Urgent! On Sep 17 Denver police arrested several anti-racist organizers, 4 of which are members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Support their legal aid and support campaign: http://www.pslweb.org/donate4denver Sign the petition to drop all charges: http://www.pslweb.org/dropthecharges
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used his platform at the annual foreign ministers’ summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on September 10 to bash China and stir up trouble in a region 8,000 miles away from his office in Washington, D.C. Pompeo urged the members of ASEAN, a 10-nation regional cooperation bloc founded in 1967, to “Reconsider business dealing with the very state-owned companies that bully ASEAN coastal states in the South China Sea.” By “bully[ing] ASEAN coastal states...
A popular uprising against police violence has broken out across Colombia following the shockingly brutal murder of Javier Ordóñez in Bogotá on September 8. In footage taken by witnesses that quickly spread and outraged the nation, Ordóñez was pinned to the ground and shocked over and over with a taser. Ordóñez, who was unarmed, repeatedly begged the officers to stop but the police showed no mercy. He was eventually taken into custody and beaten further before dying in the early hours of Septemb...
“We the inmates of Attica Prison, have grown to recognize beyond the shadow of a doubt, that because of our posture as prisoners and branded characters as alleged criminals, the administration and prison employees no longer consider or respect us as human beings, but rather as domesticated animals selected to do their bidding in slave labor and furnished as a personal whipping dog for their sadistic, psychopathic hate. We, the inmates of Attica Prison, say to you, the sincere people of society, ...
Louise Thompson Patterson was a key figure in the U.S. communist movement and the Harlem Renaissance. In this video, she speaks about her introduction to Marxism and her radicalization. This interview was conducted over three decades ago and the audio files have been digitized as part of NYU Tamiment Library’s invaluable Oral History of the American Left project. Liberation School has been transcribing and publishing interviews from this collection not as an endorsement of all the statements exp...
The following is the first of a two-part article based on a talk the author gave at the People’s Forum in July 2020. This first part focuses on Kollontai’s struggle for proletarian feminism against bourgeois feminism as well as her struggle to center gender equality within the party’s platform. Part two focuses on her writings on the family, love, and communism. The Russian communist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai lived from 1872 to 1952. Prior to the 1917 revolution, she was an active speake...
Over a hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in Tennessee in a nail-biting vote. After decades of organizing, the question of universal suffrage in the United States lay in the hands of 96 legislators, all men and all white, who filed into the room wearing red and yellow roses to indicate how they planned to vote, yellow for suffrage and red against. Twice that day on August 18, 1920, the lawmakers attempted to table the motion and failed, the vote to table ...
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 23 to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake, which had occurred just hours prior. With emotions strong and tensions high, conditions were exacerbated further by excessive police force directed at protesters, including the use of tear gas and pepper balls. Liberation News was on the scene to talk to those on the front lines in the rebellion against police brutality. The police and rightwing violence our reporters witnessed was a ...
The catchy rhythmic beat of Washington, D.C.’s home-grown Go-Go music was cranked up loud outside U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home in a protest against actions that weaken the post office. The August 23 protest was one of many around the country over the last several weeks as people come together to defend crucial delivery of mail. The U.S. post office, a target of privatization efforts for years, has been under a renewed attack by the Trump administration as the country heads into a c...
With talks between Democrats and the White house having collapsed, lawmakers have been unable and unwilling to extend the national eviction moratorium, supplemental unemployment relief, and CARES Act money that has helped families scrape by through the pandemic and recession. As Portland, the biggest city in Oregon, heads towards its third month of nightly protests against racist police brutality, its residents stand on the brink of a devastating eviction crisis. Even before the pandemic hit, Po...
Marxist theory cannot sustain itself. If relegated to academia, it will lose its revolutionary vitality. Elementary Marxist conceptions, elementary in the sense that they were accepted by advanced working-class forces throughout the world for many decades, are now virtually unknown. The link or legacy of Marxist theory has been snapped, broken, and a new generation of activists and fighters are unfamiliar with the core features of the theory. According to Lenin, the success of Bolshevism was pre...
In this forum in Los Angeles from 2019, we examine the intertwined nature of racism, capitalism, and the prison industrial complex; how the prison system itself is the manifestation and continuation of both class and race divides that have played out through US history.
In the context of the current mass uprising, political history has held a special significance this year. Juneteenth, the celebration of the last enslaved Africans’ emancipation – was also a painful reminder to Black America that we are still oppressed! Now, Black August, the celebration of Black revolutionary struggle even in the face of brutal imprisonment, is a reminder of a long tradition which continues today. As the country faces crisis after crisis–an economic one, on top of a war against...
The Democratic National Convention proves exactly how far right the Democrat Party continues to move. It was also an exercise in cowardly fear in the face of Trump’s open redbaiting and Muslim baiting. That was the stated reason that the party’s most popular liberal member of the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, received just 90 seconds to speak. That’s precisely why the Biden team joined in Trump’s condemnation of Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour after she spoke as an invited guest on a panel...
Editor’s note: The following is part of an internal document circulated by the Central Committee of the PSL in advance of our 3rd Party Congress in 2016. Here, we focus on ways that communist organizations have historically grown in strength, size, and influence—direct recruitment and organizational mergers. While there are important new openings, there are contradictory tendencies impacting the possibility of such growth. On the one hand, the neoliberal stage of capitalism clearly offers no fut...
In June, Black Lives Matter in Shoreline, Washington, held an unprecedented march and rally in the small suburban city just north of Seattle. Some 5,000 people marched in the streets led by Black youth organizers. One of these organizers is 13-year old Kailyn Jordan. This middle school student was recently threatened with lynching for her advocacy work in the community. Black Lives Matter Shoreline is organizing a rally and march at Paramount Park on July 25 to support Boo and to say that a Blac...
The story of the housing crisis in the Treasure Valley has once again risen sharply in pitch, spurred on by the unremitting COVID-19 pandemic. The Treasure Valley – also known as the Boise Metropolitan Area – comprises nearly 40 percent of Idaho’s total population and is home to more than 730,000 people. Approximately 42 percent of them are renters. Now, these renters are facing an onslaught of evictions, housing shortages, and houselessness. The Treasure Valley was already in a uniquely fervent...
The world looked on in shock as a massive explosion ripped through the Beirut port on Aug. 4 killing hundreds, wounding thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands. This comes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and just months after the Lebanese economy collapsed, leaving half the population in poverty. The UN is now warning of a humanitarian crisis. What the people of Lebanon need now is solidarity and an immediate and massive aid effort, proportionate to the damage done, and given to all without...
On July 19, Frank Gaglianese, an elected at-large member of the city council of Geneva, New York, said that he wished that he “could have got a gun and shot the squares on my computer screen and killed everybody” who participated in a recent virtual forum on police accountability. Gaglianese made his remarks at a Back the Blue Ride and Rally event at the Finger Lakes Welcome Center in Geneva’s Lakefront Park. In addition to expressing a desire to shoot those advocating for police accountability,...
August 6 and 9 mark the anniversaries of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Numerous historical and personal accounts will emerge in the press, recounting the destructiveness, inhumanity, and long-term misery created by the two U.S. bombs. Nuclear weaponry, as an indiscriminate killing force responsible for unspeakable atrocities, is truly weaponry of a different type. Many accounts will attribute the horrific bombings to the cruel pragmatism of U.S. generals, or the ignorance of Wh...
On July 22 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered the latest blast of aggressive rhetoric against China in a speech at the Nixon Library in California. Pompeo openly called for regime change in China, saying that “if we don’t change China, China will change us.” In almost hysterical language Pompeo made it clear that the U.S. ruling corporate and political elites are terrified of China’s socialist development and its emergence as an independent country with its own interests and capabilities. ...
Cooking meals, accessing healthcare, doing the laundry, caring for children and the elderly, and taking out the trash are daily activities. We rarely think of them as having much social, economic, or political significance. But they do. In our society much of this work is often ascribed to women and also devalued. This hides the fact that all this work is necessary for the reproduction of society, of social relations, of people. Social reproduction clearly concerns the biological reproduction of...
In this 2019 forum in NYC, Comrade Sasha Murphy speaks on the tremendous, inspiring legacy of Chairman Fred Hampton of the Chicago Black Panther Party. This forum concentrates specifically what we learn and continue in the tradition of being revolutionary socialists. Moving forward the concepts of giving power to the people, loving the people, and being for the people.
In this speech from a 2018 PSL forum in Washington DC, Central Committee member Eugene Puryear speaks on, in context of the downplaying of White Supremacist terrorism, the efforts of US political establishment to paint Black radical movements as extremist and terroristic. Specifically, Eugene concentrates on historical periods BEFORE the Civil Rights movement from slavery and colonialism to the end of WWII showing that Radicalism is an integral part of Black history and has always been legitimat...
Democratic candidate Joe Biden recently announced a $2 trillion climate plan to be implemented over four years if he wins the presidential seat. The plan promises a 100 percent clean energy economy by 2050. A more moderate version of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal proposal, the plan eliminates more progressive goals, such as universal healthcare and job guarantees. The Biden plan would need approval by the Senate and House, which after the coming election may or may not be c...
Some people are hailing the recent Supreme Court ruling on so-called “faithless electors” as a victory for democracy. However, we should be acutely aware that the Electoral College is actually a firewall against democracy. The case came from Washington state in 2016 when four electors were fined $1,000 each for refusing to cast their votes for Hillary Clinton who had won the state’s popular vote. The four electors cast their votes for Colin Powell rather than Hillary Clinton in a last ditch atte...
Una profunda rebelión contra el racismo ha estado conmoviendo a los Estados Unidos durante un mes. Millones de personas han salido a las calles en todas partes del país, sacudiendo la opinión pública. Instituciones de élite, individuos y marcas corporativas están luchando para ofrecer sacrificios simbólicos en el altar de la justicia racial, con la esperanza de poder librarse de la justificada ira en las calles. Al mismo tiempo, la policía está atacando sin motivo a manifestantes y continúa ases...
For 63 days, every possible attempt to derail a people’s movement in defense of Black lives has been made against protesters in Portland, Oregon. Every red-baiting, reactionary talking point has been deployed. On the ground, the Portland Police Bureau, the National Guard and three different types of federal paramilitary police have attempted to crush dissent. They claim it is about “law and order,” about protecting federal property from “violent anarchists.” Protesters see it for what it really ...
Slogans play a key role in all political activities, whether they be local demonstrations, pickets, strikes, or mass movements. While the fact that slogans are short might make it seem as though they’re of minor importance or a mere matter of semantics, the fact is that slogans can be decisive factors in individual and more protracted political struggles, for movements for reform and revolution. Slogans aren’t just words that we put on banners and placards. They are tools to orient and guide pol...
On July 3, the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, signed into law the Anti-Terrorism Bill of 2020, commonly known as the “Anti-Terrorism Law.” The bill, which broadens the definition of terrorism, takes effect July 18. Historical context The National Democratic movement in the Philippines has waged a struggle for liberation and democracy against three basic problems: imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. It is the primary mass movement in the Philippines. The Philippines...
