Socialism

Left Labor Project, New York City Closing Statement

October 6, 2021 Left Labor Project, Portside. Organize! Labor Movement, New York City (NYC), Socialism, Worker Rights and Jobs

Left Labor Project was formed in 2008 by activists in New York City unions, with the goal of influencing the broad labor movement to the left. It brought together folks who had been deeply involved in labor, and other social movements as well. It was socialist, but inclusive of people from different groups and tendencies on the left. It was diverse, and included members of a variety of unions. No unions had official affiliation to LLP, however. There were several features of LLP that distinguished it on the left and in the labor movement. It was mostly older activists, at a time before Occupy and the second coming of DSA as a predominantly under-40 group, but it sought to expand broadly via phone outreach and email. And it was a deliberate attempt to bring together members of socialist groups which have historically run on parallel, but not convergent paths.

Nicaragua’s New Way

October 5, 2021 Becca Mohally Renk, Morningstar Online. Create! Neoliberalism, Nicaragua, Sandinista Revolution, Socialism

In 1999, when I first came to Ciudad Sandino, a city of 180,000 located just outside Managua, Hurricane Mitch had recently created 2.7 million homeless people in Nicaragua and Honduras. The neoliberal government had pocketed the aid that came into the country. Ciudad Sandino had received 12,000 hurricane refugees who were living in black plastic tents, but those who had been living in Ciudad Sandino for decades weren’t in much better shape: most houses were walled with scrap wood and plastic. There was only one paved road in the city. Neighbourhoods had only sporadic access to water, no sewage system and most homes weren’t connected to the electrical grid with its frequent blackouts. The only hospital sat empty with no medicines or supplies. Children had to bring their own desks if they wanted to go to school.

Loyalty

September 10, 2021 Dakotah Lilly, Popular Resistance. Educate! Left Politics, Politics, Socialism

Whenever I wear one of my many shirts, necklaces, or buttons adorned with the faces of great leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, Che, or Evita, I will commonly get a comment in real life or on social media about how I am “worshipping” or engaging in a “cult of personality”. It’s not true, what I am exhibiting is loyalty, which is expressly different because of a simple fact; this political loyalty is a two way street. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, two time president of Argentina and current Vice President put it succinctly on the day of her inauguration as VP in 2019. She says that “Loyalty, that value that some do not understand and think that loyalty is only following a political leader. No! Loyalty between a politician and the people must be two points. The People are not stupid.

Afghanistan: Operation Cyclone Comes Full Circle

August 25, 2021 Gavin O'Reilly, Popular Resistance. Educate! Afghanistan, Operation Cyclone, Socialism, Wars and Militarism

Since Monday, the international media has focused on one story that has managed to knock Covid from the headlines; the capture of the Afghan capital Kabul by Taliban forces and the subsequent exile of President Ashraf Ghani to the UAE, following a US-Taliban authored withdrawal agreement due to be fully implemented by the end of August when the last remaining US Forces are scheduled to leave the war-torn nation. Over the past week, emotive images of desperate Afghans clinging to departing US warplanes in a bid to escape the incoming theocratic rule of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan have filled television screens worldwide, and there has been much debate in the Western media about women’s rights under the new regime, the increase in refugees that the situation looks set to create, and the competency of the Biden administration in handling the withdrawal.

Stories Of Resistance From El Maizal Commune

August 7, 2021 Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, Venezuelanalysis. Create! Land Reform, Socialism, US Sanctions, Venezuela

El Maizal Commune lies in the fertile lands between the Lara and Portuguesa states in western Venezuela. Founded in 2009, this rural commune has since become an important political and economic force in both the region and the country. It not only produces huge amounts of corn every year, but also raises cattle and pigs, along with a growing number of additional side enterprises. Most importantly, El Maizal Commune forges new social relations and new human beings: people committed to the socialist project that Chávez promoted during his lifetime.

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.

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