The proletarians of the world showed their strength on May 1st on the streets of cities from Havana to Brussels to Istanbul to New Delhi to Manila to New York. In Istanbul over 500 workers were arrested for trying to march on Gazi Park, which the government locked down for fear of a repeat of the mass protests that rattled President Erdogan’s despotic neo-liberal regime several years back. But such repression, anywhere in the world, is only delaying the inevitable. While it might be hard to tell in a country like Canada with its bedroom communities and wannabe celebrities, workers are everywhere, our masses numbering in the billions, and if united we would soon crush all opposition. Which is why the Epstein Class, the billionaires and their bourgeois propagandists do everything in their power to divide and conquer us along cultural lines, national lines, religious lines, racial lines, you name it. They know our power, brothers and sisters, and it’s time that we did too. There is a reason why Karl Marx called on workers of the world to unite – not just the workers of certain countries. The international working class movement aims not only to end exploitation of workers at the hands of business owners and landlords, but also seeks a total end to empire and the exploitation of entire nations at the hands of global capitalist cartels and militarists. No more Iraqs, no more Afghanistans, Vietnams, Libyas, Syrias, Sudans, Gazas, Lebanons, no more war against Iran, no more blockades and starvation sanctions on Cuba, no more imperialism! Empire always serves the parasites, the looters, the big firms, the military-industrial complex, everyone who gets fat by making others work, starve and die on their behalf: the Donald Trumps of the world, the Netanyahus of the world, Musk, Gates, Bezos, Epstein and all the other bloodsucking trash. No more. As workers we must know our enemy and it isn’t each other.
This brings me to a central issue: working class consciousness. Proletarians knowing they are proletarians, being proud of being proletarians and fighting for their rights, their future, and the wealth of civilization that they created. Workers being workers. Working class communities with their own culture and sense of self that are capable of building bridges with other working class communities around the world and understanding what unites them with their brothers and sisters across language barriers and national borders. This is the consciousness, the way of thinking, rooted in concrete material conditions that gives rise to worker’s power. That’s why the ruling class goes to great lengths to get workers to see themselves, even the poorest people, as honorary members of a bourgeois club that they can supposedly gain access to via lottery, good luck or kissing ass. Hard work doesn’t cut it, though they pretend it does. Remember that the definition of success in capitalist society isn’t working hard but getting others to work hard for you. Becoming a parasite in other words and leeching off other people’s work like Trump and Bezos do. They don’t want workers to wise up to the truth that the rich suck their blood every day and that all the wonders of civilization were made by proletarian hands.
They don’t want worker’s to ask:
“Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy loads of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who raised that city up each time?
In which of Lima’s houses, glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
On the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Where did the masons go?...
Philip of Spain wept when his fleet went down.
Was there no one else who wept?
Frederick the Great won the Seven Years War.
Who won it with him?...
A victory on every page
Who cooked the victory feast?
A great man every ten years.
Who paid the costs?”
That was Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads,”
Are you going to get that kind of insight from AI?
The ruling class doesn’t want working people to understand history because if they did, workers would understand who they are and understand their power as the makers of the world. Workers are god, to put it bluntly. When taken together, they are the engine of civilization without which kings and capitalists would be powerless. Parasites can only hold onto power by lulling the true god of humanity into slumber and that slumber is always fitful. When workers do wake up, as in 1917 in Russia, the world quakes. Naturally the capitalists and their spokespeople consider those risen workers and the leaders they empowered to be monsters, that’s why they still talk trash about them over 100 years later. For the workers of Russia, and later China, Cuba, Vietnam and other countries proved that god can live without fleas. Workers don’t need bosses, they can run things for themselves. No matter how hard they try, the capitalists can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
“An eagle has conceived in the rocks and shall bear a strong devouring lion: he shall loose the knees of many. Take heed now of this, Corinthians who dwell round fair Peirene and the cliffs of Corinth’s citadel.”
Historians too often obfuscate our past, brothers and sisters. Kypselos of Corinth, whose coming that Delphic prophecy foretold in 650 B.C. is a pivotal figure in Ancient Greek history who doesn’t get nearly as much credit as he should, despite the fact that it was his overthrow of an aristocratic oligarchy in Corinth, then the chief city-state of Greece, that paved the way for democracy and the flowering of arts, culture and intellectual pursuits that we associate with Classical Greece. That flourishing was only possible because ruling class power was challenged by the common people, oligarchies were smashed, and radical reforms enacted. Aristocrats, capitalists and many classical historians today prefer a sanitized picture of Ancient Greece where these things get left out and the flourishing of Classical Greek culture, especially when compared with other ancient societies where the aristocracy maintained an absolute grip on power, is treated as a sort of “mystery”. Kypselos, literally “chest man” if you look at the literal meaning of his name, was nearly murdered as an infant by agents of the Corinthian aristocracy. He survived because his mother hid him in a chest. He started out so small, so vulnerable, like all of us do, but he grew into a titan, rousing his people to shake off oppression and move mountains. The ripple effects of what he and the Corinthian people did in 650 B.C. shook Greece and ultimately the world. Revolution is not a new concept. Working people have been waking up for a long time.
It will happen again.
Links:
The Grayzone - "In Defense of Yugoslavia: Max Blumenthal on Michael Parenti's bravest work"
