Roberto
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My first language is not English. I agree with you. What I meant is that, as you know as a Marxist, there are only human beings divided into two classes…the working class and the capitalists and the Ukrainians and the Russians are part of of the working class fighting each other when they should both be fighting to abolish capitalism which is the cause of all our ills.
What I meant to say is that if Putin is convicted or not, it should not be our concern since it is all legal games of all capitalists
The only reason that it is for me the first time that the western world, especially in this invasion, is because it was not the western countries that caused it…. for me it is all hypocrisy.
I am against all invasions but NATO is already at war with Russia and they are using the Ukrainian people and their army to fight with Russia.
you are falling in this game with them!Jean McCollister…
This these best statements so far
about this war and I wish everyone reading his humanitarian view of this tragedy we are living today!!!I am pessimistic and believe that the US
they want to prolong the situation in Ukraine as an instrument to change the Putin regime and the least is that they care about the civilians.
all of them Putin and NATO are playing with fire and the danger of a nuclear catastrophethank you very much for your greetings.
I’ve been reading your political platform for a while
I consider that you are the organization that most represents what socialism is and that as long as capitalism exists there will be no solution for humanity.
also then you are the best in explaining the misnamed “socialist” countries and the first to call them state capitalismI live in the United States.
Since I was very young I have followed the politics of this country and I can see the hypocrisy of the ruling class of this country like all the others in the world, but the sad thing is that the vast majority of the working class believes that here we are the good guys from the “movie “when the United States, its ruling classes, are partly responsible for this crisis.
I am against the invasion and expansion of NATO
and no drop of blood for this rotten system that if we don’t change our existence as a species could be annihilation..
Socialism or barbarismI live in the United States and I have never voted for the two capitalist parties. For me, here we do not have a true bourgeois democracy because the electoral colleges are a mockery of the popular vote.
For Trump and Bide they are instruments of the same capitalist class but for me Trump is the evil menis bad.
26 AUGUST 2020The world to come: What should we value?
If we are serious about learning from coronavirus, we will have to do more than applaud “essential workers” from our windows or change our priorities as individuals.
Human beings are the only species on Earth that do not know how they are supposed to live. All other species have a natural environment and a natural way to sustain their form of life. While some animals have to build things to make their environment what it ought to be (as in the case of beavers building dams), there is no question of what they ought to build and how the species ought to make a living for itself. As in all environments, things can go wrong: a falling rock can break the dam, the water can become poisoned, a virus may spread. Yet when something goes wrong in the life of beavers, it is not because they have the wrong idea of how to organise their lives. Indeed, beavers cannot have the wrong idea of how they should live, since it is set by their nature.
For human beings, by contrast, the question of how we should lead our lives is always at issue, even if we try to forget that fact. We can discover the ideal conditions for other species by studying their natural way of life. But we cannot discover the best way for us to live simply by studying our present or past societies. We are the only animals – among the species known to us – who do not have a given place in nature. We have to make a home for ourselves. By the same token, we are liable to create conditions that are inimical to our own flourishing. Thus, when we are hit by a pandemic, we cannot treat it merely as a natural, unfortunate event that happens to befall our form of life. Like all animals, we can be infected for contingent reasons, but unlike other animals, we are answerable for the social causes and consequences. A pandemic inevitably raises the question of who we are as a species and how we organise our societies.
Our ability to engage the question of who we are – and who we ought to be – is at the heart of what the young Karl Marx called our “species-being.” His notion is often dismissed as a naive appeal to a supposed human essence, but such a critique is misleading. The species-being of the human is precisely that we have no given essence. We are certainly subject to biological constraints – and we cannot even in principle transcend all such constraints – but for us there is always a question of how we are supposed to deal with these constraints.
Unlike other species where every generation repeats the same life cycle, our species has a history that reflects different ways of reproducing our life-form: we have been masters and slaves, lords and serfs, capitalists and wage labourers. Moreover, our species-being entails that we can take a stand on the goodness or badness of the way we live. As Marx underlines in Capital, we are the only animal that can imagine a better world than the one we inhabit, and transform the conditions of our existence in light of commitments rather than mere instincts.
Revolutionary change, however, cannot happen merely through imagination and ideas. It requires material transformation of how we sustain our lives through production and consumption. The existential questions of our lives – what we value – cannot be separated from the economic organisation of our society. We may profess that we value our lives, and the life of other species on the planet, as ends in themselves. But we live under an economic system where we cannot in practice treat one another as ends in ourselves. Rather, our economy requires that we treat one another as means (“human capital”) for the end of producing profit. What counts in a capitalist economy is that we are producing and consuming commodities, rather than that we are flourishing as human beings. Our well-being, and the well-being of the ecosystem of which we are a part, does not have any economic “value” in itself but only insofar as we can profit from it.
To grasp our responsibility for the environmental crisis, and have any chance of shaping a better world to come, Marx’s analysis of the problem of value is indispensable. As a result of the pandemic, many are now questioning our economic priorities and challenging production for profit. Yet these critiques are merely abstract and moralising unless they are linked to the objective conditions of our political economy. The generation of profit is our collective priority not because of what we have to think but because of what we have to do under capitalism. All of us depend for our survival on the profits that are accumulated in the form of capital and distributed as wealth. Without such “growth” in the economy there would be no wages, revenue, social welfare, or public goods, since the state itself is financed by the taxation of capital wealth.
As a consequence, production and delivery of vital goods was already built on sacrificing the lives of impoverished workers, even before the pandemic made that reality painfully clear. The generation of capital wealth has always depended and will always depend on those who have no choice but to be exploited as cheap labour, whether domestically or in poorer countries to which production is moved. If we are serious about learning from our historical experience, we will have to do more than applaud “essential workers” from our windows or change our priorities as individuals. Only the overcoming of capitalism through organised collective action can fulfil the commitment to a sustainable and flourishing world. We will be told that this is impossible, but the stakes could not be higher. The being of our species depends on it.
Martin Hägglund
I would like to know which is the best book on dialectical materialism.
If you in your organization share this philosophy.
I believe that knowing that we have only one life and that the universe is indifferent to our desires and fears is not an obstacle to fighting for a better world, on the contrary, it is a reason to change this capitalist system where most of us work more than we need for one minority that exploits us and allows us to live fully and limits our needs
Stop believing in God is the first step to stop believing in our masters who dominate us.
