Tachanka

Excerpt of Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845

from the section titled "The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat"

Let no one believe, however, that the "cultivated" Englishman openly brags with his egotism. On the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest hypocrisy. What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. But let us hear the English bourgeoisie's own words. It is not yet a year since I read in the Manchester Guardian the following letter to the editor, which was published without comment as a perfectly natural, reasonable thing:

"MR. EDITOR,– For some time past our main streets are haunted by swarms of beggars, who try to awaken the pity of the passers-by in a most shameless and annoying manner, by exposing their tattered clothing, sickly aspect, and disgusting wounds and deformities. I should think that when one not only pays the poor-rate, but also contributes largely to the charitable institutions, one had done enough to earn a right to be spared such disagreeable and impertinent molestations. And why else do we pay such high rates for the maintenance of the municipal police, if they do not even protect us so far as to make it possible to go to or out of town in peace? I hope the publication of these lines in your widely- circulated paper may induce the authorities to remove this nuisance; and I remain,– Your obedient servant, "A Lady."

There you have it! The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!" It is infamous, this charity of a Christian bourgeois! And so writes "A Lady"; she does well to sign herself such, well that she has lost the courage to call herself a woman! But if the "Ladies" are such as this, what must the "Gentlemen" be? It will be said that this is a single case; but no, the foregoing letter expresses the temper of the great majority of the English bourgeoisie, or the editor would not have accepted it, and some reply would have been made to it, which I watched for in vain in the succeeding numbers. And as to the efficiency of this philanthropy, Canon Parkinson himself says that the poor are relieved much more by the poor than by the bourgeoisie; and such relief given by an honest proletarian who knows himself what it is to be hungry, for whom sharing his scanty meal is really a sacrifice, but a sacrifice borne with pleasure, such help has a wholly different ring to it from the carelessly-tossed alms of the luxurious bourgeois.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch13.htm

mood

i was searching for posts about OGAS on here and found this old post from 3 years ago, but the reddit link in it was "removed by filters" for some reason (perhaps because it used Russian language sources lol, a reddit crime after February 2022), so I looked for an archive of it and found it. It gives a refutation to the popular myth that soviet bureaucrats defunded the soviet internet because they were scared of getting their jobs automated. It also explains that the plans for a soviet internet didn't simply disappear after OGAS ended but were incorporated into a new project called ASPR. I thought it was intereseting. This was posted by GlacialTurtle 3 years ago on here.

reserve army of labor denialists on life support

The metaphysical concept is thus constructed with logic and the syllogism. A syllogism is a group of three propositions: the first two are called premises, which means “sent before”; the third is the conclusion. Another example: “In the Soviet Union, before the last constitution, a dictatorship of the proletariat existed. Dictatorship is dictatorship. The U.S.S.R. is a dictatorship. Hence, there was no difference between the U.S.S.R., Italy and Germany, all countries of dictatorship.” Here, for whom and on whom the dictatorship is exercised is not taken into consideration; the same as when one boasts of bourgeois democracy, it is not mentioned for whose profit this democracy is exercised. In this way problems are stated, things and the social world are seen as belonging to separate circles and these circles are inserted into each other. These are certainly theoretical questions, but they entail a certain way of acting in practice. We can cite the unfortunate example of the Germany of 1919, where social-democracy, in order to maintain democracy, destroyed the dictatorship of the proletariat without seeing that by so doing it allowed capitalism to subsist and gave rise to nazism.

- Georges Politzer, Elementary Principles of Philosophy

(Georges Politzer was killed by the Nazis in May 1942)

Mr Beast has closed his mouth in all his thumbnails

PSA don't ever do this irl

always loved this guy