If you want to learn about the powerful movement that ended the brutal Jim Crow system of segregation in the South, this movie misses the mark. It focuses on Mamie Till, whose 14-year-old son Emmett was cold bloodedly lynched while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. But it shows very little of how Mamie Till decided to step up and lead years of protests against the acquittal of the two racists who lynched her son, and how it helped build the civil rights movement....
[....] as long as everyone agrees to advance the fight for civil and human rights for those who identify as Transgender and as long as everyone agrees that Transwomen will not uproot females from private spaces and/or hinder the ability of females to participate in all facets of society such as sports, and as long as everyone upholds the right of freedom of expression without the fear of bodily harm, cancellation, intimidation or the firing from one's job, then it becomes a distinction without a difference.
Children, Tweens and teenagers should not be medicalized as they go through a trying period in their lives, i.e., puberty, and no one under the age of 18 should have access to plastic surgery or hormones because they were told by an authority figure that they were born into the wrong body. However, young people should have access to an abundance of psychological counseling and therapy in order to get a handle on what's usually a difficult time for all of us, but especially for those who have a same sex attraction, a gender dysphoria (rare but not unheard of), autism, extreme shyness or other mental and physical challenges.
In a word, I'm an advocate of watchful waiting….
Full:
https://theunionofworkers.wordpress.com/2022/12/30/another-note-to-another-friend/
First, do no harm!
And here lies the problem, as so many professionals these days, backed by the liberal meritocracy, the liberal media and the Democratic Party, have fallen prey to the metaphysical notion that huge numbers of youth are suddenly (in the last ten years) being born into the wrong bodies. There are signs this is changing as the forces of rational thinking mount a counter-attack, a counter-attack that will be none too soon in arriving....
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[....] In recent weeks, both the Iranian and Turkish governments have stepped up military attacks on Kurds. Tehran has launched deadly attacks on protesters in Iran, and missile assaults on Kurdish-Iranian organizations based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara has bombed Kurdish towns in both Iraq and Syria. Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil have protested these violations of Iraq’s sovereignty, at the same time promising these two regional bullies to clamp down on exile groups.
These events, central to world politics, were on the minds of those who talked with volunteers at the Pathfinder Books stand, which featured books by communists and other working-class leaders. This was the fourth time the London distributor of books from New York-based Pathfinder Press participated in a book fair in the Kurdistan region.
What’s happening in Iran is not just a women’s movement, said university student Nwa Abdullah, “but also a Kurdish movement and a movement for freedom all over Iran.”
The struggles of Kurds in Iraq and Iran have been intertwined across history. Many have family or other links on both sides of the border imposed by these capitalist states, a mere 70-mile drive from Sulaymaniyah. A worker at a print shop turned out to be from Saqqez, the hometown of Jina Amini. She showed us videos on her phone of ongoing protests.
A book fair participant got a first-hand report from the Ekbatan area of Tehran Nov. 20, after a brutal government crackdown in Mahabad and other Kurdish cities. People were chanting “Mahabad, Kurdistan, setting example for Iran” into the night. Other fairgoers smiled and said they had heard this was being chanted elsewhere in Iran, too....
Ukrainians are commemorating the 90th anniversary of the 1932-33 Holodomor, which literally means killing by hunger. Millions starved to death across the Soviet Union as the counterrevolutionary Stalinist regime in Moscow imposed forced collectivization on the peasantry, measures carried out with special brutality in Ukraine.
Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars and other ethnic minorities across Central Asia and the Caucasus region had long been oppressed under czarism. They couldn’t use their native language, practice their religion or control their cultural, economic and political affairs.
With the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, self-determination for all the oppressed nationalities, who had revolted against czarist tyranny, was championed by V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Ukrainian workers and farmers were among those who formed their own voluntary Soviet Socialist Republic, expanding use of their language, history and culture.
After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin consolidated a political counterrevolution against this communist course, driving working people out of politics and imposing Moscow’s control, crushing Ukrainians’ national aspirations. The Stalinist regime executed thousands of writers and officials who Lenin had led to advance the “Ukrainization” of Ukraine.
In 1929 Stalin launched forced collectivization of the countryside. This shattered the working-class alliance with the peasants, the backbone of the revolution, and devastated agriculture.
The brutality of these measures against the peasants was severest in Ukraine, as Moscow was determined to crush the Ukrainian people’s aspirations for self-determination. Some 3.5 million starved to death there.
To meet Moscow’s impossible quotas for grain requisitions, peasants were robbed of their harvests, leaving nothing to sell or even eat. Backed by the death penalty, this produced famine across the Soviet Union.
Leon Trotsky, who led the fight to continue Lenin’s political course, said in 1939 that a source of the “irreconcilable hostility of the Ukrainian masses” to the Soviet bureaucracy was “the suppression of Ukrainian independence.”
[....] FBI’s accusations of conspiracy and hidden goals were pure projection. It turned out to be the White House and FBI, not the SWP, that conceal their aims and methods. It turned out to be the White House and FBI, not the SWP, that maintain a covert structure to carry out what they cannot openly proclaim. It turned out to be the White House and FBI, not the SWP, that rely on conspiratorial modes of operation to achieve their goals behind the backs of the people of the United States....[....] This book puts a special focus on the Democratic administration of President Franklin Roosevelt in the late 1930s, as the US rulers prepared to enter the imperialist slaughter of World War II. It describes the growth and consolidation of the “national security” state in the wake of Washington’s military, political, and economic victory in that war over its imperialist rivals, both “foes” (Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan) and “allies” (the United Kingdom, France, and others)....
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[....] Like all prosecutors under capitalism, Smith won’t start with investigating an actual crime, but with a target to try to bring down. He has the full gamut of state resources to cobble together “evidence” to accomplish that goal, including the rulers’ political police, the FBI. Witch hunts like this are a deadly threat to the working class....
[....] Keen said that she decided to speak out after universities, schools, health care and judicial systems started “making ‘woman’ only OK to say when you are talking about a man. He can be a woman, I can’t, I have to be a “ciswoman” or something else. … You have no chance of having a real discussion if you can’t define who a woman is.”She pointed to the incident last year at a spa in Los Angeles where women and children were joined by an unclothed male. When women complained, they were told that the spa had to abide by whatever a customer says they are. “Instead of denouncing the man for indecent exposure, we have to pretend he’s a brave woman who wanted to share space with a little girl,” Keen said. “We need to fight for ourselves, without rights we have nothing.”
Keen had canceled an Oct. 25 tour stop in Portland, Oregon, after threats of violence, including one by an antifa leader who organized a fundraiser to buy weapons. The police refused to offer her any protection.
The following day in Tacoma, Washington, a Let Women Speak rally of 30 was disrupted by over 200 thugs. Some wore brass knuckles and attempted to slam female speakers to the ground. “We peaceably assembled for our free speech and we were mobbed,” Amy Sousa told the press. At least one woman had her fingers deliberately broken by an attacker....
As applied to the variants of Wokeism that are popular today, it involves the wholesale rejection of the material truth that there are two sexes, that you are born male or female and you die in the same state, and that everything else is a fashion choice, hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery. Which is fine I suppose, as long as the person making the decision to do these things is an adult and not a child....
The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation by Abram Leon is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for November. Leon was won from Zionism to Marxism by supporters of Leon Trotsky. He wrote the book while a leader of the communist movement in Belgium as the second imperialist world war opened. In 1944, he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where he died in the gas chambers at age 26, along with over a million others. The excerpt is from the introduction to the book by Dave Prince. Copyright © 2020 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY DAVE PRINCE
The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation was completed by Abram Leon in 1942 in Belgium during the war-time occupation by Germany. As the twin slaughters of World War II and the Nazis’ “Final Solution” were unfolding, Leon wrote the book to explain the foundations of Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch, as well as the road to its eradication.
“There is no solution to the Jewish question under capitalism,” he said, “just as there is no solution to other problems posed before humanity, without profound social upheavals,” revolutionary upheavals. “Unless the deep roots of the Jewish question are eliminated, the effects cannot be eliminated.” …
In the imperialist epoch, Jew-hatred fulfills a special function for the ruling classes. It is not simply one among other forms of bigotry and discrimination, nor another variety of racism, “white nationalism,” or xenophobia. Anti-Semitic words and deeds can’t be dismissed, much less “understood,” as unfortunate “tropes,” “political correctness” in defense of the Palestinian people, or inadvertent lapses in respecting the right to worship.
It is a deadly illusion that bourgeois democracy and its competing capitalist parties can be counted on to protect Jews in times of severe social and political crisis, as growing sections of the propertied classes become convinced their rule itself is under threat. It is a deadly illusion for the Jewish people, and for the working class and its allies, to believe that Jew-hatred will somehow just disappear.
Such misconceptions defy the history of the place of Jew-hatred — its particularplace — in the defense of capitalist wealth and state power under severe crisis conditions. Its persistence, Leon says, is not based in the working class. Under the Nazis, “The ghettos and the yellow badges [did] not prevent the workers from feeling a growing solidarity with those who suffer most from the afflictions all humanity is suffering.”
Jew-hatred is not a division withinthe working class, promoted by the rulers to pit one group of workers against another. It is not aimed at exacerbating competition for jobs among workers, in order to minimize resistance to exploitation. Under capitalism, such divisions fomented by the ruling class do form the material basis for racist discrimination and bigotry based on skin color, sex, immigration status, language, and more.
Virulent anti-Semitism is different both in its origins and in its purpose.
At times of sharp capitalist dislocation, insecure layers of the middle classes in town and country — facing loss of income, jobs, homes, farms, small businesses, and careers — look for someone to blame. They fear the abyss. They fear being thrown into the proletariat, down among the “deplorables,” who have nothing to sell or live on in a crisis but their less-and-less-often-purchased labor power.
With class-struggle leadership pointing the way in action, the working class and its organizations — by fighting decisively and winning victories that also benefit broad sections of small producers and proprietors — can divide such petty-bourgeois layers whose future proletarian condition looms before them. Many can be won to the revolutionary workers movement and its vanguard party, but only through the example of working-class struggle.
If class-collaborationist misleaders of the working class succeed in blocking such a revolutionary alternative, however, it is not only the labor movement that will be thrown back. Seeing the brutal reality that the current social order offers them nothing but more misery, millions in the petty bourgeoisie become open to an anticapitalism fueled by bitterness, resentment, prejudice, and hatred. So do some desperate and demoralized working people, especially those for whom the crush of debt slavery has become the main source of their exploitation by capital.
It is incorrect “to accuse big business of having brought about anti-Semitism,” Leon points out. Amid the turbulent economic and social crises of the 1920s and 1930s, as the capitalist rulers in Germany felt threatened by the prospect of proletarian revolution, “Big business only proceeded to make use of the elementary anti-Semitism of the petty-bourgeois masses,” Leon says. …
What is the root of the petty bourgeoisie’s “elementary anti-Semitism”? Where does the myth of “Jewish capitalism” come from?
Leon answers these questions by tracing the origins of modern Jew-hatred through the sweep of recorded history and class society. He takes us from antiquity, through feudalism, to the rise of capitalism with its creation of the modern working class, and then the opening of the death agony of capitalism and the imperialist world order it dominates. …
[U]sing extensive historical sources, Leon makes the case that for two millennia, from antiquity through the rise of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews are “historically a social group with a specific economic function. They are a class, or more precisely, a people-class.” …
In the imperialist epoch, it is for these reasons that Jew-hatred originates in the petty bourgeoisie and both the ultraright and the radical left wings of bourgeois and middle-class anticapitalist politics. It is only when growing numbers among the ruling families no longer see another way to maintain their rule, however, that sections of them begin encouraging and financing initially small but violent fascist parties and their fighting units to attack workers’ picket lines, meetings, and social struggles. These layers of big business do so with the aim of smashing the trade unions and working-class political parties, in order to drown in blood every act of resistance to the disaster imposed on the toilers by capital.
[....] Washington’s political police are trampling on constitutional freedoms that working people have fought for and need. Regardless of who these forces go after today, tomorrow they will focus their attention and attacks on the working class and its vanguard. This is a law of history.Freedom to assemble, to speak out and organize, to protest are crucial for workers involved in today’s strike struggles for higher wages amid soaring prices, for shift schedules that allow time for family life, and against speedup and other dangerous conditions. Mobilizing to defend these freedoms is central to building a fighting labor movement, including the right to worship freely, against unreasonable search and seizure, or cruel and unusual punishment.
Unions are more popular than they’ve been in decades, as workers face a stepped-up drive by employers to protect their profits at our expense. Biden says his administration is the most pro-union ever. But backing the rail bosses, he invoked the notorious Railway Labor Act, tying up rail workers in years of mediation, multiple “cooling off” periods and a Presidential Emergency Board to deny them the right to strike.
The U.S. rulers increasingly fear what more working people know from their own experience — the Democratic and Republican parties have no answers to the crisis of capitalism that don’t bolster bosses’ attacks and worsen deteriorating conditions inflicted on us for years. With more workers looking for ways to resist, the rulers look to strengthen their state power and the FBI....
[....] Over 1,000 people joined the Sept. 17 funeral in her Kurdish hometown of Saqqez, where many women took off their headscarves and waved them in the air. Protests spread to the Kurdish city of Sanandaj, in northwest Iran, and in Tehran, Isfahan, Sari and other cities.
Let’s look at a final example of the contradictions between the internationalization of capital and the national borders and institutions that still divide the imperialist world — the United Kingdom. The uneven development of capitalism there, and the forms it inherits from previous periods of class society, are being thrust forward into politics in new ways by the crisis of the world imperialist system. …
....We derive our organizational ideas from our ideological conceptions. We want no separate organizations of communist women! She who is a Communist belongs as a member to the Party, just as he who is a Communist. They have the same rights and duties. There can be no difference of opinion on that score. However, we must not shut our eyes to the facts. The Party must have organs, working groups, commissions, committees, sections or whatever else they may be called — with the specific purpose of rousing the broad masses of women, bringing them into contact with the Party and keeping them under its influence. This naturally requires that we carry on systematic work among the women … not only proletarian women, whether they work in mills or cook the family meal. I also have in mind the peasant women and the women of the various sections of the lower middle class. They, too, are victims of capitalism, and more than ever since the war. …
Restrictions imposed since Roe
By the time the ruling was overturned, state governments had loaded on more than 1,300 restrictions to Roe v. Wade. In 2017 there wasn’t a single medical facility providing abortions in 89% of the counties of the United States. The end of Roe hasn’t led to a huge plunge in actual access to abortion. It highlights what has already been conceded since 1973 and what needs to be fought for in the years ahead.
Unlike laws permitting same-sex marriage and access to contraception — which continue to gain wider and wider acceptance — access to abortion doesn’t hold overwhelming support. Opinion on it remains deeply divided.
The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade allows for reopening the much-needed debate to clarify how best to advance the interests of the working class and of women. There can be no road to women’s emancipation without addressing the broader social crisis bearing down on the working class, and defending the family, a refuge workers are more and more turning to.
Men and women are increasingly using our unions today to take up the fight for jobs, improved wages and working conditions, and an end to brutal work schedules — all things that are key for workers trying to start a family, or to hold one together. That includes the fight for affordable housing and child care; to federally funded medical care for all; for cost-of-living raises built into all union contracts and social programs; and access to adoption and family planning, including contraception and safe, secure abortions.
[....] Shutting down debate is the opposite of what working people need. We need to discuss and debate how we can join together and protect our families, and why our unions should lead the fight for jobs, better working conditions, access to adoption, affordable child care and family planning, including contraception as well as safe and secure abortion.Essential to advancing such a fight is answering claims of those driving to restrict access to abortion that they are “pro-life.” That banner belongs to the party that advances a course toward workers power, the only road to begin ending women’s oppression and to protect all human life.
The National Organization for Women in New York responded to the Supreme Court ruling by stepping up its drive to win votes for Democrats. Under successive Democratic and Republican administrations assaults on workers, farmers and women’s rights have accelerated.
The SWP candidates in the 2022 elections point to the need for workers to join together and organize independently of the bosses and their parties. We need to build solidarity with each union fight and build a labor party that advances a course of uncompromising struggle for what our class needs. The stakes are enormous. Working people must see the necessity of taking political power into our own hands....
[....]Since the May 2 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, some 24 violent assaults have been carried out on pregnancy centers.
A group called Jane’s Revenge said it carried out some of the attacks, leaving graffiti on site reading, “If abortion isn’t safe, you aren’t either.” On June 14 the group vandalized the Minneapolis center of the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life.
On June 10 pro-abortion activists threw an incendiary device through the window of the Gresham Pregnancy Resource Center near Portland, Oregon. The center provides counseling and medical services to women and new mothers.
In a press statement, Jane’s Revenge threatened more violence that “may not come in the form of something so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti.… Any anti-choice group who closes their doors, and stops operating will no longer be a target.” It added, “But until you do, it’s open season.”
Protesters seeking to resurrect the fatally flawed Roe decision — which cut off needed debate on how to win women’s rights — released maps of the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices and are organizing pickets there. A group called Ruth Sent Us published the details of the church that conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett goes to and the name of the religious school her children attend, targeting them for attack and undermining the right to worship.
Walls were put up around the Supreme Court June 9, a day after Nicholas John Roske was arrested outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Roske was armed with a Glock handgun, ammunition, knife, zip ties and pepper spray. He told the police he planned to kill Kavanaugh and then commit suicide. Roske’s arrest received little coverage in much of the liberal press.
“These types of actions do nothing to advance women’s rights,” Candace Wagner, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, told the Militant. “They are the opposite of what working people need — the opportunity to discuss and debate how we can join together to protect ourselves and our families, fight for jobs, better wages and working conditions and the many other things we need, such as access to family planning, including contraception as well as safe and secure abortion.”
A sign of the intensity of the factional warfare between Democratic and Republican parties was the decision by 27 House Democrats to vote against a bill to provide 24-hour security at the homes of all Supreme Court justices.
The Democratic Party’s relentless drive to prevent former President Donald Trump from running again in 2024 stepped up a gear starting June 9 with hours of televised House Select Committee hearings probing the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion at the Capitol building. These hearings are key for the Democratic Party’s 2022 election campaign, as President Joseph Biden has failed to accomplish anything of note to relieve the blows working people are taking today, and his popularity is plummeting.[....]
....We face a broader social crisis bred by dog-eat-dog capitalism. Years of mounting drug addiction is feeding a staggering rise in deaths from overdoses. The coarsening of human relations and breakdowns in solidarity are evident in mounting homelessness, mental illness and rising violent crime. The capitalist class has no interest in eradicating these deadly social ills. Any attempt to do so would eat into their profits.
When the Democrats and Republicans say they aim to protect “all Americans,” it’s a lie. Like all capitalist countries, the U.S. is class divided, and the capitalist rulers are out to defend their class interests against those of workers and farmers, both at home and abroad.
The capitalist rulers are driven today to cutthroat competition with rivals abroad to prevent going under. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has further fractured the imperialist “world order” that issued from Washington’s emergence as top dog from the carnage of the Second World War. All capitalist regimes worldwide are building up their military and seeking space to defend their rulers’ property and power. This growing world disorder is feeding new wars — like Ankara’s announcement June 1 of plans to invade northern Syria to deal blows to Kurds there fighting for independence. Capitalism is marching towards bloodier national conflicts and a third world war.
Only the working class is capable of leading millions of the exploited and oppressed in revolutionary struggle. To do that we need to build a labor party, a party with a class-against-class road forward. Through our struggles, workers discover our own capacities for courageous, united and disciplined action and can forge an alliance with small farmers. We learn to rely on fellow toilers and unlearn what the rulers never cease telling us we’re incapable of doing.
Forging a tried and trusted revolutionary leadership from the ranks of our own struggles is crucial to advancing along a road to replace capitalist rule with a workers and farmers government. That is what the Socialist Workers Party exists for.
Senseless murder and other anti-social violence are a byproduct of a system based on the brutal exploitation of the toiling majority by the capitalist ruling families and the dog-eat-dog values it breeds. Saying this is not to excuse the inhuman rampage of Ramos, and others who have laid waste to innocent lives. It is where we have to start in charting a working-class course to deal with this reality.
All class societies based on private property have depended on oppression and state-organized violence to maintain the rule of the exploiting minority.
Capitalist rulers are different only in so far as they take that violence to savage new heights with their imperialist wars of the last century, their stockpiling of an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the brutal violence they unleashed against colonial peoples fighting for their independence.
At home, the daily brutality of their drive to profit off our backs and their criminal “justice” system with its prisons and death penalty, all breed a system of “look out for number one” and violence.
Despite workers’ hard-fought efforts to unite, to form unions and fight for gains for all, the capitalist class continues to drive production with complete disregard for workers’ lives and limbs. Every year more than 5,000 workers are killed on the job in the U.S. Many more die from work-related diseases. Other workers are sentenced to death by the capitalist rulers’ for-profit “health care” system and nursing homes.
Working class is bearer of solidarity
But the working class can overthrow capitalism and its inherent brutality. Since capitalism emerged, the working class has grown massively, and, since the Second World War has become a majority in every corner of the world. Along with it have grown habits of mutual trust, working-class solidarity and opposition to racism and other forms of prejudice that workers learn through our common struggles. When we join together to defend ourselves we begin to recognize our self-worth and collective capacities.
During mass struggles, violent crime within the working class begins to diminish. That was true during the Black-led working-class movement that uprooted Jim Crow segregation, as millions discovered they had something worth uniting and fighting for. That victorious struggle was made possible by our determination to stand up to the state power of the capitalist class. It involved both the power of our numbers and, when necessary, disciplined armed self-defense against state-sanctioned violence and the terror from those trying to uphold racial segregation.
In the course of coming class struggles, workers and farmers will face violent assaults from the cops and fascist thugs that the rulers unleash to try to crush our efforts to fight for the jobs, wages, conditions and rights we need.
Ultimately it will take a fight to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers to end the violence inherent in their system. That’s what workers and farmers in Cuba showed can be done.
Through a revolutionary war led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, working people took power, and did so with as little bloodshed as possible. They refused to mistreat or demean regime troops they captured. Their victory and the course charted by their communist leadership laid the foundations for workers and farmers to take the factories, land and banks from U.S. companies and native capitalists alike and for millions to begin transforming their conditions and themselves....
Full:
[....]May 18 was the 78th anniversary of Moscow’s forced deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people from their homeland to Central Asia in 1944. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin said the Tatars were all agents of the Nazis. The date is marked annually by Tatars in Crimea and across Ukraine. Despite a ban on Tatar actions imposed for the past eight years since Russian troops seized and occupied the peninsula, hundreds gathered solemnly at a memorial monument in Kerch.Over two days in 1944 over 200,000 Tatars were herded into cattle cars, locked in, and taken by rail deep into Russia, above. Over half died during the journey and by privation over the next two years.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, waves of Tatars began returning home, to discover their homes had been seized under Moscow’s attempts to “Russify” the population. Today the Tatars, the native people of Crimea, make up some 12% of the population. With Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Tatar culture flowered and identification with Ukraine expanded....
[....]Gendron’s ravings blame Jews for seeking to “replace” Caucasians with Blacks and immigrants. He says that a key goal of his attack was to incite “retaliation and further divide” Blacks and immigrants from Caucasians. These rightist views can be found widely on the internet.Democratic Party politicians from President Joseph Biden to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Charles Schumer are also using the killings to push through measures that undermine political rights in the name of combating “domestic terrorism.”
To promote these steps, the liberals cover up basic facts, including by trying to block access to the vile 180-page manifesto written by Gendron.
Jew-hatred permeates Gendron’s manifesto. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the rulers will increasingly use Jew-hatred to divert attention from the real source of the problems working people and the middle class face, which is capitalism. The fight against Jew-hatred is crucial to the working class....
Numerous demonstrations took place across the country May 14 following the leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling that would overturn the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.
Justice Samuel Alito’s draft holds the Roe decision was not constitutional, and hands decision-making on abortion and related questions to state legislatures and public debate. It would mean that in states where abortion is legal those laws would continue to stand. Some state governments have passed or are considering legislation to impose restrictions on access to the procedure. Nationally the door would be open to a widespread debate.
But the heart of the discussion has to be put on a broader basis. The key question isn’t abortion. It’s how to organize working people to defend ourselves and make gains amid a broader capitalist crisis that is making it harder to start a family and to hold one together. This includes the fight for jobs, adequate wages, protection against soaring inflation, accessible and affordable health care, child care, access to family planning, including adoption, as well as access to contraception and safe and secure abortion when needed.
Liberals and middle-class radicals, however, oppose this course. They think working people are “deplorables” and fear a fight to win public opinion. They want to shut down discussion and show disdain for the rights and opinions of others.
“To put the right to have an abortion up for debate,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says, “degrades” women. But it’s the liberals’ refusal to discuss this and all the related questions that have aided opponents of women’s rights in systematically restricting access to the procedure ever since Roe was pushed through in 1973....
Full article:
Russian President Vladimir Putin claims Moscow had to invade Ukraine to “denazify” the country. He propagates through his rigidly government-controlled media the charge that “neo-Nazis” and “far-right nationalists” took over Ukraine in 2014 in a “coup” backed by Washington and are carrying out “genocide” against Russian speakers in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
But his accusations are false to the core. The government of Ukraine is elected and not much different than other liberal capitalist regimes around the world. Russian speakers are a significant part of the Ukrainian population. They overwhelmingly back Ukraine independence and are proud members of the fierce resistance to Moscow’s invasion.
In the United States, calling anyone you disagree with “Nazis” or “fascists” has become the stock in trade of many middle-class radicals, who use it as a way to shut down debate and discussion and silence opposition.
For Putin, his slander has an additional purpose. In World War II, Moscow’s resistance to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a key part of defeating Hitler, at a huge cost of millions of lives of Russian, Ukrainian and other peoples there. By invoking the specter of fascism, Putin hopes to convince working people in Russia to support the war effort or at least keep quiet.
Full article:
Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read (2022) is an accessible book. In it, Terry Eagleton celebrates five teachers and their methods. Describing them, Eagleton also elucidates some of what has gone to make him such a clear, useful critic.
* * *
Only world- spanning upheavals, making it impossible for old classes and their ideas to rule in same old ways, can explain the development of new approaches to literature, to say nothing of the development of new critics themselves.
Missing from Eagleton's book is any attempt to portray intellectual ferment in the most revolutionary historical period in Europe since 1789-1799: the epoch of world revolution inaugurated by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
* * *
Eagleton is not a man of 1917. For him, the moment of reception for new-old 1920s methods of critique was the conservatized status quo of the circa-1968 UK labor movement. Radicalizations and shifts in mass psychology were for workers, students, and intelligentsia in other parts of the world.
Worse, Eagleton was politically miseducated in Tony Cliff's International Socialists organization, a UK approximation to the US groups formed around renegades like Max Schachtman, who consciously rejected the program and principles of the Communist International in Lenin's Time. (This shortcoming can still be seen at work in Eagleton's most politically worthless book, 2011's Why Marx Was Right).
For Eagleton's critical revolutionaries, the political landscape could not have been more different. Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, and Williams grew up in a pre-1914 US and UK; their early careers began after the war, and after the triumph of Bolshevism. As each critic wrangled with and often rejected ongoing radicalizations and national independence struggles, they also wrangled with and "made new" a struggle with words and their use, exploring contradictions of tragedy, poetry, and fiction. The youngest critic in the book's cohort, Raymond Williams, ultimately pushed on from print and into an analysis of TV drama.
* * *
Links to my reading notes and excerpts posted last week on Facebook can be found below:
Introduction
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316691101726368&id=100001565934753
1 T.S. Eliot
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316730228389122&id=100001565934753
2 I.A. Richards
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316768231718655&id=100001565934753
3 William Empson
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5316771735051638&id=100001565934753
4 F.R. Leavis
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5318383181557160&id=100001565934753
5 Raymond Williams
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5321415424587269&id=100001565934753
Jay
11 May 2012
