Communism
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Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

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The Belgian embassy in DR Congo was set on fire as demonstrations escalated across the capital. Protesters also targeted the Dutch, French, and US embassies, expressing outrage over the escalating conflict in eastern DR Congo.

In North Kivu province, the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group has seized significant territory, including the provincial capital, Goma, after intense fighting. The violence has claimed at least 17 lives and left 370 people injured, as the rebels solidify their control in the region.

theredstream
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Spotted on a cybertruck in NYC
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“Stop bombing Gaza / Free Palestine”
Poster seen in Bari, Italy
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"No Pride in Genocide"
Seen in Regional NSW
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"Luigi Mangione, hero of the people"
Seen in Marseilles, France
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Anti-fascist graffiti seen on a Tesla property in Wellington, New Zealand
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✍🏻 V. I. Lenin
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A Liberal Professor on Equality
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Liberal Professor Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky is on the war path against socialism. This time he has approached the question, not from the political and economic angle, but from that of an abstract discussion on equality (perhaps the professor thought such an abstract discussion more suitable for the religious and philosophical gatherings which he has addressed?).

“If we take socialism, not as an economic theory, but as a living ideal,” Mr. Tugan declared, “then, undoubtedly, it is associated with the ideal of equality, but equality is a concept ... that cannot be deduced from experience and reason.”

This is the reasoning of a liberal scholar who repeats the incredibly trite and threadbare argument that experience and reason clearly prove that men are not equal, yet socialism bases its ideal on equality. Hence, socialism, if you please, is an absurdity which is contrary to experience and reason, and so forth!

Mr. Tugan repeats the old trick of the reactionaries: first to misinterpret socialism by making it out to be an absurdity, and then to triumphantly refute the absurdity! When we say that experience and reason prove that men are not equal, we mean by equality, equality in abilities or similarity in physical strength and mental ability.

It goes without saying that in this respect men are not equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But this kind of equality has nothing whatever to do with socialism. If Mr. Tugan is quite unable to think, he is at least able to read; were lie to Lake the well-known work of one of the founders of scientific socialism, Frederick Engels, directed against Dühring, he would find there a special section explaining the absurdity of imagining that economic equality means anything else than the abolition of classes. But when professors set out to refute socialism, one never knows what to wonder at most—their stupidity, their ignorance, or their unscrupulousness.

Since we have Mr. Tugan to deal with, we shall have to start with the rudiments.

By political equality Social-Democrats mean equal rights, and by economic equality, as we have already said, they mean the abolition of classes. As for establishing human equality in the sense of equality of strength and abilities (physical and mental), socialists do not even think of such things.

Political equality is a demand for equal political rights for all citizens of a country who have reached, a certain age and who do not suffer from either ordinary or liberal-professorial feeble-mindedness. This demand was first advanced, not by the socialists, not by the proletariat, but by the bourgeoisie. The well-known historical experience of all countries of the world proves this, and Mr. Tugan could easily have discovered this had he not called “experience” to witness solely in order to dupe students and workers, and please the powers that be by “abolishing” socialism.

The bourgeoisie put forward the demand for equal rights for all citizens in the struggle against medieval, feudal, serf-owner and caste privileges. In Russia, for example, unlike America, Switzerland and other countries, the privileges of the nobility are preserved to this day in all spheres of political life, in elections to the Council of State, in elections to the Duma, in municipal administration, in taxation, and many other things.

Even the most dull-witted and ignorant person can grasp the fact that individual members of the nobility are not equal in physical and mental abilities any more than are people belonging to the “tax-paying”, “base”, ‘low-born” or “non-privileged” peasant class. But in rights all nobles are equal, just as all the peasants are equal in their lack of rights.

Does our learned liberal Professor Tugan now under stand the difference between equality in the sense of equal rights, and equality in the sense of equal strength and abilities?
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✍🏻 V. I. Lenin
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A Liberal Professor on Equality
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We shall now deal with economic equality. In the United States of America, as in other advanced countries, there are no medieval privileges. All citizens, are equal in political rights. But are they equal as regards their position in social production?

No, Mr. Tugan, they are not. Some own land, factories and capital and live on the unpaid labour of the workers; these form an insignificant minority. Others, namely, the vast mass of the population, own no means of production and live only by selling their labour-power; these are proletarians.

In the United States of America there is no aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat enjoy equal political rights. But they are not equal in class status: one class, the capitalists, own the means of production and live on the unpaid labour of the workers. The other class, the wage-workers, the proletariat, own no means of production and live by selling their labour-power in the market.

The abolition of classes means placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production belonging to society as a whole. It means giving all citizens equal opportunities of working on the publicly-owned means of production, on the publicly-owned land, at the publicly-owned factories, and so forth.

This explanation of socialism has been necessary to enlighten our learned liberal professor, Mr. Tugan, who may, if he tries hard, now grasp the fact that it is absurd to expect equality of strength and abilities in socialist society.

In brief, when socialists speak of equality they always mean social equality, equality of social status, and not by any means the physical and mental equality of individuals.

The puzzled reader may ask: how could a learned liberal professor have forgotten these elementary axioms familiar to anybody who has read any exposition of the views of socialism? The answer is simple: the personal qualities of present-day professors are such that we may find among them even exceptionally stupid people like Tugan. But the social status of professors in bourgeois society is such that only those are allowed to hold such posts who sell science to serve the interests of capital, and agree to utter the most fatuous nonsense, the most unscrupulous drivel and twaddle against the socialists. The bourgeoisie will forgive the professors all this as long as they go on “abolishing” socialism.
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The abolition of classes means placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production belonging to society as a whole. It means giving all citizens equal opportunities of working on the publicly-owned means of production, on the publicly-owned land, at the publicly-owned factories, and so forth.

Lenin, A Liberal Professor on Equality

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There are individuals Ð a mere handful in the history of mankind Ð who, while themselves being the product of an imminent catastrophic change, leave their mark upon an entire epoch. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is one such giant mind, one such giant will...

Alexandra Kollantai
A Giant Mind, A Giant Will (1914-1916)

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The production relations of capitalist society approach more and more the production relations of socialist society. But on the other hand, its political and juridical relations established between capitalist society and socialist society a steadily rising wall. This wall is not overthrown, but is on the contrary strengthened and consolidated by the development of social reforms and the course of democracy. Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to day, the conquest of political power by the proletariat can break down this wall.

Rosa Luxemburg
Reform or Revolution

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The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot arise as the result of the peaceful development of bourgeois society and of bourgeois democracy; it can arise only as the result of the smashing of the bourgeois state machine, the bourgeois army, the bourgeois bureaucratic apparatus, the bourgeois police.

"The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes," say Marx and Engels in a preface to the Communist Manifesto. The task of the proletarian revolution is "...no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it...this is the preliminary condition for every real people's revolution on the continent," says Marx in his letter to Kugelmann in 1871.

Joseph Stalin
The Foundations of Leninism

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On this day, 31 January 1919, striking workers fought police in the centre of Glasgow and the army was deployed to restore order. The strikers demanded the working week be reduced from 54 to 40 hours, to create jobs for demobilised soldiers and increase workers’ leisure time.
The strike began on Monday 27 January, and by Friday 31st, 60,000 workers had downed tools. On January 31, a crowd of between 20 and 60,000 protesters gathered in George and sang “The Red Flag.” The Glasgow Evening News described what happened next: “The police found it necessary to make a baton charge, and strikers and civilians - men, women, and children - were felled in the melée that followed.”
Initially overwhelmed, the workers quickly retaliated and forced the police back. A turning point in the battle came when a lorry carrying glass bottles was trapped by the crowd. As the strikers began to pelt the police with stones and bottles, many police broke ranks and fled. Led by demobilised servicemen, the workers then marched to Glasgow Green, where they were again attacked by the police. This time they uprooted iron railings and counter-charged. Clashes continued until late into the night, and the Secretary of State for Scotland famously told the War Cabinet, “It is a misnomer to call this situation in Glasgow a strike - this is a Bolshevist uprising."
The local sheriff called for military support, and that evening, the first detachments of soldiers arrived in the city. Over the next couple of days, several tanks and 10,000 troops arrived, mostly from across Scotland, with a battalion from Northumberland. Soldiers with fixed bayonets, mortars and machine guns were stationed in key locations throughout the city. Meanwhile, numerous strike leaders were arrested by police, and the trades council office was raided. Picketing activity was greatly curtailed.
On Monday 10 February, after the employers agreed to a 7-hour reduction in the working week with no pay cuts, the strike was called off.

Working Class History
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🔴 The life expectancy of Palestinians fell by 11.5 years in the first three months of the genocide
✍🏻 Vijay Prashad


Palestine has been deeply impacted by the genocide. Using estimates from the United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South Insights analysed the decline in Palestinian life expectancy caused by the Israeli bombardment in Gaza and found that Palestinian life expectancy at birth fell by 11.5 years between 2022 and 2023, from a respectable 76.7 years in 2022 to just 65.2 years in 2023. It was the first three months of the U.S.-backed Israeli bombing—from October to December 2023—that brought about this terrible decline in total life expectancy. We are not aware of such a rapid decline in life expectancy at any other period of modern human history. A Palestinian life is now more than seventeen years shorter than an Israeli one. This gap is greater than that which existed between blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa, which was fifteen years in 1980.

Eleven and a half years lost per Palestinian. That is almost 60 million years lost for the remaining 5.2 million Palestinians who have remained in Palestine and survived the genocide. This loss cannot easily be recovered. It will take years of immense work to rebuild Palestinian society and reach anything near the pre-genocide life expectancy. Health systems will need to be rebuilt: not only hospitals and clinics, which were almost all destroyed in Gaza, but new doctors and nurses will have to be trained to replace those who were killed. Food systems will need to be recovered: not only bakeries, but fields will need to be detoxified and fishing boats repaired. Housing will need to be rebuilt to replace the 92% of homes in Gaza that were destroyed or damaged (what the UN has called a ‘domicide’). Schools will need to be rebuilt. The mental trauma that afflicts children will need to be healed so that they feel that these structures are not graves but places of safety and learning.

Originally published: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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"Lenin on vacation", painting by Evgeniy Sapiro, 1962

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

V. I. Lenin
Unity (April 12, 1914)
Collected Works. Volume 20


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As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Ten: The Working-Day

@Communism
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The direct purpose of capitalist production is not the production of commodities, but of surplus-value or profit (in its developed form), the aim is not the product, but the surplus-product. Labour itself, from this standpoint, is only productive in so far as it creates profit or surplus-product for capital. If the worker does not create profit, his labour is unproductive. The mass of productive labour employed is only of interest to capital in so far as through it—or in proportion to it—the mass of surplus-labour grows. Only to this extent is what we called necessary labour-time, necessary. In so far as it does not have this result, it is superfluous and to be supressed.

Theories of Surplus-Value [Volume IV of Capital]
[Chapter XVIII] Ricardo’s Miscellanea. John Barton


#KarlMarx #Karl_Marx #Kapital #Capital


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🔴 Estranged Labour

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers[; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844


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...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism.

Nadezhda K. Krupskaya,
On Communist Ethics (1924)

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في « البيان الشيوعي » لخصت دروس التاريخ العامة التي تجعلنا نرى في الدولة هيئة للسيادة الطبقية وتفضي بنا إلى استنتاج لا مندوحة عنه وهو أن البروليتاريا لا تستطيع إسقاط البرجوازية إذا لم تستولي في البدء على السلطة السياسية، إذا لم تحصل على السيادة السياسية، إذا لم تحول الدولة إلى « بروليتاريا منظمة بوصفها طبقة سائدة »، وأن هذه الدولة البروليتارية تبدأ بالاضمحلال فور انتصارها، لأن الدولة لا لزوم لها ولا يمكن أن توجد في مجتمع خال من التناقضات الطبقية.

فلاديمير لينين
الفصل الثاني: خبرة سنوات 1848-1851
الدولة والثورة

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