The Truth According to Třídní Válka (Class War)

Who's the bloke on the right? Engels after his facial reconstruction surgery?

Sort of looks like Makhno actually

International Voice:

TV [Třídní Válka] and groups like it, with their... exaltation of violence...

Marx's exaltation of the role violence (physical force) has in our class struggle is reprehensible?

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Manifesto of the communist party, 1848

More concerning is what happened to AI-Engels' beard! There are no known photos of Engels without a beard to my knowledge, so it's pretty presumptuous for the AI to have just assumed what a beardless Engels would have looked like and to place him next to a fully bearded Marx.

(I also have to say that AI is such a bummer as far as creativity goes. People are now just going to use AI to create beardless depictions of Engels, write entire books/articles, compose entire albums and works of art, etc. What's the point of anything then? I mean yes, AI will help to cure various diseases and cancers and probably hasten the collapse of capitalism, but are erroneous depictions of Engels really worth it? That's it! Who wants to go full Luddite with me against AI?! AI rant over.)

Just so I'm not accused of judging a book by its lazy AI cover art (at least get a proper AI image of Engels if you're going to venerate him and Marx, without ever having actually read them), here are the contents of the work:

Internationalist Voice wrote: The Třídní Válka group (Class War), unable to challenge the foundational principles or the century-long legacy of the Communist Left, has resorted to desperate measures. It has adopted superficial, vulgar language and descended into debased level of discourse, resorting to crude insults and slander against Lenin, the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg, and, most notably, the Communist Left and its various currents. (5)

Yes, how dare anyone insult the integrity of Lenin—who wrote an entire pamphlet characterizing left communists as being afflicted with an "infantile disorder" and who persecuted left communists like Miasnikov for his audacity to argue for workers' control over production!

Internationalist Voice wrote: Lenin, with a more critical view, [!!] saw the obshchina [or Russian mir/commune] as an obstacle to the development of capitalism and industrialization. In his opinion, this system not only limited production but also hindered the modernization of Russian society. He believed that for societal progress to occur, the obshchina system had to be abolished, and the land should be handed over to modern, industrial production to lay the groundwork for a socialist structure. (202)

Yes! Precisely the opposite of what Marx and Engels had argued with respect to the Russian peasantry!, in which they wrote that there was a potential for Russia to avoid capitalist development on the basis of the Russian mir! (Obviously the condition of the Russian peasantry had also changed from the time when Marx and Engels were writing to the time when Lenin was writing, but Internationalist Voice doesn't seem to consider that when comparing Lenin's writings on the peasantry to Kropotkin's.)

Internationalist Voice wrote: Contrary to the lies and demagoguery of bourgeois ideologues, leftists, Stalinists, anarchists, or those who are a mixture of these, Lenin sought a global communist revolution. Lenin, as a communist and a great Marxist, lives on in class struggles. (256)

Ha! Oh please—take this nonsense down. Why are you even posting here?

Internationalist Voice wrote: With the rise of reformism, within the social democratic parties, the left wing of social democracy was formed in defence of Marxism, whose most well-known figures include Lenin in Russia [...] (290)

!!!

Internationalist Voice wrote: With the beginning of the counter-revolutionary period, the “communist” parties transformed into national parties, and this time the “communist” parties permanently joined the camp of the bourgeoisie and formed the left of the political apparatus of capital. In countries where the revolutionary movement had reached its highest point, and was now failing and retreating, such as Russia, Germany, and Italy, the communist left were most violently suppressed, exiled, or terribly isolated. The Russian communist left played an important role in defending the proletarian concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the concept of world revolution, the rejection of the united front, etc. Unfortunately, the unbridled suppression of the anti-revolution trod a generation of the communists into the soil, although they were the builders of the glorious October Revolution, creators of unforgettable and heroic battles, and the Russian communist left could not continue on this path and become a lasting tradition. (293)

It was under your hero Lenin when the communist left in Russia was persecuted and worker uprisings like the Kronstadt Revolt violently suppressed! Stalin to a large extent simply carried on this work of purging and murdering all of the more genuine communist figures that Lenin had begun. As I mentioned, Lenin also wrote an entire pamphlet criticizing left communists like Pankhurst and others, which you don't even mention in this text it seems. You even have the gall, or rather the ignorance, to put a picture of Miasnikov right next to the above passage, when it was Lenin who played a major part in having him expelled from the Communist Party and subsequently imprisoned.[1] It was Stalin who finished the job by duping Miasnikov into returning to Russia after the Second World War, where he was promptly murdered.

1. See Avrich for example:

Paul Avrich wrote: Miasnikov did not go unmolested. Shortly after the congress he was taken into custody by the GPU, becoming the first prominent Communist political prisoner in Soviet Russia. Nor was this all. In the course of his arrest an attempt was made to "escape" him, as he had foretold in his letter to Lenin. Somehow the scheme miscarried: three shots were fired at him, but they failed to find their mark. Characteristically, as soon as he was placed behind bars, Miasnikov declared a hunger strike, as he had previously done under the tsar. Twelve days later he was released. (54)