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Communism

When People Want Housing In India, They Build It

August 19, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidised food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated.

The Red Scare

April 3, 2022 Alice Slater, In Depth News. , , , ,
New York City, New York - In 1954 I attended Queens College during the years before Senator Joseph McCarthy finally met his comeuppance at the Army-McCarthy hearings after terrorizing Americans for years with accusations of disloyal communists, waving lists of blacklisted citizens, threatening their lives, their employment, their ability to function in society because of their political affiliations. In the college cafeteria, we were discussing politics when one student thrust a yellow pamphlet into my hands.   “Here you should read this.”  I glanced at the title. My heart skipped a beat as I saw the words “Communist Party of America.”  I hastily stuffed it unopened into my bookbag, took the bus home, rode the elevator to the 8th floor, walked directly to the incinerator, and tossed the pamphlet down the chute, unread, before I entered my apartment. 

President Putin Did Not Emerge Out Of A Clear Blue Sky

March 29, 2022 Peter Bolton, Popular Resistance. , , ,
It has now been over a month since Vladimir Putin ordered Russian military forces to invade Ukraine. In this short amount of time, a tidal wave of sentimental gush has emerged from Western countries that has glossed over even the most modest criticism of the Ukrainian government while vilifying Putin and his country to an extent that is increasingly trespassing into the realm of the absurd. This narrative, disseminated by Washington, its allies, and its minions in the corporate-owned media, has been so predictable as to be bordering on self-parody, with some going so far as to draw parallels between Putin and Adolf Hitler. In the wake of this flagrantly one-sided presentation of the conflict, Russia has been subjected to sanctions from the US and its allies, the withdrawal of multiple major corporations from Russian soil, and a series of boycotts by a cornucopia of universities, NGOS and social media companies.

Ukrainian Security Services Arrest Young Communist Leaders

March 7, 2022 Muhammed Shabeer, People's Dispatch. , , ,
On Sunday, March 6, the Ukrainian security services arrested Mikhail Kononovich and his brother Aleksandr Kononovich. Both are from the leadership of the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine (LKSMU). The press service of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) stated on Sunday that the Kononovich brothers were arrested from capital Kiev and put in jail. The SBU has accused them of being propagandists with pro-Russian and pro-Belarusian views with the goal of destabilizing the internal situation in Ukraine and create the “necessary information picture” for Russian and Belarusian channels. The World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) denounced the arrest of the LKSMU leaders in Ukraine and urged progressive youth groups across the world to mobilize to demand for their freedom as their lives are in serious danger in the custody of the security forces.

We Dance Into The New Year Banging Our Hammers And Swinging Our Sickles

December 31, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines. Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek alphabet from the variants named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge. Cuba leads the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous vaccines to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity.

The Eradication Of Extreme Poverty In China

August 2, 2021 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The early decades of socialist construction laid the foundation that was deepened during the reform and opening-up period. During this time, 850 million Chinese people were lifted and lifted themselves out of poverty; that is to say, 70 percent of the world’s total poverty reduction took place in China. In the most recent ‘targeted’ phase that began in 2013, the Chinese government spent 1.6 trillion yuan (US$246 billion) to build 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads, bring internet access to 98 percent of the country’s poor villages, renovate homes for 25.68 million people, and build new homes for 9.6 million others.

Preventing A Return To Normal Amidst The Current Catastrophe

June 29, 2021 A.M. Gittlitz and Matt Peterson, ROAR Magazine. , , ,
Towards the beginning of our most recent global catastrophe, writer A.M. Gittlitz published I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, the result of his years-long research on the infamous theorist of revolutionary disaster J. Posadas (1912-1981). Combining intellectual biography and cultural analysis, Gittlitz’s book tells the story of Argentine Trotskyist Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli — better known under the pseudonym J. Posadas — and his many dedicated followers, traversing multiple continents across decades. I Want to Believe is a cautionary political tale of a radical post-war tendency marked by zealous fanaticism, an enigmatic insurgent horizon caught between utopia and annihilation and the cruelest of gaps separating sincere revolutionary desire and delusional irrelevance.

Meet The Communists Who Now Govern Chile

June 17, 2021 Vijay Prashad and Taroa Zuniga Silva, People's Dispatch. , , ,
Javiera Reyes, who is 31 years old, is the new mayor of the Santiago municipality of Lo Espejo in Chile. “I grew up in a home where [former President of Chile] Salvador Allende was always the good guy,” she told us, “and [military dictator] Augusto Pinochet was a tyrant. That marked my life.” Reyes’ comment reflects the old divides that have convulsed Chile’s politics since General Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état against former President Salvador Allende of the Popular Unity coalition on September 11, 1973. Almost 50 years have gone by and yet Chile is still influenced by the legacy of that coup and of the Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. The May 2021 election that propelled Reyes to the mayor’s office in Lo Espejo also voted in a new Constitutional Convention to rewrite the Pinochet-era Constitution of 1980.

I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West

May 2, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border. On 3 March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister Miklós Németh asked the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western Europe could be opened. ‘We have a strict regime on our borders’, Gorbachev told Németh, ‘but we are also becoming more open’. Three months later, on 15 June, Gorbachev told the press in Bonn (West Germany) that the Berlin Wall ‘could disappear when the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist’.

The Freedom Struggle Is A Labor Struggle, Then And Now

January 14, 2021 Robin D. G. Kelley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
As we think, again, about the role of organized labor in the long Black freedom struggle, it is worth noting that in India at this very moment 250 million farmers, workers, students and allies have joined in what had been a three-month long protest against the Modi government’s neoliberal agricultural policies. The new parliamentary bills essentially eliminate state-run regulated agricultural markets, and allow direct transactions between farmers and private corporate interests — namely international commodity traders and conglomerates such as Walmart and Cargill. The new arrangements will destroy small farmers and force those who survive to enter into contracts with corporate global seed and agrochemical suppliers, traders, distributors and retail concerns.

An Apology For A Massacre

January 13, 2021 Signe Waller Foxworth and Nelson N. Johnson, Tikkun. , , ,
Greensborough, NC - Public accountability for their actions often awaits evildoers who hurt people. For many who spilled onto the streets in a mood of relief, jubilation and celebration at the election news of a soon-to-be outgoing president, a day of reckoning for the nation had come. Only weeks earlier, a Southern city cautiously enacted its overdue moral reckoning with an apology for a massacre. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous proclamation, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” is an applicable lens for these events. On November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, at approximately 11:20 on a bright Saturday morning, nine carloads of Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis drove into the...

To Catch The Heartbeat Of Those Below

October 3, 2020 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
‘It was the worst when I was released. That’s the biggest prison I had to face’. Martin Aleida recalls the moment he was released from prison at the end of 1966. The then twenty-two-year-old writer emerged from nearly a year behind bars to Jakarta unable to find his friends and comrades. His workplace, Harian Rakjat (‘The People’s Daily’), the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), was no longer.

Combat Vet, West Point Grad Forced To Resign For Supporting Economic & Racial Justice

June 23, 2018 Spenser Rapone, Truthdig.com , , ,
I am a combat veteran with the First Ranger Battalion, a recent graduate of West Point and a former second lieutenant who was stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y. Since identifying myself as a socialist, there has been much controversy generated by a number of my public statements. It began with my post on social media, in which I expressed my full and enthusiastic support of former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in his fight against racial injustice, white supremacy and police brutality. After revealing a picture of myself in uniform with the hashtag #VeteransForKaepernick, I was met by solidarity from my fellow soldiers, as well as harsh blowback from my chain of command. To this day, I stand by my convictions, despite the efforts of ranking officers to pressure me into silence. I believe that standing up for the exploited and the oppressed is the most honorable thing we can do as people.

Civil Rights Unionism

June 5, 2018 Robert Korstad, Jacobinmag.com , , ,
By any measure, black tobacco workers in 1940s Winston-Salem, North Carolina were down at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They endured severe voting restrictions and segregated accommodations in public, all-powerful bosses and racist job assignments at work, and deplorable living conditions at home. America could trumpet its democratic commitments all it wanted — these workers’ lives were shot through with despotism. In Civil Rights Unionism — originally released in 2003 and excerpted below — historian Robert Korstad tells the story of how these workers were able to change their conditions. After an explosion of shop-floor activism, the predominately black workforce successfully unionized the most powerful corporation in the city, R. J. Reynolds.

Views From A Changing Cuba As Raúl Castro Steps Down

April 22, 2018 Nat Winthrop, Toward Freedom. , ,
As Cuban President Raúl Castro stepped down from office today, Cuba is expected to enter a period of dramatic change. Eager to witness the final days of the nearly six decades of Castro rule in Cuba, my son and I recently visited the island nation. We were provided a view of a communist country marked by profound continuities and changes in Cuban culture, the arts, and technology. We arrived on February 20, while a Congressional delegation headed by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont was there meeting with Castro, Cuban ministers, entrepreneurs, and ambassadors from several foreign countries.
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