Socinform: Translated Letter Marking the 4th Anniversary of the Burmese PLA
The following is a translation of a letter published by the armed wing of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), commemorating the 4th anniversary of its re-establishment. The CPB was supposedly dissolved in 1989, following a series of setbacks, including the mass suppression of the 8888 Uprising and ensuing takeover of the country by the so-called State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), establishing a new period of military dictatorship. Until recently, the general perception of the CPB in the west was that it had been completely dissolved, and that its leaders and members had all either quit the Party completely, been killed, or fled (or were exiled) to neighboring China.
Within the contemporary Marxist-Leninist movement, five states, as well as multiple historical states, stand in prominence and awe for their achievements: Actually-Existing Socialism (AES). Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, those five states are: the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. However, the simplicity of this presentation is deceptive, as no concise definition of the term AES exists, and bound up within its contemporary usage remain the contradictions of previous generations.
“What is math?” for both Marxists who don’t know math and Marxists who do
When utilized correctly, mathematics, like Marxism, is a powerful tool for analyzing complex systems. Like dialectical and historical materialist analysis, it gives the tools for one to decompose any problem into more simple rules that allow one to reason in manageable steps. This series of articles is designed to guide a reader with any level of (or no) mathematical knowledge to understand why math is important to the study of Marxism. Additionally, it aims to give the reader a sense of what math is and, more importantly, how to utilize it effectively for analysis and prediction of material events. By the end of the series, we will discuss several mathematical toolkits and their usage in analyzing labor and other historical material developments, including some physics and higher level math, such as the free energy principle, synthetic differential geometry, and measure theory. Additionally, we intend to teach immediately useful skills, such as the fundamentals of computing and various bits of computer science, as well as how to use those skills to do data analysis or tool development.
In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.
— Mao Zedong
What is culture? The Merriam-Webster English Dictionary defines “culture,” in its noun form, as the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; the characteristic features of everyday existence shared by people in a place or time. In other words, culture encompasses the attitudes, feelings, and beliefs of a specific group of people situated in a particular place and time. Therefore, understanding culture involves examining its components and contradictions, and exploring the relationships it constitutes between human society and the natural world.
It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)
Introduction: Towards Scientific Socialism
In establishing a clear understanding of Actually-Existing Socialism, that is, Scientific Socialism, Socialism in the real, or Socialism as a tangible thing within the world rather than merely an ideal existing outside of it, one is met immediately with the question of whether or not any given country in the world today may be considered “truly” Socialist, and by what measure to assess such existence.