Pawel Moscicki:

Although after the collapse of the USSR it was decreed that class struggle no longer existed and did not describe any reality, it did not end. Only Capital is winning this battle so decisively that the struggle itself is no longer noticeable. The ruthless victory of the ruling classes means that today they have almost unlimited opportunities to exploit not only the working classes in poor and developing countries (which they also did when there was a peculiar truce in the Western core of the system, known as the welfare state), but also at home. Today, we live in a post-socialist era in the sense that, in essence, the Western world is one of the integral domination of financial capital over everything: the economy, politics, culture, not to mention society.

Ω Ω Ω

… in Putin’s Russia, the exercise of power by a narrow “clique” of bureaucrats has led to a reduction in the naturally centrifugal influence of the political capitalist class. Ultimately, the destabilization of the system by the oligarchs of the 1990s was brought to an end by a gesture of subordination to central authority, or rather, the centralization of their interests within the ruling group in the Kremlin.

In this way, the “collective Putin” can pursue long-term vested interests, stabilizing the system through political coercion, skillful management of interest groups, and even the incorporation of some elements of middle-class or working-class aspirations into the political process.

Ω Ω Ω

The war in Ukraine would thus be one manifestation of a much broader class conflict, the essence of which is the clash between the long-term interests of political capitalists (in Russia) and the alliance of the middle classes with international capital (in Ukraine). Of course, this conflict also exists within each of these countries, but today the centers of political power are more or less clearly divided along these lines.

Therefore, the war between Russia and Ukraine is also, in a broader sense, a war between the national bourgeoisie fighting for autonomy in a globalized world and the comprador bourgeoisie profiting and gaining power from subordination to international financial institutions.

And most dramatically, neither group is interested in peace today, because the ongoing conflict best secures their interests. The situation is similar in the West itself, where both the neoconservatives, who are overrepresented in the American bureaucracy, and their protégés in the European Union have a class interest in continuing the war rather than ending it.

The Platz was pretty high energy, full of defiant kids.

Those of us older than 30 being represented by an Aufstehen group is amusingly appropriate. The aufstehen-berlin.com – note the „.com“ 🙂 site is really worth a look. It recounts the history of the group’s 2018 formation.

A good time was had by all, young and old. None of this was remotely visible outside of Kreuzberg, the heart of the already convinced.

Homo homini lupus est, as one inspired Latin saying has it. But man has long ceased being a wolf to man. Man is not even an image-maker to man, as some modern sociologists assume. It is all far more terrifying and much simpler than that. Man is wow to man – or if not to man, then to precisely another such wow, the result of which is that, projected on to the modern system of cultural coordinates the Latin saying becomes: ‚Wow Wow Wow!‘

Ω Ω Ω

It should be remembered that the word ‚democracy‘, which is used so frequently in the modern mass media, is by no means the same word ‚democracy‘ as was so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two words are merely homonyms. The old word ‚democracy‘ was derived from the Greek ‚demos‘, while the new word is derived from the expression ‚demo-version‘.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 90.

Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin’s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan’s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like Ivan the Terrible, rather that to appreciate Stalin’s Russia you needed to know something about Russia’s past. Harriman, who spent a lot of time with Stalin during the war, saw no traces of a court like that of Ivan IV. In his view, Stalin was a popular war leader; he was the one who held the country together: ‚So I’d like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency — one of the historic occasions where one man made so much difference. This in no sense minimises my revulsion against his cruelties; but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other.‘

—Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library, (London: Yale University Press, 2022), 140.

Hanging above the counter was a black tee shirt with a portrait of Che Guevara and the inscription: ‚Rage Against the Machine‘. On the piece of cardboard under the tee shirt it said: ‚Bestseller of the month!‘ There was nothing surprising about that — Tatarsky knew very well (he had even written about it in one of his concepts) that in the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 72.

Eternity was contingent: if, say, Stalin had not killed Trotsky, but the other way round, then it would have been populated by entirely different individuals.

…

Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but he still couldn’t understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 5-7.