marxism

How to Be a Good Communist

Written/Published: July 1939

Source: Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, Volume I

First Published: Foreign Languages Press

I'm reading this for the first time, btw, based on something I heard online. Someone also recommended it to me and said Liu Shaoqi was underrated.

Definitely giving this a go.

Good stuff.

Love Henry Winston.

You can read the book for yourself here.

Check it out. I highly recommend this book.

Oh yeah, and there's a sequel to it as well. Maybe I'll do a book club on both later on.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1795146

Video is about 50 minutes long.

You can listen to it while you're doing other things.

Glad they touched on the AFL-CIO and the recent developments in the labor movement, especially vis a vis the South.

You can purchase the book (from the original publisher rather than Amazon, hopefully, if you want) over here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-5414-6

Full title is:

Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance by Roland Boer

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the video (to help out with this Marxist-Leninist YouTube channel, which is very underrated).

Thank you!

Jose Maria Canlas Sison (born February 8, 1939), also known by his nickname Joma, was a Filipino writer and activist who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and added elements of Maoism to its philosophy — which would be known as national democracy. He applied the theory of Marxism–Leninism-Maoism on Philippine history and current circumstances.

Born of a landed family in Cabugao, Ilocos Sur, Philippines, on February 8, 1939. He finished with honors the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in the University of the Philippines in 1959 and took masteral studies in comparative literature in 1959-61. He taught English grammar and literature in the University of the Philippines in 1959-61. He became press relations officer of the Araneta University in 1962-63 and professorial lecturer in political science in the Lyceum of the Philippines, 1964-67. He became an associate professor in political science in the Center of Asian Studies of the University of the Philippines in 1986-87. He was research consultant on development and socialization in the University of Utrecht, 1987-89.

Fearless of the Cold War and the Anti-Subversion Law of 1957 which penalized with death political dissent and revolutionary activity, Prof. Sison initiated Marxist study circles and the formation of mass organizations of youth, workers and peasants in order to revive the national democratic movement against US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism in the Philippines in the 1960s. He started as a student political activist in the University of the Philippines, where he formed study circles in Marxism and the Philippine revolution from 1958 onwards. He was the founding chairman of the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines, 1959-62. He used this as a base for forming similar organizations in other universities and promoting student mass protests.

He joined the old merger party of the Communist and Socialist parties and became a member of its Central Executive Committee, 1962-67. He edited the Progressive Review, a Marxist journal of ideas and opinions on Philippine society, economy, politics, culture and foreign policy, from 1963 to 1968. He was in charge of research and education in the legal Workers’ Party (Lapiang Manggagawa) and carried out study courses among the leaders and activists of the trade union, peasant and youth movements from 1962 onwards. He was founding chairman of Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth) in 1964. He became general secretary and then vice chairman of Socialist Party of the Philippines (formerly Worker’s Party) in 1965. He promoted the national united front and became general secretary of the anti-imperialist united front, Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism in 1966-68.

Prof. Sison led the First Great Rectification Movement among the Filipino communists from 1966 to 1968 in order to criticize, repudiate and rectify the major ideological, political and organizational errors and weaknesses of the leadership of the old communist party from 1930 onwards and thereby lay the basis for the reestablishment of the communist party under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. He advocated the general line of new democratic revolution under working class leadership through protracted people’s war and with socialist perspective. He became the founding Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which was reestablished on December 26, 1968.

He was chairman of the CPP Military Commission that founded the New People’s Army on March 29, 1969. In representation of the CPP, he co-founded the National Democratic Front of the Philippines on April 24, 1973 as an undergound united front organization against the Marcos fascist dictatorship. He was responsible for the mobile office of the central leadership and marched with the revolutionary cadres, Red fighters and masses in various regions of the Philippines. He shared the fighting tasks, the difficulties, the risks and the victories of the armed revolution during its foundational period. He was captured by the Marcos fascist dictatorship on November 10, 1977, subjected to various forms of torture (including punching, water cure, in shackles and fetters for more nearly two years and solitary confinement for than five years) and detained until the fall of Marcos in February 1986.

Philippine authorities were angered by the lectures of Prof. Sison, canceled his passport and subjected him to false charge of subversion and threats of arbitrary arrest and torture. He applied for political asylum in The Netherlands in 1988. As a result of lobbying by the US and Philippine governments, he has been blacklisted as a Terrorist by the Dutch government and then by the Council of European Union since 2002. He was released on September 13, 2007 due to lack of evidence and due to worldwide public outrage over the false charge. . The US, Philippine and Dutch governments continue to oppress him with threats of prosecution and imprisonment with the use of false charges in a brazen bid to pressure the NDFP to capitulate to the Philippine government.

On December 16 2022, the Communist Party of the Philippines, alongside its news organ Ang Bayan, announced the death of Sison after having been confined in a hospital in Utrecht, Netherlands, for two weeks. NDFP executive Luis Jalandoni disclosed that Sison died due to heart failure, after almost three weeks of hospital treatment, although he did not provide more details about Sison's death.

• Interview with Com. Jose Maria Sison

• Communist Party of the Philippines–New People's Army

• Comrade Joma sings My Funny Valentine :anti-valentine-action:

• Jose Maria Sison (“Amado Guerrero”, “Armando Liwanag”) Writings

• Jose Maria Sison site

• CPP official site

hello everyone - happy Black history month 🌌 here's a massive archive list of Black and Marxist writing and film (with downloads!) to check out xoxo

• @777

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1735872

That's just the title; the video has more to do with other stuff than just Taylor Swift LMAO

But yeah, enjoy, comrades.

You can read this masterpiece here.

People swear by this work by Liu Shaoqi and I have yet to read it myself, but plan to start soon.

How to effectively counter imperialist lies on Xinjiang on the internet: A Guide

Any tactical changes or improvements to be made?

Quote from Radhika Desai in a lecture on YouTube (timestamped link)

Already posted the lecture, but I want to highlight one thing that I have been thinking about since watching.

Radhika argues that what she calls Western Marxism has placed all the emphasis on class (read: domestic exploitation of labor) at the expense of imperialism (international exploitation).

This rings true for me since much of what I have read by contemporary, firmly Western Marxists, has centered around the value production and exploitation only within the workplace, or on a national scale, but rarely on an international scale. Hence the undying arguments over the "transformation problem" (which I agree with Radhika is Ricardo's problem, not Marx's) and other such topics.

But when looking at the actual history of the major socialist revolutions in China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. etc. the biggest commonality between these countries is precisely that their revolutions were anti-imperialist and not actually the result of a dialectical implosion of commodity production, or late-stage capitalism, or whatever you'd like to call it.

Western Marxists do not think about imperialism because they live in countries which benefit from imperialism. If you live in a non-imperial core country, the primary source of your exploitation is imperialism, with exploitation by your employer being only secondary and smaller. Thus imperialism becomes the object of revolutionary struggle. It might not even have a distinctly proletarian character since even the business owners are being exploited hard by imperialism.

I want to focus even more on the Marxist study of imperialism and the special attention that non-Western revolutionaries have given to it. If anyone has good things to read, I'd appreciate suggestions!

ofc they got infiltrated by the feds, imagine my surprise.

I have some probably dumb questions to ask about marxism and wasn't sure where to go. Is there like a ask marxists or debate marxists forum? Anyway

What and how many branches of marxism want state socialism during the socialist transition period before Communism? I was under the impression that all (or most) leninists wanted state socialism during this period. I have since been told that Trotskyists don't want this. Is this correct if so what do they want instead? How does this all relate to vanguardism?

Furthermore how does marxism define a state? Is this different from how other groups define statehood?

I still don't fully grasp the difference between marxists and anarchists. I thought the difference was mainly that anarchists don't want a state, and encourage mutual aid. Now that I hear not all marxists want a state I am pretty confused.

Title: Lenin holding the Soviet flag while walking through a field of grain, in the style of van gogh

cross-posted from an old post: https://hexbear.net/post/218850

I read Capital, and the whole thing just went over my head. I really couldn't understand what he was getting at. Could any comrades help explain the LTV? Thanks!

worth the short read

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in the British colony of Trinidad on January 4, 1901. James was a bright youth who absorbed literature, history, music, sports, and art-the foundational texts of Western civilization. He attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, but chafed at the rigid disciplinarianism of the educational British system. Yet he was deeply interested in and influenced by the game of cricket introduced by the British and became a local cricket reporter before turning to fiction. James wrote several early works of fiction in Trinidad before sailing for England in 1932 at the age of 31. While in England, James spent a great deal of time focusing his writing on issues relevant to the expatriate West Indian community. He published The Case for West Indian Self-Government in 1933.

James was increasingly exposed to social issues and turned to the writings of many Communist thinkers in this period. He became a major Trotskyist thinker as well as an ardent critic of fascism. He produced a play, Toussaint L’Ouverture, with Paul Robeson in the lead role which reflected his political leanings. James was becoming more interested in revolution and social liberation as well as questions of race. He published his landmark work, The Black Jacobins, in 1938, offering a Trotskyist analysis of the 1791 slave revolution in Haiti. James and his fellow Trotskyites remained opposed to Stalinism and offered virulent critiques of the system throughout the 1930s.

C.L.R. James arrived in the United States in 1938 and remained for the next twenty years. While in the U.S., he began to have doubts about the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union and argued for a liberation of Marxism through a bottom-up emphasis. He also studied Whitman and Melville in this period. James returned to England in 1953 and five years later went back to his native Trinidad where he became involved in politics and the decolonization movement. James published Beyond a Boundary in 1963, a memoir and social commentary, that explored the place of cricket in West Indian and British society and its role in empire, family, masculinity, race, class, national culture, colonization, and decolonization. The work is widely viewed by critics as one of the best sports books ever written.

After 1960 James traveled widely throughout Africa and the Caribbean and was interested in the role of culture across boundaries. As a West Indian deeply-infused with Western culture, he sought to carve out a space of independence while still maintaining his love for what he saw as a series of cross-national ideals. He taught at the University of the District of Columbia starting in 1968 and wrote a series of works on culture, politics, radicalism, and revolution. James passed away on May 19, 1989 in London, England, on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was survived by his widow Selma.

"When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity."

• CLR James

The Black Jacobins

C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the 20th Century

C.L.R. James Archive

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Thomas Sankara, political leader of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, was born on December 21, 1949 in Yako, a northern town in the Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso) of French West Africa. He was the son of a Mossi mother and a Peul father, and personified the diversity of the Burkinabè people of the area. In his adolescence, Sankara witnessed the country’s independence from France in 1960 and the repressive and volatile nature of the regimes that ruled throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

From 1970 to 1973, Sankara attended the military academy of Antsirabe in Madagascar where he trained to be an army officer. In 1974, as a young lieutenant in the Upper Volta army, he fought in a border war with Mali and returned home a hero. Sankara then studied in France and later in Morocco, where he met Blaise Compaoré and other civilian students from Upper Volta who later organized leftist organizations in the country. While commanding the Commando Training Center in the city of Pô in 1976, Thomas Sankara grew in popularity by urging his soldiers to help civilians with their work tasks. He additionally played guitar at community gatherings with a local band, Pô Missiles.

Throughout the 1970s, Sankara increasingly adopted leftist politics. He organized the Communist Officers Group in the army and attended meetings of various leftist parties, unions, and student groups, usually in civilian clothes.

In 1981, Sankara briefly served as the Secretary of State for Information under the newly formed Military Committee for Reform and Military Progress (CMRPN). This was a group of officers who had recently seized power. In April 1982, he resigned his post and denounced the CMRPM. When another military coup placed the Council for the People’s Safety in power, Sankara was subsequently appointed prime minister in 1983 but was quickly dismissed and placed under house arrest, causing a popular uprising.

On August 4, 1983, Blaise Compaoré orchestrated the “August Revolution,” or a coup d’état against the Council for the People’s Safety. The new regime which called itself the National Council for the Revolution (CNR) made 34-year-old Thomas Sankara president. As president, Sankara sought to end corruption, promote reforestation, avert famine, support women’s rights, develop rural areas, and prioritize education and healthcare. He renamed the country ‘Burkina Faso,’ meaning, “the republic of honorable people.”

On October 15, 1987, Thomas Sankara was killed with twelve other officials in a coup d’état instigated by Blaise Compaoré, his former political ally. He was 37 at the time of his death.

THOMAS SANKARA.net

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Forest and Factory

The Science and the Fiction of Communism

A long but interesting essay that is in part a critique of Soren Mau, about science fiction and utopia, outline of what communist global organization could be, and a fictional account of the communist construction of a DC motor.

Yes, it starts with a Bordiga quote, no it isn't left Com communizer stuff.

What follows is an unusually long and math-heavy essay compared to other writing on RedSails; not coincidentally, it’s also the first time we’ve had to render math by implementing LATEX. [1] In our opinion the effort is worth it — the transformation problem has dogged Marxism for long enough, and we do not want our readers to be caught by surprise when neoclassical economists (or worse, other Marxists) throw it in their faces.

The political stakes are straightforward: Marxism ceases to be Marxism when it bails on the labor theory of value. Intellectually, Wright’s research opens the door to further investigations of the fault line between capitalist and natural necessity running through economic thought and modeling. [2] [3] It is our hope that further work in this direction will be able to expose more and more concrete ways in which capitalist social arrangements, despite their seeming necessity, are ultimately irrational and superable. — N. F.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, was born in Gori, Georgia on 21st December, 1879. was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953).

The son of a humble Georgian shoemaker, at the age of fifteen Stalin entered the Orthodox seminary in Tbilisi on a scholarship, where he proved to be a brilliant student, although he was expelled when he was caught distributing propaganda for the Georgian Socialist Party, which he had joined in 1898.

While studying at the seminary he joined a secret organization called Messame Dassy (the Third Group). Members were supporters of Georgian independence from Russia. Some were also socialist revolutionaries and it was through the people he met in this organization that Stalin first came into contact with the ideas of Karl Marx.

Soon after leaving the seminary he began reading Iskra (the Spark), the newspaper of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). It was the first underground Marxist paper to be distributed in Russia. It was printed in several European cities and then smuggled into Russia by a network of SDLP agents. The editorial board included Lenin and Trotsky

In 1901 Stalin joined the Social Democratic Labour Party and whereas most of the leaders were living in exile, he stayed in Russia where he helped to organize industrial resistance to Tsarism. he would end up being arrested and exiled to Siberia for coordinating a Strike at the large Rothschild plant at Batum.

At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party held in London in 1903, there was a dispute between Lenin and Julius Martov over the future of the SDLP. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed believing it was better to have a large party of activists.

As Lenin and Plekhanov won most of the votes, their group became known as the Bolsheviks (after bolshinstvo, the Russian word for majority), whereas Martov's group were dubbed Mensheviks (after menshinstvo, meaning minority). Stalin who was still in prison in Siberia, decided he favoured the Bolsheviks in this dispute. He escaped on 5th January 1904. Lenin was impressed with Stalin's achievements in the Caucasus and in December 1905, he was invited to meet him in Finland.

Stalin would Settled in Baku to expand the influence of bolsheviks in the Caucasus, Joseph Stalin worked closely with his friends in developing the political consciousness of the workers in the region. The workers in the oil fields belonged to a union under the influence of the Bolsheviks, and Stalin was one of the Union's delegates

He returned to St. Petersburg in February 1912, he became editor of Pravda. Lenin, who described him as my "wonderful Georgian" arranged for him to join the Party's Central Committee, he was Exiled to Siberia on 1913. he would return to St Petersburg in 1917 with the overthrow of the Tzar and the pardon to all political prisoners by Prince Lvov. He would join the then Petrograd Soviet

At this time, Stalin, like most Bolsheviks, took the view that the Russian people were not ready for a socialist revolution. He therefore called for conditional support of the Provisional Government. He also urged policies that would tempt the Mensheviks into forming an alliance. However, he disagreed with Molotov, who was calling for the immediate overthrow of Prince Lvov.

When Lenin returned to Russia on 3rd April, 1917, he announced what became known as the April Theses. Lenin attacked Bolsheviks for supporting the Provisional Government. Instead, he argued, revolutionaries should be telling the people of Russia that they should take over the control of the country. Lenin ended his speech by telling the assembled crowd that they must "fight for the social revolution, fight to the end, till the complete victory of the proletariat".

On 26th October, 1917, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets met and handed over power to the Soviet Council of People's Commissars. Lenin was elected chairman and Joseph Stalin (Nationalities), As a Georgian and a member of a minority group who had written about the problems of non-Russian peoples living under the Tsar, Stalin was seen as the obvious choice for the post as Minister of Nationalities. Nearly half of the population of the Empire was made up of non-russians. To show his good faith, Stalin appointed several assistants from the various nationalities within Russia.

At the Tenth Party Congress in April 1922, Lenin proposed a resolution that would ban all factions within the party. Stalin was appointed as General Secretary and was now given the task of dealing with the "factions and cliques" in the Communist Party

Following Lenin's death in 1924, There was a big power struggle in the party between 3 main factions. The Left opposition (trotsky), the Centre (Stalin) and the Right opposition (Bukharin).

Trotsky had argued in 1917 that the Bolshevik Revolution was doomed to failure unless successful revolutions also took place in other countries such as Germany and France. In 1924 Stalin began talking about the possibility of completing the "building of socialism in a single country". Nikolay Bukharin joined the attacks on Trotsky asserted that Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" was anti-Leninist. in 1925 Trotsky was removed from the goverment and 2 years later from the Party and exiled for Factionalism.

During the Collectivation of Land Stalin Blame the policies of Bukharin for the failure of the 1927 harvest. By this time kulaks made up 40% of the peasants in some regions, He also advocated the setting up of collective farms. By 1935, 94 per cent of crops were being produced by peasants working on collective farms.

With no start-up capital, little international trade and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization from the profits made by state-owned factories and enterprises, trade, banks and transportation.

In 1926-1927, about one billion rubles were invested in industry; three years later, about 5 billion rubles could already be invested in it. The 1930s saw the production, for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, of a wide range of new products, including motorcycles, watches and cameras, as well as the machines and tools needed to produce these and other goods.

To avoid the isolation of the Soviet Republic, the USSR entered the League of Nations (1934), and had a rapprochement with Great Britain and France.

Stalin had always opposed fascism and Hitler, on August 15, 1939 he tried to make a pact with Britain and France to attack Nazi Germany. Stalin proposed to send 1 million soldiers to fight Hitler, but the capitalist countries refused. On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow.

After the outbreak of World War II, however, and considering that the fall of England was imminent, Hitler ordered an attack on the Soviet Union. The Red Army could not contain the main German attacks at the beginning of the Barbarossa Plan, since more than 70% of the German military industry was concentrated on the eastern front for the invasion of the USSR.

When Germany reached Moscow, Stalin did not flee and even made in November a speech commemorating the victory of Soviet power, soon began to take control of the situation and Stalin was appointed Supreme Commander in Chief of the Red Army. Unlike the German forces and Hitler's hierarchy, the Soviet military autonomy took its generals into democratic decision-making and had some of its best generals, such as Zhukov and Vatutin, brought in from the frontier, also allowing the dispatch from the eastern fronts of thousands of Siberian troops already trained in combat with the Japanese.

On the night of Sunday, March 1, he was found lying on the floor, dressed in the clothes he had worn the night before and barely able to speak. Some doctors ruled that Stalin had suffered a stroke and had collapsed. His death just like Lenin's would end up in a 3-way Power struggle between Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev

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