Enteghad

Over the last few months, I noticed one particular thing: What is value, anyway? And has "value" always existed, or is this category something peculiar to capitalism? And wait, what does all this have to do with commodity production? One question opened my mind to the next, but where are the answers? The Question Of Questions: What Is Value? Many Marxists already fail at this "simple" question, what actually is value in Marxist economic theory?  The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. -Karl Marx:  Capital: Critique Of The Political Economy     Is the introductory sentence of Marx's work "Das Kapital" and already contains a lot of explanations about "value", first it is said that only in capitalist societies wealth occurs as an "a...

Is fascism really making a comeback? In recent years, I have observed (especially here, in Germany) that right-wing parties are gaining more and more popularity, such as the "right-wing conservative" and "nationalist" AfD (Alternative for Germany), but also small parties like the NPD (National "Democratic" Party of Germany) or the "Third Way", etc. So is it happening again, is fascism returning as it was in power in Germany in the 20s and 30s? Of course, I cannot predict the future, but there is a kind of trend emerging, the national liberation of the Third World is progressing, the labor aristocracy in the imperialist motherland notices this and begins to act actively according to its class interest, as does the petty bourgeoisie. At present, however, things look less critical, why? I would like to explain this now: Let us go back in time, after 1920, to Germany, when fascism arose as a fresh new movement from the dying German petty bourgeoisie,...

In my last entry, I criticized the stubbornly persistent petty-bourgeois mindset of First World communists. Today I turn to a special, (relatively) fast-growing movement in the imperialist heartland, the so-called "Principally Maoism", mainly represented by the Norwegian "Tjen Folket" and its German and Canadian offshoots. Now, when they say "Principally Maoism", they are really only saying that they want to emphasize Maoism as the third stage of development of Marxism. They call their actual "Maoism" "Maoism Gonzalo-Thought" or "Maoism Principally Gonzalo-Thought" respectively, although there is still a big argument about this point (yes, very proletarian to argue about naming, surely the Bolsheviks also spent an eternity on this; for the sake of simpleness I will just refer to them as M-GT which is the abbreviation for "Maoism Gonzalo-Thought). In "Maoism Gonzalo-Thought there are two main aspects, broadly speaking...

Just the other day I noticed that many Marxists who want to bring their ideas, or Marxism of course, into the masses are not quite clear about their own class position and the consciousness that has arisen from it. Isn't it strange that you start making other people class conscious when you don't know your class consciousness? Accordingly, I would like to present here the story about my studies of my own consciousness. Of course, my studies started with the following question "Why am I a communist anyway?"  The question was not easy for me to clarify, a long time I tried to think about it or to solve it in conversations with others for the time being unsuccessfully. I knew that part of it comes from my communist family history and my background, but as a materialist there must have been some material cause or some reason from my class base. Then, after a long period of study (of Dialectical Materialism), I gradually came to the causes of my orientation. First, I found...

In the contemporary left scene, there are still problems with defining a "class" precisely and explaining the class basis of an ideology or first of all the material basis of a class. Yet V. I. Lenin in his work "A Great Beginning Heroism Of The Workers In The Rear" (Lenin's Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 409-434) has already precisely defined the phenomenon of "class": Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a def...