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On this day, 30 June 2013, over 200 workers at the Zhongji Pile factory in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, China, surrounded the company's office, trapping five executives inside, demanding unpaid wages and protesting against proposed layoffs. The bosses were well treated, fed and allowed contact with the outside world, they were just not permitted to leave. They did try to escape on several occasions, and one of the bosses even tried to assault a government representative to try to get himself arrested.After four days of the occupation, the employers caved in, agreed backpay and agreed to keep workers employed.

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The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

#Marx, Critique of #Hegel’s #Philosophy of Right (1843)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch03.htm#027

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The #philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

#Marx, Theses On Feuerbach: Thesis 11 (1845)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm#018

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All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ...

#Marx & #Engels, #Communist_Manifesto (1848)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#025

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Mass protests erupted in France in response to the far-right National Rally party, which is on the doorstep of taking power in the country. For the first time since World War II, a far-right force of this kind would come to power.

The National Rally (RN) secured 34% of the vote in the first round of snap elections, followed by a coalition led by the New Popular Front with 28%, which was formed to block an RN victory. The front consists of socialists, communists, greens and the Unbowed party.

Meanwhile, the party of President Emmanuel Macron, dubbed the “president of the rich,” received 20% of the vote. Now all eyes are on the second and decisive round of elections on July 7, in which the RN will try to secure an absolute majority to avoid a coalition.

Protests against the National Rally broke out in several parts of the country, with anti-fascist slogans being shouted. Several times there were clashes with the police who fired tear gas into the crowd to disperse the protests.

theredstream

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On this day, 1 July 1943, gay Dutch anti-Nazi resistance fighter Willem Arondeus was executed by occupation forces. His resistance group falsified identity papers for Jewish people, and in March they attacked the Amsterdam registry, destroying thousands of records against which full papers could be checked. The unit was betrayed and most members were arrested. Alongside Willem, 11 others were executed. Before his execution, Willem asked a friend to testify after the war that "#homosexuals are not cowards". ❤️

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"Thanks to our beloved #Stalin - for a happy childhood!", soviet #poster, 1936

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Joseph Stalin

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"Representatives of #Turkmenistan at Lenin's reception", painting by N. Sysoev, 1968

In the history of modern #socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

#Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, “Dogmatism And ‘Freedom of Criticism’” (1901)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm

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"Vigilantly guard the people's property!", soviet Anti-Nazi #poster, 1942

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"Are you taking care of your breasts? Temper your nipples with cold water daily.", soviet health #poster, 1930

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“Formerly, the victory of the revolution in one country was considered impossible, on the assumption that it would require the combined action of the proletarians of all or at least of a majority of the advanced countries to achieve victory over the bourgeoisie. Now this point of view no longer fits in with the facts. Now we must proceed from the possibility of such a victory, for the uneven and spasmodic character of the development of the various capitalist countries under the conditions of imperialism, the development within imperialism of catastrophic contradictions leading to inevitable wars, the growth of the revolutionary movement in all countries of the world-all this leads, not only to the possibility, but also to the necessity of the victory of the proletariat in individual countries.”

- J. V. #Stalin (The Foundations of #Leninism)

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✍🏻 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
🔴 The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts that we shall outline in brief.

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I
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.

But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism.

Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.

Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.

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II
Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.

Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.

By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.

Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

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