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)

More concerning is what happened to AI-Engels' beard!

To juxtapose the Hebrew prophet with the gentile man of business?

adri: Precisely the opposite of what Marx and Engels [Zasulich?] 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!

Are you referring to the correspondence between Vera Zasulich and Marx?

Marx to Zasulich: I do not have to tell you that the very existence of the Russian commune is now threatened by a conspiracy of powerful interests. A certain type of capitalism, fostered by the state at the peasants’ expense, has risen up against the commune and found an interest in stifling it.

Are you referring to the correspondence between Vera Zasulich and Marx?

That's one source for Marx's comments on the Russian peasantry, in which, as mentioned, he expressed his view on how there was a potential for Russia to avoid capitalist development on the basis of the Russian commune. The other notable source is his 1877 letter to the editor of Otechestvenniye Zpiski, which he never actually sent according to footnotes in Vols. 24 and 27 of the MECW. It was Engels who circulated the letter after his death, due to how important he found it.[1] (The fact that Marx never sent the letter shouldn't lead one to believe that he disagreed with its contents, especially considering how he repeated the same views on the Russian peasantry in his other letter to Zasulich, which he actually sent in 1881.)

Engels had also voiced similar opinions on the Russian peasantry in his 1875 article "On Social Relations in Russia," which was part a series of articles for the Volksstaat newspaper collectively entitled Refugee Literature. In the article, Engels was responding to an "open letter" by the Russian revolutionary Pyotr Tkachev, in which Tkachev had criticized Engels' understanding of the social/revolutionary situation in Russia. The article was also published not long after the largely unsuccessful 1874 Going to the People Movement:

Engels wrote: It is clear that communal ownership in Russia is long past its period of florescence and, to all appearances, is moving towards its disintegration. Nevertheless, the possibility undeniably exists of raising this form of society to a higher one, if it should last until the circumstances are ripe for that, and if it shows itself capable of developing in such manner that the peasants no longer cultivate the land separately, but collectively; of raising it to this higher form without it being necessary for the Russian peasants to go through the intermediate stage of bourgeois small holdings. This, however, can only happen if, before the complete break-up of communal ownership, a proletarian revolution is successfully carried out in Western Europe, creating for the Russian peasant the preconditions requisite for such a transition, particularly the material things he needs, if only to carry through the revolution, necessarily connected therewith, of his whole agricultural system. It is, therefore, sheer bounce for Mr. Tkachov to say that the Russian peasants, although "owners", are "nearer to socialism" than the propertyless workers of Western Europe. Quite the opposite. If anything can still save Russian communal ownership and give it a chance of growing into a new, really viable form, it is a proletarian revolution in Western Europe. (MECW, Vol. 24, p. 48)

Despite the further development of Russian industry and the increasing proletarianization of the peasantry, Engels also still considered it a possibility for Russia to avoid capitalist development in his 1894 Afterword to "On Social Relations in Russia":

Engels wrote: Whether enough of this commune has been saved so that, if the occasion arises, as Marx and I still hoped in 1882, it could become the point of departure for communist development in harmony with a sudden change of direction in Western Europe, I do not presume to say. But this much is certain: if a remnant of this commune is to be preserved, the first condition is the fall of tsarist despotism—revolution in Russia. This will not only tear the great mass of the nation, the peasants, away from the isolation of their villages, which comprise their "mir", their "world", and lead them out onto the great stage, where they will get to know the outside world and thus themselves, their own situation and the means of salvation from their present distress; it will also give the labour movement of the West fresh impetus and create new, better conditions in which to carry on the struggle, thus hastening the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, without which present-day Russia can never achieve a socialist transformation, whether proceeding from the commune or from capitalism. (MECW, Vol. 27, p. 433)

Marx's and Engels' belief in this possibility of Russia avoiding capitalist development contrasts sharply with Leninist ideologues, bourgeois historians, and others who claim that Marx and Engels had always argued that Russia was destined to go through a capitalist stage of development in order to create a propertyless proletariat and the material/industrial foundations for a socialist revolution. Such dogmatism and stageism has nothing in common with what Marx and Engels actually wrote.

The late Teodor Shanin has also written more on Marx's Russian writings in his Late Marx and the Russian Road.

1. Here's the editors' footnote in Vol. 24, in which the editors are commenting on Marx's letter:

Marx's manuscript has come down to us in the form of a rough draft and contains many corrections and deletions. Two versions of the second part of the letter are extant, a concise and a longer one. With slight stylistic changes, the concise version repeats the more detailed one. The letter had not been posted [mailed] and was found by Engels among Marx's papers after his death. Engels considered it necessary to make copies of the manuscript and enclosed one of them in his letter to Vera Zasulich in Geneva of March 6, 1884 (see present edition, Vol. 47). (MECW, Vol. 24, p. 617)

There's also, as Shanin notes (and as Engels alluded to above), the 1882 Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto, in which both Marx and Engels unequivocally expressed their belief in how, once again, there was a potential for the Russian commune to serve as a point of departure for a socialist/communist revolution and for Russia to avoid capitalist development:

Marx and Engels wrote: The Communist Manifesto had as its object the proclamation of the inevitably impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, which is just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, a form of primeval common ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West?

The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development. (MECW, Vol. 24, p. 426)

Unhappily, all in vain:

What threatens the life of the Russian commune is neither a historical inevitability, nor a theory; it is state oppression, and exploitation by capitalist intruders whom the state has made powerful at the peasants’ expense.

Paul robbed Peter to pay off his own debts.