The Actor of the Year Award goes to this French pro-Israel politician, who turns into a clown by staging an attack on himself at a pro-Palestine protest.

theredstream

The biggest Amazon strike in history is underway, and Starbucks workers are rising up as well. Workers are hitting the capitalists when it hurts the most: the busy holiday season. Meanwhile, police are serving Jeff Bezos by breaking picket lines and arresting workers.

theredstream

Monument to Ho Chi Minh in Moscow by sculptor V.E. Tsigal and architect R.G. Kananin. The monument was unveiled on 18 May 1990. On the pedestal are inscribed the words of Ho Chi Minh: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom".

A "Defend the Soviet Union" rally in New York, 1920s.

Fidel Castro plays basketball in Krakow, Poland, 1972

Che Guevara at a chess tournament in Havana, Cuba, 1965

Soldiers of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. 1919

Postage stamp dedicated to the centenary of Vladimir Lenin's birth. Yemen Arab Republic (also known as North Yemen), 1970

Today marks the birth of Joseph Stalin, born on December 21, 1879, a figure whose leadership was deeply intertwined with the monumental achievements of the working class. Under his tenure, the Soviet proletariat transformed their nation through collective labor, building an industrial base that ensured economic independence and self-reliance. The collective efforts of workers and peasants brought about widespread collectivization, aimed at dismantling feudal remnants and empowering rural communities. During the Second World War, it was the resilience and sacrifice of the Soviet working class, united under a socialist framework, that delivered a decisive blow to fascism. However, after Stalin’s passing, revisionist policies undermined these hard-fought gains, reversing much of the progress made by the proletariat and weakening the global socialist cause.

#HappyBirthday #Stalin

@Communism

As long as workers have to deal with capitalists on an individual basis they remain veritable slaves who must work continuously to profit another in order to obtain a crust of bread, who must for ever remain docile and inarticulate hired servants. But when the workers state their demands jointly and refuse to submit to the money-bags, they cease to be slaves, they become human beings, they begin to demand that their labour should not only serve to enrich a handful of idlers, but should also enable those who work to live like human beings. The slaves begin to put forward the demand to become masters, not to work and live as the landlords and capitalists want them to, but as the working people themselves want to. Strikes, therefore, always instil fear into the capitalists, because they begin to undermine their supremacy. “All wheels stand still, if your mighty arm wills it,” a German workers’ song says of the working class. And so it is in reality: the factories, the landlords’ land, the machines, the railways, etc., etc., are all like wheels in a giant machine—the machine that extracts various products, processes them, and delivers them to their destination. The whole of this machine is set in motion by the worker who tills the soil, extracts ores, makes commodities in the factories, builds houses, work shops, and railways. When the workers refuse to work, the entire machine threatens to stop. Every strike reminds the capitalists that it is the workers and not they who are the real masters—the workers who are more and more loudly proclaiming their rights. Every strike reminds the workers that their position is not hopeless, that they are not alone. See what a tremendous effect strikes have both on the strikers themselves and on the workers at neighbouring or nearby factories or at factories in the same industry. In normal, peaceful times the worker does his job without a murmur, does not contradict the employer, and does not discuss his condition. In times of strikes he states his demands in a loud voice, he reminds the employers of all their abuses, he claims his rights, he does not think of himself and his wages alone, he thinks of all his workmates who have downed tools together with him and who stand up for the workers’ cause, fearing no privations. Every strike means many privations for the working people, terrible privations that can be compared only to the calamities of war—hungry families, loss of wages, often arrests, banishment from the towns where they have their homes and their employment. Despite all these sufferings, the workers despise those who desert their fellow workers and make deals with the employers. Despite all these sufferings, brought on by strikes, the workers of neighbouring factories gain renewed courage when they see that their comrades have engaged themselves in struggle. “People who endure so much to bend one single bourgeois will be able to break the power of the whole bourgeoisie,” said one great teacher of socialism, Engels, speaking of the strikes of the English workers. It is often enough for one factory to strike, for strikes to begin immediately in a large number of factories. What a great moral influence strikes have, how they affect workers who see that their comrades have ceased to be slaves and, if only for the time being, have become people on an equal footing with the rich! Every strike brings thoughts of socialism very forcibly to the worker’s mind, thoughts of the struggle of the entire working class for emancipation from the oppression of capital. It has often happened that before a big strike the workers of a certain factory or a certain branch of industry or of a certain town knew hardly anything and scarcely ever thought about socialism; but after the strike, study circles and associations become much more widespread among them and more and wore workers become socialists.

V. I. Lenin
On Strikes

#Lenin

@Communism