#WORKING CLASS LEFTISM

[possiblesword]

Dude where is the Bas Lag fandom. These books are fucking awesome. What are you guys doing.

[politijohn]

Source

Let’s go!

[sparksinthenight]

If the economy NEEDS workers working in degrading, dehumanizing, dangerous jobs where they have very little power, then you need to get a different economy. Any world that relies upon the exploitation and abuse of the workers needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt. We can make a society where no one has to work a job that’s physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, emotionally, or environmentally unhealthy or unsafe for them. We need to create that society.

[queerism1969]

Remember: capitalism is working perfectly. You are supposed to be exhausted & worried you'll lose your income to die penniless. It makes it easier to take advantage of you & pay you less. If you're too busy worrying about rent, you don't have time to battle the unfair system.

[lilithism1848]

[dazedpuppydairies]

I wanna share something I hear as an anarchist that frustrates me. I've only been told this once or twice, but I get this kind of sentiment a lot. I've been told if your supposedly an anarchist why are you so law abiding? Usually when I'm told something like that or given that sentiment it's after someone has done something to inconvenience a working-class person at their job or is just rude, etc. I'm not talking about an accident, just someone generally not giving a shit or thinking it's that person's job to put up with it. Then I say something about it and I'm told if your an anarchist why are you so law abiding? or that kind of sentiment. Folks there's nothing anarchist about purposefully treating a working class person like shit. I really don't understand why some people think treating a working-class person like shit is sticking it to the man. I think maybe it's that trope were punks are just super shitty people, but folks really there's nothing fucking punk rock or anarchist about treating working class people like shit and if you think so for some reason, you've completely missed the point.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Being “Realistic”

Some people will argue that this is not a “realistic” strategy for the global warming crisis because of the need to make major moves away from fossil fuel burning in the immediate future. The process of organizing and building a powerful grassroots labor movement is probably going to be quite protracted. Thus various “democratic socialists” will argue that it is more practical to seek reforms through the electoral systems.

But that strategy faces the notorious problem of the inherent tendency of political bureaucracies and politicians to seek accommodation to capitalist interests. Socialists who support the electoralist strategy will concede that they need the potential for mass scale struggle and disruption to push the political leaderships for reform policies such as the “Green New Deal” — pushing for rapid shift of electricity production and transport sectors away from reliance on the burning of fossil fuels. But the best way to build the capacity of the working class to engage in this level of social struggle and disruption is through the kind of grassroots movement building that green syndicalists advocate. So, in fact, our strategy is realistic after all.

[whereserpentswalk]

The amount of (often white) misogynists who make the same sexist remarks about women that they always did, but just started saying "white women" is so shockingly large. Also the amount of terfs who are just so egar to be racist against black men. Not to mention the concerted efforts to paint queer and neurodivergent culture (including the parts of queer culture that have their origins with Black or east asian queerness) and spaces as inherently white as a way of dissmissing our struggle. Or the way that people treat Antisemitism and Islamophobia as if they're at odds with eachother and not coming from the same place (Christian supremacy).

We truly do live in a society.

[prolekult]

Yesterday marked the death of Sylvia Pankhurst - one of the finest revolutionary communists to have ever graced Britain's shores. We have rarely seen such fighters on this earth.

Sylvia was the most tortured suffragette, targetted for her insistence on including working class women within the demands of women's suffrage (much to the disdain of her mother and sister). She did not balk against repeated forced feeding, hunger striking and sleep striking.

She was one of a handful of communists in Britain who opposed the first world war. Her criticism of the war was ceaseless. Practically isolated, she organised relief for working class people in London with cost-price restaurants, free child care for mothers, and more.

She broke with the Labour Party over this, and never returned despite the enormous pressure put upon her by the British labour movement and, later, the Third Internationale. Her arguments with Lenin remain a key debate in communist and British politics.

Pankhurst stood resolutely with the Bolshevik revolution at its outbreak, and was pivotal in organising the "Hands Off Russia" campaign in Britain - which culminated in dock workers across the country refusing to load any munitions to ships.

Pankhurst was an outspoken opponent of racism. Her newspaper - then the Worker's Dreadnought - was the first newspaper in Britain to hire black journalists. When articles written by the Jamaican journalist, Claude McKay, were viewed as seditious, she went to jail for him.

Her support for Irish independence never wavered. She supported Larkin, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and United Builders' Labourers Union during the Dublin lock-outs. She stood by the Irish Citizen Army during the Easter Rising.

She was one of the first in Britain to recognise the dangers of fascism, her warnings and agitation beginning as early as 1920. Through this struggle, she became deeply involved in Ethiopian national liberation, where she spent the last years of her life.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg of the contributions Sylvia made in her life. She did all of this at great cost to herself, enduring her mother and sister denouncing her in the press repeatedly, endless slander, rejection by the mainstream communist movement and worse.

Sylvia also belongs to the great pantheon of disabled revolutionaries, being diagnosed with endometriosis whilst in prison. This, along with the damage done to her organs by forced feeding, left her with often crippling stomach problems.

"I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving." She fought until she died, but capitalism didn't kill her. At aged 78, Sylvia passed on.

She was given a state funeral in Ethiopia, and remains the only foreigner buried in the front of Holy Trinity Cathedral. An Ethiopian migrant, cited anonymously in Rachel Holmes' biography of Pankhurst, summed up what she meant to him thus:

"After God, Sylvia Pankhurst".

To learn more about Sylvia, we highly recommend Rachel Holmes' biography, "Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel".

[oceanicmarxist]

4th National Conference of the Socialist Workers Party (Australia), 1976. Not sure who the speaker is.

[sparksinthenight]

Roughly 1/20 workers worldwide literally die due to workplace accidents/injuries/poisoning. The bourgeoisie aren’t just stealing from us and screwing us over. They are literally murdering us.

[queerism1969]

[lilithism1848]

[kilowogcore]

On this blog we believe the Flagsmashers did nothin' wrong.

(Art sampled from "Red Hood: The Hill" Vol. 1 #5 by Shawn Martinbrough, Tony Akins, Matt Herms, Troy Peteri, Dave Wielgosz, and Ben Meares. Edits: Altered Dialogue, New Balloons)

[dailyanarchistposts]

From Resistance to Liberation

This direct proletarian ecological interest is key because the working class has the potential power to change the mode of production — to build a different way of generating goods and services from human labor and nature. Given the way capitalism is inherently stuck in an ecologically destructive dynamic, powerful social forces are needed to be able to shift to a more ecologically friendly mode of production. The working class can be a potential social force with the power to do this for two reasons. First, because the working class is a large majority of the society. And, secondly, because of the position workers occupy in the system of production and distribution. By building organizations of resistance in the workplaces and building a movement from fighting boss power day to day, the working class can build its social power or leverage, to act as a force to bend management decisions in a direction favorable to what workers want. And in the process of doing this the workers can and do develop their capacity to fight and their aspirations for change.

This is where the syndicalist strategy comes into play. Through the development of a worker movement that is worker-controlled and developing class consciousness and aspirations for liberation from the capitalist regime, a path is opened up for a direct shift to a different mode of production which workers would be in a position to create “from below,” through their own organized movement.

The syndicalist vision of self-managed socialism provides a plausible basis for a solution for the environmental crisis because a federative, distributed form of democratic planning places power in local communities and workers in industries, and thus they have power to prevent ecologically destructive decisions. For syndicalists, socialism is about human liberation — and a central part is the liberation of the working class from subordination and exploitation in a regime where there are oppressor classes on top. Thus for syndicalism the transition to socialism means workers taking over and collectively managing all the industries — including the public services. This would enable workers to:

Gain control over technological development,

Re-organize jobs and education to eliminate the bureaucratic concentration of power in the hands of managers and high-end professionals, develop worker skills, and work to integrate decision-making and conceptualization with the doing of the physical work,

Reduce the workweek and share work responsibilities among all who can work, and

Create a new logic of development for technology that is friendly to workers and the environment.

[sequencer987]

Begging online leftists to realize that “We Will Kill You If You Don’t” is not an effective strategy when it comes to getting normies on board with your movement.