Welcome to MARS
Never before has so much been possible. Never before have the consequences of applying old ideas to new conditions been so dire. The outcome of class struggle in our day and tomorrow will determine our collective fate – if we are to have one at all.
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution. Without discussion there can be no theory. Without platforms there can be no discussion.
MARS aims to be a platform for study and discussion of revolutionary theory for our time. We are entering into the unfamiliar, the undiscovered country. We need a place to analyze and understand the astonishing economic and political changes taking place.
Advanced robotics eliminates the industrial division of labor and ousts labor from production, piece by piece, region by region, field by field. The process is uneven and takes on the historical character and response of each region and field of the global workforce.
This shift from one productive base to another will ravage the old and with it all the social and political structures that had been erected to hold it up. Wherever advanced robotics are deployed human labor is made superfluous. As new technology is introduced into the means of production, that means of production shifts. This is technological revolution. When this happens society must be built anew.
Classes forms around the new means of production and are defined by the private or public ownership of those means. Under industrial means of production class formation meant capitalism or socialism. In the fight for tomorrow the outcome of class struggle will mean communism or death.
MARS, Marxism in the Age of Robotics, is a platform to study the social, political and economic upheavals ushered in by this technological revolution. MARS will approach these questions with Marxist rigor and proletarian fire. Deindustrialize your mind. Towards the red planet, welcome to MARS, an intellectual exploration.
#toaredplanet
CONTACT US: mars@toaredplanet.com
Who We Are
We are a small group ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-seventies, about equal number women and men, and quite diverse in economic and cultural categories. We are all revolutionaries. We are students of the science of society. We are students of economic and political theory. We are students of history. We are teachers, writers, and poets.
Some of us have over 50 years’ experience in the study of Marxism and the communist movement. Some of us were born into this era, approaching the world with fresh eyes and insights unimaginable 50 years ago. Our experiences in the fight against the ravages of capitalism are vast and varied. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Global photojournalism. Fight for equal and quality public education. Fight to end Viet Nam war and US imperialism everywhere. Fight against police brutality, murder and unjust incarceration. Black, Mexican and Puerto Rican struggles for equality and freedom. Women’s fight for rights and equality. LGBTQ fight for rights and equality. Union struggles. 1967 Detroit rebellion. 1992 LA rebellion.
Everywhere we are and have been, we are committed to educating our fellow combatants and comrades, not just for victory in the immediate struggle, but with a vision of the possibility and necessity for a better world.
We have contributed to and learned much from the Communist Labor Party polarity in the US communist movement. [See related article – soon to be posted – on the history of Marxism and the US communist movement] The unique contribution of this school of revolutionary thinking is the understanding that “Marxism as a science” – the science of society – understands society as a law-governed process of motion and development, a process that is conditioned and guided by objective laws. This is a powerful tool for revolutionaries at all times and places.
“Marxism as doctrine” is specific to its time and place. The Marxist doctrine, political theory and practice of the revolutionary struggle at the time of Marx and Engels differed from Lenin’s Marxist doctrine, political theory and practice for the Russian revolution, and Mao’s Marxist doctrine, political theory and practice for the Chinese revolution.
The principles of Marxism as a science are universal; the application of these Marxist principles varies depending on particularities. Our task is to forge a new Marxist doctrine, political theory and practice for the rapid and revolutionary changes of the 21st Century.
We seek a broad audience for this essential school of revolutionary thinking. We seek to continue to expand the science of Marxism while preparing revolutionaries to develop revolutionary theory for this era. We hope to engage and connect with a great many in this joint effort to find the path to a future where humanity can flourish free of the deadly constraints of capitalism.
We hope you find what you are looking for on this website. We hope you share your thinking in comments and guest posts. We invite you – as a seeker and revolutionary – to tell us how the website can best meet your needs. We invite you to join us in the effort to end the horrors of capitalism and reconstruct society to serve the needs of humanity and the planet.
If you have an article, poem, artwork or photo that you would like to see published on MARS, please send proposal to mars@toaredplanet.com
To make inevitable what is possible.
Onward to MARS
#toaredplanet
CONTACT US: mars@toaredplanet.com
Karl Marx. Preface to Critique of Political Economy
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
Malcolm X, 1964
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.
