#Proletarian internationalism

[damnesdelamer]

Proletariat of all lands, unite!

Der Arbeyter ("The Worker"), a magazine published by the Polish Socialist Party, ca 1905

[katchwreck]

“Long live communism around the world. The fighters of the Paris commune live in the hearts of the revolutionary proletariat!”

Soviet poster from 1931.

[1966jpg]

read this

[connorthemaoist]

Proletarian internationalist solidarity poster between the Indian & Filipino Maoists

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"MILITARY IMPERIALISM DANGER TO LABOR WORLD, SAYS KEIR HARDIE," Toronto Star. September 9, 1912. Page 1 & 13. --- Veteran Leader Declares Contribution From Dominions Not Needed. --- PLAY INTO HANDS OF THE NOW RICH ---- Says Workers in Both Germany and England are Voting on War Question. --- A MUTUAL MOVEMENT ---- British M.P. a Delegate to the Trades and Labor Congress at Guelph. ---- Special to The Star By a Staff Reporter. Guelph. Ont., Sept. 3. - James Keir Hardie, M.P., of the British House of Commons, and fraternal delegate from the British Labor party to the 25th convention of the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, arrived in Guelph Monday morning at 1 a.m., from Rochester, N.Y.

A large gathering of delegates met him at the station. The sturdy frame of the former miner shows no fatigue. The only change noticeable since his last visit is his now white hair and beard. No, it was not too late for him to talk of the social problems that have engaged his whole life's work.

Situation in Britain. Interviewed by The Star, and asked about the industrial situation in Great Britain, he said:

"It is more hopeful than ever, the trade unions have strengthened their position, both numerically and in solidarity. Rec Recent strikes have shown more solidarity than ever before A like remark applies to Socialism, people who have been away for a few years and return to the Home-land are astonished at the change, and the politicians are at their wits end trying to check its growth.

The old insular spirit which has been a characteristic of the British race, mainly due to the fast that they live in an island, is breaking down through the growth of the International socialist and trade union movement,

Imperialism Versus Socialism. "The ruling class are attempting to substitute for it a spirit of Imperialism, and talk as though they would like to turn the British Empire into a huge compound from which all the rest of the world is to be excluded.

"They use big sounding phrases as one Empire, one flag, one navy, one throne, whilst meaning only enlarged area within which they they may exploit the working class. The labor movement is now too much wide awake to be taken in by such hypocritical cant.

"I am here as a fraternal delegate from the British Labor party which has 1.400.000 affiliated trade unionists and socialists

"I do not come here, however, because Canada is within the British Empire, but because the Trades and Labor Congress represents the working class movement of the Dominion of Canada. I have carried the fraternal greeting of our party to similar congresses in Germany and France, and elsewhere. The international working class movement is not limited by the boundaries of nations or empires. It encircles the whole earth and is binding the disinherited propertyless working class of f the world into one mighty army, not to make war upon other, but upon the entire capitalist system which oppresses and enslaves the workers of all lands alike.

Danger To Canadians. "I hope by my visit to the Trades and Labor Congress to do some thing to arouse the workers of Canada to a sense of the danger and menace to their well-being which military imperialism would bring in its train.

"An Imperial navy and army to which all the Dominions will continue to contribute their quota would play into the hands of the filibusters and money-grabbing contractors who never expose their own skins on a field of battle, but who'll slaughter millions of working men, whilst they stay at home and grow rich out of their fat contracts.

"The recent Boer war disclosed such an amount of swindling ling on the part of contractors who supplied the army with food, clothing, shoes, and war material as made honest men of all parties, blush for shame.

Fighting War Scare. "The greatest interest of the worker is peace. If the Canadian workmen lends himself to the beginnings of a navy or compulsory military training he will only be creating a fresh power to his enemies to keep himself in subjection..

"Are workers in Great Britain taking a definite course with regard to the present scare?"

"Yes, a ballot is being taken of the workers as to whether they are prepared to come to an agreement for stopping of work simultaneously in both countries to prevent the nations being launched into a war. Of course, the movement must be mutual."

"Are the Germans doing the same?"

"Yes, and the French workers are to take the matter up in April of next year.

"The different countries are to report next September at the International Socialist and Trade Union Congress at Vienna."

Prospect of Hostilities. "Do you think a war likely between Germany and Great Britain?"

"With all this building of navies and speculation of interested parties there is always a certain risk; responsible statesmen in both countries dread such a contingency as war, but their hands may be forced by the conspirators just as it was by the millionaires of South Africa in the case of the Boer war."

"How strong are the German workers?"

"Over four millions and a quarter voters are behind the working class party in the Reichstag in Germany, while in Great Britain, with candidates in every constituency, the labor party will poll 30 to 35 per cent. of the total vote, which will represent some three million workers."

Insurance Scheme. The Insurance scheme of Lloyd George was referred to by Mr. Hardie as a helpful scheme. The source of the revenue for it he thought should come from income tax, and a tax on unearned increment of land rather than a tax upon industry as at present

Mr. Hardie is on a lecture tour of the United States under the auspices of the Socialist party of the United States, in connection with the present political campaign.

He leaves Guelph on Wednesday, or not later than Thursday morning.

[greyxday]

Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1846)

“In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.”

[reddest-flower]

We believe that alliances with social democracy are an opportunistic manifestation of class collaboration and a serious obstacle to revolutionary struggle; the conformation of fronts of that nature will always be a liquidating element of the Communist Party; and the absence of a communist party is the biggest attack on the working class and its immediate and historical objectives.

There are, for example, expressions of those alliances that have no justification, and one of them is support for the Democratic Party of the US Communist Party. And it is that when the perspective of the interests of the working class is set aside and the logic of the “lesser evil” is placed even the imperialist policy of the Democratic Party may seem better to the imperialist policy of the Republican Party. Thus several communist parties justify their support for bourgeois policies under the pretext of struggle against the "ultra-right" and fascism.

We have great respect for the communists' policy against fascism during World War II, but we cannot deny that some elements of that policy are connected to browderism, to the opportunist platform of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, to Eurocommunism, and in some way they form a platform of certain similarities to that of opportunism in the II International.

It is a paradox that those who oppose the elaboration of a unified revolutionary strategy hold a common opportunist strategy on the grounds that the generalization of experience excludes the importance of national struggle, the specificities, the particularities; as a contraband they have a general strategy based on the possibility of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism - which has already demonstrated its unfeasibility in Chile and in the strongholds of Eurocommunism (Italy and France); in national ways to socialism, all of them with the same components: denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat, alliance with social democracy, pluriclassist political formations, capitalist management of economy, elevation of bourgeois democracy to absolute value, or if to put it roughly, that the communists manage the governments of capitalism.

Communist Party of Mexico (PCM), Our Tribute to the Communist International: Keeping the Flag of Proletarian Internationalism High, 2020

[mesetacadre]

What might decolonization in the US after a successful socialist revolution look like? Would there be one big government still? A sort of union of socialist republics? Something else entirely? Honestly I don't know how to ask.

Post-revolutionary decolonization (and realistically, the only kind of meaningful decolonization that is ever happening) in the US is a complicated matter given the relative success of the USAmerican genocidal project. The native population is 1.1% of the total population as of the 2020 census, this means that unlike in other, incomplete, settler projects such as the Sahrawi Republic or Palestine, it isn't feasible to restore the relation of the native population to the totality of the country. Regardless of population proportions though, the main focus of socialist decolonization is the struggle against any conflict between nationalities by removing the economic basis of that antagonism, which would then allow to also begin to remove the cultural elements that reinforced that dynamic of oppression. The focus is not to create more landlords but native, it's to remove the structure around private property in general, and make sure every worker, native or otherwise, receives as is needed. Taking into account the already relative dispossession of native people even before a pre-revolution context, there will have to be a great effort to bring the conditions of native people at the same level of non-native people.

Regarding the form of the new state, this will evidently depend on the form of the US state as the revolution happens. In other countries this would not be such a pressing question, but given the role and strength of the USAmerican bourgeoisie, it's not hard to believe that for any revolution to take place, the US state would need to be considerably weakened. Keeping this in mind, the strategy followed by all hitherto socialist revolutions is to not further fragment the new state. Given the complexity of navigating the construction of the first elements of a socialist economy, with the simultaneous effort needed for security, it would be both counterproductive and hypocritical to explicitly seek the independence of a portion of the population, as a part of the political program, it would be taking two steps forward and one step back. The communist revolution is national in form, because it happens within the structure of the capitalist state, but it is also international in content, because it explicitly repudiates the division of the proletariat along national lines.

We must understand that nationality, as much as it is relevant today and as much as it influences the course of history, is a byproduct of the development of capitalism, and that since it arose from the infrastructure to justify and protect it, it will also have to seize to exist and be replaced with proletarian internationalism for the duration of the transition to socialism-communism. Keeping this in mind, it would be hypocritical and regressive to, after taking control of the state and beginning the transition away from capitalism, to then turn around and divide the working class of the new country into even more national categories than they already are divided into.

The early USSR is a good comparison because of the sheer quantity of national diversity contained within the bounds of the corpse of the Tsarist Empire. The policy of the bolsheviks was neither of Russian supremacy or of immediate splintering into hundreds of nation states. Even during the very complicated and desperate context of the civil war, Finland was allowed its independence without much fuss from the CC, even if they were immediately incorporated into the German sphere via Von Mannerheim. When the 1936 constitution was being discussed, it was Stalin himself who went against the wishes of many bolsheviks to prevent the republics from gaining independence if they wished. No republics requested this however, because the oppressive mechanisms of capitalism and feudalism that had kept them under the Tsar's thumb for centuries had been replaced with an economic system that assured the equal development of all peoples within the USSR. The USSR itself was also not absolutely centralist, and the many constituent republics had varying degrees of autonomy, reflecting in some aspects the structure of democratic centralism.

I don't think the answer is to replicate the USSR, of course. The context and general state of things are very different, but there are lessons to be learnt from this successful, albeit flawed, tackling of the national question. Again though, we can't really speculate on the way that the US will look right before a revolution, and consequently the structures and problems a revolutionary government will have to start from.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

it's fucking shameful how the anti-semites on this site have jewish users so fucking scared that they (plural, VERY FUCKING PLURAL) have to ask me to answer their DMs privately. These DMs contain nothing messy or controversial. Literally just stuff like "Thank you for articulating XYZ it means a lot as a Jewish user." And multiple users are SCARED to say that to me publicly.

I'd like for these assholes harassing Jewish users to feel ashamed, but, as a Modern Jewish and Holocaust Historian, I know these anti-Semites most likely feel righteous. They always convince themselves that they're righteous while The Jews are ones:

-secretly allying with the Soviet Union as a threat to Polish sovereignty

-oppressing the proletarian classes

-murdering children in gaza

-murdering catholic babies in england

-spreading covid

-fomenting anti-german sentiment

-fomenting anti-french sentiment

-forming a dangerous fifth column to the peril of germany/france/poland/russia/syria/iran/USA/UK/transnistria/aragon/yemen/iraq/flanders

-fomenting anti-russian sentiment

-poisoning the wells

-being tacky with their Jew Money and Internationalism

-ensuring the Germany will lose WW1 and see its Eastern territories divided amongst its neighbors

-abusing dickensian orphans

-not worshipping the gods the emperor told us to worship

-deicide

-Controlling Hollywood

[connorthemaoist]

June 15, 2023 | The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) joins the international proletarian movement in paying the highest tribute to Katakam “Comrade Anand” Sudarshan. Comrade Anand was a leading cadre of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), member of the Politburo of CPI (Maoist) Central Committee and is considered one of the most important guiding figures of India’s struggle for national and social liberation.

Comrade Anand was a teacher before he joined the Naxal movement in the 1970s. His unwavering service to the Indian revolution spanned five decades. He was one of the pioneering leaders in expanding the armed revolution in the Dandakaranya area. Comrade Anand became known for his strong command of guerilla warfare which dealt heavy blows against Indian security forces.

As Secretary of the Central Regional Bureau for almost two decades, and as a leading figure of their revolutionary magazine People’s March, he helped the Indian revolutionary struggle gain global recognition and prominence.

Comrade Anand’s passing is weightier than Mount Tai. The NDFP and the entire Philippine revolutionary movement take inspiration from his victories and enduring lessons in the struggle against imperialism and all reaction. The continuous advance of India’s revolution is a testament to his legacy as a revolutionary leader, an ingenious guerilla commander, and a great teacher of the international proletarian struggle.

Long live Comrade Anand! Long live the Communist Party of India (Maoist)! Long live the International Proletarian Struggle!

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

There's a difference between "exporting revolution/creating unsustainable puppet states" and "practicing basic proletarian internationalism and mutually beneficial socialist development strategies." The latter is also not mutually exclusive with national liberation and revolutionary nationalism. This should be pretty basic lol.

[pattern-recognition]

Take a concrete example. Can a Great-Russian Marxist accept the slogan of national, Great-Russian, culture? No, he cannot. Anyone who does that should stand in the ranks of the nationalists, not of the Marxists. Our task is to fight the dominant, Black-Hundred and bourgeois national culture of the Great Russians, and to develop, exclusively in the internationalist spirit and in the closest alliance with the workers of other countries, the rudiments also existing in the history of our democratic and working-class movement. Fight your own Great-Russian landlords and bourgeoisie, fight their ‘culture’ in the name of internationalism, and, in so fighting, ‘adapt’ yourself to the special features of the Purishkeviches and Struves – that is your task, not preaching or tolerating the Slogan of national culture.

The same applies to the most oppressed and persecuted nation – the Jews. Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies. But there are other elements in Jewish culture and in Jewish history as a whole. Of the ten and a half million Jews in the world, somewhat over a half live in Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarous countries, where the Jews are forcibly kept in the status of a caste. The other half lives in the civilised world, and there the Jews do not live as a segregated caste. There the great world-progressive features of Jewish culture stand clearly revealed: its internationalism, its identification with the advanced movements of the epoch (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews among the population).

Whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish ‘national culture’ is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of all that is outmoded and connected with caste among the Jewish people; he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who mingle with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in international Marxist organisations, and make their contribution (both in Russian and in Yiddish) towards creating the international culture of the working-class movement – those Jews, despite the separatism of the Bund, uphold the best traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of ‘national culture’.

Bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism – these are the two irreconcilably hostile slogans that correspond to the two great class camps throughout the capitalist world, and express the two policies (nay, the two world outlooks) in the national question. In advocating the slogan of national culture and building up on it an entire plan and practical programme of what they call ‘cultural-national autonomy’, the Bundists are in effect instruments of bourgeois nationalism among the workers.

Lenin, V. I., Critical Remarks on the National Question (1913)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“DURANT BOOED BY HECKLERS,” The Province (Vancouver). February 4, 1933. Page 16. ---- Communists Interrupt Until Promised Platform at Conclusion. ---- OPINIONS CLASH ---- "My name Is McKenzie and I want everyone to know it." 

And with that a sturdy heckler with the burr of Scotland In his voice took the platform from Dr. Will Durant and turned it over to a certain Mr. Brown, who returned from Russia this week after having spent three months touring in the interests of "a group of Canadian workers." 

It was Russia's night at the Vancouver Theatre Friday, but a Russia in two different garbs. Dr. Durant, who spent the summer months Investigating surface Indications of the Soviet experiment, spoke to a crowded theatre In which all classes of citizens were represented. 

Protagonists of the Russian experiment opened their barrage from gallery, balcony and main floor. Simple questions soon developed into boos and hisses and for at least five minutes Dr. Durant refused to continue, threatening to leave the theatre. 

Finally, after a promise by Dr. Durant to turn over the platform to members of the Communist party at the end of his talk, order was restored, and. with the exception of an occasional query, the speaker was allowed to go on with his dissertation on the failure of the Soviet experiment. 

But if hunger, famine and fear stalked across the stage during Dr. Durant's tale of the workers' plight in Russia today, it scurried into the wings when the self-appointed speaker, Brown, arrived. Twenty years spent in lumber camps on the Pacific Coast and three months investigating Russian conditions convinced this speaker that he would rather be a worker in Russia or even a prisoner than an inhabitant once more of a Canadian lumber camp. 

"Me for the Soviet Union," he shouted, while a big majority of the audience advised him to "hurry up and go back.”

Russia has dictatorship of the proletariat Instead of a country ruled by philosophers, racketeers and bootleggers," he continued. 

Boos and hisses greeted his enthusiasm. 

STARVATION RIFE. "If anyone will pay my way back " but the audience wasn't Interested, and Mr. Brown was left in sole possession of the theatre, while some 1500 people sought the exits. 

[metamatar]

#the failure of gram panchayats in india

oh, yes i would love to hear you expand on this tbh. i agree that there is a very neo gandhian strand in modern ideas of community. which is esp interesting as the idealisation of the autonomous village community in gandhi which has to a large extent been very complicated by modern historians, now regains traction as a reaction to the ravages of increased globalisation. so you have this retreat to this very vulgar localism at a cultural level with some invocations of spiritual obscurantism like i keep hearing problems over here are incommunicable no matter that our oppression is shared because translation does violence to the ideas and the hindu organisation of hierarchy is just and natural for hindus. add to all this a global retreat from revolution as even a horizon. et viola the problem with cops is that they are not ours, no analysis of the class and caste organisation of the mass of people being invoked.

i feel like a lot of people advocating for community based solutions to policing do not read the newspapers in a country where upper caste men enact violent justice on oppressed people. the KKK organising racists into lynching frenzies to put black people in their place was also a community policing it's hierarchy. i do not know when and why the word community became an unqualified positive thing on the left.

[forevergulag]

Yo! I’ve been developing my class conscience a good deal in the past year, I think I’ve gotten a decent understanding of different economic systems and the horrors if imperialism and ways to combat that. Something I’m very uneducated on is china and if it’s “good” or not. It’s not your job to do this but could you give me the rundown on chinas role in global communism? Are their efforts truly beneficial to the modern proletariat? Thank you for your time much love ❤️

sure! thx for asking.

the PRC is a socialist state, i.e. a dictatorship of the proletariat, that follows marxist-leninist principles, such as internationalism, dialectical materialism, a strong connection to the working classes, etc. it was formed after several decades of a protracted people's war with the former republic of china and Kuomintang, with the aid of the ussr. Pre-revolution, however, it was semi-feudal, poor, and otherwise backwards economically, also meaning that the proletariat as a class was underdeveloped.

to build the proletariat, increase capital, build a broad industrial base, etc., the policy of state capitalism was determined to be the only way forward, with the experience of the USSR and materialist analysis. state capitalism utilizes the benefits of the development of capitalism, such as socialized production, desperately needed capital, the building of factories, etc., while still maintaining itself as a proletarian state, and controlling the bourgeois. state capitalism, as i stated in the first draft of my essay (shameless self plug), is not a defined economic mode such as capitalism or socialism, it is simply a set of policies to be executed by a socialist state. its niche is in general modernization of tech, production, etc., and especially of the proletarian class. the reason it is used by semi-feudal countries is for that purpose, and a socialist state with an already developed proletariat, i.e. one in which capitalism has been allowed to fully develop, would not have much use for it.

State capitalism in the PRC consists of multiple things, namely a sort of "allyship" between private enterprises and the state, which Chairman Mao Tse-tung goes into in great detail in this, which i highly reccomend.

The policy allowed the construction of their extremely powerful industrial base, and with it public health, a developed class structure, the flourishing of the cultures of minority nationalities, its disciplined and valiant PLA, and the ability to resist imperialist intervention.

It has been working to build a united front against western imperialism, it provides massive humanitarian aid to periphery countries, has powerful allyships, etc. for these reasons, it is currently the vanguard of proletarian struggle worldwide.

Of course, it does have its flaws, most of which will be immediately rectified via demcent and contact with the masses, some of which were the "growing pains" of the new socialist state, and some of which were genuine errors. but above all, it is a marxist-leninist internationalist DotP.

[communist-ojou-sama]

I'll preface this by saying I'm Black myself and am feeling kind of lost, and as a longtime follower of yours I feel you're the only person on this site I'd trust to answer this:

Do you think that mainstream Black culture of the imperial core, specifically USA, is still worth caring about anymore? The more I read and speak to people internationally, the same assurance that a Yankee is a Yankee is a Yankee regardless of race is reinforced. USA is so overprevalent across the globe that I'm struggling to see why it's important to distinguish a specific part of it from the rest, especially since recent Black activism has failed to make any impact. It all just feels like pointless idpol, I guess?

Honestly I'm asking the same questions to myself lately and don't have a satisfying answer, but I will say that while black mass culture, as all mass culture in the past few decades, has increasingly coalesced into being the domain and outlet of a middle-class, collaborationist, and assimilationist milieu, I also still think that the black working class is one of the groups in the US with the strongest revolutionary potential. The broader thing though is that I don't particularly think that a proletarian revolution is going to happen before the collapse of the US as a unitary state occurs due to outside economic and geopolitical circumstances