NEW IN ENGLISH & SPALabor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The L

Saturday, October 16, 2021

Stalinist coup killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada Revolution – The Militant

....Stalinism destroyed the Grenada revolution. Bernard Coard was trained in its brutality, rigidity, and bureaucratic “decisiveness.” Like all Stalinists, he confused political clarity with dogmatism, centralism with commands, flexibility with softness, discipline with submission, firmness with harshness. The faction he was building in Grenada was truly petty bourgeois — the nucleus of an administrative caste trained in giving orders and wielding authority, not of a political vanguard of the working class relying on the revolutionary organization, mobilization, and political education of the exploited producers. 

Maurice Bishop, not Bernard Coard, was the communist educator of Grenadian working people. Through Bishop’s speeches, workers and farmers gained a deeper understanding of the class struggle in Grenada, the Caribbean, and worldwide. Through working to deepen the Grenadian people’s involvement in the revolution, Bishop helped promote their class-struggle experience and politicization. Bernard Coard was not a “brilliant master of Marxist strategy and tactics.” He was a Stalinist phrasemonger.

Although Stalinism remains a powerful obstacle to workers’ and peasants’ struggles, as shown by the events in Grenada, its hold over the international working-class movement has been irreversibly weakened by the advance of the world revolution since the closing years of World War II. Above all, a corner was turned in 1959 with the victory of the Cuban revolution under the leadership of a revolutionary internationalist leadership. Revolutionary-minded workers, peasants, and youth throughout Latin America and many other parts of the world have been attracted to and influenced by the example of the Cuban Communist Party. …

Bernard Coard’s political course was based on a rejection in practice of what [Russian revolutionary leader V.I.] Lenin called “one of the most profound and at the same time most simple and comprehensible precepts of Marxism.” …

“In the final analysis,” Lenin said, “the reason our revolution has left all other revolutions far behind is that … it has aroused tens of millions of people, formerly uninterested in state development, to take an active part in the work of building the state.”

That is the communist perspective that Maurice Bishop died fighting to advance.


Stalinist coup killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada Revolution – The Militant

Saturday, October 9, 2021

Thousands rally to defend women’s right to abortion – The Militant

....Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New Jersey, spoke at the rally. “A woman’s decision about when or if to have children must be a private, personal decision — not the decision of a legislature or court!” she said. “This right is fundamental to winning full social, economic and political equality, uniting the working class and building our unions.”

Signs carried by some demonstrators at protests around the country, and speakers at the rallies, said the road forward for abortion rights supporters is to vote for Democratic Party candidates.

“Our rights were chipped away no matter which of the bosses’ parties — Democrats or Republicans — were in the White House,” Kuniansky said. “Without the fight for women’s equality the solidarity the working class needs to fight the bosses and to wage a revolutionary struggle to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist class is impossible.”

After decades of protests that changed the outlook of working people, in 2018 in Ireland a referendum victory ended the longstanding ban on abortions. Protests took place Oct. 2 in both Dublin and Belfast, as well as in London.

In Dublin, demonstrators carried signs reading, “Dublin to Dallas.” Ailbhe Smyth, one of the leaders of the 2018 abortion rights campaign there, told the crowd, “We understand your struggle. We know your fight. We are here to do whatever we can. We have been through it and we do not want it to happen again.”

The nonstop and all too often unanswered propaganda campaign against women’s right to choose has had an impact on the consciousness of working people. Millions of workers today are convinced life begins at conception, even if they do not support all restrictions on abortion.

“We need to fight for the right of all women to family planning services, including safe and secure birth control and abortion, essential for winning women’s emancipation,” Kuniansky told the New Jersey action. “The only way to stop the assaults on our right to choose whether or not to have an abortion is to fight to win the support of the vast majority of working people.”

The latest Pew poll shows 58% favor a woman’s right to abortion, among both women and men, across all age groups.


Thousands rally to defend women’s right to abortion – The Militant

Embracing Mao, Chinese rulers continue assault on working people – The Militant

....Today Xi and like-minded party officials fear sharp inequalities in China will spur working-class struggles.

Xi has said that in China “capital serves the people.” A leading CCP financial committee instructed the government “to regulate excessively high incomes” this summer. The government then cracked down on wealthy individuals it accuses of dodging taxes.

It declared “illegal” the grueling 72-hour workweek that bosses subject millions of workers to, and capped rent increases at 5%.

Xi has recently imposed hundreds of regulations aimed at curbing some of the profits of private high-tech companies. State-owned businesses are expanding investments in industries that private companies have dominated, including those related to national security. Xi intervened to prevent billionaire Jack Ma from launching what would have been the largest-ever public offering of shares in his company Ant Group last November.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, had begun the expansion of capitalist market relations in the 1980s, leading to the rapid growth of industry, profiteering and a massive expansion of the industrial working class. New cities mushroomed in eastern China. Foreign and Chinese capitalists accumulated vast wealth wrung from the labor of hundreds of millions of workers drawn off the land into the mills and factories.

The parasitic bureaucratic caste running the Chinese state is organized through the ruling party, which has grown to some 90 million. This bloated privileged layer rests on the surplus value drawn from capitalist exploitation of working people.

Today real estate and construction employ nearly a fifth of the labor force. Much of the growth of the capitalist economy in the last decade has been inflated by building apartment towers, in what are now “ghost cities,” sometimes completely vacant. Meanwhile, millions of workers live in substandard housing.

Beijing is trying to check some of the speculation involved in the debt-laden capitalist boom. This has threatened the collapse of the world’s most indebted property developer, Evergrande. Hundreds of Evergrande employees protested outside the company headquarters in Shenzhen last month when the company stopped repaying them the loans it had taken from their bonuses earlier in the year.

Evergrande bosses are being forced to sell off some of their strongest divisions to stay afloat, much of it to the government.

Nervous about these developments, some foreign investors counsel pulling back from their China investments. Others, like U.S. tycoon Elon Musk, have praised Beijing for trying to exert more control.

The rulers in Beijing have clamped down in Hong Kong, banning protests and imprisoning critics. They’ve threatened to invade and subdue Taiwan.

To defend its interests across the Pacific and Asia, the government is expanding its armed forces, sharpening tensions with Washington, which views the Pacific as its “prize” for coming out on top of the imperialist slaughter in World War II.

A key foreign policy initiated by Xi in 2013 is the massive Belt and Road scheme. Through state-bank loans, construction firms are building infrastructure needed by Chinese capitalists along global trading routes to increase their exports and imports.

Infrastructure projects costing $843 billion are spread across 165 countries. AidData says that unreported debts to China from regional governments who contracted with Belt and Road projects amount to another $385 billion.

The government of Laos had to hand over part-ownership of its energy grid worth $600 million to Beijing for loan relief from China-based creditors.




Embracing Mao, Chinese rulers continue assault on working people – The Militant

Saturday, October 2, 2021

ACLU rewrites history, undermines fight for women’s rights under banner of ‘gender’ – The Militant

....Regardless of how you dress, what surgeries you have had, or how you “self-identify,” it’s a scientific fact that there are just two sexes — male and female.

ACLU rewrites history, undermines fight for women’s rights under banner of ‘gender’ – The Militant

A woman’s right to choose to have an abortion is fight of all working people – The Militant

....Instead of educating and mobilizing to win a majority to defend the right to choose, organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion Rights Action League have for decades urged women not to rock the boat and to rely on Democratic Party officials. This course has been a disaster.

What is needed is to clearly answer the arguments that opponents of women’s rights use, and to mobilize in the streets to win a decisive majority among working people. Our unions should be at the forefront of this fight.

Without a fight for women’s equality, the solidarity the working class needs to fight the bosses, and to wage a revolutionary struggle to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist class, is impossible. Without the right to decide when or whether to bear a child, women cannot participate as equals in economic or political life.


A woman’s right to choose to have an abortion is fight of all working people – The Militant