Both are true, but Marx's quote references revolution as a social and historical phenomenon and Che's quote talks about an individual's approach to revolution.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Definitely. To take what he says literally without nuance is basically the economism of Bernstein et al.
To put it another way, capitalists do indeed dig their own grave, but we workers need to push them in and bury the casket.
Centrism, but actually based.
Nice analogy though.
To put it in another way: they sell us the rope to hang them with—the rope doesn't just do that on its own (unless you're Jeffrey Epstein).
“What is scientific socialism without the working-class movement? — A compass which, if left unused, will only grow rusty and then will have to be thrown overboard.
What is the working-class movement without socialism?—A ship without a compass which will reach the other shore in any case, but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass.
Combine the two and you will get a splendid vessel, which will speed straight towards the other shore and reach its haven unharmed.”
Needless to say, i am team stalin.
For the second paragraph, will it reach the other shore though because it seems that the working class is voting for fascists now?
Yes it will, no matter how bleak the current context looks/feels/is, it's still a very insignificant portion of history.
Hmmm… I am still not 100% convinced that without socialism the working class movement would reach the other shore though.
For instance, see how syndicalism got us nowhere and how the bourgeoisie just took away all the concession they gave syndicates post cold war. See how Black Lives Matter didn't achieve a bigger change due to its lack of association with socialism. The capitalists just defanged the moment and gave bare-minimum concessions to apease the people.
It seems that the working-class movements without socialism are boats that get sunk by the bourgeois missiles and torpedoes.
We need both socialism and the working-class movement to get to the other shore.
The working class movement is more significant in the long run than electoral politics
There are no contradiction here. Marx only states that capitalism will create the material condition for a revolution, he does not imply that it will magically happen.
Heaven and Earth change, but it is Man's will to seize the opportunity.
The fall is inevitable because it creates revolutionaries. But it’s up to the revolutionaries to take action.
they're not necessarily opposing viewpoints. revolution can be inevitable whilst still requiring a human action to start it
100 years after the communist manifesto, it was clear the revolution was like an olive tree, it needs some shaking to drop the olives.
I think both are true. People do have to put on work, but that people will do that is inevitable
Not trying to read too much into this if it's a joke, etc.
But
Marx was stating as an absolute statement of what he viewed as fact (and seems to be correct over a long enough timeline) that capitalism will fail due to contradictions
The Che quote is the less philosophical, more "in the shit" statement. Much like Lenin before him, these guys understood that the contradictions of capitalism lead inevitably, as Marx was getting at, to failures and collapses and it's at those moments that revolutionaries spring up and rile their base of support within the labor force of the country. Until that moment of crisis things were bad, but tolerable. During the crisis, conditions are intolerable and people are willing to do anything, including overthrowing the government/capitalist class and possibly dying for that cause. Because the alternative is death anyway. Or a living death.
On a side note, this is why there will never be (for any foreseeable future) a socialist revolution in the US. 1) material conditions are broadly "good" (although they are worsening) 2) there is effectively no leftist political movement in the US. There are a few thousand people who are genuinely anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and want a revolution, but that might as well be zero in a country this size. Not anything new or crazy to point out that as people's conditions worsen further they will turn towards more and more radical leftist ideas or right wing ideas. Considering the racist undercurrents of the US and lack of any desire for any international cooperation amongst workers mixed with the (unfortunately extremely effective) FBI/CIA ops against US leftists in the past, there's only really one path that we're likely to head down...
The idea that the proletarian revolution was just going to happen was Kautsky, attributing revisionism to Marx is a take
Kautsky
Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight is a communist?
Yeah, that tracks, I guess.
I think it is both. People are naturally the most revolutionary in times of crisis and struggle. It is the conditions which are created by the capitalist system that make the people feel that the system they live under is untenable, especially with rapid changes in conditions as experienced during financial crises. Many within the bourgeoise study the instability of capitalism in order to protect their capital or to profit from it.
Yeah, but they're both dead now, so why should we listen to anything either of them said?
