Chicago, IL – Organizers with the Coalition to March on the Democratic National Convention held a press conference outside City Hall on Tuesday morning to speak out against the denial of their permit applications. The Chicago Department of Transportation gave the coalition an alternate route four miles away from where the DNC is scheduled to happen.

“We reject their decision because we have the right to voice the demands of the people within sight and sound of the DNC. We demand a permit to march as a gesture of good faith that the police will not introduce violence into our family-friendly protest.” said Jasmine Smith, a co-chair of the Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of Torture (CFIST), which is a campaign of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

“Many of the attendees of the DNC are responsible for or complicit in U.S. aggression against other countries including genocide in Palestine, police committing crimes with impunity, mass incarceration, deportations, neglect of LGBTQ and reproductive rights, undermining of workers’ demands, and other injustices against the people,” Smith continued.

“We all have the right to protest within sight and sound of the DNC, but right now, Palestinians should be afforded even more of this right, since the politicians that will be here, including Genocide Joe Biden, are the ones responsible for the almost 30,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza by the U.S.-funded Israeli military since October 7,” said Nazek Sankari with the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)

Tthe Democratic Party base in Chicago wants a ceasefire, wants to see Israel stop the genocide, wants to see its nominal leader, Joe Biden, stop arming Israel and end U.S. aid to Israel,” Sankari continued.

“We want money for jobs and education, not for wars and occupation. From Palestine to the Philippines, we demand an end to the U.S. war machine,” said Diana Balitaan with Anakbayan Chicago, after explaining how Democratic Party politicians are allied with the reactionary Marcos Duterte regime in the Philippines.

“We’re demanding that the Democrats act and vote on our behalf, on behalf of asylum seekers and all immigrants,” said Maggie Lugo, executive director of the Federation of Michoacan Clubs. “We’re not asking, we're demanding what we deserve.''

“With or without a permit we are going to be out there. They can't stop u,” said Regina Russell, member of Mothers Advancing Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS) in a written statement.

The coalition will be appealing the decision in court this week, but organizers emphasized that the mass movement will ultimately be responsible for winning the permit.

“This is not our first rodeo,” Joe Iosbaker with CAARPR said in reference to his and other coalition members’ experience organizing marches on NATO and the RNC, as well as mass rallies for all the fights coalition members are involved in.

Iosbaker continued, “We’re going to get a permit because the power of the people is stronger than the people in power.”

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #UnitedStates #DNC #MarchOnDNC2024 #NAARPR #CAARPR #USPCN #CFIST #Anakbayan

For several weeks, UPS Teamsters voted by phone and by computer on whether or not to accept a recently negotiated tentative agreement on terms for the next union contract. On Tuesday August 22, The International Brotherhood of Teamsters released the results of that vote.

Over 86% of ballots cast were votes to accept the national agreement with more than 58% of eligible voters turning out to put their vote in the box.

In addition to the national agreement, members voted on 28 regional and local supplements. Only one of these was originally rejected, which was a small supplement covered by Local 769 in Miami. The Local 769 supplement was approved on Friday, August 25, and the contract will now go into effect immediately.

This vote comes after months of practice pickets, rallies, petitions, parking lot meetings and informational flyering. Tens of thousands of Teamsters participated in the contract struggle, most for the first time in their lives. Both the turnout and approval rate are starkly different from the results of a similar vote five years ago as well as prior contract votes.

In 2018 an agreement included concessions from the union was rejected by over 54% with less than 45% turnout. That vote to reject the contract was overruled by then-President Jimmy Hoffa Jr., and the contract was put into effect despite the “no” vote.

Numbers can’t tell the whole story, but they do say something. A comparatively high turnout indicates a more engaged membership in a contract campaign. A high “yes” vote on a tentative agreement generally indicates that members felt that the credible strike forced the company to give in. Taken together, it means when we fight we can win. While this understanding on its own isn’t enough to transform the labor movement, it’s certainly a requirement.

Eric Dorland is a 22.4 driver with UPS, and a member of Teamsters Local 638 in Minneapolis. He said, “My coworkers and I worked on this contract campaign for months and we’re proud of what we have won. Building a strike threat is what gets the goods.”

While the outstanding supplement in Miami and several stand-alone contracts in Chicago still need to be ratified, many Teamsters at UPS are looking toward the future of turning this contract fight into long-term gains. Though not everything was won, union militants are looking for more improvements to fight for in the next contract battle. There still remain massive unorganized non-union sections of the logistics industry, specifically at Amazon, that the Teamsters are going after. Using the recent wins at UPS will surely help the effort.

Many new leaders stepped up over the past year as part of the contract fight and they will now have a key role to play in building struggle on the ground to enforce this new contract, and to win further gains in future negotiations.

#UnitedStates #Teamsters

The publication of the new English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s book, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, is a major event for Marxists, as well as for scholars of Soviet history in the English speaking world. Originally published in Italian in 2008, Iskra Press has just released the first authorized translation into English, thanks to the translation work of Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro.

The late Domenico Losurdo was a first-rate philosopher, historian and scholar, and the author of many important works such as Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005) and Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (2003). One of the most significant studies of Stalin ever written, English-speaking activists and scholars have long hoped that this important book on Stalin would be translated from Losurdo’s native Italian, but left-leaning publishers of Losurdo’s other books, such as Verso, refused to touch it.

It is noteworthy, as a bit of history about the translation, that when Henry Hakamäki wrote to Verso Books requesting that they publish Losurdo’s Stalin, Verso senior editor Sebastian Budgen responded, calling the book “one of Losurdo’s worst books” and insisted, “We will continue to publish the books by him that have intellectual merit and are based on real and serious research, but not these kinds of texts.” Hakamäki has noted, however, that the book contains at least “346 works cited in it, and has well over 1000 points of citation within the text.” Indeed, Losurdo is a world renowned scholar, whose research methodology in Stalin mirrors that of his other works. We can only assume, then, that by “these kinds of texts,” Budgen means that Verso will not publish books that challenge the anti-Stalin paradigm in scholarship, no matter how well researched.

Interestingly, this controversy regarding the book’s publication really cuts to the heart of what the book is about. The title of the book refers to the idea that a “black legend” has been constructed around Stalin with the intent of discrediting communism. This “black legend” regarding Stalin is the subject of the book. What does this mean? In historiography, which is the study of historical writing and research, a “black legend” refers to a sustained trend of fabrication, exaggeration, decontextualization, and distortion which aims to paint the subject as monstrous and without redeeming qualities.

In this sense, the book isn’t a biography. Losurdo’s book is a “history and critique” of the demonization of Stalin rather than a summation of the period of Stalin’s leadership in the Soviet Union, or an analysis of the figure of Stalin himself. The book breaks down this “black legend” in a systematic way, based on rigorous and well documented research. It shows how the history of Stalin and the Stalin era has been decontextualized, distorted, fabricated and exaggerated, in order to manufacture a political mythology of Stalin as a villain.

Stalin is a major figure in the history of the international communist movement, and both his theory and practice deserve careful study and summation, not just by scholars, but also by socialists and activists who are interested in building a better society. The demonization of Stalin has always been a cornerstone of anti-communism in the United States, and this demonization has been repeated by academics and even “socialists.” Some of these are indeed anti-communists, while others simply lack the courage to stand up to the anti-Stalin propaganda. Others still simply need to become better informed, which this book can help with.

But outside of the imperialist countries, Stalin is widely regarded as a great figure, who accomplished incredible things. Stalin is recognized for transforming the Soviet Union from a backwards, semi-feudal country to a world power, and for defeating Nazi Germany and saving the world from fascism. During the period of Stalin’s leadership of the USSR, the Soviet Union abolished illiteracy, did away with unemployment, provided universal healthcare and housing, and put an end to the cycles of economic crisis and famine that had plagued Russia for centuries prior to the Bolshevik Revolution.

While the Trotskyites had long shrieked impotently about “Stalinism,” the true origin of Stalin’s demonization in the West, according to Losurdo, is Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences.” The first chapter of Losurdo’s book, entitled “How to Cast a God into Hell: The Khrushchev Report” deals with dissecting the claims made against Stalin by Khrushchev in his “secret speech.” From there, Losurdo goes through the many charges against Stalin from then to now, looking at the historical, political and social context as a whole, and helps the reader to come to a fair conclusion about what really took place in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership. Through the course of Losurdo’s work, the picture we are left with is very different from the one we are usually taught.

Losurdo notes that as scholarship has progressed. “On the whole,” he writes, “the caricatured portrait of Stalin drawn first by Trotsky and then by Khrushchev no longer enjoys much credit.” He also explains that “it now becomes clear that the Secret Speech is entirely unreliable. There is no detail in it that is not contested today.” And yet it still remains a cornerstone of the anti-Stalin paradigm.

As the Communist Party of China wrote shortly after Khrushchev’s secret speech, “the question of how to evaluate Stalin and what attitude to take towards him is not just one of appraising Stalin himself; more important, it is a question of how to sum up the historical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the international communist movement since Lenin’s death.” This is why Losurdo’s Stalin is an important and valuable book. It is a work of scholarship destined to shake up the predominant, anti-communist history that is taught at every level of U.S. society. It is also important for activists and revolutionaries to read.

Stalin himself once said, “Theory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.” Losurdo has made an important contribution to our understanding and summation of that experience, and this translation helps to make it more accessible to readers in the United States and other predominantly English speaking countries. Today, people in the U.S are taking up socialist and revolutionary ideas in a way not seen in a very long time. Everyone who is interested in socialism’s history or its future should read this book.

This book is available from the Iskra Books website: https://www.iskrabooks.org/stalin-history-and-critique J. Sykes is the author of “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#UnitedStates #BookReviews #MarxismLeninism #Stalin

Without a doubt, modern science has achieved a great deal. It has given us automation with the potential to free us from toil, medical innovations that extend life expectancy, and an understanding of the laws of physics and nature. It allows us to light and heat our homes with the push of a button, and to communicate instantly across the world. It gives us the ability to produce enough to fulfill the wants and needs of everyone. Science is a cornerstone of modern society in terms of what we produce and what we consume.

And yet, despite all of that, we live in a world where automation doesn’t free us, but instead threatens our livelihood with unemployment. These great medical innovations are inaccessible to millions. And the most basic wants and needs of the masses of the people go tragically unfulfilled. Our world is instead characterized by poverty, waste, war and environmental crisis. Why does science seem incapable of solving these issues?

The reason is simple. We live in a class society, where the exploiting classes, especially the monopoly capitalists, enrich themselves at the expense of working and oppressed people here and all over the world. In the United States and much of the rest of the world, modern science is bound to the interests of this monopoly capitalist class.

The dominant ideas in society are a reflection of the interests of the dominant class, and science is no exception. As the British Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth writes in his essay, “Dialectical Materialism and Science”, “Modern science is the creation of the bourgeoisie. It is one of the most typical products of bourgeois society. And it carries the mark of its bourgeois origin in its methods and in its ideas.” In other words, science is a part of the ideological superstructure, which arises from and reinforces the mode of production, the economic base of society.

No doubt, the ideologues of the bourgeoisie will object: “Not so! Science is perfectly objective and untouched by class interest!” Well, let’s see.

Ultimately, the ruling class takes a pragmatist approach to science. It isn’t interested in science merely for the sake of expanding knowledge, understanding and human progress. On the contrary, its approach to science is guided by one thing and one thing only: obtaining the highest rate of profit. Capitalism takes the pragmatist notion of “truth’s cash value” to its extreme. Capitalist innovation relies entirely on the anarchy of production to determine what technology is developed and what is left behind. Financial interests and lobbying groups, such as those of the coal and oil industries, play a tremendous role in holding back technology that would present a challenge to their bottom line, such as the development of green technology, for example.

We can also see how the monopoly capitalist class has a history of manipulating scientific research for the sake of oppression. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould writes in his book, The Mismeasure of Man, “The history of scientific views on race, for example, serves as a mirror of social movements.” Gould argues that science is “socially embedded” and that “culture influences what we see and how we see it.” This is why, according to Gould, racist biological determinism was for some time the norm in evolutionary science. Science thus became a weapon in the arsenal of white chauvinism and national oppression, promoting racist theories like phrenology and eugenics.

Geneticist Richard Lewontin writes in Biology as Ideology, “Modern biology is characterized by a number of ideological prejudices that shape the form of its explanations and the way its researches are carried out.” Biological determinism has long been used to justify national oppression against African Americans, Chicanos, and others, in order to justify the super-exploitation of the oppressed nations.

We also see biological determinism being used to attack women and LGBTQ people. For example, the ideology of transgender oppression is grounded in a metaphysical view of biological sex which it pits against a dialectical understanding of gender. What does this mean? As Engels puts it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. …For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.” Biological determinism in regard to gender is metaphysical in this way, seeing sex and gender as inextricably linked, determined entirely by biological chromosomes, fixed, absolute, and immutable. This biological determinism is then used as a cudgel against trans people – as an ideological justification for their oppression hiding behind a claim to scientific truth, all in the service of maintaining the capitalist gendered division of labor.

In workplaces like Amazon and UPS, technology and science are used to track and discipline workers who don’t make productivity quotas. Artificial Intelligence is being used to replace workers in a number of fields. This is the kind of science and technology that the bourgeoisie is interested in developing and promoting.

In other fields science is likewise bound by the ideology of the ruling class. For example, genetically modified and hybrid seed production is driven primarily by the profit motive of agribusiness, rather than in the improvement of food in both quality and quantity. Take the agribusiness giant Monsanto, notorious for producing Agent Orange and for its seed patents. Monsanto instituted seed savings bans in order to ensure that farmers would have to buy seeds from them each season. Farmers defying Monsanto’s ban, even unwittingly, have found themselves fined for patent infringement.

In Colombia, for example, farmers who couldn’t afford to buy Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” seeds often ended up with their crops devastated by Monsanto’s aerial pesticides, or had their crops destroyed for containing patented seeds, even if those seeds were simply carried over by birds. Meanwhile, monoculture takes root at the expense of biodiversity, and the environmental crisis driven by capitalism escalates. This is just one example of how the brunt of capitalist environmental devastation falls upon those oppressed by imperialism. This is also true within the U.S., where environmental destruction disproportionately impacts working class and oppressed nationality communities.

The capitalists always and everywhere put profit over people and the planet. Coal and oil fueled the engines of the industrial revolution, and as such the technologies developed in the course of the industrial revolution were developed in line with and dependent upon the consumption of fossil fuels. This led not only to tremendous pollution, but also to the development of a fossil fuel industry with vast wealth and power. The U.S. imperialist financial oligarchy is deeply invested in fossil fuels and fossil fuel-dependent technology, to the point that they will go to any lengths to protect their oil interests, including military intervention at the cost of millions of lives. They oppose the development of clean energy technology and even promote climate change denial, taking a head-in-the-sand approach to the trajectory towards an uninhabitable planet.

While capitalism in its early phase promoted scientific progress and pushed technology forward in unprecedented ways, that is no longer the case as the fundamental class relations of society have come to hold back scientific progress. Marx explains this in broad terms. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he wrote, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.” The progressive advance of the productive forces is the main factor in driving science forward. Now, the only way to free the productive forces of society from the fetters of the relations of production is social revolution.

Socialists aren’t luddites. On the contrary, socialism champions scientific advance. Socialism fundamentally changes the way science is used by society. In this sense, socialism is science unleashed. Socialism utilizes the science most despised by the capitalist class, Marxism-Leninism, which analyzes the laws of motion at work in society in order to reshape society to serve the needs of working and oppressed people. This partisan science of the working class is put to work to remove the fetters placed upon the productive forces by capitalist class relations. Just as capitalist class interest has come to hold science back, so too can working class interest propel science forward.

Socialism replaces the anarchy of production and the drive for the highest rate of profit with socialist planning. Cyclical crises of overproduction are eliminated. Scientific education is prioritized. In this way, science is no longer a tool to increase profit, oppress people – and to line the pockets of the ruling class at the expense of everyone else. Instead, the working class in power can put science to work to make a world free of exploitation, toil, want, waste and war.

This is the world the socialist countries are in the process of creating. Look at socialist China, where extreme poverty has been eliminated, and where developing green energy and reorienting development towards environmental sustainability has become a top priority. Even the New York Times has to admit “There is no doubt about it: China is doing more than any other country when it comes to renewable energy and electric vehicles.” In this article from the NYT morning newsletter from August 14, 2023, German Lopez asks, “How?” The answer, he says, is “China has poured a lot of money into the research, development and use of clean energy, using its extensive manufacturing base to build solar panels and wind turbines and bring down prices worldwide. It has provided subsidies to buyers of electric vehicles, as the U.S. now does. And it has pursued, and surpassed, aggressive goals: China vowed to double its capacity of wind and solar power by 2030. It is on track to meet that goal five years ahead of schedule.”

What the New York Times doesn’t acknowledge is that this great achievement is a result of China’s socialist system. It can do this because the working class is in power. Unlike the United States and the other capitalist countries, the Chinese economy isn’t compelled by a drive for maximum profit at the expense of the people and the planet. We need to follow their example, but the only way to do that is through the socialist transformation of society. If we want science to play a truly liberating and progressive role, we have to free it from the shackles of capitalist ideology. And the only way to do that is to get rid of this parasitic, wasteful and destructive class of monopoly capitalists once and for all.

J. Sykes is the author of “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#UnitedStates #MarxismLeninism #MLTheory