Ask A Red V: The Five-Year Plan

You're welcome RT.

Going to the Wayback machine, I found this article on the FBI investigating various groups (including Amnesty International) that it apparently saw as a threat to "national security" or some such nonsense--back in the days when the US was in danger of being invaded by El Salvador and Guatemala.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...-investigation-counterterrorism-investigation

Really FBI? :rolleyes:
 
No good deed goes unpunished.

Part of my daily work puts me in contact with a lot of hard-working, well-meaning people, and I wish them no ill feelings. As I have pointed out, MORE independent organization is needed, not less.
 
I read the report... not much actual data. If I quote a report with so little corroboration, I get trolled.

I'm sure AI means well, but they don't say squat about the Cuban Five.

Your ignorance on how Amnesty International works is quite telling. They only use confirmed reports (such as the one from official North Korean confirmation of flood effects). They also cover every single nation on Earth - including your precious USA. Perhaps you'd like me to quote the AI report on that nation as well?
 
Your ignorance on how Amnesty International works is quite telling. They only use confirmed reports (such as the one from official North Korean confirmation of flood effects). They also cover every single nation on Earth - including your precious USA. Perhaps you'd like me to quote the AI report on that nation as well?
No, thank you.
 
Hey, All! Resident Marxist-Leninist Ask a Red panelist, here. Thought I'd bump this with Fidel's excellent "Battle of Ideas" Speech, Delivered 5 December 2004, at the closing of the 8th Congress of the Young Communists' League.

Fidel Castro Closing Speech at the UJC closing session

Excerpt:
I have never believed that ideas orbit around public figures; rather, it is the latter that ought to orbit around ideas.

The fact that I dared to make so many predictions that, today, people are recognizing as irrefutable truths stems exclusively from the experience I have accumulated. I could have died young, as did many other Cuban revolutionaries throughout our history. Yesterday's and today's enemies did everything humanly possible to achieve this aim, but I had the privilege of having struggled for many years, since early 1953, when we had the idea of seizing the Santiago de Cuba Regiment's weapons to initiate the struggle. The credit for this privilege is not mine; the true credit belongs to those who stood by their beliefs and were willing to sacrifice even their lives for the aims we espoused. Only three days ago, when some congratulated me, reminding me of the 48th anniversary of the Granma landing, my first reaction was one of surprise. How much time has gone by and how much has occurred!

Engrossed in our present duties, some of us who took part in that action have hardly a second to look back on the beginning of that long march on which we were embarking in the days of Moncada and Granma. I would describe it all as a long learning process; it is amazing how ignorant we were when we set out on that unknown road.

I encourage all of the lurkers and posters on this thread to read the full speech. It sets the tone and tenor of struggle for the 21st Century.
 
Thread Bump to Commemorate the Passing of two heroes of the Proletariat and the Proletarian Movement:

1. Joseph Stalin, (Iosif VissarionovichStalin) who died on this day, March 5, 1953.

2. Hugo Chavez Frías, who died on this day, March 5, 2013... exactly 60 years later.

These are my heroes.... on our Red Thread.

That is all.
 
My_idols_are_dead_and_my_enemies_are_in_power.jpg
 
Which modern day country is, in a general sense, the most socialist?
 
Which modern day country is, in a general sense, the most socialist?

Cuba #1. Without a doubt. Politically, culturally and economically. And the people are NOT giving it up.
 
Do you guys think it is useful to make a distinction between right-wingers who are fundamentally bourgeois (neoconservatives, right-libertarians) and right-wingers who are fundamentally anti-bourgeois (traditionalists, monarchists)? If so, which of them are the lesser evil?
 
Do you guys think it is useful to make a distinction between right-wingers who are fundamentally bourgeois (neoconservatives, right-libertarians) and right-wingers who are fundamentally anti-bourgeois (traditionalists, monarchists)? If so, which of them are the lesser evil?

In a word: no.

The anti-bourgeois traditionalist crowd is even less likely to agree with us than the liberals are, because they also object to modernity and the Enlightenment.
 
Regarding Cuba, last year VP Murillo said "If we don't transform the socialist state companies positively, we won't be able to bring up to date the Cuban economic model."

This included lifting limits on wages and allowing state enterprises to use after tax profits to be put towards recapitalizing and make their own investments.

Is this the new economic model or is there something else that should be used?


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It's a move toward the Titoist style of market socialism/worker self-management, to be sure, which is a system with many strengths.

The Cuban economy has been an outright command economy for a long time now, it may be time for them to open things up a bit in that regard. It seems they agree. But from what I understand of the situation, the Cubans don't intend to mirror the Chinese model, so we are not talking about liberalization of the economy so much as we are democratisation of the economy.
 
Cheezy, I have more to say on Cuba, but that just about sizes it up.

Cuba is constitutionally a Socialist state, guided by the ideas of Martí, and by the political and social ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin. They are devoted to proletarian internationalism. There's more in the constitution... 2002 rewrite that specifically wrote IN socialism after Bush 43 opened his big mouth.

Goodnight for now.
 
OMG! Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883.

Here is Engels' speech at Marx' grave.

Marxist Internet Arxhive said:
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep -- but for ever.

An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.

Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.
For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the firstRheinische Zeitung(1842), the ParisVorwarts(1844), theDeutsche Brusseler Zeitung(1847), theNeue Rheinische Zeitung(1848-49), theNew York Tribune(1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the greatInternational Working Men's Association
-- this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else.

And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy.

His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
 
How ironic that Marx died and Keynes and Schumpeter were born.


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