(This is one of my multiple-thoughts-no-particular-conclusion posts)

• Đổi Mới in Vietnam seems successful. They have what they call the 'Socialist-oriented market economy' and have developed at a pace like China's

• New Economic Policy in the USSR seems successful

• Goulash Communism in Hungary seems successful. Hungary had less empty shelves than other Soviet Bloc countries. (Quote from the book 'Collective farms which work': "Hungary's success manifests itself in two rather less easily measurable ways. First, goods, and especially fresh meat and vegetables, simply are available in shops"). Hungary had A) the highest mix of market mechanisms in the Soviet Bloc B) the highest standard of living in the Soviet Bloc. On 7 May 1966, the Central Committee announced János Kádár's plans for the reform of the economy, known as the New Economic Mechanism. The reform is considered as "the most radical postwar change" of any Comecon country. [Granick, David. The Hungarian Economic Reform. World Politics, Vol. 25, No. 3. (Apr., 1973), pp. 414-429.] The plan, which became official 1 January 1968, was a major shift to decentralization in an attempt to overcome the inefficiencies of central planning. The reform gave producers the freedom to decide what and how much they produce and offer for sale and to establish commercial or co-operative relationships. Buyers were also given the freedom to choose between domestic goods and imports, firms were given greater autonomy in carrying out investments and hiring labor. As dictated by the Central Committee, success was to be measured by a firm's profitability. The New Economic Mechanism also aimed to create a more active role for prices [Hare, P.G. Industrial Prices in Hungary Part I: The New Economic Mechanism. Soviet Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2. (Apr., 1976), pp. 189-206]

• North Korea. This article on Pyongyang’s Views on Banking says, "There is an assumption sometimes expressed by outside observers that the North’s efforts in the banking sector have been primarily aimed at increasing control over funds accrued outside of central control. To the contrary, the bulk of the articles in the journals [political science journals within the DPRK] we studied focused on the opposite: how to increase “creativity” in banks, lessen rigid control from the center, and make space for bank officials—and the sector as a whole—to respond to conditions and developments at the local and enterprise levels without undue restrictions." and there's this one called 'Reports of North Korea’s Return to a Command Economy Have Been Exaggerated'. The constitution was changed in 2019 to replace the Taean Work System (party-centric method of managing the economy) with the Responsible Management System for Socialist Corporations (which increases the autonomy of managers at production sites and introduces market elements)

• And the big one, China.

Maybe some dogmatic leftists will be angry at what I've written. And the capitalist will say "Aha! This proves it! Only economic freedom is good for development" And indeed that is not 100% wrong. But the reasons it's some percent wrong –

• Markets working doesn't mean planning does not work. Gosplan worked fine for a lot of goods.

• Read theory. Marxism doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. It doesn't mean there are no markets. It does mean the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, and the proletariat decides how to command the productive forces to its benefit. Even if these examples proved "planning bad market good" (they don't - see below), would that debunk Marx's theory of exploitation? Would it debunk the need for a people's democratic dictatorship? No, it wouldn't debunk marxism: it just means the implementation of marxism involves markets.

• Read practice. The point of marxism isn't to follow some dogma, it's to do what works for the worker. If planning works, plan. If freeing markets works, free them. Both can be communism if they're under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Milton Friedman would say, "A state can't plan anything! And it shouldn't try!" Well that's obviously wrong: states plan transport infrastructure, water, post offices just fine. Gosplan planned a few strategic goods like steel just fine.

But sometimes the state CAN'T plan effectively. Some reasons for this: its computational resources are limited (less of an issue now, but very relevant in the 20th century), or the market is behaving too unpredictably, or Celine's 2nd Law prevents the state from getting accurate information.

I'm still studying and thinking about these topics, but here's one thing I can say with confidence: in cases where a state CAN'T plan, it shouldn't attempt to. That will lead to "communism is when no bread".

So what's the alternative to planning? Markets, I guess. (Is there a 3rd alternative I haven't thought of?)

Allowing markets doesn't mean allowing unregulated markets. The state can do dual-track pricing, can allow only co-operatives and not wage labour, can set price-controls (e.g. rent control). So freeing the market a bit doesn't mean going right-libertarian. (In fact, you could say that all countries are somewhere between total control and total freedom.)

Back to the Hungarian example: the New Economic Mechanism wasn't right-libertarian, it fixed the prices for material and basic intermediate goods, it limited prices for particular products or products in some product group for which there were no substitutes, such as bread. Free prices were assigned to goods that formed small parts of individual expenditures or were regarded as luxuries.

Then there's monetary methods of influence: the state could pass a law that markets should be done in non-recirculating labour-tokens rather than recirculating currency. Though to my knowledge, this has never been done in communist history. This would solve most of the problems in Cockshott's video "The limits of market socialism"

I want to read the 1936 book 'On the economic theory of socialism' by Oskar Lange to understand this better. It's a decent length and I've got a lot of theory to read.

The bit I find a little hard to swallow is the role of profitability, especially at the firm level. Only allowing profitable firms to exist sounds like a formula for exploitation. I concede that it bypasses the need for complex calculations; it collapses all those calculations onto the Bottom Line. So that's simpler and more foolproof. But it motivates firms to harm their customers with high prices and their employees with low wages.

I think some hexbearians are too optimistic about market socialism NOT being a capitalist road. It certainly has the potential to be. The class war is not won in China, and it's possible China's billionaires will influence policy.

Considered one of the most important intellectuals in Latin American social thought, Ruy Mauro Marini demonstrated that underdevelopment and development are the result of relations between economies in the world market, and the class relations they engender. In The Dialectics of Dependency, the Brazilian sociologist and revolutionary showed that, as Latin America came to specialize in the production of raw materials and foodstuffs while importing manufactured goods, a process of unequal exchange took shape that created a transfer of value to the imperialist centers. This encouraged capitalists in the periphery to resort to the superexploitation of workers – harsh working conditions where wages fall below what is needed to reproduce their labor power. In this way, the economies of Latin America, which played a fundamental role in facilitating a new phase of the industrial revolution in western Europe, passed from the colonial condition only to be rendered economically “dependent,” or subordinated to imperialist economies. This unbalanced relationship, which nonetheless allows capitalists of both imperialist and dependent regions to profit, has been reproduced in successive international divisions of labor of world economy, and continues to inform the day-to-day life of Latin American workers and their struggles.

Written during an upsurge of class struggle in the region in the 1970s, and published here in English for the first time, the revelations inscribed in this foundational essay are proving more relevant than ever. The Dialectics of Dependency is an internationalist contribution from one Latin American Marxist to dispossessed and oppressed people struggling the world over, and a gift to those who struggle from within the recesses of present-day imperialist centers—nourishing today’s efforts to think through the definition of “revolution” on a global scale.

If this is too close to sectarianism I get it, but I keep hearing about Marxist-Leninist-Maoists at the periphery of other discussions and all I know about them is:

• they seem to be distinct from other Maoist tendencies
• their name is often shortened to Maoist in conversation
• the tendency is at least nominally a synthesis of Mao's writings into prior ML theory, done by someone named Gonzalo
• their reputation among MLs seems to be deviant
• I think the rapper Power Struggle alludes to being one, which is my sole investment in this question

At the time of his death in 1927, he was lauded as “one of the most indicted and imprisoned workers” in the history of the American labor movement. Yet today, few know the name Charles Emil Ruthenberg. When he passed away suddenly at the age of 44, he cheated a Michigan prison of its next inmate and left a young Communist Party USA—then called the Workers (Communist) Party—in mourning for its first general secretary. Socialist agitator

Born the son of a Cleveland longshoreman in 1882, Ruthenberg’s formal education ended when he was 16, but he continued studying on his own, becoming part of the pool of “working-class intellectuals.” He worked a series of jobs, including in a picture frame factory, before eventually scoring a position in the business department of a book company. He developed his administrative and executive abilities there during the day and continued his self-education at night.

Seeing the class struggle play out on the job, he became more and more disillusioned with the social and economic system of capitalism. Initially preparing for a life as a minister, Ruthenberg traded the Bible for Capital, borrowed from his local library branch. When asked by a prosecutor years later how he had been converted to socialism, he answered: “Through the Cleveland Public Library.”

By 1909, when he was 27, Ruthenberg had officially joined the Socialist Party. A year later, he was the party’s candidate for Ohio state treasurer, running on a platform that called for unemployment insurance—several decades before that reform was eventually won. 60,000 people cast their ballots for him. Two years later, he was the candidate for Cleveland mayor, part of a wave of Socialist campaigns that made Ohio the country’s first “Red State,” although that designation meant something very different than it does today. He quickly became an outspoken figure on the Socialist Party’s left wing, known for his uncompromising attitude against the imperialist war looming in Europe. When the U.S. finally entered the conflict in 1917, Ruthenberg led the campaign for an anti-war resolution at the Socialist Party’s National Emergency Convention in St. Louis. He and other left-wingers were determined that their party not follow the example of the European socialist parties supporting the war.

In June, he was arrested, along with Alfred Wagenknecht and Ohio SP organizer Charles Baker, for obstructing the military draft. A swift conviction in November—the same month as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—sent them all to prison for a year. He and his comrades began serving their term in January 1918. From that time right up until his death, Ruthenberg was either in prison or facing imprisonment.

Emerging from the Canton workhouse just as the war was ending, Ruthenberg returned immediately to work. Support for the left wing of the party was consolidating among the membership, driven by dissatisfaction with the lukewarm way the party leadership had met the issue of imperialist war, its half-hearted embrace of the workers’ revolution in Russia, its refusal to join the new Communist International, and its failure to support efforts to build industrial labor unions.

The left wing, with Ruthenberg leading the charge, carried on an intense campaign to shift the party’s direction. In elections for the executive, they took 12 out of 15 seats. The old leadership refused to honor the results, however, and initiated a purge of all the left-led state parties and foreign language federations, which together represented the vast majority of the party membership. Through its bureaucratic maneuvers, the right-wing leadership effectively split the Socialist Party.

Communist founder

Ruthenberg was fresh out of jail once again after having charges against him in connection with Cleveland’s 1919 May Day parade dismissed when the break with the Socialist leadership was made official.

Though united in their opposition to what they saw as the “opportunism” of the Socialist Party executive committee, Ruthenberg and the other left-wingers were divided as to how they should proceed. The bulk of the left wing, with Ruthenberg and Fraina at their head, prepared for the founding of a new party—a communist party. They set Sept. 1 as the date to establish the new group.

But a group led by Reed and Wagenknecht insisted on staging a raid of the upcoming Socialist convention in Chicago, scheduled for the end of August, to take the seats they’d been elected to. It was a foregone conclusion that they’d be denied credentials, and so they rented a room downstairs from the official meeting, anticipating they’d need a place to set up their own party.

At noon the next day, the founding convention of the Communist Party of America opened on Chicago’s Blue Island Avenue at the headquarters of the Russian Socialist Federation. The meeting hall was decked out in red banners bearing revolutionary slogans. Portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky hung above the stage. Just as the meeting was about to open, the Chicago Police Red Squad busted into the hall, and detectives immediately began tearing down and destroying all the flags and floral decorations. Photographers rushed in to take pictures of everybody. The delegates stared at the police, and then a brass band struck up the “Internationale” and everyone started to sing and cheer.

After the excitement died down a bit, Louis Fraina made the opening keynote with the following words: “We now end, once and for all, all factional disputes. We are at an end with bickering. We are at an end with controversy.”

Of course, with two separate communist parties founded just 18 hours apart, it was clear that the division and factionalism were not over.

For a united party of action

The government stepped up its repression of both communist parties almost immediately. Many Communist leaders were driven underground or deported in the infamous “Palmer Raids.” Just over a year after the founding conventions, Ruthenberg was again targeted. He was convicted in November 1920 for “criminal syndicalism” for signing the Socialist Party Left Wing Manifesto and sent away to Sing Sing prison. The recommended sentence was 5 to 10 years, but after 18 months, he was out after an appeals court said he never should have been found guilty.

The two communist parties during this time united into a single Communist Party, thanks largely to negotiations led by Ruthenberg and Wagenknecht. John Reed had died in October 1920 in Russia, and Fraina was under a cloud of espionage and, eventually, embezzlement of party funds.

The unified party emerged from the underground as the Workers (Communist) Party, with Ruthenberg as its leader. But six weeks after he won his appeal and release, he and 16 others were arrested at a party convention in Bridgman, Michigan. The charge, again, was criminal syndicalism. Seeing that Ruthenberg was one of the ablest organizers and leaders in the Communist Party, security agencies and the police were determined to keep him isolated behind bars.

A new conviction was handed down, and Ruthenberg once more entered prison in January 1925, expecting to serve up to ten years. An appeal to the Supreme Court resulted in an order for a retrial, and 20 days later he was free once more pending further proceedings. The threat of re-imprisonment hung over his head from then until the day he died.

At a meeting of the party’s political committee in February 1927, Ruthenberg was jotting down notes when William Z. Foster told him that he looked pale. His only response was that he was “kind of under the weather.” A couple of hours later, he collapsed and was taken to emergency appendectomy surgery. He died three days later of acute peritonitis. Thousands packed a memorial meeting at Chicago’s Ashland Auditorium—the same hall where Ruthenberg had spoken at the launch of the Daily Worker in 1924. In honor of his wishes and at the request of the Communist International, his ashes were conveyed to Moscow, where he was interred just behind Lenin’s final resting place.

Through all the years of factionalism, sectarianism, and repression, Ruthenberg maintained his stance in favor of a united, legal, and practical party. Though some, like Fraina, would fade into obscurity or ignominy, Ruthenberg remained dedicated to building a party of socialism in the United States.

He was a devoted Marxist but had little sympathy for those who, on the basis of protecting their supposedly revolutionary principles, would have made the party into little more than a debating society. “The knowledge gained in study classes,” he wrote in his last Daily Worker column, “must be carried into the actual class struggle.”

His political legacy was captured in an article he wrote during the worst days of the intra-party factional fights. The Communist Party, he said in 1920, must be “a party of action,” must participate “in the everyday struggles of the workers and by such participation, inject its principles and give a wider meaning, thus developing the Communist movement.”

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I’m not sure if he is a meme or if people genuinely like Wolff. I haven’t read him extensively, but I’ve watched/read him enough times to get a sense. I have never been too impressed. While Marx and others leave me with clarity, Wolff consistently leaves me confused. It feels like he has a super narrow understanding of things but doesn’t reveal his own assumptions. It feels like a purely aesthetic Marxism to dress up his own ideas.

For example: https://youtu.be/flFyaguUqIo

The first 3 minutes is a correct summary of, basically, Marx’s letter to Kugelmann. After 3:00, his explanation falls apart. He bastardizes Marx when he says that labor in every society produces a surplus, and that in capitalism that surplus happens to take the form of a commodity. This is utterly wrong, surplus depends on the productivity of a society (I believe Marx wrote about this specific point in Grundrisse as well as Capital). No, the issue in capitalism is not that surplus is unfairly distributed, but that workers are compelled to work longer than necessary, precisely to produce a surplus.

He doesn’t make a clear distinction between surplus of use-value and surplus value.

The result is that he transform Marxism into a mere search for equitable distribution of goods, which is emphatically not what Marx himself believed as he wrote in his critique of the Gotha Program.

I’d love to be proven wrong here, or let in on the joke… thanks!

:RIchard-D-Wolff:

more or less

I posted the wrong one earlier and it was missing half of the book, oopsie

This has also been added to archive.org by somebody.

Seventy-eight years ago to this day, the People's flag was staked into the heart of most grevious reaction and the world celebrated victory over German fascism.

Seventy-eight years later, we stand on the shoulders of those heroes. We stand in the world of their victory, imperfect as it may be yet in contrast of what could have been it is a world in which we can still fight for a better tomorrow.

Let us not just spend the day honoring the sacrifice of the millions of men and women who have passed on the torch of humanity through nostalgic remembrance, but take onto us the legacy of their work to build the foundations of a better world and continue in their place so when the time comes for us to pass on the torch of humanity to the new generation we can say that out of the ruins of the old barbarism we have delivered to them a better future of peace and freedom and continue the great work towards the emancipation of the human race.

Forwards ever, backwards never.

A apocryphal story amongst the Bashkirs retells how Stalin sought the wisdom of a sufi master on winning WW2. The Sufi master revealed that the Soviets would win, but only if Stalin converted to Islam. Stalin declared “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His messenger."

The Sufi master's advice worked. Deeply in gratitude, Stalin asks him what he wanted as a reward. The man rejected any material prize and asked instead for religion to be strengthened in the USSR and for pilgrimages to Mecca to be permitted. Stalin assented, so the story goes.

While obviously fictional, the story is based on real events. In order to aid war mobilization, Stalin enlisted the help of religious leaders to agitate in their communities of worship--in exchange he liberalized religious policy, which persisted postwar

(Although this was interrupted by Khrushchev's ill-conceived anti-religious campaign) The Sufi Master from the story was also real--Gabdrahman Rasulev. He worked with Stalin personally and advised him on how to rally Soviet Muslims for war.

See:

"God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World" Jeff Eden

"Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia" by Tasar

Credit to After_History, a good channel to read through

https://twitter.com/After__History/status/1620122164170231810

Additional information:

“We are told that among the Daghestan peoples the Sharia is of great importance. We have also been informed that the enemies of Soviet power are spreading rumours that it has banned the Sharia. I have been authorized by the Government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic to state here that these rumours are false. The Government of Russia gives every people the full right to govern itself on the basis of its laws and customs. The Soviet Government considers that the Sharia, as common law, is as fully authorized as that of any other of the peoples inhabiting Russia. If the Daghestan people desire to preserve their laws and customs, they should be preserved”

J. V. STALIN (1920)

Source: Congress of the Peoples of Daghestan (November 13, 1920), Works, Vol. 4.

“You [Albanians] are a separate people, just like the Persians and the Arabs, who have the same religion as the Turks. Your ancestors existed before the Romans and the Turks. Religion has nothing to do with nationality and statehood… Nevertheless, the question of religious beliefs must be kept well in mind, must be handled with great care, because the religious feelings of the people must not be offended. These feelings have been cultivated in the people for many centuries, and great patience is called for on this question, because the stand towards it is important for the compactness and unity of the people.”

J. V. Stalin (1949)

Source: Enver Hoxha, Memoirs from my Meetings with Stalin, Second Meeting (March-April 1949), “8 Nentori” Publishing House, Tirana, Albania, 1981. Retrieved from MIA.

“…Stalin set up four Muslim religious boards (Dini İdare / Müftiyat / Dukhovniye Upravlenia) in 1942 for Central Asian, Transcausians, Northern Caucasian and Russian Muslims.

The Muslim Religious Boards guided theoretically by the Koran, the Hadith and the maslahat / the interests of the believers to resolve questions of religious dogma. The decision / fatwa of a religious board on any religious question were brought to the knowledge of all Muslims over signature of the mufti of the Religious Board.

After the Second World War the most important Islamic establishment in the USSR was the Muslim Religious Board for Central Asia and Kazakhstan where 75 per cent of the Soviet Muslim lived. The Soviet Government depended on the Mufti of Tashkent for propagation of its views among the Sunni Muslims of the Islamic World…”

Source: Seyfettin Erşahin (2005), No. 77. Journal für Religionskultur

Wark has been working on this Vectoralist concept starting back with A Hacker Manifesto

I had this in a comment on another post but I just started finding so many great quotes. I've never seen someone undertake to explain Sendero Luminoso before and I'm glad I found kites.

To call this a debate would be to overstate the claims of the PPW universalists. Debates require that both sides develop their positions and justify them with evidence, and one of the consequences of the internet is that any asshole with a keyboard and a connection can pretend to have great knowledge of revolutionary theory. But given that many millenials newly awakened to the horrors of capitalism-imperialism and looking into revolution, communism, and Maoism have encountered this “debate” online, it is worth taking this opportunity to address some real questions of revolutionary strategy that have come up along the way. These questions include:

• What can we learn from the experience of the people’s war in Peru?
• What demographic shifts have taken place since the Chinese revolution and what are their implications for revolutionary strategy?
• What is Maosim? Why are most self-proclaimed Maoists so dogmatic?
• Why has there been so much disarray in the international communist movement since the 1976 counterrevolutionary coup in China?
• What is a correct military strategy for revolution in imperialist countries?
• What is the relationship between the subjective factor and objective conditions in the revolutionary process?
• What is the nature of bourgeois state power, and how can communists in imperialist countries build up a force that can overthrow it?

The greatest weakness of Sendero Luminoso and Chairman Gonzalo is that many of its/his written statements are dogmatic as fuck. There, I said it. There is a strong religiosity emanating from many of these statements that projects a grand and godly faith in the impending victory of the revolution, even suggesting the strategic offensive of the world revolution (in the 1980s?!?), rather than a compelling, nuanced analysis of the state of the world and the prospects for and difficulties of revolution. We can understand why in the 1980s, with the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s over and following the tremendous loss of proletarian state power in China in 1976, with a religious and spiritual population as their mass base, and with the real need for revolutionary sacrifice, Sendero may have felt this approach was necessary. Maybe we can even accept it in the Buddhist sense of the term, learning to embrace and move through the negatives that are part of our historical and present-day experiences as communists, rather than ignoring or fearing them. But we don’t need to repeat it; we can take the good and leave out the bad. The PPW universalists have instead decided to take the worst attribute of Sendero Luminoso, magnify it, and shout it from the rooftops (or more accurately, click it from their keyboards).

In 1962, a young Abimael Guzmán (AKA Chairman Gonzalo) was appointed professor of philosophy at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in the capital of the Ayacucho region. There, in rousing lectures that earned him the nickname “Champú,” Professor Guzmán and his comrades used their faculty positions to present students with a historical materialist understanding of society and the need for revolution. By the late 1960s, Sendero Luminoso had virtual control over the university, including administrative functions, and had a particularly strong position within the teacher’s college. They used these positions to recruit the cadre who would go on to form the backbone of the people’s war. Moreover, from the teacher’s college, they dispatched newly-minted university graduates to the surrounding peasant communities in the Ayacucho region as school teachers, where they in turn conducted social investigation and organized those peasant communities in preparation for launching the people’s war.

Gonzalo’s strategic genius was in taking advantage of the bourgeoisie’s rapid expansion of education to gain temporary footholds within the bourgeois ideological state apparatuses and use these positions to accumulate forces for revolution—in other words, in his correct reading of the conjuncture, not prophetic divination. These positions were always temporary, and Sendero lost its control over the University of Huamanga by the mid 1970s. But the damage was done, and Sendero cadre trained at the university were already organizing peasants all over Ayacucho—the region that would become the first stronghold of the people’s war in the early 1980s. Professor Guzmán took a position at La Cantuta teacher’s college on the outskirts of Lima in the mid-to-late 1970s, recruiting more teachers into Sendero’s ranks. Sendero would continue to employ this strategy in other places throughout the people’s war. For example, it deployed 100 teachers in schools in the slums of the Central Highway region east of Lima, helping the people’s war to advance towards the center of bourgeois power. Here there is a broader lesson: the bourgeoisie’s ideological hegemony over the masses is something that has to be forged and continually reforged, and at moments when the nature of this hegemony is in transition, as it was when the Peruvian bourgeoisie massively expanded education in part to bring more peripheral populations under its ideological hegemony, communists can seize opportunities.

(Before I begin, let me specify that what I'm considering is two approaches to labour under communism. Assume all sides agree that the exploitation of labour for profit is a bad thing; what this specific post is discussing is two approaches to non-exploitative labour. Secondly, I'll mostly stick to laying out my own thoughts rather than using a tonne of references, though all this has been discussed in books. Thirdly, I'm trying to explore threads of thought here rather than argue for some conclusion.)

It's a truism that productivity increases over time, as labour-saving technologies and techniques are developed. An hour of labour now apparently produces what 4.4 hours of labour produced in 1950.

This increase in productivity has been significant since the invention of the steam engine and everything since. It could become quite extreme in the 21st century, with lights-out manufacturing, fully robotic warehouses, self-driving vehicles, aeroponic plant labs, etc. (Again, assume all this automation is happening under communism; a different set of issues are raised if it happens under private ownership.)

There are two things an economic planner could do when productivity increases: 1) keep labour hours the same but increase the amount of goods produced, 2) reduce labour hours, creating the same amount of goods with more holiday-time, 3) some combination of these two

Increasing production

Suppose that one man, working for one day, can produce enough food for ten men to eat for a year. Food will be very very cheap (by the labour-theory of value). That makes everybody more food-secure and is something to be celebrated. The challenge it brings is that we can't employ a large amount of our workforce in agriculture.

I chose food as an example deliberately because the demand isn't very elastic. We can't quintuple the amount of food produced to increase wage-labour (because I'm already stuffed man no thanks).

Similarly, construction demands can't be elastically increased. If everyone has an apartment, then what? Ok, so we can give them a bigger apartment, and build some nice opera houses and community halls, but that can maybe increase the amount of construction by 100%. The amount of construction can't be increased by 10,000% – you'd just have empty buildings. And technology will decrease the labour-time per unit of building by a greater factor: here's China building a 10-storey building in under 29 hours: https://invidious.namazso.eu/watch?v=you-BV35B9Y

In short: if demand can't be increased elastically, neither can supply. Demand for goods puts a limit on this method of job-creation.

The elasticity of demand is different in different industries. The planner could respond to this abundance by increasing production quotas of:

• luxury goods

• Things never before seen, e.g. by space colonisation, or by employing large sectors of the workforce in research&development. There'll be a limit here too, as not everyone has the aptitude for R&D.

Stimulating supply is necessary if you have a position of pro-work communism. It preserves Marx's principle-of-equivalence, that everyone should be rewarded for the work they do, e.g. get one labour-token per hour they work. If we must view unemployment as a problem, we must find work for people.

But hol' up a minute. Even if we can increase consumption, do we want to? It's anti-efficiency. Capitalism conspires to increase consumption by doing things like Juicero and increasing private vehicle ownership. Do we want to do the same? Increasing production-consumption creates ecological harm under any economic system.

Economic planners should, in my opinion, increase consumption a bit, to the limits of human comfort, even human luxury. But it's a bad system that needs to increase consumption in order to increase production in order to pay wages. I'd rather give free money to non-workers.

Reducing labour

There are two ways to reduce labour: a) reduce the number of hours worked, b) reduce the number of people working, i.e. increase the number of people unemployed

As regards a) reducing working hours: working hours have been falling under capitalism – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annual_working_time_in_OECD.svg – but it's complex to disentangle the effects of technology, exploitation, and pressure from unions in causing this. Probably fair to say productivity-boosting technology is one contributing factor.

Reducing labour hours from 2200 per year to 1750 is fine. It brings no problems. Even bringing it down to around 1350 (the current average in Iceland) should be fine. As labour hours get very low (under 21st-century communism, remember), deskilling could become a problem. Could we reduce work to 800 hours a year, so every employed person is working what we would call a part-time job? Maybe not, because people like doctors wouldn't get enough work experience to get enough skills to be effective.

As regards b) reducing the workforce: this obviously brings problems to be solved. So much politics is about "More Jobs!", "The right to work!". One response to this is to be a pro-work communist. The Soviet Union created full employment (while reducing working hours), though that may not apply the same way in the 21st century with more advanced automation.

How can an economic planner respond to technology-induced increases in the number of unemployed people? There are four available responses: i) welfare, ii) universal welfare, iii) stimulating demand to increase work, iv) make-work in non-producing sectors

i) if unemployed people are given welfare by the government, this creates a division in society. Workers will feel (from valid self-interest) that they are supporting idlers. This happens under social democratic capitalism (grumbling about "welfare queens"), but the criticism would be more valid under a non-exploitative system.

ii) basic income would solve the problem in i). If workers and non-workers get the same welfare payments, the workers have no complaint. The problem it runs into is arithmetic: where does the money come from? This depends on what monetary system prevails: maybe the money could simply be printed, maybe labour-tokens would have to be taxed.

iii) See previous section

iv) As robotic automation eats most jobs in the means of producing, caring professions (childcare, elder care, etc.) could perhaps expand. This would be a communist version of the jobs guarantee proposed by Pavlina Tcherneva), providing automation-resistant government-issued jobs to everyone who wants them. I suspect there is a limit to this, for similar reasons to those explored above: there's a limit to the demand for care-professionals (though it's not yet been reached in reality), so there must be a limit to supply too. Maybe the state could even start paying mothers/parents for the work they do in "producing" productive members of society (second-wave feminists advocated for this.) E.F. Schumacher said that we shouldn't necessarily see work as a curse (as an economic 'bad'). Perhaps the economic planner shouldn't encourage fully automated plant labs. Instead he should plan community farms, which do require labour-input (and therefore make food more expensive, a bad thing to the labour-theory-of-value) but also have positive externalities of people working outdoors, preserving the soil, building community, laughing together, and the psychological benefits that come from being busy and productive. I'm talking about a situation where enough labour-saving technology is used to make it easy, decent work rather than a Dickensian grind.

The labour-theory-of-value says automate everything as much as possible to make everything as cheap/available as possible. That's correct as far as it goes. It should be done. It's the only way we can beat poverty. But when automation becomes extreme, you can't keep labour-theory-of-value and principle-of-equivalence (i.e. paying according to labour-input). You can compromise on labour-theory-of-value and create a medium-labour society of handicrafts, small farms, and other pleasant, fulfilling jobs; this is a sort of pro-work communism. You can compromise on principle-of-equivalence, and give people free money with which to buy the fruits of the robots; this is a sort of anti-work communism.

Propaganda artwork is titled <Felix Dzerzhinsky, 1877-1926. "Be Vigilant and Alert!" >

To correct the misunderstanding of what a political purge is - which is a result of the peopagandized education America feeds its citizens from cradle to grave - I am here to post excerpts of varying books from varying professional authors, historians, and journalists of varying political backgrounds on what "purging the party" actually entailed in the Soviet Union. If I run out of space in the main post, I will continue it in the comments.

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The entire membership of the Communist Party was therefore subjected to what is called a “cleansing” or “purge” in the presence of large audiences of their non-Communist fellow workers. (This is the only connection in which the Soviet people use the term “purge.” Its application by Americans to all the Soviet treason trials and in general to Soviet criminal procedure is resented by the Soviet people.) Each Communist had to relate his life history and daily activities in the presence of people who were in a position to check them. It was a brutal experience for an unpopular president of a Moscow university to explain to an examining board in the presence of his students why he merited the nation’s trust. Or for a superintendent of the large plant to expose his life history and daily activities — even to his wife’s use of one of the factory automobiles for shopping — in the presence of the plants workers, any one of whom had the right to make remarks. This was done with every Communist throughout the country; it resulted in the expulsion of large numbers from the party, and in the arrest and trial of a few.

Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 136

_

The purge–in Russian “chiska” (cleansing)–is a long-standing institution of the Russian Communist Party. The first one I encountered was in 1921, shortly after Lenin had introduced “NEP,” his new economic policy, which involved a temporary restoration of private trade and petty capitalism and caused much heart burning amongst his followers. In that purge nearly one-third of the total membership of the party was expelled or placed on probation. To the best of my recollection, the reasons then put forward for expulsion or probation were graft, greed, personal ambition, and “conduct unbecoming to communists,” which generally meant wine, women, and song.

Duranty, Walter. The Kremlin and the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 116

_

Kirov’s murder brought a change, but even so the Purge that was held that winter was at first not strikingly different from earlier Purges.

Duranty, Walter. The Kremlin and the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 116

_

The Central Committee organized a “purge” and expelled barely 170,000 members in order to improve the party quality. Stalin has frequently been held responsible for the “purge.” He was not its author. This party-cleansing was done under Lenin’s leadership. It is a process which is unique in the history of little parties. The Bolsheviks however, do not regard it as an extraordinary measure for use only in a time of crisis, but a normal feature of party procedure. It is the means of guaranteeing Bolshevik quality. To regard it as a desperate move on the part of leaders anxious to get rid of rivals is to misunderstand how profoundly the Bolshevik party differs from all others, even from the Communist Party’s of the rest of Europe.

Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 144

_

Lenin initiated the first great “cleansing” of the Bolshevik party just as the transition had begun from “war communism” to the new economic policy. In 1922, when, as Lenin put it, “the party had rid itself of the rascals, bureaucrats, dishonest or waivering Communists, and of Mensheviks who have re-painted their facade but who remained Mensheviks at heart,” another Congress took place; and it was this Congress which advanced Stalin to the key position of Bolshevik power. It brought him into intimate contact with every functionary of the organization, enabling him to examine their work as well as their ideas.

Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 145

_

The party maintains its quality by imposing a qualifying period before granting full membership, and by periodical ” cleanings” of those who fail to live up to the high standard set.

Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 169

_

In all fairness I must add that no small proportion of the exiles were allowed to return home and resume their jobs after the Purge had ended.

Duranty, Walter. The Kremlin and the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 122

_

Besides examining Communists against whom definite complaints are made, the Control Commission at long intervals resorts to wholesale “purges” of the Party. In 1929 it was decided to institute such a purge, with a view to checking up on the rapid numerical growth of the Party, which has been increasing at the rate of about 200,000 a year during the last few years, and eliminating undesirable elements. It was estimated in advance that about 150,000 Communists, or 10 percent of the total membership (including the candidates) would be expelled during this process. In a purge every party member, regardless of whether any charges have been preferred against him or not, must appear before representatives of the Control Commission and satisfy them that he is a sound Communist in thought and action. In the factories non-party workers are sometimes called on to participate in the purge by offering judgment on the Communists and pointing out those who are shkurniki or people who look after their own skins, a familiar Russian characterization for careerists .

Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 68

_

From time to time the party “cleans out” its membership, and this is always done an open meetings to which all workers of the given institution are invited. Each communist in the institution must give before this public an extended account of his life activities, submit to and answer all criticism, and prove before the assembled workers his fitness to remain in the “leading Party.” Members may be cleaned out not only as “hostile elements, double-dealers, violators of discipline, deganerates, career-seekers, self-seekers, morally degraded persons” but even for being merely “passive,” for having failed to keep learning and growing in knowledge and authority among the masses.

Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 31

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I have in the course of 15 years in the Soviet Union met an occasional Communist who was a grafter, and many more who were stubborn bureaucrats and unenlightened fanatics. But I have also seen how the party throws out dead wood–not always accurately–and renews itself from the working class it leads.

Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 37

_

It would be a mistake to regard the 1933 chistka as having been directed solely against members of the opposition. The largest single group expelled were “passive” party members: those carried on the roles but not participating in party work. Next came violators of party discipline, bureaucrats, corrupt officials, and those who had hidden past crimes. Members of dissident groups did not even figure in the final tallies. Stalin himself characterized the purge has a measure against bureaucratism, red tape, deganerates, and careerists, “to raise the level of organizational leadership.” The vast majority of those expelled were fresh recruits who had entered the party since 1929, rather than Old Bolshevik oppositionists. Nevertheless, the 1933 purge expelled about 18 percent of the party’s members and must be seen as a hard-line policy or signal from Moscow.

Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 127

_

“Not everyone who wishes can belong to the party,” said Stalin; “it is not given to everyone to brave its labors and its torments.”

Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 280

_

Western students have applied the word “purge” to everything from political trials to police terror to nonpolitical expulsions from the party. The label “Great Purges,” which encompasses practically all party activities between 1933 and 1939, is an example of such broad usage. Yet the Communist Party defined and used the word quite specifically. > The term “purge” (chistka–a sweeping or cleaning) only applied to the periodic membership screenings of the ranks of the party. These membership operations were designed to weed the party of hangers-on, nonparticipants, drunken officials, and people with false identification papers, as well as ideological “enemies” or “aliens.” In the majority of purges, political crimes or deviations pertained to a minority of those expelled. No Soviet source or usage ever referred to the Ezhovshchina (the height of police arrests and terror in 1937) as a purge, and party leaders discussed that event and purges in entirely separate contexts. No political or nonpolitical trial was ever called a purge, and under no circumstances were operations, arrests, or terror involving nonparty citizens referred to as purges. A party member at the time would have been mystified by such a label.

Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 38

[Continued below]

one of many great paragraphs:

The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda (in Gramscian: organs of coercion and consent). We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

article source

Even among many contemporary Communists, the nature of Marxism-Leninism is not adequately understood. Some treat it as a label of affiliation, a way to identify that one aligns with the larger movement of Communism. Others treat it as a mere philosophical position, an immature idea in its own right that can only develop when positioned against a different, more matured school of science. However, Marxism-Leninism is a mature and developed scientific school of study, it is the scientific structure by which we can study and develop economic, political, and social relations, as well as the science of applying revolutionary change.

Marx himself treated the development of his ideas as a scientific one, as shown in the 1867 Preface to the first German edition of Das Kapital: “In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains … Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: ‘Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.’ [Follow your own course, and let people talk – paraphrased from Dante]”1

In reading Das Kapital, we don’t see a simple adaptation of positions based on idealistic dogmatism, we don’t see a mechanistic refutation of opposing ideas based on nothing as when anticommunists will rely on “common knowledge” arguments; we see a methodological, scientific deconstruction of political economy, we see a continuation of the scientific laws established by the original philosophers applied to the analysis of the development of economy and society as a whole.

This misconception results in several fundamental errors, which I will explain here.

The first is the error of approaching Marxist education through the rote memorization of ideas and concepts. Self-professed Communists will attempt to learn our phraseology and slogans without ever understanding our principles, will champion the rallying cry of class struggle while never understanding its practice and development. In doing so, they become dogmatists, rigidly adhering to the concepts of Marxism as they learn them, rather than learning the principles of Marxism behind those concepts and actively applying them to developing situations.

The second is the error of believing that their individual understanding of Marxist concepts holds equal, or even greater, weight when measured against the collective school of Marxist theory. People will join the Party who believe that they are the purist Marxist, that they are the true revolutionary who understands the theory better than anyone, that those who oppose their existing understanding of Marxist concepts are revisionists and opportunists. They will claim to attempt to learn our ideas while professing an already existing expertise. If you already know our theory, and singularly hold the knowledge necessary to build a revolutionary Communist Party, then what use are we to you? And if you claim to know our theory, independently, better than we do, collectively, then what use are you to us?

Regardless of who is right and who is wrong on a given issue, this individualist approach is decidedly anti-Bolshevik. To be a Bolshevik is to submit oneself to the Majority within the Party, and to apply the principles of democratic centralism in all things related to the Party. If everyone was to attempt to impose their will on the Party when they believed themselves to be right, rather than subjecting themselves to the will of the Party, we would be anarchists. If an aspect of the Party line is incorrect, this is something which can be resolved through the framework of democratic centralism. And make no mistake, comrades, the damage done from breaking democratic centralism is far greater than the damage done from temporarily having an incorrect line.

The third error is those who approach being a Communist as part-time, or hobbyists, rather than treating it with the gravity it deserves:

“Such workers, average people of the masses, are capable of displaying enormous energy and selfsacrifice [sic] in strikes and in street, battles with the police and the troops, and are capable (in fact, are alone capable) of determining the outcome of our entire movement — but the struggle against the political police requires special qualities; it requires professional revolutionaries. And we must see to it, not only that the masses “advance” concrete demands, but that the masses of the workers “advance” an increasing number of such professional revolutionaries.”2

This passage from “What Is to Be Done?” by V.I. Lenin demonstrates the necessity of refining ourselves as Communists to the highest caliber, the transformation of working-class consciousness into professional revolutionary organization. This conception of Marxist theory which reduces it to a simple intellectual exercise, to a mere point on a larger grid of political philosophy rather than the scientific development of that philosophy itself, results in a non-serious approach totally devoid of dedication and discipline, with a total disregard for the scientific rigor demanded by revolutionary Marxism.

The fourth error is the development of ideological eclecticism. If Marxism-Leninism becomes reduced to a mere list of ideas which can be adopted and discarded on a whim, rather than a school of science rooted in dialectical materialism and historical materialism where ideas are accepted on the basis of scientific rigor and concrete analysis, this allows for revisionists and opportunists to manipulate Marxism to their own ends, to dilute both its revolutionary and its scientific nature, ultimately defanging Marxism and rendering it powerless.

As Communists, we cannot accept or reject ideas based on who said them or based on our preconceived ideas of how things should be. That is the approach adopted by Anarchists and Trotskyists. We accept or reject ideas based on whether or not they align with objective reality and hold up to scrutiny and analysis. In “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” J.V. Stalin puts it succinctly:

“Contrary to idealism, which denies the possibility of knowing the world and its laws, which does not believe in the authenticity of our knowledge, does not recognize objective truth, and holds that the world is full of “things-in-themselves” that can never be known to science, Marxist philosophical materialism holds that the world and its laws are fully knowable, that our knowledge of the laws of nature, tested by experiment and practice, is authentic knowledge having the validity of objective truth, and that there are no things in the world which are unknowable, but only things which are as yet not known, but which will be disclosed and made known by the efforts of science and practice.”3

We cannot allow these unserious, idealistic elements to take hold any more than they have, and we must actively combat the tendency that lays claim to Marxism while rejecting its scientific nature and approach. That which does not conform to objective reality gets corrected by reality, viciously so, and if our theory and methodology is rooted in idealistic misconceptions about Marxism-Leninism rather than in a strict application of the science, the same will be true for us.

References https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iv.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

My fault for going on twitter BUT WHAT THE FUCK DOES “BEING A STALINIST” MEAN IN FUCKING 2022? This is basically shit stirring against an imaginary boogeyman

The general understanding of the United States in Marx's historiographic vision is fairly straightforward, however. The American Revolution was, like its counterpart in France, a bourgeois revolution, which had the social aim of overthrowing the feudal-aristocratic order and imposing the rule of the capitalist middle classes, or in Marxist terminology the bourgeoisie. What made the American Revolution special for Marx, however, was that feudalism had no real roots in America in the first place, it was "subordinate to bourgeois society" from the very beginning; this, combined with the fact that America was a whole new continent available for exploitation, allowed the bourgeoisie to "develop to hitherto unheard-of dimensions". [1]

As he makes clear in On the Jewish Question, this is also reflected in the United States' commodification of religion. In the US, "the relation of religion to the state" is crystallised in its pure form. "The preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel just as the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business deals". [2] The bourgeois revolution in the United States has subjugated and commodified religion to an extent not seen anywhere else.

In 1846, in fact, Marx described America as the "most progressive nation" on the planet. [3] Now, this is a rather ambiguous quote because he is actually describing what he thinks Proudhon says about America, but if you read the passage as a whole it seems clear he agrees on that point, just not the idea he ascribes to Proudhon, namely that racial slavery is well and good because it sustains American economic life.

Marx supported the intensification of bourgeois relations, as in the United States, as a prelude to proletarian revolution: "In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade." [4]

Interestingly, later on, Marx actually put his name to a letter to Abraham Lincoln, which was submitted by the International Working Men's Association in 1864 and received by the American government. The text of this letter is reproduced here, and is worth a read since it's very short. Of particular interest is the final paragraph:

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War [i.e., the Civil War] will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

Also of interest is that Ambassador Adams' reply on behalf of Lincoln is cordial and seems to accept the sentiments of the letter in full!

Sources:

[1] In Bruce Cumings, 'Revising Post-Revisionism, Or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History', in America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations Since 1941, p. 48.

[2] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[3] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.htm

[4] http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htm#marx

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was reestablished on 26 December 1968, coinciding with the 75th birthday of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

Although its ranks initially numbered around 500, the party grew quickly, supposedly due to the declaration and imposition of martial law by former president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos during his 21-year rule. By the end of Marcos rule in the country, the number of combatants had expanded to include more than 10,000 fighters.

In 2019, Sison claimed that the number of its members and supporters is growing. The organization remains an underground operation, with its primary goals being to overthrow the Philippine government through armed revolution and remove U.S. influence over the Philippines. It consists of the National Democratic Front , a coalition of other revolutionary organizations in the Philippines with aligning goals; the Kabataang Makabayan, which serves as its youth wing; and the New People's Army , which serves as its armed wing

History

Amado Guerrero, then a central committee member of Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas or PKP-1930, lead the reestablishment of the party. Jose Maria Sison, allegedly the man behind the nom de guerre Amado Guerrero, confirmed its birth at Barangay Dulacac in the tri-boundary of Alaminos, Bani and Mabini in the province of Pangasinan. This is where the CPP's "Congress of Reestablishment" was held on 26 December 1968, at a hut near the house of the Navarettes, the parents-in-law of Arthur Garcia, one of the CPP founders.

In the 1960s, a massive leftist unrest called First Quarter Storm occurred in the country to protest against the government policies, graft and corruption and decline of the economy during the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos. The unrest was also inspired by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War and other revolutionary struggles abroad against United States imperialist aggression. One of the leaders of this leftist movement was Jose Maria Sison, a founder of Kabataang Makabayan. He was soon recruited to be a member of Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP-1930). During that time the new PKP members, independently from the incumbent PKP members, were conducting clandestine theoretical and political education on Marxism–Leninism, with special attention dedicated to workers, peasants and youth.

This would eventually lead to a significant split between the PKP members. The new members advocated to resume what they regarded as the unfinished armed revolution against foreign and feudal domination, referring to the legacy and de facto continuation of the Philippine–American War of 1899, combat subjectivism and opportunism in the history of the old merger party and fight modern revisionism then being promoted by the Soviet Union. This ideology was the basis for the split from the PKP-1930, the (re)creation of the CPP, and the subsequent "Congress of Reestablishment."

Soon after its reestablishment, the Party linked up with the other cadres and commanders of the HMB and engaged them in ideological and political studies, mass work and politico-military training. On 29 March 1969, the New People's Army was established and on 24 April 1973 the National Democratic Front.

Afterwards, the CPP launched the Protracted People's War. The eventual objective is to install a "people's revolutionary government" via a two-stages revolution: National Democratic Revolution followed by a Socialist Revolution.

The reestablishment was considered by the party as the First Great Rectification Movement, criticizing the errors of the old Party. The CPP adheres to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as its guiding ideology in analyzing and summing up the experience of the party and its creative application to the concrete conditions in the Philippines in fighting US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. It considers Maoism as the highest development of Marxism-Leninism.

Nowdays thet are still in a peoples War against the current Goverment of the Philippines, they have influence/control in 73 of 81 Provinces in the Philippines. Sison isnt the leader of the CPP anymore and he is currently on Exile on the netherlands.

The CPP have a website called Philippine Revolution Web Collective ( PRWC ) and it Features news and information about the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People's Army (NPA), and the Philippine revolution. they also have a Twitter Account :comrade-birdie:

Also Marco Valbuena the Chief Information Officer of the CPP also has a Twitter Account

if you are going to donate to the CPP have in mind that they are considered a Terrorist org by the USA and the EU, so try to donate to a third party instead so you dont end up in a list.

https://hexbear.net/post/158599 check out this mega about a fellow comrades new game they made themselves and give it support

Resources for Organizing your workplace/community :sabo:

Resources for Palestine :palestine-heart:

Buy coffee and learn more about the Zapatistas in Chiapas here :EZLN:

Here are some resourses on Prison Abolition :brick-police:

Foundations of Leninism :USSR:

:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:

Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:

Remember, sort by new you :LIB:

Follow the Hexbear twitter account :comrade-birdie:

THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:

Come listen to music with your fellow Hexbears in Cy.tube :og-hex-bear:

Queer stuff? Come talk in the Queer version of the megathread ! :sicko-queer:

Monthly Neurodiverse Megathread and Monthly ND Venting Thread :Care-Comrade:

Join the fresh and beautiful batch of new comms:

!worldbuilding@hexbear.net :european-soviet:

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!cars@hexbear.net :cringe:

Self-reliance is a revolutionary spirit and fighting Principle of independent people who shape their own destiny themselves

President Kim Il Sung was born on April 15, 1912 (the first year of the Juche era) in Pyongyang City's Mangyongdae as the first-born of Kim Hyong Jik and Kang Pan Sok. His father Kim Hyong Jik named him Song Ju (a word that means to constitute the pillar), hoping that he would become the pillar of the country.

President Kim Il Sung spent his childhood in different parts of the country and China where his parents carried out revolutionary activities. With a vision of the future, his father made him learn the Chinese language from a very young age and study in a Chinese elementary school. As a result, he came to master that language perfectly, which later served him a great help in developing the anti-Japanese struggle in Chinese territory.

In March 1923, in accordance with his father's advice that in order to carry out the revolution he should know the reality of the country, he left Badaogou in China and arrived in the native Mangyongdae (this journey on foot is called “Road of a thousand laughs for study ”) And entered the Changdok school in Chilgol where the house of his maternal grandparents is located.

In January 1925, upon receiving the unexpected news that the Japanese re-arrested his father, he resolutely left Mangyongdae with the firm decision not to return until the country's independence had been achieved.

After the death of his father, in June 1926 he enrolled in the Hwasong School, a two-year military political establishment established in Huadian by anti-Japanese nationalist organizations and on October 17 of the same year founded the Union to Defeat Imperialism (UDI ) and its responsible was elected.

With a view to further unfolding revolutionary activities, Kim Il Sung interrupted his studies at the Hwasong School six months after his admission and moved the scene of his actions to Jilin. While studying at Yuwen High School in Jilin, on August 27, 1927, he reorganized the UDI into the Anti-Imperialist Youth Union, a more comprehensive mass organization, and on August 28, he founded the Korean Communist Youth Union.

He formed various mass organizations and led the anti-Japanese struggle. He elucidated the way forward for the Korean revolution and the strategic and tactical problems to accomplish his fundamental task at the Kalun Conference held from June 30 to July 2, 1930.

On July 3, he organized the “Konsol Comrades Association”, the first party organization in Kalun, and on July 6, he founded the Korean Revolutionary Army (ERC), a political-paramilitary entity in Guyushu of the Yitong district, to make preparations for the Anti-Japanese Armed Fight.

On April 25, 1932, he proclaimed the founding of the Anti-Japanese People's Guerrilla (later reorganized into the Korean People's Revolutionary Army), led the anti-Japanese armed struggle, and thus achieved the restoration of the Homeland on August 15, 1945. the Homeland in September of the same year. On October 10, 1945, he structured the Central Organizing Committee of the Communist Party of North Korea and declared the birth of the Party to the world.

On February 8, 1946, he organized the North Korea Provisional People's Committee and was elected President and proclaimed the 20-Point Platform. In August 1946 he formed the North Korean Labor Party with the merger of the Communist Party and the Neo-Democratic Party. He successfully led the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal democratic revolution in a short space of time.

He constituted the North Korean People's Assembly through the first democratic elections and was elected Chairman of the North Korean People's Committee, the new central organ of state power, and presented the tasks of the transition period to socialism. In February 1948 he transformed the Korean People's Revolutionary Army into the Korean People's Army, regular revolutionary armed forces.

On September 9, 1948, he founded the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the unified central government of the Korean people, and according to the unanimous will and desire of all the Korean people, he was elected Prime Minister and Head of State. On June 30, 1949, he convened the Joint Plenary of the Central Committees of the Labor Parties of North and South Korea and was elected Chairman of the Central Committee of the Labor Party of Korea.

Leading the Homeland Liberation War from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953 to brilliant victory, he safeguarded the sovereignty of the nation and started US imperialism rolling downhill. On August 5, 1953, in the VI Plenary of the CC of the Party, he presented the basic line of postwar economic construction and led the struggle to fulfill it.

At the same time, he promoted the socialist revolution aimed at transforming the relations of production in the cities and the countryside through socialism. He was reelected President of the CC of the Party in the III and IV Congresses held in April 1956 and in September 1961, respectively. He presented the new idea of ​​continued revolution and defined its main content to carry it out in three aspects: ideological, technical and cultural.

In December 1962, he convened the V Plenary of the IV Period of the Central Committee of the Party, where he proposed the new strategic line of developing in parallel the economic construction and that of national defense in view of the aggravating maneuvers provoking the new war of the US imperialists .

He successfully led the fulfillment of the historic tasks of industrialization from 1957 to 1970. He defined as the general task of the Korean revolution to transform the whole society according to the requirement of the Juche idea.

He presented the three principles of the reunification of the Fatherland in May 1972, the project for the founding of the Coryo Democratic Confederal Republic in October 1980 and the Ten-Point Program of the Great Pan-National Unity for the Reunification of the Fatherland in April 1993.

In June 1994, he received Carter, former President of the United States, in Pyongyang and thus prepared a new favorable conjuncture to carry out bilateral negotiations on the nuclear problem and the summit meeting of North and South Korea.

President Kim Il Sung, who worked selflessly for the Party and the revolution, the Fatherland and the people, for the verification of independence throughout the world, died of a sudden illness in his office, on July 8, 1994, at Two o'clock in the morning.

• With the Century - Kim Il Sung Memoirs :juche:

• Official Web page of the DPRK :juche-boi:

• Thank you, Father Kim Il Sung [HQ] :kim-salute:

Hola Camaradas :fidel-salute-big: , Our Comrades In Texas are currently passing Through some Hard times :amerikkka: so if you had some Leftover Change or are a bourgeoisie Class Traitor here are some Mutual Aid programs that you could donate to :left-unity-3:

Here is a list of Trans rights organizations you can support :cat-trans:

Here are some resourses on Prison Abolition :brick-police:

Alexander, M - ‘The New Jim Crow’ (2010)

Davis, A - ‘Are Prisons Obsolete’ (2003)

Jackson, G. - ‘Blood in My Eye’ (1972)

Vitale A.S - ‘The End of Policing’ (2017)

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/angela-y-davis-are-prisons-obsolete :angela:

Foundations of Leninism :flag-su:

:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:

Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:

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Yesterday’s megathread :sad-boi:

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THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:

COMMUNITY CALENDAR - AN EXPERIMENT IN PROMOTING USER ORGANIZING EFFORTS :af:

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William Z. Foster, born on this day in 1881, was a radical American labor organizer and Marxist politician whose career included serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) from 1945 to 1957. He was previously a member of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), although he was critical of the former for not working with already existing unions.

Foster was a key figure in the drive to organize the packinghouse industry during World War I and in instigating the Steel Strike of 1919. He was the more radical, pro-Soviet political rival of CPUSA leader Earl Browder, who was a supporter of the Roosevelt administration.

Foster was also a prolific political writer, and his work "Towards Soviet America" has been continuously republished by both leftists and anti-communists who see it as scandalous. Foster described the book as a "plain statement of Communist policy, avoiding technical complexities and theoretical elaboration...Its central purpose is to explain to the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and poor farmers how, under the leadership of the Communist party, they can best protect themselves now...".

The American Party of Labor claims descent from Foster and his secretary and aide, Jack Shulman.

• The history of the Communist Party of the United States by William Z. Foster

• Toward Soviet America

Hola Camaradas :fidel-salute-big: , Our Comrades In Texas are currently passing Through some Hard times :amerikkka: so if you had some Leftover Change or are a bourgeoisie Class Traitor here are some Mutual Aid programs that you could donate to :left-unity-3:

The State and Revolution :flag-su:

:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:

The Conquest of Bread :ancom:

Remember, sort by new you :LIB:

Yesterday’s megathread :sad-boi:

Follow the ChapoChat twitter account :comrade-birdie:

THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:

COMMUNITY CALENDAR - AN EXPERIMENT IN PROMOTING USER ORGANIZING EFFORTS :af:

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