"Internally, capitalist countries practice bourgeois democracy (not feudalism) when they are not fascist or not at war; in their external relations, they are not oppressed by, but themselves oppress, other nations. Because of these characteristics, it is the task of the party of the proletariat in the capitalist countries to educate the workers and build up strength through a long period of legal struggle, and thus prepare for the final overthrow of capitalism. In these countries, the question is one of a long legal struggle, of utilizing parliament as a platform, of economic and political strikes, of organizing trade unions and educating the workers. There the form of organization is legal and the form of struggle bloodless (non-military). On the issue of war, the Communist Parties in the capitalist countries oppose the imperialist wars waged by their own countries; if such wars occur, the policy of these Parties is to bring about the defeat of the reactionary governments of their own countries. The one war they want to fight is the civil war for which they are preparing. But this insurrection and war should not be launched until the bourgeoisie becomes really helpless, until the majority of the proletariat are determined to rise in arms and fight, and until the rural masses are giving willing help to the proletariat. And when the time comes to launch such an insurrection and war, the first step will be to seize the cities, and then advance into the countryside' and not the other way about. All this has been done by Communist Parties in capitalist countries, and it has been proved correct by the October Revolution in Russia."
- Problems of War and Strategy (Mao)
"I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating — partly in American funds, but more especially in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year … [and which] are forced up to quite an unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse...In this way, I have made over £400 and, now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It's a type of operation that makes small demands on one's time, and it's worthwhile running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money... Had I had the money during the past 10 days, I'd have made a killing on the Stock Exchange here... the time has come again when, with wit and very little money, it's possible to make money in London."
- Karl Marx (A Letter to his Uncle)
It must be stressed that the Protestant Reformation was a Revolution from below that was empowered by the translation of the Bible into the Common Language of the people, breaking the Catholic Church dictum over large swaths of the world. As Lenin observed “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them” and it must be stressed that, as far as can be ascertained, it is wise to assume that the Decline of the Rate of Profit creates interesting phenomenon within the Capitalist system, in both austerity of the Working Class, but also the generation of Fictive Capital through the Stock Market and the newly minted, purely faith based, Crypto-Currrency Market. As a result of such issues inevitable in the profit seeking system, the Capitalist system is generating new inroads of monetary streams to stimulate these exact fictive markets for the generation of entirely imaginary capital that can be cashed out for actual money to be used outside the fictional system of stock, bond, and crypto, and put into the real world for genuine action on the physical plain of politics; as the Bourgeoisie does at will. (It must also be stressed that Capitalism’s ability to commodify actual fiction (Intellectual Property) is something that is also on the increase as well)
It seems that Investment Banks are inadvertently giving the Working Class the opportunity for something similar in the Imperial Core. More and more, probably tied with the Decline of the Rate of Profit, Investment Banks are opening up opportunities to small earners that were only reserved for the Rich; partly due to A.I. "Managed Accounts" are now accessible to low earners of income, Managed Accounts used to require a quarter of a million dollars to open, the low end now is five thousand dollars. Let me take a single Investment Bank as an example, here I will perform an armory inspection of some available armaments the Left has at their fingers; lest we be pacifists resigned to our own defeat; I will be using the Fidelity Investment Bank as the primary example, with mentions of the Autopilot Investment App.
There are six different Managed Accounts Fidelity Investments offers, along with whatever the Fidelity Go Account (which requires no minimum amount of money) is, making about seven types of low level barrier to entry Account Types, along with the Autopilot Investment App, which will soon be linkable to Fidelity, that allows for you to shadow invest behind Politicians and Hedge Fund Investors, opening even more avenues for potential wealth acquisition; these funds seem to have been made possible due to Fractile Investing, wherein stocks can be purchased simply in part rather than in whole, while granting the owner partial ownership benefit of the fraction, this includes dividends, capital gains, as well as future share distributions due to stock ownership. The Left constantly talks about how crashes are inevitable and cyclical, yet we do not take advantage of these predictable events, Fidelity has Federally Insured Savings Accounts that can be opened to store money in, the Left could do so, while linking this account up to those opened Managed accounts, and wait until a collapse occurs, and when it does the Left can strike while the market is low and buy into these multiple Managed Accounts at low value. and as the Market Recovers. can acquire monetary gains for the Movement, riding the wave of Capital Investors and their market manipulations alongside them in their ocean of acquisition. (Fidelity also allows for connecting Crypto Currency Investment Accounts, along with allowing for investments, from Fidelity itself, for the two Crypro Currencies considered “Legitimate” Bitcoin and Etherium” for the purposes of investing in the totally fictive speculative Crypto Market, and transferring such gains into the more “Real” Stock Market.)
In the few Managed Accounts I myself have opened I actually can track my "monthly income" from them, it's about nearly thirty dollars a month in predictable income. There are also other means of acquisition, like the different types of Margin Trading and Credit, as well as how their Cash Back Credit Card allows for the Cash Back, acquired through spending, to simply be used for further investing, and apparently some forms of Stock Market debt can be written off on your taxes. Another aspect that should be studied is the Pre-Tax Investment Funds, like the IRA 401k, 403b, 457, Heath Savings or Flex Spending Accounts are untouched tax free savings accounts that plenty of people, including recently the American Enterprise Institute, have complained about how it keeps money away from the Federal Government until it's cashed out in retirement or medical services, keep this in mind when the government is doing, or facilitating, operations like Gaza. Roth and ABLE Disability Accounts can generate After-Tax tax free savings as well; both forms have been criticized for the issues they create in the system; especially because its one of the few tax avoidance methods that the average Working Class individual can reliably take part in with benefits to themselves; any corporate advocacy at removing such accounts should be viewed as another attempted tax shift of the wealthy atop the Working Class; the recent Secure 2.0 Act has begun the attempt at clawing such tax revenue back, by granting workplace retirement account access to go from Pre-Tax contributions by the employee, through the 401k/403b system, and instead shift it to the After-Tax Roth system, meaning that the average working person will have to use their actual take home pay to save for retirement rather than the unusable pre-tax funds they don’t see on their paycheck anyway, slowly shifting the tax burden more onto the worker through administrative slight of hand. If the Working Class, while they still have access to these Pre-Tax accounts, makes use of these it actually may heighten the contradictions and force the government to choose between the high earner investors and the low level ones; perhaps causing a split? Opportunities exist for those with eyes to see.
The recent example of Albert Einstein College of Medicine receiving a Billion Dollar Donation that will now be used to make the college tuition free for all students, from the donation date and into the future, is an important example of the compound interest effect being structured to create a Market Cycle that can, in effect, establish a virtuous cycle in this instant; as imperfect and unreliable as the Market is, large sums of money can effectively establish, to an average Working Class Person, what appears to be an eternal money well from which to draw on.
The fetishization of Analysis of the situation as Action in itself, rather than taking our Analysis and establishing concrete strategies of action for the purposes of funding the potential for Revolution must stop. Collectivizing funds together enough to establish a revenue stream and thereby acquire reliable money for the generation of Professional Revolutionaries, people we pay to do the job of Organizing, Educating, Traveling, and Agitating, along with Labor Lawyers that we can keep funded for Anti-Corporate Lawsuits, Union Strike Fund Contributions, Protest Funding, even contributing to International Struggles Abroad, as well as funding for establishing a reliable Political Party for both Local, City, State, and Federal Representation; all things the Bourgeoisie do for their own system, as under Capitalism all are mercenaries for the stipend of currency that grants the only freedom Capitalism recognizes, the freedom of money to move, we’re just the vessels that facilitate its transportation to another vessel, nothing more.
Criticisms have been made of the Working Class of the Imperial Core, criticisms I find unreasonable and not reflected upon with meaningful care. One being, that the Working Class doesn't exist within the Imperial Core, I dismiss this as a hand-wringing gesture by flustered ideological defeatists whose contributions are simply a repetition of this with no meaningful addition. The Second being that the Working Class in the Imperial Core does not wish to fight, the examples of the protests against the genocide in Palestine and the increased Union Drives throughout the Core, as well as increases in the organic formation of Left Militias; as interviewed by the German National News Broadcast are indeed counter examples to this assertion, more must be done but promising signs have been extant even through earlier periods. The Third is that the Working Class, when comfortable, or when allowed comfort, doesn't want to jeopardize such comfort, I submit where would such a criticism not hold true anywhere on the earth? (People are animals that avoid pain and pursue pleasure, this is a biological imperative that even nonhuman animals exhibit, if one’s analysis ceases there and one then throws up their hands and declares defeat, I question the strategic creativity of the analyst and submit their shrugging is simply a justification of either inaction or a lack of genuine adaptation under ever changing combat conditions on the Imperial Core Front of shifting battlefield of the Class War) A Fourth I have heard has been the lack of the “physical prowess” of those within the Imperial Core as slothful and out of shape, thereby justifying the assertion of the “lack of a willingness, or ability, to fight”, this I believe is a misapplication of what fighting even would mean in the Imperial Core; as Mao himself said that actual combat should be avoided until the Capitalists have so thoroughly discredited themselves in the wider society that their downfall would be relatively simple. The glory associated with the Peoples War of the Imperial Periphery is not, and will not, be the same as the glory of the combatants within the Imperial Core, if anything it will not be the AK that will symbolize the warrior here, but the briefcase, the numbers they run will not be that of active soldiers in the field, but of quarterly profits for the funding of our legal and social operations at home and abroad. In short, our glory may indeed be that of the gamified revolutionaries, many of whom will not be able to participate in the streets or halls, but will indeed be able to contribute their funds towards the employ of professional revolutionaries on the ground by having those funds accrue enough compound interest so that the Revolutionary machine can fund itself by parasitizing off of the Stock Market itself; we must bear-hug the Market, so that its gains are ours, and with every successive windfall we must gain in strength alongside it, thereby making a strong market ensure a strong Socialist Movement beside it; like an infant we feed off of the mother system until we can be born, for Capitalism must birth Socialism, just as Feudalism birthed Capitalism; perhaps we must accept our parent before we can outgrow them?
As Mao put it “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” Often people shy from the unpleasant nature of contradiction. The very idea that the Left may indeed have to take up the trade of the investor to defeat the very system they fight against seems contrary. Yet, Marx had his Rich Industrialist coauthor Engels, Stalin Robbed Banks, the Left has always needed money to establish, secure, and move about. However, today in the Imperial Core, the Left needs not rely on overt appeals to the illegal or extralegal, which comes with costly attacks from the state, today the Left in such places can legally acquire funding through Property Acquisition and Bourgeois Right. Through the purchase of Stock, and various Securities, the Left may fund itself; today communication is easy and such abilities at establishing a central donation fund is streamlined to no end. The Capitalists have created a world wherein such a thing has never been easier in all of history. So the question is, who is going to take the Ring to Mordor?☭
