The following is the second of a two-part article based on a talk the author gave at The People’s Forum in July 2020. This second part focuses on Kollontai’s writing on the family and love. Part one covers Kollontai’s struggle for proletarian feminism against bourgeois feminism as well as her struggle to center gender equality within the party’s platform. Alexandra Kollontai’s approach to political struggle was grounded in historical materialism, the Marxist approach to history. She didn’t see t...
Mar 08, 2021•18 min
Mayor London Breed and the city of San Francisco have sued the San Francisco Unified School District on the basis of lacking a "concrete" plan for returning to in-person learning, claiming negligence of students' education. In fact, it is the city that hasn’t provided the necessary resources for a safe school reopening. More outrageously, the city has failed to protect our most impacted students and families, many of them Black and Latino. It's clear the blame is not on teachers, unions, student...
Mar 05, 2021•12 min
This is an excerpt from Gloria La Riva's discussion of her recent experiences being caught in the winter storms that have been devastating much of Texas, leaving many without shelter, water or electricity. She has started a GoFundMe to raise money to help some of the people she met while in a temporary shelter get back on their feet. Please read and give if you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-texas-shelter-friends-rebuild-their-lives?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campa...
Feb 27, 2021•9 min
This week, Mississippi is experiencing unprecedented freezing conditions resulting from ice storms that blasted through the U.S. South. In addition to being unaccustomed to the freezing rain, ice, and snow, thousands of Mississippians suffering rolling blackouts and power outages, unheated homes and water shutoffs, have been left to fend for themselves. Starting Feb 15, at least 250,000 Mississippians have lost power at some point during the week; counties in the southwest to east central Missis...
Feb 24, 2021•11 min
The decade of the 1950s is known for the dramatic rise of reactionary politics, especially the virulent anti-communism of the McCarthy era. Amidst and against this period of great reaction emerged the civil rights struggle, initially spearheaded in the southern United States. Witnessing the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the lynching of Emmett Till and the resistance of Rosa Parks, the Black community was enlivened, enraged and galvanized into collective action. The boycott that followed ...
Feb 22, 2021•15 min
The Communist Manifesto stands among the most well-read books of all time. One hundred sixty years after it was first published, it has been reprinted hundreds of times in most of the world’s languages. It has been praised, slandered, banned and distorted. Certainly more than any other political pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto has stood the test of time. It is studied in schools, colleges, workplaces, activist study groups and underground discussion groups all over the world. The reason that t...
Feb 21, 2021•11 min
The closing days of January shook Wall Street with a struggle between powerful stock market players and amateur investors that left investment firms reeling with billions in losses. On one side were hedge funds that had bet big on stock prices dropping for the video game store chain GameStop and other companies. On the other, a large number of small investors coordinating on online platforms such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum to buy shares and encouraging others to do the same. These hedge fu...
Feb 18, 2021•11 min
A winter storm of historic proportions is causing critical infrastructure failures across the state of Texas, with another winter storm approaching tonight. The full weight of the devastation isn’t yet known, but initial reports from across the state are showing disturbing patterns. Four million or more Texans are without power. Outages that were initially called “rolling outages” are now lasting several days. The private non-profit corporation that oversees the electric grid is now admitting th...
Feb 17, 2021•19 min
President Biden signed a package of 17 executive orders immediately following his inauguration on Wednesday. The orders are a mixed bag — some have very little substance and are primarily symbolic, but others deal with measures that have significant effects on people’s lives. As socialists and other fighters for the working class develop our assessment of the new administration as it takes shape, it is important to understand why Biden made this his first major political act after assuming offic...
Feb 14, 2021•7 min
The Party for Socialism and Liberation joins with progressive organizations and media around the world in demanding that the Indian government cease its repression of leading media outlet Newsclick. Newsclick is read and watched by millions every day and is facing persecution for the key role it plays providing independent coverage of people’s movements, especially the massive farmers’ struggle that poses an existential threat to the far right government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Police r...
Feb 13, 2021•3 min
Thirty years ago, the socialist government of Romania was overthrown in a military coup d’etat. Industrialization had transformed the lives of millions of Romanians during the country’s socialist period. But the later years were marked by strict rationing and frequent shortages as the government sought to pay off its foreign debt. Romanian people hoped that their lives would improve after 1989. But life today is much worse than even the most economically-deprived times of the 1980s. A 2010 poll ...
Feb 05, 2021•33 min
Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara was born December 21, 1949 in Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso), which, at the time, was a West African French colony. Sankara, a fierce enemy of the global system of neocolonial, imperialist capitalism (as well as all forms of bigotry and oppression), was assassinated on October 15, 1987, just four years after the people lifted him up as the president of their new revolutionary nation-state. Like other influential socialists of the twentieth century Sankara’s life and...
Feb 02, 2021•18 min
More than any other revolution before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789 inspired people across the globe to look beyond the societies in which they lived and see the possibility for social change. Of course, the rights guaranteed after the French Revolution were bourgeois democratic rights. The French Revolution secured the political rule of the capitalist class. It cleared the way for the capitalist economy to develop freely, overpowering the restrictions of the feudal ...
Jan 30, 2021•24 min
On the day before his inauguration, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he would propose that comprehensive legalization be proposed in Congress for undocumented immigrants. To explain this important issue, longtime Los Angeles-based immigrant rights leader and attorney Juan José Gutiérrez was interviewed by Gloria La Riva on January 20.
Jan 22, 2021•27 min
2020 was a year of unprecedented crisis and mass movement. The impact of the pandemic, and massive loss of jobs, income, health care, housing and education has been greatly worsened by the capitalist system. The racist police murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and so many others were met with the most massive wave of sustained protest in U.S. history. Now, with tens of millions faced with foreclosure and eviction, and the criminal failure of the government to provide needed relief, it is cl...
Jan 22, 2021•23 min
All revolutionary politics are predicated on revolutionary optimism: the belief, rooted in experiences in the struggle, that workers and the oppressed can and will win. Yet revolutionary optimism doesn’t just apply to the masses as a whole. Revolutionary organizers believe not just in the potential of the masses as a whole, but as individuals as well. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/comrades-made-not-born/
Jan 21, 2021•11 min
What was Trump trying to accomplish on Jan. 6 by organizing a massive march on the Capitol just as Congress was preparing to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory? Trump was desperate to overturn the election outcome. He lost the popular vote by more than 7 million but only narrowly lost several battleground states, which allowed Biden to win the electoral college. Trump’s team had filed hundreds of lawsuits at the federal and state level to overturn the election outcome in those states. Every o...
Jan 20, 2021•42 min
Listen to this special recorded forum on what is -- and isn't -- in the stimulus bill. Recorded live on 9 Jan 2021.
Jan 16, 2021•13 min
On April 30, 2005, Vietnam celebrated the 30th anniversary of liberation and reunification after a war that itself lasted more than 30 years. In Ho Chi Minh City—formerly known as Saigon—and all over the country, mass events saluted the millions who fought and died to free their country from foreign domination. How did the Vietnamese Revolution emerge victorious? How did the national liberation movement in a relatively small country manage to defeat not one but two of the major imperialist power...
Jan 16, 2021•20 min
On Jan. 1, the 62nd anniversary of Cuba’s revolutionary victory, the government is implementing a sweeping economic policy with reorganization of the monetary system to promote more efficiency and greater production. It comes at a crucial time when the U.S. blockade and the impacts of COVID-19 are creating deeper difficulties for the Cuban people. Cuba’s socialist system enabled the people and government to weather the storm of 2020 and save lives in a way that U.S. capitalism could not and did ...
Jan 15, 2021•20 min
Statement by the Party for Socialism and Liberation The paralysis that gripped the U.S. capitalist establishment in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Trump-instigated, fascist-led assault on the U.S. Congress and the continuing threats from armed fascist organizations came to an abrupt halt on Jan. 12 with the public letter sent to all members of the U.S. military signed by the eight generals who comprise the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The statement read: “The violent riot in Washington, D.C. o...
Jan 13, 2021•17 min
On January 1, 1916, just about 10 years before Mussolini’s fascist regime imprisoned him, Italian communist Antonio Gramsci published a short article in Avanti! (Forward!)–the Italian Socialist Party’s (PSI) daily newspaper–about why he “hates” New Year’s Day. Gramsci thought it was a forced celebration and said he “would like every hour of my life to be new.” Gramsci connected this desire with socialism, writing, “I await socialism for this reason too.” This short article gets circulated on the...
Jan 13, 2021•34 min
2020 was a year of unprecedented crisis and mass movement. The impact of the pandemic, and massive loss of jobs, income, health care, housing and education has been greatly worsened by the capitalist system. The racist police murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and so many others were met with the most massive wave of sustained protest in U.S. history. Now, with tens of millions faced with foreclosure and eviction, and the criminal failure of the government to provide needed relief, it is cl...
Jan 12, 2021•26 min
Listen to Gloria La Riva in this special recorded forum on the fascist insurrection Trump incited against Congress. Recorded live on 9 Jan 2021.
Jan 11, 2021•19 min
Today, a fascist mob — called to action by Donald Trump and acting in obvious collusion with elements of the Capitol Police, the Department of Defense, and possibly other armed forces — stormed the U.S. Capitol building and dispersed Congress. Trump himself spoke at today’s main protest rally outside the White House as part of his campaign to desperately hang on to power. The extreme right wing that assaulted the Capitol today is united above all by the figure of Trump. Shortly before the mob ma...
Jan 07, 2021•6 min
Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is a classic work of anti-capitalist feminism. The book examines capitalism’s investment in sexism and racism, showing how the consolidation of the capitalist system depended on the subjugation of women, the enslavement of black and indigenous people, and the exploitation of the colonies. Federici demonstrates that unpaid labor–especially that of women confined to the domestic sphere and of enslaved workers–is a necessary support for waged labor. Under cap...
Jan 03, 2021•23 min
Williana Burroughs was a dynamic and dedicated communist in Depression-era Harlem. Bringing her radical politics into the struggles Black Harlemites faced, and vice versa, Burroughs helped establish trust between the Communist Party and the community. And she fought so that her own comrades would amplify the voices of Black working-class women. Born Williana Jones in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1882, “Liane” grew up in poverty. Her mother, formerly enslaved and recently widowed, moved the family to...
Dec 23, 2020•8 min
Anyone who aspires to be a real communist or to understand the theory of modern communism must study Lenin’s pamphlet The State and Revolution. Lenin was able to nearly finish this monumental contribution to Marxism and revolution while on the run, living underground and hiding from the police from August to October 1917, just before the insurrection that seized power. The State and Revolution has been published in practically every written language. It is considered the veritable manifesto for ...
Dec 21, 2020•50 min
The 2020 election broke the record for the most ballots cast and is set to be one of the largest percentage turnouts of eligible voters recorded. The massive vote total produced all sorts of contradictory results. In Florida, Trump won alongside a $15/hr minimum wage ballot measure. In California, Democrats won a thumping victory even while referendums for workers rights and rent control went down by large margins. Legal weed triumphed in “deep blue” New Jersey and “dark red” South Dakota. The M...
Dec 20, 2020•20 min
“Are we on the eve of Bolshevism?" December 2018 marked the 100-year anniversary of the slaughter of striking typographers and workers of Bucharest, Romania. More than 15,000 men, women and children — workers from all factories –– filled the streets on Dec. 13, 1918 in solidarity with the typographers. Their demands: an 8-hour work day, a living wage and recognition of the workers’ union. Everywhere that class society has existed, people have organized and fought back. Romania has a rich history...
Dec 13, 2020•18 min
