Throughout history, elements of #socialism, such as communal ownership of land and socialized organization of production, have been successfully practiced in village communities and medieval cities. Failures in realizing #communism were often due to external factors like government intervention and the challenges of combining agricultural and industrial societies. Despite these challenges, history shows humanity's ongoing endeavor to achieve some form of #communist organization.
Today in Labor History April 1, 1976: Surrealist artist, Max Ernst, died. In addition to his artwork, he was an anti-Fascist, who was literally chased out of France by the Gestapo. He opposed Stalin’s Moscow trials. And much of his art had anti-Fascist and anti-Stalinist themes. He produced his painting “Fireside Angel” (or “Angel of the Hearth and Home”) after the Spanish Republicans were defeated by the Fascists. Ernst said, “Now this was naturally an ironic title for a sort of ungainly beast that tramples down and destroys everything in its path. It was the impression I had at the time of what was likely to happen in the world, and I was right.”
Today in Labor History April 1, 1929: Textile workers struck at the Loray Mill, in Gastonia, N.C. Textile mills started moving from New England, to the South, in the 1890s, to avoid the unions. This escalated after the 1909 Shirtwaist strike (which preceded the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire), the IWW-led Lawrence (1912) and (1913) Patterson strikes, which were led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood and Carlo Tresca. The Gastonia strike was violent and bloody. Dozens of strikers were imprisoned. A pregnant white woman, Ella Mae Wiggins, wrote and performed songs during the strike. She also lived with and organized African American workers, one of the worst crimes a poor white woman could commit in the South. The strike ended soon after goons murdered her. Woody Guthrie called Wiggins the pioneer of the protest ballad and one of the great folk song writers.
Wiley Cash wrote a wonderful novel about Ella Mae Wiggins and the Gastonia strike, “The Last Ballad.” Jess Walter wrote a really great novel about the Spokane free speech fight, featuring Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, called “The Cold Millions.” Other novels about the Gastonia strike include Sherwood Anderson’s, “Beyond Desire,” and Mary Heaton Vorse’s, “Strike!”
Today in Labor History March 30, 1930: Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers demonstrated in thirty cities. 35,000 marched in New York City and were violently assaulted by the police. At the time, there was virtually no formal aid available for the unemployed or poor. The ruling elite feared that workers would choose the dole over work if given the choice. So, they opposed unemployment insurance. Even the AFL opposed unemployment insurance because it saw itself as the representative of skilled workers only. It didn’t care about unskilled factory workers. The demonstrations were organized by the Communist Party, with the goal of overthrowing capitalism.
Labeling #communism as a disease and promoting hate against its proponents echoes the same dangerous rhetoric used by the Nazis to vilify their political opponents. Such language not only demonizes an entire ideology but also contributes to a climate of intolerance and division. Instead of resorting to hateful language, we should engage in constructive dialogue and seek common ground to address the root causes of social and economic injustice.
The Nazis frequently used dehumanizing language and derogatory terms to refer to #communism and #communists. They portrayed communism as an evil force to be eradicated, and this dehumanization of communists played a significant role in the Nazi regime's persecution of political opponents, including communists, during their rule in Germany. This person is propagating Nazi rhetoric.
@dev0ur
There's plenty to debate about regarding #communism. The historical implementations of authoritarian communism resulting in corruption and violence don't invalidate the principles of libertarian communism, which emphasize voluntary cooperation and decentralization. There's a difference between authoritarian regimes and libertarian socialist principles that you're refusing to understand. Dismissing all forms of communism as inherently harmful without examining them is completely ignorant
Today in Labor History March 29, 1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. They were executed at Sing Sing in 1953. The Rosenberg’s sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol (adopted by Abel Meeropol, the composer of “Strange Fruit,”), maintained their parents’ innocence. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, decoded Soviet cables showed that their father had, in fact, collaborated, but that their mother was innocent. They continued to fight for the mother’s pardon, but Obama refused to grant it. The Rosenberg’s sons were among the last students to attend the anarchist Modern School, in Lakewood, New Jersey, before it finally shut its doors in 1958.
Wealth inequality is a result of the private ownership of the means of production, and a redistribution of resources is necessary to ensure equitable access and create genuine equality among all members of society. In a truly just society, resources would be collectively owned and managed democratically, ensuring that everyone's needs are met and no one is left behind due to economic disparities. #communism#communist#capitalism#capitalist#socialism#socialist#democracy
I feel like to a certain extent pacifism has a privelege problem. A lot of people fail to understand that violence being framed as a choice is ignoring reality for those of us who face discrimination or have lived at the bottom of society, of which I have both. Everyone in society is either having violence constantly inflicted upon them, participating in the systems that push that violence down upon others, or a mix of both.
There is no peace in our current society. Society as a whole, as it exists today, is violence, and being able to ignore that reality is privelege. For pacifism to attain any viability requires a fundamental change in society. Otherwise all it will mean is "peaceful violence", meaningless to those of us subject to it, and a denial of reality by those who inflict it.
#Lefebvre#Marxism#Cities#Urbanism#Communism#Ecology#Environmentalism: "Describing Lefebvre as an ‘ecological thinker’, however anachronistic it may seem, is not absurd in the eyes of his daughter, quite the contrary. She reports that he was ‘very good friends’ with Bernard Charbonneau (1910-96), a precursor of radical ecology and author of the book Le Jardin de Babylone, published in 1969 and reissued by the post-Situationist publisher L’Encyclopédie des Nuisances in 2002. ‘They saw each other in the Pyrenees, where they lived 15 km apart. Charbonneau was a secondary school teacher and lived in a house with no electricity or any modern comforts,’ recalls Armelle Lefebvre, who sees in her father’s legacy the seeds of an ‘ecosocialism’.
Kristin Ross maintains that Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the Marxist notion of ‘appropriation’ helps her to understand the strength of contemporary territorial struggles, ‘in particular this idea of reclaiming lived space and lived time’. ‘Lefebvre believed that individuals and groups could not constitute themselves as political subjects without generating a space – both physical and social – that they themselves appropriate, manage and “produce”,’ she explains. ‘This is a profoundly ecological idea, and one that is certainly at the heart of territorial movements and struggles for land restitution such as Notre-Dame-des-Landes, StopCopCity in Atlanta, Standing Rock and, of course, Earth Uprisings. Appropriation implies “use” rather than ownership.’
She adds that ‘Lefebvre wrote in a very visionary way in the 1970s about how struggles against land grabbing invariably created alliances between different kinds of people, who sometimes came together despite great ideological and identity differences – that was a process that the people of the ZAD experienced, lived and described as “composition”.’ Lefebvre’s work, long obscured in France, still deserves our full attention." https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/henri-lefebvre-dogmatism-in-reverse?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_blog
The struggle against #capitalism doesn't end after one big #strike or #protest. Working-class liberation is an ongoing pursuit that won't end until every last #worker in the entire world is free from exploitation, inequality, and oppression, and it won't end a second before. #communism
Today in Labor History March 25, 1931: The authorities arrested the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and charged them with rape. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American youths, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused of raping two white women. A lynch mob tried to murder them before they had even been indicted. All-white juries convicted each of them. Several judges gave death sentences, a common practice in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women. The Communist Party and the NAACP fought to get the cases appealed and retried. Finally, after numerous retrials and years in harsh prisons, four of the Scottsboro Boys were acquitted and released. The other five were got sentences ranging from 75 years to death. All were released or escaped by 1946. Poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote it in his work Scottsboro Limited. And Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son was influenced by the case.
Peter Kropotkin's "Letter to Lenin" criticized Lenin's authoritarianism and argued for decentralized, libertarian #socialism based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation among #workers and communities. It urged Lenin to reconsider his centralizing policies in favor of more grassroots, autonomous organization. #communism#communist
Today in Labor History March 23, 1918: 101 IWW members went on trial in Chicago for opposing World War I and for violating the Espionage Act. In September, 1917, 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiring to subvert the draft and encourage desertion. Their trial lasted five months, the longest criminal trial in American history up to that time. The jury found them all guilty. The judge sentenced Big Bill Haywood and 14 others to 20 years in prison. 33 others were given 10 years each. They were also fined a total of $2,500,000. The trial virtually destroyed the IWW. Haywood jumped bail and fled to the USSR, where he remained until his death 10 years later.
The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.
Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”
Most modern societies are of a size well beyond the individual family and tribe loyality and as such, average loyality - and thus willingness to sacrifice ones own needs - for the greater good
It was unable to incite sufficient #altruistic potential so the #egoistic potential ultimatively won out.
"Why should I work harder when there is not a sufficient reward for it"? My society isnt the worst, but it also isnt the best and I dont feel a particular high loyality to it". It also wont make much of a difference because I am just a very small cog in a very large machine."
One might argue, that the highest potential can be reached when both altruistic and egoistic motivations combined.
As an non-terminable public servant, my egoistic motivation suggests that I should call in sick even when only mildly impaired. But my altruistic appreciation of the wellfare of my colleagues👇
People are bound to criticize #communism, but at the very least if they do it would be beneficial to everyone if they understood the difference between authoritarian and libertarian interpretations of communism. It would make for a lousy debate if someone's debating against a Libertarian #Communist while using arguments against Marxism-Leninism, an event that happens all too often.
> "Legend has it that #emacs intermittently flashes the word #COMMUNISM across the screen as a subliminal "fuck you" to the man. I think its working."
@rml "git grep" wont work as-is because it is encoded in the source code with ROT-13, so you would have to grep for the ROT-13 encoded string for "COMMUNISM" in order to find it. They aren't stupid enough to leave a subliminal clue like that as plain text right there in the source code.
Today in Labor History March 18, 1871: The Paris Commune began on this date. It started with resistance to occupying German troops and the power of the bourgeoisie. They governed from a feminist and anarcho-communist perspective, abolishing rent and child labor, and giving workers the right to take over workplaces abandoned by the owners. The revolutionaries took control of Paris and held on to it for two months, until it was brutally suppressed. During Semaine Sanglante, the nationalist forces slaughtered 15,000-20,000 Communards. Hundreds more were tried and executed or deported.
Happy St.Patrick's Day!
Just a quick reminder for some of the followers of one of the three Abrahamic faiths who seem to have forgotten their responsibilities:
"I am a Christian, that obliges me to be a communist." -George Bernard Shaw
Remember,
"They're your rules, either follow them or admit you've abandoned the faith." - Marcus Brigstocke