Socialism

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.

Arce-Castillo Socialist Alliance For South America, Part II

July 26, 2021 Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Popular Resistance. Educate! Bolivia, Peru, Pink Tide, Socialism

Arce in Bolivia and Castillo in Peru face some similar challenges: paralyzed economies, the exhaustion of some sources of income such as natural gas and the emergence of others (e.g. lithium); the pandemically-related rise in poverty; deep social divisions between rich and poor and between well-endowed areas and areas less fortunate; a historical legacy of ruling class entitlement; health and education systems in great need of additional resources, especially in the poorer and more remote regions; environmental challenges such as the destruction of the Amazon rain forest; the insistent pressure for access and profit by multinational corporations, especially in the extractivist industries; the need to fortify and expand national institutions and the role of the State in the national economy; the always looming threat of the regional hegemon, the USA and its allies, both local and global, which, when angered sufficiently stifle economic and political development through the application of sanctions and financing of local “pro-democracy” movements.

Arce-Castillo Socialist Alliance For South America, Part I

July 25, 2021 Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Popular Resistance. Educate! Bolivia, Peru, Pink Tide, Socialism

On July 28, 2021, Pedro Castillo, son of illiterate Andean peasants will be inaugurated as President of Peru, celebrating the victory of his socialist party Perú Libre in the elections of June. Peru has strong historical ties to other regional powers, most notably Ecuador and Bolivia. Castillo’s victory follows by two months the swearing in of Guillermo Alberto Santiago Lasso Mendoza as President of Ecuador in May. Although Lasso is center-right, he will be constrained by the continuing hold over Ecuador’s 137 seat assembly of allies of former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) which maintains the largest bloc with 49 seats, and the leftist Pachakutik party which has unprecedented indigenous influence, holding about 45 seats in alliance with the center-left Democratic Left party.

Defend The Cuba Revolution And Struggle For More Socialism

July 15, 2021 Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Capitalism, Cuba, Socialism, US Imperialism

Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, an economic crisis, broken supply chains, killer cops, mass incarceration, government surveillance, nuclear weapons, irrational anti-social mass shootings, normalized racism, homelessness, crumbling schools, depression, fear, suicides, and obscene disparities in incomes and wealth—all the features of a moribund, brutal, anti-human global colonial-capitalist system in the United States—and we are supposed to be defensive about socialism! Give me a break. Yet, the propagandists of death never sleep. Even as their system is being exposed as the generator of global warming (climate change), nuclear madness, cultural degeneration, and strange, violent societies and people, the ideological dirty workers are busy diverting attention away from the failures of their system to the internal contradictions found within the few examples of societies struggling to remake themselves in ways that center the needs and aspirations of the people.

On Contact: Worker Cooperatives

July 11, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. Resistance Report Chris Hedges, Cooperatives, Environment, Socialism

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses worker cooperatives with Niki Okuk, activist and founder of the worker cooperative Rco Tires. Okuk founded Rco Tires in 2012. They've since recycled more than 300 million pounds of rubber, diverting 70 million gallons of oil from landfills, and with 16 employees, making it one of southern California's largest sustainability plants. Rco Tires creates alternative uses for trash tires, turning them into new products. Because of Okuk's progressive hiring and management practices, the cooperative provides stable jobs for local black and Latino residents who struggle to find employment because of past criminal convictions or their legal status.

Defense Of For-Profit Health Care Hasn’t Changed In Decades

July 10, 2021 Luke Savage, Jacobin Magazine. Educate! Health Care, Medicare for all, Propaganda, Socialism

This month marks the fifty-sixth anniversary of Medicare, signed into law by president Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965. The effects of the program were expansive and immediate: three years after its creation, some 96 percent of those sixty-five and older had hospital insurance, up from only 54 percent in 1963. Today, despite decades of attempts to undermine it, it remains among the most popular of all government programs — vastly outperforming private alternatives in a huge survey recently published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. A June poll also identified high, and in some cases stratospheric, levels of support for various proposed enhancements currently being debated in Congress, including one which would lower the age of eligibility to sixty.

China Pulls Itself Out Of Poverty 100 Years Into Its Revolution

July 4, 2021 Vijay Prashad and John Ross, Counterpunch. Educate! China, Finance and the Economy, Poverty, Socialism

On February 25, 2021, China’s President Xi Jinping announced that his country of 1.4 billion people had pulled its people out of poverty as it is defined internationally. Since 1981, 853 million Chinese people have lifted themselves out of poverty thanks to large-scale interventions from both the Chinese state and the Communist Party of China (CPC); according to the data of the World Bank, three out of four people worldwide who were lifted out of poverty live in China. “No country has been able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in such a short time,” Xi said. When UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited China in September 2019, he gushed over this accomplishment, calling it the “greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.”

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.

The Communard Union, Chávez’s Ideas In Action

June 21, 2021 Cira Pascual Marquina, Venezuelanalysis. Create! Bolivarian Process, Communes, Socialism, Venezuela

Since 2019, several Venezuelan organizations that were weathering the storm of the crisis began to meet and sound each other out. In doing so, they were motivated by the need to survive in the face of the crisis, but they were also concerned with the [capitalist] restoration that was being imposed by some sectors of the government. Thus began a process of building a shared platform around a common program of struggle. The Communard Union initiative took shape when these organizations were reflecting on the commune as a strategic project. The final proposal came out of a meeting held at the Che Guevara Commune in Mérida State in December 2019, with the participation of several communes, including Luisa Cáceres de Arismendi from Anzoátegui, El Maizal from Lara-Portuguesa, 5 de Marzo from Caracas, Sectores Unidos from Lara, and Pancha Vásquez from Apure.

Lenin Danced in the Snow to Celebrate the Paris Commune and the Soviet Republic

May 28, 2021 Vijay Prashad, The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! France, Lenin, Socialism, Soviet Union

On 28 May 1871, one hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris Commune collapsed after seventy-two days. The workers of Paris created the Commune on 18 March, building on the wave of revolutionary optimism that first lapped on the shores of France in 1789 and then again in 1830 and 1848. The immediate spur for the Commune was Prussia’s victory over France in a futile war.

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’.

We Can Solve The Climate Crisis!

April 22, 2021 Tina Landis, Liberation News. Create! Capitalism, climate crisis, Earth Day, Socialism

Climate change is unfolding at an increasingly rapid rate with more severe droughts, storms, wildfires and floods impacting the globe. Yet, the capitalists continue to plunder the planet and extract fossil fuels, destroying ecosystems and increasing warming. The 2018 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that we have 12 years to avert runaway catastrophe. That call to action becomes more urgent by the day while the majority of governments globally take limited actions that fail to meet the urgency of the crisis. The very system of capitalism itself is the cause of climate change with the Global North holding the majority of responsibility due to earlier development and consumer lifestyles.

Zambia Is The Tip Of The Tail Of The Global Dog

April 10, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Elections, International Monetary Fund, Socialism, Zambia

On 12 August 2021, the people of Zambia will vote to elect a new president, who will be the seventh person elected to the office since Zambia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 if the incumbent loses. The incumbent, President Edgar Lungu, is facing a strong challenge from Fred M’membe, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party Zambia. M’membe knows the importance of a challenge. As the editor of The Post since its creation in 1991, M’membe has long faced malicious harassment and political persecution. The voice of M’membe’s The Post sizzled with truth-telling; silenced in 2016, it was reborn as The Mast. In 2009, an editorial in The Post described how, despite decades of independence, Zambia remained in the claws of an unjust world system.

Truth Commission Details Horrible Crimes Akin To Native American Genocide And Slavery

April 10, 2021 Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine. Educate! Cold War, Empire Economy, Russia, Socialism

With a new Cold War heating up between the U.S. and Russia and China, Witness for Peace Southwest, Addicted to War and CodePink organized a Truth Commission on the original Cold War on March 21st, which brought together the testimony of historians, activists and others who lived through the period. Following a hearing three years ago, the Zoom event was hosted by Frank Dorrel, publisher of the popular anti-war text Addicted to War, and Rachel Bruhnke, a high school Spanish teacher and member of Witness for Peace Southwest. In her opening remarks, Bruhnke emphasized that the Cold War should rank as one of three great crimes in U.S. history, the first two being the genocide of the native Americans, and enslavement of African-Americans.

Ecuador’s Election Is A Test Of Our Solidarity

April 8, 2021 David Adler, ROAR Magazine. Educate! Ecuador, Elections, International Solidarity, Socialism

On 11 April, the people of Ecuador will cast their final vote to elect the country’s next president. But as we approach the second round of Ecuador’s presidential election, the attacks on its electoral process are escalating rapidly. In the last month alone, we have seen calls for a military coup published in Ecuador’s most popular newspapers, efforts to disqualify candidates with false accusations of fraud, and an attempt to confiscate its voting databases for an illegal ‘audit’ of the first-round votes. These tactics are designed not only to challenge the democratic institutions of Ecuador, but also for export to authoritarian actors around the world.

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