When I was a child the boys of the town never came near me except to make fun of me. I was almost always alone. Sometimes, finding me by chance among them, they hurled themselves against me, and not only with words. One day – and while he told me this his great eyes shone with an inner light - … they started to throw stones at me with more violence than usual, with the evilness which is found among children and the weak. I lost patience, and grabbing stones I too started to defend myself with such energy that my attackers were put to flight. Mario, I succeeded in beating them: I terrified them to such an extent that from that day they respected me and no longer annoyed me. I ran to my mother … and told her of my first victorious battle: she kissed me tenderly and it was the best prize that I could have wanted.
Gramsci cited in Garuglieri's Garuglieri, 'Ricordo di Gramsci.' Societa, 691-701., 1946, p. 700.
@Communism
Gramsci cited in Garuglieri's Garuglieri, 'Ricordo di Gramsci.' Societa, 691-701., 1946, p. 700.
#Gramsci #AntonioGramsci
@Communism
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The grasping, malicious, frenzied filthy avidity of the money-bags, the cowed servility of their hangers-on is the true social source of the present wail raised by the spineless intellectuals—from those of Rech to those of Novaya Zhizn— against violence on the part of the proletariat and the revolutionary peasants. Such is the objective meaning of their howls, their pathetic speeches, their clownish cries of “freedom” (freedom for the capitalists to oppress the people), etc. They would be “prepared” to recognise socialism, if mankind could Jump straight into it in one spectacular leap, without any of the friction, the struggles, the exploiters’ gnashing of teeth, or their diverse attempts to preserve the old order, or smuggle it back through the window, without the revolutionary proletariat responding to each attempt in a violent manner. These spineless hangers-on of the bourgeoisie with intellectualist pretensions are quite “prepared” to wade into the water provided they do not get their feet wet.
The drooping intellectuals are terrified when the bourgeoisie and the civil servants, employees, doctors, engineers, etc., who have grown accustomed to serving the bourgeoisie, go to extremes in their resistance. They tremble and utter even shriller cries about the need for a return to “conciliation”. Like all true friends of the oppressed class, we can only derive satisfaction from the exploiters’ extreme measures of resistance, because we do not expect the proletariat to mature for power in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations, but in the school of life and struggle. To become the ruling class and defeat the bourgeoisie for good the proletariat must be schooled, because the skill this implies does not come ready-made. The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only meal teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.
The strength of the proletariat and the peasantry allied to it grows with the resistance of the bourgeoisie and its retainers. As their enemies, the exploiters, step up their resistance, the exploited mature and gain in strength; they grow and learn and they cast out the “old Adam” of wage-slavery. Victory will be on the side of the exploited, for on their side is life, numerical strength, the strength of the mass, the strength of the inexhaustible sources of all that is selfless, dedicated and honest, all that is surging forward and awakening to the building of the new, all the vast reserves of energy and talent latent in the so-called “common people”, the workers and peasants. Victory will be theirs.
V. I. Lenin
Fear Of The Collapse Of Tile Old And The Fight For Tile New
@Communism
Mosaic of Lenin in the abandoned military settlement near the former airport Brand- Germany
The drooping intellectuals are terrified when the bourgeoisie and the civil servants, employees, doctors, engineers, etc., who have grown accustomed to serving the bourgeoisie, go to extremes in their resistance. They tremble and utter even shriller cries about the need for a return to “conciliation”. Like all true friends of the oppressed class, we can only derive satisfaction from the exploiters’ extreme measures of resistance, because we do not expect the proletariat to mature for power in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations, but in the school of life and struggle. To become the ruling class and defeat the bourgeoisie for good the proletariat must be schooled, because the skill this implies does not come ready-made. The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only meal teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.
The strength of the proletariat and the peasantry allied to it grows with the resistance of the bourgeoisie and its retainers. As their enemies, the exploiters, step up their resistance, the exploited mature and gain in strength; they grow and learn and they cast out the “old Adam” of wage-slavery. Victory will be on the side of the exploited, for on their side is life, numerical strength, the strength of the mass, the strength of the inexhaustible sources of all that is selfless, dedicated and honest, all that is surging forward and awakening to the building of the new, all the vast reserves of energy and talent latent in the so-called “common people”, the workers and peasants. Victory will be theirs.
V. I. Lenin
Fear Of The Collapse Of Tile Old And The Fight For Tile New
#Lenin
@Communism
Mosaic of Lenin in the abandoned military settlement near the former airport Brand- Germany
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The masses are the crucial factor. They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built.
Rosa Luxemburg
Order Prevails in Berlin
Rosa Luxemburg
Order Prevails in Berlin
#Rosa #Luxemburg #RosaLuxemburg
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🔴 Washington funnels more than $22 billion in military support to Israel’s genocidal war machine since October 2023
The United States has provided the Israeli regime with more than $22 billion in military support since last October, when Tel Aviv launched its war of genocide on the Gaza Strip.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) provided the staggering figure in a report on Tuesday, saying the U.S. had supplied the weaponry for the perpetration of aggression across the West Asia region, including in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
Throughout 2023, Washington’s military patronage for Tel Aviv rose by a whopping 78 percent. The four-year-long period preceding it saw the former furnishing 69 percent of the regime’s military hardware.
Just throughout the 23 days that followed the onset of the regime’s brutal military assault against Gaza and its concomitant escalated deadly aggression towards Lebanon, the U.S. outfitted the regime with upwards of 10,000 tons of weapons worth $2.4 billion.
A new report released by the UN Human Rights Office says Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on hospitals in Gaza have had a catastrophic effect on the territory’s healthcare system. The number grew to 50,000 tons by August 2024. The arms were transported to the regime using hundreds of planes and ships.
The hardware ran the gamut of deadly weapons, including missiles for the regime’s Iron Dome system, precision-guided bombs, CH-53 heavy lift helicopters, AH-64 Apache helicopters, and 155mm artillery shells, along with bunker-busting munitions and armored vehicles.
The unstinting arms flow came while the war went on to claim the lives of more than 45,500 Palestinians, mostly women and children, namely six percent of Gaza’s population, and the aggression against Lebanon killed more than 3,960 people.
The Israeli regime’s campaign of genocide in Gaza has reduced the territory’s population by 6 percent, says the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
The U.S.’s military support for the regime began two years before its occupation of huge swathes of regional territories in a heavily Western-backed war in 1948.
Over all, Washington has provided the regime with $310 billion in military and economic aid, which has been regularly adjusted for inflation, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank.
Prior to 2023, the military aid alone would amount to an annual $3.8 billion. By the end of the last year, the country had authorized over 100 arms sales to the regime.
Originally published: Radio Havana Cuba
By Ed Newman
The United States has provided the Israeli regime with more than $22 billion in military support since last October, when Tel Aviv launched its war of genocide on the Gaza Strip.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) provided the staggering figure in a report on Tuesday, saying the U.S. had supplied the weaponry for the perpetration of aggression across the West Asia region, including in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
Throughout 2023, Washington’s military patronage for Tel Aviv rose by a whopping 78 percent. The four-year-long period preceding it saw the former furnishing 69 percent of the regime’s military hardware.
Just throughout the 23 days that followed the onset of the regime’s brutal military assault against Gaza and its concomitant escalated deadly aggression towards Lebanon, the U.S. outfitted the regime with upwards of 10,000 tons of weapons worth $2.4 billion.
A new report released by the UN Human Rights Office says Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on hospitals in Gaza have had a catastrophic effect on the territory’s healthcare system. The number grew to 50,000 tons by August 2024. The arms were transported to the regime using hundreds of planes and ships.
The hardware ran the gamut of deadly weapons, including missiles for the regime’s Iron Dome system, precision-guided bombs, CH-53 heavy lift helicopters, AH-64 Apache helicopters, and 155mm artillery shells, along with bunker-busting munitions and armored vehicles.
The unstinting arms flow came while the war went on to claim the lives of more than 45,500 Palestinians, mostly women and children, namely six percent of Gaza’s population, and the aggression against Lebanon killed more than 3,960 people.
The Israeli regime’s campaign of genocide in Gaza has reduced the territory’s population by 6 percent, says the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
The U.S.’s military support for the regime began two years before its occupation of huge swathes of regional territories in a heavily Western-backed war in 1948.
Over all, Washington has provided the regime with $310 billion in military and economic aid, which has been regularly adjusted for inflation, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank.
Prior to 2023, the military aid alone would amount to an annual $3.8 billion. By the end of the last year, the country had authorized over 100 arms sales to the regime.
Originally published: Radio Havana Cuba
By Ed Newman
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Media is too big
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
Have you noticed the raging wildfires, searing heatwaves, and the devastating flash-floods? Capitalism is literally burning the planet. Watch on to see how.
Flash floods from China to Brazil engulf entire cities. Wildfires devour entire forests in several parts of the world. Record heatwaves prove fatal in many regions. The climate crisis could lead to 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in economic losses worldwide by 2050, warns the WEF.
The richest 1% account for the same emissions as the poorest 66% of humanity (5 billion people) in recent years, according to a recent OxFam report. “Oxfam undertook an analysis of 125 billionaires and found that, on average, they emitted 3m tonnes of CO2e a year through their investments—over a million times more than the average for someone in the bottom 90% of humanity.”
theredstream
Flash floods from China to Brazil engulf entire cities. Wildfires devour entire forests in several parts of the world. Record heatwaves prove fatal in many regions. The climate crisis could lead to 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in economic losses worldwide by 2050, warns the WEF.
The richest 1% account for the same emissions as the poorest 66% of humanity (5 billion people) in recent years, according to a recent OxFam report. “Oxfam undertook an analysis of 125 billionaires and found that, on average, they emitted 3m tonnes of CO2e a year through their investments—over a million times more than the average for someone in the bottom 90% of humanity.”
theredstream
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Marx_Critique_of_Hegels_Philosophy_of_Right.pdf
682.3 KB
🔴 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Author: Karl Marx
Written: 1843
Published: 1927 (posthumously)
This is an early work by Karl Marx, written in 1843 but published much later in 1927. In it, Marx critiques Hegel’s ideas about the state, arguing that they’re too abstract and fail to address real material conditions. He also touches on religion, calling it the "opium of the people," and begins developing his views on alienation and class society. It’s a short but pivotal text that shows Marx’s shift from idealism to the materialism that defines his later work.
@Communism
Author: Karl Marx
Written: 1843
Published: 1927 (posthumously)
This is an early work by Karl Marx, written in 1843 but published much later in 1927. In it, Marx critiques Hegel’s ideas about the state, arguing that they’re too abstract and fail to address real material conditions. He also touches on religion, calling it the "opium of the people," and begins developing his views on alienation and class society. It’s a short but pivotal text that shows Marx’s shift from idealism to the materialism that defines his later work.
#Book #PDF #KarlMarx #CritiqueOfHegel #Marxism #Philosophy #HistoricalMaterialism
@Communism
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🔴 The Social Character of Value
✍🏻 Rosa Luxemburg
[Adam] Smith…did not differentiate the twofold character of value-creating labour.… Failure to differentiate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour as concrete and useful labour on the one hand, and abstract and socially necessary labour on the other, indeed forms one of the most important characteristics of the theory of value as conceived not only by Smith but by all members of the classical school.
Disregarding all social consequences, classical economics recognized that human labour alone is the factor which creates value, and it worked out this theory to that degree of clarity which we meet in [David] Ricardo’s formulation. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between Marx’s theory of value and Ricardo’s, a distinction that has been misunderstood not only by bourgeois economists but also in most cases by the popularizers of Marx’s doctrine: Ricardo, conceiving as he did, of bourgeois economy in terms of natural law, believed also that the creation of value, too, is a natural property of human labour, of the specific and concrete labour of the individual human being.
This view is even more blatantly revealed in the writings of Adam Smith who for instance declares what he calls the “propensity to exchange” to be a quality peculiar to human nature, having looked for it in vain in animals, particularly in dogs. And although he doubted the existence of the propensity to exchange in animals, Smith [inconsistently] attributed to animal as well as human labour the faculty of creating value, especially when he occasionally relapses into the Physiocratic doctrine.
"No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer. Not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle, are productive labourers.…
The labourers and labouring cattle, therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner’s profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [New York: Modern Library, 1937], 344–45)"
Smith’s belief that the creation of value is a direct physiological property of labour, a manifestation of the animal organism in man, finds its most vivid expression here. Just as the spider produces its web from its body, so labouring man produces value—labouring man pure and simple, every man who produces useful objects—because labouring man is by birth a producer of commodities in the same way human society is founded by nature on the exchange of commodities, and a commodity economy is the normal form of human economy.
It was left to Marx to recognise that a given value covers a definite social relationship which develops under definite historical conditions. Thus he came to discriminate between two aspects of commodity-producing labour: concrete individual labour and socially necessary labour. When this distinction is made, the solution of the money problem becomes clear also, as though a spotlight had been turned on it.
Marx had to establish a dynamic distinction in the course of history between the commodity producer and the labouring man, in order to distinguish the twin aspects of labour which appear static in bourgeois economy. He had to discover that the production of commodities is a definite historical form of social production before he could decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. In a word, Marx had to approach the problem with methods of deduction diametrically opposed to the classical school, he had in his approach to renounce the latter’s faith in the human and normal element in bourgeois production and to recognise their historical transience: he had to reverse the metaphysical deductions of the classics into their opposite, the dialectical.
The excerpt is taken from Chapter III, “A Criticism of Smith’s Analysis,” in Rosa Luxemburg’s 1913 work, The Accumulation of Capital
✍🏻 Rosa Luxemburg
[Adam] Smith…did not differentiate the twofold character of value-creating labour.… Failure to differentiate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour as concrete and useful labour on the one hand, and abstract and socially necessary labour on the other, indeed forms one of the most important characteristics of the theory of value as conceived not only by Smith but by all members of the classical school.
Disregarding all social consequences, classical economics recognized that human labour alone is the factor which creates value, and it worked out this theory to that degree of clarity which we meet in [David] Ricardo’s formulation. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between Marx’s theory of value and Ricardo’s, a distinction that has been misunderstood not only by bourgeois economists but also in most cases by the popularizers of Marx’s doctrine: Ricardo, conceiving as he did, of bourgeois economy in terms of natural law, believed also that the creation of value, too, is a natural property of human labour, of the specific and concrete labour of the individual human being.
This view is even more blatantly revealed in the writings of Adam Smith who for instance declares what he calls the “propensity to exchange” to be a quality peculiar to human nature, having looked for it in vain in animals, particularly in dogs. And although he doubted the existence of the propensity to exchange in animals, Smith [inconsistently] attributed to animal as well as human labour the faculty of creating value, especially when he occasionally relapses into the Physiocratic doctrine.
"No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer. Not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle, are productive labourers.…
The labourers and labouring cattle, therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner’s profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [New York: Modern Library, 1937], 344–45)"
Smith’s belief that the creation of value is a direct physiological property of labour, a manifestation of the animal organism in man, finds its most vivid expression here. Just as the spider produces its web from its body, so labouring man produces value—labouring man pure and simple, every man who produces useful objects—because labouring man is by birth a producer of commodities in the same way human society is founded by nature on the exchange of commodities, and a commodity economy is the normal form of human economy.
It was left to Marx to recognise that a given value covers a definite social relationship which develops under definite historical conditions. Thus he came to discriminate between two aspects of commodity-producing labour: concrete individual labour and socially necessary labour. When this distinction is made, the solution of the money problem becomes clear also, as though a spotlight had been turned on it.
Marx had to establish a dynamic distinction in the course of history between the commodity producer and the labouring man, in order to distinguish the twin aspects of labour which appear static in bourgeois economy. He had to discover that the production of commodities is a definite historical form of social production before he could decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. In a word, Marx had to approach the problem with methods of deduction diametrically opposed to the classical school, he had in his approach to renounce the latter’s faith in the human and normal element in bourgeois production and to recognise their historical transience: he had to reverse the metaphysical deductions of the classics into their opposite, the dialectical.
The excerpt is taken from Chapter III, “A Criticism of Smith’s Analysis,” in Rosa Luxemburg’s 1913 work, The Accumulation of Capital
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