“Every class struggle is a political struggle.” With that statement Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, opened his report to an International Socialist Educational Conference in Oberlin, Ohio. “That’s a reality more and more workers in the United States are bumping up against in their own lives and battles today.”
Mu
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Forging a proletarian party in the class struggle today – The Militant
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Friday, August 2, 2024
300 days since the October seventh pogrom. What we know and what we don’t know. – The Union Of Workers
[....] We know that for the communists our strategic tasks remain the same: to build revolutionary workers parties in the countries where we live that will educate and organize the working-class along the road to power, that can fight for the construction of workers and farmers governments, which will give us the most powerful tool imaginable to allow the workers of the world to come together as equals to build a socialist future.
What remains unknown
What we don't know is the pace and form this fight will take, we just know it's coming, if not in the lifetime of me and my peers, then in the lifetimes of the younger generations and those generations yet to come.
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Saturday, July 20, 2024
Shots at Trump are product of liberal frenzy, capitalist crisis – The Militant
....The attempt on Trump came after over eight years of concerted efforts by Democrats, liberal press outlets, the middle-class left, late-night talk show hosts and more to portray Trump as a fascist and deadly danger to capitalist “democracy.” As the November election has come nearer, and as the Democratic incumbent Joseph Biden’s campaign has stumbled, this shrill tirade has grown more and more hysterical and violent.In 2022 Biden declared that what he termed “MAGA-Republicans,” who number in the tens of millions, are “semi-fascists” who “threaten the very foundations of our republic.” Just a few days before the shooting, Biden said the Democrats’ campaign needs to “put Trump in a bullseye.” The shooting is a reflection of the deepening political crisis racking the U.S. capitalist rulers and their two-party setup. The Democrats in particular are beset by deep differences reflected in the recent debate over Biden’s candidacy.What really drives their hysteria is growing concern over the wide working-class support for Trump. Despite what they claim, this doesn’t represent a turn to the “far right,” any more than does the vote for the European parliament and other recent elections. It reflects the fact workers are increasingly looking for a way to fight against the effects of the crises of capitalism that the employers and their government push on their backs. The rulers fear growing class struggle to come....
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Shots at Trump are product of liberal frenzy, capitalist crisis – The Militant
Monday, July 1, 2024
Are working people in Europe flocking to join the ‘far right’? – The Militant
Elections to the European Parliament June 6-9 saw heavy losses for governing capitalist parties that tens of millions of working people hold responsible for the worsening conditions they confront. The results reflect these crisis conditions, but they’re presented in the liberal press worldwide as a shift of the working classes to the “far right.”
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Saturday, June 22, 2024
Reviewed: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) by Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) by Fredric Jameson
This is the most politically confusing and unMarxist of Jameson's books. It floats on a stream of euphemisms when scientific terms would have been simpler and clearer. Example: his use of "world system" instead of imperialism is especially grating. (At least we are spared "hegemony," "precariat," and "globalization").
The thesis: postmodernism is the post-1970 mode of capitalist "cultural production" -- in which superstructural factors are determinant even in the final instance over economics.
(This yearning on the part of the middle class left to write-off the multinational US working class and workers and farmers around the world is even more widespread today than it was when this study came out).
And for a book on capitalist "cultural production" from 1989, there is remarkably little curiosity about some of the big events in the class struggle circa 1979-1989. Internationally, these include: the advances of the Cuban revolution; the Reagan-Thatcher anti-labor drive; the 1979 revolutions in Grenada, Iran, and Nicaragua; the battle of Cuito Cuanavale and the coming revolution in South Africa; the UK miners strike; the strike wave in the USSR and Eastern European workers states.
Notable labor milestones in the US that escape even parenthetical "mapping" by Jameson: the 1978-79 UMWA strike; the breaking of PATCO; the Hormel P9 strike, and the strikes in copper mining in the southwest.
References to works by Marx are often to material of secondary importance: some journalism and the Grundrisse. The latter was an extensive notebook, but not a text prepared by Marx and Engels for publication, and so not as rigorously revised and edited as the initial volume of Capital. Jameson is much more comfortable with the theoretical wiggle-room offered by the earlier work's imprecisions. (Similar to academic Marxists who comb Lukacs and Gramsci after passing-by Lenin and Trotsky).
Many of Jameson's insights into cultural theory are clearly presented. But he has no nose for recognizing and assessing POLITICAL WEIGHT. There is not a more severe handicap for a Marxist of any type.
Jay
21 June 2024
Friday, June 21, 2024
The 10 Commandments shouldn't be posted in schools
Excerpt:
Separation of church, state is a right
Working people cannot rely on the courts or political maneuvers to protect our rights. The rightists are counting on being able to clog judicial machinery and reverse previous rulings. Freedom of religion and separation of church and state are hard-won gains of the First American Revolution. A broad campaign to defend these rights needs to be organized.
When I was in grade school and through much of junior high school in Pennsylvania, a state law (passed in 1949 as part of the anticommunist witchhunt) required the school day be opened with a reading of 10 verses from the Bible and a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Teachers could be fired for failing to comply. Students who declined to participate faced harassment.
The purpose these exercises served was to instill blind obedience, conformity, and discipline. The Supreme Court finally outlawed those compulsory religious exercises in 1963 after lawsuits by the Unitarian family of Edward Schempp in Abington, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore atheists Madalyn Murray and her son.
What's wrong with posting the Ten Commandments? Harrisburg dentist Michael Cook, who addressed the board, said the Ten Commandments should be posted to "remind our students there is a standard of moral conduct."
It's not true that the Ten Commandments are just good rules to live by. They are ancient statutes codifying compulsory monotheism. Posting them in public schools a violation of the fundamental right of working people to freely decide their religious views.
The Ten Commandments are a small portion of an elaborate set of ancient laws recorded in the Old Testament. Among other things this body of law spelt out that the penalty for violating strictures on worshipping one almighty God was death by stoning.
Monotheism reflected the emergence of the father-dominated family, private property, and classes.
The state developed as the supreme power through which the ruling class oppressed and extracted tribute from all others. Monotheism provided the ideological heavy artillery of the oppressing classes by hallowing the family patriarch, governing authorities, and priesthood, and the state headed by priests.
The Tenth Commandment is abbreviated in the Harrisburg version as "Thou shall not covet." In its unabridged form it sanctified private property, which was still a new, and difficult to impose, social relation in ancient times. This holy mandate classified women and slaves as chattel, along with oxen and donkeys.
Class-conscious workers defend the democratic right of believers of all faiths to practice their religion free from discrimination. Imposing a religious document on all those attending a public school is the opposite of this right.
In the culture war the rightists seek to roll back women's rights and the rights of all working people and youth—often in the name of defending "Christian values." One student was heard commenting after the meeting, "These are the same people that want to take away abortion rights." This is part of the employers' drive against our wages, heath care, and union rights, and part of the rulers' drive to war.
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