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

@Communism

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

@Communism

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

🔴 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

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

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

@Communism

🔴 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


@Communism

...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)

@Communism

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

@Communism

Anti-fascist stickers seen in Adelaide

Washington DC

Camden Town

Every product on a capitalist shelf is a monument to the suffering of the working class.

🔴 Elon Musk and the Dictatorship of the Capital
✍🏻 Nikos Mottas
1️⃣

“Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism. Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood”.


The above words, written by Bertolt Brecht in 1935, serve as a timeless reminder of the inextricable bond between capitalism and fascism. Back in the 1930s, the monster of Fascism and Nazism, which led humanity to an unprecedented bloodshed, was born from the bowels of capitalist system itself (e.g several European and American monopoly giants, including General Motors, IBM, Ford Company, IT&T, Standard Oil, etc, are known for providing financial support to Nazi Germany before and even during the Second World War).

2️⃣

The monster certainly didn't emerge from outside of the capitalist world nor threatened its existence. On the contrary, Fascism and Nazism have been expressions of the dictatorship of the Capital, being utilized as a spearhead against the rise of the organized labour movement and the “communist threat”. Today, 80 years after the Peoples Great Antifascist Victory in the Second World War, our era is once again marked by the rise of far-right and fascist political forces: From the Baltic countries to the United States and from Germany to Ukraine, the serpent's egg is growing again, taking various forms.

The return of Trump in the U.S Presidency, the strengthening of fascist parties in Europe (“Alternative for Germany”, “National Rally” in France, “Freedom Party” in Austria, British fascists, etc) and the broader rise of far-right, racist and ultra-nationalist groups is the outcome of internal changes within the global capitalist system. As the world is heading towards an imperialist war, new political forces come to the fore of bourgeois politics in order to manage and safeguard the interests of monopoly capital.

The direct involvement of Elon Musk – the richest man in the world - in U.S politics and his tendency to meddle in the internal affairs of foreign countries is indicative of a fierce competition that is taking place within the capitalist system. Behind the fight for the so-called “woke agenda” lies a much deeper confrontation between multiple sectors of monopoly capital for new spheres of influence, division of markets, raw materials, commodity transport networks, energy sources and routes.

The case of arch-capitalist Elon Musk, a close ally of Trump, owner of Tesla, Space X and social media platform X, is the epitome of what we call “the dictatorship of the Capital”. Taking advantage of his powerful social media influence, he intervenes in the internal affairs of other countries by openly endorsing far-right and ultra-nationalist forces, while at the same time he spreads his anti-communist venom at every instance. His straight-arm, Nazi-like gesture at Trump's inauguration caused justifiable disturbance across the world thus strengthening the voices that call him a promoter of the global fascist right.

Musk's audacious endorsement and promotion of certain bourgeois political forces throughout the globe underscores the fundamental point: This is what capitalists do all the time! From media tycoon William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s to the infamous George Soros in recent decades, arch-capitalists tend to support those political forces that serve their broader agendas and interests. Under the pretexts of “democracy” and “human rights”, the big Capital has committed heinous crimes against whole nations (e.g. Yugoslavia, Libya, Ukraine, etc).

Let's be clear: Elon Musk is only the tip of the capitalist iceberg. His promotion of fascist, ultra-nationalist or racist groups isn't a “conspiracy” against modern democratic values, but rather a manifestation of what Brecht called “most nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive form of capitalism”. The alternative to this profound hideousness won't be found among the choices that the capitalist system offers.

You can't eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. The only true alternative to capitalist barbarity of Musk, Soros and other similar parasites, is the struggle for a social system without exploitation of man by man, without imperialist wars and multi-billionaires. This is the struggle for Socialism-Communism.

Nikos Mottas

З юності Карл Маркс виявляв неабияку щедрість та любов до людей. Коли Маркс був студентом, його батько писав йому: «Ти витратив за рік 700 талерів, а навіть найбагатші студенти витрачають 500 талерів». Але молодий Карл Маркс значну частину коштів роздавав нужденним товаришам.
Будь як наш ватажок Карл Маркс!

Letter from Heinrich Marx to son Karl

Posted by comrade Oleh Vernyk