#marxism

[jkl-fff]

In part because the companies that used/produced CFCs didn't have a stranglehold on capitalist economies (especially the US), and weren't able to use their billions and billions of dollars to buy politicians (especially but not exclusicely republicans) while launching a propaganda campaign that convinced a depressingly large amount of the population that the ozone hole was a hoax (especially but not exclusively conservatives. We succeeded with eliminating CFCs because those companies couldn't weild practically the entirety of capitalism against the public good.

We absolutely can solve climate change, too, to be clear. It's just that oil mega-corporations have conspired against humanity and the environment--the well-being of the Earth itself--because they know that they're the problem that needs to be solved. Fixing climate change means they stop making billions and billions of dollars annually, and they'd rather burn us up than sacrifice their wealth and power. We gotta eliminate their figuratively and literally toxic control of lawmakers as part of the solution.

[dandelionjack]

i’ve been locked off interactions on twitter for a week for telling some nazis to kill themselves, so i’ll respond to this here instead, which i know is cheating because tumblr is an echo chamber of niceness. but i just got so mad at it that i couldn’t not respond: if you know how my past week went, it genuinely feels like certain tweets were genetically engineered to prod your anxieties and self-hatred specifically

anyway. no. why? because without rest we will simply burn ourselves out, and burnt-out activists aren’t useful for any revolutionary vanguard, sorry. nobody can be engaged 24/7, that’s just… not how the human mind works. it’s not materialist to believe that you can function like a perpetual motion engine — congrats mate, you’ve been duped by the protestant work ethic.

also, “petty bourgeois” how, exactly? i’d wager that a worker who has just spent an 8 hour shift at their, say, retail job requires quite a lot of rest before they can engage in union organising or propaganda distribution or any other political activity. oftentimes posting on the internet is all they’ll have energy for, if that. speaking from experience. rest is CRUCIAL to avoid going insane from the overload of information that this world subjects us to. logging off is literally a survival mechanism.

yes, liberals are wrong — rest isn’t resistance in of itself. but it’s a necessary prerequisite for resistance to become possible in the first place. it is as essential to keeping up a LIFE — exactly like eating, showering, going outside, talking to people are. you wouldn’t call other biological processes petit bourgeois, would you? rest is a biological process, not a frivolous demand. not just sleep at night, by the way — rest while AWAKE. there is countless research on it.

audre lorde was the person who coined the phrase in its initial form. and i think it should never have been changed from what she wrote — she was speaking from her experience as a Black feminist woman diagnosed with cancer — but people prefer pithy memorable phrases with alliteration to sentences that actually mean something. this has led many MLs to think that “rest is resistance” means “har har, liberals think they’re revolutionary for buying a bath bomb from lush and a face mask from [face mask brand, i don’t know man, i don’t use face masks].” but the original quote was nowhere near an apologetics for consumerism in the name of “letting people enjoy things”: it was a proud statement by a Black disabled author who refused to lay down and die in a society that encouraged her to do so.

shut up.

[thespectrehauntingfodlan]

A cartoon from 1914 that could have been written today

[stillnaomi]

no matter how you examine a bar of chocolate, there's no indication of the exploitation that went into creating it — not an atom that screams "I came into being through slavery!" and yet, the social relations of slavery and unequal exchange are facts of its existence. in the capitalist world, we're presented with an endless series of commodities, while the social relationships behind their production and distribution are hidden from us. when people understand the misery that others are forced into in order to shave $0.5 off the production costs of every t-shirt, sofa, or TV they purchase, they often feel rage at the capitalist system. that's why we must continually expose such things. don't let them be hidden from view

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

"Nowhere is the power of capital, the power of a handful of billionaires over the whole of society, so crude and as openly corrupt as in America. Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society, & no...form of franchise (voting) can alter the essence of the matter.”

— V.I. Lenin (1919)

[whereserpentswalk]

I fucking hate this "capitalism is when you make money, the more money you make, the more capitalism it is" mindset people have gotten. No, an artist selling their own work is not them engaging in capitalism, it's literally a worker owning their own means of production.

Remember capitalism is someone profiting off of someone else's labor though owning capital. It is not simply the act of profiting at all.

[memingursa]

Rabid Joe Biden about to bomb the Vatican

[bolshevikitherat]

from the Lavender and Red Union, a group of communists who wrote this in 1975.

"GAY LIBERATION IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT SOCIALIST REVOLUTION. SOCIALISM IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT GAY LIBERATION."

[juegosintiperojuegocontigo]

[nuadaargetlamh]

One is a convicted criminal that wants to:

Institute a dictatorship “on day one only” (with majority support from his party!)

Give a greenlight to Project 2025

Use a weakened Schedule F to install THOUSANDS of cronies

Institute military tribunals for his political enemies (and allies!)

Gun down “enemies from within”

Support Russia in wiping Ukraine off the map

Use the combo of the removal of the Chevron deference/the Supreme Court allowing people to openly bribe them/Schedule F to extend the far-right’s reach into every government agency and deregulate everything to the benefit of his rich capitalist buddies

Has gotten total immunity for “official acts” (what counts as “official”? Whatever his Schedule F appointed judges choose of course.)

Already took away so many freedoms from racial minorities/queer people/women/anyone-that-isn’t-a-rich-white-man that it would take ages to list them all in this post

and so so so so SO MUCH MORE.

The other is a typical neoliberal politician.

Remember also, you’re not just choosing a president, you’re choosing their cabinet, potential Supreme Court justices, federal employees as well. With the above listed ALONE, Trump would do so much more damage than just what he can do himself. That’s not including everything else his Federalist Society Supreme Court would and have given him on a silver platter. Supreme Court Justices are for LIFE, and we’ve already seen the potentially irreparable damage this far-right activist court has done to the fabric of democracy.

Project 2025 really deserves a part to itself just to list some of what it includes: complete abortion/contraceptive ban (no exceptions), destroying worker’s unions and protections, remove Social Security/Medicare/Affordable Care Act, end civil rights protections in government, ban teaching the history of slavery, remove climate protections while gutting the EPA, end equal marriage and enforce the “traditional family ideal”, use the military to gun down protests, mass deportation of legal immigrants (especially Muslims), ending birthright citizenship, pack the lower courts, and plenty more. The far-right wasn’t able to take full advantage of Trump’s presidency the first time since it was so unexpected. They’re preparing so that they won’t make the same mistake again. THERE ARE OVER 900 PAGES OF POLICIES AND PLANS THAT THEY ABSOLUTELY WILL IMPLEMENT IF THEY WIN. READ IT. Anyone that says they won’t is either a liar or already drank the Kool-Aid. Isn’t it interesting that every politician that supports it, including his vice president, wants Trump to win?

Not to mention, if you care about Palestine (like I do, a lot), Trump would be MUCH WORSE for Palestine than the other candidate, supporting Bibi going “from the river to the sea” and already cut off millions in aid to Palestine in 2018 (which Dems reversed!). If you support a free Palestine and don’t vote blue, you have categorically hurt them more than if you did. Even Palestinians themselves want the Democrat candidate over Trump. There is no quick and bloodless peace deal that both Palestine and Israel would ever agree to. The road to an end of the Palestine-Israel conflict is going to be long and difficult, probably decades of dedicated de-radicalization in both states, and will involve far more than one person’s decisions in the end. Unless Trump takes power, and avoids all that by sending enough bombs to turn the Gaza Strip into dust.

There are a few reasons you would choose to vote third party in a FPTP system (support ranked choice voting btw) or not vote “in protest” while ignoring all the state and local elections that affect your area more than the president. Either you’re privileged enough to not be affected by what Trump would bring, you’re ignorant of the consequences, or you care more about doing nothing perfectly rather than doing something, anything that isn’t 100% ideologically “pure” to fight against the far-right fascist movement.

Am I a democratic socialist? Yes. Am I a realist? Also yes. In every single down-ballot race, and through my activism, I will fight for the rights of the oppressed and working-class. But the Presidency isn’t fucking winnable right now, and probably won’t be for decades. Pro-corporatist/anti-worker sentiment is baked into the fucking bones of this country and its people. A majority of eligible voters wouldn’t vote for Bernie, and he’s barely center-left. Voting for anything other than one of the two big parties is a useless feel-good gesture at the moment. Or you’re a dumbass accelerationist, and if you are, honestly go fuck yourself.

Let’s say you want a socialist revolution, full-tilt government takeover. I want that too, in my wildest dreams! We’re on the same page there. So how are you going to do it. How? HOW? What pro-worker activist groups are you working with? Are you encouraging your workplace to form a union? Volunteering for/donating to your local farmers’ co-op? Canvassing for pro-worker legislation? Hell, even something as small as distributing free copies of high-school/college textbooks, so that those of poorer means have a better chance at affording advanced education? Are you doing anything to help? Any praxis at all, rather than typing wishful thoughts of revolution alongside insults to people who aren’t as “correct” as you on the internet?

Every voter that still supports Trump is energized by every cruelty he enacts, while millions of Democrats and third-partyists care more about purity tests and manifesting socialist revolution tulpas than avoiding a fascist dictatorship.

Have a brain, touch grass, and vote blue all the way down that fucking ballot.

[jingerpi]

i know it sounds made up but studying Marxism will save you. like, understanding how and why society works the way it does and being able to have the knowledge that it wasn't always like this and one day this too will be surpassed will do wonders for your mental health. not to mention the tools for analysis and understanding can give you insight into yourself, because it does also do that, it's just that the knowledge and understanding that comes from studying socioeconomics derived from class struggle (rather than bourgeois intellectualism) recontextualizes so many of our issues and struggles that things no longer feel like they're explicitly you're fault nor do they stretch beyond our imagination infinitely into the past and beyond our futures. If you feel hopeless or confused, reading theory can genuinely help. it will solidify your understanding of the world and how to move forward, rather than simply pointing out all the problems (as many social media posts tend to) the answers are in theory.

the crazy thing is it's not just beneficial to our mental health but to our external, physical health too. learning these things can uplift the Proletariat as a class and start to bring us closer to those futures you'll become able to see. theory is a map to a better future, not only is it relieving to see there is one out there, we can actually follow it, and that's the best part.

[scouse1g]

[read-marx-and-lenin]

There is no magic "abolish the state" button, which is why I'm an anarchist, as "when the state has socialismed enough it will just magically poof away in a cloud of smoke" is the leninist position.

That is not the Leninist position, the Leninist position is and always has been that the state cannot disappear until the material conditions for its disappearance are achieved. The withering away of the state, first outlined by Engels, is not a magic process but one that proceeds from the abolition of class and the dissolution of the bourgeoisie.

How are you going to get rid of the bourgeoisie without a state? Are you going to simply ask them nicely to leave you alone? If you are organized and if your organization is suppressing the bourgeoisie as a class, then you have created a state, you have created an authoritarian imposition on the free organization of some section of the people. If you are not doing any of this, then the bourgeoisie who you have left unmolested will invariably come to dominate you once more.

Anarchists have always played word games to get around these simple facts. There are the practical anarchists who will admit to some amount of authority, but always with the caveat that theirs is *just* authority, *necessary* authority, and that is is the *unjust* authority that they condemn. Just authority is not the State, because the State is unjust, and so if they see an authority as just then it cannot be the State. Fair enough, you can call things by whatever names you like, but if you put these ideas in practice you basically end up with Leninism. You want to create dual power? You want to abolish the bourgeois state and replace it with a democratic organ of the working class? Well so did Lenin, and now you know why the Mensheviks accused him of anarchism.

Then there are the quite impractical capital-A Anarchists, who are adamant that anarchy means anarchy and that even voluntary hierarchy and submission to democratic authority is impermissible. Whether pacifistic or militaristic, they are generally unremarkable and ineffective at their goals because they eschew most effective forms of organization as ideologically impure. Even the most advanced anarchists, the CNT in Spain and the Maknovists in Russia, were plagued by economic confusion and disorganization. Their lack of discipline led to their downfall.

If you want to read more, here are some pertinent links:

[pinsforfingerz]

[t-i-m-e-l-o-o-p]