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There is a point and purpose to life, determined by the concrete historical conditions of your life: your place in history and in class society.

As a member of the working class and as a human, you have specific rational self-interests in the form of things you want to obtain and things you want to avoid. These interests align with the other members of your class, so that what's in the rational self-interest of the working class as a whole is the same as what's in the rational self-interest of each member of the working class. And the most effective methods of fulfilling these interests can be determined scientifically, using the rational power of the human mind. Fighting to advance your own self-interest, through advancing the collective self-interest of the class you belong to, at the place and time in history that you were born into, is a clearly defined and non-arbitrary 'purpose' to have in life.

And as history shows, the collective action of millions of people, fighting as partizans of the working class, can bring about enormous victories - improving their living standards, tearing down unjust structures and making society more inclusive, and creating miraculous wonders never seen before in history. The only reason life is so awful for so many people is because we haven't won yet. But in some places we, the working class of the world, are winning and life is improving, so sometimes when I'm feeling hopeless I watch this video. I think my favorite part of the song, which I've never seen in other versions, is the final verse:

Which is correct, all we have to do is win and then we can finally see the red sunrise at the dawn of human history, that is, history written through the conscious choice of all humanity.

As to the question of why any of this is happening at all, here is what I think: at the beginning of the universe there was only energy in the form of photons of light. Through a series of dialectical interactions with the other fundamental fields of the universe, that light was transformed into physical matter, which then in turn began interacting dialectically with itself - through gravity, accumulating into stars; through atomic forces, transmuting into new chemical elements; through the dialectical evolution of the balance of those two opposing forces, causing supernovas and releasing the new elements back into the universe.

As these elements accumulate, through random interactions new molecules are formed; as these molecules accumulate on the watery surfaces of planets across the universe, eventually, at random, some of them may form into cell membranes, enzymes, RNA, DNA; as cells accumulate, at random, some of them may mutate in a way that joins them together into a single organism; as organisms accumulate, they randomly mutate and evolve until eventually, by chance, a conscious being may come into existence; these beings may develop intelligence, form societies and create new forces of production; the operation of these forces of production may split society into classes; these classes develop, the forces of production develop, the contradictions between the class structure and the power of the forces of production develop until at some historically contingent place and time, the workers gain control and start building communism.

At no stage is anything directed, nothing is 'pushing' matter towards more complex forms or 'pulling' it towards an end state, but the simple fact that it is possible for any of these things to happen means that, if the dice are rolled for long enough, they will happen - and once they do, they set the new ground state for all future dice rolls. The light from the dawn of the universe is pouring like a waterfall down these stepped pools, swirling and bubbling at each stage until in some random place the sloshing happens to send a little overflow into the next pool. The light swirls there again until it happens to overflow again, and again, and again... and at the bottom, or at least, at the point where the light can start consciously choosing to try and overflow to new levels of complexity, is a sapient being who is a communist.

Unfortunately, we live in the pool just before that one, where we have to struggle in an irrational society built on an outdated, contradictory framework - but even now there are places that have reached a higher level of complexity, and the advantage those places have by being more rationally organized means that the higher complexity will spread out from there, and inspire those trapped under the old system to tear it down and break free. In the midst of this, you may just be a single individual mote being buffeted around, forced to suffer, and see others suffer, terrible crulties and injustice at the hands of monstrous beasts, but at the same time, as a class-conscious member of the working class of this world, you are an inerasable shining link in the chain leading from the beginning of the universe to a future world that is flourishing beyond all possible imagination under the light of a red star.

The sudden realization of this, through the synthesis of an astrophysics education with dialectical materialism, into the image of this 'cascade of light', is why I chose this name, and so, even though the suffering in our time, in our lives, in your life and mine, is terrible and sometimes almost unbearable, in my heart I have a tiny little unbreakable piece of hope because ultimately communism will win, and it will win forever, until the end of the time, over and over again everywhere in all of space, because the universe is a machine for turning photons into communists.