Lenin on the social roots of opportunism

....Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the "defenders of the fatherland" in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists, to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.

The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experiences of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.

Full:

https://www.themilitant.com/2002/6649/664959.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawGpfL5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcUww4mqNTMuwni-oJVHABawWAdIOWltNVJ56naO56GoOwsO9lHW7jjUbQ_aem_cANF9ZyxsMP8RPhLkHNbPw 

Jumping the Shark. Former members of the Socialist Workers Party enter the camp of Jew hate. – The Union Of Workers

https://theunionofworkers.wordpress.com/2024/11/15/jumping-the-shark-former-members-of-the-socialist-workers-party-enter-the-camp-of-jew-hate/ 

Columbus ‘deserves our respect, deserves to be remembered’ – The Militant

[....] In its July 13, 2020, issue of the Militant, Managing Editor Terry Evans wrote an article entitled “Destruction of statues seeks to erase history we need to know.” 

 

It said, “Behind the destruction and removal of monuments lies the notion that by erasing symbols from the past, reflecting different stages of class development, you can ‘cancel’ them and pretend they didn’t happen.

“Knowing the real history of past class struggles is key to charting a road forward. Along that road working people will decide what statues and other historical monuments we want to keep and where, and what new ones to erect.

“We don’t need small self-appointed groups imposing their own will on others tearing down statues, putting barriers in front of working people learning from our history, and gaining confidence in what we can become.”

He pointed out that working people today can’t judge past civilizations by comparison with conditions today, many the result of mighty class struggles and revolutionary transformations. Things that we reject today have accompanied important social advances in the past. That’s true of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas.

Full:

Columbus ‘deserves our respect, deserves to be remembered’ – The Militant

Workers step up solidarity in face of the US embargo – The Militant

Workers step up solidarity in face of the US embargo – The Militant

[....] Efforts to recover from the blackout and hurricane are “a major task given the economic and financial conditions the country is living through due to the tightened blockade against Cuba and the inclusion of our country on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in an Oct. 21 national address.

By putting Cuba on this outrageous list, Washington threatens sharp sanctions on companies and banks around the world that trade with or facilitate credit to Cuba. This drastically restricts Cuba’s ability to purchase food, medical supplies, fuel, equipment and spare parts, magnifying shortages of basic goods and crippling transportation and other services.

The U.S. rulers, however, continue to underestimate the capacities of Cuba’s working people. Cardet, the retired Holguín teacher and staunch partisan of the revolution mentioned earlier, pointed with pride to a message circulated by one of her former students.

“I suffer the effects of the blackouts like anyone else,” he said. “But you know, I don’t feel like blaming Díaz-Canel or the government. I don’t feel like banging pots in the street,” as opponents of the revolution urge Cubans to do. “In any case, I would bang a pot to demand the blockade be lifted and that we be removed from the list that prevents Cuba from obtaining hard currency.

“In short, I don’t feel like ceasing to believe in the people who go out every day — despite the blackout — to teach, to cure patients, to produce.”

Why fight to defend constitutional freedoms is key for working class – The Militant

[....] U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson attacked First Amendment protections earlier this year in a case challenging attempts by the White House and the FBI to compel big tech companies to self-censor the websites they run. On March 18, Jackson told Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga, “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government.”

But that’s the point of the First Amendment. It was adopted to “hamstring” the government. It bars it from interfering in discussion and debate, including against those who hold views the capitalist rulers oppose.

Hillary Clinton complained Oct. 5 that if Facebook, X or Instagram “don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.” Similar views are expressed across the Democratic Party, including by Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who says, “We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in media.”

The “we” Clinton and Ocasio-Cortez seek to protect is the U.S. state apparatus. But when they talk about the government, they try to strip it of its actual class character. They hide the fact that the U.S. government exists to serve the capitalist class, their profit-driven offensive against working people, and their imperialist interventions and wars abroad.

Workers have an opposite starting point — the need for protection from that state and all of its institutions, from the government and courts to the FBI, and the ever-growing number of federal regulatory agencies that intrude into workers’ lives and impose the political agenda of the liberal meritocrats who run these agencies.

Liberals are increasingly calling for the Constitution as a whole to be dumped. They say it was written by slave owners. They ignore the fact that it was the product of a mighty revolutionary struggle against the oppression of the British monarchy, alongside subsequent battles of farmers and other sections of the toiling population.

One example is a widely touted new book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United Sates, by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley law school.

“Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution,” Jennifer Szalai asserts in her favorable New York Times review of the book. She adds that the Constitution fosters “the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.”

Liberal venom against the Constitution is ultimately aimed at the working class. In 1939 Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, explained, “Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history.”

Why fight to defend constitutional freedoms is key for working class – The Militant

Mideast showdown: Israelis fight to defend a refuge from Jew-hatred – The Militant

Mideast showdown: Israelis fight to defend a refuge from Jew-hatred – The Militant

The Israeli government has released documents its forces captured in Gaza that provide further proof Iran’s capitalist rulers and the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon — despite their denials — were centrally involved in the yearslong preparations for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, murderous pogrom against Jews in Israel....

[....] Hamas’ goal: Kill the Jews

Improving the life of Gazans has never been part of Hamas’ program. Its founding covenant states that “the Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews).” Hamas’ political continuity goes back to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, in the 1930s and ’40s. Al-Husseini, a close collaborator with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany, helped to set up a Muslim unit of the SS. He asked Nazi officials to prevent Jewish children in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria from going to Palestine, demanding they be deported to Poland, where the Nazis had set up death camps. 

Facts described in a new book by Ha’aretz reporter Lee Yaron, 10/7: 100 Human Stories help to answer those who still harbor illusions that Israel should negotiate with Hamas and its backers to find a “diplomatic” solution. While she says the Israeli government shares responsibility for today’s conflict, the facts she presents are telling. 

Hamas targeted ‘peace activists’

Before Oct. 7, Yaron notes, Kibbutz Be’eri members routinely “volunteered to transport Palestinian patients to Israeli hospitals and annually donated thousands of dollars to families in Gaza.” Many of its residents were “peace activists” and opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Hamas deliberately targeted them. One in 10 residents of Be’eri was murdered or kidnapped Oct. 7. That includes the killing of 74-year-old Vivian Silver, a leader of Women Wage Peace.... 

“These rights not only protect me, but they protect the people who are suing me. And they’re worth fighting for because if I lose my rights, we all lose these rights.”

Baker defends free speech, right to worship, as ‘worth fighting for’ – The Militant