Richard Becker speaks at the Party for Socialism and Liberation's forum "Crisis in Ukraine & Anti-war Analysis", discussing the latest events in Europe, and the roots of the crisis.
The Biden administration announced a major escalation in its sanctions against Russia yesterday with a ban on the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and coal to the United States. A White House press statement said that the United States made this decision “in close consultation with our allies and partners around the world” and with bipartisan consensus. This move from the U.S. government fuels the flames of global tensions to the benefit of giant energy and military corporation...
The war in Ukraine is ushering in a new period of heightened danger in world politics and the threat of a global conflict that would devastate humanity. Socialists and people who want peace need to recognize that the entire U.S. foreign policy and military establishment is now organized around “great power conflict” against Russia and China as the defining strategy for decades to come. It is essential to recognize that Russia, China and other countries are not being targeted fundamentally becaus...
Originally from Chicago, Ill, George L. Jackson grew up in California. In 1961, a young Jackson convicted of armed robbery for allegedly stealing $70 from a gas station. Outrageously, Jackson was sentenced to one year to life, despite assurances from his attorney of a favorable deal if he plead guilty. Jackson would experience the racist injustice of the U.S. system at the height of the global liberation movements of the era, which couldn’t help but bleed into the rapidly expanding U.S. prison s...
La operación militar rusa en Ucrania pone de manifiesto que el mundo ha llegado a una peligrosa bifurcación. Es de vital importancia que la gente en Estados Unidos, la que obtiene gran parte de la información de los medios de comunicación burgueses que funcionan como una cámara de eco del gobierno, sepa que la crisis actual es el subproducto de un largo esfuerzo del Estado estadounidense para establecer una dominación absoluta en toda Europa. Su política tiene como objetivo socavar la seguridad ...
The crisis in Ukraine dramatically escalated over the course of the last week, culminating in yesterday’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics by Russia and the subsequent deployment of Russian troops into these areas. The United States and European powers are now rolling out sanctions targeting Russia, including Germany’s suspension of the critical NordStream 2 gas pipeline. The sanctions announced so far by the Biden administration in particular targets the financial secto...
The Russian military operation in Ukraine highlights that the world has reached a dangerous fork in the road. It is critically important for people in the United States, who are receiving the bulk of their information from the capitalist media that functions as an echo chamber for the U.S. government, to know that the current crisis is the byproduct of a long effort by the United States to establish absolute domination throughout Europe. The U.S. policy is aimed at undermining Russia’s security ...
From its beginning, the so-called “Freedom Convoy” in Canada has been a vehicle for the far right to promote their views and press their reactionary demands. Despite being labeled the “trucker protest” by the corporate media, it does not represent the interests of workers in the trucking industry or otherwise. Its leadership from the beginning included far-right political figures and former police and security state employees. If met, its main demand — to end vaccine mandates — wouldn’t improve ...
When the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed in October 1949, the country’s economy was in a shambles, devastated by decades of war and ravaged by inflation triggered by global forces beyond local control. The Communist Party of China and the new revolutionary government faced tremendous challenges in restoring order to rural and urban areas, securing the country’s territory from foreign influence or invasion, and establishing conditions of stability and security within which the people co...
In November 2016, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, U.S. diplomats in Cuba began to complain about hearing strange noises and experiencing various symptoms including nausea, headaches and hearing loss. Those noises were ultimately shown to have been common crickets. But the U.S. government’s claim that its diplomats had been “attacked” (at first by sonic weapons and later by microwave weapons) and were suffering “Havana syndrome” not only persisted, but expanded in the years that follo...
Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics. Despite its outsized role in Marxist debates, the model can, when contextualized and understood in its nuances, be quite useful for analyzing capitalist society and organizing for socialism [1]. Marx explicitly introduces the distinction between the base and superstructure ...
The contemporary political economy of the People’s Republic of China, the nature of the Chinese system, has been the subject of much discussion and debate in mainstream academic, media, and political circles, as well as on the left. Since the end of the 1970s, China has pursued policies of “reform and opening” to develop its economy, a process that has resulted in the massive growth of production, China’s emergence as a major player in global trade, and the lifting of around 800 million people o...
The Biden administration, Pentagon and NATO allies are conducting a dangerous and reckless campaign against Russia — one that has the potential to turn into a catastrophe for the people of the United States, Russia, Ukraine and the world. The aim is to strengthen the U.S. position as the dominant world superpower, a thoroughly bipartisan goal. In recent months, Russia has been the object of intense media demonization designed to win over the U.S. public to support this campaign. The Party for So...
Workers across the country are wondering with increasing desperation: Will the COVID crisis ever end? Two years after the first case of the virus was detected, society is becoming increasingly, bitterly divided over how to address this crucial question. All the while the death toll continues to mount. The situation is not hopeless. Although right wing demagogues have slowed the vaccination process and intensified the spread of the virus by sowing doubt about the most basic public health measures...
Editorial Collective Note: This is a new introduction to alienation that replaces our earlier introduction written in 2006. It’s part of our renovation and expansion of our “Fundamentals of Marxism” series and other articles on Marxist theory and the class struggle. Offering a brief introduction to Marx’s theory of alienation is not a straightforward task. This is due, in part, to conflicting interpretations of key aspects of Marx’s project directly related to alienation, the timing of the publi...
As the Omicron variant causes record levels of infection in the United States, the end of the pandemic seems as far away as ever. But far from preparing a robust response to defeat the virus, the Biden administration is preparing to surrender and encourage the public to “learn to live with” COVID indefinitely. When the Party for Socialism and Liberation pointed out the fact that China has in fact succeeded at virtually eliminating deaths from the virus, we were attacked by far-right pundits like...
Environmentalists have long stressed limits to human interaction with nature. It’s commonly argued that transgressing “natural limits” caused the environmental crises we face today. While this sentiment might direct our attention to the severity and scale of destabilizing contradictions in our relationship with nature, its underlying analysis is unable to grasp and overcome the root cause of these contradictions: capitalist production. A deeper and more critical understanding of society’s relati...
El Partido por el Socialismo y la Liberación se une a millones de personas en todo el país para expresar nuestra completa indignación por la absolución de Kyle Rittenhouse de todos los cargos. Una vez más, el sistema judicial de Estados Unidos ha funcionado para proteger a un asesino racista, que salió a las calles de Kenosha el 25 de agosto de 2020 para hacerle guerra a la gente que protestaba por los disparos de la policía a Jacob Blake, un hombre negro de 29 años. El veredicto es un exasperan...
Después de pasar semanas llevando a cabo negociaciones en la trastienda con el senador Joe Manchin, la senadora Krysten Sinema y otros demócratas de derechas en el Congreso sobre el presupuesto del programa social, el gobierno de Biden anunció ayer un “marco” que abandona algunos de los elementos más importantes de la propuesta original. Como parte de la capitulación de la administración ante los derechistas, ha acordado recortar a la mitad la asignación total a los programas sociales: de 3,5 bi...
The Russian revolution marked the beginning of a new period in human history. It was the first time that the oppressed were able to come to power – to take power and hold onto power. It truly had a transforming effect on the world. In this part of this series, we will lay the basis for later discussing what was to become the most famous split in political history: what is known as the Trotsky-Stalin split. We have to keep in mind that these names do not represent just individuals, but political ...
The Party for Socialism and Liberation joins with millions of people across the country in expressing our complete outrage at the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on all charges. Once again, the U.S. court system has functioned to protect a racist murderer, who went out into the streets of Kenosha on August 25, 2020 to wage war on people protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man. The verdict is an infuriating reminder of the fundamentally white supremacist nature of the...
The capitalist class and its well-paid intellectuals and pundits continue to argue that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 means that socialism and communism are impossible. A stereotyped and negative image of the Soviet Union and socialism has been relentlessly fed to the people of the United States ever since the Russian Revolution, which took place in 1917. It is extremely rare for the establishment to mention any of the truly remarkable achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republi...
In the suffering of the Global South, the brutality of capitalism lies bare. In a footnote toward the end of Capital, Marx wrote that the colonized subject reveals “what the bourgeois makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it can, without restraint, model the world after its own image”. The forms of primary accumulation he articulates there were in their most naked form in the colonies. Contrary to liberal and academic misreadings, Marx paid great attention to the relationship between col...
The Bolsheviks were relatively weak in the countryside among the peasantry. They had always been in the cities; they spent most of their existence underground and going out into the country had been hard for them. They were mainly a workers’ party, but the peasants made up a huge majority of the population. The SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries) were the main party in the countryside. The relationship between the peasants (farmers and agricultural workers) to the workers in the cities was a key iss...
On April 3, 1917, Lenin, Zinoviev and other leaders arrived in a sealed car on a train. The German government allowed them to return to Russia across Germany and through German-held territory because it hoped that they would take Russia out of the war and relieve the pressure on Germany – that was explicitly the German government’s reason. E. H. Carr, an English historian wrote a tremendous 14-volume history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Here is how Carr describes the scene of Lenin’s return: Ale...
The Russian Revolution is a vast subject. An exhaustive analysis of it is beyond the scope of this writing. But below, some of the key points will be highlighted. The Russian Revolution took place in the background of World War I, a war between imperialist powers over control of territories and colonies. The war caused a split in the international socialist movement. Right up to the outbreak of the war, the parties of the Second International had vowed to fight against the war once it started. S...
As the Party for Socialism and Liberation, we condemn in the harshest terms the brutal military coup that took place on October 25 in Sudan and the subsequent repression and arrests by the Sudanese military forces. We stand in full solidarity with the people of Sudan and the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) in their resistance against the coup. We fully support the call by the SCP and the Sudanese Professional Association for a political strike and for the people to take to the streets in civil di...
Three years before the 1969 Stonewall Uprising that galvanized a generation of LGBTQ activists, and more than a decade before Harvey Milk led the fight against the Briggs Initiative as San Francisco’s first gay city supervisor, a group of trans women and drag queens revolted against bigoted police violence in San Francisco’s heavily oppressed Tenderloin district. These courageous fighters turned the tables on their oppressors and ushered in a new wave of class-conscious organizing by queer youth...
Toward the end of our earlier introduction to surplus value, the heart and motor of the class struggle, we wrote that: “The rate of surplus value for the capitalist is the rate of exploitation for the worker. By merely prolonging the working day, the capitalist accrues more (absolute) surplus value. Increasing the working day from eight to 10 hours results in two more hours of surplus value for the capitalist and of exploitation for the worker”. For any working period—whether it be a day, an hou...
As this statement was being prepared, a Texas state judge issued a stay temporarily blocking an anti-abortion group from enforcing SB 8 against Planned Parenthood, giving some relief to health care providers and abortion rights advocates. The Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the Texas Senate Bill 8 and demonstrated its unwillingness to protect the rights of women late Wednesday evening when they voted 5 to 4 allowing the Texas “heartbeat bill” to go into effect. Purposefully written wi...
