The Indian Bolshevik

(Vortex Youtube) 1. The Nordic countries are Socialist Nordic countries have free market systems; not government-controlled economies. Their high taxes lead to lavish social benefits. The Nordic nations are welfare states. Their governments do not interfere in business. 2. Socialists want to take away your property This myth confuses private property with personal property. When socialists talk about the abolition of private property, they are referring to the socialization of the means of production—the resources and equipment that create wealth. Working people do not own this type of property—which is why we have to work to survive. Right now, the wealth of the 1,000 billionaires is equal to that of the 3.5 billion poorest people on the planet. To provide everyone with more, that wealth must be redistributed into various welfare programs. 3. The dictatorship of the proletariat is Fascism The two-party “democratic” system under capitalism is in fact a dictatorship of the Bourgeoise. U...

  In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base/ substructure and the superstructure. Marx defines the base as the social relations between men which create and produce materials that are eventually put up for the exchange. From the base comes a superstructure in which laws, politics, religion and literature legitimize the power of the social classes that are formed in the base.  Antonio Gramsci divided Marx's superstructure into two elements: political society and civil society. Political society consists of the organized force of society (ex: police and military) while civil society refers to the consensus-creating elements (ex: trade unions, political parties, schools and universities, religious institutions, media, NGOs and all other bodies indirectly associated with the State) that contribute to cultural hegemony. Both constituents of this superstructure are still informed by the values of the base, serving to establish and enforce these values in society....

Antonio Gramsci  (1891 – 1937) was a leading Italian Marxist. He was an intellectual, a journalist and a major theorist who spent his last eleven years in Mussolini’s prisons. During this time, he completed 32 notebooks containing almost 3,000 pages. These notebooks were smuggled out from his prison and published in Italian after the war but did not find an English-language publisher until the 1970s. The central and guiding theme of the Notebooks was the development of a new Marxist theory applicable to the conditions of advanced capitalism. His  Prison Notebooks  are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. “Hegemony” was most likely derived from the Greek  egemonia , whose root is  egemon , meaning “leader, ruler, often in the sense of a state other than his own”. Since the 19th century, “hegemony” commonly has been used to indicate “political predominance, usually of one state over another”. Gramsci’s “hegemony” refers to a ...

  Guy Debord's  La société du spectacle  ( The Society of the Spectacle ) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-driven consumer culture. He examines the “Spectacle,” the term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity. Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord’s lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments while encouraging us to focus on appearances. Debord observed that the spectacle actively alters human interactions and relationships. Images influence our lives and beliefs daily; advertising manufac...

 Commodity fetishism is one of Marx’s most consistently enduring ideas, and it is surprisingly accessible. Commodity fetishism is the condition in which production is no longer seen as a social endeavour but as the simple exchange of money and commodities. Under commodity fetishism, commodities themselves compete with each other, and commodity fetishism ends up transforming the entire social order or “the world.” Commodity fetishism ends up obfuscating the true relationship of humans to production and of the capitalist to the worker. (NYU Edu) Once a good is produced and enters the market, the monetary value that is ascribed to the product works to sever its ties from the production process. Potential buyers no longer equate the product with the work that was put into it. Instead, its value comes from its price tag. The consumer, in turn, sees only one glowing perspective of the product, while a veil is cast over the hard, sometimes dreary, labour that is put into it.  For exa...