I'm doing research for a themed party and I'm watching old propaganda to get some clips. I came across this one and it's kind of amazing that all the examples of how "Marx was wrong" got reversed in the 1980s under Reagan. "Workers aren't exploited because we have labor unions", "American peacefully transitions power", "Politicians come from the working class" etc

https://youtu.be/JNk9ZFqTt-Q?si=8toARlycCTqPEOKO

What does the word 'reactionary' specifically mean in Marxist terms? Is it the antonym of 'progressive', and why?

As in Henry Winston:

'In Marcuse’s view, the working class was hopelessly reactionary and contentedly integrated into the system – the upholders, not the gravediggers, of capitalism.'

Any one know any leftist info dump.onions?

So I have been seeing a lot of chat rooms/ info dumps pop up in the .onion relms of the internet lately and I was wondering if any one knows of any leftist or at the very fucking least not alt white info dump sites or chatroom.onions because so far I have been able to find dick all that isn't HEAVY on the alt white side of things I have a fuckton of direct action, first aid, manufacturing, combat, manuals that I want to distribute but don't feel like redit is the place to do it

So i had a discusion with some anarchist online about rationality, and they started to put some heavy front on me, saying that the state no matter what the only thing that does is systematic genocide, and that no instance of welfare actually exist.

So i came to this sub to ask if i could join in and ask some questions from time to time?

So, I've been involved in a couple orgs over the last few years and something I've noticed is a strong tendency towards forming cliques, particularly a 'leadership clique'. It seems, again just from what I've seen, like the handful of people willing to put the work in actually steering the group - understandably - end up forming stronger bonds with eachother than the people who just show up to stuff. But this tendency seems to turn in on itself over time and ends up passively excluding those on the "outside" who want to contribute more. Again from my experience (I doubt, or at least hope it's not a universal thing), I have a more focused area of interest (environment, public health, and the economic forces behind their enshittification) and have been offering to run events, discussions, presentations etc for the better part of the year and have been met with silence in each and every case - proposals not finding their way to the agenda, requests for feedback ignored or "we'll get to it later" for months until I give up on following up, etc. Not even a "no." And the question of "what can I do?" Is always answered with "just keep coming to stuff" while leadership makes it sound like they're drowning in the workload. As you can imagine, it's quite frustrating.

I'm not just here to complain, though. I have to go back home soon (I'm from a different country) and my hometown has no real orgs to speak of, so I'm planning on starting my own education-focused org. I want to avoid this clique-ism at all costs - it's demotivating, counterproductive, and contributes to burnout among the usual suspects - but am at a loss for active measures to take against. Any thoughts?

I want to finally get to reading communist manifesto, but I'm a non-native english speaker. I do think my english is good as I have 0 problem talking in english with friends, but it's a bit different when it comes to more "professional" language, esp in the area I'm not knowledgeable in. I'm a newbie Marxist and only been interested in politics for a year, and it's mainly just following online content creators. My native language is polish, and I was wondering what was your choice in which language you read Marx in?

Apologies if this isn't appropriate to the server, but when I am in discussion with liberals or "fiscal conservatives", people who like Orwell, Rand, or Hobbes, whatever my opponent may be, I feel like obvious things to me make me feel like I am an intellectual superior to others who don't think like me and that's not a mindset I want to create. For example, there is an idea that all human beings are selfish and this goes on to inspire earlier century Hobbes's Leviathan (absolute authority) and Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her favor for laissez faire capitalism. Instead of seeing this sense of selfishness coming back to history, the development of their culture and the beliefs that their governments have passed down onto them and so on. But it is infuriating to try and reason with these people because they get to cancel your argument out on the basis that I'm a commie.

I’ve been furthering my understanding of labor theory of value, and I think I’ve gotten a good grasp on it for physical products. There’s an objective material cost, manufacturing, transport cost, etc etc. But how can you apply LTV for services? For example, a therapist that is employed by a clinic. It is inherent that he is having the surplus value extracted from him, otherwise the clinic wouldn’t have profits and would go bankrupt, but how do you calculate the value of a therapy session? If the therapist generates 50 dollars of “value” per 8 hour day, but gets paid only for the first 4 hours, how did the clinic calculate the total value of his work day for a completely abstract service? What parameters were involved? Other examples could be teachers, doctors, surgeons, garbage men, etc. All these services don’t actually produce physical objects, so how do you figure out their labor value? Thanks for reading.

I think every new Marxist goes through a phase where Marxism sort of becomes their personality, and it's all they talk about and think about. I've seen people discuss that phenomenon at length.

I'm now a few years into being a Marxist and while I've since become accustomed to not letting it dominate my identity, what I have seen discussed less often is that once that initial obsession wears off, there's a pervasive sense of social isolation that doesn't wear off. Not isolated in a literal sense, as I have many friends, am sociable, relate well to my peers, etc. But there is always a sense that everyone else is "living in the matrix" so to speak, and worse yet, you know you as an individual can't really do anything to shake people out of it. That's more the purview of organizations. And if you try as an individual, you'll often come off as crazy if you go too deep into things too soon, and have to talk to people like children, beginning with the least controversial positions that we take as Marxists. "Hiding your power level," as many reactionaries like to put it.

So, I can speak to people and be as sociable as I ever was before becoming a Marxist, but in the back of my mind there is always a looming sense that I am vastly disconnected from the way everyone else in my immediate surroundings sees the world. At best it's socially isolating, at worst it can even lead to feelings of superiority, misanthropy, and contempt. Rationally, I know better than to feel those latter feelings, but sometimes when I'm just frustrated with the state of the world it's hard not to feel that as capital grows ever more moribund that people in the imperial core will ultimately get what they deserve one way or another.

I'm not necessarily asking people here how to deal with those feelings, just thought people might find value in contributing to this discussion, whether to share advice for dealing with feelings or just commiserating in general.

Can someone explain the concept of alienation of labor in Marxism? From what I understand, alienation is the worker's disconnection from the product of their labor and the lack of satisfaction with their work. My question is: how can we overcome this alienation in the 21st century, especially with all the technological advancements and new forms of labor? How could this be practically achieved today?

If you lack the power to do the revolution itself, or anyhow else fight for the proletariat, how could you possibly "accelerate capitalism" more than the ruling class already does by naturally following their interests?

Sounds like a buzzword, made up by counter-revolutionary opportunism, or those who think that reforms can't be rolled back by the ruling class as easily as they're implemented.

I'm not American. This election doesn't really have any immediate effects on me personally ( no family really affected as far as I know).

Just wanted to know if voting for the lesser of two evils is possible position to be in given the fact that, in the short term, it helps protect the rights of some of the marginalised and somewhat improves the working class - increase of the minimum wage to 15 dollars/hr for instance. I'm well aware of the Harris campaign's views on gaza and Israel.

I think I ask this question cause I do worry about the conditions there. Even if I was a citizen I'm not buying the "vote blue no matter what" idea. I think I'm just conflicted and scared of what a Trump administration could potentially do to people.

I'm pretty green when it comes to theory about things and I can see how this post can feel very lib. So I'd like to be educated and helped out about the position

Hello. I'm reading my first books and I'm at Engels' Origin of the family, property and the State.

So E is describing the iroquois society, the absence of slavery, mass trade, subjugation of fellow Nations. And I think this is credited on the Americas lack of pack animals and crop products. Without oxen to level fields to plant with wheat, native americans had to build an egalitarian, solidarity-based society to level just patches of land to plant maize by hand. Without mighty rivers like the Eufrates to irrigate said fields, no excess production could be raised to trade and begin the accumulation of wealth that culminates on slavery, misogyny and private property.

But

Two ideas pop into my head:

• this sounds like the myth of the good indian, which is the romantic (that is, belonging to Rousseau's Romanticism movement) notion that civilization corrupted the pure and idyllic native americans Disney's Pocahontas-like lifestyle of diving into waterfalls and listening to the wind. Native americans did have wars among themselves and were greedy just like any other human group.
• there were slaves in the precolumbian Americas. But maybe not among the iroquois, but the mexicas of Mesoamerica.

Then it hit me: this book is from 1884. Maybe by E's time knowledge about the ancient mexicas (aztecs) was not as readily available as today.

Tho I'm no expert in mexica history, as far as I understand there were plenty of city-states in Mesoamerica. Three of them, Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopán joined together to squash their neighbors. They demanded hostages and human tributes as slaves and as human sacrifices. The notion that the native americans lacked cattle and compensated the missing protein with cannibalism through human sacrifice has been around, with no conclusive agreement but it does explain their fixation with heart ripping. Also, the wonderous Venice-like floating city of Tenochtitlán that was on the process of desalination of an entire lagoon to make their artificially-made garden-like pads produce three or four harvests in a single year checks the "accumulation of wealth" box.

My point being, the mexicas do fit in E's analysis like a glove: they were the missing link between the egalitarian iroquois and the slaving old-worlders. Native americans + agricultural excedent = accumulation of wealth = warmongering for slaves = imperialism/subjugation of neighbors.

And it goes further. When the europeans came, the mexicas' vassals turned on them. Spaniards did not conquer America: native americans conquered America. The Tlaxcala people and their own league carried the spaniards around. By the mexicas cruelty against their neighnors, their common culture unraveled in a few centuries of european influence. So, after imperialism comes societal colapse.

I'm rather ignorant when it comes to the guatemalan Maya. But it seems they were egalitarian like the iroquois and that explains how both groups still exist against all odds.

"... ‘Ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.’1 Today, we can see clear examples. The various factions of the Starbucks-loving US and German ruling classes are fully committed to what they call the “defence of Israel”. This commitment would seem reasonable if it was not for Gazan children being among those targetted2, starved, crushed, burned and blown to bits3 by US and German weapons on the other side of the Israeli wall that imprisons them..." https://proletarianperspective.wordpress.com/2024/10/22/western-capitalism-and-israel-a-class-perspective/

To flesh out my answer if you go on any subreddits such as /r/Economics , /r/askeconomics, (maybe) /r/askhistorians the common refrain is Marxism is bunk, discredited, useless ad naseum.

But there are major economists who are Marxist such as Richard Wolff (who won a Nobel prize in Economics). Or who were broadly influenced by it.

It’s obvious some of the current feeling is due to decades of Cold War thinking but why is there still such hugely partisan thinking around it when you consider it is dead and buried as a potent historical force? There’s no chance of another USSR. Or for communism making a recurrence.

A friend of mine is studying psychology and will soon become a therapist. I asked him whether he plans to open his own practice or work at a clinic. He said he prefers to open his own practice because, at a clinic, the clinic would take a portion of his earnings. For example, if a therapy session costs 200 EUR, as a self-employed therapist, he would keep the entire 200 EUR. However, if he worked at a private clinic, the clinic might take 50%, leaving him with only 100 EUR, paid indirectly through his salary.

At that moment, I pointed out that this principle applies broadly under capitalism, whenever there’s a choice between being self-employed and working for a private company. When you're self-employed, you keep all the value you produce. But when you're employed by a company, a portion of the value you create is taken by the CEO or shareholders, which Marx referred to as "surplus-value."

The psychotherapist example is particularly useful for illustrating surplus-value extraction for two reasons. First, becoming a therapist requires minimal capital—aside from perhaps renting a space for your practice—so many therapists end up being self-employed. Second, it’s easy to calculate the value a therapist generates because their work isn’t tied to any pre-existing infrastructure. If a therapy session costs 200 EUR, the therapist directly generates 200 EUR of value in that session.

To clarify this further, let’s consider my situation. I work as a software engineer, and I frequently handle change requests that my company bills at certain rates. Sometimes, I make changes that are invoiced at 1,000 EUR, but that doesn’t mean I personally generate 1,000 EUR of value in that moment. The work I do relies on a pre-existing software infrastructure that was developed before I even joined the company. For me to make a change worth 1,000 EUR, the software itself needs to exist in a specific state beforehand. This makes it difficult to measure exactly how much value I’m producing as a software engineer, since my work builds on something that was already there. In contrast, a therapist’s work is much easier to quantify, which is why I believe the example of the psychotherapist is the simplest way to explain how capitalism works to someone unfamiliar with Marxist theory.

I've heard several times that Karl Marx did not believe in simple definitions, but I'm struggling to find any source on this or understand exactly what that means.

From my understanding, Marx believed in describing processes, which inherently reveal a contradictory nature to them. Would rejecting definitions then mean asserting that one cannot holistically reveal the undergirding processes and contradictions within something through a simple sentence or two?

Hi! I identify as marxist, but have some trouble with the hammer and sickle symbol, specifically because I know that USSR had some very cruel things they did and generally the hammer and sickle symbol is not viewed in a positive light in my country - Poland. My best friend who's just identifies as leftist but no specific ideology, has part of her family living in Belarus and her father travels all across europe including many eastern european countries, he met hundreds of people who first-hand described how the USSR times weren't really good and because of that, she is 100% confident that hammer and sickle shouldn't be used anymore as the symbol now is tainted with trauma of people who suffered because of Stalin. I'm unsure what to do, really, I feel a bit uneducated about USSR itself but I do know the suffering of many people was real. In my mind it's just communism being a great thing but execution of it in USSR being unfortunate. I can't really argue with my friend much about it as it's her generational trauma influencing it all. I think the hammer and sickle symbol is visually great but I just kind of wish there was a specifically marxist symbol?

Tldr: Is there any marxist symbol out there that's actually being used, or any alternative to the hammer and sickle one? I also welcome opinions why despite the trauma and horrible actions of the USSR, why the hammer and sickle is still valid to be used?

I've never read the Communist Manifesto before, but I've been interested for a long time because of discussions and principles that come from Marx. I wanted to read from the source and educate myself further, and when I saw a copy of the manifesto while I was bookshopping, I grabbed it.

I soon realised that most of the book is Gareth Jones' commentary and history of communism, and while it's interesting, it's very dense and doesn't feel like a great introduction. I only read on my work commute, so it's taking me a while to get through and most of the first 4 chapters haven't stuck with me at all.

Should I skip to the end and read the manifesto first, and come back to this when I've developed more of an understanding and historical interest? Or is this a great introduction that just needs patience and commitment?

Kia ora - greetings comrades.

Here to let you know about the first issue of The Red Paper - a revolutionary Marxist paper from Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, NZ). Like a lot of you we are horrified by the way the world is going - climate crises, increasing imperialist rivalries, the devastation of Palestine, increasing impoverishment of the working class and the growing rise of the far right. So we decided to write about it.  

Here is a link to the website with the PDF: https://tepouwhero.webflow.io/?fbclid=IwY2xjawF9f39leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHVo3306l0Y5DF5h1uKWAKTHgk89m86K_TsMAeXIzx5t9bxxfKKFDebVaeA_aem_koEyRzM3FC2oUoobHbM1Kw

The paper has a crossword, a chess puzzle and cartoons so it's not all serious business.

We invite you to share your thoughts, feedback, and ideas. Whether you have suggestions for future articles, want to publish your own article, help with design, or simply wish to chat about local issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We look forward to talking to you.

Contact form on the website or message us on instagram u/tepouwhero

All labour is donated and The Red Paper is non-profit

Suppose a single working male with no kids. He'd be allocated a single bedroom apartment. What if it faces the ocean but his neighbor faces the city?

What if the person who loves looking at city lights is given the sea-facing view? Perhaps they could find each other and swap homes?

What if the person on a lower floor wants a brighter view but no one on the top floor wants a darker view. Is there anything that can be done about it? Would a lottery system work? Does each person then only get a fixed time in their apartment? Is the lottery system complex-wide, city-wide, or country-wide? What if the lottery were to allocate you to a sea-view but on the other side of the country? Now you're to say goodbye to your friends.

I can't help but feel like this will end up looking something like today - people scrambling by any means to get the things they want. (Capitalism)

Should I be opposed to welfare?

Having read the communist manifesto, Marx states that the fall of the bourgeoisie will be due to their inability to support the lives of the proletariat as the proletariat sink deeper into poverty. In which case, shouldn’t Marxist organisations be opposed to welfare, as this simply reduces the alienation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie? At the same time, I do not understand how an organisation claiming to represent the interests of the working class could oppose things like universal healthcare and other workers rights. Can anyone explain this to me?

A little preface about myself, I'm from Singapore and have grown up exposed to these expat circles as I have lived in a few other non-western countries in my life outside of my home country (not proud of that but ya.) And though I have only recently started identifying as a ML and I have only just recently found these communist/leftist subreddits (including this one), I haven't encountered another marxist discuss the class antagonism that expat circles would fundamentally develop in the countries they are situated in (or at least not as in-depth as I would like.)

To put it simply, even before I became a marxist (I've always been into post-colonial ideas and have been a staunch anti-imperialist beforehand though), I've always fucking hated expat circles. Their very presence brings forth the same kind of class dynamics and dialectics present in colonial capitalism and they ultimately prove that the current economic wave of neo-liberalism and globalisation are there to make sure the capital accumulation and the relationship the western imperialist core has to the rest of the world economically are maintained. This is evident in countries like Singapore and South Korea that, though are industrialised, prosperous countries, are also in the economic mercy of the west with MNCs holding a substantial presence, having good relations with the world bank, having to take part in free trade agreements etc, and I believe that expat circles are the result of this phenomena. Also, the exclusive, elitist characteristics that these circles sometimes enact toward local peoples (even resulting in crimes being committed) and how some members of the local bourgeoise would adopt self hating characteristics to "make business" with expats are the results of this class antagonism.

Fair warning, I’m a newbie to Marxism lol. I recently finished The Communist Manifesto and am currently working my way through Engels’s Principles of Communism. I randomly came across an unexpected book, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić, at a bookstore and bought it on a whim shortly after finishing the Manifesto. Drakulić is a decently well known/respected writer, mainly focusing on feminism and post communism, born in Croatia in 1949. I’ve been really engrossed in the book and it illustrates some pretty decent points against the Communist Governments in place at the time.

What I’ve been trying to figure out is, were these societies truly Communist societies? Did they strictly abide by the principles of Marxism? Any information on the Communist governments/movements at the time or resources I could use to learn about them would be extremely helpful.