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It really depends on where you are. In south European countries interest for communism is growing again due to the crisis and the austerity plan and will continue to grow since the austerity will inevitably lead to more poverty among the population. The problem seems to be that Western Communist Parties are too much institutionalized within the system. Revolutionary consciousness is lacking in the direction of those parties but hopefully this will change in the near future.
Scary.
Luís Henrique
Right people don't care about communism which is why we have to work with the consciousness that exists, and vie to expand it to other realms. however nobody's going to fight for communism if we can't keep unions and social services intact, which themselves have had to been struggled for in the past.
For student organizing in california, join this group!
http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=1036
http://socialistorganizer.org/
"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
If they're institutionalized into the system they're not a communist party.
For student organizing in california, join this group!
http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=1036
http://socialistorganizer.org/
"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
Unions have been almost entirely incorporated into the bourgeois superstructure (minus the IWW); they had their hey day, however as a means of revolutionary struggle, they are a lost cause. Work with the rank and file? Absolutely. However to attempt this archaic idea of wrestling the leadership away from the union bureaucrats is a dead end.
Union bureaucracies have been incorporated into the bourgeois superstructure, but to refuse to work with and protect organizations that rise organically, and which historically have been led by communists, would be stupid. We need to support any rank and file movements to get rid of, or to work around the bureaucracy, as in we NEED to support strikes and other working class actions, seeing as the bureaucracy will never support and will act against those.
I don't advocate wrestling away the leadership, but at some point we need to recruit union members to a real communist party, which doesn't exist yet, that's all i'm saying. IWW and union militants like James P. Cannon, Ferrel Dobbs, and the Dunne brothers were some of the founders of the Communist Party in the U.S. which is a lesson that we could learn from.
For student organizing in california, join this group!
http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=1036
http://socialistorganizer.org/
"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
And do you expect people to go on strike or go up against the state and risk their lives for something they do not care about?
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
Why do you think strikes and/or struggles against state forces have to be ideologically motivated?
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.
Marx, German Ideology (1845)
I care.
I expect people to strike and go against the State for what they care. Which starts by their immediate interests, wages, living conditions, rights, etc. I do expect people, through fighting for these, to realise that the capitalist system cannot on the long term accommodate their immediate interests, and so turn against the system.
Otherwise I wouldn't believe in class struggle, I would believe in intellectual strife between ideas.
Luís Henrique
As such, instead of trying to seek out people who care about "communism" in name, we should be looking for signs of movement. Probably there are more people who "care" than indicated by adding up the membership tallies of however many organizations.
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
I think it's of absolute importance that people know what they're fighting for. Overthrowing this system without knowing what to replace it with is a road to a new dictatorship.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
I think that when people start struggling for their immediate interests, they will naturally be more open to ideologies that contribute to their struggle.
Our goal, as communists, is not to conjure up some utopian society which will never correspond to material conditions (this is exactly what Marxism arose in opposition to), but to struggle for the interests of the proletarian class and to work to merge the workers movement with the Marxist one.
"Three days previously the men had had no thought of striking. Now they formed eager audiences for such extremists as Albert Parsons." - Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, p.26
1877, right before the Great Upheaval, the American proletariat's Paris Commune.
Maybe, but people will only learn what they are fighting for by fighting.
Luís Henrique
I'm not a real communist, and forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but I think one problem that communism faces is it's name.
For me it has a bit of negative meaning because of Stalin, Mao, North Korea and the cold war.
And because of that people don't care what communism is about, they get a negative feeling from the word because of what they associate it with and so the general public except for a few don't care about communism.
Priming comes to mind of what I'm meaning. But as I looked priming on the internet it seemed like a different meaning. I know there's a psychologic term for it.
