Return to Home Page


Browse Articles 

Browse Archived Articles

     
     


Good People! Wake Up
!

by Theresa El-Amin

The Supreme Court 5-4 decision on the travel ban confirms yet again that the lifetime appointment to the bench for federal judges does not protect us from their politics or their inhumanity. They won't lose their jobs over an unpopular decision. Therefore, they are emboldened to interpret the constitution in the context of their own politics.
     
Read more
     

The African Diaspora in Europe Today
By Stephen Small
     
In Europe today, non-Black people often ask—why are there so many Black people in Europe? But a far better question is ‘why are there so few Black people in Europe?’ The African diaspora in Europe began when Europeans first invaded and colonized Africa. Racist/sexist stereotypes and caricatures were first developed and disseminated across Europe before the United States and other nations across the Americas were even created. And racist ideologies and nomenclatures were substantially elaborated in Europe, by elite white men from Swedish botanist and zoologist, Carl Linneaus, French naturalist George Buffon and German physiologist and anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach; and from English philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer, English statistician and eugenicist Francis Galton to Italian criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso. European nations kidnapped and transported millions of Africans into vicious enslavement across the Americas. Tiny numbers of Africans were brought to Europe to sing, dance and perform or to study Christianity. Some were put as spectacles in zoos. Many women became concubines and prostitutes. And master-enslavers brought their favorite human property to serve them. With the exception of a short period in Spain and Portugal in the 1400s, and England in the 1700s, the numbers of Black people allowed into Europe was deliberately kept small until the 20th century.  Then thousands of black people (overwhelmingly men) were recruited to fight in European wars. Later on, we were actively recruited and encouraged by governments and businesses to relocate to England, France, Netherlands and Portugal, to work in jobs that white men and women no longer wanted.
     
Read more 
     
     
Freedom Manifesto
     
The Black Liberation Movement has reawakened. Militant activists are fighting against police terror, for jobs and a livable wage, for housing for the homeless, against environmental racism, for quality education, for human rights for our LGBT brothers and sisters, and more. This manifesto is a contribution toward uniting our diverse forces into one mighty movement for Black liberation and the transformation of the entire society.

This manifesto is for workers in trade union locals and worker centers, students on campus and in high school, brothers and sisters locked up in the prison camps, activists on all battlefronts in every community. Capitalism stinks and is not the system that we need to lead decent and meaningful lives.

   
Read more
     
     
A Socialist Southern Strategy in Jackson
By Max Ajl
   
Book review of Jackson Rising
     
We know that the literal meaning of the word Utopia is no-place. It doubles as a word meaning a perfect world. Appropriately, the Latin American literary giant, Eduardo Galeano, who came from the continent which has gifted the world so many of this and last century’s attempts to reach the unreachable, gave us the very best spin on the word. Utopia lay always “at the horizon.” “What then, is the purpose of utopia?” Galeano asked. “It is to cause us to walk.”
     
Read more 

           
     

Draft Organizing Proposal for “Old and New"
by Kali Akuno

The following is what I would like to propose to guide some of the core dimensions of the work of Old and New. 

First, I want to build on the strength of Old and New, which is its diversity. Old and New has assembled some principled forces from perhaps the broadest ideological and political range of any radical formation in the United States. This is a unique strength that we have to capitalize and build upon. The question is how? And to what end? 

Read more

     



A New Prison Abolition Path
Using On-Line Courses
for Prison Education 
By Russell Maroon Shoats/z
    
As a decades-long Political Prisoner I have participated in and become aware of many failed efforts to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC).
    
Here I offer a new prison abolition path.
     

We must begin a nationwide push to turn the PIC into an incubator of the social and environmental changes that are needed in the 21st century. A paradigm that can unite prisoners, positive change elements in the broader society, academia, prison employees, the communities they come from, and society at large is a quest to provide Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) within the entire PIC (for prisoners and prison employees alike).
     
Read more


The First Ecosocialist International

Weaving Ourselves to Mother Earth
 
October 31 – November 3, 2017, Cumbe of Veroes, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
 
It has been one year since “The Calling of the Spirits” in Monte Carmelo, Lara, when, with spirited minds and seeds in our hearts, we initiated a convocation titled “The Cry of Mother Earth.” Those who responded to this cry are now here: around 100 people from 19 countries and five continents, 12 original peoples from Our America, and ecosocialist activists from 14 states of Venezuela. We are here in the Cumbe* of Veroes, cradled in the enchanted mountains of Yaracuy, where the guardian goddess of nature lives. From the 31st of October until today, the 3rd of November, 2017, we have done the work demanded of us: the articulation of a combined strategy and plan of action for the salvation of Mother Earth.

Read more 
   

Charlottesville, Virginia

Editorial Statement

 
August 15, 2017: Politicians of both major parties have been calling on President Donald Trump to clearly and specifically denounce the “alt-right” (read “Nazi/Klan”) violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, August 12, in response to Trump’s press conference where he instead blamed “many sides” for what happened. Everyone except Trump knows that “many sides” are not to blame, only one side is: the side of racism and bigotry.
     
What all of these politicians fail to call for, however, but the citizens of this nation ought to, is for Trump to not only denounce the violence in Charlottesville but to take personal responsibility for it, since it was Trump’s public validation of this previously fringe ideology in US society—both during his campaign for the presidency and by his post-election appointments—which created the atmosphere where those who advocate the most virulent forms of racist ideology are today able to conceive the kind of demonstration they held in Charlottesville, attempting to make their variety of racism/white supremacy an accepted ideology not only in the White House but also in the political discourse of US society more broadly. 
        

Special Update and Further Commentary on the Release of Oscar Lopez Rivera,


by Matt Meyer

February 9, 2017—Puerto Rican Patriot Oscar Lopez Rivera is now free! Transferred this morning to San Juan, Puerto Rico, he will not be able to travel, hold meetings, give speeches or statements until his official date of clemency on May 17, 2017. He will serve his last days till then in a US federal facility in Puerto Rico. But he will be able to see his beloved daughter, granddaughter, siblings and family, to eat the foods of his youth, to see “the water’s edge” of which he profoundly wrote during his 35 years behind bars for the thought-crime of seditious conspiracy. He is on his homeland, and though he cannot yet feel the full force of the embrace of the entire peoples of Puerto Rico, he is nonetheless surrounded by that love and solidarity. 

Read More 


On Our Duty to Celebrate Oscar, 

by Matt Meyer

     
Immediately following Obama’s decision to commute the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera, social media was burning up with half-thought-out writings about the strategies, tactics, and process of the Oscar freedom campaign. Having served as a leading international associate of Dr. Luis Nieves Falcon and the Puerto Rican Human Rights Campaign since the late 1980s, and worked collaboratively with the National Boricua Human Rights Network since its inception, I have my own thoughts on what worked best and what mistakes were made along the way. There is, however, widespread agreement that—as I wrote on the fateful day of the announcement—Obama’s decision was “based primarily on a consistently-held, vigorously-fought, simple but stalwart commitment to decades-long, door-to-door, community-to-community, email-to-email (or tweet to tweet) building of a massive, grassroots-led single-minded campaign.” Though important parts of the Campaign were carried out by the Puerto Rican Diaspora and in some of the world-wide work, the foundation was clearly centered on the island of Puerto Rico itself.

Read More  

     

Column: "Daylight Time" by Susie Day

First Woman President Nukes Iran

WASHINGTONPresident Hillary Clinton, making good on her 2008 threat to "totally obliterate" Iran,  celebrated her first week in office by ordering a nuclear strike on Iran's capital city of Tehran. As a squadron of F-35s streaked through the sky toward the Mideast metropolis of over eight million, President Clinton outlined her foreign policy to a bevy of reporters at a White House press conference.

Ideas for the Struggle 

by Marta Harnecker

The following text is made up of 12 articles that were first published in Venezuela in 2004 and that were slightly modified in 2016. They were written without a predetermined order in mind and I have preferred to maintain this order to facilitate discussion with my earlier readers. I recommend starting from the topic that most interests you and then reading the rest of the text. As it is impossible to develop all facets of an idea in two pages, only by reading the whole text will readers be able to fully understand each individual articleMarta Harnecker, August 2016

Read More   Download PDF 



After Bernie—Electoral Strategy for the Left in 2016
     
by (list of signers)

June, 2016—Now that Donald Trump, an overt racist, has wrapped up the Republican nomination for US President, a chorus of voices is proposing a “left strategy” which can “defeat Trump” by electing the more covert racist, Hillary Clinton, whom the Democratic Party will almost surely be nominating.

Read More   Download PDF
 

     

Establishing a New York City
Maroon Exchange

     

by Bryan Olamo and Lee Miscere


Too many of us are consumers within a system that robs us of the fruits of our labor and maximizes profit for corporations. For a long time, US and global production has had little to do with satisfying the needs of human beings. Instead, production is driven by the endless accumulation of wealth, resources, and power. Too many people spend their lives as just one moving part in a machine built to deplete and destroy the planet.

The New York City Campaign to Free Russell Maroon Shoatz is investigating the possibility of an alternative, something we are calling a “Maroon Exchange,” so we can begin to take back our own labor, our relationships with each other, our collective relationship to the earth, and thereby our lives.

Read More  Download PDF

     

     

Poetry of Resistance: Imagining
the Overthrow of Capitalist Oppression

by Lauren Schmidt

       

[NOTE: This essay was originally a presentation to a panel with the same title at the Left Forum in New York City, May 31 2015. It was sponsored by the National Writers Union. Other panelists that day were Lora Tucker, Raymond Nat Turner, and Martín Espada.]
    
When I was fourteen years old, I took a book from my high school English teacher’s shelf, An Anthology of American Negro Poetry, a book that would introduce me to the poet who made me want to be a poet: Paul Laurence Dunbar. Before reading Dunbar and a number of poets in that anthology who would influence me as a writer—Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton chief among them—I had read poets I was supposed to love but never did: William Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot. It was Dunbar’s poem, “My Sort o’ Man” that made me say to myself, “If that’s what poetry can do, I want to be a poet.”
   

Read More  Download PDF

  

     

After Greece, Puerto Rico: 

Another Crisis Created by Capitalism

     

by Saulo Colón and Daniel Vila for the NYC Committee
for Dignity over Debt in PR

     

On Monday June 29, the Governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro García Padilla, delivered a live message to the people of Puerto Rico stating that the government’s $73 billion debt is unpayable. The governor stated, “The public debt, considering the present level of economic
activity, is unpayable.”

     

Read More

     

     

     

Glenn Ford on Black and Working-Class
Political Independence

     

The implications of his ideas for supporters of Bernie Sanders

     

by Linda Thompson

 

I would like to encourage readers of this website to listen to Glen Ford (of Black Agenda Report) speaking at a Socialist Action Canadian conference on “The Democratic Party, Death Trap for U.S. Blacks—Independent Labour/Black Political Action”: 
     
     
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCPVBaO5Cj4
   
His talk is worth the 45 minutes it takes to listen to—in particular for those who are considering their attitude toward the decision by Bernie Sanders to run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. It’s also significant in terms of understanding the question of “white privilege,” which is a perennial sticking point for many self-proclaimed socialists and revolutionaries.

   
I will try to summarize the highlights for those who cannot take the time to view the entire video, interspersing a few comments of my own about the implications of Ford’s analysis.

 

Read More  Download PDF

     
  
     

The Lover of a Subversive
Is Also a Subversive

     
Colonialism and the Poetry of Rebellion
in Puerto Rico

     
by Martín Espada

My great-grandfather, Buenaventura Roig, was the mayor of Utuado, a town in the mountains of Puerto Rico. When he died in 1941, thousands of mourners flocked to his funeral. Almost fifty years later, my father and I searched for the grave of Buenaventura Roig.
 
We never found it. Instead, we wandered into a remote cemetery, high up in the mountains, with row after row of stones dated between 1950 and 1953. These were men killed in a faraway place called Korea, among the 756 Puerto Ricans who died fighting for the United States in the Korean War.
 
My father, Francisco Luis (Frank) Espada, was also a Korean War-era veteran. He fought another war, on a different front, refused service at a segregated diner in San Antonio, Texas, jailed in Biloxi, Mississippi for refusing to sit at the back of the bus, subjected to apartheid in the same country he was sworn to defend.
     
Read More   Download PDF    
Three Waves of Struggle:
Notes Toward A Theory Of Black Liberation And Social Revolution
by Abdul Alkalimat and Saladin Muhammad
 
Introduction
 
Everyone knows that the Black liberation struggle has awakened and put the War against Black America back into the national political discussion. Everywhere people are proclaiming Black Lives Matter!
 
People in communities and on campuses are getting back into the streets, saying this is a new day and we won’t be silent any longer. Youth are in the lead. Their power is their energy and fearlessness.
     
Read more  
     
     
Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of
Religion, Freedom of Spiritual Belief
by Silvia Antonia Brandon-Pérez, May 6, 2018     
     
I am a long-time socialist and ordained woman priest according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, deemed excommunicated automatically because of my "disobedience" to the principles that ordination is forbidden to individuals unless they are male. I contribute these thoughts because of the inability of many fellow socialists and revolutionaries to accept and most particularly to respect my belief systems. It seems to be one of the forbidden topics. Allow me, then, to claim a moment of your attention.

     

Read more



Stop the Harassment and Threats
Against Radical Feminists
Ad in the December 2017 issue of The Progressive
     
[Note from the editors: Below find the text of an ad that appears in the December issue of The Progressive. In our view the issues raised warrant a conversation on the revolutionary left. We are therefore reproducing the ad here as our way of helping to facilitate that discussion.]
     
As socialists and progressives we are committed to building a united movement of the left rich in our diversity capable of creating a just, democratic, and egalitarian society freed from all forms of oppression and discrimination. To build such a movement for fundamental change will require an atmosphere of mutual respect, and an ability to tolerate political differences among our movement sisters and brothers. It will also require a willingness to engage in open debate and discussion in order to find common ground and build solidarity among various oppressed groups with at times divergent interests.

Read more    Download PDF

     

     

Hurricane Maria Brings Out the Hypocrisy in “American Citizenship” for Puerto Ricans
By  Carlito Rovira

In the days following the massive devastation caused by Hurricane Maria news reports have emphasized the “American citizenship” of Puerto Ricans. But why are Puerto Ricans suddenly being projected actively as American citizens when, traditionally, this has not been the case?

The same media outlets have discovered that most people in the U.S. do not know that Puerto Ricans hold U.S. citizenship. For many North Americans—who often suspect that people who speak Spanish and come from a territory in Latin America are “illegal”—the concept of Puerto Rican's as “citizens” must be baffling indeed.


     
          
     
A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and It's Place in the Black Liberation Movement


by Sundiata Acoli
     

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October, 1966, in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The name was shortened to the Black Panther Party (BPP) and it began spreading eastward through the Black urban ghetto colonies across the country.

In the summer of ‘68, David Brothers established a BPP branch in Brooklyn, New York, and a few months later Lumumba Shakur set up a branch in Harlem, New York. I joined the Harlem BPP in the fall of ‘68 and served as its finance officer until arrested on April 2, 1969 in the Panther 21 conspiracy case which was the opening shot in the government’s nationwide attack on the BPP. Moving westward, Police Departments in each city made military raids on BPP offices or homes in Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, Omaha, Denver, New Haven, San Diego, Los Angeles, and other cities, murdering some Panthers and arresting others.

Read More 

     
     
Build and Fight: Beyond Trump and the Limitations of the United Front, 

by Kali Akuno and Doug Norberg
     
Monday, January 23, 2017On Inauguration Day, we note the considerable range of the opposition to Trump, from traditional activists to very mainstream folks. In many respects the opposition mounted was unprecedented, on a day where patriotic and jingoistic hyperbole is typically concentrated and loudly broadcast more than at any other time, and when, traditionally, new Presidents make appeals to the heart and to democratic unity while all who know how false the claims are bite their lips, party, and hope for the best. The opposition struggling to find expression is broad and deep. But nearly all expressions of opposition are resorting to traditional methods of reformist-oriented protest while millions of people throughout the United States and the world are discussing and debating how they are going to survive and resist the emerging Presidential regime of Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing populism and a resurgent “America first” white nationalism.
     

Read More 

    

On the Trump Victory:

Four Post-Election Messages
   
by Greg Saunier

Dear artists and musicians,
Don't give up in despair. The narrative that Trump, Clinton and the corporate media have tried to sell us in 2016 is: "humanity is ugly, cutthroat, dark and pointless. . . .

Dear Trump voters,
Your man is already double-crossing you. . . .

Dear Clinton die-hards,
It is time for you to get out of the way. . . .

Dear progressives,
Thanks to Clinton pocketing 99% of the DNC fundraising money meant for down ballot races, both houses of Congress will now be Republican. . . .

Read More  


My Penny's Worth the Day After the Election

by Steve Bloom    

November 9, 2016—I offer my thoughts about the election for a penny, discounting 50 percent from the usual two-cents worth. I don’t feel as if I am in a position to demand full price. Although I was not the only one confidently predicting a Clinton victory for the last several months, it seems to me that all of us who were making that prediction need to give ourselves a reality-check based on the actual result. I remember having a similar sense, of the need for a critical self-reflection, last time I was stunned by the outcome of an election—in 1990, when the Sandinistas were defeated in Nicaragua. Tuesday night shook my world with that kind of force. If others are honest I think you will acknowledge something similar.

Read More   Download PDF 

     

The Case for Reparations

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Read More 

  


Film Review:

Sebastiao Selgado,
Social Photographer
by Deborah Engel;-DiMauro
          
"Salt of the Earth" showcases the work of Sebastiao Salgado, a social photographer and former economist from Brazil. Narrated by Wenders, the film traces Salgado's development as a photographer and reflects on his projects in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and all over South America. Though he traveled widely, Salgado explored each location long-term and in-depth, creating evocative and vivid photo essays of the world's most harrowing places and dispossessed people.     
     
Read More 
     
     
        

Tribute to the Families
of Our Political Prisoners
and Prisoners of War

by Dequi Kioni-Sadeki

Saturday, January 17th, 2015—Welcome to this 19th year of fundraising and paying tribute to the Families of our political prisoners and prisoners of war. On behalf of Herman and Iyaluua Ferguson especially, our founding members and our current members, we thank you for being here and for standing in the tradition of Black love, Black resistance, Black family and Black community.  Some of y’all have attended this dinner from its inception; some have come and gone and come back; some are here for the first time. Whatever your category, we hope it won't be your last time and that we can count on your continued support until we have no more freedom fighters held captive behind the walls. We also thank Michael Garvey, the 1199 SEIU activists, and the MLK, Jr. Labor Center’s staff here today for helping to make this day what it is.

Read More  Download PDF


     
          

Dragon and Hydra Revisited
A Dialogue

by Steve Bloom and Russell Maroon Shoatz

     
Special introductory note by the editors:

In the “Policies of this Website” we explain that we are seeking to promote discussions “where participants are engaged in active listening and a search for commonalities or convergences―giving at least as much emphasis to this as we do to 'clarifying differences.' The overall goal of our project is not just to recapitulate well-established views but to transcend them if/when we can in order to create a stronger collective synthesis of revolutionary thought.”

We believe that the exchange below is an excellent case study in this process and how it can work effectively. . . .


Introductory note by SB: In November of last year I

Most of the attacks on Clinton that I read on Facebook are from Sanders supporters. Have you also published columns mocking Sanders's pretensions to speak for the world's oppressed, or is the mockery reserved for Clinton? Do Old and New supporters view Sanders as a positive alternative to Clinton?
 
Most of the attacks on Clinton that I read on Facebook are from Sanders supporters. Have you also published columns mocking Sanders's pretensions to speak for the world's oppressed, or is the mockery reserved for Clinton? Do Old and New supporters view Sanders as a positive alternative to Clinton?
 

sent Maroon a letter about his essay “Dragon and Hydra,” which read, in part: “Your historical assessment regarding the failure of the dragon is indisputable: Any and all dragon formations that have, at least up to now, actually succeeded in conquering power ended up transforming themselves into a new oppressive force of some kind. However, we can make an equally valid argument regarding the historical failure of hydra formations. Not one of them has proved up to the task either―if we define the task as stopping a manifest-destiny imperialism from dominating and ultimately destroying the planet.”

In February, as part of our exchange over this question, I suggested some preliminary conclusions, explaining that "I might modify or reconsider them as a result of an exchange with you and/or a discussion in the group. Still, they represent the general approach I believe, at this point, we ought to collectively affirm after considering the relevant issues." What follows is Maroon's response to these four conclusions.

Introductory note by RMS: This text reflects a conversation between veteran activist Steve Bloom and political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz, exploring ways to move the oppressed and toiling masses' struggle forward, without that struggle losing control of the very organizations that have served to help liberate the masses from their primary antagonists.

Read More  Download PDF

     


Fighting for Socialism on Great Turtle Island—
The Struggle Against Settler Colonialism

by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

The U.S. and Canada are settler colonial dictatorships. This is hardly a revelation. Yet most anti-capitalist leftist radicals seem unaware of or indifferent to this truth, a fact that is well illustrated by the paucity of concern expressed in socialist publications and other outlets with decolonization struggles on Great Turtle Island (the name some Native Peoples give to what is often called“North America”). This struggle should, however, be understood as fundamental to bringing about the demise of U.S. imperialism and building a post-capitalist alternative. There has, of course, always been verbal acknowledgment of this and even a few efforts among socialists to recognize and act upon settler colonialism. Still, it has rarely figured prominently or centrally in any socialist platform in this part of the world, nor have the contradictions inherent in a Eurocentric socialism (in which I include anarchism) been systematically confronted―at least not without less than flattering results (see for example the book edited by Ward Churchill, number 7 on our list of readings below).
   

Read More  Download PDF  

Browse Archived Articles