We need to start calling them the parasite class because they need us we don’t need them
There are many parasitic classes historically, such as the feudal lords, slave owners, patriarchs, landlords, etc. The capitalists are the present dominant parasitic class.
Maybe it should be the Parasite Phylum?
That works!
Marxism-Leninism is dangerous to the ruling class because it’s true, understands the world in an actionable way, and stands to end all of class society.
the extent to which the ruling class has convinced us that it’s dangerous is surprising sometimes.
i learned about marx because my teacher & my father reacted VERY strongly when i asked my teacher who marx was and she called my dad to “warn” him.
if they had neutral (or maybe even positive) reactions, i probably wouldn’t have bothered to search for him online at the school library.
Mahmood Mamdani, father of the newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, shared how he was introduced to Marx:
I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, “FBI.” I thought, “Wow, just like on television.” They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone – because this turned out to be big – it is after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma. They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?”
I said, “I haven’t met him.”
Guy said, “No, no, he’s dead.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“No, no, he died long ago.”
I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, “Why are you asking me if he died long ago?”
“No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.”
I said, “Sounds amazing.”
I’m giving you a sense of how naïve I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.
https://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani
Yep! Often times reaction backfires.
What. The. Hell. That’s actually crazy. I wonder what country that is…
In my highschool we actually had to study him. And it was far from a
☭communist country.Edit: lmao why the hell do I have a shortcut to automatically replace communist with ☭
I was born and raised in the United States and my school’s history books mentioned his name alongside Hitler, but didn’t say why so I asked.
Excuse me? Alongside Hitler?? Im so sorry, the United State’s education system is fucked up. Well I guess it isn’t that surprising. You were also taught that WWII was won by the great and powerful USA.
yes i was and that’s the context of why i asked my teacher about marx; it don’t remember exact wording, but it was to the effect that evil people like hitler and marx had fooled europeans in the past into committing many atrocities so the united states created the un so that the united states wouldn’t have to keep protecting the world by itself.
I had never realized how much propaganda they feed the children in the US…
the isreali children get it much worse
To be fair, if you weren’t raised in a socialist country, it’s almost certain that you were taught a caricature of Marx and Marxist thought.
He was treated as an important philosopher and was a recurrent author used to criticize the current system. and we used a lot of excerpts from his manifesto, das Kapital…
But he wasn’t seen as you’d depict him in communist countries. We confronted his ideas with Arendt’s for example…
Ultimately, we weren’t taught that he was bad or good, we were just taught his thoughts among other philosophers’ and we used them to write our own essays, form our own opinions.
Without knowing how that was done, it sounds like it just as easily could have been done deliberately to demonize him, by comparing him to Arendt’s theories.
I translated an online course with deepL, that sums up what we’ve seen on him (allegedly, I don’t remember exactly as it was back in high school!):
https://hastebin.ianhon.com/a13c
Sorry, didn’t find any other way to paste this long ass text without polluting the comments so I used this.
Actually not the worst way I’ve seen him taught, far from it in fact.
Can you tell me shortly how a marxist-leninist society would look like? I guess not like the Sovjet Union?
The Soviet Union, Cuba, DPRK, Laos, PRC, Vietnam, and former non-USSR socialist states in Europe such as the GDR were and are all examples of Marxism-Leninism being applied to establish socialist society. What makes you think the Soviet Union isn’t an example? At a fundamental level, Marxist-Leninists seek to establish an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect, and the working classes are in control of the state. At a more detailed level, however, this can look very different depending on local levels of development, history, and unique material conditions.
Because the Soviet Union was an autocratic surveillance state wasn’t it? At least that’s what I learned about GDR and projected it to other communist states.
The Soviet Union was a democratically run socialist economy, as was the GDR. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference. Further, surveillance in socialist countries pales in comparison to modern capitalist surveillance and data harvesting.
The Soviet union was a donut empire in service to Russia. It was an autocracy disguised as communist.
The Soviet Union was a socialist economy, where the working classes were dramatically uplifted and in control of production, distribution, and the state. It wasn’t simply “disguised” as socialist, such a reading requires believing the working classes in eastern Europe to have been too stupid to comprehend their own oppression. The actual truth of the matter is that the working classes became highly educated, with literacy rates going from 20-30% to 99.9%, and free education to the highest levels. For what purpose would an alleged “autocracy” mass educate the working classes, rather than keep them under-educated and docile?
I don’t trust the statistics of a state that let millions inhabitants starve to death.
How exactly was the normal worker in control of production? Wasn’t it more like production was in the hand of the state, which in fact was very hierarchical?
I don’t trust the statistics of a state that let millions inhabitants starve to death.
They didn’t “let” millions of inhabitants starve to death, they did everything they could to alleviate it. Russia was notorious for frequent famine and starvation prior to collectivization of agriculture, and ended famine once and for all once it had. That’s a major contributor to the doubling of life expectancies in Russia:
Moreover, contemporary historians rely on statistics provided by the soviets, fact-check them, and find them to be very reliable.
How exactly was the normal worker in control of production? Wasn’t it more like production was in the hand of the state, which in fact was very hierarchical?
As I explained earlier, and will copy again, the state was run by the working classes. Socialism is not the absence of hierarchy, you’re thinking of anarchism. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action (as I’ll show at the end). Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
Several elections which I attended will show concretely how soviet democracy functions. Four election meetings were held simultaneously in different hamlets of Gulin village, which had no assembly hall big enough for all. One of these meetings threw out the Party candidate, Borisov, because they felt that he neglected their instructions; they elected a non-Party woman who had displayed energy in improving the village and were praised by the election commissioner—himself a Party member—for having discovered good government timber which the Party had neglected. The central meeting in Gulin expected 235 voters; 227 appeared and were duly checked off by name at the door. There ensued personal discussion of every one of nine candidates, of whom seven were chosen. Mihailov “did good work on the roads.” The most enthusiasm developed over Menshina, a woman who “does everything assigned her energetically; checks farm property, tests seeds, collects state loans.” Dr. Sharkova, head of the Mothers’ Consultation, was pushed by the women: “We need a sanitary expert to clean up our village.” The incoming soviet was instructed to “increase harvest yield within two years to thirty bushels per acre, to organize a stud farm, get electricity and radio for every home, organize adult education courses, football and skiing teams, and satisfy a score of other needs.
- Anna Louise Strong
All in all, the version of the Soviet Union that exists in your head is a work of fiction.
Literacy rates in the baltics were already at 91.1-91.6% before being invaded by the Russians disguising as communists.
Not evenly so across the whole of eastern Europe, and moreover socialism dramatically uplifted the baltics as well.
And Britain dramatically uplifted India. Same shit. Colonialism branded as communism.
I don’t thinks that’s the part that is a problem for them, most people acknowledge the existange of surplus value, it’s almost a part of the current common-sense, however the main difference is that pro-bourgeoisie see it as a moral right to exploit. In my opinion, it is the dialectical way of thought of Marx that the reactionary bourgeoisie see as an existential threat.
Part of the problem of communicating the idea that workers are exploited is that a lot of the audience has been trained to hear socioeconomic words as trigger words for capitalism. Using the capitalist terms provided will avoid the cognitive trigger placed by generations of propaganda. “You’re not paid enough” is the start of “surplus value”.
“Boss makes a dollar while you make a dime for the same amount of company time - but you’re working harder. You’re doing the actual work. You deserve to be paid like it.”
“Company profits are the bosses celebrating how much they didn’t pay you for working harder than them”
“Did you get a bonus for doing your work? Because they got a bonus for your work.”
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Leelah: “Why are you cheering, Fry? You’re not rich!”
Fry: “True. But someday I might be rich, and people like me better watch their step!”
But what is the alternative? Have everything co-owned by the workers? How would that work?
Edit: just to clarify. These are serious questions and not rhetorical or gotcha ones, as I am seriously interested.
Cooperatives already exist that work at scale. Huawei is a form of Co-op. Outside of that you could keep everything the same just make ceo/management positions democratic within the company. Many solutions if you think about it for any amount of time.
I can think of many things. I was interested in the solutions from a marxist/leninist viewpoint. I am actually surprised the answers I got are not that radical as I would have expected.
The setup of society isn’t radical in and of itself at least in the short to medium term , look at China, the USSR, Cuba, it’s simply the path to get there is one unfortunately of violence and struggle against those currently enforcing the capitalist order.
The alternative is socialism, ie an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect and the working classes control the state.
Yes, one option is that every worker would own shares in the company or some other similar setup. There are plenty of worker-owned co-ops in existence already so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility.
One of my favorite illustrations about how this would benefit workers is this: Imagine a factory owned by a single person (a capitalist) with 100 workers. If the owner invests in robots that let him replace 50 workers, he will fire 50 workers and let the robots take their jobs and pocket the profit himself, even though he doesn’t actually do any of the labor.
Now imagine that same factory but it’s owned by the 100 workers instead. If they collectively invest in the robots, they would share their profits and instead of firing half of themselves. They could choose to either work half as much for the same pay, or work the same amount and pocket the extra value the robots produced instead.
A world based on the latter idea would let us all work a lot less, and anything that takes us to a future where we prioritize human time instead of shareholder value is one I’d rather live in.
Trying to base an economy entirely on cooperatives, unfortuately, still retains the base problems of market and profit-focused economics. Socialism remains a necessity, even if it can make use of cooperatives at certain levels of development, like Huawei in the PRC.
I agree, but given the two options I’d still choose to work in a worker-owned co-op while we work towards that higher goal.
Sure, I can agree with that, just as long as we maintain the necessity of revolution I don’t oppose cooperatives along that path.
Look into ESOPs. Publix has one of the larger ones. Basically, at the end of the year they add around 8% of your gross wages to your retirement account in the form of company stock. Once you have a fair amount in there, you feel a bit more connected to the success of the company. It’s a good idea for both employee retention and employee performance. For some reason, it’s not a popular thing to do, and even Publix has limited it from what it once was.
Hell, salaried workers are exploited.
Salaries are essentially abstracted wages, same with piece-rates. Marx goes over the different ways labor is paid in Capital.
Some certainly are. But my salaried coworkers come in later then me, take a lunch twice as long as me and then leave before me. All while being paid 4x what I make.
them being exploited less doesn’t mean everyone there ain’t working for a living
I’m aware.
What? I’ve never read Marx and it’s still really hard to disagree with that. We don’t have to gatekeep common sense behind theory.
what part of this is gatekeeping, read theory
It’s not about gatekeeping “common sense,” much of what Marx elaborates on is far from common sense until you adopt the method of dialectical materialism. Theory is necessary, just like you wouldn’t want a random person to perform surgery, so too you wouldn’t want an untrained revolutionary.
Jesus fucking Christ of that’s not gatekeeping I don’t know what is.
you wouldn’t want an untrained revolutionary.
How can you type that with a straight face?
In what way is this gatekeeping? The working class can quite easily understand that we are being exploited, just looking at disparity alone makes it come quite easily to us. However, the inner workings of capitalism, imperialism, its drives, how it works and functions, all of this is far from obvious. If it were truly obvious, then everyone would probably already be a Marxist.
I can say that revolutionaries should be trained, because we know what happens when they are, vs. when they aren’t. For example, in the Russian revolutions, many factions tried to rely on “sponteniety” or otherwise disapproved of revolutionary theory. These factions all lost out to the bolsheviks, who were dedicated, professional revolutionaries.
That isn’t to say that the entire working class shouldn’t participate, just that they won’t be the ones leading revolution. Lady Izdihar made a helpful diagram:
All of these components are necessary for success, which we can verify by looking at successful vs. failed revolutions. It isn’t gatekeeping to say that a random person should be a surgeon without due training, but instead aconowledgement that for success, we need to train, and that we cannot expect everyone to have the time and dedication to train equally. This isn’t shutting people out of the movement, but proper organizing.
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The reason the red scare existed was because the western capitalists were terrified of the revolution spreading to western Europe and the United States, which was extremely likely in the early 20th century. As such, all manner of censorship of Russian-language news, theoretical texts, reporting, etc. became the norm, and what was deemed acceptable to the capitalists was extremely filtered media, either from opposition in the USSR itself, or from western reporting, complete with what we now recognize as propaganda.
The truth is that the USSR was extremely functional. It delivered consistent results for the working classes, and in so doing doubled life expectancies, brought mass literacy and industrialization, dignified the soviet people, and much more. The west had to rely on a combination of fabrication, exaggeration of real issues, minimization of real successes, and other tried and true methods to invent an alternate reality version of the soviet union. Journalists like Anna Louise Strong, that supported socialism and reported on it honestly, were censored.
The red scare existed because porkie was terrified of a system that stood to steal from under their feet the very foundation they set up for their total reign.
USSR had a lot of issues, but was a lot better (for the working class) than what was before and what came after. The reason for red scare was to prevent the western working class from overthrowing the oligarchy.
Right now, China is surpassing western neoliberal nations by carefully mixing socialist and capitalist modes of production, guided by Marxism-Leninism with further theoretical developments.
You gotta go out and read some books dude.
The reason why the red scare existed was because the capitalists were scared of the workers and still are, the soviets had no equivalent and didn’t need to.
the soviets had no equivalent
Soviet reeducation camps and the million plus people that died in them disagree.
I think both capitalist and communist propaganda is full of shit, but damn.
Are you referring to the soviet prisons in general as “re-education camps?” An enormous number of prison deaths occured during World War II, when famine was widespread due to the Nazis storming Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice.
The soviet union, despite having a progressive legal system, was in a state of constant turmoil caused by pressures both external and internal. They couldn’t simply delete all previously existing ruling-class people and ideology, class struggle continues under socialism. Further, pressure from the imperialist west, invasion both in threat and in action, and intentional sabateurs meant that the prisons certainly weren’t empty. The soviet union never had a single year of normal, stable growth, free from intense opposition on the outside and counter-revolutionary forces on the inside.
I’ll state it again, as I said in my other comment: the red scare existed because porkie was terrified of a system that stood to steal from under their feet the very foundation they set up for their total reign.
I encourage you to learn more about the topic, we’re all taught to hate communism and be doomers, by our families, schools, media and so on, but when you look at the facts communism is better for the vast majority of people, those who do all the work but receive less compensation for it. The surplus of our work is stolen by those who own stuff.
You presume too much about my background. You are also missing the fact that every attempt at communism has somehow also resulted in a small group of elites stealing the surplus labor.
every attempt at communism has somehow also resulted in a small group of elites stealing the surplus labor.
That is completely false. You have no clue what you are talking about. If you want to talk about something, try educating yourself first
I did educate myself, and in so doing I learned that false statements with absolute terms are easily disproven. I noticed a distinct lack of disproof in your reply. All heat, no light.
I did educate myself,
Obviously you didn’t
You made a claim, backed by nothing, and now you want evidence against it?
Evidenceless claims can be dismissed evidenceless.
No? Socialism and capitalism have delivered demonstrably different results precisely because the social surplus within socialism was and is directed towards fulfilling the needs of the people, via large projects and social programs, which under capitalism are limited due to the capitalist class entitling itself to the vast majority of the surplus.
No judgement intended, but you’re literally echoing anticommunist propaganda, I encourage you to keep learning.
Propaganda is not necessarily false. All you are saying is that I’m not aligned with your political project. You are correct.
While you’re correct in that propaganda isn’t necessarily false, I said you’re repeating anticommunist propaganda, which is notorious for being a mix of exaggeration, bad faith interpretation and outright fabrication. We all learn that bs, unfortunately not all of us do the work to go over the claims and realize just how much it all rests on misrepresenting and misunderstanding history.
I think both capitalist and communist propaganda is full of shit,
