Red & Black

Notes

 

 

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 & Engels The German Ideology

 

 

Communism is not a party programme or a one party state. Communism is simply the movement to overthrow the conditions of life imposed by the rule of capital.  This statement is as true today as when in 1848 Marx wrote that workers had nothing to lose but their chains.

Yet the world of today is not 1848. The spectre of communism still haunts capitalism, but capitalism has evolved. This evolution has not ameliorated the need for revolution only the way the workers respond to it. The 'old' workers movement was composed of parties, unions and mass organizations. By and large those organizations have disappeared or been swallowed by 'mass' society. Those who seek to rebuild the left, to see a new 1917, or 1936, are chasing conditions which have long been superseded by the process of capitalist development. As against looking to such formal indicators as union membership, party votes or newspaper sales as indices of class struggle, rather look to strike figures, wildcats, sabotage and above all resistance to capitalism in all its forms.

 

 

Red & Black Notes is a libertarian socialist project based in Toronto, Canada. The focus of the project is twofold : To circulate information from a libertarian socialist perspective, both current and historical, and to provide a forum for discussion of those issues.

Red & Black Notes has no gospel to preach, no master manifesto for the masses to embrace or ignore, only a lingering sympathy with those historical currents such as council communism, which stressed the self mobilization of working people as a means to the new society. Red & Black Notes cooperates with other periodicals and organizations both in Canada and internationally in the pursuit of this goal.

 

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For the Abolition of Wage Labour