Socialism; The Opposite of Laziness

By Comrade Jonah

It is impossible to be both lazy and a socialist at the same time. Socialism isn’t something you just believe in, vote for, or, worst of all, post about on social media. Socialism is something you do. If you don’t go out into the world, agitate the masses, conduct revolution, and carry out the class struggle, then you aren’t really a socialist.

Any actual socialist aspires to be like the great revolutionaries who have driven the movement. They should admire people like Lenin, who spent years writing in exile, or Mao, who marched 6,000 miles around China to escape his reactionary pursuers. Perhaps most of all, real socialists strive to be like Che Guevara.

Born into a wealthy family, Che abandoned his privilege in order to greater serve the cause of the masses. Many of his fellow revolutionaries were brutally murdered as their ship arrived in Havana. Although his revolution later turned out to be successful, Che knew his mission wasn’t complete. It is necessary for all genuine socialists to actively support the international movement as well. He went on to carry out anti-imperialist struggles in Congo and Bolivia, which sadly led to his death at the hands of comprador fascists. But this only made him even more powerful; his legacy carries on to today as one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century.

In China, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, you name it, socialism was established by people like him. Many were imprisoned and exiled for years before seizing state power. Others were murdered by reactionary governments before they could complete their duty to the revolution. If this laziness to you, I don’t know what words you would use to describe the corrupt, parasitic ruling class under whom we live.

We also mustn’t forget the efforts put forward by the masses in the phase of socialist construction. In the past, socialism has been implemented in the most backward nations on the planet. Even with the entire population on the job, industrializing such a nation is not an easy task. Although they were compensated fairly, many of these workers had to work very long and hard for the prosperity of themselves and their countries. A good deal of Chinese peasants worked upwards of 12 hard hours a day out of a desire for a more industrialized, modern nation to live in.

After the Great Leap Forward, the CCP learned from the success of agriculture in the Tachai village. People worked hard every day, sometimes up to 18 hours, to sustain themselves and expand the scope of the village’s productive forces. All of this was done under the strong leadership of the communist ideology and socialist political line. Quite the opposite of laziness, don’t you think?

A local farmhand named Chen Yung-kuei, inspired by the Communist message, began to organize the village’s poorer peasants into a reconstruction corps that tore down hills, rerouted streams and increased grain production 25-fold.

Chen, the acknowledged hero of Tachai and China’s most famous peasant, had been orphaned at age 9 after his impoverished father had sold his mother to a landlord and then taken his own life. Chen’s skill at persuading the Tachai peasants to give up private plots and work long hours for the good of the whole village began to win renown in the 1950s. Then Tachai received its most severe test when a huge flood struck at late 1963.

“More than 90 per cent of the houses were wrecked and more than 80 per cent of the fields were destroyed,” Chia recalled. Chen and the other villagers vowed to rebuild everything quickly, starting with the fields and leaving their wrecked homes until last. They refused to accept any outside aid, Chia said. One brigade member who particularly distinguished herself in that crisis was 16-year-old Kuo Feng-lien, who formed an “iron girls” team that worked 18-hour days to repair the terraces and reinforce them in a new way conceived by Chen. [Source]

In every successful socialist experiment to date, both the masses and party leaders have worked hard, long hours to bring about the success of their people. On the contrary, it was lazy elites like Deng, Khrushchev, Le Duan, or Gorbachev who struggled against the proletarian cause. Revolution has been time and time again sabotaged by the lazy-ass reformers stemming from Bernstein and Kautsky of the Second International. Among the masses, greed and laziness contribute to the absence of class consciousness in many parts of the world. This isn’t a problem that socialists are to leave unaddressed. We have to learn that being lazy isn’t just unacceptable in socialism, it is one of the greatest dangers to the socialist cause.