Saturday, January 28, 2023

Paul Ehrlich is still peddling ‘population bomb’ hysteria – The Militant

[....] If you tuned into “60 Minutes” on Jan. 1 you heard Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, tell the audience, “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

It’s the same prediction Ehrlich made in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s,” he wrote then, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

His book gave a patina of scientific legitimacy to policies of the World Bank, United Nations Population Fund and others used by governments to forcibly drive down fertility in the semicolonial world.

In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were set by the number of intrauterine devices they inserted into women. Millions were sterilized in Mexico, Bolivia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and elsewhere. In the Philippines, according to Smithsonian Magazine, birth-control pills were pitched out of helicopters over remote villages.

In India, some states required sterilization for both men and women to obtain water, electricity, medical care and pay raises. More than 8 million men and women in India were sterilized in 1975 alone.

Today Ehrlich is joined by the likes of Greta Thunberg and other “climate activists” who insist we are on the precipice of “mass extinction.” Les Knight, founder of Voluntary Human Extinction, says the best thing humans can do to help the Earth is to stop having babies and die out. “Look what we did to this planet,” Knight told the New York Times. “We’re not a good species.”

Instead of pointing to the capitalist system whose profit drive condemns billions of human beings the world over to live with insufficient food, clothing, medical care, shelter and more, Ehrlich and others like him say the problem is too many people.

But we aren’t the problem. It’s our labor that transforms nature, and is the source of all wealth, and all advances in social productivity, culture and conservation. It’s a matter of how social labor is organized, to whose benefit, to what social and economic ends.

And that depends on which class holds state power, as the Socialist Workers Party explains in “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor,” printed in New International  no. 14. [....] 

Full:


Paul Ehrlich is still peddling ‘population bomb’ hysteria – The Militant

Atlanta cop attack, antifa riot leads to ‘terrorism’ charges – The Militant

[....]  The arrests and deadly cop assault here will be used to justify the expanding use of the rulers’ political police and its targeting of unionists, fighters for Black rights, opponents of Washington’s wars and working-class parties like the Socialist Workers Party.

Atlanta cop attack, antifa riot leads to ‘terrorism’ charges – The Militant

Road to women’s emancipation debated at US women’s marches – The Militant

[....]  Speaking during an open mic at the end of the program, Ilona Gersh, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Chicago mayor, started from a working-class perspective.

 

 

“Birth rates are down, suicide and drug addiction are increasing, young adults are forced to live with their parents for an extended time,” Gersh said. “We need a union-led fight for jobs — with wages and conditions that allow workers to support a family. We need to fight for child care, health care, cost-of-living raises. And for access to contraceptives and safe, legal abortion when needed.

“Working people are beginning to use their unions to fight for these things. We need to build a labor party, based on our unions. Not look to the Democrats and Republicans, the capitalist parties that have gotten us to this point,” she said.

These were some of the questions SWP members and supporters discussed and debated throughout the day.

“I don’t agree with looking to the courts to advance our interests,” Gersh told Claire, a volunteer handing out flyers urging participants to vote in the upcoming state Supreme Court election. “The Roe v. Wade ruling was the Supreme Court acting as a legislative body. Dobbs was good, because it put the issue back to the states and the people. We need to take advantage of that and debate the issue to win a majority. What we need is a fight to repeal the 1849 law.”

“I think of the court election as a stopgap measure,” responded Claire, who didn’t want to give her last name. “Getting a different balance on the court can block the law. I agree the Democratic Party has failed us, but I’m scared for women’s lives right now.” They left it at that, and each continued talking to other participants.

As the march gathered, Gersh spoke with nursing students Jessica Forsgren and Ashley Morgan. “The biggest obstacle we have is people are so divided between Democrats and Republicans,” Forsgren said.

“What’s at the root of sharpening conflicts today is actually the divide between the capitalist class and the working class,” Gersh said, “as the bosses and their government make us pay for their crisis.”

“Well, it’s a big step to reach that understanding,” said Forsgren....


Full:
Road to women’s emancipation debated at US women’s marches – The Militant



Thursday, January 26, 2023

👍 In Review: “The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward”


[The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward is] a sober and well argued synopsis of where we stand today, made possible through collective work among equals, as we struggle together to build organizations that will stand tall for our class, sans divided loyalties of any kind….


Full review:

https://theunionofworkers.wordpress.com/2023/01/26/in-review-the-low-point-of-labor-resistance-is-behind-us-the-socialist-workers-party-looks-forward/#subscribe-blog



Purchase: https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/the-low-point-of-labor-resistance-is-behind-us


Recommended reading: MARXISM VS. 'THE NEW HISTORIANS OF CAPITALISM’: An academic tendency distorts the history of slavery and capitalism James Miller, 2021




[....] The quality of scholarship of Becker, Baptist, Johnson, Rockman and their colleagues is generally quite accessible and often contains valuable insights into historical conditions and processes. They provide detailed revelations of the horrific abuses involved in the slave system, as well as the many ways in which capitalist exploitation and commercial activity developed interdependencies forms of collaboration with the slave system, particularly in the first 60 years of the 19th century. In this respect, they shed new light on some of the more obscure features of 19th century U. S. history. But their principal objective is to represent slavery and capitalism as amalgamated into a virtually undifferentiated unity.


Full: https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/marxism-vs-the-new-historians-of?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=850683&post_id=99150149&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email



Sunday, January 22, 2023

The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward





The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward


BY MARY-ALICE WATERS

The Militant Vol. 87/No. 4

January 30, 2023


The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward is the product of trade union and broader political work over the last year by SWP members responding to deepening cracks in the world order established by the victors of the inter-imperialist slaughter known in the United States as World War II.


This activity by party members, shoulder to shoulder with other working people and youth, is being carried out amid mounting global conflicts among rival capitalist powers, with explosive ramifications for workers and farmers in the Americas, Europe, the Mideast, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.


Above all, the articles and documents here highlight the opportunities ahead for class-conscious workers, as a decades-long retreat by the working class and trade unions comes to an end. The intensified speedup, longer and longer hours, attacks on job safety, declining real wages, lack of steady employment, and spiraling social and moral blight — conditions produced by the ruling class families in the United States and capitalism's dog-eat-dog social relations — are pressing more and more working people to say, "Enough is enough." Workers have begun using our collective economic power and class solidarity in response.


The material compiled in these pages has been written and prepared for publication by the Editing Commission of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee: Jack Barnes, Steve Clark, Dave Prince, and Mary-Alice Waters. It opens with an article from the Militant newsweekly, "published in the interests of working people," as its masthead proudly proclaims. The article reports on the June 9–12, 2022 International Active Workers Conference organized by the SWP, with some 350 participants from eleven countries.


The contents include two SWP National Committee policy statements.


One, in defense of Ukraine's independence and sovereignty, was released March 3, 2022, in the opening days of Moscow's invasion, launched with the avowed aim of erasing the very existence of its neighbor.


The other was issued on October 11, 2022, in the wake of Hurricane Ian's devastating path across western Cuba. Consistent with the SWP's history the statement, like many before it, demands an immediate end to the US government's six-decades-long murderous attempt to crush Cuban working people for their audacity in making a socialist revolution in what Washington considers its own backyard.


The heart of the book, from which the title is taken, is the political resolution adopted December 12, 2022, by the 49th Constitutional Convention of the Socialist Workers Party. It sets forth the course of action that has guided the party's work and will continue to do so — the course necessary today to forge mass proletarian parties and an international communist movement able to lead the struggle to end capitalist rule.


As the opening lines of the SWP Constitution state, the purpose of the party is to advance the education and organization of the working class "in order to establish a workers and farmers government which will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism."


*  *  *


The resolution is written in the form of twenty-seven numbered sections, yet none of the questions engaged here stand alone. They can be understood only as part of the line of march of the working class to state power, the political line of the resolution as a whole.


Among the questions addressed are:


Why the fight to prevent erosion by the capitalist government — both in Washington, as well as in the fifty states — of freedoms protected by the US Constitution is central to the US class struggle today. Freedom from government intervention and constraints on worship, on speech, on the press, on due process, on a trial by a jury of one's peers (not forced confessions in the form of "plea bargains"), and more. This includes opposing the US rulers' expanding use of Washington's political police, the FBI above all.


Why the tenacious maintenance of the US Supreme Court and judiciary as courts of written law, not de facto legislative bodies, is essential to defense of the liberties of working people under the Constitution.


Why socialist revolution is impossible without a fight to build the trade unions and transform them into independent instruments of class struggle, wielded by class-conscious, battle-tested members.


Why the working class needs a labor party based on the unions, a labor party that could present a complete break from the illusion that the parties or candidates of the imperialist rulers can represent us. A party that speaks and acts in the interests of the working class and oppressed as a whole. A party that rejects demagogic appeals to the politics of resentment, used by both the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties to appeal to and pit against each other insecure layers of the middle class and sections of the toilers.


Why there is no road to African American liberation — no end to racist discrimination and the legacy of centuries of slavery and then Jim Crow terror and oppression — separate and apart from the working-class course toward a victorious socialist revolution.


Why the fight against Jew-hatred, on the rise across the world today, must be integral to the program and strategy of the revolutionary workers movement, and of all organizations of the exploited and oppressed.


Why the fight for women's emancipation is inextricably intertwined with addressing the capitalist-caused crises of joblessness and inflation; the lack of affordable medical care, childcare, and housing; as well as drug addiction and domestic violence — all of which bear down on the families of working people, and on women especially. Why there should be no federal, state, or municipal laws restricting the safe medical availability of abortions.


Why a revolutionary party must be proletarian in composition as well as program and leadership.


Why the positions reaffirmed by SWP convention delegates trace their continuity from the founders in 1847 of the modern revolutionary workers movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and the world's first communist party they led. To the opening years of the first victorious socialist revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 under the leadership of V.I. Lenin. To the example of Cuba's socialist revolution under the leadership of Fidel Castro and the leading cadres of the Rebel Army. And to the SWP's class-struggle experience from the founding of the first communist party in the US in 1919 down to today.


Why the Transitional Program, the 1938 founding resolution of the Socialist Workers Party and of our world movement, remains at the center of our program to this day.


*  *  *


Asserting that "the low point of labor resistance is behind us" is not a prediction about coming struggles. Nor is it a promise about when or where new and more powerful class battles will break out. Instead, that assessment is based on the increased confidence and combativity, as well as the anger demonstrated by working people confronting very different conditions around the world.


We've seen it during the post-COVID economic "recovery" with strikes, organizing efforts, and other union fights in the United States by bakery workers, rail freight workers, coal miners, and other unionists, as well as by others organizing to establish unions where they work.


We've seen it in fights by public education workers and truckers in Canada, by rail workers and nurses in the United Kingdom, and by workers and unionists from Australia, South Korea, and Russia to Israel, South Africa, and Puerto Rico.


We've seen it in the mass revolt in China against the brutal, anti-working-class COVID policies of the Stalinist regime in Beijing.


In the hundreds of thousands of youth and working people who've taken to the streets across Iran in response to the death of Zhina Amini at the hands of the hated "morality" police.


In the determination of the toilers of Ukraine to roll back Moscow's attempt to wipe them off the map.


In the steadfastness of Cuban working people in defending their socialist revolution in face of the mounting human and material hardships inflicted by Washington's brutal, decades-long economic, trade, financial, and diplomatic drive to crush the revolution.


*  *  *


The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward is a companion to two other Pathfinder books, one published in late 2021, the other forthcoming in 2023. Both develop central aspects of the SWP's program and activity addressed here in the party's 2022 convention resolution.


Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History is a defense of Marxism — a defense of the proletarian line of march toward power, historical materialism, and basic physical and biological science — against what the resolution calls the "anti-working-class race-baiting, wokery, and 'cancel culture' on the bourgeois and petty bourgeois left."


The second book, coming later this year, brings back into print the 1960 booklet Too Many Babies? The Myth of the Population Explosion by SWP leader Joseph Hansen, along with Lenin's writings on the working-class road to women's emancipation. The Bolshevik leader intransigently condemns capitalist population control notions, pointing to their "completely reactionary nature and ugliness."


"Anti-working-class 'overpopulation' demagogy," the SWP resolution notes, "is still rife among bourgeois and middle-class 'environmentalists,' climate doomsayers, scientists, and organizations claiming to champion women's rights. This includes 'counseling' working-class women and their spouses, often misrepresented as family planning, to bring fewer children into the world."


As the document explains, Lenin contrasted "such an outlook to that of 'the class-conscious worker,' who is confident in 'the working-class movement and its aims' and who says instead: 'We are already laying the foundation of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction' — and their children, and their children!"


Together, these three books underline the more and more pressing reality that the working-class forces capable of forging that "new edifice" are being born and will be born in the class battles of the world-in-becoming.


The proletarian internationalist party-building course presented in these pages is the only one that can lead to victory. It's the only one worth fighting for. The future of humanity is in the balance.


January 2, 2023


Source: https://themilitant.com/2023/01/21/the-low-point-of-labor-resistance-is-behind-us/#


‘Peace’ movement backs Putin’s war aims – The Militant

EDITORIAL

January 30, 2023

As he openly explained, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last February to destroy its government, subjugate its people, obliterate their national identity, and incorporate it into a rebuilt greater Russian empire.

 With working people in the lead, Ukrainians have fought back courageously, determined to defend their country’s independence. This struggle is in the interests of working people everywhere and deserves our solidarity and aid.

The imperialist rulers in Washington, as well as in Berlin and Paris, are looking for the realities of battlefield losses to force the two sides to the negotiating table. Bourgeois politicians here, especially in the left wing of the Democrats and right wing of the Republicans, seek to pressure the capitalist government in Kyiv to cede territory occupied by Moscow in return for “peace talks.”

A bogus “new peace movement,” a coalition of Stalinist and middle-class radicals, is trying to gather forces to act as shills for Putin’s war, calling rallies and “teach-ins.” Some of these forces, such as Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, are also joining a “Rage against the War Machine” rally in Washington, D.C., Feb. 19 organized by currents both right and left, including the Libertarian Party and People’s Party. Demands center on calling for Washington to cut off funding and arms shipments to Ukraine and press Kyiv to make concessions to end the war.

Behind the slogans, “NATO Expansion, No! Peace in Ukraine, Yes!” a Jan. 14 rally in New York drew over 100 people, organized by the ANSWER coalition, People’s Forum and others. This self-proclaimed “new peace movement” is determined to give aid and succor to Putin’s war.

All these forces peddle the slanderous canard pushed by Putin that the massive, popular Maidan uprising in 2014 that overthrew the dictatorial pro-Moscow regime of Victor Yanukovych was in reality a fascist coup engineered by Washington.

The idea that the millions of Ukrainian working people who fought to take control of the destiny of their nation were nothing but a band of neo-Nazis is absurd.

Militant editor John Studer helped lead a series of reporting and solidarity teams to the Maidan in Kyiv — and to dozens of Ukrainian cities and towns, including Sokol, Chernobyl, Kharkiv, Pavlograd, Kryvyi Rih and Energodar. They met with coal miners, rail and nuclear workers, Jewish leaders, supporters of Cuba’s socialist revolution and others — all of whom backed the Maidan and continue to fight to defend Ukrainian independence. You can find lively reports from those trips on our website.

Putin’s claim — echoed by the new “peace” forces — that he was forced to launch his murderous invasion because of moves by Washington and other NATO governments is utterly false and cynical. A sovereign and independent Ukraine poses no military threat to Russia of any kind.

These petty-bourgeois apologists for the Kremlin claim Moscow’s invasion and destruction is in fact a “proxy war” with Washington. This cynically attempts to bury the unrelenting fight for national sovereignty being waged by the Ukrainian people, as well as the growing opposition to Putin’s war among Russian soldiers and working people.

These so-called peace forces are determined to strangle support for Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty. In March the International Longshore and Warehouse Union adopted a strong statement condemning the Russian invasion as “an act of aggression that endangers a population of more than 40 million people.” A number of retired union officials and others signed a letter run in the Dec. 26 Workers World demanding the ILWU reverse its positions and “oppose the U.S./NATO-provoked war!” They called for “dockworkers around the world” to take action to block military cargo being shipped to Ukraine for its defense.

Working people do need to oppose the economic and financial embargo imposed on Russia by Washington and its allies, as well as military maneuvers by these governments. Those sanctions fall most harshly on workers and farmers in Russia and are obstacles to building solidarity between toilers in Ukraine and Russia.

Class-conscious workers place no political confidence in the capitalist government in Kyiv, which upholds the system of exploitation of working people by Ukraine’s wealthy rulers and uses the war to justify attacks on workers’ wages, working conditions and political rights.

The struggle by the Ukrainian people for self-determination — which was championed by V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution — deserves the support of working people everywhere. That is why it is important to campaign for Moscow’s invading forces to get out of Ukraine, all of Ukraine!




‘Peace’ movement backs Putin’s war aims – The Militant

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Recommended website: Jim Miller's Observations

Jim Miller's Observations here.


"History and the Law of Value" --available on my substack-- is an essay that is intended to help facilitate the understanding of how Marx's law of value evolved historically before becoming the basic law of capitalist development. The essay takes the form of a polemic against pseudomarxist scholar John Weeks, who systematically misinterprets Marxist theory and attempts to pit Engels against Marx….


Full:


https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/history-and-the-law-of-value?sd=pf