diff --git a/Engels - The Principles of Communism.md b/Engels - The Principles of Communism.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3f8a7bb..0000000 --- a/Engels - The Principles of Communism.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,423 +0,0 @@ -# The Principles of Communism - -- Frederick Engels, 1847 - -![First page of the manuscript](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.gif) - ---- - -Written: October-November 1847; -Source: Selected Works, Volume One, p. 81-97, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969; -First Published: 1914, Eduard Bernstein in the German Social Democratic Party’s _Vorwärts!_; -Translated: Paul Sweezy; -Transcribed: Zodiac, MEA 1993; marxists.org 1999; -HTML Markup: [Brian Baggins](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/../../../../../admin/volunteers/steering.htm#emeritus); -Proofed: and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005. - -[Document Introduction](#intro). - ---- - -## 1 - -What is Communism? - -Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. - -## 2 - -What is the proletariat? - -The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.[1](#nb) - -## 3 - -Proletarians, then, have not always existed? - -No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions. - -## 4 - -How did the proletariat originate? - -The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. - -This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry. - -Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metal industries. - -Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done. - -But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor. - -This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds of labor are performed in factories – and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts and manufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others. These are: - -(i) The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie. - -(ii) The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat. - -## 5 - -Under what conditions does this sale of the -labor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place? - -Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. - -But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life. - -However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum. - -This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production. - -## 6 - -What working classes were there before the industrial revolution? - -The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes. - -In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United States. - -In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists. - -## 7 - -In what way do proletarians differ from slaves? - -The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. - -The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. - -The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. - -The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave. - -The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. - -## 8 - -In what way do proletarians differ from serfs? - -The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor. - -The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. - -The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. - -The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences. - -## 9 - -In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen? - -In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition. But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less communist movement. [2](#nc) - -## 10 - -In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing workers? - -The manufacturing worker of the 16th to the 18th centuries still had, with but few exception, an instrument of production in his own possession – his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plot of land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things. - -The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. - -The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian. - -## 11 - -What were the immediate consequences of the industrial revolution and of the division of society into bourgeoisie and proletariat? - -First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labor totally destroyed, in all countries of the world, the old system of manufacture or industry based upon hand labor. - -In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to historical development, and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were violently forced out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed their own manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress for thousands of years – for example, India – were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now on the way to a revolution. - -We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year’s time. - -In this way, big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. - -It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class. - -Second, wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. - -The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital. - -The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. - -Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way. - -Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government. - -Third, everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital. - -Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength. - -Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution. - -## 12 - -What were the further consequences of the industrial revolution? - -Big industry created in the steam engine, and other machines, the means of endlessly expanding industrial production, speeding it up, and cutting its costs. With production thus facilitated, the free competition, which is necessarily bound up with big industry, assumed the most extreme forms; a multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and, in a short while, more was produced than was needed. - -As a consequence, finished commodities could not be sold, and a so-called commercial crisis broke out. Factories had to be closed, their owners went bankrupt, and the workers were without bread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere. - -After a time, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate again, wages rose, and gradually business got better than ever. - -But it was not long before too many commodities were again produced and a new crisis broke out, only to follow the same course as its predecessor. - -Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things. - -## 13 - -What follows from these periodic commercial crises? - -First: - -That, though big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition; - -that, for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter; - -that, so long as big industry remains on its present footing, it can be maintained only at the cost of general chaos every seven years, each time threatening the whole of civilization and not only plunging the proletarians into misery but also ruining large sections of the bourgeoisie; - -hence, either that big industry must itself be given up, which is an absolute impossibility, or that it makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all. - -Second: That big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. - -It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions. - -We see with the greatest clarity: - -(i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and - -(ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether. - -## 14 - -What will this new social order have to be like? - -Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. - -It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association. - -Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods. - -In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand. - -## 15 - -Was not the abolition of private property possible at an earlier time? - -No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. - -Private property has not always existed. - -When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order. - -So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production – so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society’s productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development. - -The agrarian Middle Ages give us the baron and the serf; the cities of the later Middle Ages show us the guildmaster and the journeyman and the day laborer; the 17th century has its manufacturing workers; the 19th has big factory owners and proletarians. - -It is clear that, up to now, the forces of production have never been developed to the point where enough could be developed for all, and that private property has become a fetter and a barrier in relation to the further development of the forces of production. - -Now, however, the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and the forces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at hand to multiply them without limit in the near future. Moreover, the forces of production have been concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great mass of the people are more and more falling into the proletariat, their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable in proportion to the increase of wealth of the bourgeoisie. And finally, these mighty and easily extended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie, that they threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now, under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary. - -## 16 - -Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible? - -It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but even harmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes. - -But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working toward a revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words. - -## 17 - -Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke? - -No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. - -In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. - -## 18 - -What will be the course of this revolution? - -Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat. - -Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following: - -(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc. - -(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds. - -(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people. - -(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state. - -(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. - -(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers. - -(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation. - -(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together. - -(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each. - -(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts. - -(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock. - -(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation. - -It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces. - -Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain. - -## 19 - -Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? - -No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. - -Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries – that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany. - -It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace. - -It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range. - -## 20 - -What will be the consequences of the -ultimate disappearance of private property? - -Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished. - -There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone. - -The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will assure to society all the products it needs. - -In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members. - -The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development. - -Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely different kind of human material. - -People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound to it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop _one_ of their faculties at the expense of all others; they will no longer know only _one_ branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as a whole. Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful. - -Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety. - -The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other. - -A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development. - -The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property. - -## 21 - -What will be the influence of communist society on the family? - -It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents. - -And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the “community of women”. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it. - -## 22 - -What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities? - -The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.[3](#nd) - -## 23 - -What will be its attitude to existing religions? - -All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance[4](#ne) - -## 24 - -How do communists differ from socialists? - -The so-called socialists are divided into three categories. - -### Reactionary Socialists - -The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end. - -This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the following reasons: - -1. It strives for something which is entirely impossible. -2. It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution. -3. As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist, these reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians. - -### Bourgeois Socialists - -The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it. - -To this end, some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. - -Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow. - -### Democratic Socialists - -Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measures the communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition to communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society. - -These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat. - -It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them – provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists. - -It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences. - -## 25 - -What is the attitude of the communists to the -other political parties of our time? - -This attitude is different in the different countries. - -In England, France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the communists still have a common interest with the various democratic parties, an interest which is all the greater the more closely the socialistic measures they champion approach the aims of the communists – that is, the more clearly and definitely they represent the interests of the proletariat and the more they depend on the proletariat for support. In England, for example, the working-class [Chartists](#nf) are infinitely closer to the communists than the democratic petty bourgeoisie or the so-called Radicals. - -In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat – that is, with the agrarian [National Reformers](#6). - -In Switzerland, the Radicals, though a very mixed party, are the only group with which the communists can co-operate, and, among these Radicals, the Vaudois and Genevese are the most advanced. - -In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist - -(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and - -(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is already in power. - -In the name and on the mandate of the Congress. - ---- - -### Footnotes - -The following footnotes are from the Chinese Edition of Marx/Engels Selected Works, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1977, with editorial additions by marxists.org - -[Introduction](#1.1) In 1847 Engels wrote two draft programmes for the Communist League in the form of a catechism, one in June and the other in October. The latter, which is known as _Principles of Communism_, was first published in 1914. The earlier document [_Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith_](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/../../1847/06/09.htm), was only found in 1968. It was first published in 1969 in Hamburg, together with four other documents pertaining to the first congress of the Communist League, in a booklet entitled _Gründungs Dokumente des Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847)_ (Founding Documents of the Communist League). - -At the June 1847 Congress of the League of the Just, which was also the founding conference of the Communist League, it was decided to issue a draft “confession of faith” to be submitted for discussion to the sections of the League. The document which has now come to light is almost certainly this draft. Comparison of the two documents shows that _Principles of Communism_ is a revised edition of this earlier draft. In _Principles of Communism_, Engels left three questions unanswered, in two cases with the notation “unchanged” (bleibt); this clearly refers to the answers provided in the earlier draft. - -The new draft for the programme was worked out by Engels on the instructions of the leading body of the Paris circle of the Communist League. The instructions were decided on after Engles’ sharp criticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft programme drawn up by the “[true socialist](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/../../../../../glossary/terms/t/r.htm#true-socialism)” Moses Hess, which was then rejected. - -Still considering Principles of Communism as a preliminary draft, Engels expressed the view, in a [letter to Marx dated November 23-24 1847](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/../../1847/letters/47_11_24.htm#tuesday), that it would be best to drop the old catechistic form and draw up a programme in the form of a manifesto. - -“Think over the Confession of Faith a bit. I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing: _Communist Manifesto_. As more or less history has got to be related in it, the form it has been in hitherto is quite unsuitable. I am bringing what I have done here with me; it is in simple narrative form, but miserably worded, in fearful haste. ...” - -At the second congress of the Communist League (November 29-December 8, 1847) Marx and Engels defended the fundamental scientific principles of communism and were trusted with drafting a programme in the form of a manifesto of the Communist Party. In writing the manifesto the founders of Marxism made use of the propositions enunciated in Principles of Communism. - -Engels uses the term _Manufaktur_, and its derivatives, which have been translated “manufacture”, “manufacturing”, etc., Engels used this word literally, to indicate production by _hand_, not factory production for which Engels uses “big industry”. _Manufaktur_ differs from handicraft (guild production in mediaeval towns), in that the latter was carried out by independent artisans. _Manufacktur_ is carried out by homeworkers working for merchant capitalists, or by groups of craftspeople working together in large workshops owned by capitalists. It is therefore a transitional mode of production, between guild (handicraft) and modern (capitalist) forms of production. - -(Last paragraph paraphrased from the -Introduction by Pluto Press, London, 1971) - -[1.](#nb1) In their works written in later periods, Marx and Engels substituted the more accurate concepts of “sale of labour power”, “value of labour power” and “price of labour power” (first introduced by Marx) for “sale of labour”, “value of labour” and “price of labour”, as used here. - -[2.](#nc1) Engels left half a page blank here in the manuscript. The [_Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith_](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/../../1847/06/09.htm#12), has the answer shown for the same question (Number 12). - -[3.](#nd1) Engels’ put “unchanged” here, referring to the answer in the June draft under No. 21 which is shown. - -[4.](#ne1) Similarly, this refers to the [answer to Question 23 in the June draft](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/../06/09.htm#22): “All religions which have existed hitherto were expressions of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.” - -[5.](#nf1) The Chartists were the participants in the political movement of the British workers which lasted from the 1830s to the middle 1850s and had as its slogan the adoption of a People’s Charter, demanding universal franchise and a series of conditions guaranteeing voting rights for all workers. Lenin defined Chartism as the world’s “first broad, truly mass and politically organized proletarian revolutionary movement” (Collected Works, Eng. ed., Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol. 29, p. 309.) The decline of the Chartist movement was due to the strengthening of Britain’s industrial and commercial monopoly and the bribing of the upper stratum of the working class (“the labour aristocracy”) by the British bourgeoisie out of its super-profits. Both factors led to the strengthening of opportunist tendencies in this stratum as expressed, in particular, by the refusal of the trade union leaders to support Chartism. - -[6.](#6.1) Probably a references to the National Reform Association, founded during the 1840s by George H. Evans, with headquarters in New York City, which had for its motto, “Vote Yourself a Farm”. - ---- diff --git a/anticapitalist_orgs.md b/anticapitalist_orgs.md deleted file mode 100644 index de7fae9..0000000 --- a/anticapitalist_orgs.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,64 +0,0 @@ -# Anticapitalist organizations - -## What can we do? - -Many think that fighting against capitalism feels a lot like throwing pebbles at a tidal wave. How can _I, alone_, do anything to stop all of the [injustices I see being committed?](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md) We see our neighbors being picked up and [deported by ICE](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#latinos), [police murdering and imprisoning us](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#black-people), debts that lock us into [indentured servitude](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#workers-and-the-poor), [global surveillance of every minute detail of our lives](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#pervasive), endless [wars and imperialism](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#imperialism), ecological destruction, and [literal slave labor camps](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#prisoners). Our rents, food costs, and debts are going up, and our [incomes have stagnated.](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/capitalism_doesnt_work.md) The media, and everything around us seems apathetic, complacent, and oblivious. Eight men currently control about half the world's wealth. Their share is growing daily, and will reach a conclusion obvious to anyone who's played monopoly before. With only our labor to sell, and the demand for that labor decreasing, things seem oppressively bleak. - -Here's the thing: **You are not alone**. In fact, **we wage workers are the majority**. The ruling class of [absentee owners](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/crash_course_socialism.md) makes up a _tiny minority_ of your city's population. Often invisible to us, is the fact that we as wage workers are _surrounded by comrades_ who share our same basic interests. Some hold more prejudices than others, but all are deserving of a comfortable life, free from fears about our health and living situation. We are impoverished by an _imposed artificial scarcity_, a mal-allocation of the things we need to survive. World food production and housing _already surpasses global needs_, yet [1 out of every 7 US citizens needs to visit food banks to survive.](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/hunger-study-food/14195585/) In the [UK there are 10x more houses than homeless families.](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/housing-crisis-10-empty-homes-5008151) Our healthcare and other social services, which are in some cases ample, are increasingly being privatized and gutted. We know that by simply organizing and planning for _human needs rather than private profit_, we can solve our societal problems. We have but to shake off these mooching, leeching, capitalist parasites, like a dog shaking off fleas. - -How do we get there, how do we win? **We join anti-capitalist organizations.** - -Capitalists retain their power through the strategy of _divide and conquer._ [Scapegoating hasn't gone out of style;](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating) the tactic has always been to blame certain races, sexes, religions, activists, and transform them into demons causing all the world's problems, so people won't point their fingers upwards. The _isolating individualism_ [upheld by them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony) pervades all aspects of our lives: we often live in isolated housing, we're actively told not to organize or form unions, the news tells us to be afraid of our neighbors... everything (even human life) has value only as a unit of _individual consumption._ Their ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted, the natural, the inevitable norm that is _good for all_, rather than one them benefits the ruling minority only. Profit and the _entrepeneurial capitalist innovator_ become our new Gods, hiding the truth about our material conditions. There is a **finite number of hours of labor that can be done in a given day,** and most of it is going to absentee owners. Or as Eugene Debs put it, that "millions of men and women work all the days of their lives and secure barely enough for a wretched existence." - -Anti-Capitalist organization always has, and always will be, our only hope, and the only real threat to Capitalism. Malcolm X keenly stated that the hand becomes a weapon only when our fingers are **joined together into a fist.** - -Our task is the same as it always has been: to **agitate, educate, organize, and join leftist organizations in our cities.** - -Our pessimism or optimism is irrelevant: _we have no choice but to organize_ for the overthrow of Capitalism; anything less results in a [destruction of the environment and our lives.](https://pics.onsizzle.com/in-this-hour-socialism-is-the-only-salvation-for-humanity-12219484.png) We have no time to waste, capitalists prefer our pacification and death, to our organized resistance. [The police state is here](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#pervasive), and no amount of [pacifist resistance](https://theredphoenixapl.org/2011/08/11/pacifism-how-to-do-the-enemys-job-for-them/) will threaten it. - -### Notes - -Lastly, for those who think that broadcasting a list like this (potentially to our enemies) harms the cause of anti-capitalism. Note that: - -- All of these organizations have (or should have) vetting processes in place for new members. -- These are all completely legal, _above ground_ organizations. Many of them even do armed organizing where it is legal to do so. -- Socialists disdain to conceal our aims; Reactionaries are a vocal minority that are given a loudspeaker by the capitalist media, but workers and those that believe in worker power have always outnumbered them. - -This list is a living document; it will be updated as necessary. Feel free to contact me to add to this, fork this list, or create your own versions. - -## Organizations - -| Name | Tendency | Contact | Locations | -| :----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------: | :------------------------------: | :-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------: | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -| [Party for Socialism and Liberation](http://www.pslweb.org/) | Marxist-Leninist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/pslweb/) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/pslweb) | US - Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; Miami, Florida; New Haven, Connecticut New Paltz and New York City (Harlem), New York; Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and the Inland Empire in California; Phoenix, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; Austin, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and St. Louis, Missouri | -| [Socialist Party USA](http://socialistparty-usa.net/) | Multi-tendency | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/SPUSofA/) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/SPofUSA) | US - New York City, New York; Washington, DC; Maine; Boston, Massachusetts; Montclair, New Jersey; Carrboro, North Carolina; Memphis, Tennessee; Los Angeles, Moorpark, California; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Puget Sound Region, Washington; Jackson, Mississippi; Golden Crescent Area, Rio Grande Valley, Houston, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; Green Bay Area, Wisconsin; St. Louis, Missouri; Red River Region, Minnesota; Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; Chicago, Sauk Valley, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; | -| [Socialist Alternative](http://www.socialistalternative.org/) | Trotskyist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/SocialistAlternativeUSA/) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/SocialistAlt) | US - New York City, New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Tampa, Florida; Philadelphia, Pennslyvania; Oakland, California; Seattle, Washington; New Orleans, Louisiana; Madison, Mobile, Alabama; Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Chicago, Illinois | -| [Redneck Revolt / John Brown Gun Club](https://www.redneckrevolt.org/) | Armed Anti-Capitalist | [Contact](https://www.redneckrevolt.org/contact) [FB](http://www.facebook.com/redneckrevolt) [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/redneckrevolt) | US - Phoenix,Arizona;Los Angeles,California;San Diego,California;San Francisco,California;Colorado Springs,Colorado;Fort Collins,Colorado;Gainesville,Florida;Miami,Florida;Orlando,Florida;Tampa,Florida ;Nez Perce,Idaho;Wichita,Kansas;New Orleans,Louisiana;Brunswick,Maine;Grand Rapids,Michigan;Traverse City,Michigan;Ypsilanti,Michigan;Lansing ,Michigan;Eau Claire,Michigan;Minneapolis,Minnesota;Rolla,Missouri;Columbia,Missouri;Springfield,Missouri;Albany,New York;Palmyra,New York;Long Island,New York;Redwood,New York;High Point,North Carolina;Columbus,Ohio;Astoria,Oregon;Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania;Providence,Rhode Island;Chattanooga,Tennessee;Houston,Texas;Ogden,Utah;Montpelier,Vermont;Seattle,Washington; | -| [Socialist Rifle Association](https://www.socialistra.org/) | Armed Anti-Capitalist | [Contact](https://socialistra.org/contact/) [FB](https://www.facebook.com/SocialistRifle) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/socialistra) | US - Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento, California; Los Angeles, California; Flagstaff, Arizona; Northwest Kansas; Wichita, Kansas; Tulsa Oklahoma; Dallas, Texas; Northwoods, Wisconsin; Madison, Wisconsin; Pittsburgh, PA; Northeast Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Southwest Florida; | -| [Industrial Workers of the World](https://www.iww.org/) | Unionism | [Contact](https://www.iww.org/branches) [FB](https://www.facebook.com/iww.org) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/_IWW) | US - Every state | -| [Workers World Party](http://www.workers.org/) | Marxist-Leninist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/WorkersWorldParty/) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/workersworld) | US - Boston, Massachusetts; Buffalo, New York, and Rochester, New York; Charlotte and Durham, North Carolina; Cleveland, Ohio; Huntington and Morgantown, West Virginia; Lexington, Kentucky; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Virginia; Washington, DC; Los Angeles and San Diego, California; Houston, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Detroit, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; | -| [Black Rose Anarchist Federation](http://blackrosefed.org/) | Anarcho-communist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/BRRNfed/) | US - Austin Texas; Boston, MA; Burlington, Vermont; Central Illinois; Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; Miami, Florida; New York City, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Portland, Oregon; Providence, Rhode Island; Richmond, Virginia; San Antonia, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Denver, Colorado; Durham, North Carolina; | -| [International Socialist Organization](http://www.internationalsocialist.org/) | Trotskyist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/International-Socialist-Organization-122646921103159/) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Socialists_ISO) | US - CA, Los Angeles; CA, NorCal, Berkeley; CA, Northern California (District); CA, San Diego; CO, Boulder; CO, Denver; CT, New Haven; CT, New London; DC, Washington DC; FL, Orlando; FL, South Florida; GA, Georgia State University; IL, Chicago (District); IL, Chicago, DePaul; IL, Chicago, Loyola; IL, Chicago, University of Chicago; IL, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana; KS, Lawrence; MA, Boston; MA, Western Mass; MD, University of Maryland; ME, Portland; MI, Mount Pleasant; MN, Twin Cities; MO, University of Missouri; NC, Asheville; NC, Boone; NC, Greensboro; NC, Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill/UNC; NC, Winston-Salem; NY, NYC, Brooklyn; NY, NYC, Brooklyn College; NY, NYC, Columbia University; NY, NYC, Downtown Manhattan; NY, NYC, Hunter College; NY, NYC, Lehman College; NY, NYC, New York City (District); NY, NYC, New York University; NY, Potsdam; NY, Rochester; NY, Syracuse; OH, Athens; OH, Columbus; OH, Dayton; OH, Toledo; OR, Portland; PA, Philadelphia; PA, Pittsburgh; TX, Austin; TX, Denton; TX, Denton, Texas Women’s University; VT, Burlington/University of Vermont; VT, UVM; WA, Seattle; WA, University of Washington; WI, Madison; WI, Milwaukee; | -| [Freedom Road Socialist Organization](http://frso.org/) | Marxist-Leninist | [Contact](https://frso.org/join/) [FB](https://www.facebook.com/FreedomRoadSocialistOrg) | US | -| [Huey P Newton Gun Club](http://hueypnewtongunclub.org/) | Black Empowerment | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/HueyGunClub) | US - Dallas, Texas | -| [Trigger Warning Queer and Trans Gun Club](https://www.facebook.com/triggerwarninggunclub/) | Queer / Trans Empowerment | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/triggerwarninggunclub/) | US - Rochester, New York | -| [Party of Communists USA](http://www.partyofcommunistsusa.org/) | Marxist-Leninist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/partyofcommunists/?ref=br_rs) | US - New York City, New York; Atlanta, Georgia | -| [Maoist Internationalist Movement](https://www.prisoncensorship.info/faq) | Maoist | [Contact](https://www.prisoncensorship.info/contact) [FB](https://www.facebook.com/MaoistInternationalist/) | US | -| [Red Guards of Los Angeles](http://redguardsla.org/) | Maoist | [FB](http://www.facebook.com/RedGuardsLA) [Twitter](http://twitter.com/RedGuardsLA) | US - Los Angeles, CA | -| [Red Guards of Austin](https://redguardsaustin.wordpress.com/) | Maoist | [Contact](https://redguardsaustin.wordpress.com/) | US - Austin, Texas | -| [Red Guards of Charlotte](https://redguardscharlotte.wordpress.com/) | Maoist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/redguardscharlotte1/) | US - Charlotte, North Carolina | -| [Red Guards of Kansas City](https://kcmlm.wordpress.com/) | Maoist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/itisrighttorebel/) | US - Kansas City, MO | -| [Red Guards of Pittsburgh](https://redguardspittsburgh.wordpress.com/2018/03/10/attn-pittsburgh-loose-lips-sink-ships-be-aware/) | Maoist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/redguardspittsburgh) | US - Pittsburgh, PA | -| [New Black Panther Party](https://www.facebook.com/The-New-Black-Panther-Party-Southeast-Region-Hashim-Nzinga-643248062674191/?fb_dtsg_ag=Ady85UUKUbAspxRM0TrSwhC3UMcOiCzGWcq2uucsc00cjA%3AAdzLbTTtZ6d17ABFdBTf0KofTp-NuGFGYVCDKgOwgzPbsg) | Black Empowerment | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/The-New-Black-Panther-Party-Southeast-Region-Hashim-Nzinga-643248062674191/?fb_dtsg_ag=Ady85UUKUbAspxRM0TrSwhC3UMcOiCzGWcq2uucsc00cjA%3AAdzLbTTtZ6d17ABFdBTf0KofTp-NuGFGYVCDKgOwgzPbsg) | US - Atlanta GA | -| [Green Party](http://www.gp.org/) | Eco-Socialism | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/GreenPartyUS) | US | -| [American Party of Labor](http://americanpartyoflabor.org/) | Marxist-Leninist, Hoxhaist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/americanpartyoflaborapl) | US | -| [Progressive Labor Party](http://www.plp.org/) | Marxist-Leninist | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PLPchallenge) | US | -| [Peace and Freedom Party](http://peaceandfreedom.org/home/) | Eco-Socialism / Trotskyism | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/PFP.CA.Official/) | US | -| [Socialist Action](https://socialistaction.org/) | Trotskyism | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/socialist.action.1) | US | -| [Socialist Labor Party](http://www.slp.org/) | De Leonism | [De Leon literature](http://www.slp.org/De_Leon.htm) | US | -| [Democratic Socialists of America](http://www.dsausa.org/) | Democratic Socialism / Reformism | [FB](https://facebook.com/demsocialists) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DemSocialists) | US | -| [Socialist Workers Party](http://themilitant.com/) | Multi-tendency | [about](http://www.slp.org/De_Leon.htm) | US | -| [Liberty Union Party](http://www.libertyunionparty.org/) | Multi-tendency | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/LibertyUnionParty) | US | -| [Workers' Solidarity Alliance](https://workersolidarity.org/) | Anarcho-Syndicalism | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/workersolidarityalliance) | US | -| [Rose City Antifa](https://www.rosecityantifa.org/) | Multi-tendency | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/sometimesantisocialalwaysantifascist/) | US - Portland, Oregon | -| [Revolutionary Communist Party](http://revcom.us/) | Maoist | [FB](https://www.facebook.com/Revolutionary-Communist-Party-991523717554453/) | US | diff --git a/arm_frontpage.md b/arm_frontpage.md deleted file mode 100644 index ab75ea9..0000000 --- a/arm_frontpage.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -# Anticapitalist Revolutionary Movement (ARM) - -ARM is a revolutionary anticapitalist organization with a commitment to: - -- Revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. -- Direct-democracy in decision-making. -- Community organization providing alternatives to capitalism for housing, transportation, food, electricity, medical treatment, and education, seizing existing means if necessary. -- Resistance to racism, sexism, LGBTQ-hate, religious bigotry. -- A unified front, which may include _temporary alliances_ with broad leftist causes, in order to provide a platform for agitation. diff --git a/buddhism/buddhism_study_guide.md b/buddhism/buddhism_study_guide.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..45f81da --- /dev/null +++ b/buddhism/buddhism_study_guide.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +# Buddhism Study Guide + +This is a collection of Buddhist works, roughly organized according to difficulty / depth. These alternate between theory, and practice. + +- Walpola Rahula - What the Buddha Taught. [Audiobook](magnet:?xt=urn:btih:80bff21e99dac30cea0ed93872f1c7a95d8ad6cd&dn=Walpola Rahula - What the Buddha Taught [audible]). The best introduction to the main Buddhist concepts: The Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold path, the three marks of existence, and the five hindrances. +- Bhante Gunaratana - Mindfulness in Plain English. [Audiobook](magnet:?xt=urn:btih:01550874f1b65109dfdd639a805e5e1383ea8cbc&dn=Mindfulness in Plain English (Audiobook)) . The best introductory meditation manual, to get you started. +- Bhante Gunaratana - The noble eightfold path +- Ron Purser - McMindfulness. [Audiobook](magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0738443238ab62dad0c2f80260fa69845446c044&dn=McMindfulness by Ron Purser). Goes into depth on how mindfulness practices are and have been historically used in the pursuit of increasing exploitation and profit. +- The Dhammapada +- Amy Schmidt - Dipa Ma - The life and legacy of a Buddhist Master. +- Bhante Gunaratana - Mindfulness in plain english +- Mahasi Sayadaw - Manual of Insight +- Buddhaghosa - The Path of Purification +- Hecker, nanamoli - The great disciples of the Buddha +- Walpola Rahula - The heritage of the Bhikkhu +- Bhikkhu Bodhi - In the Buddha's words +- [Loving Kindness (metta) in Theravada Buddhism – drarisworld](https://drarisworld.wordpress.com/2019/04/06/loving-kindness-metta-in-theravada-buddhism/) +- [Metta: The Philosophy and Practice of Universal Love](https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/buddharakkhita/wheel365.html) diff --git a/buddhism/buddhist_questions.md b/buddhism/buddhist_questions.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b331fd5 --- /dev/null +++ b/buddhism/buddhist_questions.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +# Buddhist questions + +## Why reject our biology? Community, relationships, sex, etc. + +Nature and flowers are beautiful, why is there a rejection of relationships, sex, and holding . Historical celibacy and its propaganda use in creating a rich religious organization based on donations (and later feudalism, the tibetan buddhist example), where social reproduction is still done (new converts come in and inherit the wealth), rather than biological reproduction replacing the property-owners. + +Over-focus on detachment from what makes us human, and what has dominated our nature for most of our history. Do we ask that birds not sing. Must a bird avoid singing to become enlightened? If the answer is no, then why do buddhist monastic orders ask people to abstain from sex and relationships, holding this up as an admirable example to lay people? + +Reread will durants critique of schoepenhauer for this. + +## The focus on idealist, rather than materialist goals. + +Isn't the biggest source of suffering on the planet hunger, starvation, the unequal distribution of resources, the fact that 20 men own more wealth than all the women in Africa. Buddhism limits itself to the spiritual realm, yet this is not the primary realm of suffering. Without social and political organization devoted to eliminating this greatest source of suffering, which must first be sati. + +The only people with time and comfort enough to engage in meditation, are those who exist outside production, or are rich enough to have the free time to engage in it. The joke is, these people are happy not because they meditate, but because they are in a financially secure enough position to have hours of free time every day to meditate if they wish: not a luxury afforded to the masses of humanity. + +## Focus on isolated retreat centers, why not in cities? + +Ultrasociality . To be the flower in the garbage, requires that one live where people are. 90+% of people in the world live in cities, and must work to + +## The topics of focus, why concentration and awareness, why not more metta? + +McMindfulness, capitalist use of mindfulness. Our life comes from our mind, why don't we think about compassion more? Buddhist insight and concentration is used by samurai warriors, police, and militaries, and now by companies to increase performance to extract more profit from labor. + +## If there are enlightened beings, why aren't they solving the largest sources of suffering? + +Dipa ma for example, even claimed to have many supernatural powers, yet she used none of them to undo the horrors of capitalism or colonialism. + +If all these enlightened beings are doing is alleviating spiritual or psychological suffering, then they aren't doing anything remotely as positive as someone doing work to fight poverty. All their thousands of hours spent on the cushion aren't es worthwhile as a single flawed person giving food to the homeless, or organizing against capitalism. diff --git a/buddhism/meditation.md b/buddhism/meditation.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a7bb64a --- /dev/null +++ b/buddhism/meditation.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +# Meditation practice + +## Daily schedule + +- Pick at least 2 specific times every day, to meditate for 15-30m. Setting an alarm helps, for consistency. Find what works best for you. + +## What doesn't work + +- Doing 1-10m per day is pointless. Your mind is like a glass of water with sediments, it needs time for those sediments to settle to the bottom. This is why skilled meditators recommend longer sessions. Dipa Ma recommends 4h / day, 2h sit at dawn, 2h in the evening. 1-2h per day seems to be the recommended amount, but 20-40m / day is a good starting point. +- Trying to start out too long / day will fail, because it requires a lot of motivation. We want to gradually build a habit, not rely on motivation. + +## Preparation before Meditating on your subject + +- Mindful breath that you will succeed, and are on the same path as the Buddha and other arahants. +- Mindful breath of loving-kindness towards all beings. +- Mindful breath of death, and the impurity of your body. + diff --git a/buddhism/mind illuminated 10 stages.md b/buddhism/mind illuminated 10 stages.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5c967fe --- /dev/null +++ b/buddhism/mind illuminated 10 stages.md @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +# STAGE ONE: ESTABLISHING A PRACTICE + +This Stage is about developing a consistent and diligent meditation practice. Being consistent means setting a clear daily schedule for when you’re going to meditate, and sticking to it except when there are circumstances beyond control. Diligence means engaging wholeheartedly in the practice rather than spending your time on the cushion planning or daydreaming. Goals: Develop a regular meditation practice. Obstacles: Resistance, procrastination, fatigue, impatience, boredom, lack of motivation. Skills: Creating practice routines, setting specific practice goals, generating strong motivation, cultivating discipline and diligence. Mastery: Never missing a daily practice session. + +# STAGE TWO: INTERRUPTED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING MINDWANDERING + +Stage Two involves the simple practice of keeping your attention on the breath. is is easier said than done. You will discover that attention is easily captured by a distraction, making you forget that you’re supposed to be paying attention to the breath. Forgetting quickly leads to mind-wandering, which can last a few seconds, several minutes, or the entire meditation session. is sequence is so important it’s worth committing to memory— the untrained mind produces distractions that lead to forgetting, which results in mind-wandering. In Stage Two, you only work with the last event —mind-wandering. Goals: Shorten the periods of mind-wandering and extend the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object. Obstacles: Mind-wandering, monkey-mind, and impatience. Skills: Reinforcing spontaneous introspective awareness and learning to sustain attention on the meditation object. Spontaneous introspective awareness is the “aha” moment when you suddenly realize there’s a disconnect between what you wanted to do (watch the breath) and what you’re actually doing (thinking about something else). Appreciating this moment causes it to happen faster and faster, so the periods of mindwandering get shorter and shorter. + +Mastery: You can sustain attention on the meditation object for minutes, while most periods of mind-wandering last only a few seconds. + +# STAGE THREE: EXTENDED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING FORGETTING + +Stages Two and ree are similar, but mind-wandering gets shorter and shorter until it stops altogether. e biggest challenge during this Stage is forgetting, but sleepiness oen becomes a problem as well. Goals: Overcome forgetting and falling asleep. Obstacles: Distractions, forgetting, mind-wandering, and sleepiness. Skills: Use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to extend the periods of uninterrupted attention, and become familiar with how forgetting happens. Cultivate introspective awareness through the practices of labeling and checking in. ese techniques allow you to catch distractions before they lead to forgetting. Mastery: Rarely forgetting the breath or falling asleep. +## MILESTONE ONE: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION TO THE MEDITATION OBJECT + +e first Milestone is continuous attention to the meditation object, which you achieve at the end of Stage ree. Before this, you’re a beginner—a person who meditates, rather than a skilled meditator. When you reach this Milestone, you’re no longer a novice, prone to forgetting, mind-wandering, or dozing off. By mastering Stages One through ree, you have acquired the basic, first-level skills on the way to stable attention. You can now do something that no ordinary, untrained person can.2 You will build on this initial skill set3 over the course of the next three Stages to become a truly skilled meditator. e Skilled Meditator—Stages Four through Six + +# STAGE FOUR: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING GROSS DISTRACTION AND STRONG DULLNESS + +You can stay focused on the breath more or less continuously, but attention still shis rapidly back and forth between the breath and various distractions. Whenever a distraction becomes the primary focus of your attention, it pushes the meditation object into the background. is is called gross distraction. But when the mind grows calm, there tends to be another problem, strong dullness. To deal with both of these challenges, you develop continuous introspective awareness to alert you to their presence. Goal: Overcome gross distraction and strong dullness. Obstacles: Distractions, pain and discomfort, intellectual insights, emotionally charged visions and memories. Skills: Developing continuous introspective awareness allows you to make corrections before subtle distractions become gross distractions, and before subtle dullness becomes strong dullness. Learning to work with pain. Purifying the mind of past trauma and unwholesome conditioning. Mastery: Gross distractions no longer push the breath into the background, and breath sensations don’t fade or become distorted due to strong dullness. + +# STAGE FIVE: OVERCOMING SUBTLE DULLNESS AND INCREASING MINDFULNESS You have overcome gross distractions and strong dullness, but there is a tendency to slip into stable subtle dullness. is makes the breath sensations less vivid and causes peripheral awareness to fade. Unrecognized, subtle dullness can lead you to overestimate your abilities and move on to the next Stage prematurely, which leads to concentration with dullness. You will experience only a shallow facsimile of the later Stages, and your practice will come to a dead end. To overcome subtle dullness, you must sharpen your faculties of attention and awareness. Goal: To overcome subtle dullness and increase the power of mindfulness. + +Obstacles: Subtle dullness is difficult to recognize, creates an illusion of stable attention, and is seductively pleasant. Skills: Cultivating even stronger and more continuous introspective awareness to detect and correct for subtle dullness. Learning a new bodyscanning technique to help you increase the power of your mindfulness. Mastery: You can sustain or even increase the power of your mindfulness during each meditation session. + +# STAGE SIX: SUBDUING SUBTLE DISTRACTION + +Attention is fairly stable but still alternates between the meditation object and subtle distractions in the background. You’re now ready to bring your faculty of attention to a whole new level where subtle distractions fall away completely. You will achieve exclusive attention to the meditation object, also called single-pointed attention. Goal: To subdue subtle distractions and develop metacognitive introspective awareness.4 Obstacles: e tendency for attention to alternate to the continuous stream of distracting thoughts and other mental objects in peripheral awareness. Skills: Defining your scope of attention more precisely than before, and ignoring everything outside that scope until subtle distractions fade away. Developing a much more refined and selective awareness of the mind itself, called metacognitive introspective awareness. You will also use a method called “experiencing the whole body with the breath” to further subdue potential distractions. Mastery: Subtle distractions have almost entirely disappeared, and you have unwavering exclusive attention together with vivid mindfulness. + +## MILESTONE TWO: SUSTAINED EXCLUSIVE FOCUS OF ATTENTION + +With mastery of Stages Four through Six, your attention no longer alternates back and forth from the breath to distractions in the background. You can + +focus on the meditation object to the exclusion of everything else, and your scope of attention is also stable. Dullness has completely disappeared, and mindfulness takes the form of a powerful metacognitive introspective awareness. at is, you’re now aware of your state of mind in every moment, even as you focus on the breath. You have accomplished the two major objectives of meditative training: stable attention and powerful mindfulness. With these abilities you’re now a skilled meditator, and have achieved the second Milestone. e Transition—Stage Seven + +# STAGE SEVEN: EXCLUSIVE ATTENTION AND UNIFYING THE MIND + +You can now investigate any object with however broad or narrow a focus you choose. But you have to stay vigilant and make a continuous effort to keep subtle distractions and subtle dullness at bay. Goal: Effortlessly sustained exclusive attention and powerful mindfulness. Obstacles: Distractions and dullness will return if you stop exerting effort. You must keep sustaining effort until exclusive attention and mindfulness become automatic, then effort will no longer be necessary. Boredom, restlessness, and doubt tend to arise during this time. Also, bizarre sensations and involuntary body movements can distract you from your practice. Knowing when to drop all effort is the next obstacle. But making effort has become a habit, so it’s hard to stop. Methods:5 Practicing patiently and diligently will bring you to the threshold of effortlessness. It will get you past all the boredom and doubt, as well as the bizarre sensations and movements. Purposely relaxing your effort from time to time will let you know when effort and vigilance are no longer necessary. en you can work on letting go of the need to be in control. Various Insight and jhāna practices add variety at this Stage. Mastery: You can drop all effort, and the mind still maintains an unprecedented degree of stability and clarity. + +## MILESTONE THREE: EFFORTLESS STABILITY OF ATTENTION + +The third Milestone is marked by effortlessly sustained exclusive attention together with powerful mindfulness.6 is state is called mental pliancy, and occurs because of the complete pacification of the discriminating mind, meaning mental chatter and discursive analysis have stopped. Different parts of the mind are no longer so resistant or preoccupied with other things, and diverse mental processes begin to coalesce around a single purpose. is unification of mind means that, rather than struggling against itself, the mind functions more as a coherent, harmonious whole. You have completed the transition from being a skilled meditator to an adept meditator.7 e Adept Meditator—Stages Eight through Ten + +# STAGE EIGHT: MENTAL PLIANCY AND PACIFYING THE SENSES + +With mental pliancy, you can effortlessly sustain exclusive attention and mindfulness, but physical pain and discomfort still limit how long you can sit. e bizarre sensations and involuntary movements that began in Stage Seven not only continue, but may intensify. With continuing unification of mind and complete pacification of the senses, physical pliancy arises, and these problems disappear. Pacifying the senses doesn’t imply going into some trance. It just means that the five physical senses, as well as the mind sense,8 temporarily grow quiet while you meditate. Goal: Complete pacification of the senses and the full arising of meditative joy. Obstacles: e primary challenge is not to be distracted or distressed by the variety of extraordinary experiences during this Stage: unusual, and oen unpleasant, sensations, involuntary movements, feelings of strong energy currents in the body, and intense joy. Simply let them be. Method: Practicing effortless attention and introspective awareness will naturally lead to continued unification, pacification of the senses, and the arising of meditative joy. Jhāna and other Insight practices are very productive as part of this process. + +Mastery: When the eyes perceive only an inner light, the ears perceive only an inner sound, the body is suffused with a sense of pleasure and comfort, and your mental state is one of intense joy. With this mental and physical pliancy, you can sit for hours without dullness, distraction, or physical discomfort. + +# STAGE NINE: MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PLIANCY AND CALMING THE INTENSITY OF MEDITATIVE JOY + +With mental and physical pliancy comes meditative joy, a unique state of mind that brings great happiness and physical pleasure. Goal: e maturation of meditative joy, producing tranquility and equanimity. Obstacles: e intensity of meditative joy can perturb the mind, becoming a distraction and disrupting your practice. Method: Becoming familiar with meditative joy through continued practice until the excitement fades, replaced by tranquility and equanimity. Mastery: Consistently evoking mental and physical pliancy, accompanied by profound tranquility and equanimity. + +# STAGE TEN: TRANQUILITY AND EQUANIMITY + +You enter Stage Ten with all the qualities of śamatha: effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity. At first these qualities immediately fade aer the meditation has ended. But as you continue to practice, they persist longer and longer between meditation sessions. Eventually they become the normal condition of the mind. Because the characteristics of śamatha never disappear entirely, whenever you sit on the cushion, you quickly regain a fully developed meditative state.9 You have mastered Stage Ten when the qualities of śamatha persist for many hours aer you rise from the cushion. Once Stage Ten is mastered, the mind is described as unsurpassable.10 + +## MILESTONE FOUR: PERSISTENCE OF THE MENTAL QUALITIES OF AN ADEPT + +When you have mastered Stage Ten, the many positive mental qualities you experience during meditation are strongly present even between meditation sessions, so your daily life is imbued with effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity.11 is is the fourth and final Milestone and marks the culmination of an adept meditator’s training. + +CULTIVATING THE RIGHT ATTITUDE AND SETTING CLEAR INTENTIONS We naturally tend to think of ourselves as the agent responsible for producing results through will and effort. Certain words we can’t avoid using when we talk about meditation, such as “achieve” and “master,” only reinforce this idea. We oen believe we should be in control, the masters of our own minds. But that belief only creates problems for your practice. It will lead you to try to willfully force the mind into submission. When that inevitably fails, you will tend to get discouraged and blame yourself. is can turn into a habit unless you realize there is no “self” in charge of the mind, and therefore nobody to blame. As you continue to meditate, this fact of “no-Self” becomes increasingly clear, but you can’t afford to wait for that Insight. For the sake of making progress, it’s best to drop this notion, at least at an intellectual level, as soon as possible. In reality, all we’re “doing” in meditation is forming and holding specific conscious intention—nothing more. In fact, while it may not be obvious, all our achievements originate from intentions. Consider learning to play catch. As a child, you may have wanted to play catch, but at first your arm and hand just didn’t move in quite the right way. However, by sustaining the intention to catch the ball, aer much practice, your arm and hand eventually performed the task whenever you wanted. “You” don’t play catch. Instead, you just intend to catch the ball, and the rest follows. “You” intend, and the body acts. + +In exactly the same way, we can use intention to profoundly transform how the mind behaves. Intention, provided it is correctly formulated and sustained, is what creates the causes and conditions for stable attention and mindfulness. Intentions repeatedly sustained over the course of many meditation sessions give rise to frequently repeated mental acts, which eventually become habits of the mind. At every Stage, all “you” really do is patiently and persistently hold intentions to respond in specific ways to whatever happens during your meditation. Setting and holding the right intentions is what’s essential. If your intention is strong, the appropriate responses will occur, and the practice will unfold in a very natural and predictable way. Once again, repeatedly sustained intentions lead to repeated mental actions, which become mental habits—the habits of mind that lead to joy, equanimity, and Insight. e exquisite simplicity of this process isn’t so obvious in the early Stages. However, by the time you reach Stage Eight and your meditations become completely effortless, it will be clear. While useful, the lists of goals, obstacles, skills, and mastery provided in this discussion so far can obscure just how simple the underlying process really is: intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become mental habits. is simple formula is at the heart of every Stage. erefore, here’s a brief recap of the Ten Stages, presented in a completely different way that puts the emphasis entirely on how intention works in each Stage. Refer to the earlier outline when you need to orient yourself within the context of the Stages as a whole, but look at the outline that follows whenever working through the individual Stages begins to feel like a struggle. STAGE ONE: Put all your effort into forming and holding a conscious intention to sit down and meditate for a set period every day, and to practice diligently for the duration of the sit. When your intentions are clear and strong, the appropriate actions naturally follow, and you’ll find yourself regularly sitting down to meditate. If this doesn’t happen, instead of chastising yourself and trying to force yourself to practice, work on strengthening your motivation and intentions. + +STAGE TWO: Willpower can’t prevent the mind from forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is wandering. Instead, just hold the intention to appreciate the “aha” moment that recognizes mind-wandering, while gently but firmly redirecting attention back to the breath. en, intend to engage with the breath as fully as possible without losing peripheral awareness. In time, the simple actions flowing from these three intentions will become mental habits. Periods of mind-wandering will become shorter, periods of attention to the breath will grow longer, and you’ll have achieved your goal. STAGE THREE: Set your intention to invoke introspective attention frequently, before you’ve forgotten the breath or fallen asleep, and make corrections as soon as you notice distractions or dullness. Also, intend to sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully as possible. ese three intentions and the actions they produce are simply elaborations of those from Stage Two. Once they become habits, you’ll rarely forget the breath. STAGES FOUR THROUGH SIX: Set and hold the intention to be vigilant so that introspective awareness becomes continuous, and notice and immediately correct for dullness and distraction. ese intentions will mature into the highly developed skills of stable attention and mindfulness. You overcome every type of dullness and distraction, achieving both exclusive, single-pointed attention and metacognitive introspective awareness. STAGE SEVEN: Everything becomes even simpler. With the conscious intention to continuously guard against dullness and distraction, the mind becomes completely accustomed to effortlessly sustaining attention and mindfulness. STAGES EIGHT THROUGH TEN: Your intention is simply to keep practicing, using skills that are now completely effortless. In Stage Eight, effortlessly sustained exclusive attention produces mental and physical pliancy, pleasure, and joy. In Stage Nine, simply abiding in the state of meditative joy causes profound tranquility and equanimity to arise. In + +Stage Ten, just by continuing to practice regularly, the profound joy and happiness, tranquility, and equanimity you experience in meditation persists between meditation sessions, infusing your daily life as well. As with planting seeds, at each Stage you sow the appropriate intentions in the soil of the mind. Water these intentions with the diligence of regular practice, and protect them from the destructive pests of procrastination, doubt, desire, aversion, and agitation. ese intentions will naturally flower into a specific series of mental events that mature to produce the fruits of your practice. Will a seed sprout more quickly if you keep digging it up and replanting it? No. erefore, don’t let impatience or frustration stop you from practicing, or convince you that you need to seek out a “better” or “easier” practice. Getting annoyed with every instance of mind-wandering or sleepiness is like tearing up the garden to get rid of the weeds. Attempting to force attention to remain stable is like trying to make a sapling grow taller by stretching it. Chasing aer physical pliancy and meditative joy is like prying open a bud so it will blossom more quickly. Impatience and striving won’t make anything grow faster. Be patient and trust in the process. Care for the mind like a skilled gardener, and everything will flower and fruit in due time. diff --git a/burn_the_constitution.md b/burn_the_constitution.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2f656d4..0000000 --- a/burn_the_constitution.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,54 +0,0 @@ -# Burn the Constitution - -To emphasize the commonality -of the 99 percent, to declare deep enmity of interest with the 1 percent, is to do exactly what the -governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them-from the Founding Fathers to -now-have tried their best to prevent. Madison feared a "majority faction" and hoped the new -Constitution would control it. He and his colleagues began the Preamble to the Constitution with -the words "We the people ...," pretending that the new government stood for everyone, and hoping -that this myth, accepted as fact, would ensure "domestic tranquility." - -## What is the Constitution? - -A constitution is a set of fundamental principles and precedents according to which a state or an organization is governed. As a **foundational document**, it outlines the relationship between its subsections, defines how laws are made, what - -## The problems - -- The cult of the constitution - -### Who were the framers? - -- There is an almost religious devotion to which most citizens hold up both the constitution, and the framers - -- As is the case with any codified document of law or principles, its important to figure out in whose interest it was written. There is no such thing as a neutral political document. -- A class analysis. -- By discovering this, we can go beyond apparantly -- Neutrality - -### Reforming the Constitution - -- Limits of reformism. How does it get changed? Go through history of amendments. Mass struggle, revolts, protests, etc. -- Go through how each clause oppresses workers in some way. -- Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- ​ - -## The solution - -- Stop holding a highly flawed and vague document as an infallible religious text. -- Stop glorifying the framers as enlightened beings, when in reality they were the class enemies of the workers then, just as much as now. -- Realize that bourgeois political processes cannot reform the constitution. Improvements only occur when politicians are threatened by violence and instability. - -## - -## - -Things that were legal, and enforced by the police: - -- Holocaust -- Slavery -- Segregation - -# Resources - -- http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnkin5.html -- ​ diff --git a/how_to_win_a_revolution.md b/how_to_win_a_revolution.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1aa3b36..0000000 --- a/how_to_win_a_revolution.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,111 +0,0 @@ -# How to Win a Revolution - A handbook for the 21st century struggle against capitalism. - -- Cuban, Haitian, Russian, and French revolutions, Paris Commune, and the Spanish Revolution -- Read Che - tactics book -- Read Mao - tactics book -- Read that one liberal's book about how to win a non-revolutionary struggle. -- Huey P. Newton's -- Lives of Lenin and Trotsky, Marx and Engels, Toussaint L'Overture, Dessalines, Danton, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Mao. - Look at the lives of successful revolutionaries. -- NOT influenced by machiavellianism, democratic -- Search and read books about guerilla warfare -- Read David Kilcullen - The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla -- Less than 50 pages. -- Like the anarchists cookbook, or how to win a revolution - -# Table of Contents - -1. [What is a Revolution?](#what-is-a-revolution) - 1.1. [The Ruling Class](#the-ruling-class) -2. [Example2](#example2) -3. [Third Example](#third-example) - -## The Crisis - -Short description of why capitalism is bad, why reformism doesn't work, and why revolution is necessary. A short description also of the path, as given in Lenin's S+R. We won't know how the world will exactly look without wage slavery, whether it will be a bookchin-like communalism, or TODO include picture fully automated luxury gay space communism. - -## - -## What is a Revolution? - -### The Ruling, and the Ruled - -Property relations. Who controls the means of production, and how this is organized. -When one group of people overthrows another, to become the new dominant, ruling class. "Political Revolutions" and "Coups" are often not revolutions at all. Replacing one military dictator, with another, without changing the class-nature of the power structure, isn't a revolution. - -## Conditions - -### Dissatisfaction - -What is this pointed at? Minorities? The ruling class? Where is the rage directed at? Where the rage gets directed, is where the guns get pointed. - -### Solidarity / Class Conciousness - -#### Unified class interests - -#### Comradery, and friendship - -#### Social Justice - -### Armed population - -### Leadership - -#### Organization - -#### Decision-making - -## Strategy - -### Organizing - -Why organizing is necessary. Use trotskys article on why individual terrorism is bad. Need class nature. - -#### Political Parties - -#### Unionism in the 21st century - -#### Spreading the message - -Pablo iglesias video, language and propaganda. Agitprop. Memes. - -### Location - -Why the countryside / forests is no longer a viable 'cover' for guerilla warfare. Guerillas need safety, and protection, IE, cover, can't have meetings and organize, no rifle practice. David Kilcullen video, 45:45. Max Boot on guerilla warfare. Traditionally guerillas weren't successful in cities. Today we have foliage penetrating radar that can see through forests, Drones that can surveil mountain ranges 24 hours a day. No more cover in the rural environment anymore, the cover is in the cities. Governments try to understand the information about cities, knowing who people are, where they live, where they go. These pieces of information can be obfuscated and made confusing. - -The cover areas must be in slums, or 'illegible' territory, IE areas where capital has no vision. - -### Strikes - -Workers councils in the 21st century don't have the same power as they did in earlier times. Automation, and a labor surplus means that workers tactics like strikes, sit-ins, aren't as effective as in earlier times. - -### Arming - -### Fighting - -#### Tech - -Syrian rebels using android phones to control mortars. Drones. Self-created armored vehicles, alshams, miniature lightweight, home-made tank. Remote controlled machine gun, with armored video cameras. Consumer electronics, urban environment, democratized military tech. David kilcullen out of the mountains youtube, 26:21. OpenStreetMaps for strategy. - -### Winning the battle of public opinion - -In 2010, Kilcullen brought together his writings in his book Counterinsurgency and developed his understanding of counterinsurgency to address the globalized threat of radical Islam. He argues that successful counterinsurgency is about out-governing the enemy and winning the adaptation battle to provide integrated measures to defeat insurgent tactics through political, administrative, military, economic, psychological and informational means. -Everything that the city/government does, you have to provide an alternative to do better. Free breakfast, etc. - -Che teaching people how to read, giving health care to the campesinos. - -### Seizing power - -#### When is the right time? - -Too early, and you'll blow it, or be destroyed. - -### Defeating the counter-revolution - -### Compromises - -## What to do next? - -Extra: - -- Talk about how in russia, the conscripted soldiers aligned with the workers, and the army was pissed off at the government. Conversely in Cuba, the army actively suppressed the people, and an insurgency was necessary. diff --git a/images_csv.md b/images_csv.md deleted file mode 100644 index ca4faa5..0000000 --- a/images_csv.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,21 +0,0 @@ -# Images.csv - -An open source repository of images, and image hosting server. - -It consists of: - -- A CSV file, containing a list of images, and torrent_infohashes. -- An image upload server, that can serve any of those images on demand. - -csv columns: `image_hash, torrent_infohash, tags, filename, ip` - -- Someone runs a server, it has a simple image file upload API. -- The front end does an image hash check before uploading against a primary images.csv source hosted somewhere. -- If the hash is new, the upload goes through, and a change to that file is done somehow. The server creates a torrent, and seeds it, and adds that line. -- if the hash already exists, the server torrents the file, and serves it as an upload. -- A `size_limit` is given to make sure the server doesn't seed above a certain limit, and removes older files. Maybe ~100MB by default. -- Periodic scrapes ensure that everything is always available. - -## Links - -- https://github.com/lolney/rust-bittorrent-client diff --git a/mandarin_guide.md b/language_learning/mandarin_guide.md similarity index 55% rename from mandarin_guide.md rename to language_learning/mandarin_guide.md index d2b041c..12300b4 100644 --- a/mandarin_guide.md +++ b/language_learning/mandarin_guide.md @@ -1,35 +1,20 @@ # Mandarin Study Plan -- [Refold Mandarin Guide](https://refold.la/quickstart) - ## Daily study -| Type | Time (minutes) | -| --------- | -------------- | -| Vocab | 15 | -| Grammar | 15 | -| Immersion | 30 | - -2200 hours for fluency - -## To Watch - -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=dpQ3IMd4AMg?list=PLwFUKjRMEUxw2IRsDA8GZGW1AZdgCoiAA -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=q2hrlAGewvY -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ng3UC894haQ -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=qrXIeWGvHDg?list=PLrYgra2FrMh-fQrd59Gdqn9Jq9ZLTqfJc -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=mfBwNIjMbss?list=PL7VdqFXO0Lzdu2U1q-_vZxcuWyqJEitZV +- At least 10m per day, but you need 2200 hours for fluency. ## Immersion resources +- [Comprehensible input wiki - Chinese videos](https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Chinese/Library) - [Refold mandarin main guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS5Hri7NoO6bhY4rFpCGpkPCB46OS2ZCX7bpDiRU2dNA0CJnHwWKG885NdAbREzXVRkSnbVO8ODaVwv/pub) - [Refold Mandarin resources](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1mq3sfslUsC9WlPM7pJN5A7hOFdVqpEFBbiU8-fgmRUw/htmlview#gid=0) - [Heavenly path resources](https://heavenlypath.notion.site/heavenlypath/Heavenly-Path-d9be1806465b4525afeb132d1079194c) -- Chinese marxism lectures youtube? ## Apps -- [HelloChinese](http://hellochinese.cc/) +Apps are mostly useless for the early stages, but the following will help you learn characters. + - [DuChinese](https://www.duchinese.net/) ## Listening / Watching @@ -38,7 +23,6 @@ - [Unconventional Chinese with Keren](https://youtube.com/channel/UCxqLWT3swHvP9_4bv7Qssxw) - [Slow and clear Chinese](https://youtube.com/channel/UCdwdSGQsSbcapDmODtOr58g) - [Shuo Shuo Chinese](https://youtube.com/channel/UC_Aiv9xguPQxZ6msnNoz3HQ) -- [Xue Bai Lessons](https://youtube.com/channel/UCpuAQiIlxFe0FlR2gXXLUKA) (Comprehensive, but not liking so far) ## Reading @@ -48,12 +32,3 @@ - [CCTV live channels](https://tv.cctv.com/live/) - [Some Dramas](https://youtube.com/user/chinaonetv) - -## Vocab - -### Anki decks - -- [HSK](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1907668496) -- [Zhongwen red green blue](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3169370251) -- [Domino Chinese](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/722819818) -- [Spoonfed Chinese](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/53920083) diff --git a/language_learning/toki_pona_guide.md b/language_learning/toki_pona_guide.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7727532 --- /dev/null +++ b/language_learning/toki_pona_guide.md @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +# toki pona guide + +## Learning the language + +The best way to learn a language, is via hours of comprehensible input. + +- [jan telakoman - pilin e toki pona.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwYL9_SRAk8EXSZPSTm9lm2kD_Z1RzUgm) +- [Youtube channel - ma pi toki pona](https://youtube.com/channel/UCQTppoxw6lJTtvr9ZRIjmgg) . Has lots of fluent speakers having conversations about different topics. + +## Other resources + +- [ku - the toki pona dictionary](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978292367/) +- [pu - toki pona: the language of good (first book)](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978292308) diff --git a/left_anticommunism_parenti.md b/left_anticommunism_parenti.md deleted file mode 100644 index d1c8295..0000000 --- a/left_anticommunism_parenti.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,154 +0,0 @@ -# Left Anticommunism: the unkindest cut (CLASSICAL ESSAY—REPOST) - -Editor’s Note: Part opportunism, part careerism, part willful denial (or ignorance) of true capitalist and imperial dynamics, and part attachment to the comforts of being within the respectable fold of “permissible” criticism, Left Anticommunism continues to take a huge toll on the American left. In this comprehensive and incisive essay, Michael Parenti explores the reasons why the Left anti-communist stance must be seen for what it is: a de facto collaboration with the forces defending the corporate status quo. \[This selection is from Parenti’s book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights, 1997). It is reproduced here by courtesy of the author. \]— Patrice Greanville - -## LEFT ANTICOMMUNISM - -By Michael Parenti. - -This article is being reposted by readers’ request. This essay first ran in the 1990s, and was first republished on May 23, 2015 on TGP. It is reposted here again due to the upsurge in McCarthyism from “the left”, spearheaded by the usual suspects, mainly CIA-influenced liberals in the Democratic party and numerous media assets, plus their legions of clueless followers. - ---- - -[![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/noamChomsky.jpg "noamChomsky")](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/noamChomsky.jpg) - -_Despite a lifetime of “shaming” the system, NOAM CHOMSKY, America’s foremost “engagé” intellectual, remains an unrepentant left anticommunist._ - -In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum. - -## Genuflection to Orthodoxy - -Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about “left intellectuals” who try to “rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements” and “then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We’re seeing it right now in the \[former\] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and \[are\] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans” (Z Magazine, 10/95). - -Chomsky’s imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of “communist thugs” who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communists did not “very quickly” switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union’s waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsin’s violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993. - -Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power’s sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed. - -For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left. - -**Adam Hochschild:** Keeping his distance from the “Stalinist Left” and recommending same posture to fellow progressives. - -**Adam Hochschild**, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they “weaken their credibility” (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in the Cold-War condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters. Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations. - -The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent. - -Even when attacking the Right, the left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that “when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, \[Reagan\] will change not his mind but the facts.” While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism “both of the Right and Left,” individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote. - -[![Orwell-reactionary-quote-one-does-not-establish-a-dictatorship-in-order-to-safeguard-a-revolution-one-makes-a-revolution-in-george-orwell-139740](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Orwell-reactionary-quote-one-does-not-establish-a-dictatorship-in-order-to-safeguard-a-revolution-one-makes-a-revolution-in-george-orwell-139740-600x282.jpg)](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Orwell-reactionary-quote-one-does-not-establish-a-dictatorship-in-order-to-safeguard-a-revolution-one-makes-a-revolution-in-george-orwell-139740.jpg) - -A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was **George Orwell.** In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes. - -Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish–while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa. - -Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, **Murray Bookchin**, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words). - -## Slinging Labels - -Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as “Soviet apologists” and “Stalinists,” even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did. - -Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. **Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.** - -That many U.S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin’s writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the “Leninist” label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: “Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution \[sic\] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.” Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power’s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right. - -At the time of the 1996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: “Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize.” U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was _disapproving_ of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, _Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development._ He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists. - -Lenin constantly dealt with the problem of avoiding the two extremes of liberal bourgeois opportunism and ultra-left adventurism. Yet he himself is repeatedly identified as an ultra-left putschist by mainstream journalists and some on the Left. \[Notably Chris Hedges, accused him often of “highjacking the revolution”, whatever that means.—Eds) Whether Lenin’s approach to revolution is desirable or even relevant today is a question that warrants critical examination. But a useful evaluation is not likely to come from people who misrepresent his theory and practice. - -Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations to be morally unacceptable because of the “crimes of communism.” Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic Party in this country, either as voters or members, seemingly unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist Party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic Party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism. \[And the Democrats are full responsible, as integral parts of the imperialist machinery, for all the crimes of the US empire in at least a century of continuous expansion, crimes detailed by many scholars, and compiled—inter alia—in books such as _Rogue State_ (Bill Blum).—Ends\] - -## Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism - -The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party “state capitalism” or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries “socialist” is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something _different_ from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world–as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize. - -First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West \[even more so when compared with today’s grotesque compensation packages to the executive and financial elites.—Eds\], as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess. {Nor could they transfer such “wealth” by inheritance or gift to friends and kin, as is often the case with Western magnates and enriched political leaders. Just vide Tony Blair.—Eds\] - -The “lavish life” enjoyed by East Germany’s party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center _shared by all the residents._ They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the “lavish” consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy. - -Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1. - -Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance. - -Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India. - -All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States. - -But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage. - -The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed. - -The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundamentals as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution. - -The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism–not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience–could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued: - -> How do \[the left critics\] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling \[revolutionary\] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation \[of existing communist societies\], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92.) - -The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country. - -Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists: - -> It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe–and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them–all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. . . . - -> These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists \[should make\]. (Guardian, 11/13/91) - -To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale. - -## Decentralization vs. Survival - -For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980. - -Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “\[E\]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack \[against bourgeois forces\].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.” - -Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party. “The time has come,” he told an enthusiastically concurring Tenth Party Congress, “to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition.” Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes. - -Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party’s Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution–like every other–that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way. - -By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more political diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organizations, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small businesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base. - -The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more comfortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only problem is that the country would have risked being incapable of withstanding the Nazi onslaught. Instead, the Soviet Union embarked upon a rigorous, forced industrialization. This policy has often been mentioned as one of the wrongs perpetrated by Stalin upon his people. It consisted mostly of building, within a decade, an entirely new, huge industrial base east of the Urals in the middle of the barren steppes, the biggest steel complex in Europe, in anticipation of an invasion from the West. “Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered but the construction went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history.” - -Stalin’s prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide. The cost of this survival included 22 million Soviets who perished in the war and immeasurable devastation and suffering, the effects of which would distort Soviet society for decades afterward. - -All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not “make inevitable” the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of “suspect” nationalities. - -The transforming effects of counterrevolutionary attack have been felt in other countries. A Sandinista military officer I met in Vienna in 1986 noted that Nicaraguans were “not a warrior people” but they had to learn to fight because they faced a destructive, U.S.-sponsored mercenary war. She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda. As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands–the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the suppression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society. - ---- - -[![Richard Lichtman, an otherwise capable theorist and activist, was among those on the Marxian left who applauded the downfall of the Eastern bloc nations and the USSR itself. ](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/richard_lichtman.jpg)](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/richard_lichtman.jpg) - -Richard Lichtman, an otherwise capable theorist and activist, was among those on the Marxian left who applauded the downfall of the Eastern bloc nations and the USSR itself. - -The overthrow of Eastern European and Soviet communist governments was cheered by many left intellectuals. Now democracy would have its day. The people would be free from the yoke of communism and the U.S. Left would be free from the albatross of existing communism, or as left theorist Richard Lichtman put it, “liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China.” - -In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe. - -In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. “Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.” As Richard Levins put it, “So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay” (Monthly Review, 9/96). - -Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don’t get it. - ---- - -## ABOUT THE AUTHOR - -[![m.Parenti](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/m.Parenti.jpg)](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/m.Parenti.jpg) - -**Michael Parenti** is an award-winning, internationally known American political scientist, historian, and culture critic who has been writing on a wide range of both scholarly and popular subjects for over forty years. He has taught at several universities and colleges and has been a frequent guest lecturer before campus and community audiences.\[_[citation needed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed "Wikipedia:Citation needed")_\] In addition, he has played an activist role in political struggles, most notably various anti-war movements. Included among the subjects he addresses are American politics, world affairs, news and entertainment media, ideology, historiography, ethnicity, and religion. - -**NOTE—** - -PARENTI is the author of twenty-three books, among which: - -- [The Face of Imperialism](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-the-face-of-imperialism) (Paradigm, 2011) -- [God and His Demons](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-god-and-his-demons) (Prometheus Books, 2010) -- [Democracy for the Few](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-democracy-for-the-few) (Wadsworth, 9th edition, 2011) -- [Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-contrary-notions) (City Lights Books, 2007) -- [The Culture Struggle](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-the-culture-struggle) (Seven Stories Press, 2006) -- [Superpatriotism](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-superpatriotism) (City Lights Books, 2004) -- [The Assassination of Julius Caesar](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-the-assassination-of-julius-caesar) (The New Press, 2003) -- [The Terrorism Trap](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-the-terrorism-trap) (City Lights Books, 2002) -- [To Kill a Nation](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-to-kill-a-nation) (Verso Books, 2001) -- [History as Mystery](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-history-as-mystery) (City Lights Books, 1999) -- [Blackshirts and Reds](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-blackshirts-and-reds) (City Lights Books, 1997) -- [Dirty Truths](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-dirty-truths) (City Lights Books, 1996) -- [Inventing Reality](https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-inventing-reality) (Wadsworth, second edition, 1993) - are duly regarded as classic. diff --git a/lise_vogel_domestic_labour_revisited.md b/lise_vogel_domestic_labour_revisited.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2875977..0000000 --- a/lise_vogel_domestic_labour_revisited.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,150 +0,0 @@ -# Domestic Labour Revisited [^1] - -_Written by Lise Vogel, 2000_ - -From the late 1960s into the 1970s, socialist feminists sought to analyse women’s unpaid family-work within a framework of Marxist political economy.[^2] Such an analysis would provide a foundation, they thought, for understanding women’s differential positioning as mothers, family-members, and workers, and thereby for a materialist analysis of women’s subordination. At the time, interest in the bearing of Marxist theory on women’s liberation seemed perfectly normal – and not just to socialist feminists. Radical feminists also adopted and transformed what they understood to be Marxist concepts.[^3] - -From these efforts came a voluminous literature. Women’s liberationists studied Marxist texts, wrestled with Marxist concepts, and produced a range of original formulations combining, or at least intermingling, Marxism and feminism. Their enthusiasm for this work is hard today to recapture.[^4] It turned out, moreover, to be relatively brief. By the end of the 1970s, interest in domestic-labour theorising had dramatically declined. The shift away from the so-called domestic-labour debate was especially pronounced in the United States. In this paper I look again at the challenge of theorising the unwaged labour of housework, child-bearing, and child-rearing. I argue that much of the early domestic-labour literature followed an intellectual agenda that has not been well understood, reviewing my own work in this light. I then consider the reception of such endeavours by their audiences. Finally, I suggest that the early domestic-labour theorists’ unfinished project deserves further attention. - -## Theories and theorising - -The notion that something called ‘domestic labour’ should be theorised emerged as part of a critique launched by North American women’s liberationists in the late 1960s and soon picked up elsewhere, notably in Britain. Although central in women’s experience, the unpaid work and responsibilities of family-life were rarely addressed in radical thought and socialist practice. Women’s liberationists, wanting to ground their own activism in more adequate theory, began to wonder about the theoretical status of the housework and child-care performed in family-households, usually by women. Over the next years, an enormous set of writings known collectively as the domestic-labour debate examined this puzzle.[^5] - -The domestic-labour literature identified family-households as sites of production. Reconceptualised as domestic labour, housework and child-care could then be analysed as labour-processes. From this beginning came a series of questions. If domestic labour is a labour-process, then what is its product? People? Commodities? Labour-power? Does the product have value? If so, how is that value determined? How and by what or whom is the product consumed? What are the circumstances, conditions, and constraints of domestic labour? What is domestic labour’s relationship to the reproduction of labour-power? To overall social reproduction? To capitalist accumulation? Could a mode of reproduction of people be posited, comparable to but separate from the mode of production? Might answers to these questions explain the origins of women’s oppression? - -The burgeoning domestic-labour literature seemed initially to confirm, even legitimate, socialist feminists’ double commitment to women’s liberation and socialism. Before long, however, a range of problems surfaced. Concepts and categories that had initially seemed self-evident lost their stability. For example, the notion of reproduction of labour-power became surprisingly elastic, stretching from biological procreation to any kind of work that contributed to people’s daily maintenance – whether it be paid or unpaid, in private households, in the market, or in the workplace. Likewise, the meaning of the category domestic labour fluctuated. Did it refer simply to housework? Or did it include child-bearing and child-care as well? Circular arguments were common. For example, domestic labour was frequently identified with women’s work and conversely, thereby assuming the sexual division of labour women’s liberationists wished to explain. In addition, the debate’s almost exclusive concern with unpaid house-hold-labour discounted the importance of women’s paid labour, whether as domestic servants or wage-workers. And its focus on the economic seemed to overlook pressing political, ideological, psychological, and sexual issues. - -Women’s liberationists also found the abstractness of the domestic-labour literature frustrating. The debate developed in ways that were not only hard to follow but also far from activist-concerns. Concepts appeared to interact among themselves without connection to the empirical world. Not only was the discussion abstract, it seemed ahistorical as well. Perhaps most damaging, much of the domestic-labour literature adopted a functionalist explanatory framework. A social system’s need for domestic labour, for example, was taken to imply that that need was invariably satisfied. Where in the debate, many wondered, was human agency? Meanwhile, feminist agendas were bursting with other matters, both theoretical and practical. By the early 1980s, most socialist feminists had decided to move ‘beyond the domestic labor debate’. They left behind the ambiguity, conceptual fuzziness, circularity, and loose ends of an unfinished project.[^6] - -The shift away from the effort to theorise domestic labour within a framework of Marxist political economy seemed to make sense. Many women’s liberationists assumed theory to be directly pertinent to day-to-day activities and thought a given theory had determinate political and strategic implications. Conversely, they looked to empirical accounts of history and current circumstances as a way to constitute the appropriate basis for theory.[^7] Rejecting the abstractions of the early domestic-labour literature, they sought a conceptual apparatus that could be used to organise and interpret the data of women’s lives. - -This approach reflected a particular epistemological orientation, one that put theory into a kind of one-to-one relationship with the empirical. Theory was assumed to be isomorphic with what was understood to be reality. As such, it could produce empirical generalisations, statements of regularity, and models. Explanation and prediction would then depend on extrapolation from these presumably accurate representations. In this view, familiar from the social- scientific literature, theory is a broad-ranging intellectual activity, grounded in the empirical and capable of supplying descriptions, explanations, and predictions – and thereby able as well to guide policy or strategy. - -This is not the only way to think about theory, however. Much of the early domestic-labour literature implicitly adopted a different perspective, rooted in certain readings of Marxist theory current in the 1960s and 70s. Associated most famously with the French philosopher Louis Althusser, this alternative perspective accords theory an epistemological specificity and a limited scope. Theory, in this view, is a powerful but highly abstract enterprise and sharply different from history.[^8] As Althusser put it, speaking of Marx’s Capital: - -> Despite appearances, Marx does not analyze any ‘concrete society’, not even England, which he mentions constantly in Volume One, but the capitalist mode of production and nothing else. This object is an abstract one: which means that it is terribly real and that it never exists in the pure state, since it only exists in capitalist societies. Simply speaking: in order to be able to analyse these concrete capitalist societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is essential to know that they are dominated by that terribly concrete reality, the capitalist mode of production, which is ‘invisible’ (to the naked eye). ‘Invisible’, i.e. abstract.[^9] - -From this perspective, theory is necessarily abstract as well as severely constrained in its implications. It can point to key elements and tendencies but it cannot provide richly textured accounts of social life. Even less does it directly explain events, suggest strategies, or evaluate the prospects for political action. These are matters for a qualitatively distinct kind of inquiry – one that examines the specifics of particular historical conjunctures in existing social formations. - -To put it another way, this alternative approach conceptualises theory as a sort of lens. By itself, the lens tells us little about the specifics of a particular society at a particular moment. It is only by using the lens that observers can evaluate such specifics and strategise for the future. Compared to theorising – producing the lens – these tasks of empirical investigation and political analysis constitute intellectual work of a different and, I would argue, more challenging sort. - -## A different starting point - -I turn now to my own work on domestic labour. My purpose in so doing is to offer an example of women’s liberationist theorising within the intentionally abstract framework just described. From this perspective, the domestic-labour debate was a theoretical, rather than historical or sociological project. Its outcome would be expected to take the form of sets of abstract concepts and identifications of possible mechanisms and tendencies. These could not, by themselves, really ‘explain’ anything concrete – neither the rich, idiosyncratic, and constructed character of experience nor the specific nature and direction of popular mobilisation or social transformation. Even less could they suggest political strategies. Such questions would be matters for empirical investigation and political analysis by the actors involved. - -The challenge, then, was to discover or create categories to theorise women’s unpaid family-work as a material process. Women’s liberationists, myself included, examined the classic texts of Marx, Engels, Bebel, and others, discovering only a precarious theoretical legacy at best. This finding led, in my case, to a lengthy critical reading of Marx. In this reading I followed what I understood to be Althusser’s advice: - -> Do not look to Capital either for a book of ‘concrete’ history or for a book of ‘empirical’ political economy, in the sense in which historians and economists understand these terms. Instead, find in it a book of theory analysing the capitalist mode of production. History (concrete history) and economics (empirical economics) have other objects.[^10] - -Using this approach to theory, I hoped to be able to contribute to the construction of a more satisfactory theoretical lens with which to analyse women’s subordination. - -As my conceptual point of departure I considered two notions basic to Marx’s work: labour-power and the reproduction of labour-power. For Marx, labour-power is a capacity borne by a human being and distinguishable from the bodily and social existence of its bearer. Labour-power’s potential is realised when its bearer makes something useful – a use-value – which may or may not be exchanged. The bearers of labour-power are, however, mortal and suffer wear and tear; every individual eventually dies. Some process that meets the ongoing personal needs of the bearers of labour-power is therefore a condition of social reproduction, as is some process that replaces them over time. These processes of daily maintenance and long-run replacement are conflated in the term reproduction of labour-power. - -In class-divided societies, dominant classes somehow harness labour-power’s ability to produce use-values for their own benefit. For clarity, I therefore restricted the concept of reproduction of labour-power to the processes that maintain and replace labour-power capable of producing a surplus for an appropriating class.[^11] In the remainder of this section, I look very briefly at several characteristics of the reproduction of such labour-power: the processes involved, the role of biological procreation, and certain inherent contradictions. This prepares the way for the next section’s discussion of reproduction of labour-power in capitalist societies. - -Marx considered the reproduction of labour-power to be central to social reproduction, but he never provided a thoroughgoing exposition of just what it entailed. At times he focused on renewal of the individual labourer; elsewhere, he underscored the importance of maintaining and replacing non-working members of the working class. For clarity, again, I therefore distinguished three kinds of processes that make up the reproduction of labour-power in class-societies. First, a variety of daily activities restore the energies of direct producers and enable them to return to work. Second, similar activities maintain non-labouring members of subordinate classes – those who are too young, old, or sick, or who themselves are involved in maintenance-activities or out of the workforce for other reasons. And third, replacement-processes renew the labour-force by replacing members of the subordinate classes who have died or no longer work. - -With these three kinds of processes disentangled, the concept of reproduction of labour-power can be freed from normative assumptions concerning biological procreation in heterosexual family-contexts. Although the reproduction of labour-power in actual societies has usually involved child-rearing within kinbased settings called families, it can, in principle, be organised in other ways, at least for a period of time. The present set of labourers could be housed in dormitories, maintained collectively, worked to death, and then replaced by new workers, brought from outside. This harsh régime has actually been approximated many times through history. Gold-mines in Roman Egypt, rubber-plantations in French Indochina, and Nazi _Arbeitslager_ all come to mind. More commonly, an existing labour-force is replenished in two ways. First, by processes of what I term ‘generational replacement’, whereby workers bear children who grow up to become workers themselves. And second, by the entry of new workers into the labour-force. For example, individuals who had not previously participated at all may become involved in wage-labour, as when wives entered the American labour-market in the 1950s. People may enter the work-force sporadically, at harvest, for instance, or during economic crises. Immigrants can cross national boundaries to enter a society’s labour-force. Persons may also be forcibly kidnapped, transported far from home, and coerced into a new workforce, as was done for New-World slave-plantations. - -From the theoretical point of view, in other words, the reproduction of labourpower is not invariably associated with private kin-based households, as the domestic-labour debate commonly assumed. In particular, it does not necessarily entail any or all of the following: heterosexuality, biological procreation, family-forms, or generational replacement. Nonetheless, most class-societies have institutionalised daily-maintenance and generational-replacement processes in a system of heterosexual family-forms. That such arrangements are empirically so common probably reflects their advantages – contested and constantly renegotiated – over the alternatives. - -Class-societies that rely on biological procreation for the reproduction of labour-power encounter several contradictions. While pregnant and for a short time thereafter, subordinate-class women experience at least a brief period of somewhat reduced ability to work and/or to engage in the activities of daily maintenance. During such periods of lower activity, the women must themselves be maintained. In this way, child-bearing can diminish the contribution subordinate-class women make as direct producers and as participants in maintenance activities.[^12] - -From the perspective of dominant classes, such childbearing is therefore potentially costly, for pregnant-women’s labour and that which provides for them might otherwise have formed part of surplus-labour. At the same time, subordinate-class child-bearing replenishes the work-force and thereby benefits dominant classes. There is a latent contradiction, then, between dominant classes’ need to appropriate surplus-labour and their requirements for labour-power to perform it. - -From the perspective of subordinate classes, other contradictions may emerge. Arrangements for the reproduction of labour-power usually take advantage of relationships between women and men based on sexuality and kinship. Other individuals, frequently the biological father and his kin-group or the kin of the child-bearing woman herself, have the responsibility for making sure women are provided for during periods of diminished activity associated with childbearing. Although in principle women’s and men’s differential roles need only last during those child-bearing months, most societies assign them to the variety of social structures known as families, which become sites for the performance of dailymaintenance as well as generational-replacement activities. The arrangements are ordinarily legitimated by male domination backed up by institutionalised structures of female oppression. - -How these various contradictions manifest themselves and are confronted in actual class-societies cannot be directly derived from their existence at this very general level. This discussion simply shows that subordinate-class women’s child-bearing capacity positions them differently from men with respect to the processes of surplus-appropriation and reproduction of labour-power. While they may also be workers, it is subordinate-class women’s differential role in the maintenance and replacement of labour-power that marks their particular situation.[^13] - -## Capitalism and domestic labour - -The previous section considered elements of the reproduction of labour-power in the case of societies divided by class. In this section I look at the reproduction of labour-power in that distinctive kind of class-society known as capitalism. On this topic Marx had a fair amount to say but, as the domestic-labour literature showed, it was nonetheless not enough.[^14] - -In capitalist societies, according to Marx, labour-power takes the specific form of a commodity, that is, a thing that has not only use-value but also exchangevalue. Borne by persons, this commodity has certain peculiarities. Its use-value is its capacity, when put to work in a capitalist production-process, to be the source of more value than it itself is worth. Its exchange-value – what it costs to buy the labour-power on the market – is ‘the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the laborer’,[^15] an amount that is established historically and socially in a given society at a particular moment. - -To explore the relationship between labour-power’s value and capital’s interest in surplus-appropriation, Marx used an abstraction: the working day of a single working man, expressed in hours. (For Marx, the worker was always male, of course.) He defined ‘necessary labor’ as the portion of a day’s labour that enables the worker to purchase the means of subsistence. And he defined ‘surplus labor’ as the remainder of the day’s labour, which the capitalist appropriates.[^16] To put it another way, the worker works part of the time for himself and the rest of the time for the boss. The first, the worker’s necessary labour, corresponds to his wages; the second, his surplus-labour, constitutes surplus-value at the disposal of the boss. - -For Marx, capitalist accumulation creates a constantly changing profit-driven system. If capitalists must seek more and more profits, it is in their interest to seek reductions of necessary labour. Marx discussed methods (other than cheating) they can use to achieve such a reduction. On the one hand, they can lengthen working hours or intensify the pace of work without changing the value of labour-power. More hours or more intense work means the worker expends more labour-power for the same wage. That is, his labour-power is cheapened. Marx called this kind of reduction of necessary labour ‘absolute surplus value’. On the other hand, capitalists can reduce necessary labour by making the production-process more productive. Greater productivity means the worker needs fewer working hours to complete necessary labour and more surplus-value goes to the boss. Within limits, a wage-increase could even be granted. Marx called this kind of reduction of necessary labour ‘relative surplus value’. - -Marx’s discussion of the relationship between necessary and surplus-labour within the working day is wonderfully clear. At the same time, its focus on a single individual labourer perforce excludes consideration of all the additional labour that secures not only the workingman’s maintenance and replacement but also that of his kin and community and of the workforce overall.[^17] That these various processes can be omitted from Marx’s account, at least at this point, is an effect of capitalism’s particular social organisation. As in no other mode of production, daily-maintenance and generational-replacement tasks are spatially, temporally, and institutionally isolated from the sphere of production. In his concept of ‘individual consumption’, Marx recognised that capitalism gives life off the job a radically distinct character from wage-labour. Individual consumption happens when ‘the laborer turns the money paid to him for his labor-power into means of subsistence.’[^18] Marx’s main interest, here, is to contrast the worker’s individual consumption of means of subsistence with his ‘productive consumption’ of means of production while on the job. But he said little about the actual work involved in individual consumption. Here was a realm of economic activity essential to capitalist production yet missing from Marx’s exposition. - -The domestic-labour literature sought, in various ways, to make visible the workings of the reproduction of labour-power in capitalist societies. From my perspective, this meant reconceptualising necessary labour to incorporate the processes of reproduction of labour-power. Necessary labour has, I argued, two components. The first, discussed by Marx, is the necessary labour that produces value equivalent to wages. This component, which I called the social component of necessary labour, is indissolubly bound with surplus-labour in the capitalist production-process. The second component of necessary labour, deeply veiled in Marx’s account, is the unwaged work that contributes to the daily and long-term renewal of bearers of the commodity labour-power and of the working class as a whole.[^19] I called this the domestic component of necessary labour, or domestic labour. - -Defined this way, domestic labour became a concept specific to capitalism and without fixed gender assignment. This freed it from several common-sense assumptions that haunted the domestic-labour debate, most especially the notion that domestic labour is universal and that it is necessarily women’s work. - -The social and domestic components of necessary labour are not directly comparable, for the latter does not have value.[^20] This means that the highly visible and very valuable social component of necessary labour is accompanied by a shadowy, unquantifiable, and (technically) valueless domestic-labour component. Although only one component appears on the market and can be seen clearly, the reproduction of labour-power entails both. Wages may enable workers to purchase commodities, but additional labour – domestic labour – must generally be performed as well. Food-commodities are prepared and clothes maintained and cleaned. Children are not only cared for but also taught the skills they need to become competent working-class adults. Working-class individuals who are sick, disabled, or enfeebled are attended to. These various tasks are at least partly undertaken by domestic labour. - -In other words, I argued that necessary labour is a more complicated conceptual category than previously thought. It has two components, one with value and the other without. Domestic labour, the previously missing second component, is sharply different from the social component yet similarly indispensable to capitalist social reproduction. It lacks value, but nonetheless plays a key role in the process of surplus-value appropriation. Locked together in the performance of necessary labour, social labour and its newfound mate, domestic labour, form an odd couple never before encountered in Marxist theory.[^21] - -Capitalists’ interest in reducing necessary labour may extend to its domestic as well as its social component. If some people devote much of their energies to domestic labour – hauling water from the well, cooking on a hearth, washing clothes by boiling them, teaching children the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and so forth – then they are less available for work in production. By contrast, when domestic labour is reduced, additional labour-power is potentially released into the labour-market. Reduction of domestic labour has been an ongoing process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the early 1900s, food-preparation was less time-consuming, laundry was in some ways less onerous, and schools had taken over most of the task of teaching skills. More recently, frozen food, microwaves, laundromats, and the increased availability of day-care, nursery, kindergarten, and after-school programmes have decreased domestic labour even further.[^22] Reduction of domestic labour through technological and non-technological means does not inevitably make households send more of their members’ labour-power onto the market. It does, however, create a greater possibility that they might do so. - -In short, capitalists as a class are caught between a number of conflicting pressures, including: their long-term need for a labour-force, their short-term demands for different categories of workers and consumers, their profit requirements, and their desire to maintain hegemony over a divided working class. In the abstract of my theoretical construction, these contradictory pressures generate tendencies, of course, not preordained inevitabilities. Such tendencies do not necessarily produce outcomes favourable to dominant classes, as functionalist interpretations would have it. Rather, the processes of reproduction of labourpower constitute an embattled terrain. In actual societies, capitalists adopt a variety of strategies, some of which involve manipulating domestic labour in ways that can be analysed as creating absolute or relative surplus-value. At the same time, working people strive to win the best conditions for their own renewal, which may include a particular level and type of domestic labour. Because both capital and labour are ordinarily fragmented into distinct sectors, the results are not uniform across layers. - -A contradictory tendential dynamic thus threads through historical struggles over the conditions for the reproduction of the commodity labour-power. Particular outcomes have included the family-wage for certain groups, protective legislation covering female and child industrial workers, sex- and race-segregation in the labour-market, migrant-labour housed in barracks, and so forth.[^23] - -To this point I have discussed the reproduction of the commodity labourpower as an economic phenomenon.[^24] There is, however, a key political phenomenon that also pertains, a tendency towards equality. Marx argued that this fundamental political feature of capitalist societies has a basis in the articulation of production and circulation.[^25] In production, a great range of concrete useful labour is rendered equivalent as human labour in the abstract, or value. In circulation, commodities can be exchanged on the market when they embody comparable amounts of that value. Labour-power is, of course, also a commodity, bought and sold on the market. Workers and capitalists thus meet in the marketplace as owners seeking to exchange their commodities. For transactions to take place, capitalists must offer wages that are equivalent to the value of workers’ labour-power. Contrary to notions of capitalism as a cheating system, this is an equal exchange. Equality in the market goes hand in hand with exploitation in production. - -Equality of persons is not, then, an abstract principle or false ideology but a complex tendency with roots in the articulation of the spheres of production and circulation. Lack of equality, I argue, represents a specific feature of women’s (and other groups’) oppression in capitalist societies. Only subordinate-class women perform domestic labour, as discussed above, but all women suffer from lack of equality in capitalist societies. - -Efforts to expand equality’s scope make radical challenges on at least two fronts. First, they tend to reduce divisions within and among subordinate layers and sectors, by moving all persons towards a more equal footing. Second, they can reveal the fundamentally exploitative character of capitalism, for the further rights are extended, the more capitalism’s economic and social character is exposed. Far from exercises in fruitless reformism or supposedly divisive identity-politics, struggles for equality can contribute to building strategic alliances and even point beyond capitalism. - -To sum up the theoretical scenario I offered, in all its abstractness: In the capitalist mode of production, the logic of accumulation and the articulation between the spheres of production and circulation doubly mark women’s position. On the one hand, subordinate-class women and men are differentially located with respect to important economic aspects of social reproduction. On the other, all women are denied equal rights. In actual societies, the dynamics of women’s subordination respond to this dual positioning, among other factors. - -## Audiences and paradigms - -Efforts to theorise domestic labour addressed two distinct audiences in the 1970s: feminists, especially socialist feminists, and the Left. Most feminists eventually rejected the domestic-labour literature as a misguided effort to apply inappropriate Marxist categories. Most Marxists simply disregarded the debate, neither following nor participating in it. Neither potential audience fully grasped the ways that socialist feminists were suggesting, implicitly or explicitly, that Marxist theory had to be revised. - -One factor that ultimately limited the feminist audience was the domesticlabour debate’s approach to theory. As discussed earlier, many feminists had difficulty with the epistemological perspective that underlay much of the domestic-labour literature. Not only was it extremely abstract, it also considered the scope of theory to be severely limited. In particular, questions of subjectivity and agency fell outside theory of this sort. These questions belonged, rather, to the difficult and messy realm of concrete historical investigation and analysis. Most feminists came to reject this view of theory and sought instead to found theory on detailed empirical description. A powerful but generally unacknowledged difference of theoretical paradigm thus separated the two perspectives. As is far more apparent to me now than it was years ago, the holders of one could not communicate effectively with those partial to the other. Even the task of reading each other’s work, not to mention that of usefully critiquing it, encountered the obstacle of paradigm incompatibility.[^26] - -Through the 1970s, the Left was mostly hostile to the notion of developing a feminist socialism, much less that of revising Marxist theory. In many camps, feminism was considered inherently bourgeois as well as a threat to class-unity. US Marxist theorists, mostly male, generally ignored the domestic-labour literature. In part, the problem here was again a paradigm-incompatibility, this time of a different sort. From a traditional-Marxist perspective, the dynamics of capitalism had ultimately to do with class-exploitation. Other issues – for example, gender-, race-, or national oppression – might be important concerns for socialists, but they lay outside what was understood to be the realm of Marxist theory. - -The audiences for domestic-labour theorising dramatically contracted in the 1980s. Playing a role in the downturn, certainly, were the increasingly conservative political climate and the decline or destruction of many radical social movements. Feminist intellectual work managed to flourish, but with far fewer links than earlier to women’s movement activism. Surviving on college- and university-campuses, it encountered a range of disciplinary constraints and professional pressures. Younger generations of feminist scholars had missed, moreover, the chance to participate in a radical women’s liberation movement rooted in the upheavals of the 1960s. Not surprisingly, confidence in the relevance of socialist thought to feminist theory diminished. - -The 1980s and ’90s did not, to the surprise of some, witness the demise of domestic-labour theorising. Rather, a certain level of interest has persisted. Where there are relatively strong traditions of Marxist theory for one reason or another, as in England and Canada, small communities of economists, sociologists, and historians, male as well as female, continue to address questions descended from those posed in the early domestic-labour literature.[^27] - -In these years in the United States, however, relatively fewer researchers have been involved with the issues posed in the domestic-labour debate. Feminists who continue to use the terminology often do so in a manner more metaphorical than analytical. Domestic labour, for example, is still taken to mean some thing whose site and workers are obvious (the private household, women) and whose content is self-evident (usually, housework, or housework and child-care). Reproduction, a term with meanings within several distinct intellectual traditions that were at first the subject of much discussion, has also acquired a generic meaning.[^28] Along with a new phrase, ‘reproductive labour’, it now often covers a wide range of activities contributing to the renewal of people, including emotional and intellectual as well as manual labour, and waged as well as unwaged work. Reviewing the literature, Evelyn Nakano Glenn[^29] observes that: - -> The term social reproduction has come to be more broadly conceived . . . to refer to the creation and recreation of people as cultural and social, as well as physical, beings. Thus it involves mental, emotional, and manual labor. This labor can be organized in myriad ways – in and out of the household, as paid or unpaid work, creating exchange value or only use value . . . . [For example, food production] can be done by a family member as unwaged work in the household, by a servant as waged work in the household, or by a short-order cook in a fast-food restaurant as waged work that generates profit. - -US Marxist theorists in the 1980s and 90s have continued to be mostly male and generally inattentive to several decades of socialist–feminist scholarship and commentary. Many take feminism to be an instance of a so-called identitypolitics that can only balkanise the Left. They worry as well about the unity of Marxist theory. At the same time, they seem not to be aware of the range of current debates and discussions that address these very problems. A handful have begun, however, to enter the dialogue. Some cover ground already well travelled in the domestic-labour debate, even reinventing analyses first proposed by feminists in the 1970s. Others interpret the issues surrounding female oppression as matters of language, psychology, or sexuality. In so doing, they construct women’s subordination as wholly external to the processes of surplus-appropriation and capitalist social reproduction and therefore not the subject of Marxist political economy. - -Early domestic-labour theorists sought to put women’s lives at the heart of the workings of capitalism. They were among the first to intuit the coming crisis of Marxism and to begin exploring the limitations of Marxist theory. Their challenge to feminist theory and to the tradition of Marxist political economy remains, in my view, an unfinished project. - -## Domestic labour in the twenty-first Century - -The domestic-labour literature insisted that women’s oppression is central to overall social reproduction. Despite all its problems, this insight remains valid. Capital still demands reliable sources of exploitable labour-power and appropriately configured consumers of commodities – demands that are perennially the object of struggle and not always met. With global restructuring, the processes through which labour-power is maintained and replaced are undergoing radical transformation and domestic labour remains key to these changes. The forms of domestic labour proliferate, moving ever further from the male-breadwinner/ -female-dependent nuclear-family norm. Most households contribute increasing amounts of time to wage-labour, generally reducing the amount and quality of domestic labour their members perform. Other households are caught in persistent joblessness, intensifying marginality, and an impoverished level and kind of domestic labour. Here, it could be argued, the reproduction of a sector of labourpower is in question.[^30] The processes of labour-power renewal also disperse geographically, frequently moving across national boundaries. Migration becomes more widespread, dividing families and producing new kinds of non-kin as well as kin-based sites of domestic labour. Meanwhile, the expanded scope and availability of rights-based equality to traditionally marginalised groups, beneficial in many ways, creates unanticipated hazards.[^31] - -At the turn of the twenty-first century, heavy burdens fall on women, alongside undeniably empowering changes. These burdens include, among others, the double day, absent husbands, isolation from kin, and single motherhood without adequate social support. In short, women’s experience still points to the question of theorising domestic labour and its role in capitalist social reproduction. - -[^1]: This paper first appeared in Vogel 2000. It originated as a presentation at the July 1994 meetings of the Conference of Socialist Economists in Leeds, England. My thanks to Filio Diamante for inviting me and to my co-panelists and audience for lively discussion. In preparing this text for publication, I benefited from the very helpful comments of Christine Di Stefano and a number of anonymous reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my colleague James Dickinson, whose detailed observations and probing questions were, as always, invaluable. -[^2]: It is not possible to separate a socialist from a Marxist feminism as they were practiced in the 1970s; I therefore use the term socialist feminism inclusively. In this paper, I generally follow contemporary American usages of terms. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the term women’s liberation was current, intended to demarcate the younger and presumably more radical branches of the women’s movement from the so-called bour-geois feminism of the National Organization for Women. Within the women’s liberation movement, socialist feminists formed a distinctive tendency. By the late 1970s, the term women’s liberation was being replaced by the term feminism. That feminism was now a broader term than it had been earlier perhaps reflected the declining importance of distinguishing branches within the women’s movement. -[^3]: For example, Firestone 1970 and Millett 1970. -[^4]: For descriptions of the excitement with which feminists confronted Marxist theory in the 1960s and 70s, see Echols 1989; Vogel 1998; and the personal accounts in Duplessis and Snitow (eds.) 1998. -[^5]: For fine (and very short) overviews of the domestic-labour debate, see Himmelweit 1983a and 1983c. For a survey of the literature, see Vogel 1986. See also the essays in Sargent (ed.) 1981, and in Hansen and Philipson 1990. -[^6]: Molyneux 1979. -[^7]: See, for example, Brenner and Holmstrom 1983; Molyneux 1979; or, in its own way, Nicholson 1986. -[^8]: See, among others, Althusser 1971a; Hindess and Hirst 1975; Willer and Willer 1973; as well as Marx 1973d. -[^9]: Althusser 1971a, p. 77. -[^10]: Althusser 1971a, p. 78. -[^11]: The concept of the reproduction of labour-power thus becomes pertinent, strictly speaking, only to subordinate classes. This is not to say that dominant-class women do not experience gender-subordination. Rather, their situation is associated with their roles in the maintenance and replacement of property-owning classes and requires its own analysis. -[^12]: Paddy Quick (Quick 1977) argues that the core material basis for women’s subordination in class-societies is not the sexual division of labour or gender-difference per se, but the need to maintain subordinate-class women during child-bearing. -[^13]: Likewise, dominant-class women have a special but quite different role in the maintenance and replacement of their class. -[^14]: The following three paragraphs radically compress Marx’s discussions of aspects of the reproduction of labour-power. Marx discussed the material at great length and with ample empirical illustration. -[^15]: Marx 1971a, p. 167. -[^16]: Strictly speaking, a portion of the value created by the worker’s labour goes to replace constant capital. -[^17]: Elsewhere, Marx recognised that such labour was a condition for overall social reproduction. -[^18]: Marx 1971a, p. 536. -[^19]: At this level of abstraction, I use the term working-class to indicate all those who are propertyless in the sense of not owning the means of production. The majority of the population in the United States today, as elsewhere, is in this sense working-class, making it necessary in less abstract contexts to consider the stratification of households by occupation, education, income, and so forth. -[^20]: The question of whether or not domestic labour has value in the Marxist sense triggered its own mini-debate within the women’s liberationist literature. In my view, it does not. For an exposition of why, see Smith 1978. -[^21]: This discussion, which clarifies but does not alter my earlier argument (Vogel 1983), now seems to me less persuasive. What is clear, however, is that whether domestic labour is conceptualised as a component of necessary labour or not, the bottom line is that some way to theorise it within Marxist political economy must be found. -[^22]: Nona Glazer (Glazer 1987) discusses ‘work-transfer’ as an important twentieth-century counter-tendency to domestic-labour reduction. Work-transfer occurs when labour formerly performed by clerks is transferred to self-service shoppers, thereby increasing domestic labour. Martha Gimenez (Gimenez 1990) incorporates Glazer’s work transfer into her discussion of four distinct kinds of domestic labour. Significant though the various mechanisms of work-transfer are, I would doubt that they contradict long-term tendencies for households to decrease the total amount of domestic labour performed. -[^23]: This analysis of domestic labour as a key component of the reproduction of labour-power has an empirical counterpart in the way studies of the working class have changed over the past three decades. Rather than focus just on workers and their unions, numerous researchers look more broadly at working-class households and communities as bearers, maintainers, and replacers of labour-power. See Sacks 1989; Glucksmann 1990. -[^24]: I agree with Nancy Fraser (Fraser 1998) that most of what can loosely be termed gender-relations is not in the economic sphere. My claim here is that there is nonetheless some piece that is economic, that it plays a role in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, and that its theorisation belongs to political economy. This important but limited economic aspect of women’s oppression in capitalism is surely one of the factors that marks its specificity as opposed to, for example, racial or class-subordination. -[^25]: Here, again, I radically compress a lengthier account in Marx. -[^26]: Thomas Kuhn (Kuhn 1962) describes the many ways theoretical paradigms remain invisible while powerfully framing their users’ thinking. With respect to the theoretical framework under discussion, Althusser (Althusser 1993, pp. 185–6) also comments on the phenomenon: ‘From the outset we had insisted on drawing a structural distinction between a combinatory (abstract) and a combination (concrete), which created the major problem. But did anyone acknowledge it? No one took any notice of the distinction . . . No one was interested in [my approach to] theory. Only a few individuals understood my reasons and objectives’. -[^27]: For England, see the bibliography in Gardiner 1997, and the journal Capital & Class. For Canada, see Hamilton and Barrett 1990, and the journal Studies in Political Economy. -[^28]: For 1970s considerations of the meanings of the concept of reproduction, see Edholm, Harris, and Young 1977; and Beechey 1979. See also Himmelweit 1983b. -[^29]: Glenn 1992. -[^30]: Gimenez (Gimenez 1990, p. 37) suggests that such households ‘simply reproduce people; and [the labor power of ] people . . . without marketable skills, [has] no value under capitalist conditions’. For a different interpretation, see Sassen 1998. -[^31]: See, for example, Vogel 1995. diff --git a/market_socialism.md b/market_socialism.md deleted file mode 100644 index 528ed30..0000000 --- a/market_socialism.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,61 +0,0 @@ -# Why Marxists are against markets - -Market socialism is an **extremely fringe view** among socialists. So, why do some people (even socialists) think we need markets? - -Remember that this is a **distributional** problem : we have a bunch of goods and services that we need to distribute to people in need of them. - -Markets are **one way** to do that, and the primary way under capitalism. Markets are based on two things: - -- **Individual profit**: IE, buying low, selling high, and ignoring the effect of the transaction on others (externalities). -- **Commodification of every resource** (even people). - -Labor is one such commodity, that is bought for cheap, and it's results sold for high (IE profit). - -### History of markets Yes, markets are oppressive. - -Markets only became the primary way to distribute goods _within the last 500 years_. For the vast majority of human history, rituals, harvest festivals, a group of elders deciding fair distribution, or communal decision-making accomplished what the market does today. Writers like Plato and Aristotle detested markets (small-scale trade within cities and between nation-states at that time), because they witnessed how the individualistic profit motive worked to **destroy the community**. - -Markets, through the **commodification of every resource** (including human beings), destroy the community in the following ways: they promote generational wealth hoarding, increasing inequality, treating people as objects, monopolistic practices (price-fixing, dumping, colluding), rent-seeking, informational failure (over/under production), booms/busts/business cycles, negative externalities (affecting the environment and third parties), unpaid labor (such as housework, and childcare), human exploitation (slavery and wage-slavery, prostitution), large-scale imperialism (Such as in Africa, South America, and Asia post 1700s) demerit goods (encouraging for-profit drug use, see Opium wars), inefficient and incorrect valuation, artificially high barriers to entry for many sectors.... in short, they result in an antagonistic relationship between a working class, and an owning/wealth hoarding class. - -Also, **free markets inherently favor those with the most capital**, giving elites leverage over poorer communities. For many of the poorer places in the world, free market interventionism is identical to imperialism: business interests, with the help of the military, conquer or buy up the land, labor, and resources of the poorer country, bribe local labor leaders, businessmen, and police forces, and enforce the domination of the richer imperialists. For example, in Cuba under the Batista dictatorship, 70% of the Arable land was owned by US businesses. - -### What do we replace markets with? - -You'll hardly see any Socialist advocating markets as a distribution system, because of that individualistic profit motive. Most of us advocate for **democratically planned economies** with labor vouchers, or **gift economies** in goods that are widely abundant. For a great academic breakdown of how planned economies would work, I suggest [Cottrell - towards a new socialism](http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf). - -### What about market socialism? - -The argument for market socialism states that we outlaw the commodification of labor, but retain markets. This completely ignores the incentive structures associated with market transactions, by which the profit motive demands the commodification of everything, including labor. Even if the market were socially controlled and commodification of labor were _somehow_ outlawed, it would still allow hoarding of wealth, **individual profit motive over collective good**, and emphasize monetary incentives over human ones. - -Market enterprises have one goal, increasing profit and market share, in isolated transactions. What would prevent a coop from **polluting a river** that people use, if they're able to cut corners and extract a larger profit? - -What would prevent a small group of people from accumulating wealth and using it for individualistic motives? Maybe they won't be legally able to exploit a labor force, but they will still try to get away with it to satisfy the profit motive, which is unavoidable and systemically inherent to a market system. - -Finally, there is the market socialist principle that somehow we stop treating labor as a commodity, but we continue to treat _everything else_ like one. Natural resources, health care, living spaces, and food security are things we should **not** be treating as a commodity, which they would be under a market system. - -Market socialism in a predominantly capitalist society has a historical name: **utopian socialism**, or the cooperative movement. Engels, in [Socialism: Utopian and Scientific](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm), explained how a few of the early socialist reformers such as Fourier and Owen nobly tried to set up idealistic isolated islands of socialism, known as worker cooperatives, in the early stages of the industrial revolution. These all failed in the long run, both because they relied on capitalist enterprises for materials and means, and because they were out-competed by capitalists who did a better job of extracting a higher profit from their workforce. Engels stated that as the class contradictions become more absurd, _The mode of production rises in rebellion against the form of exchange_, IE, the socialized force of production (the united working class) rises up against the individualism of the market. - -## How do we get to Fully Automated Luxury Queer Space Communism? - -In the transition towards communism, most socialists prefer gift economies for abundant goods, and labor-time economies for scarce goods. - -### What about scarce goods, and getting paid in the socialist future? A: Labor vouchers - -Labor vouchers would replace money as a way to govern demand for non-abundant goods. - -Labor vouchers are different from money in that: - -1. They are valued in **time** (Specifically average socially necessary labor time), not an arbitrary substance or thing. -2. They are attached to a person/family, and can't be traded. -3. They are destroyed after they're exchanged for goods/services from the democratic workers council organization (I usually call it the pool) -4. They optionally have expiration dates (to prevent wealth hoarding, and inter-generational conflict) - -In books like I like linked above, goods/services are valued and labor vouchers are based on **labor time**, and that book provides good calculations for how to value labor time for various things. Instead of getting paid a certain amount per hour, you would receive something that proves your _hours worked_. Goods and services are then valued based on all the constituent labor time necessary (including all the sub-parts) to produce them. For example, a door might cost 2 Labor hours (LH), after adding in the time costs to harvest all the materials for the wood frame, metal handle, lock, hinges, etc, and assemble them. Large input-output tables (and some linear algebra) could be used to calculate the labor time values of every good and service in an economy. - -As technological improvements decrease the labor time cost of goods and services to nearly zero, that good becomes an abundant good. Many food products and consumer items could already be considered abundant. When nearly all goods are abundant, then we could say that we've reached full communism. - -With regards to moderating demand for goods, grocery stores **can currently** function in gift and labor voucher economies, since they already gauge consumer demand by keeping track of which items have been scanned when leaving the store, and can determine how much of what good needs to be restocked, or produced. This information, absent of a money price, represents a "signal", to the associated producers, telling them where to allocate labor resources, and push for technological advances. - -Unlike a capitalist economy, where the goal is individualistic profit, in a labor-time economy the goal is **minimizing the labor-time-cost** of all goods and services, to improve the well-being of the community. - -Likely there would also be a kind of basic income of labor vouchers, to make sure everyone gets a fair share of the distribution of food and housing and such (this could be seen as accounting for unpaid labor done in the home). Since they are attached to a person/family, labor vouchers prevent wealth accumulation being handed down to further generations. diff --git a/recipes/tofu.md b/recipes/tofu.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5c3dbdd --- /dev/null +++ b/recipes/tofu.md @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +# Tofu + +- Freeze tofu, then thaw it. +- Cut into .5 inch squares. +- Put squares in sink, push on them to get out any extra water. +- Put on a flat plate, with your chose marinade. Marinade for at least 15m. +- Heat pan to med to med-high, add a little canola oil. +- cook for 5m, don't move it. Check to make sure it's golden brown, not burned. +- flip and cook other side for 4-5m. diff --git a/reviews/barbie_movie_essay.md b/reviews/barbie_movie_essay.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9dec1cc --- /dev/null +++ b/reviews/barbie_movie_essay.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +# Barbie essay + +2 lenses: Buddhism and Marxism + +Looking at it from the 3 buddhist marks of existence: anicca, dukkha, and anatta (attachment to identity and self), of which the last is paramount. Really gets to the heart of the limitations of attachment to self/identities, even if these identities are admirable ones. Humanity, authenticity being sold as marketable commodities. + +Marxist concepts: Alienation, and the commodification of identities. Trying to escape from consumerized identities, and the catch-22s of being an oppressed group. Particularly the selling of identities of the 80s-90s, related to commodity fetishism: where the products themselves seem to have more "humanity" and authenticity than humans do. + +Not a straight-forward Marxist story: the villain is not a capitalist exploiting the labor of the characters, and the main characters aren't fighting for their. But it is an attack on a patriarchy, and domestic exploitation. + +- A vulgar Marxist might make a point about these toys being a source of profit, but of course all children deserve playthings, and this capitalism is just currently the way they're produced. Young girls also need play, and figures to look up to. That being said, all of these identities being sold, are "marketable" in some way. There is a constant search for authenticity. + +## Characters and what they represent + +- Daughter represents the critical view of even feminist beauty standards, and the vapidity of consumerist culture. +- Ken represents male fragility, and the attachment to vapid identities of power, none of which ultimately bring him happiness. A lack of self-esteem outside of not just a position of power, but even more fundamentally outside of a relationship. After his position of power is shedded, all he feels he needs to be happy, is for barbie to love him back. His unrequited love is the real source of all his actions: to try to make barbie love him. +- Will ferrel, seen as a goof. He's a man in charge, but kind of a buffoon who doesn't know what he's doing. While its cliched trope to show the "evil main-character capitalist", in reality the patriarchs in charge of society know how to keep their position of power, continue exploiting women's household and reproductive labor, and adapt barbies for that purpose, serving the dual purpose of making a profit, as well as ingraining patriarchal and pro-capitalist ideologies in the products they sell. + +## Pluses + +- Riotously funny, and the jabs at patriarchy are hilarious. This movie doesn't punch down, but always up. +- Pretty to watch: beautiful visuals. + +## Shortcomings + +- Doesn't critique the idea of physical beauty, and patriarchal beauty standards. All Barbies are "beautiful", even if they don't conform to patriarchal standards of beauty. The idea isn't that ugliness, or a lack of physical beauty is acceptable, no, the idea is that each specific identity is beautiful, and every woman is beautiful. There is one scene where she says that an old grandmother is beautiful, pregnant or overweight barbies. But the idea of not attaching to physical beauty is never questioned. Basing self-esteem on physical beauty, even outside of normative standards, isn't a helpful thing. Perhaps a better message would be to not base our identities around beauty at all, and embrace even societal ugliness as being acceptable. Weird barbie (while being an oracle of sorts) is also looked down on by other barbies for her perceived ugliness and strangeness: an alienation and ostracism existing even with the group of barbies / women. +- The political problem and its solution. Bourgeois democracy is seen as the solution to the political problem. They distract the men, play on their vanity, get them fighting with each other, so that they can vote all women into power. While this shouldn't be taken too seriously as its clear this segment of the film is mainly for comedic effect, the message of "vote out the patriarchy" doesn't have a good track record, and only Marxist feminists have posited effective solutions here. There are a few cases in the film of "the politics of representation" being the answer, as the main character mentions that she sometimes hopes a powerful woman will come along and save the rest. Get into "representative" / bourgeois feminism and its short-comings, how most of the US war industry are run by women CEOs, bombing women and children in the global south. +- Asks more questions than it answers, and never gets to the heart of identity. Its asking too much of any one film to solve all the problems of woman-hood and finding an identity within patriarchal systems, how to live with and co-exist with people who you care about that are still exploiting their position of power. Outside of these consumerized identities. By the end of the movie, barbie does reject this simplistic consumerized identity, but an alternative is never posed. An admirable goal would have been for barbie to reject that these identities and traits make up who she is, but an advanced view of Not-Self is difficult for anyone to imagine. Barbie rejects the "consumerized" identity, but never completely rejects all attachments to self, and never profoundly says, not just these identities, but ALL traits are impermanent, and not-me, and I'm fully unrestrained by any attachment to self. +- Pacing. Late-capitalism has reached an end-stage of attention-spans, where everything needs to be as eye-catching, titillating, as possible. You never get to rest, relax, or take a breath. The attention-span The "big 30-second attention-span, in all movies made after 2010. If you watch any movie before the year 1990, you'll know what I mean: the characters can breath, dialog can be slow and intentional, points can resonate, we can relax with the characters, we can experience their emotional journies in real-time. In the 2010s afterward, everything is a 30-second attention-grabbing soundbyte. + +Even for all its problems, the film deserves to be lauded for taking on these complex issues, in a big-budget hollywood film whose ultimate purpose is to reinforce bourgeois and thus patriarchal attitudes. + +the buddha discovering death diff --git a/js_imperialism_favorites.md b/reviews/js_imperialism_favorites.md similarity index 100% rename from js_imperialism_favorites.md rename to reviews/js_imperialism_favorites.md diff --git a/reviews/lenin_imperialism_book_study_notes.md b/reviews/lenin_imperialism_book_study_notes.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e74c04e --- /dev/null +++ b/reviews/lenin_imperialism_book_study_notes.md @@ -0,0 +1,193 @@ +# Lenin's Imperialism book study notes + +## Context + +- Written in 1916, during WW1, written for two purposes +- To educate people on this new state of capitalism. + - IE an early or middle to a late stage, where + - "free competition" of the early stage of capitalism is dying. + - Monopolies have formed + - Capitalism becomes a world system. + - Production is exported abroad, Colonialism overtakes internal production. + - The world becomes divvied up by a handful of imperial core countries (GB, France, US, Germany, Holland, Japan) + - Finance capital overtakes industrial capital in the rich countries. +- As a polemic against a lot of groups: + - Pacifists or imperialist apologists who thought that imperialism and monopoly was bringing about a "world democracy". + - Bourgeios economists who denied the reality of the export of production, monopoly, and imperialism. + - Small and Middle Capitalists who want to go back to the days of "free competition". + - Those groups who accepted all of the above, but saw imperialism as beneficial. + - Reformists, pacifists, chauvinist socialists, kautskyites, capitalists and their apologists, etc + +## Other interesting points + +- Seems like it was written yesterday, mainly because we still live in the imperialist era. +- Even a lot of the companies are still existing: Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan (Chase bank) Rockefeller, ThyssenKrupp. +- Continues on from Engels in creating the field of dependency theory / social bribery, and furthers concepts of labor aristocracy, and the struggle between rich and poor nations. + +## Definition + +### General + +The domination of a weaker country by a stronger one; referring primarily to the conquering and exploitation of the land, labor, and natural resources of the weaker country. In + +### Leninist + +> Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. + +## Chapter 1 - Creation of Monopolies + +### Summary + +- By the beginning of the 19th century, due to the growth of industry, free competition has been superceded by monopoly capitalism: the concentration of production into a few giant firms ( who often form cartels ) that dominate their industry. +- These monopolies control all the expertise, resources, trading networks, +- In a sense production has become "socialized", and development internal to firms, but the benefits / surplus goes to the company owners. + - Peoples republic of walmart - makes this same point. +- Goes over these statistics for Germany, US, GB. +- Goes over monopolistic practices and methods they use to push out small and middle producers. + +### Quotes + +> In Germany, Less than one-hundredth of the total number of enterprises utilise more than three-fourths of the total amount of steam and electric power! [...] Tens of thousands of huge enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing. + +## Chapter 2 - Banks and their new role + +### Summary + +- Banks grow from the middlemen taking fees for providing money capital to industrialists to secure raw materials, to taking over their role entirely ( or subsuming them): banks become experts in industry, and choose how and where to allocate resources themselves. +- Goes over this in GB, France, and Britain, how the # of banks has decreased. +- In many countries, the + +### Quotes + +> As banking develops and becomes concentrated in a small number of establishments, the banks grow from modest middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and sources of raw materials in any one country and in a number of countries. This transformation of numerous modest middlemen into a handful of monopolists is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism. + +> We see the rapid expansion of a close network of channels which cover the whole country, centralising all capital and all revenues, transforming thousands and thousands of scattered economic enterprises into a single national capitalist, and then into a world capitalist economy. + +## Chapter 3 - Finance capital + +### Summary + +- Industrial and banking capital merge, to form finance capital. +- Goes over bank assets to show this new state of affairs. + +- Social democrats think share issueing is the "democratization of capital", when in reality its 1 dollar = 1 vote, so even "40 per cent of the shares of a company in order to direct its affairs". +- + +### Quotes + +> The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry—such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of that concept. + +> Speculation in land situated in the suburbs of rapidly growing big towns is a particularly profitable operation for finance capital. [Talks about how means of communication / infrastructure increase the value of land ]. + +> It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest. The extent to which this process is going on may be judged from the statistics on emissions, i.e., the issue of all kinds of securities. + +## Chapter 4 - Export of Capital + +### Summary + +- When wages in the imperial core become high, it becomes more profitable to export capital and production to undeveloped countries, where wages, land, and natural resources are cheap. +- Shows figures for money capital invested by GB, france, and germany in america, europe, asia, africa, etc. + +### Quotes + +> Capitalism is commodity production at its highest stage of development, when labour-power itself becomes a commodity. [...] England became a capitalist country before any other, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, having adopted free trade, claimed to be the “workshop of the world,” the supplier of manufactured goods to all countries, which in exchange were to keep her provided with raw materials. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this monopoly was already undermined; for other countries, sheltering themselves with “protective” tariffs, developed into independent capitalist states. On the threshold of the twentieth century we see the formation of a new type of monopoly: firstly, monopolist associations of capitalists in all capitalistically developed countries; secondly, the monopolist position of a few very rich countries, in which the accumulation of capital has reached gigantic proportions. An enormous “surplus of capital” has arisen in the advanced countries. + +> As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high, for capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low, raw materials are cheap. The export of capital is made possible by a number of backward countries having already been drawn into world capitalist intercourse; main railways have either been or are being built in those countries, elementary conditions for industrial development have been created, etc. The need to export capital arises from the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become “overripe” and (owing to the backward state of agriculture and the poverty of the masses) capital cannot find a field for “profitable” investment. + +## Chapter 5 - Division of the world by capitalist monopolies + +### Summary + +- These capitalist monopolies begin a "great game" / race to conquer poorer nations and divide the world into spheres of influence. +- Talks about how essentially 2 electric companies so dominated the world market, that no other company could be completely independent from them. Same for oil, shipping, railways, and steel. + +### Quotes + +Against the imperialism is bringing peace "socialists": + +> Certain bourgeois writers (now joined by Karl Kautsky, who has completely abandoned the Marxist position he had held, for example, in 1909) have expressed the opinion that international cartels, being one of the most striking expressions of the internationalisation of capital, give the hope of peace among nations under capitalism. Theoretically, this opinion is absolutely absurd, while in practice it is sophistry and a dishonest defence of the worst opportunism. [...] but the substance of the struggle, its class content, positively cannot change while classes exist. [...] The question as to whether these changes are “purely” economic or non-economic (e.g., military) is a secondary one, which cannot in the least affect fundamental views on the latest epoch of capitalism. To substitute the question of the form of the struggle and agreements (today peaceful, tomorrow warlike, the next day warlike again) for the question of the substance of the struggle and agreements between capitalist associations is to sink to the role of a sophist. + +## Chapter 6 - Division of the world among the great powers + +### Summary + +- Existing imperial-core capitalist states, needing to seek profit abroad, accelerate colonialism, moreso than they did during the "free competition" era. +- Compares the colonial possessions of GB, Germany, France, Russia, US, and Japan, in terms of land and population. +- Many of these had larger land and populations outside their own borders. +- Continues on from Engels and creates some of the foundations for labor aristocracy theory, talking about a bourgeois proletariat who benefits from imperialism. + +### Quotes + +> It is not without interest to observe that even then these leading British bourgeois politicians saw the connection between what might be called the purely economic and the socio-political roots of modern imperialism. Chamberlain advocated imperialism as a “true, wise and economical policy,” and pointed particularly to the German, American and Belgian competition which Great Britain was encountering in the world market. Salvation lies in monopoly, said the capitalists as they formed cartels, syndicates and trusts. Salvation lies in monopoly, echoed the political leaders of the bourgeoisie, hastening to appropriate the parts of the world not yet shared out. And Cecil Rhodes, we are informed by his intimate friend, the journalist Stead, expressed his imperialist views to him in 1895 in the following terms: “I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists." + +> Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practised imperialism. But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between socio-economic formations, inevitably turn into the most vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.” Even the capitalist colonial policy of previous stages of capitalism is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital. +> +> The principal feature of the latest stage of capitalism is the domination of monopolist associations of big employers. These monopolies are most firmly established when all the sources of raw materials are captured by one group, and we have seen with what zeal the international capitalist associations exert every effort to deprive their rivals of all opportunity of competing, to buy up, for example, ironfields, oilfields, etc. Colonial possession alone gives the monopolies complete guarantee against all contingencies in the struggle against competitors, including the case of the adversary wanting to be protected by a law establishing a state monopoly. The more capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies. + +## Chapter 7 - Imperialism as a special stage of capitalism + +### Summary + +- Gives several definitions of imperialism + - The short one: When free competition has been replaced by monopoly capitalism + - Longer one + - 5 characteristics + - monopoly capitalism + - merging of industrial and bank into finance capital + - export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities + - Formation of int'l cartels that share the world + - territorial division of the world among the biggest capitalist states. +- Debates with Kautsky over definitions: kautsky thinks its just a policy, and that industrial capital is still dominant. + +### Quotes + +> Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. + +## Chapter 8 - Parisitism and the decay of capitalism + +### Summary + +- The imperial core countries become parasitic blood-suckers on their colonies. +- They turn from industrial into Creditor states. +- Talks about the bribing native politicians, recruiting the armies from among the colonies themselves. +- Talks about increase in immigration to the imperial core countries, rather than away. +- Talks more about the social bribery, labor aristocracy / bourgeois proletariat in England, due to the benefits imperialism brings. + +### Quotes + +> As for the second circumstance, Hobson writes: “One of the strangest symptoms of the blindness of imperialism is the reckless indifference with which Great Britain, France and other imperial nations are embarking on this perilous dependence. Great Britain has gone farthest. Most of the fighting by which we have won our Indian Empire has been done by natives; in India, as more recently in Egypt, great standing armies are placed under British commanders; almost all the fighting associated with our African dominions, except in the southern part, has been done for us by natives." + +> It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century—vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market. Marx and Engels traced this connection between opportunism in the working-class movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism systematically, during the course of several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: “The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.”[13] Almost a quarter of a century later, in a letter dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks of the “worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the middle class”. In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.”[13] (Engels expressed similar ideas in the press in his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, which appeared in 1892.) +> +> This clearly shows the causes and effects. The causes are: (1) exploitation of the whole world by this country; (2) its monopolist position in the world market; (3) its colonial monopoly. The effects are: (1) a section of the British proletariat becomes bourgeois; (2) a section of the proletariat allows itself to be led by men bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie. + +## Chapter 9 - Critique of imperialism + +### Summary + +- Summarizes the attitude of different classes of society towards imperialism. +- Many socdem parties like the SDP of germany or fabians are "social-imperialists": socialism in words but imperialism in deed. +- Critiques people (mainly kautsky ) who want to reform imperialism; +- Critiques the tendency of bourgeois economists to be naive and talk about peace under imperialism. + +### Quotes + +> From this Kautsky concludes that “we have no reason to suppose that without military occupation the growth of British trade with Egypt would have been less, simply as a result of the mere operation of economic factors.” “The urge of capital to expand ... can be best promoted, not by the violent methods of imperialism, but by peaceful democracy.” + +> Kautsky’s obscuring of the deepest contradictions of imperialism, which inevitably boils down to painting imperialism in bright colours, leaves its traces in this writer’s criticism of the political features of imperialism. Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing but the violation of the right of nations to self-determination). Hilferding rightly notes the connection between imperialism and the intensification of national oppression. “In the newly opened-up countries,” he writes, “the capital imported into them intensifies antagonisms and excites against the intruders the constantly growing resistance of the peoples who are awakening to national consciousness; this resistance can easily develop into dangerous measures against foreign capital. The old social relations become completely revolutionised, the age-long agrarian isolation of ‘nations without history’ is destroyed and they are drawn into the capitalist whirlpool. Capitalism itself gradually provides the subjugated with the means and resources for their emancipation and they set out to achieve the goal which once seemed highest to the European nations: the creation of a united national state as a means to economic and cultural freedom. This movement for national independence threatens European capital in its most valuable and most promising fields of exploitation, and European capital can maintain its domination only by continually increasing its military forces.” + +## Chapter 10 - The place of imperialism in history + +### Summary + +- Talks about how this imperialist / monopoly capitalism stage intensifies class contradictions, and that this is a transitional period in history. +- Even though capitalism and industrial development appear to slow down in the imperial core countries, things are accelerating as a whole. +- Talks about how usurer / rentier / creditor states become pitted against colonized ones.... more labor aristocracy theory. + +### Quotes + +> From all that has been said in this book on the economic essence of imperialism, it follows that we must define it as capitalism in transition, or, more precisely, as moribund capitalism. + +> Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the “rentier state”, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an ever-increasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by “clipping coupons”. It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a greater or lesser degree, now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (Britain). + +> The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism, which revealed itself first and most clearly in Great Britain, owing to the fact that certain features of imperialist development were observable there much earlier than in other countries. Some writers, L. Martov, for example, are prone to wave aside the connection between imperialism and opportunism in the working-class movement—a particularly glaring fact at the present time—by resorting to “official optimism” (à la Kautsky and Huysmans) like the following: the cause of the opponents of capitalism would be hopeless if it were progressive capitalism that led to the increase of opportunism, or, if it were the best-paid workers who were inclined towards opportunism, etc. We must have no illusions about “optimism” of this kind. It is optimism in respect of opportunism; it is optimism which serves to conceal opportunism. As a matter of fact the extraordinary rapidity and the particularly revolting character of the development of opportunism is by no means a guarantee that its victory will be durable: the rapid growth of a painful abscess on a healthy body can only cause it to burst more quickly and thus relieve the body of it. The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism. diff --git a/reviews/peoples_republic_of_walmart_review.md b/reviews/peoples_republic_of_walmart_review.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6fabd7f --- /dev/null +++ b/reviews/peoples_republic_of_walmart_review.md @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +# People's Republic of wal-mart short review + +The only point the book makes, is that large capitalist monopolies, like wal-mart or amazon, which are themselves economies larger than many countries, don't compete inside themselves; they use computerized, fully top-to-bottom planning to minimize waste and achieve a high degree of efficiency. That argument, is mainly posed in two chapters (the amazon chapter the only one worth reading), and its a good one, even though its not new (capitalist firms that reach monopoly positions, don't compete within themselves, that's been known since the days of the east india company and other entrenched monopolies, and that point doesn't need a whole book, a short article works fine). + +But around 60% of the book is uneducated western takes on actually existing socialist economies and democracies, and it tries really hard to make the case that planning in the USSR was "authoritarian", not democratic, and was a failure, which it [clearly was not (see this introductory article.)](https://gowans.blog/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work/) Many great books have been written on the planned economies of USSR, China, GDR, Cuba, and to write a book about economic planning without investigating these, is utterly shameful and eurocentric. I can recommend some books if anyone's interested. + +Secondly, they don't propose any alternatives, except a vague "planning, but its democratic this time unlik those ebil communists", unlike other great works that actually try to work out how a fully planned democratic economy would work, like Paul Cockshott's towards a new socialism, which I've written a [short write-up on here.](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/paul_cockshott_cyber_communism.md) + +TLDR, The writers are western chauvinists. They tried to write a book on economic planning, whilst ignoring the massive successes of planned economies in the 20th-21st century. diff --git a/zak_cope_divided_favorites.md b/reviews/zak_cope_divided_favorites.md similarity index 100% rename from zak_cope_divided_favorites.md rename to reviews/zak_cope_divided_favorites.md diff --git a/routines.md b/routines/routines.md similarity index 100% rename from routines.md rename to routines/routines.md diff --git a/routines/tank_energy.md b/routines/tank_energy.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1df36ec --- /dev/null +++ b/routines/tank_energy.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +# Creative Tank / Energy + +Structuring your work / pomodoro schedule around tank filling. + +Breaks: use tank fillers + +pomos: tank emptiers + +## Questions + +- Does this activity make you more energized to do something? +- Does this activity drain your energy? +- Do you feel inspired to be creative? + +## Tank fillers + +- Sitting Meditation +- Walking meditation +- Sleeping / napping (20 or 90 minutes) + +## Tank emptiers + +- Social media +- Coding +- Watching movies +- Reading books +- Masterbating diff --git a/workout_routine.md b/routines/workout_routine.md similarity index 100% rename from workout_routine.md rename to routines/workout_routine.md diff --git a/socdem_bribery.md b/socdem_bribery.md deleted file mode 100644 index b8ec70b..0000000 --- a/socdem_bribery.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,21 +0,0 @@ -# Paying one half of the poor to kill the other half: Why Marxists should not support social democrats in the Imperial core. - -IE, why pushing for social democracy in the imperial core countries is a terrible idea. - -In Settlers, Sakai talks about how a lot of poor proles from europe who came to the US, _still pushed for the genocide and expropriation of native american lands_, because it meant that they could potentially get land for next to nothing. The colonial bourgeoisie were happy to give them that slice of the american pie, because it meant furthering the US goals of westward expansion, and building a garrison / middle layer of settler troops who would have their same goals in driving out Native Americans. - -The same thing happened with the new deal, where workers were bribed with welfare and higher wages to abandon revolutionary organizations, coalitions with black and brown workers, and be pushed into settler unions (and management positions) who could do their bidding against various other working groups, creating yet another grouping of "middle class / labor aristocrats" whose goals aligned more with the bourgeoisie than with the poor. - -This new _new deal_ Sanders is proposing is the same idea: that workers in the imperial core will accept a new round of welfare policies. Since the US is primarily a service / consumer goods import economy, social services are entirely funded off the backs of third world workers who get paid next to nothing in wages. [Sanders record of voting for US military intervention in 15+ countries](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanders), his preference for lighter skinned social imperialists (like the nordic countries), his denigration of actually existing socialist movements (he calls Maduro a "vicious tyrant"), and his anti-immigration stances are more than enough evidence that he wants to continue the US policy of enslaving the third world to feed the imperial core. - -All of these are instances of **one half of the poor being bribed into killing the other half;** but in the modern day, its imperial core workers being bribed into continuing the exploitation of the third world to provide cheap products and enough surplus value to fund welfare policies. Rather than dismantling capitalism / imperialism, Sanders wants to increase taxes on billyahnayas, in which a cut of their imperialist superprofits will go towards first world welfare, thus strengthening the alliance between capital, and its labor aristocracy, much like the new deal. I know, we can call this new class collaborationist garrison of labor aristocrats, the "middle class"! - -In fact, many forward-thinking capitalists are openly in support of this project: [Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Sam Altman, are just a few billionaires who support a universal basic income](https://www.industryleadersmagazine.com/billionaire-entrepreneurs-who-support-universal-basic-income/), seeing its potential use as a finely tunable fuel source to quell class struggle, gain public support, and preserve their fortunes. - -To quote /u/Guillotron9000 : - -> Nothing of the sort will happen. Even if Sanders is elected he'll pass M4A and most of his base will be satisfied. And the capitalists won't care too much either. They'll just make up for the losses by fucking over the third world even harder. -> -> The whole movement around Bernie isn't about socialism. It's about the Americans demanding a bigger part of the pie from their imperialist overlords. This is just a compromise between the capital and the workers in the imperial core. And it's not at all surprising either. Americans are already provided much more than their counterparts in the developing world. - -The Marxist antivenom for this western chauvinist poison is organization that is internationalist in scope/aim, like many movements in the Global south (such as the Bolivarian revolution). Workers in the imperial core must continue to refuse these new deals, these bribes to preserve the US empire / western colonialism, keep supporting actually existing socialist movements, advocate for the [defeat of the US empire](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/26.htm), and begin to build armed organization that can eventually challenge their police states. diff --git a/toki_pona_guide.md b/toki_pona_guide.md deleted file mode 100644 index e1fc768..0000000 --- a/toki_pona_guide.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,23 +0,0 @@ -# toki pona guide - -## Learning the language - -- [jan Lentan's lessons](https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/). By far the best guide for learning the language. -- [jan Misali's 12 days of toki pona](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4L-dvvng4Zc). Not as good as jan Lentan's lessons, but serves as a speedy introduction to the vocab. - -## Vocabulary - -- Download a client for the spaced-repetition software, [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/). - - [AnkiDroid for Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki) -- [Shared Deck of all the current popular words](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1075479788) (~137 words as of 2022, known as _pu + nimi ku suli_). -- [Shared Deck of all the phrases from jan Lentan's lessons.](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/204928497) -- You can find other shared decks [here](https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/toki%20pona). - -## Listening / Fluency - -- [Youtube channel - ma pi toki pona](https://youtube.com/channel/UCQTppoxw6lJTtvr9ZRIjmgg) . Has lots of fluent speakers having conversations about different topics. - -## Other resources - -- [ku - the toki pona dictionary](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978292367/) -- [pu - toki pona: the language of good (first book)](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978292308) diff --git a/why_torrents_are_better.md b/why_torrents_are_better.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9ebabaa..0000000 --- a/why_torrents_are_better.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,44 +0,0 @@ -# Why Torrents are better than streaming servers as a self hosted solution. - -Instead of using plex or emby, consider using a dedicated torrent server, and torrent clients elsewhere. - -## Quality - -- Streaming servers can **never** have the same quality as local music / video players. - - Video streaming servers like plex or emby, often have to transcode / convert the video to lower-quality formats. Native video players can handle `x265`. - - Audio streaming servers often can't handle high quality formats like `flac`, whereas local media players can handle these easily. - -## Amount of Content - -- The content on streaming services are limited to what you _specifically_ have downloaded. This can never match the hundreds of thousands of torrents being shared by people across the globe. Search sites like [Torrents.csv](https://torrents-csv.ml/) have often faster searching than self-hosted solutions (and you can self host the searching if you wish). -- Which is better, having a collection of _my music_, or having a collection of _all music_? - -## Choice of media player - -- With torrents, I can use **any media player I want**. Most OSs make this as simple as a double-click to play media. VLC / MPV can natively play high quality video and audio, x265, flac, opus, etc. -- With streamers, I'm forced either to use a web client, or their own (often proprietary, sometimes paid) app. I prefer open-source standards like VLC. - -## Availability / Reliability - -- Torrents have effectively solved the data distribution problem: content is shared in a web of connections, and a torrent with more than one seeder is already more resilient than the strongest streaming server. - - Why should there be 10,000 separate streaming services, not helping each other host or share the data, when torrents have made it so 10,000 clients **are helping each other share the data**? -- Services like plex don't offer this shared hosting. -- Music / content is often removed from services like youtube frequently. Torrents can never be removed. -- People often goto video streaming sites, and these are taken down rapidly. Many torrents have been reliably shared for 10+ years. -- What about hardware failure? If your streaming servers hard drive goes down, you lost everything. With torrents, any with more than one seeder is safe. - -## Ease of use - -- Streaming servers require you to set up a web server, often requiring you to learn nginx / apache, as well as follow various setup processes for the services themselves. This is understandable for some tech-oriented people, but what about a non-techie, who just likes music / movies? Why should they be required to learn these tools? - - Content should be available **for all**, regardless of technical skill, or ability. -- Downloading a torrent, and enjoying the media, involves: - - Clicking a download magnet link. Wait for it to finish. - - Open it. - -## Caching / Saving / Streaming - -- Many of us don't have data, or are often in areas where data is spotty. - - Its often a _feature_ of services like plex to be able to save media locally, to avoid this problem. This is default with torrents. -- Torrent clients like qbittorrent and libretorrent for android let you _download files in sequential order_, IE stream, at the click of a button. -- Services like [Torrents.csv](https://torrents-csv.ml) let you search for files within torrents, so you can easily download / stream individual songs. -- Its your choice where things are downloaded to. You can have a desktop or server with a highly available torrent client, and/or a smartphone torrent client.