The dictatorship of the proletariat

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing, but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.—Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)
Karl Marx

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a dictatorship in the classical roman sense. It is a class dictatorship, where a class is dominant. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletariat expressing its political hegemony. The proletariat is the class which sells its labour to survive, the proletariat is you and I. If you have a boss, you are proletarian.
Now, the world lives under capitalism, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, i.e. the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, factory owners, those who own the means of production, who subsist solely off others people’s labour and by exploiting. Whoever you vote in will be rich, and they will act in their own interests, using the state as a tool to exercise their political hegemony.
The state would be ran though soviets, in which workers elect representatives, which are recallable and accountable. The delegates would go in and pass their views to a larger soviet that encompasses a certain area, and is made up of a number of delegates from the basic soviets. This continues until we get to the soviet that covers the whole country.
This would allow the people to have control over their area, workplaces and lives, and they will undoubtably peruse their class interests.

The flag translates to Paris commune, which is widely accepted as the first dictatorship of the proletariat, and served as a lesson to what happens if one is too liberal in a revolution.

By Anton

Turkey arrests Marxist Communists

By Leon J Williams

This morning 85 Marxist Communists, including 15 lawyers were arrested by Turkey’s Islamic right-wing government in various parts of the country.

The lawyers belong to a firm that often defends left-wing activists.

Currently there are no concrete reasons why the arrests took place.

A Turkish lawyers’ association, CHD, accused the state of “an all-out attack against people and institutions who oppose the system and struggle for democracy and freedom”.

Although these Marxists, who belong to the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKP-C) are listed as a terrorist group they (unlike the PKK) do not target civilians.

For more details click here.

Sparticists uprising

By George Volkov

 

 

On the 15th January 1919, the freikorps, a right-wing, nationalist paramilitary group, made up of ex-great war soldiers, murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, by beating them too the floor with rifle butts, shooting them in the head, and finally, throwing their bodies in the freezing landwehr canal.
Post war Germany was disastrous: money had to be spent instantly as it was constantly loosing value, wheelbarrows of money were needed to buy bread, and the allies still demanded their £6,600,000,000 reparations.

The government was weak, and the army was reduced to 100,000 men. The main industrial areas were given independence, which meant Germany’s economy couldn’t recover. It had lost vast amounts of it coal, and 15% of its arable land. It was no surprise that when Germany couldn’t pay it’s second reparation payment, and France invaded the Ruhr, that the workers went on strike, with signs of ‘no French or dogs’ on cafés. They were hailed as heroes, but by doing this, the German economy got much worse.

I hope you enjoyed the background information. I also hope the verbosity of this article has not bored you. This is where we get to the main point of this article: the Sparticists.
The Spartacists were actually founded in the summer of 1915 when both Luxemburg and Liebknecht left the SDP because of the party’s support for Germany’s participation in the First World War. The SDP were the social democracy party, the name for socialists around the globe. The social-democrats abandoned revolution, in favour of reforms, abandoning Marxism, and in a sense, socialism, becoming tools of the bourgeoisie, no longer friends of the proletariat.
In December 1918, some of the Spartacists – including Luxemburg and Liebknecht – founded the German Communist Party. Luxemburg had written numerous pamphlets about Lenin and how his leadership of the Russian Revolution would be of such great value to Russia.

While her political philosophy may well have merited such pamphlets, many Germans (and Europeans in general) were terrified of the ‘Red Plague’ in Russia and the adoption of the name ‘communist’ was looked upon with distrust. Many soldiers had returned from the war fronts massively disillusioned with the German government and hugely suspicious of anything or anyone that had left-wing political beliefs, ven the SDP, which can be compared to labour in the UK, or the democrats in the US. Many who had quit the German Army joined the right wing Freikorps. These would have been battle-hardened men who had been subjected to military discipline.

The leaders of the Spartacus League, Luxemburg and Liebknecht (I hope I have not repeated myself too much), were dissatisfied with the actions of the post-war SPD government. The SPD government had compromised with the conservative military and right-wing militias, promising reform rather than revolution in return for their support and aid in returning the country to the semblance of order. Alongside protesting workers, Liebknecht and Luxemburg led the Spartacist Uprising in an attempt to overthrow the government on the 1st of January, 1919.
Barricades were erected, newspaper offices were seized, printing revolutionary paper, such as ‘red flag’, workers armed themselves, hoping to save Germany through socialism! Unfortunately, the SDP enlisted the help of the Freikorps, who brutally put down the revolution, arresting Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on the 15th of January, beating them with rifle butts, shooting them in the heads, and throwing Rosa Luxemburg in the Landwehr canal.
Every year, German socialists and communists still go to Luxemburg’s and Liebknecht’s grave, on the 15th of January, which shows that they are still important in politics today, and soon, they may be as important as they were in wartime, and post-war Germany.
They died, as all Marxists should, after attempting to make the world a better, fairer, more equal place.

Would you believe me if I told you Cuba is better than America?

By George Volkov

Cuba, whilst being blockaded in an attempt to starve them into allowing the US to exploit it’s people again, still provides more for it’s people than the US.
In this short piece of writing, i am going to present to you facts, not opinions, because what can prove something more than a fact?
Castro became prime minister in 1959, after overthrowing General Batista, who gained power in a military coup.
In 1960, the Cuban government introduces aggressive economic reforms: American-owned businesses come under state control and the economy becomes centrally planned, this, along with the landowners having their land given to the peasants who have worked on it their whole lives, gets large amounts of support.

With the lowest unemployment rate, which is at 1% and the highest literacy rate in the world at 99%, not to mention some of the best and most humanitarian doctors to ever walk the earth, Cuba would be a great country to live in. Unfortunately, due the US blockade, and the fact very few countries want to anger uncle sam, Cuba is still very much under-developed.

Most of the Cubans who left were the rich ones, the exploiters, or as we leftists call them, the bourgeoisie. This would explain why the Cuban-American population is so well off. When Cuba is at its worst everyone still gets their food, water, and healthcare when America is at its best 40,000 people still die a year from not having healthcare.

Why do the US want Castro out so badly?
The US fear Castro, he has made socialism look successful, a rare case when “socialist leaders” actually turn out to be socialists. The fact they have tried to starve Cuba, invade Cuba, and assassinate Castro, (638 ways, according to a channel 4 documentary), shows they really don’t like how well Cuba is doing.
Yes, the US claim Castro is a dictator, and that is why they want him gone, the real reason is he kicked US business out of Cuba, so it could benefit the people of Cuba, not the American government and fat cats.

And if the US are so bothered about dictators, why did they give Pinochet bombers and munitions to take over from the democratically elected Marxist Salvador Allende, via a coup d’état?
With the US foreign policy, you can see a pattern.
Will it make us money? Do they oppose the US? Did they stop us gaining money at the expense of others?
Are they socialist or communist?

If the answer is yes, then the US will to something, whether it be the CIA training and arming rebels (Nicaragua, Afghanistan, which didn’t backfire at all…), assassinations, or starting a coup (Guatemala, Chile).

In cuba, if you have cancer, you can’t get medicine to treat it. Why? The blockade. You can’t even get painkillers imported, for a headache. This is the inhumanity of the US embargo. It criticises Castro because Cuba does not have the same standard of living as the west, yet it is the cause of the problem. It’s like a slave owner, beating his slave, then berating the slave for not working as well. The US is clearly attempting to discredit Castro for the conditions it is creating itself.

And for the “Cuba was better before Castro” argument: Kennedy admitted, after trying to invade Cuba, and assassinate Castro many times, that Cuba is better off under Castro than it was under Batista.

¡Hasta la victoria siempre!

Until the Eternal Victory!