Liberation Audio

Every year, Pew Research publishes a study on the U.S. population’s political priorities. Their 2024 report shows that, like the previous years, “no single issue stands out after the economy,” with almost 75 percent of respondents rating it the main goal for the next administration, a rate “considerably larger” than any other policy. Yet when we see pundits discuss “the economy” on the news, they speak an obscuring language. The economy is an abstraction, in that there is no such “thing” as the economy. What we call “the economy” is, in reality, the ways that humans produce, distribute, exchange, and consume products or services. In this sense, “the economy” has a history as long as humanity. Yet there are different ways of organizing the economy. Unlike what we’re taught, the capitalist economy is a relatively recent phenomenon and is neither the final, just, most effective, nor possible form of organizing what, how, and why we produce. The introductory article to this series ended with one of the most foundational of the contradictions of capitalism: between use value and exchange value. Understanding this one contradiction goes a long way in helping understand the antagonism between those of us who live by working and the few of them who live by making us work. The conflict between use value and exchange value is an expression of the struggle between classes. This entry explains some aspects of the contradiction between use value and exchange value, how they help us better understand the world around us, and some ways we can wield that understanding to explain the exploitation humans, all living creatures, and the Earth suffer from, which is necessary for eliminating the root cause of that suffering. Read the original article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/use-value-exchange-value/

Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradictions of capitalism are complicated, working and oppressed people can easily understand them for the simple reason that we all live with and negotiate any number of contradictions every day. The contradictions we deal with that are the most confining, that most constrain our capacities and that keep us oppressed are specifically the contradictions of capitalism. On any given day, we find abundant evidence that makes it clear that the capitalist system doesn’t work in practice. Examining the contradictions of capitalism and demonstrating how they are inherent in the system, proves that capitalism doesn’t even work in theory. Understanding capitalist contradictions heightens our agitation and accelerates political consciousness by cutting through capitalist ideology and the various excuses of capitalists, politicians, and their media. Knowing capitalist contradictions better informs our tactics and strategies in any given struggle and serves as a bridge to socialist reconstruction in the U.S. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/capitalist-contradictions-and-revolutionary-struggle-an-introduction/

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The international capitalist institutions like the World Bank that are increasingly taking up the issue of cities and climate change can’t explain the various factors behind urbanization nor can they pose real solutions to its impact on or relationship to climate catastrophes. Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 UN Habitat report. Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate. Marx and Engels lived during a time in which capitalist urbanization was a nascent phenomenon concentrated mostly in some European cities, like Manchester, the English city about which Friedrich Engels wrote his first and classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels demonstrates how the “great town” of Manchester, the first major manufacturing center in England, was great only for capitalist profits. The concentration of capital required for the invention and adoption of machinery outproduced independent handicraft and agricultural production, forcing both into the industrial proletariat of the city. There, they had to work for the capitalists, whose wages were so low they could, if they were lucky, live in overcrowded houses and neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Because the city was produced chaotically for capitalist profits, no attention was given to accompanying environmental impacts. As the masses were driven from their land into the urban factories, the ancestral ties to the land and ecological knowledge of how to live sustainably on that land was lost. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/capitalist-urbanization-sponge-cities/

Note: Following the original publication of this article, Alex Saab was extradited to Miami on October 16th 2021, and remains in prison awaiting an appeal. On March 18, The Cape Verde Supreme Court approved the extradition of Venezuelan government envoy Alex Saab to the United States. Saab was en route to Iran to secure food and medicine deals for Venezuelan public programs last year when he was arrested in Cape Verde, at the request of the U.S. government under Donald Trump. He has been imprisoned in Cape Verde since June 2020. Saab is appealing the extradition. The arrest of Saab is part of the U.S. government’s larger attack on Venezuela’s CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production) food distribution program. It is also a blatant violation of national sovereignty spanning several continents as the U.S. demands the right to arrest anyone, anywhere, for pursuing economic development free of U.S. dictates. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/extradition-of-alex-saab-u-s-takes-effort-to-starve-venezuelans-to-new-lows/

Despite its association with sovereign nations involved in wartime alliances, the term “ally” has become influential in activist circles on the US left. Attention to debates over what it means to be an ally reveal the limits of the politics of allyship. They also provide an opportunity to reflect on the difference between allies and comrades. Allyship is anchored in liberal politics. People committed to revolutionary politics need to be comrades. Over the last decade, there have been intense discussions on social media and among community organizers who can be an ally. Generally, allies are understood to be privileged people who want to do something about oppression. They may not consider themselves survivors or victims, but they want to help. So allies can be straight people who stand up for LGBTQ people, white people who support Black and brown people, men who defend women, and so on. I have yet to see the term used for rich people involved in working-class struggle. Allies don’t want to imagine themselves as homophobic, racist, or sexist. They see themselves as the good guys, part of the solution. As is frequently emphasized in debates around allyship, claiming to be an ally does not make one an ally. Allyship requires time and effort. People have to work at it. Much of the written and video work on allyship is thus instructional, often appearing as a how-to guide or a list of pointers—how to be an ally, the dos and don’ts of allyship, and so on. The instructions for being a good ally are mini lifestyle manuals, techniques for navigating (but not demolishing) settings of privilege and oppression. Individuals can learn what not to say and what not to do. They can feel engaged without any organized political struggle at all. The “politics” in these allyship how-tos consists of interpersonal interactions, individual feelings, and mediated affects. The pieces on how to be a good ally that circulate online (as blog posts, videos, editorials, and course handouts) address the viewer or reader as an individual with a privileged identity who wants to operate in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. This potential ally is positioned as wanting to know what they can do right now, on their own, and in their everyday lives to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression. The ally’s field of operation is often imagined as social media (in knowing the right way to respond to racist or homophobic remarks on Twitter, for example); as charitable contribution (in donating to and setting up GoFundMe campaigns); as professional interaction (in hiring the marginalized and promoting the oppressed); as conversations at one’s school or university (in knowing what not to say); and, sometimes, as street-level protests (in not dominating someone else’s event). Even more often, the ally’s own individual attitude and behavior is what is targeted. The how-to guide instructs allies on how to feel, think, and act if they want to consider themselves as people who are on the side of the oppressed. Their awareness is what needs to change. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/from-allies-to-comrades/

Liu Liangmo’s story is as remarkable as it is unknown. An anti-imperialist, pro-Communist Christian, with a significant relationship to the Black Liberation Movement and the Indian Freedom Struggle, Liu lived in the U.S. as a diplomat after participating in the ongoing Chinese revolution. He wrote a column for the prominent Black newspaper. The Pittsburgh Courier, before returning to his home country and attaining a fairly high-ranking position there. His story offers notable insight into the history of pre- and post-revolutionary China and its approach to the Black freedom movement in the U.S. It also reveals much about the turbulent “Second Popular Front” era in China, during which time Communist forces obtained broader legitimacy. This has largely been erased from U.S. political and historical consciousness, which helps explain Liu’s relative marginality. Most radical movements since the late 1960s have rightly critiqued the legacy of the Popular Front for blurring the lines between reform and revolution and, by extension, capitalism and communism. They see the Popular Front as an opportunist approach to building unity where radical ideas and the independent working-class program were subordinated to maintain legitimacy among left-liberal reform currents. What is lost in such sweeping generalizations are the unusual concrete circumstances and strategic conundrums that Communist forces faced worldwide in this moment, especially among the struggles of oppressed peoples against colonialism and fascism. Liu Liangmo’s story provides an opportunity to critically examine this period anew. His Courier columns covered a wide breadth of “popular front” political activities and the relationships expressed in those writings speak to both the strengths and the weakness of Communist political activity during World War II. On the one hand, there was unprecedented vitality and significance to Communist-led interventions while, on the other hand, there was a lack of strategic clarity that forestalled a larger political breakthrough. Using Liu’s columns as a foundation, we can address this moment and draw important international parallels. Read the full story here: https://www.liberationschool.org/liu-liangmo-pt-2/

Liu Liangmo (1909-1988) was a prominent Chinese anti-imperialist, religious leader and, from 1942-1945, columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier—at that time the nation’s widest circulating Black newspaper. Liu’s columns (and actions as an organizer) were a significant part of efforts by progressive Chinese people, on the mainland and in the diaspora, to build alliances with the Black Liberation movement as part of a broader effort to shape the post-war world. His words linked the causes of ending colonialism, imperialism, and race discrimination—from the Yangtze to the Ganges to the Mississippi—mirroring the words and actions of millions of others involved in similarly-minded struggles around the world, including Liu’s favorite U.S. singer: Paul Robeson. Liu’s columns represent the efforts of Communist and aligned currents to turn the allied effort in the favor of the exploited and the oppressed. This was counteracted in the so-called “Cold War,” as imperialist forces worked to make the world “safe for capitalism” in the wake of the World War II. His columns and activities offer interesting insight into the struggle within the “Second United Front” in China between the Nationalist Kuomintang and the Communists during the Second World War and their differing approaches to the post-war world: whether China should be an anti-colonial vanguard or seek inclusion in the imperialist “great power” club. The “Nationalist” Chinese government’s chose the latter, heavily impacting their approach to racism in the US. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/liu-liangmo-pt-1/

In commemorating Black August, we commemorate the struggle of those who have fought before us and faced violent repercussions from the state. We uplift the revolutionary history of the Black working class and its fundamental position in forging and leading the struggle for liberation for all. And we recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation and for the freedom of all political prisoners. When I think of political prisoners, and when I think of those who have relentlessly committed themselves to Black Liberation, I always think of Assata Shakur. From Assata’s story, we are able to learn what it means to be motivated by a deep love for the people and the struggle for freedom—and what it means to embody a determined and unbreakable spirit in the face of crackdowns and government repression designed to stifle and destroy the movement. Account after account from Assata’s comrades and fellow revolutionaries describe Assata as a light, a positive spirit who remained disciplined and committed to the struggle despite incredible hardships. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/assata-shakur-the-making-of-a-revolutionary-woman/

In early 1956, construction was almost complete on what the Japanese authorities and general public thought was going to be a battery factory in what is now known as West Tokyo, but what at the time was farmland. When the “factory” was finished on April 10 of that year, however, a banner outside the perimeters announced that it was the new home of Korea University, which was previously a series of shacks attached to Tokyo First Korean High School. This episode is part of the much longer and widely unknown anti-colonial struggle of Koreans in Japan, a struggle with implications and lessons for the whole world. It’s a struggle that, just like the Korean struggle more broadly, has been systematically isolated. As such, it’s a struggle that needs more international solidarity, particularly from those of us in the U.S. Yet it’s also a struggle that can provide hope and inspiration for all people fighting against colonialism and imperialism. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/the-chongryon-movement-the-struggle-of-koreans-in-japan/

Our understanding of the state lies at the heart of our struggle to create a new society and fundamentally eliminate the oppression, exploitation, war, and environmental destruction characteristic of capitalism. In a socialist state, people collectively manage society, including what we produce, how much we produce, and the conditions of our work, to meet the needs of the people and the planet. Under capitalism, the state is organized to maintain the capitalist system and the dictatorship of a tiny group of capitalists over the rest of us through the use (or threat) of violent force and a range of institutions that present capitalism as “common sense.” The primary function of the capitalist state is to protect itself, which means it manages contradictions within the capitalist class and between their class and the working class. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/marxist-state-theory-intro/

The Cuban people voted by supermajority on Sept. 25 to approve the Families Code, a revolutionary law that modernizes, recognizes and legalizes all manifestations of families in Cuba. The previous 1975 Family Code was revolutionary for its time, but needed a major updating with almost 50 years of growth in social consciousness worldwide and in Cuba. The new Families Code broadens the family model to be fully inclusive. It includes the right to same sex marriage, expanded rights of adoption, allows surrogacy births, more protection for seniors and grandparents’ rights, stronger protections against domestic violence and explicit expansion of the rights of children. Composed of 471 articles and 117 pages, the hefty code details the fullest inclusion of every Cuban’s family as one sees fit, and “defends equality, non-discrimination, dignity and respect for diversity.” Of 6,251,786 eligible voters, 74.01% turned out to vote. Of these, a supermajority of 66.89% approved the Families Code. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/supermajority-of-cubans-vote-for-revolutionary-families-code/

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions? The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country. In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/corporate-personhood-monopoly-capital-and-the-precedent-that-wasnt-the-1866-santa-clara-case/

By the early 1970s, the global revolutionary tide of socialist and national liberation struggles was at its apex, and the tide was washing over the U.S., with expanding and increasingly militant social movements and political organizations. The beginning of “neoliberalism” was a domestic aspect of the coming global counterrevolution, which devastated the world for decades. This article tells the story of how the right wing of the capitalist class came to drive a new set of reactionary Supreme Court rulings, government policies, and ideological battles against democracy and the basic democratic rights our class won and that the right wing soon started rolling back. A key figure in this anti-democratic turn was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a tobacco company executive turned Supreme Court Justice. In the transition between the two roles, he wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” In hindsight, the private memorandum Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971—known as the “Powell Memo”—in many ways represents the inaugural moment in this counteroffensive. Titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Memo clearly expressed the sharpness of the class struggle at that time and encapsulated the capitalist class’ fear that they were losing the battles of ideas and the world. It undoubtedly laid the groundwork for some key components of U.S. imperialism’s new offensive against the global revolutionary upsurge that characterized the immediate post-World War II environment, an offensive that is still with us today. Read the full article here:

In an article published this year for International Women’s Day, Maddie Dery summarizes the various experiences of the women’s liberation movement since the early 20th century: “The history of International Women’s Day teaches us that when we fight, we win”. This spirit, which threads through the historic struggle for women’s liberation and socialism, is easily identified in the revolutionary origins, legacies, and futures of International Women’s Day. At Liberation School, we want to end March—which, since 1987, the U.S. recognizes as “Women’s History Month”—and pull that red thread by publishing Claudia Jones’ historic 1950 speech at an International Women’s Day rally, which was also published in Political Affairs, the monthly journal of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Jones’ speech rooted the contemporary moment of the class struggle in the long history of the fight for Black liberation, women’s emancipation, peace, and socialism, linking together fighters from Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, from Lucy Stone and Ida B Wells to Williana Burroughs and Clara Zetkin. Born in Trinidad in 1915, Claudia Jones moved to New York City eight years later. She is one of the most significant revolutionary theorists and organizers of the 20th century. After joining the Communist Party in 1936 through the struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys, she rapidly developed as an organizer and intellectual and within two years was the associate editor of the CPUSA’s Weekly Review and after another two years was the lead editor. Pushing the Party to prioritize struggles against male and national chauvinism, in the late 1940s Jones theorized the “super-exploitation” of Black working-class women through their structural location in U.S. society. In one 1949 article, she wrote that “the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to… heightened political consciousness”. For Jones, the heightened oppression of Black women workers and their historic roles as leaders and organizers of their communities made Black women’s participation and leadership essential to the communist and progressive struggle. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/claudia-jones-1950-iwd-speech/

Every working person is keenly aware that prices are up. Nasty surprises and disbelief keep turning up at the register. People are being forced to forgo even the most minor and seemingly harmless comfort purchases, adding to the accumulation of the indignities necessary for survival under capitalism. Even worse, the alleged culprits can seem abstract and hard to pin down, like “the supply chain.” Some try to blame good things like higher wages, and others point to enraging levels of straight-up corporate greed. There is a debate raging about which factors cause inflation, with one other “cause” thrown in: government spending. The various explanations serve more as ideological markers than as actual explanations. They all have the virtue of having some “solution” that Congress or the White House can or should pursue immediately. Our indignation at the daily web of injustices we are forced to navigate reflects the contradiction between capitalism and humanity. Inflation reflects the dynamics of a system based on exploitation. Ultimately, there is no long-term solution to inflation or other ills of capitalism without replacing the system. Without such systematic change, all “immediate” solutions produce new cul-de-sacs for the working class. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/value-price-and-inflation-immediate-and-structural-causes/

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts. Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript. This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/walter-rodney-a-peoples-professor/

The Party for Socialism and Liberation is built on two essential premises. One is revolutionary Marxist theory and analysis on all issues affecting humanity and the environment we live in, especially the most pressing issues facing workers and oppressed peoples. We strive through our literature, newspaper, social media, video, agitational leaflets, and more, to popularize and communicate to our class the truth behind the capitalists’ lies and the urgent need for socialism. But theory and politics would mean nothing without struggle. That is the other essential premise of our organization. Action is the key to progress, the only way to defeat right-wing policies and win rights, and ultimately to achieve the liberation of humanity through socialism. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/party-action-building-peoples-movements-streets/

We are in a period where the world’s poor and working people are waging heroic struggles against imperialist war and exploitation. Millions of people poured into the streets in the last few years to prevent Bush and Cheney’s rush to war against Iraq, only to find that this imperialist war had the backing of both political parties of U.S. imperialism, of the big business media, of the corporations and the banks. The protests were huge—the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever. The anti-war movement spanned the globe. It was an historic demonstration of unity by the people of all continents uniting against U.S. imperialism. Yet the war machine pushed ahead. Today, tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead. Thousands of GIs, workers in uniform, have been killed or wounded, with more being sent to their deaths daily. Politicians of all stripes promise “endless war” — and it is only because of the fierce Iraqi resistance to the Pentagon occupation that has slowed, but not stopped, the plans for the next war for empire. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/founding-statement-of-the-party-for-socialism-and-liberation/

In 2013, five unelected judges gutted the right to vote for tens of millions of African Americans and others. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby v. Holder overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) that prevented voter suppression. That provision—outlined in Section 4(b) of the Act—required state and local governments with a documented history of racism to submit any changes to their electoral laws for pre-approval by a federal agency. A single court case, heard in in a room where no cameras are allowed, stole from millions a landmark protection of the fundamental right to a vote. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/shelby-county-v-holder-how-the-supreme-court-attacked-black-voting-rights/

Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was mercilessly beaten to death earlier this month during a traffic stop by five Memphis Police Department officers. In a few hours, the video of his murder will be released to the public. Righteous outrage is already boiling across the country, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation will be joining thousands in the streets tonight to demand justice. Only mass action can revive the movement against police terror, and to end that terror ultimately requires a revolution — a change in who holds power in this country. Tyre Nichols was a beloved father of a 4-year-old son who grew up in Sacramento, California, and moved to Memphis in 2020. Tyre “was a beautiful soul and he touched everyone,” his mother remembered at a press conference, and had a passion for photography. That he was pulled over in what seemed to be a simple traffic stop and then brutally beaten for three minutes while completely defenseless is testament to the utter inhumanity of the police in this country. Read the full statement here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-justice-for-tyre-nichols-take-to-the-streets/

Contrary to the mythology we learn in school, the founding fathers feared and hated the concept of democracy—which they derisively referred to as “tyranny of the majority.” The constitution that they wrote reflects this, and seeks to restrict and prohibit involvement of the masses of people in key areas of decision making. The following article, originally written in 2008, reviews the true history of the constitution and its role in the political life of the country. The ruling class of today—the political and social successors to the “founding fathers”—continues to have a fundamental disdain for popular participation in government. The right wing of the elite is engaged in an all-out offensive against basic democratic rights and democracy itself. This offensive relies heavily on the Supreme Court and the legal doctrine of constitutional “originalism”. Originalism means that the only rights and policies that are protected are ones that are explicitly laid out in the constitution, conforming with the “original” intentions of the founders. As the article explores, this was a thoroughly anti-democratic set up that sought to guarantee the power and wealth of the elite. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/class-character-of-the-u-s-constitution/

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and other imperialist countries have repeatedly declared that history is over, meaning that humanity cannot transcend the capitalist system, which is elevated as the pinnacle of human development. As Margaret Thatcher claimed “there is no alternative” to capitalism, and the best we can hope for is a kinder, gentler, and more “humane” form of it. According to the capitalist class, the fall of the Soviet Union demonstrated that “socialism doesn’t work” and socialist revolution is foolhardy, so we shouldn’t preoccupy ourselves with fighting for it. Despite this prognosis, socialist revolution is very much on the table in the U.S. and all over the world. As we are facing multiple existential crises for humanity and the planet, socialist revolution is not just possible, but an absolute necessity to ensure our collective future. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/what-is-socialist-revolution/

The corporate media is on a nonstop campaign asserting that the U.S. electorate is turning to the right and rejecting progressive policies. It is clear that if Republicans win back either the House or Senate, this message will be amplified a thousand times over. But this narrative is completely fraudulent. In the working class especially, there is a widespread rejection of corporate power, an embrace of core progressive policies and a desire to fight. Whether or not that sentiment is fully reflected in the midterm outcome — and there are various factors suppressing it — there is no reason for any socialist to adopt the false picture of the working class provided by the corporate media. The contest between the two ruling-class parties for control of Congress is entering its final stretch. The midterm election is now less than three weeks away, with Republicans hoping to take control of one or both houses of the legislature. The outcome will have a major impact on the trajectory of U.S. politics in the coming years, potentially hobbling the already-unpopular Biden administration, deepening gridlock and turmoil at the summits of elite politics, and setting the stage for an even fiercer confrontation in 2024. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-the-right-wings-program-is-deeply-unpopular-so-why-are-the-elections-so-close/

In the preface to the first edition of volume one of Capital, dated July 25, 1867, Marx introduces the book’s “ultimate aim”: “to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society”. Looking back 155 years later, it’s clear the book not only accomplished that aim but continues to do so today. In a few short pages, Marx introduces the method he used to study and present his research into the dynamics of capitalism, explains the reasons why he focused on England, distinguishes between modes of production and social formations (and by doing so refutes any accusations of his theory of history as progressing linearly through successive stages), identifies the capacities he’s assuming of the reader, affirms he’s interested in critiquing the structures of capital and not the individuals within it, and explains that the main function of the book is to help our class intervene in the constantly changing capitalist system. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/marxs-first-preface-to-capital/

The following interview, facilitated by Derek Ford, took place via e-mail during June and July in preparation for Black August, when progressive organizers and activists deepen our study of and commitment to the Black struggle in the U.S. and the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist class struggles worldwide. During this time, we wanted to provide a unique and accessible resource on Walter Rodney, the revolutionary Guyanese organizer, theorist, pedagogue, political economist, and what many call a “guerrilla intellectual.” Liberation School recently republished Rodney’s essay on George Jackson here (https://www2.liberationschool.org/walter-rodney-on-george-jackson/). Read the interview here: https://www.liberationschool.org/walter-rodneys-revolutionary-praxis-devyn-springer-interview/

This is the first English translation of this interview and the opening installment in a Liberation School series of previously untranslated work by Thomas Sankara. This translation series is the result of a collaboration with ThomasSankara.net, an online platform dedicated to archiving work on and by the great African revolutionary. We would like to express our gratitude to Bruno Jaffré for allowing us to establish this collaboration and providing us with the right to translate this material into English for the first time. Thomas Sankara (1949-1987), who is sometimes referred to as the “African Che Guevara,” was the Marxist-Leninist leader of the Burkinabé Revolution from 1983 until his assassination in 1987, which is finally being investigated. Sankara made major contributions to the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle, the defense of national self-determination, the construction of socialist internationalism, women’s liberation, the fight against capitalist-driven environmental destruction, and many other significant fronts of global class struggle. The text below was originally published in L’Humanité, a newspaper with strong historical ties to the French Communist Party, before being republished on ThomasSankara.net. Read the article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/sankara-we-didnt-import-our-revolution/

During the summer of 2020, tens of millions of people took to the streets to participate in the largest uprising in this country’s history. From the smallest towns to the biggest cities, working people across races, genders and ages joined together to demand justice for all victims of police terror. The national spotlight was primarily on Black victims of police terror like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and many more. But the righteous anger did not only stem from Black people. The rebellion of Black people brought millions of working class people from every racial background in the streets, shaking the racist foundation of this country. And when a racist, sexist, anti-Asian massacre in Atlanta took the lives of 8 of our working-class siblings, it wasn’t just Asian people in the streets. The crowds, standing shoulder to shoulder with each other in the face of racist hate were multinational. The solidarity demonstrated throughout the summer of 2020 and beyond remains an undeniably powerful force, that achieved concessions previously thought to be impossible. For many, the heated struggle in the streets demonstrated not only the possibility, but the necessity of solidarity in fighting for our liberation. For the ruling class — which benefits from keeping our class divided — that solidarity was a threat to the status quo. The ruling class has long attempted to thwart working-class solidarity by pitting racial groups against one another, a history that includes dividing Black and Asian people. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/afro-asian-multi-national-unity/

Cities across the U.S. are rapidly transforming. “Gentrification-style” luxury developments are replacing neighborhood landmarks and low-income housing. Sky-high rents are pushing poor residents increasingly further from city centers. These trends are symptoms of gentrification, the process by which poor and working-class people are driven out of their communities due to an influx of capitalist investment in their neighborhoods. Gentrification is not always defined in these terms. Some cite cultural explanations, from the kind and number of amenities (like coffee shops, bike lanes, etc.) developed in an urban neighborhood to changing social norms around “lifestyle choices” (like not having children), defining gentrification as a result of individual consumer preferences. Or they might define it as the result of collective consumption patterns, which happens in arguments about “gay gentrification.” Some define gentrification as a process of white people moving to Black neighborhoods and pushing long-term Black residents out of major urban centers such as Washington D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia. Still others merely accept that gentrification is a “natural” and unavoidable phenomenon. In general, these groups view gentrification as a short-term problem to be corrected by policy tweaks, such as reforming residential zoning laws, or “better” individual choices. Instead of individual or even policy choices, Marxists understand gentrification as a process that is fundamentally caused by the laws of capitalism—as part and parcel of its regular cycle of capital accumulation—coupled with racism and other forms of oppression. In this article, we explain the underlying forces that produce gentrification by turning to Marx and Engels before covering more recent research and organizing around the topic. At the end, we discuss the practical implications of a revolutionary understanding of gentrification. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/gentrification-a-revolutionary-understanding/

Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, many tens of thousands of people have taken to the street in protest — some for the first time. Now the question is: What’s next? What can be done? Biden has within his power many different executive authorities that would provide abortion access in all 50 states. But it will require a big struggle to make it happen. With trigger laws pending to go into effect it is essential that the movement make these demands now! Watch the webinar online: https://youtu.be/6CkqE_hfL-A

The past, as they say, is never truly past. In recent months, Soviet nationality policy, a topic many thought consigned to academic backwaters and communist happy hours, has been thrust into the forefront of public conversation. The war raging in Ukraine has brought to the forefront questions about the borders, languages, and ethnicities of the country. How did they get that way, who is responsible, and how do these questions impact the causes and consequences of the current crisis? The conversation, however, has been something of a battle of dueling nationalisms. In response to far-right Ukrainian nationalism, Russian President Vladimir Putin has spun his own nationalist views, blaming the Bolsheviks for setting the stage for tensions between Russia and Ukraine today. Taking the two sets of critiques, one might be led to believe that the Soviet Union was some sort of venal, brutal empire that held the just aspirations of its various nationalities and ethnicities captive, manipulating “national borders” to generate fake nations and false national consciousness. The truth is far from the stories told by both the Ukrainian nationalists and Putin. The Soviet Union was the most advanced attempt at addressing national oppression, racism and discrimination at a country-wide level. Among many other things, the USSR was the first nation to engage in widespread affirmative action at levels no country before or since has reached. The Soviets took hundreds of nationalities and brought them under one governmental authority that took on economic backwardness and cultural repression to open up a liberatory future for peoples who had spent centuries under the yoke of the Tsars’ imperial ambitions. In fact, the depth of the tragedy afflicting Eastern Europe right now can only be fully understood in light of the decades-long Soviet effort to put an end to national antagonism and forge a future based on the unity of working and poor people for their collective benefit and that of humanity. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/nations-and-soviets-the-national-question-in-the-ussr/

Women’s History Month is a time to recommit ourselves to the unfinished struggle for women’s liberation, and this year it is even more crucial than ever. The conservative leaning Supreme Court is considering gutting or even overturning Roe v. Wade, which would roll back women’s hard-won and fundamental right to abortion. The current attacks on abortion rights are the culmination of decades of reactionary organizing to establish extreme reproductive control by challenging birth control access, criminalizing miscarriage, undoing the right to abortion, and promoting abstinence-only sex (mis)education. This article offers a Marxist analysis of why abortion rights are in peril today, and how the historical attempt to limit and control reproductive freedom stretches back to the very beginnings of class society. This article was originally published in the Autumn 2019 issue of Breaking the Chains magazine, titled “Not a Moral Issue.” Read the article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/marxist-analysis-attacks-reproductive-rights/

The overthrow of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War restructured global imperialism and all of world politics. Without an understanding of the internal logic of imperialism, some hoped that now there would be a “peace dividend,” a period after the Cold War where the United States and its junior partners would have no reason to initiate more wars and invasions. The illusion was that the lone superpower would not be threatened by any potential rival, and therefore peace and calm would rein. In the quarter-century since the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the United States has in fact been engaged in constant war, and now has a bipartisan military outlook based on “permanent war.” It continues to operate over 900 military bases in more than 100 countries in every region of the world. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/the-unipolar-era-of-imperialism/

On Feb. 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin undertook what he referred to as a “special military operation…to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.” Western bourgeois media immediately decried these stated goals, regularly repeating that the allegations of Nazism in Ukraine are nothing more than Russian “fake news.” Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, went so far as to flatly state that “there are no Nazis in the Ukraine.” Similar claims resound throughout the mass media’s echo chambers, and the fact that the current president of Ukraine is Jewish is often short-sightedly presented as the only “proof” necessary. Disputing the existence of Nazis and fascists in Ukraine serves the purpose of constructing a twisted but simplistic narrative loosely based on WWII: Putin is an evil, Hitler-like figure intent on attacking the freedom-loving Ukrainian government and its innocent supporters. The goal of such a narrative is to foster blind and unquestioning support for the Zelenskyy government, NATO and the imperialist Western powers. A “humanitarian” war, meaning a brutal NATO intervention that would likely spark WWIII, is thereby presented as a viable option. In this context, any attempt to provide a sober and concrete analysis of the actual history of Nazism in the region runs the risk of being disingenuously labeled and dismissed as “pro-Putin” because it does not support this war-mongering narrative. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/nazis-in-ukraine-seeing-through-the-fog-of-the-information-war/

On May 11, the U.S. Senate voted down the Women’s Health Protection Act, 49-51. The WHPA would have made abortion legal, eliminating the role of the Supreme Court on the issue of abortion and nullifying the pending Supreme Court decision, the draft copy of which has already been leaked to the media. The Democratic Party leadership is responsible for this catastrophe because they refused to forcefully defend abortion rights and women’s rights over the past two decades. It was not a priority for them. They only gave lip service for abortion rights to get votes. Millions of women are now losing control over their own bodies. It’s not just Joe Manchin to blame. The Democratic leadership has only seen abortion rights as a bargaining chip in bourgeois, capitalist politics. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, has insisted that support for abortion rights should not be a “litmus test” for Democratic candidates. In recent days she even went to Texas to support the campaign of Henry Cuellar, who is opposed to abortion rights, against a more progressive challenger who supports abortion rights. This clearly indicates that the Democratic Party leadership doesn’t give a damn about abortion rights. They are playing politics and using the issue of abortion to fundraise and mobilize voters for the midterm elections, while failing to preserve the fundamental right to abortion. This is not the first time this has happened. In 2009 and 2010, the Democrats did not have a razor thin majority in the Senate, but a huge majority. Fifty-nine Senators were Democrats, and one Independent voted with the Democratic caucus. In that same Congressional term, the Democrats had a vast majority in the House of Representatives, and they had just elected Barack Obama as president, who enjoyed immense popularity in his first two years. Then too, the Democrats could have adopted legislation like the Women’s Health Protection Act that would have enshrined abortion rights forever. On May 14, there will be large-scale protests in support of abortion rights initiated by Planned Parenthood. In addition to supporting abortion rights in general, the message of the May 14 organizers will be focused on voting for the Democratic Party in the upcoming midterm elections. This is a smokescreen and shield for the Democratic Party’s role in the destruction of abortion rights. While Planned Parenthood is running interference for the Democratic Party’s insidious role in allowing abortions rights to be destroyed, there is no reason to focus a political attack on any other organization than the Democratic Party itself. Planned Parenthood provides many critically needed medical services, not only abortion and birth control but important preventative care as well as transition care for transgender people; the organization is under attack by right-wing anti-abortion forces around the country. Campaigning for the Democratic Party must be understood as a losing strategy. In fact it is a fraudulent exercise. Recent history clearly demonstrates that even when the Democratic Party controls all branches of government, they have not cared enough about abortion rights to ensure that abortion rights legislation becomes the law of the land. We have to make this clear in our conversations at the May 14 actions. A militant mass movement in defense of abortion rights will be launched. This movement needs to expose the failure of the Democratic Party to adequately mount a defense of abortion rights. In fact, the Democratic Party must be held responsible for the catastrophe that is being imposed on women, girls and every person who needs access to safe, legal abortion.

The Supreme court has declared war against women and our basic rights to control our own bodies. Now is the time to fight back. Millions of people going into the streets would make it clear that without justice there can be no peace. A heroic individual has leaked to the public the decision by the Supreme Court to end abortion rights by overturning the Roe v Wade decision, and the later Casey decision. Read the full statement here: https://www.liberationnews.org/supreme-court-declares-war-on-women-and-abortion-rights-take-to-the-streets/

Brian Becker gives a virtual lecture on the importance of V.I. Lenin's State and Revolution, and how important it is to understand and maintain the revolutionary nature of Marxist theory and practice. Brian is a founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, and a host on The Socialist Program with Brian Becker (https://soundcloud.com/thesocialistprogram). You can watch the original video of the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gpqM5Lfbs&ab_channel=LiberationNews

Karl Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1864 that he was sure that the “American anti-slavery war” would initiate a “new era of ascendancy” for the working classes for the “rescue…and reconstruction of a social world”. The Black historian Lerone Bennett, writing 100 years later, called Reconstruction, “the most improbable social revolution in American history”. Clothed in the rhetoric and incubated within the structure of “American Democracy,” it was nonetheless crushed, drowned in blood, for being far too radical for the actual “American democracy.” While allowing for profit to be made, Reconstruction governments made a claim on the proceeds of commerce for the general welfare. While not shunning wage labor, they demanded fairness in compensation and contracts. Reconstruction demanded the posse and the lynch mob be replaced with juries and the rule of law. This all occurred during a time when the newly minted “great fortunes” brooked no social contract, sought only to degrade labor, and were determined to meet popular discontent with the rope and the gun where the courts or the stuffed ballot box wouldn’t suffice. The defeat of Reconstruction was the precondition for the ascension of U.S. imperialism. The relevant democratic Reconstruction legislation was seen by elites as “class legislation” and as antithetical to the elites’ needs. The proletarian base of Reconstruction made it into a dangerous potential base for communism, especially as ruling-class fears flared in the wake of the Paris Commune, where the workers of Paris briefly seized power in 1871. The distinguished service of Blacks at all levels of government undermined the gradations of bigotry essential to class construction in the United States. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/reconstruction-in-america/

Richard Becker speaks at the Party for Socialism and Liberation's forum "Crisis in Ukraine & Anti-war Analysis", discussing the latest events in Europe, and the roots of the crisis.

The Biden administration announced a major escalation in its sanctions against Russia yesterday with a ban on the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and coal to the United States. A White House press statement said that the United States made this decision “in close consultation with our allies and partners around the world” and with bipartisan consensus. This move from the U.S. government fuels the flames of global tensions to the benefit of giant energy and military corporations, making the prospect of lasting peace in Ukraine even more remote. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/embargo-on-russian-oil-gives-gift-to-energy-corporations-deals-blow-to-hopes-for-peace/

The war in Ukraine is ushering in a new period of heightened danger in world politics and the threat of a global conflict that would devastate humanity. Socialists and people who want peace need to recognize that the entire U.S. foreign policy and military establishment is now organized around “great power conflict” against Russia and China as the defining strategy for decades to come. It is essential to recognize that Russia, China and other countries are not being targeted fundamentally because of human rights, or this or that military action, but because they no longer accept the U.S.-dominated world order. We must stand in opposition to this new Cold War-style period of confrontation. This major power conflict is not in the interests of the great mass of people, in the United States or worldwide. The logic of it will only produce severe economic pain, climate disaster and ultimately catastrophic war. The working class has no interest in being dragged into such a conflict in the name of preserving the dominance of Wall Street and the Pentagon. In the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and ever since, the corporate media in the United States has been working overtime to spread misinformation and confusion. They hope that inundating people with non-stop anti-Russian content will manufacture the consent necessary not just for a short-term military escalation in Eastern Europe, but so as to sign people up for a whole new Cold War. Against this, the Party for Socialism and Liberation is advancing five basic points that can serve to unite those who oppose U.S. imperialism and support peace. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/the-working-class-must-reject-the-new-cold-war-5-points-of-unity/

Originally from Chicago, Ill, George L. Jackson grew up in California. In 1961, a young Jackson convicted of armed robbery for allegedly stealing $70 from a gas station. Outrageously, Jackson was sentenced to one year to life, despite assurances from his attorney of a favorable deal if he plead guilty. Jackson would experience the racist injustice of the U.S. system at the height of the global liberation movements of the era, which couldn’t help but bleed into the rapidly expanding U.S. prison system. Jackson’s political radicalization and activism did not occur until he was imprisoned, which was not uncommon. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn comments that, “there had always been political prisoners—people sent to jail for belonging to radical movements, for opposing war. But now a new kind of political prisoner appeared, the person convicted of an ordinary crime, who, in prison, became awakened politically” Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/george-jackson-blood-in-my-eye/

La operación militar rusa en Ucrania pone de manifiesto que el mundo ha llegado a una peligrosa bifurcación. Es de vital importancia que la gente en Estados Unidos, la que obtiene gran parte de la información de los medios de comunicación burgueses que funcionan como una cámara de eco del gobierno, sepa que la crisis actual es el subproducto de un largo esfuerzo del Estado estadounidense para establecer una dominación absoluta en toda Europa. Su política tiene como objetivo socavar la seguridad de Rusia, rodeándola de misiles avanzados que pueden alcanzar objetivos rusos en menos de 10 minutos. Durante los últimos tres meses, el gobierno ruso ha solicitado que se negocien los problemas de seguridad y, al mismo tiempo, ha desplegado tropas en las fronteras entre Rusia y Ucrania, y entre Ucrania y Bielorrusia. Putin anunció que Rusia intervendría militarmente en Ucrania después de que Estados Unidos y la OTAN rechazaron sus exigencias fundamentales: que Ucrania no se incorporara a la OTAN y que su territorio, que comparte una frontera de 1.200 millas con Rusia, no se utilice como base para misiles avanzados apuntando a Rusia. En esencia, Putin y Rusia exigían que Ucrania fuera un país neutral, sin nunca ser un miembro de la OTAN. Fue precisamente a través del territorio de Ucrania que Rusia enfrentó la invasión nazi de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y otras anteriores de potencias occidentales. En la Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuando Ucrania y Rusia eran un solo país (la Unión Soviética), más de 27 millones de personas murieron resistiendo la invasión nazi. En este momento crítico, es imperativo que el gobierno de Estados Unidos cambie su postura imprudente y provocadora de cercar a Rusia y expandir implacablemente la OTAN hacia el oriente. Desde la disolución de la Unión Soviética en 1991, Estados Unidos ha intentado incorporar a casi todos los antiguos aliados europeos soviéticos/rusos a la OTAN, la que es una alianza militar ofensiva. Tras ver rechazadas todas sus demandas por parte de Estados Unidos y la OTAN, el gobierno ruso decidió invadir Ucrania. A partir de este momento, se están llevando a cabo importantes operaciones militares. El gobierno ruso ha dicho que no ocupará Ucrania, pero que pretende llevar a cabo la “desmilitarización” y “desnazificación” del país. No está claro qué significan realmente estos términos. En algunos segmentos del Estado ucraniano, en particular la policía y el ejército, existe una considerable influencia nazi. En la vida política de Ucrania, el poder de los grupos fascistas ha disminuido considerablemente en los últimos años y no ejercen influencia decisiva dentro de la administración del presidente Zelenskyy. Estados Unidos y las potencias europeas han prometido imponer un régimen de sanciones totales a Rusia, aislando al país de la economía mundial y apuntando a sus industrias más vitales. Biden ha anunciado hoy una primera tanda de sanciones. Estas sanciones se dirigen a algunos de los mayores bancos y empresas de Rusia y están especialmente dirigidas a limitar su capacidad para acceder a las divisas y a los mercados de alta tecnología. Ya se han impuesto una serie de sanciones desde 2014, con la incorporación de Crimea a Rusia tras el golpe de Estado respaldado por Estados Unidos en Kiev. Es probable que sigan más medidas. En conjunto, los acontecimientos de los dos últimos días constituyen una ruptura profunda e histórica del orden geopolítico existente y tendrán consecuencias en cascada durante los próximos años. Lea la declaración completa: https://www.liberationnews.org/declaracion-del-psl-sobre-la-intervencion-militar-de-rusia-en-ucrania/

The crisis in Ukraine dramatically escalated over the course of the last week, culminating in yesterday’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics by Russia and the subsequent deployment of Russian troops into these areas. The United States and European powers are now rolling out sanctions targeting Russia, including Germany’s suspension of the critical NordStream 2 gas pipeline. The sanctions announced so far by the Biden administration in particular targets the financial sector, sanctioning two major Russian banks and prohibiting people and institutions in the United States from buying Russian government debt. These same states continue to threaten unleashing “unprecedented” sanctions in the event of a further escalation, which would aim to cut the country off from the world economy and cause tremendous suffering among ordinary Russians. Many ruling-class figures in the United States are even demanding that such sanctions be imposed now preemptively. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council was held last night, where the United States and its allies condemned Russia and the Russian representative defended its actions. The representative from China stated, “All parties concerned must exercise restraint and avoid any action that may fuel tensions. We welcome and encourage every effort towards a diplomatic solution and call on all parties concerned to continue dialogue and consultation and seek reasonable solutions to address each other’s concerns on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” India, which has a close relationship with Russia, also issued essentially a neutral statement at the security council. The governments of Syria and Nicaragua have supported Russia’s move. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-nato-expansion-must-end-to-guarantee-peace-in-ukraine/

The Russian military operation in Ukraine highlights that the world has reached a dangerous fork in the road. It is critically important for people in the United States, who are receiving the bulk of their information from the capitalist media that functions as an echo chamber for the U.S. government, to know that the current crisis is the byproduct of a long effort by the United States to establish absolute domination throughout Europe. The U.S. policy is aimed at undermining Russia’s security by surrounding it with advanced missiles that can reach their Russian targets in less than 10 minutes. For the last three months, the Russian government simultaneously called for negotiations about their security concerns while at the same time amassing troops at the Russia-Ukraine border and at the border of Ukraine and Belarus. Putin announced that Russia would militarily intervene in Ukraine after the United States and NATO rejected their fundamental demands that Ukraine not be incorporated into NATO and that Ukraine, which shares a 1,200-mile border with Russia, not be used as a staging ground for advanced missiles that target Russia. In essence, Putin and Russia were demanding that Ukraine be a neutral country and never a member of NATO. It was precisely through the territory of Ukraine that Russia was subjected to the Nazi invasion of World War Two and earlier invasions by western powers. In World War Two, when Ukraine and Russia were one country (the Soviet Union), more than 27 million people died resisting the Nazi invasion of their homelands. At this critical moment, it is imperative that the U.S. government change its reckless, provocative stance of encircling Russia and relentlessly expanding NATO eastward. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has attempted to incorporate almost every former Soviet/Russian European ally into NATO, which is an offensive military alliance. After having all of its demands rejected by the United States and NATO, the Russian government decided to invade Ukraine. As of this moment, major military operations are underway. The Russian government said it will not occupy Ukraine but that it intends to carry out the “demilitarization” and “de-Nazification” of the country. It is unclear what these terms actually mean. In some segments of the Ukrainian state – particularly the police and military – there is considerable Nazi influence. In the political life of Ukraine, the power of fascist groups has waned considerably in recent years and they do not exercise decisive influence inside of the administration of President Zelenskyy. The United States and European powers have vowed to impose a total sanctions regime on Russia, cutting the country off from the world economy and targeting its most vital industries. An initial volley of sanctions was announced by Biden today. These target some of the largest banks and corporations in Russia and are especially aimed at limiting Russia’s ability to access foreign currency and high tech markets. A series of sanctions have already been imposed since 2014, with Russia’s incorporation of Crimea after the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev. More measures are likely to follow. Taken together, the events of the last two days constitute a profound and historic rupture in the existing geopolitical order and will have cascading consequences for years to come. Read the full statement: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-on-russias-military-intervention-in-ukraine/

From its beginning, the so-called “Freedom Convoy” in Canada has been a vehicle for the far right to promote their views and press their reactionary demands. Despite being labeled the “trucker protest” by the corporate media, it does not represent the interests of workers in the trucking industry or otherwise. Its leadership from the beginning included far-right political figures and former police and security state employees. If met, its main demand — to end vaccine mandates — wouldn’t improve workers’ lives, but would instead do the exact opposite by sending them back to the job in the “new normal” with less health and safety protections. Some online pundits influential with socialists and progressives have muddied the waters and are praising the protest as some kind of workers’ uprising against the bosses. The Party for Socialism and Liberation opposes the far-right convoy and the broader anti-vaccine movement that imperils the lives of working people. A major police operation began in the early morning of Feb. 18 in Ottawa after weeks of extremely lenient or even openly supportive treatment by police officers that gave the convoy crucial room to grow. This reactionary movement has long since spread beyond Ottawa and may now have the capacity to persist despite the police action. In fact, it has become a worldwide phenomenon inspiring similar actions in France, Belgium and the United States. The Teamsters union in Canada represents 55,000 drivers including 15,000 long-haul truckers. Ninety percent of them are vaccinated. The head of the Teamsters in Canada released a statement titled “The Real Enemy for Truckers is Covid-19,” in which he argued that “the despicable display of hate lead by the political Right and shamefully encouraged by elected conservative politicians does not reflect the values of Teamsters Canada, nor the vast majority of our members, and in fact has served to delegitimize the real concerns of most truck drivers today.” Read the full statement: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-why-workers-should-oppose-the-far-right-canadian-trucker-convoy/

When the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed in October 1949, the country’s economy was in a shambles, devastated by decades of war and ravaged by inflation triggered by global forces beyond local control. The Communist Party of China and the new revolutionary government faced tremendous challenges in restoring order to rural and urban areas, securing the country’s territory from foreign influence or invasion, and establishing conditions of stability and security within which the people could pursue their livelihoods. The new leadership was dedicated to the long-term goal of developing China into a modern, industrialized, socialist economy, but had to undertake that endeavor in a context of institutional limitations, complex social conditions, and an uncertain geopolitical environment. The CPC had a membership of around 1,000,000 and faced the prospect of guiding the governance and advancing the economy of a population of more than 450,000,000. Seventy years later, China was the second largest economy in the world, had eliminated absolute poverty among its people, and was re-emerging as a significant participant in global economic and political affairs. With nearly 1.4 billion people—and more than half of them living in modern cities, with life expectancy more than double that in 1949, and with education and public health provision at high level global standards—China achieved what the Party characterized as a “moderately prosperous society,” the initial stage of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/ten-crises-wen-tiejun/

In November 2016, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, U.S. diplomats in Cuba began to complain about hearing strange noises and experiencing various symptoms including nausea, headaches and hearing loss. Those noises were ultimately shown to have been common crickets. But the U.S. government’s claim that its diplomats had been “attacked” (at first by sonic weapons and later by microwave weapons) and were suffering “Havana syndrome” not only persisted, but expanded in the years that followed to include more than one thousand diplomats and CIA agents in countries around the world. Now, more than five years after the initial claims of this “syndrome” emerged in Havana, and numerous articles in the press suggesting that Cuba, Russia, or China was responsible for these “attacks,” the CIA has finally admitted there has never been any proof that any of this was true. As the headline in the NBC News article which broke the story reads, “CIA says ‘Havana Syndrome’ not result of sustained campaign by hostile power.” The U.S. government hasn’t completely abandoned the story, still claiming that “In about two dozen cases, the agency cannot rule out foreign involvement.” But the New York Times spelled out what that statement really means: “The idea that Russia, China or Cuba was responsible for attacking hundreds of diplomats around the world was never backed up by any evidence that the Biden administration could unearth.” Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/havana-syndrome-claims-exposedby-the-cia/

Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics. Despite its outsized role in Marxist debates, the model can, when contextualized and understood in its nuances, be quite useful for analyzing capitalist society and organizing for socialism [1]. Marx explicitly introduces the distinction between the base and superstructure in the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the preface, Marx builds on his previous work with Engels, The German Ideology, writing: “In the social production of their existence, humans inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” [2]. The base of society—which is also translated as “infrastructure”—includes the relations of production and the productive forces. Productive forces name labor-power, instruments or tools used by workers, and the materials workers transform in the production process. The relations of production entail the social organization of production and reproduction, or how the re/production of life is structured. It’s important to emphasize that the base isn’t just the forces of production but production relations, which are not only economic but social. The superstructure comprises the political-legal system of the state and consciousness—or ideology—in general, which manifests in culture and art, religion and spirituality, ethics and philosophy, etc. The superstructure emerges from the totality of the relations of production. Political activity and intellectual processes and products are conditioned by the mode of production (the relations and forces of production). And as we’ll see below, elements of the superstructure in turn impact the base. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/base-superstructure-introduction/

The contemporary political economy of the People’s Republic of China, the nature of the Chinese system, has been the subject of much discussion and debate in mainstream academic, media, and political circles, as well as on the left. Since the end of the 1970s, China has pursued policies of “reform and opening” to develop its economy, a process that has resulted in the massive growth of production, China’s emergence as a major player in global trade, and the lifting of around 800 million people out of poverty, while at the same time generating serious problems of inequality, corruption, and environmental stress. At the heart of this project has been the decision by the Communist Party, originally under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping, then carrying on through successive changes of leadership, to use the mechanisms of the marketplace to develop the productive economy. How should this situation be characterized? Is it capitalism, state capitalism, market socialism Read the full article here: https://www.liberationschool.org/beyond-the-sprouts-of-capitalism-understanding-chinas-contemporary-socialist-project/

The Biden administration, Pentagon and NATO allies are conducting a dangerous and reckless campaign against Russia — one that has the potential to turn into a catastrophe for the people of the United States, Russia, Ukraine and the world. The aim is to strengthen the U.S. position as the dominant world superpower, a thoroughly bipartisan goal. In recent months, Russia has been the object of intense media demonization designed to win over the U.S. public to support this campaign. The Party for Socialism and Liberation condemns the anti-Russia campaign and calls for an end to the imperialist NATO alliance. Read the full statement here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-no-war-on-russia-abolish-nato/

Workers across the country are wondering with increasing desperation: Will the COVID crisis ever end? Two years after the first case of the virus was detected, society is becoming increasingly, bitterly divided over how to address this crucial question. All the while the death toll continues to mount. The situation is not hopeless. Although right wing demagogues have slowed the vaccination process and intensified the spread of the virus by sowing doubt about the most basic public health measures, it is still possible to end the pandemic. We can look at other countries for examples of why this is true. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have successfully contained COVID, despite huge difficulties. Even though it was the country where the virus struck first, China prevented its uncontrolled spread through a massive, centralized public health response that included guaranteeing workers the necessities of life like food and shelter. Adjusted for population size, the death toll in the United States is approximately 850 times higher than in China. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/a-socialist-plan-to-defeat-covid-19/

Editorial Collective Note: This is a new introduction to alienation that replaces our earlier introduction written in 2006. It’s part of our renovation and expansion of our “Fundamentals of Marxism” series and other articles on Marxist theory and the class struggle. Offering a brief introduction to Marx’s theory of alienation is not a straightforward task. This is due, in part, to conflicting interpretations of key aspects of Marx’s project directly related to alienation, the timing of the publication of Marx’s early manuscripts where the theory is articulated, and the political contexts in which it was taken up. Central to any theory of alienation are questions of the nature of existence, which are often posed this way: Is there a natural or timeless essence from which the human could be alienated? While this question has preoccupied many academics, our most important task is to consider the impact of debates around alienation on our practical, day-to-day organizing. In this article, we introduce Marx’s writing on alienation as they appear in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, before discussing the historical context of their publication. We then chart the development of Marx’s thought from the manuscripts to his later work that is grounded in dialectical and historical materialism. Marx’s early works conceive “human nature” as an essential and ahistorical condition from which capital alienates workers, while, as we show, his later work focuses on capital’s process of abstraction and conceives of the human as a process of production, and therefore as dynamic and contingent on the mode of production. Read the full article: https://www.liberationschool.org/13-what-is-alienation-html/

As the Omicron variant causes record levels of infection in the United States, the end of the pandemic seems as far away as ever. But far from preparing a robust response to defeat the virus, the Biden administration is preparing to surrender and encourage the public to “learn to live with” COVID indefinitely. When the Party for Socialism and Liberation pointed out the fact that China has in fact succeeded at virtually eliminating deaths from the virus, we were attacked by far-right pundits like Ben Shapiro – who took the position that such a feat is essentially impossible and asserted that China’s achievement was just a massive falsification. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/yes-there-really-were-only-two-covid-deaths-in-mainland-china-in-2021-heres-how-they-did-it/

Environmentalists have long stressed limits to human interaction with nature. It’s commonly argued that transgressing “natural limits” caused the environmental crises we face today. While this sentiment might direct our attention to the severity and scale of destabilizing contradictions in our relationship with nature, its underlying analysis is unable to grasp and overcome the root cause of these contradictions: capitalist production. A deeper and more critical understanding of society’s relation to nature under capitalism is needed. This article introduces Marxist conceptions of the relationship between capitalism and nature. It begins by examining the words “nature” and “production” and the different meanings and functions those terms serve, before turning to two different Marxist approaches to capitalism and nature: the metabolic rift and the production of nature. At the end, we emphasize how and why such approaches must inform organizing for environmental justice. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/marxism-and-nature/

El Partido por el Socialismo y la Liberación se une a millones de personas en todo el país para expresar nuestra completa indignación por la absolución de Kyle Rittenhouse de todos los cargos. Una vez más, el sistema judicial de Estados Unidos ha funcionado para proteger a un asesino racista, que salió a las calles de Kenosha el 25 de agosto de 2020 para hacerle guerra a la gente que protestaba por los disparos de la policía a Jacob Blake, un hombre negro de 29 años. El veredicto es un exasperante recordatorio de la naturaleza fundamentalmente supremacista blanca del sistema legal capitalista de Estados Unidos. La absolución de Rittenhouse tiene ramificaciones tremendamente peligrosas. En efecto, otorga una licencia para matar a los vigilantes de la derecha, que ahora se sentirán aún más facultados para aterrorizar a la gente en nombre de la “ley y el orden”. Existe una larga y mortífera tradición de violencia de tipo miliciano de extrema derecha en Estados Unidos, y esta amenaza ha recibido ahora un enorme impulso por parte del Estado. El tribunal canguro presidido por el juez Bruce Schroeder fue una vergüenza, y aumentó en gran medida las posibilidades de que Rittenhouse fuera absuelto por el jurado, compuesto casi todo de personas blancas. El proceso estuvo amañado desde el principio, y se volvió más y más absurdo con cada día que pasaba. Lea el artículo completo: https://www.liberationnews.org/declaracion-del-psl-la-absolucion-de-rittenhouse-otorga-a-los-vigilantes-racistas-una-licencia-para-matar/

Después de pasar semanas llevando a cabo negociaciones en la trastienda con el senador Joe Manchin, la senadora Krysten Sinema y otros demócratas de derechas en el Congreso sobre el presupuesto del programa social, el gobierno de Biden anunció ayer un “marco” que abandona algunos de los elementos más importantes de la propuesta original. Como parte de la capitulación de la administración ante los derechistas, ha acordado recortar a la mitad la asignación total a los programas sociales: de 3,5 billones de dólares a 1,75 billones. La vergonzosa rendición de Biden se debe al enfoque fundamental que adoptó en esta lucha. En lugar de tratar de presionar lo más posible a los defensores de la derecha dentro de su propio partido, Biden sólo expresó la más leve de las críticas. Biden comentó en un acto público en Baltimore la semana pasada: “Joe [Manchin] no es un mal tipo. Es un amigo”. Y Biden efectivamente trató a Manchin como un amigo, accediendo a sus demandas de recortar del presupuesto una amplia gama de programas que habrían proporcionado un gran alivio a los trabajadores. Esto incluye la eliminación completa de las bajas familiares y por enfermedad pagadas. Estados Unidos es el único país rico del mundo que no garantiza este tipo de permisos, que inicialmente se habrían fijado en 12 semanas. La gratuidad de los colegios comunitarios también ha sido totalmente eliminada en el nuevo marco de Biden. El Programa de Rendimiento de Electricidad Limpia, quizás el componente climático más crucial de la propuesta original, ha sido eliminado para complacer a los capitalistas de la industria del carbón que matan el planeta. El CEPP (en inglés) habría invertido 150.000 millones de dólares para facilitar la transición a una economía neutra en carbono. Lea el artículo completo aquí: https://www.liberationnews.org/los-democratas-de-derecha-recortan-el-presupuesto-del-programa-social-despues-de-que-biden-se-niegue-a-luchar/

The Russian revolution marked the beginning of a new period in human history. It was the first time that the oppressed were able to come to power – to take power and hold onto power. It truly had a transforming effect on the world. In this part of this series, we will lay the basis for later discussing what was to become the most famous split in political history: what is known as the Trotsky-Stalin split. We have to keep in mind that these names do not represent just individuals, but political groupings and political strata. This part is on the early years of the revolution, after the revolutionary seizure of power in 1917. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/early-years-of-the-russian-revolution/

The Party for Socialism and Liberation joins with millions of people across the country in expressing our complete outrage at the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on all charges. Once again, the U.S. court system has functioned to protect a racist murderer, who went out into the streets of Kenosha on August 25, 2020 to wage war on people protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man. The verdict is an infuriating reminder of the fundamentally white supremacist nature of the capitalist legal system in the United States. The acquittal of Rittenhouse has tremendously dangerous ramifications. It effectively hands a license to kill to right wing vigilantes, who will now feel even more empowered to terrorize people in the name of “law and order”. There is a long and deadly tradition of far right militia-type violence in the United States, and this threat has now been given a huge boost by the state. The kangaroo court presided over by Judge Bruce Schroeder was a disgrace, and greatly enhanced Rittenhouse’s chances of acquittal by the nearly all-white jury. The process was rigged from the start, and grew more and more absurd with each passing day. Read the full statement here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-rittenhouse-acquittal-hands-racist-vigilantes-a-license-to-kill/

The capitalist class and its well-paid intellectuals and pundits continue to argue that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 means that socialism and communism are impossible. A stereotyped and negative image of the Soviet Union and socialism has been relentlessly fed to the people of the United States ever since the Russian Revolution, which took place in 1917. It is extremely rare for the establishment to mention any of the truly remarkable achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the full name of the Soviet federation of 15 republics, and the other countries that subsequently set out to build socialism. The triumph of the Russian Revolution nearly a century ago was truly a world-historic event. It was the first time in history that the working class was able to seize and hold power, and to reorganize the economy and society on a socialist basis. It proved that the oppressed, with their own leadership and their own party, could create a new reality.

In the suffering of the Global South, the brutality of capitalism lies bare. In a footnote toward the end of Capital, Marx wrote that the colonized subject reveals “what the bourgeois makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it can, without restraint, model the world after its own image”. The forms of primary accumulation he articulates there were in their most naked form in the colonies. Contrary to liberal and academic misreadings, Marx paid great attention to the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. Marx came to argue that colonialism was the backbone of capitalism, and that anti-colonial movements could even be the key to global capitalism’s overthrow. This is why anti-colonial struggles have long been guided to victory by Marxist theory. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/09-what-is-imperialism-html/

The Bolsheviks were relatively weak in the countryside among the peasantry. They had always been in the cities; they spent most of their existence underground and going out into the country had been hard for them. They were mainly a workers’ party, but the peasants made up a huge majority of the population. The SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries) were the main party in the countryside. The relationship between the peasants (farmers and agricultural workers) to the workers in the cities was a key issue. Based on an analysis, for a long time, the Bolsheviks distinguished between the rich peasants, called “kulaks” in Russian, the middle peasants, the poor peasants and agricultural laborers. The kulaks employed labor, exploited labor and owned large plots of land. The middle peasants owned land and basically had enough to live on. And the poor peasants, the majority, lived on plots of land inherited from feudalism that were too small to live on. They were constantly going under, starving to death, had their children starve and lived in destitute. Agricultural laborers were a growing sector in the countryside. They were poor peasants who had lost their land altogether and were really proletarians in the countryside. The Bolsheviks distinguished between these different layers and their strategy was to fight the kulaks, neutralize the middle strata, and win over the poor peasants and agricultural laborers. Even though they were not supposed to be the peasant party, the Bolsheviks were the only ones who, all through the revolution, from the beginning, openly supported the peasants’ seizing the big estates without compensation. Even the SRs took a position against the land seizures, stating that they would have to wait until there is a constituent assembly, draw up the proper legislation and assure the land owners of how much they would be compensated. The Bolshevik stated that it was the right of the poor peasants to take the land, the big estates. But the SR leadership, while claiming to represent all the peasants, really represented the interests of the better off layers – the capitalist farmers and aspiring capitalist farmers. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/3/

On April 3, 1917, Lenin, Zinoviev and other leaders arrived in a sealed car on a train. The German government allowed them to return to Russia across Germany and through German-held territory because it hoped that they would take Russia out of the war and relieve the pressure on Germany – that was explicitly the German government’s reason. E. H. Carr, an English historian wrote a tremendous 14-volume history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Here is how Carr describes the scene of Lenin’s return: Alexander Kollontai produced a bouquet which Lenin carried awkwardly: and the party proceeded to the former imperial waiting room. Here, Lenin was officially welcomed by Chkheidze, the president of the Petrograd soviet, who, in a few carefully chosen words, expressed his hopes for ‘a closing of the ranks of democracy’ in defense of ‘our revolution.’ Lenin, turning vaguely away from the official party towards the assembled crowds outside, addressed them as ‘dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers,’ greeted in their persons ‘the victorious Russian revolution,’ declared that the ‘robber imperialist war’ was the beginning of civil war all over Europe, and concluded:‘Any day, if not today or tomorrow, the crash of the whole of European imperialism may come. The Russian revolution, made by you, has begun it and opened a new epoch. Hail the worldwide socialist revolution.’ As Sukhanov notes, it was not a reply to Chkheidze. It did not even fit ‘the context’ of the Russian revolution as understood by all without exception who had witnessed it or taken part in it.’ Lenin had spoken; and his first words had been not of the bourgeois, but of the socialist, revolution. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/2/

The Russian Revolution is a vast subject. An exhaustive analysis of it is beyond the scope of this writing. But below, some of the key points will be highlighted. The Russian Revolution took place in the background of World War I, a war between imperialist powers over control of territories and colonies. The war caused a split in the international socialist movement. Right up to the outbreak of the war, the parties of the Second International had vowed to fight against the war once it started. Socialist parties had pledged to oppose sending workers of the warring countries to kill each other and die for their respective bourgeoisies, the capitalist class. But when the war started, nearly all of these parties collapsed in the face of the war hysteria in their respective countries and ended up supporting the war. Only the Bolshevik party, one of the socialist parties in Russia, and a small party in Serbia took a strong position against the war. The five Bolshevik members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, were sent into exile in Serbia for their position. The Bolsheviks were forced to go completely underground, and faced a new period of isolation and persecution when the war started. Rather than capitulating to the war hysteria, the Bolsheviks called for “revolutionary defeatism.” Their position was that the workers of every belligerent country should call for the defeat of their own ruling class. They called for socialist agitators in the armies to encourage fraternization between the soldiers of warring sides to discuss their common interest in ending the war and stopping killing each other. Lenin also called for turning the imperialist war into a civil war; in other words to turn this imperialist war between nations into a war between classes and against the capitalists. These positions were considered quite bold, to put it mildly, even by other anti-war socialists, or internationalists as they were known. Lenin was considered to be the extreme of the extreme at the time. Over the following two and a half years, millions of soldiers and civilians died in the bloodiest and most destructive war in history up to that point. The Russian Empire suffered huge casualties. Its army was made up mainly of peasants, as was the population as a whole – nearly 90% peasants. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in single battles. Famines and epidemics spread. On Feb. 23, 1917 (on the old calendar still used in Russia), March 8 on the modern calendar, International Women’s Day, a strike of woman textile workers in Petrograd was called. Petrograd, later named Leningrad and today called St. Petersburg, was the capital and the center of industry. The strike spread like wildfire. The war years of death, disease and deprivation for the workers and peasants, while the czar, the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie lived in almost indescribable luxury, now brought forth an explosion of revolutionary anger that was unstoppable. It was a spontaneous uprising – no organization or party had planned or organized it. But it was strongly influenced by decades of revolutionary work and experiences, especially the experience of the working class in the 1905-06 revolution. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/

As the Party for Socialism and Liberation, we condemn in the harshest terms the brutal military coup that took place on October 25 in Sudan and the subsequent repression and arrests by the Sudanese military forces. We stand in full solidarity with the people of Sudan and the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) in their resistance against the coup. We fully support the call by the SCP and the Sudanese Professional Association for a political strike and for the people to take to the streets in civil disobedience to stand against this power grab by the military forces opposed to the movement for change that began in 2018. This coup is a desperate effort to stop the process of transition of power to the people of Sudan and their legitimate representatives. We are confident that the mass protest movement which SCP is a crucial part of will emerge victorious against this reactionary coup. Long live the people of Sudan and their resistance! Long live the Sudanese Communist Party Hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan are in the streets courageously resisting the coup staged by the military on Monday. The country’s top armed forces leader Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced the take over and declared a state of emergency. As part of the coup, soldiers arrested Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and other high ranking civilian officials, and it was revealed today that Hamdok was being held captive at al-Burhan’s personal residence. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/sudan-massive-resistance-defends-december-revolution-vs-military-coup/

Three years before the 1969 Stonewall Uprising that galvanized a generation of LGBTQ activists, and more than a decade before Harvey Milk led the fight against the Briggs Initiative as San Francisco’s first gay city supervisor, a group of trans women and drag queens revolted against bigoted police violence in San Francisco’s heavily oppressed Tenderloin district. These courageous fighters turned the tables on their oppressors and ushered in a new wave of class-conscious organizing by queer youth, especially from working class and oppressed communities. Although it was almost forgotten, the uprising at Compton’s Cafeteria is part of our revolutionary history, demonstrating that militant resistance is nothing new. The uprising reminds us that our struggles today both build on our ancestors’ fights and shape those to come. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/compton-cafeteria-riot/

Toward the end of our earlier introduction to surplus value, the heart and motor of the class struggle, we wrote that: “The rate of surplus value for the capitalist is the rate of exploitation for the worker. By merely prolonging the working day, the capitalist accrues more (absolute) surplus value. Increasing the working day from eight to 10 hours results in two more hours of surplus value for the capitalist and of exploitation for the worker”. For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.” The former is when the worker produces the value of their own wage, and the latter is when the worker produces surplus value for the capitalist. The ratio between the two is the rate of surplus value for the capitalist and the rate of exploitation for the worker. Absolute surplus value, Marx says, is “produced by prolongation of the working-day” [2]. In other words, if the ratio between necessary and surplus labor is fixed, then prolonging the working day will result in more surplus value for the capitalist and a greater degree of exploitation for the worker. Capital’s entire reason for being is to produce surplus value, to increase the exploitation of the working class. As a result, there’s a logical impulse for each capitalist to extend the working day as much as possible. Yet not only might this produce problems for capitalism as a whole (in that it could exhaust the supply of labor-power available), but the working class fights back against exploitation, and at times is able to force limits to the length of the working day. What happens, then, when political legislation limits the working day to, say, eight hours? This is obviously a limit to capitalist accumulation. For capital, however, “every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome”. Relative surplus value is capital’s strategy for overcoming this limit. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/relative-surplus-value-the-class-struggle-intensifies/

As this statement was being prepared, a Texas state judge issued a stay temporarily blocking an anti-abortion group from enforcing SB 8 against Planned Parenthood, giving some relief to health care providers and abortion rights advocates. The Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the Texas Senate Bill 8 and demonstrated its unwillingness to protect the rights of women late Wednesday evening when they voted 5 to 4 allowing the Texas “heartbeat bill” to go into effect. Purposefully written with obfuscatory procedures and language designed to circumvent Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court relinquished its duty to uphold the legal right to abortion by allowing this bill to go into effect in the state of Texas. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-block-senate-bill-8-legalize-and-expand-abortion-access-now/

In the battle against COVID-19, Cuba has been a country of firsts. It is the only country in all Latin America to produce its own vaccines. Cuba has sent more than 5,000 doctors to help treat COVID patients in 57 brigades to 40 countries around the world since the pandemic began. No other country has come close. Now, in a major new development, babies and children two years old and up will be massively vaccinated starting in 10 days. Cuba is the first country in the world to vaccinate babies and children under 12. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/cuba-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-vaccinate-children-under-12/

How the U.S. destroyed Afghanistan Past and present U.S. officials are blaming each other for their defeat in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the corporate media are portraying the brutal 20-year occupation as a humanitarian mission, an attempt to modernize the country. Learn why the Taliban are themselves the direct result of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and why this is a failed imperialist project. Why we need a revolutionary party In the U.S., we live in a system based on oppression and exploitation. Through struggle, we can make some improvements. But only a revolution can end this oppression. Hear why a revolution is only possible when led by a militant, class-conscious revolutionary party.

All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them? It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orientation [1]. While it’s often taken as an abstract guide-book for how to teach, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is really a theoretical reflection on his own experiences teaching peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary movements, leadership, and organization. After spending 70 days in prison for “treachery” [teaching poor peasants to read and write], he was exiled from Brazil following the military junta in 1964. He eventually settled in Chile, which is where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The book has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and others. Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches and learns from the masses in struggle. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/paulo-freire-and-revolutionary-leadership/

The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself. Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle. Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected. The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/degrowth-a-politics-for-which-class/

The U.S. war in Afghanistan began not 20, but more than 40 years ago. Except for the towering arrogance of the leaders in Washington, it could have ended in November 2001 when the Taliban offered to surrender. The earlier phase, which lasted from 1979 to 1989, is excluded from nearly any mention by the mainstream capitalist media today. But without understanding what happened back then, it is impossible to comprehend the current catastrophic situation for the people of that country. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/the-u-s-empire-in-afghanistan-a-40-year-catastrophe/

Originally posted on RedsInEd.org At the instigation of deep-pocketed conservatives, nine states have adopted bans on Critical Race Theory education, and similar bills are being considered in 26 others. While the language in these bills is often vague, the intent is clear: to silence a truthful presentation of the role of racism in U.S. history and institutions. But teachers are fighting back through their unions. What is Critical Race Theory? Critical Race Theory is a practice of asking questions about racism in order to analyze and understand it. One of its main features is the concept that race is a social construct. Today the term “Critical Race Theory” is being used by the right wing as a catch-all for any anti-racist, anti-bigotry, culturally-responsive or ethinic studies-based curricula. In reality, CRT was developed decades ago by legal academics and later by academics in education and other fields to assess and understand structural racism in society and how it manifests in laws, policies and phenomena. CRT is typically studied at the undergraduate and graduate levels — and is rarely part of K-12 curricula — although it can inform the teaching and practice of educators for whom CRT research was part of their training. Right-wing attempts to censor the study and use of CRT-informed teaching seek to maintain the status quo. These bans would inhibit an educator’s ability to identify, analyze, and implement solutions to deep inequities in education, and would prevent their students’ development of these same skills. Read the full statement: https://www.liberationnews.org/reds-in-ed-statement-on-attacks-on-critical-race-theory/

Marxist ideology is one of the most potent weapons the working and oppressed classes have, a weapon that our class can and has used to not only win reforms but to build revolutionary societies where the people, and not profits, are in control. As the PSL identified at our 3rd Party Congress in 2016, one of our primary tasks is to mend the “break in ideological continuity” that emerged after the overthrow of the Soviet Union by reestablishing “the theory of revolutionary Marxism and the entire vision of workers’ power” as a dominant guiding pole in people’s struggles [1]. To correct for the ideological break, it’s helpful to have a concrete understanding of ideology and the different forms it takes. Although the word ideology is used frequently, it’s commonly used in a pejorative sense to refer to something that’s not factual, that’s unscientific, or that’s devoid of substance. It’s also used by those hostile to socialism to present a distorted view of Marxism. What exactly is ideology? What is the difference between bourgeois and Marxist ideology? What significance does this have for organizing today? To address these questions and help repair the break in the ideological continuity of revolutionary socialism in U.S. social movements, this article outlines Marx’s understanding of ideology. It traces his historical-materialist approach to investigating the relationship between ideas, material reality, and modes of production through several of his works. This allows us to take in the theory’s nuances about life and consciousness, as well as to draw out examples that are still relevant and applicable today. In particular, we focus on the theory of commodity fetishism and the function of the wage in producing the bourgeois ideological conception of the atomized individual. Proposing a move from “true/false” to “correct/incorrect,” the end of the article returns to the importance of popularizing and promoting Marxist ideology to understand and transform the world today, as revolutionaries have done throughout the socialist struggle to break the chains of exploitation and oppression. Read the full article: www.liberationschool.org/what-is-ideology

The full story of the struggle to end chattel slavery in the U.S. has yet to be fully told. History books have always minimized the struggle of enslaved people, who from the beginning in 1619 in North America, fought slavery at every turn, rebelling, escaping, fighting for the right to fight. Some 180,000 enlisted in the Union army and suffered among the highest casualties in a war where high casualty rates were considered proof of bravery. The role of white working-class people in the struggle against slavery has also been left out of history books, buried beneath an avalanche of lies, distortions and slander. The ruling class is terrified of multinational solidarity, particularly in the working class. Their history is meant to show that such solidarity is not today, nor ever, possible. The truth is hidden. “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” — Karl Marx, Capital Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/abolitionist-solidarity-in-the-struggle-against-slavery/

July 26 marked the 68th anniversary of the dawn raid on the Moncada Barracks led by Fidel Castro that sparked the revolutionary movement that would triumph six years later in 1959. Due to COVID-19, mass demonstrations were canceled but the celebrations of the National Day of Rebellion continued nonetheless. Cuban leaders and youth performed voluntary work in the countryside, as a part of a tradition that stretches back to the early days of the revolution. Voluntary work is part of a collective effort by the conscious working class to combat the worst elements of the blockade and set a positive example for society. Trade unions, cultural collectives, women’s movements, and other socialist-led organizations demonstrated and came out with statements in support of the Cuban revolution on this auspicious anniversary. After the 1952 coup carried out by dictator Fulgencio Batitsta, many young Cubans were ready to take up arms against the hated puppet of the U.S. empire. The assault was foiled and revolutionaries fled into the rugged Sierra Maestra as they were hunted down by the soldiers of Batista, blood dripping from their hands after torturing and murdering captured revolutionaries. Fidel relates in his autobiography My Life how he survived the slaughter by revealing his identity to a Black officer. Impressed by Fidel’s bravery and resolve, the officer held back his soldiers whispering to them, “You can’t kill ideas.” The ideas of Moncada will never die. The ideas of national self determination, freedom from colonialism and a life with dignity remain firmly anchored in millions of Cubans who have demonstrated in recent weeks to express support for their revolution and sovereignty against a multi-pronged war carried out by the United States. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/cubans-come-out-july-26-defend-revolution-vs-multi-pronged-yanqui-assault/

“In contradistinction to German fascism, which acts under anti-constitutional slogans, American fascism tries to portray itself as the custodian of the constitution and ‘American democracy.’” – Georgi Dimitrov Six months ago, on January 6, 2021, a racist mob, incited by outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a chaotic attempt to prevent the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results, a necessary step before the inauguration of Joe Biden. The assault on the Capitol was led by militarized fascist groups composed of many current or former military and police.[1] Some of the leaders of the organizations involved, such as Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio and Joseph Biggs, had direct ties to U.S. intelligence agencies, having served as FBI informants.[2] Only one fifth of Capitol Police were on duty that day, and they were unprepared and underequipped, even though the U.S. national security state had advance knowledge of the plot. A Senate investigation concluded that there was a multi-teared security “failure” on January 6th that involved not only Capitol Police but also the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, among other agencies: Capitol Police were seen opening barricades and fraternizing with fascists, there were delays in deploying the National Guard, restrictions on reinforcements came from on high (implicating Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, amongst others), DHS agents on standby were not deployed, etc.[3] Much is still unknown about what was actually going on behind the spectacular scenes of the storming the Capitol. The fact that the bourgeois media ran an expansive faith-in-government campaign in its wake, and Senate Republicans blocked plans for a bipartisan governmental commission to investigate it, has only contributed to the obscurity surrounding this event. Essential questions remain: Although there are clear signs of governmental involvement, how deep and wide was the conspiracy? Which precise factions of the capitalist ruling class backed the organizations behind the assault on the Capitol, and to what extent was it “astroturfed” by them (meaning discretely funded to create the illusion of a grassroots movement from below)?[4] What was the exact ratio and relationship between state agents and the para-state—i.e. vigilante—actors involved?[5] Was this solely an organic conflict between the Trump and Biden camps, or was something more at play? It is important to note in this regard that the PR campaign that ushered Biden into office as the “savior of our democracy” has empowered his administration to break countless campaign promises and use the storming of the Capitol as a pretext for pushing for increased securitization, surveillance and the criminalization of dissent (which have always been used to target the Left). Whereas serious and rigorous investigations will need to take place in order to resolve these questions, a scantly known fascist plot to seize control of the U.S. government in the 1930s sheds important light on the history of homegrown fascism and the clandestine machinations of the bourgeoisie. Although there are significant differences between these two events, and facile analogies should be avoided in the name of precise materialist analysis, knowledge of the details of the earlier plot can help us better understand the relationship between bourgeois democracy and fascist movements in the U.S. settler colony. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/fascist-plots-in-the-u-s-contemporary-lessons-from-the-1934-business-plot/

“Hammer and Hoe,” a 1990 book written by historian Robin D.G. Kelley, chronicles the development of a communist movement in Alabama during the Great Depression. It highlights the struggles communists faced in organizing a sharecroppers’ union and building mass campaigns to free people accused of crimes in political frame-ups like the Scottsboro Boys. Kelley emphasizes how communism was able to synthesize with Southern Black culture. He sheds light on the unique homegrown resistance that granted Southern Blacks the ability to place their fight in the context of the anti-imperialist struggle for the first time. Kelley recounts the rise of Southern youth movements that ultimately gave birth to the student sit-ins and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/communism-and-black-resistance-in-the-1930s-south/

Editor’s note: The following article was written by Walter Rodney for a 1971 issue of Maji Maji, the quarterly journal of the youth wing of the Tanganyika African National Union. The speech is held at the Robert W. Woodruff Library in Atlanta, Georgia, under the supervision of the Walter Rodney Foundation. The text here is from History is a Weapon with a few additional copyedits. To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in America’s toughest jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was Black, and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that Blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George Jackson was political prisoner and a Black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/walter-rodney-on-george-jackson/

Ask any teacher in any setting, and they’ll tell you there’s no “formula” or “recipe” for education. Despite what corporate charter movements assert—like Teach for America’s “I do, you do, we do” rote learning—teaching is always dependent on relationships, trust, respect, and a host of other elements—and all of these can change day to day. Teaching on a Monday after a big fight broke out at a weekend party is different than teaching on a Wednesday when things have settled down a bit. Teaching in a pandemic is markedly different from teaching before one. These are just a few examples of the limitless and unpredictable forces that shape the educational experience. As any communist organizer knows, Marxist pedagogy is not a matter of merely explaining or convincing, of coming up with the right wording, question, presentation, speech, or reading. These are educational tactics rather than pedagogies, which refer to specific ways, modes, or logics of education. Marxist pedagogy is contingent on a multitude of factors: the dominant political ideology at the time (is it intensely anti-communist or more open?), the consciousness of students as individuals or a collective (are they coming from a liberal issue-based organization or a strand of the movement?), the autonomy we’re allowed in particular settings (is it an after school club at a public/private school, community meeting, or a Party office?). And of course, there are other factors like different skills, personalities, time commitments, and relations between amongst teachers and students. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/marx-pedagogies-research-and-presentation/

The economic reality of the United States today is one of vast inequality in wealth and living standards. At present, 31.1 million households do not have enough food to eat in an average year. Housing within the means of average Americans is increasingly scarce, forcing people, including families, to live on the streets. Even for those who are insured, medical care involves ever-increasing costs for routine and critical care. This suffering is not evenly distributed among the working class. Almost half of all Black children today grow up in poverty, compared to 15 percent of white children. The Indigenous nations that predated the United States, their land stolen and most of their population slaughtered, have had only small tracts of land returned to them, where incomes are markedly lower than the rest of the nation, and acquiring medical care and other basic needs is a struggle for many. This is notable in itself, but it stands in stark contrast to the lifestyles of a privileged few. With the exception of the 2008 financial crisis, the country’s GDP has grown every single year for many decades. Worker productivity has skyrocketed, yet the value created did not accrue to working people suffering in intense poverty. So where has all that value gone? Wealth accrued to a very small number of people in the United States while the many go without. Of the richest ten families on the planet today, half are U.S. citizens. Of the ten wealthiest individuals on the planet today, seven are U.S. citizens. The three people at the top of this list have a net worth as equal to that of the poorer 50% of the country combined. The United States is only one among many nations in which this state of affairs can be seen: widespread, profound lack, among more than plenty concentrated in the hands of few. The situation replicates itself on a global scale as well: the pervasive lack of basic needs for the many in the United States stands in the shadow of an ever more pervasive lack of basic needs endured by workers in South America, Africa, or many parts of Asia. This is reflected in the fact that eight people alone hold as much wealth as the poorer 50% of the entire world combined. The phenomenon of plenty for the few, and little for the many, is representative of an economic arrangement that spans nearly the entire globe. That economic arrangement is Capitalism. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/02-what-is-capitalism-html/ Illustration by: Andrew Nance

To the surprise of many, the Republic of Cuba finished the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games with 15 medals. Their seven gold, three silver and five bronze medals place them 14th in the world. This is remarkable given the impact of the U.S.-imposed blockade and the size of Cuba’s population. Of the countries that won more medals than Cuba, only New Zealand has a smaller population. Cuba ranked second in Latin America behind Brazil, which has a population of 211 million compared to Cuba’s 11.33 million. Cuban athletes won a medal for about every 755,333 people in Cuba. The United States, with 113 medals total, received one medal for about every 2,904,425 people in the United States. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/cubas-big-wins-at-olympics-due-to-its-revolution/

This article is the third in a series of articles on the situation in Cuba recently written by Manolo De Los Santos and Vijay Prashad. On July 22, US President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris released a “fact sheet” on US “measures” against Cuba. The release from the White House said that Cuba was a “top priority for the Biden-Harris administration.” On March 9, Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” On July 12, NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell asked Psaki if Biden had reassessed his priorities regarding Cuba after the protests on the island the previous day. “In terms of where it ranks in a priority order,” Psaki replied, “I’m not in a position to offer that, but I can tell you that we will be closely engaged.” Not a priority, closely engaged, top priority: matters have moved rapidly from March 9 to July 22. What moved the Biden-Harris administration to focus so quickly on Cuba? On the morning of July 11, some people in Cuba—notably in the town of San Antonio de los Baños—took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the social and economic problems created by the US-imposed blockade and by the global pandemic. The reaction to these events in Havana and in Washington, D.C., is instructive: Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel heard the news of the protests, got into a car, and drove the 40 miles to San Antonio de los Baños, where he met with the people; while in Washington, Biden used the protest to call for the overthrow of the Cuban government. US government-funded nongovernmental organizations and Cuban American groups hastened to take advantage of the frenzy, excited by the possibility of regime change in Cuba. On the evening of July 11, tens of thousands of Cubans rallied across Cuba to defend their revolutionary process. Since that Sunday evening, Cuba has been calm. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/let-cuba-live-the-movement-standing-up-to-bidens-maximum-pressure-campaign/

In this presentation, a PSL member outlines the Party's position on the upcoming Governor recall election in California. We explain why we should vote against this undemocratic right-wing power grab, expound on the reactionary policies of frontrunner Larry Elder, and why voting NO on the recall is better for the working class, even though we do not support Gavin Newsom or his policies. Read a party statement here: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-on-california-recall-election/

The unopposed entrance of Taliban forces into Kabul marks the bitter conclusion of a 20-year year military adventure by U.S. imperialism that senselessly inflicted death and suffering on an enormous scale. The fact that the U.S.-backed Afghan government surrendered without a fight is the clearest indication that it was nothing more than an extension of U.S. imperialist power. The stark reality showed itself: either the U.S. imperialist occupation that began 20 years ago would be sustained literally forever, or this government would collapse upon the exit of U.S. military forces. The Taliban coming to power in the mid-1990s was the consequence of the CIA war against the socialist government of Afghanistan that had come to power in 1978 during the Saur Revolution. The U.S. was perfectly willing to do business with the Taliban prior to September 11 in spite of their odious policies including their prohibition on the education of girls. The hope and promise of the earlier socialist period was crushed by U.S. intervention and the later collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, the people of Afghanistan have lived under one reactionary government after another. The complete and almost instantaneous military and political collapse of the Afghan government has led to a situation where the Taliban is presiding over the panicked evacuation of its opponents from inside the capital city. Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, hundreds of thousands of Afghans died, millions were forced to flee their homes, tens of thousands of working class enlisted soldiers from the United States were killed or injured — and in the end the political situation in the country is returning to a situation where the Taliban dominates the country. Read the full statement: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-u-s-backed-afghan-government-surrenders-to-the-taliban/

Approximately 400 years ago, in August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States for the first time. The centuries since have seen the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in human history. Yet where there is oppression, there is also resistance. Since 1619, Black radicals and revolutionaries have taken bold collective action in pursuit of their freedom, threatening the fragile foundations of exploitation upon which the United States is built. These heroic struggles have won tremendous victories, but they have also produced martyrs—heroes who have been imprisoned and killed because of their efforts to transform society. “Black August” is honored every year to commemorate the fallen freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, to call for the release of political prisoners in the United States, to condemn the oppressive conditions of U.S. prisons, and to emphasize the continued importance of the Black Liberation struggle. Observers of Black August commit to higher levels of discipline throughout the month. This can include fasting from food and drink, frequent physical exercise and political study, and engagement in political struggle. In short, the principles of Black August are: “study, fast, train, fight.” Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/study-fast-train-fight-the-roots-of-black-august/

Editor's note: Central to our ideology is the idea that in order to understand and prepare for the class struggle in the U.S. we must first take the global situation into account, understanding that the interconnectedness of global and national politics is primary and dialectical, constantly changing and bursting with contradictions. In this document we assert this thesis and undertake an examination of the global class struggle as it has ebbed and flowed from 1945 until the present. We look at the upsurge of socialist and national liberation struggles from 1945-1979 and their impact on the class struggle in all countries, before turning to the era of counterrevolution that we find ourselves in today. We conclude with a few remarks on moving from counterrevolution to revival, which we believe are particularly important given the election of Donald Trump. The following was initially written as an internal document to facilitate discussion within our party as we headed into our 2nd Party Congress in 2013. As such, it does not account for the changes in the global situation that have taken place since then. The historical arguments and the general theses put forward, however, regarding the primacy of the international situation, the periodization of the global class struggle, and the relationship between global and national politics still hold. When Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 they and the other young revolutionaries in Europe (Marx was 29 and Engels was 27) believed that continental Europe was on the verge of revolution. The revolution would of necessity be directed against the monarchist regimes of the old ruling classes. They anticipated that both the proletariat and the liberal bourgeois democratic forces would be in the streets and at the barricades. They were not wrong.

Our first class starts by examining various definitions of fascism in order to foreground how it has functioned historically as a concept-in-class-struggle, while also emphasizing the importance of a dialectical approach. This will allow us to situate fascism within the deep history of capitalism and its imperialist expansion. We then analyze how the Italian fascists and the Nazis rose to power within the constitutional parameters of bourgeois democracy--by receiving abundant funding from big industrial domestic and international capital--to run populist electoral campaigns and whip up certain sectors of the population around an ultra-nationalist and colonial program. Since every capitalist country had fascist movements in the wake of the Great Depression, we also examine what happened to these movements in the cases when they fully consolidated state power. Finally, we discuss how an internationalist, materialist perspective can help us make sense of the capitalist ruling class’s decisions to favor hegemony or repression in specific instances, and what this concretely means for fascist political practices and their visibility as such. Course materials: Daniel Guérin, Fascism and big business https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/guerin/1938/10/fascism.htm José Carlos Mariátegui, “Biologia del fascismo” https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1925/escena/01.htm Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 35-46.

For this class, we focus specifically on the relationship between fascism and the U.S.’s racist police state. How has fascism functioned in the U.S., and how has the Empire contributed to its growth internationally? What were the forces operative behind the so-called Business Plot in 1934, a planned fascist seizure of state power, and what light does this shed on the present moment? What lessons can we as organizers learn from projects like the CIA’s Operation Gladio, which established an international network of Nazis and fascists, who committed acts of terrorism that were then blamed on communists? How does all of this history relate to the current state of American politics and the events of January 6, 2021? Class materials: George Seldes, Facts and fascism (New York: In Fact, 1943), 11-15; 68-79; 277-286. Gabriel Rockhill, “Fascist plots in the U.S.: Contemporary lessons from the 1934 “Business Plot” https://liberationschool.org/fascist-plots-in-the-u-s-contemporary-lessons-from-the-1934-business-plot/ Sarah Churchwell, “American fascism: It has happened here” https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/22/american-fascism-it-has-happened-here/

Our final class is an opportunity to synthesize the wide-ranging themes addressed, with a particular focus on the current state of U.S. politics and the global fight against fascism. We consider what lessons organizers can learn from the history of communist struggles against fascism, both within the U.S. and internationally. We also examine the contemporary moment, and in particular the election of Biden-Harris, as well as the persistence of Trumpism, in light of the historical relationship between liberalism and fascism. Finally, we explore what we can do to develop the power and organizational frameworks necessary to stand strong against fascism, while also continuing to advance our collective agenda of socialism and liberation. Class materials: The Socialist Program with Brian Becker, “In the news roundtable: The role of the racist mob in American politics” https://soundcloud.com/thesocialistprogram/in-the-news-the-role-of-the-racist-mob-in-american-politics Glen Ford, “Democratic fascists prepare to drop the hammer” https://www.blackagendareport.com/democratic-fascists-prepare-drop-hammer

This class looks at some of the important communist responses to fascism and explores how communists have organized on the ground to fight and win against fascists. We begin with interwar Europe and international debates in communist party organizing but also discuss how Marxist-Leninists like the Black Panther Party understood fascism in the U.S. This provides us with some useful perspectives on various tactics, their relative successes and failures, and what this means for the present moment. Class materials: Clara Zetkin, “Resolution on fascism” (adopted on June 23, 1923 by the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International) https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/06/fascism-report-comintern.htm Georgi Dimitrov, “Unity of the working class against fascism” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/unity.htm The Black Panther, May 31, 1969 on “Fascism in America” https://www.marxists.org/history//usa/pubs/black-panther/03n06-may%2031%201969.pdf

The United States, a country with a $20 trillion economy, is waging a full-scale economic war against an island whose economy equals half of one percent of that — Cuba. The war has been going on for 60 years. It began shortly after the 1959 revolution to punish Cuba for taking control of corporations owned by rich capitalists in the United States who had brutally exploited the Cuban people for decades. Supporters of the Cuban revolution call this economic war a blockade, not an “embargo” like the corporate media. That is because the U.S. government is not only preventing its own citizens and businesses from trading with Cuba, it also prohibits trade with foreign entities that also do business with Cuba. In essence, the United States makes companies choose between doing business in the United States’ $20 trillion economy or in Cuba. Here are six ways that this cruel blockade profoundly impacts the lives of the Cuban people. Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/six-ways-the-cruel-u-s-blockade-makes-cubans-suffer/

Cuba, like every other country on the planet, is struggling with the impact of COVID-19. This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world. Meanwhile, the United States hardens a cruel and illegal blockade of the island, a medieval siege that has been in place for six decades. In April 2020, seven United Nations special rapporteurs wrote an open letter to the United States government about the blockade. “In the pandemic emergency,” they wrote, “the lack of will of the US government to suspend sanctions may lead to a higher risk of such suffering in Cuba and other countries targeted by its sanctions.” The special rapporteurs noted the “risks to the right to life, health and other critical rights of the most vulnerable sections of the Cuban population.” Read the full article here: https://www.liberationnews.org/the-united-states-tries-to-take-advantage-of-the-price-cubans-are-paying-for-the-blockade-and-the-pandemic/ Reposted from People’s Dispatch. This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel spoke to the Cuban people today — Sunday, July 11 — at 4:00 p.m. Eastern, after going to the site of one of several protests that took place in Cuba today. This unprecedented series of events are the result of the growing difficulties the people are experiencing by the double blow created by the increasingly severe U.S. blockade and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being in control of infections for many months, cases have been growing in recent weeks and days. Because the Cuban government is necessarily prioritizing medicines and health care for thousands of COVID-positive patients, shortages are being experienced by the rest of the population. Electrical energy is scarce because of the blockade, and what little is available is being directed to facilities for COVID patients. As a result, blackouts are happening in parts of the country, adding to the people’s difficulties. The United States is taking advantage of the situation by heavily financing counter-revolutionary groups that are part of the protests and trying to foment opposition. And yet, this is at a time when Cuba’s famed biotechnology industry has created five vaccines to vaccinate its population, the real hope for saving lives. This speech provides crucial context and information being covered up by the corporate media in the United States. We in the Party for Socialism and Liberation stand with the Cuban Revolution and the heroic people who have resisted U.S. imperialism for more than 60 years. Down with the U.S. blockade! The following is an unofficial translation of President Díaz-Canel’s words, from CubaDebate.cu Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/cuban-president-diaz-canel-revolutionaries-to-the-streets/

The Party for Socialism and Liberation stands in full solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, its government and people in the struggle against the latest sinister counter-revolutionary efforts of U.S. imperialism. The sixty year old blockade and hundreds of sanctions imposed under the Trump Administration have caused grave shortages of food, medicines, electricity and other necessities of life. The shortages have greatly exacerbated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island. No working person in the United States should be fooled – this is the latest manifestation of an imperialist war to destroy Cuban independence and socialism. U.S. hands off Cuba! Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-u-s-imperialism-seeks-counter-revolution-in-cuba/

The notion that the rich are rich because they’re frugal, smart, entrepreneurial, and hardworking, and that the poor are poor because they’re wasteful, lazy, stupid, and irresponsible is widespread. This is the ideology of meritocracy: that success or failure in life is up to the individual’s choices. The ideology takes on different forms, such as the idea that Black liberation is achieved through “Black buying power,” as Jared Ball’s recent book puts it. Whatever form it takes, this ideology serves the purpose of blaming the poor for their poverty and the oppressed for their oppression. The capitalist system that produces both is totally absolved. What’s interesting is that although this notion is widely accepted, it is easily disproved. Who, after all, thinks Donald Trump gained his wealth by employing his intelligence? It’s obvious that his wealth has nothing to do with his own individual personality, characteristics or merits. On the other end, who doesn’t know smart and creative people—maybe even with advanced degrees—who are either working low-waged jobs or are unemployed? Marx was the first to discover and articulate the specific source of inequality under capitalism: surplus value. In a letter he wrote to Engels the year he published the first volume of Capital, Marx said that “the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc.” was one of the “best points” made in the book. But there are a few necessary steps to take before we can really grasp surplus value, which is the real motor of class struggle. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/03-what-is-surplus-value-html/

Gentrification is the systematic process of displacing poor people from a community and replacing them with more affluent people, all in the interest of profit. It has become a primary local policy of the representatives of the ruling class and is clearly carried out by the state. While it is clearly a policy, it is also an outcome of the capitalist approach to housing and development. Profit is king. People’s livelihoods and well-being are not considerations. A serious socialist program for housing must unequivocally reject the idea that gentrification is a process caused primarily by an influx of white wealthier people and fancy coffee shops. They more serve as symbols that gentrification won. By the time wealthy people and coffee shops show up, the behind-the-scenes work for gentrification has already taken place. We should begin to correctly frame gentrification as a violent function of the capitalist model. A clear political alternative that can unify working-class people of all nationalities and keep housing affordable and safe for all is the answer. Read the full article here: https://www.breakingthechainsmag.org/not-just-rich-people-and-cafes-toward-a-socialist-understanding-of-gentrification/

In the early hours of July 7, Haitian president-turned-dictator Jovenel Moïse was assassinated at his home in Port-au-Prince. While many details of the assassination remain unclear, the political vacuum in Haiti will likely result in a fierce struggle over the direction of the nation in the coming weeks. The Biden administration’s initial reactions to the assassination disturbingly indicate that the U.S. government is considering deepening their intervention in Haiti, which could possibly involve a military intervention. Biden’s official statement pledges that the United States “stand[s] ready to assist”. The spokesman for the State Department ominously said that the United States is “prepared to receive additional requests from Haitian authorities”. A new U.S. occupation of Haiti, or any type of meddling in the country’s sovereign affairs, would be a disaster. For over a century the U.S. military has helped corporations plunder Haiti, carrying out invasions, supporting coups and menacing anyone who fights for the freedom and independence of the country. Even if they use humanitarian language, the goal of any U.S. intervention remains the same. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/haiti-no-to-u-s-intervention-in-wake-of-jovenel-moise-assassination/

July 1, 2021 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Celebrations throughout China and commemorations worldwide are taking place today in recognition of the Party's leadership and its incredible legacy. It's worthwhile for socialists to reflect on this legacy and, in particular, the contemporary state of China's political economy. On November 9, 2013 Xi Jinping gave a talk at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in which he discussed the characteristic features of China’s economy after more than two decades of “reform and opening.” He recalled that at the 14th National Congress of the CPC, in 1992, the Party had re-dedicated itself to the goal of “establishing a socialist market economy, allowing the market to play a basic role in allocating resources under state macro control.” He went on to assert that, by 2013, a socialist market economy had been “basically established” but also observed that “there are still many problems.” This assessment of the situation, which remains essentially applicable to China today, reflects the complexity of China’s historical path since Liberation in 1949. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/the-cpc-100-years-on-understanding-chinas-contemporary-political-economy/