Month: April 2023
The Paris Commune
Karl Marx
On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of “Vive la Commune!” What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?
“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs…. They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”
But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.
Read More »Lessons of the Commune[1]
V. I. Lenin
Published: Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 March 23, 1908. Published according to the text in Zagranichnaya Gazeta.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1972, Moscow, Volume 13, pages 475-478.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2004). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README
After the coup d état, which marked the end of the revolution of 1848, France fell under the yoke of the Napoleonic regime for a period of 18 years. This regime brought upon the country not only economic ruin but national humiliation. In rising against the old regime the proletariat under took two tasks—one of them national and the other of a class character—the liberation of France from the German invasion and the socialist emancipation of the workers from capitalism. This union of two tasks forms a unique feature of the Commune.
The bourgeoisie had formed a “government of national defence” and the proletariat had to fight for national independence under its leadership. Actually, it was a government of “national betrayal” which saw its mission in fighting the Paris proletariat. But the proletariat, blinded by patriotic illusions, did not perceive this. The patriotic idea had its origin in the Great Revolution of the eighteenth century; it swayed the minds of the socialists of the Commune; and Blanqui, for example, undoubtedly a revolutionary and an ardent supporter of socialism, could find no better title for his newspaper than the bourgeois cry: “The country is in danger!”
Read More »Cuba celebrates 62 years of socialism
Cuba celebrated today the 62nd anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist character of its Revolution, with a political-cultural event led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Granma | April 17, 2023
Havana, Apr 16 (Prensa Latina) Cuba celebrated today the 62nd anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist character of its Revolution, with a political-cultural event led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
At the corner of 23rd and 12th, Havana, the place where the historic leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, made the declaration, Government and State officials, leaders of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), political and mass organizations members, and the population recalled the event that marked the ideological course of the project initiated on the island on January 1, 1959.
US sees in Finland’s NATO accession encirclement of Russia
M. K. Bhadrakumar
Indian Punchline | April 06, 2023
The national flag of Finland was raised for the first time at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Brussels on Tuesday, which also marked the 74th anniversary of the western alliance. It signifies for Finland a historic abandonment of its policy of neutrality.
Not even propagandistically, anyone can say Finland has encountered a security threat from Russia. This is an act of motiveless malignity toward Russia on the part of the NATO, which of course invariably carries the imprimatur of the US, while being projected to the world audience as a sovereign choice by Finland against the backdrop of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
Read More »Why the Media Don’t Want to Know the Truth About the Nord Stream Blasts
Jonathan Cook
The Greanville Post | April 11, 2023
No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.
Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.
In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.
Read More »How the U.S. Regime Is Scaring Its Public to Accept Martial Law
Eric Zuesse
The Greanville Post | April 16, 2023
Like with any dictatorship, America’s is based upon censorship (as a consequence of which my articles are virtually banned in the U.S.-and-‘allied’ — or vassal — countries). In a democracy, there is no censorship, because censorship kills even the possibility of democracy. It enables mass-mind-control, which any dictatorship needs in order to exist and to survive. On April 6th, I headlined “How the U.S. Government Is Now Secretly Instituting Martial Law”, and linked to the text of what will be, if it becomes passed by both houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by the President as is expected to happen, martial law over all publication, broadcasting, and Websites — all media — in the United States. This expected-to-become law bill in the U.S. Congress states explicitly that it is needed in order to protect America (especially its children) against “foreign adversaries” that explicitly include (but are not limited to) six supposed enemies: China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. (If you already know all of that, then you probably learned about it on a Website that is already banned.)
Read More »Common Sense, Not Conspiracy Theories, Accounts For Africans’ Embrace Of Russian Media
And China’s help to provide Africans with free TV, even in remote villages, is making a new life possible.
Andrew Korybko
The Greanville Post | April 15, 2023
The New York Times condescendingly implied that Africans lack the media literacy to discern the difference between fact and fiction in their latest piece about why they’re embracing Russian media. Titled “How Putin Became a Hero on African TV”, it pushes the conspiracy theory that there’s supposedly a shadowy Kremlin-concentric plot at play to explain this growing trend, which denies Africans any agency with respect to deciding for themselves which information products to consume.
It’s not difficult to figure out what’s going on as long as observers aren’t blinded by wishful thinking fantasies like those that continue to influence many Western commentators. It’s common sense that Africans would gravitate towards alternative sources of information to learn more about events across the world after rightly coming to suspect the US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) of ulterior motives.
Read More »AI-GPT: a game changer?
ChatGPT is being heralded as a revolution in ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) and has been taking the media and tech world by storm since launching in late 2022.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT is “an artificial intelligence trained to assist with a variety of tasks.” More specifically, it is a large language model (LLM) designed to produce human-like text and converse with people, hence the “Chat” in ChatGPT.
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The GPT models are pre-trained by human developers and then are left to learn for themselves and generate ever increasing amounts of knowledge, delivering that knowledge in an acceptable way to humans (chat).
Practically, this means you present the model with a query or request by entering it into a text box. The AI then processes this request and responds based on the information that it has available. It can do many tasks, from holding a…
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Deaths due to heat in Middle East & North Africa likely to rise 60 times by end of century
Over 80% deaths can be prevented by limiting global warming to 2°C
Kiran Pandey
Down To Earth | April 11, 2023
The number of heat-related deaths in the countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is likely to increase 60 times by the end of this century, warned a new study released April 3, 2023.
In comparison to two deaths (2.1) per 100,000 people estimated currently, about 123 people per 100,000 are expected to die of heat-related causes annually by the end of this century under high-emissions scenarios, the report stated.
High-emissions scenario refers to a scenario called shared socio-economic pathway (SSP)5-8·5, where the current CO2 emissions levels roughly double by 2050. This reflects the SSP representing a fossil fuel intensive world.
Read More »
Journal of People 