Communism

Ukrainian Security Services Arrest Young Communist Leaders

March 7, 2022 Muhammed Shabeer, People's Dispatch. Organize! Communism, Fascism, Russia, Ukraine

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. Educate! Communism, COVID-19, New Years Eve, Vaccine apartheid

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. Create! China, Communism, Poverty, Socialism

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. Strategize! Class Struggle, Communism, Revolution, Socialism

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. Educate! Chile, Communism, Electoral Politics, Left Politics

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. Educate! Communism, Germany, Privatization, Socialism

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. Educate! Black Working Class, Capitalism, Communism, Labor Unions

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. Educate! Communism, Massacre, North Carolina, Racism

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. Educate! Communism, Indonesia, Media, Military Rule

‘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 Resist! Communism, Repression, US military, Veterans

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 Educate! Class Struggle, Communism, History, Racism

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. Educate! Communism, Cuba, Media

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.

Thirty-Five Years Of Comintern Publishing: A Balancesheet

April 16, 2018 John Riddell, Socialistproject.ca Educate! Class Struggle, Communism, History

I objected that I had no background in academic research and publishing. Waters and Sheppard countered that given my grasp of history in that period, my knowledge of the three main translation languages, and my experience as a socialist activist attempting to implement the Comintern’s ideas, I was the obvious choice. I accepted the challenge and took charge of the project. It has taken a good deal more than a decade. Along the way, Pathfinder has been replaced as publisher by Historical Materialism Book Series and Haymarket Books. Nine documentary books have now gone to press, totaling 6,500 pages, and another is in preparation. (See list of volumes below.) More than 100 collaborators have helped in various ways to produce them.

Political Analysis Of South Africa By The SA Communist Party

July 22, 2017 Staff, www.sacp.org.za Educate! Communism, South Africa

By Staff of SACP - We, 1, 819 Communist militants, have met over the past five days as delegates to the SACP's 14th National Congress in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng. We are drawn from over 7, 000 SACP branches from across our country and from the ranks of the Young Communist League of South Africa. As delegates, we represent 284, 554 SACP members. Five years ago, at our 13th National Congress, we proudly announced that our membership had grown massively to over 150, 000. We have nearly doubled once again. We are well aware that this surging popularity of the Party imposes responsibilities upon all of us. Our Congress occurs at a time when South Africa's monopoly-dominated capitalist economy, with its colonial and apartheid legacy features, continues to reproduce crisis levels of unemployment, inequality and poverty - all of which are strongly marked by racial, gendered and spatial features. At this Congress we have taken resolutions which both reaffirm our principled strategic posture as well as advancing specific interventions that need to be undertaken. We are reaffirming our strategic commitment to a radical second phase of the National Democratic Revolution as the most direct route to a socialist South Africa. To reinforce and give practical content to this strategic perspective we have also resolved on many specific interventions.

The Rebel Girl

January 24, 2017 Mary Anne Trasciatti, www.jacobinmag.com Strategize! Communism, History, Women

By Mary Anne Trasciatti for Jacobin - In 1976, Life magazine marked the US bicentennial with a special report on “Remarkable American Women.” I was thirteen years old at the time and I remember thumbing eagerly through the pages of the magazine, a gift from my mother to nurture my budding feminism. Among the 166 women profiled was the Rebel Girl, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (also known as the IWW or the Wobblies), free speech fighter, co-founder of the ACLU, and first female secretary of the Communist Party USA. Her bio and photo appeared in the section titled “Noble Causes,” along with seventeen other “Crusaders for the Sick, Poor and Oppressed,”

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