HOW TO BECOME A MARXIST: 31 – What is Socialism?

Ever since the Arab Spring of 2011, and the international Occupy movement that it inspired, many people all over the world are turning to revolutionary people and ideas to both explain the current situation and point the way forward. As a Marxist, I believe that the most important aspect of point the way forward involves figuring out what options are available to involve ever increasing numbers of people in the active struggle for a better world. The better world I know we need to fight for is socialism.

So what is Socialism?

There are two answers to this question, because socialism is not just about the goal itself, but also the process of achieving that goal.

Lets start from the end and work our way backward, like a crime scene. An alternate title for this post may be, “The Murder of Class Society.”

Socialism, in the most literal sense, is a transitory stage in human history between capitalism and communism in which the bourgeoisie has been overthrown by the working class, as a class. In the process of doing so, the proletariat has created it’s own worker’s state to defend and implement it’s own class interests.

Every workplace, whether it is a factory, a retail clothing store, a McDonald’s, a school, a hospital, or a downtown office is now owned and operated democratically, and without hierarchy, by the workers themselves through formations of work place councils. The workplace councils manage the workplaces democratically to decide what will be produced, how it will be produced, and what will be done with the left overs. All workplace councils are networked together at the national level to form the worker’s state and eventually they are networked together at the international level to democratically plan the world economy in the interests of human need.

At a minimum, the period of human history considered socialist lasts until there is no bourgeoisie and counter-revolutionaries to defend against that try to re-implement private property, hierarchy in the workplace, and an anarchic economy based on blind competition for profit. For this threat to be eliminated, the revolution has to spread internationally or risk being strangled, because an example of socialist revolution in one country puts the bourgeoisie at risk in every country (as we seen with the Arab Spring spreading and inspiring the Occupy movement).

But also because the capitalist economy is international itself, so that various aspects of production actually occur in different parts of the world, whether gathering raw materials, refining them, or assembling them into the finished commodity. Therefore all centers of the existing capitalist economy have to be integrated into the socialist economy for it to fully function.

Once there is no counter-revolution to defend against the worker’s state begins to whither away as it’s main purpose is armed coercion and there is no class left to coerce. Then begins the development of Communist society out of Socialism. Communism being a world with a democratically planned international economy without the existence of class, and therefore no organized bodies of armed people.

Explained another way, socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, in an effort to eliminate class altogether and therefore eliminate the dictatorship of any class over any other class.

But as mentioned earlier, there is more to the question of “what is socialism?” One of the most interesting things about socialism is that it is not just a historical phase or a collective state of being. It is also the process of people being pushed, by capitalism, into thinking and acting politically. Essentially, into becoming truly aware, class conscious, and alive. In pushing working people into becoming active and struggling against parts of, or all of, the system people begin to lose their fears, sense of inadequacy, mistrust of others, and prejudices that capitalism beats into us on a daily basis.

In the process of fighting back against the bourgeoisie, the working class begins to learn how to become active individuals, how to organize their proletarian brothers and sisters, how to work together democratically to achieve various big or small reforms, and to build up the experiences, organizations, and networks that will determine the success or failure of the proletarian revolution.Through these struggles, people learn that their best asset is each other, so that the slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” becomes branded on the collective mind.The lessons the working class learns in community and university organizing it applies in the work place and carries those lessons for life. These struggles and lessons become the building blocks of socialism.

Unless the proletariat is engaged in struggle, it remains a passive, unconscious mass of workers going through the routine motions of daily life. But when pressed by capitalist exploitation, oppression, war, and crisis, the working class is shaken out of its stupor and starts down the road of what Lenin called “the self-emancipation of the working class, by the working class, as a class.”

Socialist society is a society with the maximum engagement by the masses necessary to carry out direct democracy, which involves work place democracy.

That is Socialism.

The Proletariat Turns 21 in Twenty-Eleven

Dear comrades,

For the few of you that follow this blog, I do apologize for my few and far between posts over the past three or four months. My life is going through a lot of hurdles during these tough times though I am thankful that I have my health and a roof over my head.

With that said, as difficult as this year has been for me, it has been tremendously more difficult for many more people in this country and around the world. This pain and disillusion has manifested itself with the self immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and the Arab Spring which spread around the world in the form of revolutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa and as Occupy in the rest of the world.

For two incredible and inspiring recaps of 2011, I direct you to The blog by prominent Marxist John Molyneux and by the editorial staff of the influential Socialist Worker.

PLEASE read the above linked articles for both recaps of this revolutionary year, as well for a call to arms to remind us all that the time is now to fight for change and to overthrow the existing world order.

After reading these articles, I thought back to two other things I had read this year. One was the recent article in the International Socialist Journal (ISJ) about the fact that for the first time in human history most human beings are now workers. The other thing I had read was a recap of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution which lead me to write a blog post here on that same topic applied to the contemporary situation in the US.

So what am I getting at? Why am I making you read all of those linked articles? Because as far as I can tell, the working class has finally turned 21. Meaning: capitalism has not only spread itself all over the world, as it had begun to do with the conquest of the Americas and the pillaging of Africa, but “globalization” has also lead to the industrialization of the whole world and, by extension, the proletarianization of the great majority of living people.

If most people today are now proles, then most people today are now potential participants in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class, for the working class, as a class.

The bourgeoisie of the US and Europe went into globalization over-drive from the 1970s through to the present in an attempt to undermine the revolutionary potential of their own proletarians. But as they introduced capitalist social relations aroudnd the world, and especially industrial capitalism, the inadvertently ended up surrounding themselves with even more grave-diggers than before.

Whats more, in the process of doing so, the bourgeoisie revolutionized the means of production to such a point that their very own achivements could be even more readily used against them. Not only is the proletariat now more than ever “the universal class” but the universal class is also armed with smart phones and social-networking sites that enable it to coordinate rebellion on an unprecedented scale.

As if that was not enough, the new technology and spread of the proletariat also makes the potential for a socialist economy (i.e. a democratically planned economy based on workplace democracy) all the more obvious. Conversely it makes the anarchic capitalist system of unplanned production for competition and profit all the more absurd.

If the working class was being born in 1848, and learning to walk in 1871, then it learned to run in 1917, and is finally reaching its adulthood in 2011.

Just as capitalism is reaching new levels of potentially irreconcilable ecological destruction and nuclear war, the working class is reaching its maturity and finding out it is an international class with the international power to run the world.

Whereas before the bourgeoisie could run around the world and put off revolution by trying to cripple the domestic workers by hyper-exploiting foreign workers, they have now run out of places to strangle.

The bourgeoisie has surrounded itself with land mines and it is up to the revolutionary sections of the proletariat to guide the explosive power of our class.

HOW TO BECOME A MARXIST: 30 – Cops and Communists

In a previous post I went into the issue of “Soldiers and Socialists” and tried to explain the relationship of soldiers to the working class, how socialists should relate to them, and the potential for soldiers to side with the workers movement as socialists themselves.

A lot of people in the current Occupy Wall Street movement see this example of potential unity between soldiers and protesters and they apply it to the cops as well. At first glance, this comparison seems to make sense since both soldiers and cops are basically the same in the general sense. Both of them are human beings that are paid and armed by the bourgeois state to carry out violence on the working class. So from this perspective, both should also be potential allies of a proletarian movement (i.e. of a movement of the 99%).

The recent experience of the Occupy movement throughout the US has raised the questions of “what role do cops play in society and how should we relate to them?” Lets examine these questions further to figure out how to relate to the police.

The first thing to say is that cops and soldiers do have some things in common. As already mentioned, they are both paid and armed by the bourgeois state. Both are expected to use their weapons and training against the weak, the defenseless, the innocent, and above all: against the working class.

When they are not actively inflicting violence on people, cops and soldiers are expected to hold the communities they monitor in constant terror. Each of them holds their respective targets in a constant state of siege, where everyone they are monitoring is suspect and they are trained to only rely on their fellows in uniform against the occupied population. But this last point of comparison is also where the contrasts begin.

For the soldier, the occupied population is usually in a different country. The training a soldier receives is typically designed to dehumanize people of a specific “foreign” nationality, race, ethnicity, or language group. The dehumanization is intended to assist the soldier in brutalizing and murdering the occupied population.

While the cops are also trained to engage in racial profiling, the difference is that the population that they hold under seige is their fellow compatriots.

So whereas a soldier is trained to murder people in a distant land, the cops experience is of monitoring, brutalizing, and murdering his neighbor. This also gets into the second major difference between cops and soldiers.

Just like the soldier, the cop is trained to hold everyone in suspicion besides their fellows in uniform. But a soldier eventually ends their tour of duty and goes home. Presumably, unless the soldier has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, the soldier can return to their country of birth and put down the constant suspicion and monitoring that comes from holding others in a state of siege. But the cops are already home. They hold everyone in suspicion always.

This difference also adds a third, and crucial, dynamic to the consciousness of soldiers versus cops. Most people who join the military do so because they have too or because they will receive some sort of financial benefits for having done so (like the GI Bill in the US). So for most people in the military, it is not that they want to go out and brutalize people, but that they are somehow compelled to join for a few years of their lives. This turns the experience of the soldier in the military into a parallel with that of a worker in the work place.

Essentially, the soldier just does whatever they have to do to get through the years in the military. This creates the dynamic of trying to do as little as possible, just like a worker tries to do as little as possible during the 8 hour day to “just get through it.”

This “just get through it” mentality in the military creates a struggle between the upper classes in the military (i.e. the officers and the brass) and the soldiers which can lead to heightened class consciousness for the soldiers and the establishment of soldiers councils which mirror workers councils in the work place.

So whereas you never hear of police mutinies, soldiers mutinies are frequent in history and essential to the victory of a proletarian revolution as the soldiers side with the workers. The cops are in a state of perpetual seige, so there is never the opportunity for dissent as every moment and situation could become deadly (in their minds).

The fact that soldiers eventually end their duty after a few years also adds a fourth dynamic of soldiers seeing their future tied to the success/failure of the working class. What I mean by this is that while a cop’s job security depends on social inequality and the maintenance of “law and order,” the soldier knows thta eventually they will rejoin they will be thrown back into the proletarian masses.

Eventually, the soldier will be out their submitting job applications, resumes, and participating in humiliating job interviews. Once the tour as a soldier is over it will be back to worryong about the rent, the conditions in the work place, and the lack of social welfare programs like unemployment and medical insurance.

These are things the cops never think about. As long as there are poor people who commit “crimes” to make ends meet, the cops have job security busting heads and racially profiling people and they don’t have to think if these things.

So while beating protesters is just another day of paid over-time for cops, the protesters that soldiers beat today might be them or their families tomorrow.

This reality makes a soldier more likely to sympathize with, and even join, the proletarian struggle. Conversely, a cop sees workers struggles as a threat to their job security since the bourgeois state and system keep them paid.

A living laboratory for workers struggle has been Egypt. In Egypt we have seen the difference between cops and soldiers in practice.

In practice, when Egyptian protesters went upnto tanks and walls of armed soldiers, the soldiers (often in spite of orders from superiors) would mingke with protesters and let them pass or continue camping in the public squares.

In practice, the cops did everything they could to disrupt the protesters. They would initiate looting, release prisoners to stir up hysteria, and even ride into protester occupied camps with weapons to terrorize and murder protesters.

In practice, the cops could be counted on as the final defenders of Mubarak while the soldiers tended to remain passive or even join the protesters in their struggle.

To be clear, there is a difference between the soldiers as a section of the working class and the military as an institution, but that is a post for another day.

In short, as we have seen in Egypt and in other moments of world history, the soldiers are a part of the 99% and can be win to our side, while the cops aree the defenders of the 1%.

So if the cops are our enemies in blue, the. How do we relate to them?
- Do we try to win them to our side?
- Do we let them beat us as a principaled dedication to non-violence?
- Do we attack them on sight at every opportunity?

It is important to say that the reality is that therre are no blanket answers to this question. The staring point for figuring out how to relate to the cops is to understand that they are our enemies and AT BEST, we can hope they let us carry on. After that, the answer to the question depends on the balance of forces and the debates within the movement.

If before a mass march, the organizers have made it openly clear that the march may involve street battles with the cops and the majority of protesters understand and accept this, then carry on. If a cops start to physically confront protesters during a march and the protesters clearly out-number the cops, then we’ll see who comes out on top.

But it does not help the movement to dedicate protesters to being completely non-violent 100% of the time. It also does not help to egg-on cops all the time either. Both are recipes for disaster and demoralization. The fact is that the cops are brutal and deadly and every situation has to be taken on a case by case basis depending on democratic and open debate within movements as well as depending the balance of forces at a given moment.

For more info please see this article in Socialistworker.org and this lecture at wearemany.org.

HOW TO BECOME A MARXIST: 29 – Understanding Austerity, Taxing the 1%, and Society’s Wealth

Since 2008′s Great Recession started the media internationally has been  desperate to ram through anti-working class austerity policies like increasing the retirement age, slashing public spending on health care, and doing mass lay offs of public and private sector jobs.

Until the Occupy Wall Street protests kicked off, it was basically taken for granted that the only way to pay for the budget crisis had to be on the backs of the working class.

But what the hell does that all mean? Lots of folks on both the right and the Left seem sort of uncertain as to whether or not there really is any viable solution besides the regular austerity measures that are usually thrown in our faces. So lets take a minute to see the economy from capitalist and Marxist perspectives.

1) Capitalist Economics: A World of Scarcity, Greed, and Privilege

There are two fundamental principles to a capitalist economic analysis of society. The first and underlying notion is that the rich are rich because they DESERVE to be so and that any improvements of society depends on their business interests. The second notion built on this one is that there is only a LIMITED amount of wealth in the world and that is why individuals and countries must compete for the limited wealth that can be tapped into.

In essence, the two fundamentals of bourgeois economics are based on the bourgeoisie’s “right” to private property (as distinct to “personal” property) and that the right to private property means that those who lack private property (i.e. working class people who do not own businesses, do not own heavy industry, or are not CEOs of major multi-national corporations) are the only logical targets of austerity as any taxation, nationalization, or occupation of the wealth of the bourgeoisie would be an infringement to the right of private property.

In essense, the right to private property is the right to be rich at everyone else’s expense. This is the fundamental nucleus of capitalist economics.

2) Marxist Economics: Democratically Planned Economy Based on Human Need

You could call it the economic perspective of 99/99/99. The two fundamentals to understand for Marxist economics are that the working class is the “UNIVERSAL CLASS” meaning that it is international in scope and that it is the first class in human history capable of abolishing class society precisely because our international existence allows us to democratically plan an economy internationally, without the need for privare ownership of the businesses and industry but insread owning and running these things in common.

The second point is that the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION has created the science and machines that are capable of mass producing enough food, housing, clothing, and medicine to address everyone’s needs and that as world population grows it only adds to the working class’ capacity to produce.

For Marxist economics, the scarcity, private property, and competition of capitalism is not just obsolete, but it is actually a deadly hinderance for the maintenance and fulfillment of humanity. 

————

SO what do these two perspectives say about solving the economic crisis? There are two major starting points for pools of wealth in society. One way to tap into society’s wealth is to hit the proletariat. Although individual workers are poor compared to the wealth of individual capitalists, the collective mass of workers have wages, savings, benefits, home equity, etc which can be tapped into to pay for the economic crisis. Since the international capitalist economy is currently suffering from over-production, that means that there are currently no new markets to tap into. 

When nothing new can be sold, the only alternative is to dig. To make up for the lack of profits from direct sales, the bourgeoisie lowers wages, removes benefits, and increases prices for products/services until savings and equity are all tapped out. This is the capitalist solution for the economic crisis which allows them to hold on to their class status while getting the system back on track. In the process, the bourgeoisie gets the proletariat accustomed to a new, lower quality of life while the capitalists themselves go on being unimaginably wealthy.

The Marxist alternative is to attack the second pool of wealth: the Bourgeoisie. They hold enourmous amounts of wealth in bank accounts, property, investments, etc. By taxing them at a sigificantly higher rate many social services could be saved and even improved. If we took this demand a step further, to arresting the bourgeoisie and seizing their wealth, we could end the world economic crisis.

But the Marxist alternative does not stop there. The reality is that as long as capitalism exists, there will be a division between rich and poor. Since the rich can afford to buy politicians and write laws, any legislation thst imposed on them would only be temporary. Also, the bourgeoisie would never let themselves be arrested en masse and have their wealth seized (even if this would benefit 99% of the world population). This is where the Marxist perspective takes on its particular turn.

Marxism is, in a nutshell, the self-emancipation of the working class, by the working class, as a class. Putting this into practice, this means that for the working class to win even a modest gain such as a taxing the 1%, workers need to organize together beyond racial, gender, national, and sexual borders to take down the rich and powerful. This level of struggle against the bourgeoisie requires developing grassroots vehicles for democracy which, in the process of fighting for reforms, can become the basis for a future workers government.

For Marxists, the solution here is not just to struggle to tax the bourgeoisie, but to become prepared to rule society without the 1% and overthrow them in the process snd replace them with a worker’s state that can defend the working classes’ gains. Of course, every struggle for rerforms does not end in revolution, but in every struggle largerr and larger sections of workers are drawn in organizing and activisim and turned on to radical ideas about how to build a better world based on human need instead of corporate greed.

A better world is possible: Occupy everything, demand everything.

HOW TO BECOME A MARXIST: 28 – Understanding Demands, Slogans, and Protests

Demands, Protests, Slogans: Drawing in the Masses

In a previous post I wrote about the fundamental role of the revolutionary newspaper. In a nutshell, the revolutionary newspaper serves the purpose of including the masses in the political debate of current events as well as providing revolutionary leadership for the masses to realize their own potential to run society democratically.

The central point of the revolutionary paper is the involvement of the masses, which is also why protests, slogans, and demands are important. I wanted to write this post awhile ago, but the question of why demands and protests matter has risen to the front since the Occupy movement took off a few weeks ago.

There are two main political trends in the occupy movement that are, to one degree or anotherr, jostling for leadership (whether consciously or unconsciously). One political trend is the notion that we need to raise demands for different reforms and even radical changes to society. The other trend is the political concept that the occupations in cities around the world are ends in-and-of-themselves and that they are an “experiment” in a future society or new ways of living.

It is, first of all, completely true that the occupations, by inviting any and all of the 99% to camp out, participate in political discussion and democratic/consensus organizing is absolutely a testament to the capacity and desire amongst most working class people to live in a better world. The occupations are all evidence that a better world is possible and that there are people willing to build it.

But, it is also important to understand that movements grow and shrink and that movements also last more or less time. In spite of the fact that many people within the occupy movement claim that there are no demands and that demands “legitimize the power of the 1%” the reality is that the occupations did not begin with people silently taking over a public space. There has always been the explicit demand for people to realize that most of us are the 99% and that we need to join the occupations. There has, from the beginning been that basic demand, which is itself an attack on the 1%.

The reason I mention that movements grow and shrink and stick around or disappear is that to begin the movement, there needed to be a demand to mobilize people to join the struggle. But for the struggle to grow and last it needs to continue drawing in wider sections of the working class. The only way to do so is to raise various demands that resonate with people and show them that the occupy movement does indeed represent the 99% (i.e. Black, white, LGBTQ, straight, male, female, people of all faiths and nationalities, etc.).

Raising demands doesn’t empower the bourgeoisie, they already have the legal and physical power. They have the bourgeois laws that enforce private property. They have the police that arrest, brutalize, and murder people who stand up to the capitalist system. The power is already theirs. Our workers power, the power of the 99%, can only be realized when workers unite across racial, gender, sexual, faith, and international lines.

To tap into this power, the actual living, breathing individuals that make up the 99% have to be reached out to. The only way to reach out to the masses is through demands, slogans, and protests. When an individual comes across a demand or slogan they have the same affect as when a corporation puts out an add or catch-phrase for their company (i.e. “I’m lovin’ it” or “built Ford tough”). Advertising, like slogans and demands are something large numbers of individuals can see and then potentially identify with.

Just as advertising draws individuals from the masses to certain corporations or products, so too political movements and organizations must raise demands and slogans that reach out to the masses and convince larger and larger sections of the 99% that the occupy movement does indeed represent their best interests and that it is necessary to actively participate in it.

Protests are that all important physical way of demonstrating a show of force. Just like the former USSR used to parade around missiles, and the US still has its militaristic “air shows” in major cities every summer, a march or protest is an important way for the masses to demonstrate the level of support a particular cause or demand has. 

But also, a protest provides a physical and (generally) safe space for people interested in the demands and politics of the movement to learn to participate, to feel the power of being surrounded by like-minded comrades, and become activists who will in-turn help pull in more people to join the struggle.

The mass marches that have occurred, literally, around the world since the occupy movement kicked off has been a major source of inspiration to billions of people. The lesson is that we, the 99%, the working class, are not alone and that we are capable of organizing ourselves to fight back against the right-wing, the police, and the 1%.

After years of the right-wing and bourgeois media promoting the idea that the Left is dead and protest doesn’t matter, we are relearning that protests do matter and that they can help revive and rebuild the Left to fight for a better world. 

The only way to win a better world is to involve the masses, the 99%, the working class. To mobilize and organize the 99%, we need demands and slogans that resonate with our brothers and sisteres against the bourgeoisie, against war, as well as against racism, sexism, and homophobia. 

All over I hear people at work and amongst my loved ones say, “I like the occupy movement, but what are they fighting for?” the majority of the people who have actively participated have had a gut-reaction and identified with the movement and tried to build it. But this instinctive identification with the class war can only continue for so long without a more deliberate attempt to draw people in through slogans and protests that more and more people can identify with and broaden the political debate in this country while also pushing it to the Left.

A better world is possible: Occupy everything, demand everything.

HOW TO BECOME A MARXIST: 27 – Capitalism, The Industrial Revolution, and Socialism

I’ve been having a bit of writers block regarding how to explain the Industrial Revolution and its relevance to both human history in its past, current, and future forms. On top of that, the 99% have hit the streets from Egypt, Greece, Spain, New York, Japan, and beyond! For the first time in a few generations the masses are on the move and starting to wake up to their collective existence and collective power!

But back to the post… The first two things to say about the development of heavy industry is that it began the process if mechanizing labor in a major way, unlike was ever previously dreamed. The machines were able to multiply the labor of one person 100x over. 

Heavy industry is to production what power steering is to driving. With the least amount of exertion human beings are able to use the machines to build the homes, create the clothing, and produce the food we all need at speeds and quantities that can end hunger, homelessness, and all other forms of economic humiliation.

But where did the machines come from? Why hadn’t anyone made them before? The answers to this question are too long for this single post, but a few major points are worth understanding.

1) The development of heavy industry required unprecedent amounts of wealth to form the material basis for their invention and development. In a world divided into classes, the only way to get this extreme wealth was to steal it while underwriting the theft through slavery (i.e. a double theft).

Europe was able to develop heavy industry long before all other parts of the world by robbing the Americas and Africa to develop its industry over a few centuries. For another example, Stalinist Russia developed its heavy industry by hyper-exploiting its own population with concentration camps. For a more modern example, India is currently one of the fastest growing industrial powers. A major portion of the development of its modern industry has involved the displacement of “Tribals,” or Adivasi, in the central parts of India. 

Developing heavy industry, under capitalism, requires hyper-exploitation and unbridled access to raw materials.

2) The development of heavy industry also required an economic system that put a premium on labor for profit. So while other previous socieites focused on individual, family, or communal labor for subsistence; capitalism is a system based on deliberately producing way beyond mere subsistence for the purpose of selling everything that has been produced. 

The competion created by the market system where, without any logic or planning, various capitalists try to sell whatever they can in competitiom with one another, created the competitive drive to streamline labor to make it more productive to better compete against other capitalists.

The hyper-wealth coming from the Americas could fund both the materials, the research, and the progressive development of smaller and more primitive machines that would eventually evolve into the heavy industry that changed the world with mass production.

So why hasn’t the industrial revolution ended poverty? In fact, why has it been used instead to throw billions into poverty, created ecological disaster, and international war? It comes down to who controls the machines. The machines are just that, machines. They are at the mercy of whichever CLASS is in control of society. So while the capitalist class is based on competition and profit, they will use the instruments of society to meet those interests.

So what if the working class could lay its hands on the machines and democratically control them? The working class is not built on competition. Instead, the experience of the working class is of cooperation in the workplace and the desire for democracy both inside and outside the work place. While capitalists are supposed to compete for market share, workers are supposed to cooperate to produce.

Someone recently found my blog by typing the question: “What can Marxism offer economically developing nations?” Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing here, but it is was something like that. That got me thinking, “what can’t it offer?”

For starters, Marxism is all about internationalism. It is opposed to the division of the world into competing nations, which inevitably results in the division between oppressor and oppressed nations. Marxism supports the struggle against Imperialism by oppressed nations in both political and armed resistance. Though ultimately, Marxists stand for the abolition of all nations because the working class has no country. We are everywhere and the whole world is ours.

But also, this got me thinking about economics and industry. In a democratically run run society, which would include a democratically planned economy, individual nations woukd not have to struggle to develop heavy industry independent of, and in competition against, other capitalist nations.

The reason Stalin’s Russia and today’s bourgeois-democratic India have hyper-exploited their populations (and the populations of others) is because the nations that were able to industrialize first exist in a competitive capitalist economy in which it does pay to share technology because that evens the competitive playing field. So while the industrialized nations use their technological might for imperialism, weaker capitalist nations hyper-exploit “their own” lower classes to catch up.

But of we lived in a society with an international, democratically planned economy, a socialist economy, that emphasized human need over corporate greed, the less industrialized countries could be provided with the necessary technology to improve living standards for people all over the world.

Moreover, some aspects of industry would nit even need toe shared, per se, since the currently existing levels of industrialization already have the potential to provide for everyone. 

For socialism to be possible, it required the technology and science to end scarcity. The capitalism’s international spread and drive to profit have created the international networks and technology that make unimaginable amounts of wealth possible. The question now is who gets the “legal” right to control the machines that produce this wealth, and the wealth itself? Should the capitalists hold the right to private property over the machines (i.e. the capital) and its wealth, or should it be democratically owned and used by the people who work the machines and produce the wealth?

These are the questions the world is starting to ask. The “Occupy” protests have spread around the world and they are beginning to ask the same questions internationally: “do we need to live in a capitalist society,” and “what kind of a better world can we build?”

A better world is possible: Occupy everywhere and demand everything.

Ten Years After 9/11: A Socialist’s Perspective (The World Scene)

Technical issues. Will update.