““At one pole, there stands the most enormous machinery of state terrorism and international intimidation and blackmail. This camp includes the American government and ruling elite, the only force, which has used nuclear bombs against people, reducing hundreds of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into ashes within seconds. A state that slaughtered millions in Vietnam and razed and ruined their country for many years by chemical bombardments.

MORE…

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/02/iranian-communist-comrade-views.html

But while these struggles are an important beginning, they are going to have to go a lot further if we are going to begin to turn the tide. Workers and the oppressed are going to have to challenge the whole profit-driven logic of capitalism and introduce a new social order of freedom and mass democracy.

The high point of resistance has been the Arab revolutions, in particular the Egyptian revolution. The Egyptian revolution is a brilliant illustration of the whole process of revolution – of how a struggle in defence of living standards and for basic democratic rights can and must, if it is to succeed, spill over into a challenge to the whole basis of capitalist rule.

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But the still unfolding Egyptian revolution sends a powerful message to those suffering injustice the world over. Mere tinkering with the system will not win real change. Only a revolutionary movement has a chance of ending the inequality and barbarism of the current system.

http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7219:why-we-need-a-revolution&Itemid=403

“I am not complaining. I am merely describing what is happening in a revolutionary process. We have chosen to ride these contradictions, always keeping this in mind – everything that favours the broad masses is suitable, everything that enables common action is suitable. Sometimes you stumble, and certainly over time other kinds of contradictions will emerge… [but] any revolutionary process stagnates if it does not have contradictions.”[1]

http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=6663&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateandcapitalism%2FpEtD+%28Climate+and+Capitalism%29

For Marx, the crux of capitalism’s doom is a concept known as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF). This concept may be foreign to some, but the TRPF finds a fitting sibling in the law of diminishing returns discussed in mainstream economics. For Marx, the TRPF is the key for why capitalism is an unsustainable system. In order to deal with the TRPF, capitalists would use countervailing influences such as bailouts, credit expansion, foreign trade, and reducing wages in order to postpone the inevitable collapse of capitalism — in other words, capitalists would use counteracting tactics to effectively kick the can down the road

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To say the least, one might argue that Marx did not foresee the great lengths that capitalists would go in ingeniously crafting innovative countervailing influences to deter the TRPF. One might also argue that the capitalists found their respective “thermonuclear device” of countervailing influences in the form of Keynesian monetary policy. Keynesianism is pretty much the atomic bomb of counteracting influences to the TRPF. Whereas Marx may have viewed capitalism’s collapse as a superstructural phenomenon as being near in the future, arguably Keynesian monetary policy, overpopulation, credit expansion, and foreign trade have extended capitalism’s course for decades — in the words of economist Nouriel Roubini, delaying the “final day of reckoning”.
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Even then though, for Marx capitalism does not collapse thereby necessarily bringing about socialism; Marx did recognize alternatives to socialism in the historical progression; I’ve previously mentioned alternatives including barbarism and extinction. In theory, for Marx capitalism could endure to such a point where by virtue of man’s desire to survive, the capitalist system becomes impractical. The severity of crises increases over time to a breaking point. At that point, the capitalist superstructure has become so weakened that it is a mere frail shell of what it once was.

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One may contend that the history and collapse of the USSR and free-market reforms in China and Cuba suggest that Marx was wrong. However, in considering the historic superstructural progression from ancient society to feudalism to capitalism going forward to socialism, the spearhead of the developing transition from capitalism to socialism would probably not occur in Russia or China, but rather in the US and Western Europe…the cutting edge of the historical process. If it is true (per Marx’s theory) that no superstructure collapses until all the productive forces of the superstructure have been developed, then it makes sense to say that the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism would be expected to occur more so in the US and Western Europe, rather than in Russia or China. That being the case, the completion of such a superstructural transition may not occur for hundreds of years into the future

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http://www.benzinga.com/general/politics/12/02/2353675/capitalism-today-atlas-shrugging-or-atlas-on-life-support-part-1-of-2

Lenin’s conception of revolutionary organization has been distorted beyond all recognition. In part, these distortions are the work of people who continued to look upon Russia as socialist after Stalin came to power. This required accepting the idea that a Leninist “vanguard” party demanded blind obedience.

MORE…

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/17/behind-the-lies-about-Lenin

The bill, SB 2106, would slash the current Florida tipped minimum wage of of $4.65 an hour to the federal standard of of $2.13 an hour, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Restaurants would have to promise that employees would make at least $9.98 an hour with tips to qualify for the new wage.

“We are being brave and bold and being statesmen and not politicians,” Republican state Sen. Nancy Detert, the committee’s chair, asserted, adding that the bill had been requested by the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/17/florida-bill-would-slash-minimum-wage-for-tipped-workers/

Together with David Blood, senior partner of ‘green’ fund firm Generation Investment Management, the environmental activist has crafted a blueprint for “sustainable capitalism” he wants the financial industry to adopt to support lasting economic growth.

“While we believe that capitalism is fundamentally superior to any other system for organising economic activity, it is also clear that some of the ways in which it is now practised do not incorporate sufficient regard for its impact on people, society and the planet,” Gore said.

At a briefing ahead of Thursday’s launch, David Blood said capitalism has been blighted with short-termism and an obsession with instant investment results, which had ramped up market volatility, widened the gap between rich and poor and deflected attention from the deepening climate crisis.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/16/sustainablecapitalism-idUSL5E8DG45E20120216

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/02/farage-globalist-troika-driving-greece.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MishsGlobalEconomicTrendAnalysis+%28Mish%27s+Global+Economic+Trend+Analysis%29

The roots of the epidemic, scientists say, appear to lie in the grueling nature of the work performed by its victims, including construction workers, miners and others who labor hour after hour without enough water in blazing temperatures, pushing their bodies through repeated bouts of extreme dehydration and heat stress for years on end. Many start as young as 10. The punishing routine appears to be a key part of some previously unknown trigger of chronic kidney disease, which is normally caused by diabetes and high-blood pressure, maladies absent in most of the patients in Central America.

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killing more than 24,000 people in El Salvador and Nicaragua since 2000

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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_CENTRAL_AMERICA_MYSTERY_DISEASE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-02-12-00-00-37

1. Communists distinguish themselves from other supporters of socialism in that their conceptions of the future social order and the path leading to it are based upon a theory of history,historical materialism, the essence of which was worked out by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The theoretical content of Marxism-Leninism is determined and enriched by practical political experience. The theory still retains the experiences of the workers’ movement in the period of its formulation in the midnineteenth century. It reflects these struggles as they developed historically, including the controversies and contradictions. The truth content of the theory arises from the fact that consistent positions have been drawn from these struggles. Even wrong positions, later corrected, had not been adopted without reason; one must learn from them, just as one learns from all mistakes.

2. As a theory of history (drawing upon a comprehensive understanding of processes of nature and the relationship between nature and history, upon dialectics of nature and dialectical materialism), Marxism-Leninism, by its very essence cannot be a dogma but a theory that assimilates history. Where it became mere dogma it very quickly lost touch with reality. Loss of creative theoretical development led to errors in the development of its practice and false conclusions. The communist movement has experienced such errors in its theoretical development even while its creative development continued.

3. That a theory is capable of development does not mean that it can be changed in any arbitrary way. Marxism-Leninism would no longer be itself if it were to discard the recognition that all history is a history of class struggles. The basis of its scientific analysis of historical processes is the insight that the decisive driving force in history is the development of productive forces and their corresponding production relations, and that the development of productive forces proceeds in ever-present contradiction with the institutionalized stable form of production relations. Analysis of an existing social (and that includes political) situation and development of an appropriate political strategy depend on this insight and are based on the understanding of the general foundations and structural essence of the social formation, including its numerous particular operational mechanisms and contradictions. Indispensable to Marxism-Leninism is also dialectics, in its twofold aspect as a universal principle of the interconnectedness of the contradictory forms of motion and as a method of representing these contradictory forms of motion. This means that reality is a multifaceted unity: it is continually changing; its motion results from the mutual interaction of contradictions on each other; and in this motion the qualitatively new arises from the accumulation of quantitative changes. A basic understanding of Marxist-Leninist theory is that social consciousness is determined by social being. The contradictions of social being express themselves in social consciousness so that human beings confronted by the contradictions of social being arrive at their various individual positions on the basis of their interests, traditions, experiences, and understanding. Finally, basic contradictions manifest themselves in class positions.

4. Human beings are not the helpless objects of a fatalistic historical process, but are always the active subjects of history. Nonetheless human behavior, when guided exclusively or primarily by private interests and personal motivations, can have unanticipated results. Opaque social structures change intended outcomes, as it were behind the backs of the individuals. Good will alone, therefore, does not suffice to make the world better; mere morality is not a political principle (no more than charity can remove the source of poverty); a theoretical understanding of the relation between individual and society is necessary. A political movement to change the world to reach a specific goal cannot succeed if it derives its strategy and actions simply from the desired outcome or a cross-section of average individual opinions. This would be to reproduce the errors of bourgeois conceptions of democracy. The desired change in society, whether through planned reforms with the final goal of revolutionary transformation or through a revolution, requires a theoretically guided organization, that is, a political party sustained by the collective will of its supporters. In order for the will of all to become a common will capable of being translated into action, individual members must subordinate themselves to the organizational form, reining in their individual particularities of course not without prior participation in forming that common will; this principle of discipline is a simple condition of survival and effectiveness for all revolutionary parties.

5. The basic contradiction of all class societies is the private appropriation of social wealth whatever the form of the relations of production. In previous historical stages, each change in the relations of production shifted only the structures of appropriation, and shifted the responsibility for the use of the social wealth from one class to another. With these shifts, the mechanisms of exploitation became ever more abstract and opaque. This abstraction has reached, under capitalism and especially in its highly developed, state-monopolistic, and transnationally organized form, this abstraction has reached a level in which the overwhelming part of humanity is excluded from the appropriation of surplus value and decisions about its use, and in which the mechanisms of the accumulation of capital, the creation and reinvestment of surplus value, have also become independent of the decision makers. The class interest of that class at whose expense and against whose self-interest social wealth is created lies in the alteration of property relations and, because it is the only class that is opposed to these structures of appropriation, the establishment of a new social order is its historical mission, which it has the possibility of achieving. The opposition between capital and labor establishes the identity of the working class (regardless of the differences in the character of the work performed by its members) as the class that is in a position to abolish the capitalist relations of production. To materialize itself in activity as a class (and not just a sum of individuals) and thereby become the subject of this historical mission it must acquire consciousness of the situation in which human beings in general and members of the working class in particular find themselves, that is, a class consciousness. Various levels of class consciousness will obviously arise from different experiences  and not at all solely through theory; but class consciousness must always be grounded on the theory of class society and class struggle.

6. A new qualitative element in the development of the productive forces emerges in connection with the scientific and technological revolution. On the one hand, science and technology can today guarantee a generally high material standard of living if a just system of appropriation and distribution were institutionalized. On the other hand, science and technology also make possible the destruction of the human species and large parts of nature. Indeed, the humanity of the human species is threatened by genetic or psychophysical manipulation. The capitalist form of production relations, which makes the accumulation of capital and its private control and appropriation the law of motion of social life, cannot solve this contradiction. Rather, the contradiction is intensified many times in mass misery (as in the Third World), in the continually growing danger of war, and in mental impoverishment and the distortion of the free unfolding of the personality. Only a socialist society provides the perspective of a human future worthy of humanity.

7. The perspective of communism connects the objective laws of history, which are the laws of reproduction of human conditions of life, with the subjective striving of each person toward self-realization and happiness. Self-realization, however, is not conceivable without reference to and consideration of fellow human beings; self-realization is not the right of the fist of the individual at the expense of others but has its foundation in the insight that the individual can only be himself or herself in solidarity with others. Solidarity and consciousness of the social nature of human beings, that is, a socialist morality, underlie the program of the Communist Manifesto, that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels 1976, 506). In capitalist societies the new attitude toward life is formed in the struggle for socialism, in socialist societies, in the struggle for the construction of socialism. This struggle requires an organizational form: the theoretical understanding of the social and political processes of the present and the proposal of goals for the future must be worked out collectively by the members of an organization, mediated by them, and translated into political action. A communist party is the organization in which this occurs (including the errors that always occur in real-life decisions); as the “place” where the conception of a socialist future is proposed and where the present strategy is worked out with this conception in mind, it is the revolutionary vanguard of the working class (even in a nonrevolutionary period).

8. The historical mission of the working class and the task of the communist party therefore have two aspects: first, the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and thereby of the private appropriation of surplus value brings about the changes in the relations of production that have become necessary because the development of the forces of production in the scientific and technological revolution can no longer be sensibly controlled by private interests; a comprehensive plan for the entire society is required. Second, the working class in its struggle for self-determination against exploitation, oppression, and injustice brings about the goal of establishing a society in which free and equal citizens can develop their talents in full; only such a society, a communist society, can guarantee human rights.

9. The construction of socialism, with communism emerging from it, will be a long and contradictory process even after the abolition of the capitalist property relations. Presocialist forms of consciousness and behavior last long after the institutional changes, some for several generations. Class positions do not disappear in one fell swoop; that is, the class struggle also continues, most of all the struggle over the new socialist worldview; accordingly, theoretical work and ideological clarity acquire great importance. This is the more so, as the path to socialism does not run parallel and simultaneously in the world as a whole, but rather must be traversed by some socialist countries under conditions of competing systems in which the metropolitan centers of capitalism will still be economically stronger. Thus the construction of socialism essentially depends upon the communist party giving leadership to the social development and providing guidance to other social forces in the socialist countries. This leading role must not be permitted to solidify into bureaucratic mechanisms (a danger to which it is subject at all times), but must be achieved and maintained with political power.

10. It is well to remember the insight of Karl Marx that “no social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed” (Marx 1975). Capitalism today, in the development of its productive forces, begets external contradictions to the point of threatening the extinction of humanity in this respect it prepares in its womb the transition to socialism. However, capitalism is still capable of organizing within its own framework the continued development of the forces of production, even though with increasing deterioration of the quality of life. For this reason, the struggle against capitalism is still the main task of communists throughout the world.

http://csminn.cpusa.org/holzv30.pdf