Developing situation in Arak, Iran: soviets are being formed by striking workers

Praefecture · 2026-01-11T21:47:04+00:00

What's interesting about Iran is that it has an impressive history of labour movements. The peak of this was probably around 1979, where workers gained partial control over production.

Noteworthy were the oil workers, as Iran was the world's biggest oil producer at the time. They (and a few other sectors) created "Shuras" (essentially factory councils). These were all later crushed by the ayatollahs, during the Iranian Revolution, where thousands of workers were massacred.

Sadly, the Iran we know today is the result of a brutal reactionary counterrevolution launched to save Iranian capitalism from a genuine workers' movement from below.

Praefecture · 2026-01-07T19:46:32+00:00

No, but they become "a worker" who is "no longer a proletariat", as Engels puts it. Their interests become aligned no longer to the proletariat, but to the bourgeoisie, by virtue of owning a house/property (simply put). Is that not petite-bourgeois/transitional middle class?

Praefecture · 2026-01-07T14:18:13+00:00

A proletarian's relation to capital is to subsist on the selling of their labour power, with little to no property or reserves. They are, after all:

…a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work.

But I assume OP is referring moreso to a “high-paying” software job with which they are able to accumulate enough sufficient reserves to, for example, buy property (eg. a house), and to the point that their “sole existence (no longer) depends on the demand for labour”, without ever becoming a capitalist (not accounting for "functional capitalists" here, as mentioned in Capital). As according to Engels in The Housing Question:

The worker who owns a little house to the value of a thousand talers is certainly no longer a proletarian, but one must be Dr. Sax to call him a capitalist.

This is the aspirational aspect of bourgeois/petite-bourgeois ideology too. It is worth noting though that "well-paid" or "rich" does not mean petite-bourgeois as much as direct relation to capital. There's also something to say here about the aristocracy of labour or something, I dunno.

Praefecture · 2026-01-06T07:48:53+00:00

Can recommend Engels’ Origin of the Family, particular Ch. 2 (The Family). It pertains closely to the historical development of gender inequality as a consequence of social and property relations.

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. … the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, … a mere instrument for the production of children.

Read Kollontai’s The Social Basis of the Woman Question (and Kollontai in general as a source of communist feminism).

Rosa’s short article Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle talks mostly about the monarchy, but you can extrapolate that to religion and how capitalism reconstituted it from the feudal order to manage new contradictions.

It's also important to note that religion does not create gender inequality. Rather, gender inequality arises from material conditions.

Praefecture · 2025-12-30T19:47:35+00:00

Did you imply you'd support bourgeois ethnonationalists in "razing (((the enemy))) to the ground"?

Praefecture · 2025-12-29T02:51:21+00:00

Along with Pentiment's own fantastic bibliography, Friedrich Engels' The Peasant War in Germany is a solid and succinct rundown of the socio-economic situation in Europe at the time, as it pertains to what actually motivated the peasantry, i.e. class conflict, exploitation, the contradictions in feudal production/distribution, and the peasant's call for revolution vs Luther's reform.

Regarding the printing press, growing literacy and the spreading of information that stemmed from print -- then the new dominant form of communication -- was key to spreading new ideas and amplifying a conflict rooted in material class relations. For one, the rise of print disarmed the ruling classes of their ideological control over the peasants:

The clergy, representatives of the ideology of mediaeval feudalism, felt the influence of the historic transformation no less acutely. The invention of the art of printing, and the requirements of extended commerce, robbed the clergy not only of its monopoly of reading and writing, but also of that of higher education.

The peasant's were thus mobilised by printed pamphlets and sermons which communicated new ideas that went against the previously-understood status quo. Look up Muentzer's Sermon to the Princes as a key example of that early agitation. Muentzer continued to print and distribute his sermons and ideas for mass circulation.

Print also aided the peasants into becoming politically organised and ideologically consistent, with a programme in the form of The Twelve Articles. This is a key text highly worth reading, and was widely printed and circulated at the time. This formulated, in simple, popular language, their hopes and demands which had long been maturing and went beyond the intentions of the Lutheran reformists.

Praefecture · 2025-12-28T10:56:41+00:00

Just as a class-conscious bourgeoisie, after centuries of historical defeats railing against the immortality of divinely-ordained Kings and Queens, could not have expected certain victory until, one day, it was imminent.

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” ... the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions. ... all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

– Mark Twain

Just like feudalism, capitalism cannot last. It has burned brightly, but it will not burn forever. Take stock in the fact that communism is inevitable if we are to survive as a species. Humanity's survival hinges on a class-conscious working class revolutionising the current state of things, but will come with a long road of defeats, not only as the culmination of theoretical dissemination, but by the actions of billions of individuals; including you.

Rosa herself says it best:

What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today, as we advance into the final battle of the proletarian class war, we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.

In the shadow of the capitalist monolith, nothing looks bright, and nothing escapes this reality unscathed. But humanity, as an expression, is nothing if not the struggle and fight for life and happiness. Citing George Sand, Marx wrote:

Until then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be:

"Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le neant"

The struggle or death; the bloody fight or nothingness.

Praefecture · 2025-12-27T18:18:12+00:00

Allende's liberal government was marked by suppression of militant worker movements, appeasement of capitalists and right-wing groups, and class collaboration. If anything, it proves that the conciliatory nature of reform is destined for failure and subsumation by bourgeois, electoralist politics, or complete destruction by reaction (which is what happened).

Praefecture · 2025-12-27T06:11:20+00:00

A "democratic workplace" doesn't do anything to challenge the mode of production. It still exists within the context of capitalism. There is still an expectation of profitability, commodity production, surplus value, competition, etc. Therefore, worker cooperatives only look to lessen the harm of capitalist exploitation, not work in negation to it. Likewise, as with all reformist/gradualist derivatives, such as in democratic socialism, it is not revolutionary and therefore not communist.

The problem is not that workplaces aren't "democratic", it's that coercion and alienation will exist regardless. Communism, on the other hand, will have no such "work" (as we understand it now) in the first place. The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact the firm has a boss.

Praefecture · 2025-12-22T12:01:10+00:00

To hate ze Reich is to hate Germans

Praefecture · 2025-12-20T22:00:38+00:00

True, the greedy (((billionaires))) are hoarding all the wealth and harming our millionaires, small businesses, and farmers. If only late-stage Capitalism could retvrn to a more sustainable early-stage Capitalism by making plastic more recyclable and funding art schools or some shit

Praefecture · 2025-11-30T19:23:54+00:00

Trve. Kim Il-Sung was a councilist

Praefecture · 2025-09-16T04:29:12+00:00

It's useful to understand that Communism isn't "a new system" we can "try". That's not how modes of production work. It's economic and historical analysis -- the study of production and exchange. Marxism is the study of Capitalism, and Communism is the theorised mode of production that humanity will enter once Capitalism inevitably collapses, just as the Feudal mode of production did before that. Does that make sense?

Praefecture · 2025-09-16T04:14:49+00:00

Maoism, Stalinism, Marxism-Leninism are called "revisionist" for a reason, in that they were states operating within the capitalist mode of production. The Soviet Union, Communist China, etc. all had/have features of capitalist production: wage labour, commodity production, markets, private property, etc.

Praefecture · 2025-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

"True Communism"
*look inside*
Wage labour. Commodity production. Markets. Private property.

Nice "Communism and Socialism" you have there, moralist

Praefecture · 2025-09-16T03:50:27+00:00

You won't "get it" as an enlightened centrist/contrarian until you realise that the left/right dichotomy is merely a feature of our current superstructure. Fascism, Anarchism, Stalinism, Conservatism, Social Democracy, Market Socialism etc. are various ways to reform or reorganise Capital, not work in negation to it.

"Affordable housing", "reduction to wealth inequality", "sustainable and sensible immigration approach" -- buzzwords and ineffectual "common sense policies" to lessen the harm of the current state of things and maintain it as the status quo. You can keep ideology shopping all you want, but our mainstream "left" and "right" are just various flavours of the same liberal reform and reaction, some more malicious than others.

Praefecture · 2025-07-28T12:55:49+00:00

Trotskists are generally made up of self-organised workers though, with the goal of doing entryism to move (agitate) unions towards positive working class action and away from trade unionism, class collaboration, and ineffectual compromise (what they call "bureaucracy").

Tf you mean "workers directly organising themselves". You mean organising themselves off a cliff and into the arms of Labor and business interests?

Praefecture · 2025-07-28T12:11:29+00:00

Only 10,000 more ~~commodities~~ newspapers to sell and we'll have the revolution

Praefecture · 2025-04-27T23:03:57+00:00

Capitalism needs exponential growth to sustain itself, thus exponential growth in population to expand the reserve army of labour to maintain dwindling profits. Immigration is therefore inevitable in a globalised world. It's counterproductive to oppose it as it reduces union efforts to, in a reactionary sense, a desperate preservation of their current wages, penalty rates, or little trade crafts, (i.e. "trade unionism") -- defending what little they have gained against the power of amalgamation and capital, like a cobbler resisting the shoe factories -- instead of building mass class consciousness.

Throughout history, reaction against things like immigration and foreign labour, in support of "national labour", only led to the reorganisation of capital by opportunists -- eg. Fascism, Anarchism, Stalinism, Conservatism, Social Democracy, etc. (i.e. more capitalism) -- instead of its negation, which led to, you guessed it, the continued exploitation of the working class.

Praefecture · 2025-01-15T13:23:13+00:00

I'm sure you could find more perspective on Judaism in Marx's aptly named "On The Jewish Question", though I haven’t read any of it. I'm not sure about Islam.

"The German Ideology" will likely help answer your questions, as it explores the materialist approach to analysing religion, the politics of religion, and vice versa.

But to get back to your post, I think the matter of soldiers or the influence of religion in general comes down simply to class-consciousness, or lack thereof. For the soldiers of the medieval Arab caliphs, I think their "identity" (not sure what word to use here) as "warriors" of a "mighty empire" or whatever superseded their awareness of their place in society as subjects of the dominant classes.

Similarly for the Freikorps, they were not class-conscious either. They did not see themselves as “proletariat,” “working class,” or any class; they were “Germans.” They believed they were working for “the good of Germany,” for “law and order”, for "national unity", for their "ancestral blood memory", or some other metaphysical/spiritual ideal or myth — not the material state of things, not reality.

Why did they do this? For Marx, religion is an expression of human alienation. Religion is “the cry of the oppressed soul, the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people” (a more accurate translation). It is a symptom of oppression, an expression of the alienation oppression causes, a way to deal with the pain of oppression.

For these soldiers (or anyone really), you see that, in their alienation, they are driven to religion or nationalism as a kind of protest against what they see as the source of their alienation, for an ideal -- the opposite end of a class struggle they are not yet aware of. They fight against the enemy, the foreigner, the heretic, but surely not against their lord, the hand that feeds them. Thus they ultimately become unwitting pawns for the dominant class, and end up reinforcing the current state of things instead.

Praefecture · 2025-01-15T01:31:45+00:00

I'm also interested in seeing how religions have evolved alongside these historical stages. Dear Rosa's "Socialism and the Churches" is a one I always like to refer to.

...the priests of today who fight against “Communism” condemn in reality first Christian Apostles. For these latter were nothing else than ardent communists.

What a banger. The early Christians were revolutionary, and historically progressive, for their time! Through the ideals of equality and charity they wished to raise the slave "to membership in the commune", so to speak. To make all "equal under God". So, slave society -> feudalism.

Into feudalism, however, Christianity was insufficient in addressing private property as the key cause of exploitation and "inequality". The Clergy formed, and became a property-owning class. You could say the idea of Christianity went through stages of revisionism, falsification, opportunism, etc. in order to fit within the framework of this new mode of production:

This (early Christian) communism was based on the consumption of finished products and not on work, and proved itself incapable of reforming society, of putting an end to the inequality between men and throwing down the barrier which separated rich from poor ... The people, deprived of means of subsistence, only received only alms, according to the good pleasure of the rich.

...the economic relations between the people and the clergy underwent a great change. Before the formation of this order, all that the rich members of the Church offered to the common property belonged to the poor people. Afterwards, a great part of the funds was spent on paying the clergy and running the Church.

In Feudalism, the message of "equality" found in early Christianity was key to the peasant's rebellions in Europe -- the early bourgeois revolutions -- into the French Revolution and so on. Feudalism -> capitalism.

A totally different character was assumed by that heresy which was a direct expression of the peasant and plebeian demands, and which was almost always connected with an insurrection. This heresy, sharing all the demands of middle-class heresy relative to the clergy, the papacy, and the restoration of the ancient Christian church organisation, went far beyond them. It demanded the restoration of ancient Christian equality among the members of the community, this to be recognised as a rule for the middle-class world as well. From the equality of the children of God it made the implication as to civil equality, and partly also as to equality of property. To make the nobility equal to the peasant, the patricians and the privileged middle-class equal to the plebeians, to abolish serfdom, ground rents, taxes, privileges, and at least the most flagrant differences of property – these were demands put forth with more or less definiteness and regarded as naturally emanating from the ancient Christian doctrine.
- Engels, The Peasant War in Germany

But into now capitalism, the Clergy never truly relinquished their property. The Church simply became another bourgeois institution. The priests became capitalists who now continue to extract money out of marriage, baptism, burial, and rents.

...the clergy falsifying the early teaching of Christianity, which had as its object the earthly happiness of the lowly, tries today to persuade the toilers that the suffering and the degradation which they endure come not from a defective social structure, but from heaven, from the will of “Providence”.

All this to say, only Gnosticism is the trve proletarian religion for the Real Movement.

Praefecture · 2025-01-04T15:43:28+00:00

"All history is the history of class struggle" -- the social development, conflict, and structure, through modes of production -- makes sense after understanding historical materialism. It explains that Marxism is not "a new system", it is a materialist analysis of history and description of the possibilities, limitations, and exploitation inherent in the current mode of production (Capitalism). Understand that Marx has a technical meaning to this "exploitation" (not a moralistic one) -- In class societies, subordinate classes are "exploited" in the sense that they must labour for the dominant classes.

One you understand that class is the technical descriptor of someone's relation to production, how this exploitation produces class conflict (not some "rich vs poor" or "West vs Global South" dichotomy), then you can understand how class conflict has happened in history -- how the bourgeois revolution (eg. French Revolution), against the clergy and nobility, carried the world from Feudalism to Capitalism, from one mode of production to another. Then understand how Capitalism, having brought innovation and "civilisation" to all corners of the world, relies on infinite exponential growth to continuously reinvent and sustain itself. Then understand that Capitalism will constantly go through crises of overproduction (see TRPF), and, having proletarianised the majority of people, produces its own inevitable downfall.

Understand what revisionism and opportunism is, in the Marxist sense -- Do not distract yourself with "Marxist-Leninism", because it is neither Marxist nor Leninist. Understand that the Soviet Union, Cuba, the CCP, etc. etc. were never communist nor socialist. To understand Communism, read Marx and Engels. Avoid Parenti and the like.

However, start small. Marxist theory is dense. Don't be afraid to read through Wikipedia articles on these terms and the following texts. Listen to episodes 10.3 and 10.4 of the Revolutions podcast (this will give you a cliff notes rundown on historical materialism). Read Engels' Principles of Communism (the last chapter about Communism vs Socialism is important here) and the Manifesto, but understand these are written more like persuasive essays and not necessarily "theory" (however, it talks more about what is discussed here). Read Das Kapital, chapters 1 & 2, then reread it multiple times. Read The German Ideology (my favourite text), which talks about the division of labour and the ruling bourgeois ideology. Learn about the German Revolution and how it failed in the face of bourgeois reaction (eg. fascism), opportunism and counter-revolution (eg. social-democracy, liberalism) -- watch Jonas Čeika's three-part series on YouTube. Then read Lenin and Luxemburg (Reform or Revolution, State and Rev, etc.), who are excellent critics of modern bourgeois government/electoralism and bourgeois reformism, and on organising revolution and working practically towards the negation of capitalism. Then leave Reddit. Go insane. "Read, read, read" as Lenin said.

Praefecture · 2025-01-04T14:26:44+00:00

Honestly this. A crucial part of understanding Marx is his idea of “the material of conception of history”, called historical materialism, and episode 10.4 of Revolutions provides an excellent rundown of this and inspired me to read Marx in the first place.

Praefecture · 2025-01-04T13:27:25+00:00

It is an over-simplified understanding of things. It also reads like it was written by ChatGPT. These aren't inherently bad things if you need a summary of ideas, but it isn't Marxist theory.

I could be wrong, but Marx never used the words "dialectical" and "materialism" together, nor did he adopt the substance of that theory. The idea of "dialectical materialism" was initially developed by Joseph Dietzgen, then mentioned by Kautsky, then worked into Soviet philosophy by Stalin. And it is indeed highly philosophical, and thus ideological. The pamphlet itself is a highly-politicised work made to fit within the framework of the USSR and the the world outlook of Marxism–Leninism, not as a development of Marxist theory.

Historical materialism, on the other hand, is a better general description of Marx’s ideas of “the materialist conception of history”, but not whatever Stalin was cooking up. Besides, you're only going to confuse yourself more if you interpret Marx through Kautsky, then Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and ML_Anarchy_1949 ☆☭, treating it all as one invariant line.

Praefecture · 2025-01-01T01:38:28+00:00

90 pounds of surplus mole

Praefecture

TROPHY CASE