#marxism

Welcome to my Tumblr, comrades! I go by "z," but "ziggy" works too. "comrade" is even better. I'm a Millennial she/they socialist-feminist from Maryland, United States (I like "Turtle Island" better). 😊

I was initially going to use this blog strictly for educating baby leftists and answering questions related to history and Marxist theory. The plan was to have a separate blog for talking about myself and expressing myself creatively, but I have decided against that.

Simply being my(silly)self might help some folks feel less intimidated by theory and history. I’ll be the first to admit that the first time I picked up Capital vol. I, I couldn’t get through more than a few pages. I ended up joining a study group that a local org did weekly on Zoom, and I am incredibly happy that I did!

Let me just say—don’t try to start with Capital if you’re just starting out. In fact, you’re never expected to read it. Understanding the subject matter is what’s important, and in the age of the internet, you can learn in a variety of ways.

As soon as I get a little free time, I plan to add resources for learning theory, as well as links to orgs that you can check out. Even if you don’t agree with everything that an org stands for, it’s important for us to connect, organize, learn, and help one another. Joining an org may provide you with opportunities such as staying up to date and attending protests, demonstrations, panels, volunteering opportunities and more.

Right now, it’s important for folks to focus on finding ways to connect and be involved in their communities. Instead of avoiding your Republican neighbor, invite them to dinner and discuss common values. After finding ways to connect, try sprinkling in some propaganda. Do it without using trigger words—i.e. socialism, bourgeoisie, planned economy, dictatorship, etc.

Stop making the excuse, “I don’t want to get political.” Newsflash—every decision that you make throughout the day that affects another human being in some way, is political! Do you have values that you hold close to your heart like boycotting generative A.I. or helping the unhoused population? Oops—you’re political!

If we can organize effectively, we just might make it as a species. I have been involved in political activism for over two decades, and I have seen a lot of passion and effort by regular working-class people, but I will say this—this next generation of young people are a different breed. They give me hope at a time when hope is a little hard to come by.

This introductory post is running a little long, so I won’t add more to it. Feel free to reach out to me or share something you find useful or important.

Despite the fact that I was very critical of the past chapters, I must admit that this one is fairly good overall. My immediate issues are primarily with wording - "the real movement" is lingo most often used by Italian left-communists that stems from "The German Ideology" by Marx:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

It's not used very often outside of this context, from my experience.

The chapter readily conflates "social democracy" and "democratic socialism", which may cause a lot of confusion amongst readers but is, in actuality, a justified conflation. It is a distinction without a difference; the latter claims to want to attain "socialism" through democratic means, whereas the former wants a "mixed economy", but in actuality, the differences are purely superficial and both political currents produce identical results in practice. The label of "democratic socialism" is merely a reaction to the obvious opportunist capitulation of present-day social-democrats, who themselves used to be much like the present-day democratic socialists, having been forced to give in to material pressures to survive. This capitulation rightfully labels the social-democrats as being "uninterested in building socialism", yet democratic socialists can't help but adopt the same methods in the hope of different results. The democratic socialists today are precisely the political current that calls for a reformist programme to overcome capitalism, and they follow in the footsteps of great historical social-democrats - hence it makes sense, from a modern perspective, to label Lasalle, Ebert, and the Gotha Programme as "democratic socialist". I would argue these historical social-democrats were even more committed to the proletarian cause than today's democratic socialists. There are a lot of neat and simply explained principles contained within this chapter, so people new to Marxism should absolutely give it a read! P.S. it is in this chapter that I noticed a lack of concrete perspective when it comes to political action. This is the case with a lot of leftist and Marxist writings - political action is always abstracted as something "you" or "I" can do.

So what is there to be done? Well, first, class collaborationism in all forms must be replaced by class solidarity on the working class’s part, and class traitorism on the bourgeois class’s part. Class traitorism, in this case, would mean a defection of a member of the bourgeoisie from the greater group in support of the working class. This, paired with a wide class movement amongst the working class, would be revolutionary.