#socialist strategy

[truth4ourfreedom]

[workersolidarity]

This is what people DON'T understand about Marxism Leninism

You organize your workplace, your community, your Union, every aspect of your life you organize along CLASS LINES.

NOT IDEOLOGICAL LINES

I don't need to agree with someone on culture war issues to fight the Capitalist Class by their side.

The point of doing this, when you put aside your differences to fight those that are FUCKING you daily, a feeling of comradery begins to form between those fighting against the Capitalist system.

THIS is when you change hearts and minds!

That's why we call each other comrade.

It's a feeling of brotherliness and sisterliness that forms and before long, the very people you thought you'd be fighting against, are fighting by your side to unfuck society.

When you have that connection with a person, it's no longer so difficult to compromise with them, to find levels of understanding that weren't possible before.

But it starts by learning to be mature enough to know when to shut the fuck up and accept people's differences, even their prejudices, in order to turn their attention towards beginning to fight against the Oligarchs, corrupt politicians and bosses fucking us all equally.

Many minds will be changed through this strategy.

And when the Revolution is over and the building must begin, it is then that your Socialists can turn their attention to fighting to build a better world from the rubble of the old.

And if you've worked the class strategy right, all the way till the end, and not got caught up in infighting, you will stand a chance of winning enough hearts and minds to build a new Socialist world and defeat anyone standing in your way.

[oceanicmarxist]

asking u cuz u seem at least a few notches above ur average tumblr “communist”. what (if anything) works of kautsky are worth reading?

The Class Struggle, The Social Revolution & The Road to Power

Will add that Kautsky made some hard breaks with Marxism through the 1910s and 1920s (this is why Lenin and Luxemburg criticize him for), so late Kautsky and early Kautsky read like two different people sometimes.

Also recommend Mike Macnair's Revolutionary Strategy (he derives a lot of his politics from Marx, Kautsky and Lenin).

[oceanicmarxist]

Same reason why Confederate monuments or Nazi statues should be blown up.

Not a Stalinist. Also not some rightist who thinks that religion is compatible with communist let alone Bolshevism or Marxism.

So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.

Lenin: On Religion

'Religion is the opium of the people,' said Karl Marx. It is the task of the Communist Party to make this truth comprehensible to the widest possible circles of the labouring masses. It is the task of the party to impress firmly upon the minds of the workers, even upon the most backward, that religion has been in the past and still is today one of the most powerful means at the disposal of the oppressors for the maintenance of inequality, exploitation, and slavish obedience on the part of the toilers. Many weak-kneed communists reason as follows: 'Religion does not prevent my being a communist. I believe both in God and in communism. My faith in God does not hinder me from fighting for the cause of the proletarian revolution.' This train of thought is radically false. Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically. Every communist must regard social phenomena (the relationships between human beings, revolutions, wars, etc.) as processes which occur in accordance with definite laws. The laws of social development have been fully established by scientific communism on the basis of the theory of historical materialism which we owe to our great teachers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This theory explains that social development is not brought about by any kind of supernatural forces. Nay more. The same theory has demonstrated that the very idea of God and of supernatural powers arises at a definite stage in human history, and at another definite stage begins to disappear as a childish notion which finds no confirmation in practical life and in the struggle between man and nature. But it is profitable to the predatory class to maintain the ignorance of the people and to maintain the people's childish belief in miracles (the key to the riddle really lies in the exploiters' pockets), and this is why religious prejudices are so tenacious, and why they confuse the minds even of persons who are in other respects able.

N. Bukharin & Y. Preobrazhensky, ABC of Communism Chapter 11: Communism and Religion

The medieval Saint Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, Ukraine, shortly before it was demolished by the Soviets in 1935. X

[jonesposting]

Some better news for today, the Austrian communist party saw a huge increase in votes in last Sundays local election in Salzburg putting them on tack to establish a second communist mayor in a major Austrian city after Graz! They are on this run partially because they are the only real leftwing opposition in the country but also by standing by their commitment against capitalism and, probably most importantly, their commitment to provide local services like tenant organising, minor financial aid and legal advice for tenants!

Organising works!

[chedelat]

me thinking about literally any ship from disco elysium: this too is dialectics

[ordingdrublene]

Wartime strategy of Ording Drublene

fill A bucket with waste (bullet casings, escrement, small ruble bits, small people bits, fluids, expired rations) and catapult it at ya enemies

if you don't know what your doing neither does the enemy

Laws of War are more of suggestions

Fear is a good weapon screech violently and often (also crawl around like A fast zombie from half life 2)

[truth4ourfreedom]

We need to start doing this here in the US! Biden is going to be signing away our freedom as a nation!

[probablyasocialecologist]

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point. Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it. It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this. But these are all just symptoms. The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned. Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even basic steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future. Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment. At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development. The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital. And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism. They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative. So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

Jason Hickel

[zololacan]

BIng ai Image creator with the prompt being Jean Bauldrairds essay "requiem for the media" and its other subsections as the prompt in different styles

Requium for the media, Enzensberger: A "Socialist" Strategy,Speech without Response,Subversive Strategy and "Symbolic Action",The Theoretical Model of Communication,The Cybernetic Illusion. Art Deco, Russian Cosmism, Anime,

Requium for the media, Enzensberger: A "Socialist" Strategy,Speech without Response,Subversive Strategy and "Symbolic Action",The Theoretical Model of Communication,The Cybernetic Illusion., Cinematic

[bimboficationblues]

so the thing about "read theory" as a mantra: in the social media sphere there is a consistent downplaying of what that kind of commitment actually entails, plus a consistent obfuscation of what exactly the commitment is necessary for.

let's say that you're interested in learning more about specifically "Marxist theory." This, I think, also raises a bunch of questions about what we mean by theory - works of political philosophy, texts on revolutionary and military strategy, political speeches, journalistic or sociological analysis, historiography - these varying things with very different discursive norms and standards of evidence or logic often get rolled into one singular object called "theory." but let's set that aside for now.

you want to learn this for maybe an assortment of reasons, here's a few (non-exhaustive) good ones:

Marxism has been a substantial historical force that has probably had a notable impact on the world around you in some way.

Learning about Marx/ism might offer some level of insight into your current social world that other things are unable to offer.

Many texts - Capital, The Wretched of the Earth, The Second Sex, The State and Revolution - are also world-historical forms of political literature, which is interesting.

Follow-up to 2 - maybe having some level of familiarity with these things will give you the ability to better articulate yourself and participate in social and political movements around you.

generally speaking the Social Media Marxist approach is to tell you to go read off a list of texts of whatever writers the author personally agrees with or whatever works she happens to have read. so you decide to start with the big guy Marx, who is at the top of the list. totally reasonable decision.

however, there are a few contextual questions that might reasonably come up when doing so.

first, it will be clear that Marx did not pop out of an intellectual vacuum; Lenin has a rather popular identification of the "three sources of Marxism" - post-Hegelian German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. from my perspective, these are more like three of his main objects of ire (and so in some sense are both influences and also breakages - but not strictly speaking a synthesis), but I digress. so, frequently, in order to grasp what Marx is talking about or responding to, you are going to need some level of familiarity with a lot of additional people: Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Hegel, Bauer, Feuerbach, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Mill, Sismondi. suddenly you are not just learning about the works of one guy, but his attitude towards all the people he relies on for support or aims his criticisms at. and each of those different intellectual relationships is going to be different. sometimes at different times!

second, and relatedly, Marx is not always the most charitable to the people he's criticizing, who were often rival socialists (so there were pretty notable political and personal stakes at work in proving them wrong or diminishing their influence over the movement). the introductory materials to the new translation of Capital also observe that Marx's approach to scholarship is, shall we say, haphazard; often he makes quotes or citations that are not actually representative of what he's citing. finally, many of the people he's criticizing have sort of been rendered obsolete historically *in no small part* due to the success of Marxism as a political orientation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. so to determine whether Marx is being fair to the people he is basing his critique on, we will have to do some level of intellectual work to check. so now we're not just evaluating Marx's relationship to different thinkers but also the substantial content of each of those thinkers themselves.

third, Marx did not pop out of a social vacuum. all of these different writers didn't just crop up from nowhere but wrote within particular sociohistorical contexts, some of which were rather divorced from the European revolutionary wave, first worldwide financial crisis, and the shifting character of the United States in the wake of the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery - some of the historical events that Marx was more explicitly engaging with. and the radical liberals, republicans, and socialists Marx criticized all also had their own intellectual and social histories. so now we're getting a little far afield from the initial notion, which was just to read some guy, and getting into the realm of social history, and trying to understand the relationship between world history and the ideas produced within it.

fourth, you are a subject in the world, which is to say YOU did not pop out of a social or intellectual vacuum. you likely bring predispositions, assumptions, biases, and cognitive distortions to what you read; we all do. working through those and trying to note where they're happening - where they might be fine and where they might be problematic - will require a certain willingness to reflect, to write, to take notes, to analyze and self-scrutinize, and to be critical of both yourself as a reader and of the text you are reading. (a nested problem is that we have a truly staggering amount of material from Marx and Engels, and you might have to make certain determinations as to which material is important or worthwhile or more useful, and identify the standards by which you think that - all of which requires a certain reflection on your status as a political thinker).

okay, so consider all that. we started with "I wanna read this one guy," we end with "to really grasp the work of this one guy it's also important to know both preceding and contemporaneous world history, his intellectual influences, and the gaps or silences or errors in his work.” now consider that, if you really want to be able to speak on them with some level of confidence and intellectual honesty, you have to apply approximately the same level of rigor to every other writer on the Social Media Marxist approved list - Lenin, Fanon, Che, Kollontai, Cabral, Mao, Luxemburg, whoever. not to mention their critics, both direct and indirect!

Marx developed his work through an incredibly sustained engagement with enormous volumes of different material; we have entire notebooks of him poring over Max Stirner, or Spinoza, or the political economists, or the empirical observations of English factory inspectors. I'm not saying that you have to do that, or even that one strictly *has* to go down any or all of the first three rabbitholes I identified. Marx was in the somewhat unique position of sustaining himself through the support of Engels and his journalistic work, as a product of being in perpetual exile. that's not the kind of position that most of us are typically in.

the point is not "commit yourself to being a perfect monastic scholar in order to reach perfect truth" - such a thing is probably a fantasy, even if we wish otherwise. the point is that if you think "theory" is worth taking seriously, well, you have to actually take it seriously. if you don’t think it has stakes or utility, that’s fine; different people find different things useful. I think “theory” is not a set of dead letters by canonical authors but produced through social life. but if “reading theory” is a way to clarify and assert yourself as a political subject and agent, to claim some intellectual autonomy and acquire some understanding that you can put into practice in your life, then that’s demanding. it’s not impossible, but it does take real effort and a commitment to study and a certain level of resistance to being dogmatic. otherwise you are just letting yourself be rhetorically persuaded by whatever is in front of you or whatever affirms your biases.

as Marx says in the preface to Capital, Volume I, "I am of course assuming that my readers will want to learn something new, and so are ready to think for themselves."

[silhalei]

Hmm... Viva la Revolution

[tpwrtrmnky]

Strategy game protagonist: The whispers of the dark north are beckoning me... saying I must make the hard choices, and deal with the evil here for the greater good

Me, a Norwegian: Haha, this guy doesn't realize he's being corrupted by the evil of the land!

Norwegian oil company: Hey we could really use driven people with a passion for the environment. Use the power of oil for good socialist causes.

Me, a Norweigan: Hmmmmmmmm

[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.

[darkfrog24]

You know what's happening tomorrow in the U.S.? A STATE AND LOCAL ELECTION! Don't like Democrats or Republications and would prefer a third party? Hey, you know when a third party can actually win? A STATE OR LOCAL ELECTION. Most of the laws that actually affect the lives of U.S. residents are state laws, not federal. You know all the bans on/protections of abortion that happened after the Nine overturned Roe v. Wade? That's state legislatures doing that. THAT IS WHAT THIS ELECTION WILL DO. IT WILL ELECT THE STATE SENATORS AND STATE REPS THAT DO THINGS LIKE THAT. You know how school boards are voting to ban/protect books in schools? HEY GUESS WHAT! This is your school board election. Hey, one school district near me is voting about whether to put a cop in the school. Care about cops in schools? STATE AND LOCAL ELECTION TIME!!

"But Froggie," you say, "I don't know one candidate from the other. I don't want to make an uneducated vote." Well gotcha covered.

Ballotopedia.org can get you a copy of your ballot if your area doesn't send you one in the mail.

Vote411.org and BallotReady.org sometimes have parallel interviews with local candidates.

There you go, you responsible voter you. Now you're as ready as can be for your STATE AND LOCAL ELECTION!

For all of my US followers for whom general public official election day is coming up (Nov. 7th) PLEASE do not become so disillusioned with the current state of higher power politicians that you skip out on voting for local offices; off year and local elections are already critically unemphasized but these are the people who have the most direct power over jails, police, school curriculum, etc. Do not let your grief be weaponized as a distraction from also continuing to fight police brutality, queer and bipoc censorship in schools, bodily autonomy, housing inequality, etc, on the smaller scale battlefields where every vote truly does count

[txttletale]

What are your criticisms of Chavismo and Maduro just out of curiosity?

now i'd like to preface this with a disclaimer that any opposition ghoul would do nothing but sell the country out to the USA and UK every which way in a heartbeat--maduro is better than any alternative, whether that's guaidó or whichever neoliberal puppet they prop up to replace him.

anyway, there were two key problems with chavismo. firstly, it's fundamentally a national-bourgeois led social democratic movement. obviously in an imperialized country like venezuela this made it profoundly progressive, and the achievments of the bolivarian revolution were incredible--chávez cut malnutrition in half, cut unemployment in half, sent millions of children to school and gave millions of elderly people pensions. however, this project of wealth distribution ultimately had to accomodate the national bourgeoisie. which of course on one hand you can argue was completely necessary, but on the other hand allowed the parasitic classes to entrench themselves firmly within elements of the state apparatus and made chavismo as a project entirely incapable of confronting the national bourgeoisie or corruption.

these of course are the realities of 'democratic socialism', of sweeping a socialist into office in a bourgeoise democracy. through some extremely clever political structures, such as the new constitution, communes, and bolicarian circles--he was able to move much more radically than most in his position. but ultimately, he could not escape the fundamental limits of the source and constraints of his power.

the second is that--and this is a very tawdry and obvious piece of analysis--while it is of course admirable and correct that he seized the nation's oil wealth and enriched the country with it--the way he did it was obviously shortsighted. without a sovereign wealth fund, worker's democratic control of the oil industry, or a solid and far-ranging investment plan, he laid the groundwork for some of the current crisis on the assumption that oil prices would stay high forever.

maduro inherited these faults and added far more of his own. during the crisis that began in earnest in 2016, the other shoe dropped wrt oil prices at the same time as the US tightened their murderous sanctions regime. faced with economic crisis, maduro has broadly chosen to move from chávez' strategy of accomodation with the national bourgeoisie to a full on alliance. social programs have been slashed, pensions cut, wages have plummeted, and worst of all, maduro has sold off countless state enterprises in the hope that oft-prayed to benevolent deity, "foreign capital" would miraculously heal the economy. in the course of this he made an enemy of many early chavistas, as well as the leftmost wing of chávez' coalition -- he has mobilized the full force of the bourgeois state against the country's communist party and other genuinely revolutionary movements, most gallingly the marxist-leninist movimiento tupamaro.

so, tldr: chavismo was genuinely radical compared to even your average third-world social democracy--however it remained fundamentally constrained in what it could accomplish by the lack of an actual proletarian state, was unable to rid itself of reliance on the national bourgeoisie for that same reason, and made some very avoidable mistakes in the handling of the nation's oil wealth--maduro inherited those flaws but has been much more accomodating to both national and international capitalists to the detriment of the people of venezuela.