For this class, we focus specifically on the relationship between fascism and the U.S.’s racist police state. How has fascism functioned in the U.S., and how has the Empire contributed to its growth internationally? What were the forces operative behind the so-called Business Plot in 1934, a planned fascist seizure of state power, and what light does this shed on the present moment? What lessons can we as organizers learn from projects like the CIA’s Operation Gladio, which established an intern...
Jul 25, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Our final class is an opportunity to synthesize the wide-ranging themes addressed, with a particular focus on the current state of U.S. politics and the global fight against fascism. We consider what lessons organizers can learn from the history of communist struggles against fascism, both within the U.S. and internationally. We also examine the contemporary moment, and in particular the election of Biden-Harris, as well as the persistence of Trumpism, in light of the historical relationship bet...
Jul 25, 2021•1 hr 23 min
This class looks at some of the important communist responses to fascism and explores how communists have organized on the ground to fight and win against fascists. We begin with interwar Europe and international debates in communist party organizing but also discuss how Marxist-Leninists like the Black Panther Party understood fascism in the U.S. This provides us with some useful perspectives on various tactics, their relative successes and failures, and what this means for the present moment. ...
Jul 24, 2021•1 hr 5 min
The United States, a country with a $20 trillion economy, is waging a full-scale economic war against an island whose economy equals half of one percent of that — Cuba. The war has been going on for 60 years. It began shortly after the 1959 revolution to punish Cuba for taking control of corporations owned by rich capitalists in the United States who had brutally exploited the Cuban people for decades. Supporters of the Cuban revolution call this economic war a blockade, not an “embargo” like th...
Jul 20, 2021•13 min
Cuba, like every other country on the planet, is struggling with the impact of COVID-19. This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world. Meanwhile, the United States hardens a cruel and illegal blockade of the island, a medieval siege that has been in place for six decades. In April 2020, seven United Nations special rapporteurs wrote an open letter to th...
Jul 14, 2021•9 min
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel spoke to the Cuban people today — Sunday, July 11 — at 4:00 p.m. Eastern, after going to the site of one of several protests that took place in Cuba today. This unprecedented series of events are the result of the growing difficulties the people are experiencing by the double blow created by the increasingly severe U.S. blockade and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being in control of infections for many months, cases have been growing in recent wee...
Jul 12, 2021•15 min
The Party for Socialism and Liberation stands in full solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, its government and people in the struggle against the latest sinister counter-revolutionary efforts of U.S. imperialism. The sixty year old blockade and hundreds of sanctions imposed under the Trump Administration have caused grave shortages of food, medicines, electricity and other necessities of life. The shortages have greatly exacerbated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island. No working pe...
Jul 12, 2021•4 min
The notion that the rich are rich because they’re frugal, smart, entrepreneurial, and hardworking, and that the poor are poor because they’re wasteful, lazy, stupid, and irresponsible is widespread. This is the ideology of meritocracy: that success or failure in life is up to the individual’s choices. The ideology takes on different forms, such as the idea that Black liberation is achieved through “Black buying power,” as Jared Ball’s recent book puts it. Whatever form it takes, this ideology se...
Jul 11, 2021•33 min
Gentrification is the systematic process of displacing poor people from a community and replacing them with more affluent people, all in the interest of profit. It has become a primary local policy of the representatives of the ruling class and is clearly carried out by the state. While it is clearly a policy, it is also an outcome of the capitalist approach to housing and development. Profit is king. People’s livelihoods and well-being are not considerations. A serious socialist program for hou...
Jul 09, 2021•13 min
In the early hours of July 7, Haitian president-turned-dictator Jovenel Moïse was assassinated at his home in Port-au-Prince. While many details of the assassination remain unclear, the political vacuum in Haiti will likely result in a fierce struggle over the direction of the nation in the coming weeks. The Biden administration’s initial reactions to the assassination disturbingly indicate that the U.S. government is considering deepening their intervention in Haiti, which could possibly involv...
Jul 09, 2021•5 min
July 1, 2021 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Celebrations throughout China and commemorations worldwide are taking place today in recognition of the Party's leadership and its incredible legacy. It's worthwhile for socialists to reflect on this legacy and, in particular, the contemporary state of China's political economy. On November 9, 2013 Xi Jinping gave a talk at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China...
Jul 06, 2021•27 min
The following is an edited version of an internal document initially written in late 2015 and formed part of the basis for party-wide discussions in the Party for Socialism and Liberation in early 2016. The document examines the new possibilities and difficulties posed by the proliferation of social media from the perspective of the Leninist party. Ben Becker evaluates the resulting qualitative shifts in mass communication, obstacles to vertical organization, the individualizing tendencies of so...
Jul 04, 2021•32 min
Ahn Hak-sop was an officer in the Korean People’s Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) during the Korean War. In 1952, he was captured by the United States and its proxy forces while on his way to a meeting in the southern part of Korea. He served decades as an unconverted political prisoner before finally winning release in 1995. Today, he is still active as a peace and reunification activist in the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea). Liberation School i...
Jun 25, 2021•9 min
On May 25, 2020, 44-year-old white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old unarmed Black man George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, sadistically murdering him. Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit 20 dollar bill at a local convenience store in the middle of a pandemic that left tens of millions of Americans out of work and deeper in poverty. Floyd was a victim of the capitalist system, one of the tens of millions who were out of employment. The deadly enco...
Jun 25, 2021•6 min
In class 3, students learn about how the key Black communist figures and organizations of the 20th century shaped the struggle against racism, the labor movement and the overall revolutionary struggle in the U.S. We also cover how the U.S. government repressed Black communists and attempted to divert the Black liberation movement away from its revolutionary tradition.
Jun 18, 2021•56 min
In the final class, we draw from the historical context of the first three classes to explore why the PSL understands the struggle for Black liberation to be a national liberation struggle. We analyze the relationship between this struggle liberation and the struggle for power today.
Jun 18, 2021•1 hr 4 min
The first class examines how the development of each class in early American society (enslaved Africans, Southern planters, Northern industrialists, Western free soilers, and more) was largely defined by its relationship to the Slavocracy. Conflicts between these various classes, particularly the northern capitalists and Southern planters, led to a Civil War that shook the social, political and economic foundations of the country.
Jun 18, 2021•52 min
The second class covers the post-Civil War efforts to reconstitute Southern society on a new basis. We focus on Reconstruction, America’s “unfinished revolution” and the Southern populist movement to learn about the pursuit of Black political power and multinational working class solidarity in action.
Jun 18, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Within two months in a town, in Muong Thanh Valley of northwest Vietnam, anti-imperialist Vietnamese fighters besieged and defeated over 16,000 French colonial troops and spelled the downfall of the French empire. Dien Bien Phu was one of the greatest victories of the oppressed in all of history and inspired revolutionaries and progressives around the world. We cannot understate this victory and we cannot understate the central role women played. Women have always been in the struggle in Vietnam...
Jun 13, 2021•10 min
Part 2 of the Program of the Party for Socialism and Liberation In order to guarantee the interests of working and poor people who make up the vast majority of the United States, a new revolutionary government run by and for the workers and poor will be established. The present capitalist government—the role of which has been to defend the big-business system of exploitation by a web of hundreds of measures, legal and illegal, and has been accessible only to the super-rich elite—will be abolishe...
Jun 12, 2021•18 min
Part 1 of the Program of the Party for Socialism and Liberation: The Party for Socialism and Liberation exists to carry out the struggle for socialism inside the United States, the center of world capitalism and imperialism. The PSL stands in solidarity with our sisters and brothers around the world who are resisting capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination. The need for the socialist reorganization of society becomes more apparent and urgent with each passing day. While a tiny part of...
Jun 12, 2021•28 min
Frederick Engels is best known for his theoretical and political work he undertook alongside his lifelong comrade, Karl Marx. Yet Engels made other important contributions to the workers’ movement of his time and ever since. During a moment in which millions of workers in the U.S. have been thrown out of work as a result of the intersection of the Covid-19 pandemic and an overdue capitalist economic crisis, Engels’ 1872 pamphlet, “The Housing Question,” bears particular import. While there have ...
Jun 08, 2021•16 min
Israel presents itself as a “homeland for all Jews” that welcomes and provides safe haven to all Jewish people. The ironically-named Law of Return, passed on July 5, 1950, declared that all Jewish people had the right to come to live in Israel. But does Israel actually accept all Jewish people? Of course this law is inherently racist towards the Palestinian people, whose land was stolen to create the state of Israel. And it is also clear that the Zionist political movement has a particular histo...
May 30, 2021•8 min
The Paris Commune took place 150 years ago this year in France. It was one of the most earth-shaking events in history up to that point, and it’s one that continues to have an impact even today. Marx said about it a few years afterwards that it was the most slandered event in human history, but what happened later was that it was pushed out of the picture almost altogether—especially, of course, in this country. Marx wrote extensively about it at the time, and there’s a pamphlet called The Civil...
May 28, 2021•51 min
Despite the ceasefire agreement on May 20, Israel carried out a campaign of mass arrests called “Operation Law and Order” today and yesterday to take revenge on those who heroically participated in the popular uprising that occurred over the course of the country’s 11-day long massacre of Palestinians. The aim of the operation was to arrest Palestinians living within the 1948 borders of Israel who shocked the Israeli ruling establishment by participating with such intensity in the resistance. Pa...
May 26, 2021•4 min
Thousands of Palestinians took to the streets of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and cities inside the 1948 borders of Israel on May 21 to celebrate the ceasefire following 11 days of fighting between Palestinian and Israeli forces. No such celebrations were reported among the Israeli population. Extreme right-wing politicians condemned the government of Benjamin Netanyahu for entering into the agreement, and vowed to now oppose his re-election as prime minister. The victory came at the cost...
May 26, 2021•8 min
In response to the mobilization of tens of thousands of Palestinians defending the right to live in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and worship at the Al-Aqsa mosque, Israel has unleashed murderous actions all across occupied Palestine. Al-Aqsa is an iconic national symbol of the Palestinian people and one of the holiest sites in Islam. It has been repeatedly targeted by Zionist extremists who want to take it over. The latest escalation by Israel are air strikes M...
May 26, 2021•7 min
Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241
May 15, 2021•27 min
Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241
May 15, 2021•8 min
Written by Richard Becker Copyright © 2009 by PSL Publications Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932241
May 13, 2021•11 min
