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Communism

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.

Thirty-Five Years Of Comintern Publishing: A Balancesheet

April 16, 2018 John Riddell, Socialistproject.ca , ,
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 ,
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 , ,
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,”

Mapping American Social Movements Through 20th Century

May 9, 2016 James Gregory, www.fdepts.washington.edu , , , ,
By James Gregory forUniversity of Washington - This collaborative project features maps and other visualizations showing the chronological geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics during the 20th century, including radical movements, labor movements, women's movements, many different civil rights movements, environmentalist movements, and more. Until now historians and social scientists have mostly studied social movements in isolation and often with little attention to geography.

Roots And Contours Of Worker Rebellion In A Changing China

April 9, 2016 Herman Rosenfeld, www.socialistproject.ca , ,
By Herman Rosenfeld for The Socialist Project - It is impossible to ignore the large and growing wave of worker strikes and protests now rocking China. Just last year there were over 2700 actions, double the numbers of 2014 and more than 500 during this past January alone. They are in response to the Chinese government's restructuring program of wage cuts, worker layoffs, and workplace closures during an economic slowdown and plans to move away from the export-oriented strategy followed in this stage of the reform period.

Former Czech Dissident: Freer Under Communism Than Capitalism

October 26, 2014 Andre Vltchek, www.counterpunch.org , , ,
Before the so-called ‘Velvet Revolution’, people complained about not having access to certain types of information, or certain cultural products, including certain films. They were not allowed to travel abroad, whenever they wanted, etcetera. But they didn’t realize that their dignity of life was much, much better then, than it is nowadays. They didn’t realize that when capitalism enters, they would start to feel anxieties, very deep existential anxieties… They would start being terrified that they would lose jobs. They are now forced to trade their human dignity for keeping their jobs. Now they have to kiss the backsides of their bosses much more than they would have had to, under Communism. It is all very interesting, as people used to have certain advantages, which were of course created, built and established by socialist movements throughout history. And they sort of forgot, having those values and advantages, that…They did take things for granted. They did not even realize that they had some great things, that they had great lives. Suddenly, when they began losing them, they realized that something was going terribly wrong. Some people are now very disappointed. It is very interesting: this shift from a socialist system to a capitalist one. Under socialism, Czechoslovakia produced everything, literally from needles to locomotives. Now everything has changed! All the national industries have gone. Sold or stolen by those…
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