Social democracy and communism - Anton Pannekoek
1919 text by council communist Anton Pannekoek on social democracy and communism.
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The Road Followed by the Workers Movement
On labour exploitation
It remains evident to both a professed State Capitalist or a Stalinist that exploitation exist in the world. The central difference between the two would be their perception of what constitutes exploitation and who they think does the exploitation. The factor that also makes them similar is their historical justification of exploitation in the name of what they consider a greater future. Which I'll explain in this essay.
The Capitalist history of advocating or apologizing for exploitation:
Social democracy: The last bastion of capitalism
Article detailing the history of social democracy and how it defends capitalism.
"Back in 1911, Churchill had argued that welfare provision would deter workers from turning to “revolutionary socialism” and, by the 1930s, his prediction had proved correct." This still echoes today and sums the premise in a nutshell. Social Democracy is both the graveyard, and the gravedigger of every social movement.
Without You, Not a Single Cog Turns…
A text written some days after the conflict between the rioters and the stalinists on 20 October (the second day of a 48 hour general strike) in front of the greek parliament .
“The way things are today, only when people are frightened will they take to the streets; and they will come out abruptly, all at once… Then, the KKE 1 will be enlisted to stop them.” This impressively precise prediction was made by an old Trotskyist in a chat over a coffee in 2007.
- 1. Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας, the Communist Party of Greece.
Let’s all vote Labour without illusions
Submitted by working class s... on Nov 16 2011 21:58
A compilation of four articles written earlier in 2011. It covers all four parts of a brief history of the Labour Party when it was ‘Old labour’. It looks at the years from its inception, up until 1994 when Tony Blair became leader. According to Labour loyalists, these were the ‘glory years’. This was the Labour Party that truly represented the working class, and it is the party that we need to reclaim. The alleged glory years are of course utter bollocks. There is nothing and never was anything to reclaim.
The Labour Party conference starts in Liverpool this weekend. In honour of this, here together, are parts 1,2,3,4, of the ‘fuck all’ to reclaim series.
The shoot-out at Rue Grange aux Belles, 1924
Submitted by Battlescarred on Oct 6 2011 13:14
A short account of the incident that signalled a major rift between the Communist Party and the anarchists in France.
If anything acted as a marker for the utter rift between the anarchists and Communists in France it was the killings at the Rue Grange aux Belles on 11th January 1924.
The lost honor of labor - Robert Kurz
In this provocative and wide-ranging 1991 essay, Robert Kurz marshals Marx’s critique of the basic categories of capitalism and argues for “liberation from labor”, meaning the “‘abstract labor’ embodied in the form of value” that functions “tautologically” as a “self-referential” “end-in-itself” with destructive results for humanity (not to be confused with “human reproductive activity or with the process of metabolism with nature”); rejecting both technical regression (the “poverty of needs”) and obsolete reformism (the “Marxism of the workers movement”) he advocates “the planning and direction of the material nexus of reproduction in a directly social manner”.
The Lost Honor of Labor: Socialism of the Producers as Logical Impossibility – Robert Kurz
Part One
The Ontology of Labor
The German war economy and state socialism - Robert Kurz
In this excerpt from his book, The Collapse of Modernization (1991), Robert Kurz discusses the role played by the WWI German War Economy as a model for the catch-up modernization program implemented first by the Bolshevik regime and then completed by Stalin (defined by Preobrazhensky in 1926 as “Socialist Primitive Accumulation”), points out that this understanding of the transition to socialism was almost universally accepted at the time among all socialist and communist factions, including the most radical ones, due to a “false ontology of labor” and a “socio-technological” understanding of capital that are incompatible with Marx’s critique of the commodity form and abstract labor.
The German War Economy and State Socialism – Robert Kurz
The Sociologism of Class Struggle and the Veiling of Bourgeois Forms
The revolutionary alternative to left-wing politics
Subversion's critique of the radical left as being merely the state capitalist left wing of capital, as opposed to a revolutionary working class force.
The Left has not failed. And that is one of the greatest disasters ever to befall the working class.
Most people think that the Left is the movement of the working class for socialism (albeit riven by opportunism and muddle-headed interpretations on the part of many in its ranks).
Nothing could be further from the truth.
“If we have rice, we can have everything”: a critique of Khmer Rouge ideology and practice
Junge Linke on the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia, and its origins.
1. The Khmer Rouge have become synonymous with the terror of ‘communism’.
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