial Micawbers and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune, while ninety-nine become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine live by perpetually repeated failure.

But in these towns the proletarians are the infinite majority, and how they fare, what influence the great town exercises upon them, we have now to investigate.

Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845 The Industrial Proletariat

#Engels

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Portrait of Friedrich Engels by Alessandro Lonati

“Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.”

~The German Ideology, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

#KarlMarx #FriedrichEngels #Engels #Marx

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For this year’s best instant-karma moment, let us not forget when a racist was brilliantly shut down and put to sleep on a London train after repeatedly threatening a young Black man.

theredstream

#Good_night_right_side

15 December 1897 Scottish mill worker, songwriter and socialist Mary Brooksbank was born in Aberdeen.Growing up in poverty, her baby brother died of diphtheria before the age of three
Moving to Dundee, Brooksbank began work in jute mills aged 11,and at 14 engaged in her first strike for a pay increase after a young woman walked around the area mills blowing a whistle to call the workers out on strike
Brooksbank later got involved in opposition to World War I,and founded the Working Women Guild to fight for better health and social services, and was active in organising women workers on the railways. She was imprisoned three times in her life for her activities, which she continued until her death aged 82
Brooksbank's songs were mostly about working class life, and perhaps her most famous work,The Jute Mill, includes the lines:
"Oh dear me, the world is ill-divided,/Them that works the hardest are the least provided./I maun work the harder, dark days or fine,/Tae feed and cled my bairnies affen ten and nine."

“Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases. Our revolution is not simply for spouting slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to use them as catchwords, as codewords, as a foil for their own display. Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses of our country.”


Thomas Sankara, his aide-de-camp, pilot Etienne Zongo (to his left) and on the far left of the photo, Blaise Compaoré at a troop review, 1983.

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The Struggle for Existence, political cartoon, The Worker Newspaper, USA

Tragically, nothing has changed.

The great leftist US cartoonist Fred Wright (1907-1984) on who actually does the work!

I, Daniel Blake is a 2016 British social-realist drama directed by Ken Loach. The film tells the story of Daniel Blake, a middle-aged carpenter recovering from a heart attack, who struggles against the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the welfare system in the UK. Known for its sharp critique of austerity policies, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiiOHvyBEQY

'We Have Run Out of Body Bags to Bury the Dead' in Gaza

A relentless series of assaults in central and northern Gaza by Israeli forces, according to reports on the ground, have killed numerous civilians—including children, rescue workers, and journalist—in recent days with no end in sight.

“Because they have their strategy-the strategy of laissez­ faire; the strategy of individual versus collective effort, of appealing to that little bit of selfishness that exists in each person to beat out the rest. They appeal to that petty superiority complex that every­ one possesses that makes one think they are better than everybody else. The monopolies instill in individuals, from childhood on, the view that since you are better and work harder, that it is in your interest to struggle individually against everyone else, to defeat ev­eryone else and become an exploiter yourself.
The monopolies go to great lengths to prove that collective ef­fort enslaves and prevents the smarter and more capable from get­ting ahead. As if the people were made up simply of individuals, some more intelligent, some more capable. As if the people were something other than a great mass of wills and hearts that all have more or less the same capacity for work, the same spirit of sacrifice, and the same intelligence.
They go to the undifferentiated masses and try to sow divisions: between blacks and whites, more capable and less capable, literate and illiterate. They then subdivide people even more, until they single out the individual and make the individual the center of so­ciety.”

― Che Guevara

#CheGuevara #Capitalism

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Che Sketch, USA 1967

Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the “most just”, “purest”, most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations in the higher unity, a unity that is growing before our eyes with every mile of railway line that is built, with every international trust, and every workers’ association that is formed (an association that is international in its economic activities as well as in its ideas and aims).

The principle of nationality is historically inevitable in bourgeois society and, taking this society into due account, the Marxist fully recognises the historical legitimacy of national movements. But to prevent this recognition from becoming an apologia of nationalism, it must be strictly limited to what is progressive in such movements, in order that this recognition may not lead to bourgeois ideology obscuring proletarian consciousness.

Lenin
Critical Remarks on the National Question

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It would be wrong to think that the Second World War was a casual occurrence or the result of mistakes of any particular statesmen, though mistakes undoubtedly were made. Actually, the war was the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of modern monopoly capitalism. Marxists have declared more than once that the capitalist system of world economy harbors elements of general’s crises and armed conflicts and that, hence, the development of capitalism in our time proceeds not in the form of smooth, and even progress but through crises and military catastrophe.

... That group of capitalist countries which considers itself worse provided than others with raw materials and markets usually makes attempts to alter the situation and to repartition the “spheres of influence” in its favor by armed force. The result is a splitting of the capitalist world into two hostile camps and war between them.

Stalin

Origin and Character of the Second World War February 9, 1946

Friedrich Engels once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now,we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means.This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism ...

Rosa Luxemburg
The Junius Pamphlet

“In the so-called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of Papa Stalin and nobody can tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was considered very bad to read him, but that was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I will keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a series of things that are very good.”

Ernesto Che Guevara

#Stalin #CheGuevara

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