Tag: Karl Marx

Marx/Engels: On the Question of Free Trade

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Karl Marx, On the Question of Free Trade

To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created – for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.

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How Henry R. Luce and Clare Boothe Luce helped turn America on to LSD + Some Notes

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)
The German Ideology

The Time and Life Acid Trip: How Henry R. Luce and Clare Boothe Luce helped turn America on to LSD. (archived)

I accidentally came across this when I was looking into Henry Luce, some more. It doesn’t mention Luce’s ties to the CIA, i.e. Operation Mockingbird. The notes are from another project that I’ve been slowly working on. That one I won’t be publicizing until I’m finished with it.

Related & Notes:

Stephen Siff: Henry Luce’s Strange Trip: Coverage of LSD in Time and Life, 1954-68

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More notes on the marriage of RAND and SeaLight

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Understanding and Countering China’s Maritime Gray Zone Operations | RAND

As noted, there appear to be real challenges working through the necessary technologies to support command messaging efforts from being able to acquire simple programs, such as Adobe [1], that can help improve image quality of released content to access to social media. It would seem prudent that an assessment of such issues should be conducted by the command with necessary remediation actions undertaken when the new commander comes into USINDOPACOM.

…

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) at the U.S. Department of State [2], for example, partially funds the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative [Center for Strategic and International Studies]. The GEC, the State Department, or DoD should seek to identify other voices that can support and that can more credibly communicate key messages.

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The Meaning of the Right to Self-Determination and its Relation to Federation

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination

The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation. Concretely, this political, democratic demand implies complete freedom to carry on agitation in favour of secession, and freedom to settle the question of secession by means of a referendum of the nation that desires to secede. Consequently, this demand is by no means identical with the demand for secession, for partition, for the formation of small states. It is merely the logical expression of the struggle against national oppression in every form. The more closely the democratic system of state approximates to complete freedom of secession, the rarer and weaker will the striving for secession be in practice; for the advantages of large states, both from the point of view of economic progress and from the point of view of the interests of the masses, are beyond doubt, and these advantages increase with the growth of capitalism. The recognition of self-determination is not the same as making federation a principle. One may be a determined opponent of this principle and a partisan of democratic centralism and yet prefer federation to national inequality as the only path towards complete democratic centralism. It was precisely from this point of view that Marx, although a centralist, preferred even the federation of Ireland with England to the forcible subjection of Ireland to the English.

Related:

Vladimir Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

Related:

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1893: Engels to Franz Mehring

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1893: Engels to Franz Mehring

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.

Related:

Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh: Marx/Engels Letters (PDF)

Lenin: Bourgeois And Proletarian Democracy

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Bourgeois And Proletarian Democracy

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor. It is this truth, which forms a most essential part of Marx’s teaching, that Kautsky the “Marxist” has failed to understand. On this—the fundamental issue—Kautsky offers “delights” for the bourgeoisie instead of a scientific criticism of those conditions which make every bourgeois democracy a democracy for the rich.

Related:

Lenin Collected Works: Volume 28 (PDF)

Karl Marx, Jenny von Westphalen and Engels On Love and Marriage

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Karl Marx, Jenny von Westphalen and Engels
On Love and Marriage

From Jenny von Westphalen in Trier to Karl Marx in Paris, 18 August 1844.

The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. The relation of man to woman is the most genuine relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become his natural essence. The relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need: the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need.

… If you love without evoking love in return – if through the vital expression of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune.

Private Property and Communism, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.