Chicago, IL – Karl Marx observed over a 150 years ago that “the biggest thing happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”

According to Marx, the defining event leading up to the Civil War was not the Slaveholders’ Rebellion announced by the cannon fire on Fort Sumter but the raid on Harpers Ferry led by John Brown and Shields Green – a Black and white band of abolitionists. In other words, the movement of the slaves inspired by Harpers Ferry, and the election of a president – Lincoln – who was opposed to the unbridled expansion of chattel slavery, were the indispensable preconditions for Civil War.

In a certain sense the movement of the slaves was already fermenting revolution. The secession of the slave states was really a counter-revolution before the revolution. This is precisely why Marx characterized the secession as the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” He understood that what the South was fighting for was the liberty to enslave Black people and to turn the United States into a slave republic.

Marx writes that “the North, after a long hesitation and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history, drew at last the sword not for crushing slavery, but for saving the union, the South, on its part, inaugurated the war by loudly proclaiming ‘the peculiar institution’ as the only and main end of the rebellion. It confessed to fighting for the liberty of enslaving other people...”

Harriet Beecher Stowe also clearly stated the aims of the slaveholders, said she: “The slave party, finding they could no longer use the Union for their purposes, resolved to destroy it.”

The slave party, in alliance with the northern Democratic Party and its precursors, had a diplomatic history of one compromise after another, from inscribing in the Constitution that Black people were three-fifths human, to the Fugitive Slave Acts, to the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, and right on up until the Union was made the “slave of the slaveholder.”

War was inevitable because the slave party was hell bent on removing every legal barrier to the expansion of slavery into the territories. The movement of slaves and their allies were uniting with the “Free Soilers” to stop the expansion of slavery. Now it became a question for the South not only to taint the democratic institutions of the North and Northwest with the stench of slavery but to overturn the democratic institutions all together. The war waged by the South was not a war of defense but a war of conquest.

Hence a new era of revolutionary struggle is born in the raid on Harpers Ferry and the blast of cannon fire on Fort Sumpter.

Marx understood, way before Lincoln or before anyone except for Frederick Douglas and the revolutionary abolitionists, that not only was this a war fought for slavery; he recognized the revolutionary role of the slaves in winning the war and ending slavery. Being that he gave detailed attention to the movement of the slaves and the program of liberation of Black people, he supported their demands for emancipation, the right to bear arms, the demands for land and social equality.

Once the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and freed slaves were inducted into the armed services, Marx and the revolutionary abolitionists knew that the death knell of slavery had been sounded – that the Civil War had went from being a constitutional war aimed at keeping slavery in the Union to a revolutionary war aimed at smashing the Slaveholders’ Rebellion, thus liberating the slaves.

I have taken the liberty of sharing Marx’s analysis of how the Slaveholders’ Rebellion had to be defeated by revolutionary means, bringing about Black liberation, because I believe this can help us in understanding what needs to be done today.

There has been a lot of popcorn analyses comparing the events of January 6, when white supremacists stormed the Capitol, with the launching of the Civil War in 1861. This is because the Civil War was also clearly a fight for the ‘liberty’ to enslave our people. And like the white supremacists then, Trump and his crew were hell bent on ignoring every barrier prohibiting them from wielding power.

Since the overthrow of Reconstruction, i.e., the ending by violence and terror the revolutionary gains of the Civil War, there is a whole other history of alliances and compromises between the old former slaveholding South and the high finance northern capitalist to continue the oppression and super-exploitation of Black people. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution – abolishing slavery, granting citizenship as a birth right, equal protection of rights and the right to vote – were kept on paper but not fully enforced ‘til this day.

The white supremacist attempted coup on January 6 had the explicit aim of overturning the presidential election of November 3, 2020 by disenfranchising millions of Black and brown voters. It is not enough that the ultra-right has already reversed affirmative action and gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they want the total use of government to enforce their extremist white racist agenda. They want undisputed power to continue police tyranny in our communities, to perpetrate mass incarceration as the New Jim Crow, to plunder the national treasury, give tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for the poor and so on. When the masses rise up and fight back not only with protests in the streets but in the electoral arena at the ballot box, the MAGA white supremacist thugs are unleashed by their commander in chief against the very government that up to now has been loyal to them and has given their leader, Trump, unprecedented executive power.

This is not 1861. This 2021, but we live in the shadow of the unfinished revolution started by the last Civil War. To go forward we must muster the masses the get Trump and his racist regime out, we must do so while at the same time firmly and unequivocally putting forth an agenda for Black, and Chicano/Latino liberation, along with a class struggle agenda for hundreds of thousands of workers who are dying and suffering from this COVID-19 health crisis and economic devastation

It is incumbent on us to demand that Congress must end this white-supremacist revolt, by fully restoring the Voting Rights Act, expanding the Civil Rights Act to mandate that Black and brown people have the right to determine who polices their communities and how their communities are policed and to defund the police. They must end mass incarceration and grant reparations for the slavery and genocide perpetrated against our people. We don't just want Trump and his cohorts held accountable, we want to end this racist tyranny with Black liberation.

#ChicagoIL #InJusticeSystem #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #Antiracism #Us #Socialism #Antifascism #impeachment #Marx #CivilWar

The whistleblower’s report lays out how Trump attempted to strongarm Zelensky and the Ukrainian government into reopening an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The younger Biden was involved in a number of questionable business practices while a member of the executive board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. Trump tried to get Zelensky to do his bidding by withholding significant military aid that the United States has been giving to Ukraine since the 2014 coup d’état. Because of this, the mainstream media has taken to referring to the whole situation, including the ensuing private investigation, as “Ukrainegate.”

The investigation by Congressional Democrats began in early October and lasted for nearly the entire month. After spending all of November on further deliberation, two formal articles of impeachment were advanced by the House Judiciary Committee. The charges include abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. On December 19, the House of Representatives voted along party lines to impeach Trump.

What many people in the U.S. don’t understand about the process is that even though the House has taken this action, the articles of impeachment need to be passed by the Senate as well before Trump can actually be removed from office. This is an important detail, given that the Senate is controlled by Trump’s Republican Party. Additionally, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has thus far not turned over the articles of impeachment to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), citing the unlikelihood of a fair vote.

The manner in which this has been handled, and the issue which pushed the Democrats in Congress to take this action, reveals something about the impeachment process. Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is an evil man who deserves to lose his position as president of the United States.

Apparently sexual assault, open support of domestic white supremacist terrorists, concentration camps and family separation, and war-mongering (among many other things) don’t qualify as reasons to impeach President Trump, at least not to the Democratic leadership in Washington. Instead, it’s withholding military assistance to a country that many consider to have been overtaken by fascism, a result of the aforementioned U.S. interference in 2014. These weapons and other materials of war have been handed over to neo-Nazis in the Azov Battalion and other fascist elements within the Ukrainian armed forces. In turn, they’ve been used against other Ukrainians in their civil conflict and against oppressed groups in Ukraine, such as the Roma people. Implicit and explicit bipartisan support for the rise of reaction in Ukraine is the real ‘Ukrainegate,’ not this backroom politicking that has resulted in Trump skewering himself.

But let’s get back to the why of it all. The simple answer to this overarching question is that the Democratic Party doesn’t actually care about the things that Trump has done that materially impact working class and oppressed people in this country. In fact, they have actively aided him in much of it, including the provision of greater funding for his anti-immigrant agenda and for the expansion of the U.S. war machine. The Democrat leadership in DC can’t pursue impeachment on any of these grounds because they have willingly participated in the advancement some of the worst elements of Trump’s anti-people project.

In just the last week or so, 180 House Democrats came together with a nearly unified Republican caucus to pass a $738 billion military budget that includes Trump’s long-sought ‘Space Force,’ freedom to continue the established practice of endless war, and measures that deepen U.S. involvement in the humanitarian disaster in Yemen. The Afghanistan Papers, a series of documents detailing the lies U.S. intelligence concocted to justify the 18-year-long-and-counting war against that country, were released with minimal coverage. The Indian government is waging the kind of genocidal campaign against Muslims that the U.S. government wrongfully accuses China of perpetrating in its own country. Mass upheavals against injustice continue to roil from Chile to Iraq. But these issues get only fleeting coverage, if any at all, in the mainstream media.

All of this points to the need for the development of authentic movements of people in order to not only defeat Trump but to defeat the monstrous system that he stands for. The upcoming Democratic National Convention being hosted in Milwaukee represents an opportunity for the existing movements to unite. Under the umbrella of the growing Coalition to March on the DNC, the popular movements can demonstrate the people’s will and our resolve to bring the fight to our true enemies: the rich and powerful who make up the ruling class of this country.

All those who wish to advance a people’s agenda in order to defeat Trump and the forces that gave rise to him are invited to participate in this effort, which will culminate in a mass rally and demonstration in Milwaukee on July 13, 2020, the first day of the convention. As a brilliant leader once said: it is the people and the people alone who are the motive force of history.

Ryan Hamann is an organizer of the July 13 march on the DNC.

#MilwaukeeWI #PeoplesStruggles #impeachment

On December 18 the U.S. House of Representatives voted by a 230-197 margin to impeach President Donald Trump. The day before, thousands of people turned out at hundreds of protests across the country to support the impeachment effort.

Trump was impeached by a party-line vote on two counts: first, for abuse of power after he withheld military aid from the Ukraine in an effort to get the government there to investigate Joe Biden’s son for corruption; and second, for obstruction of justice because of his campaign to cover up his actions.

What was not voted on were Trump’s many other crimes against the people, in particular his anti-immigrant vendetta that led to the Muslim travel ban, severe restrictions on the numbers of refugees that the United States would accept, and worst of all, his concentration camps and family separations of Central American refugees trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, the Democratic leadership of the House voted for more funding for Trump’s wall and further militarization of the border in bipartisan vote. While most members of the House Hispanic and Progressive caucuses opposed the bill, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leadership were willing to sacrifice the lives and wellbeing of refugee families and children to consolidate support for impeachment among corporate Democrats.

Pelosi and leaders of the Democratic Party seized upon impeachment as a way channel widespread anger against Trump into the Democratic Party and ultimately the 2020 elections. Impeachment was also a means to consolidate more of the billionaires behind the Democratic Party and to widen splits among conservatives, many of whom have left the Republican Party or even have come out in favor of impeachment.

What Pelosi and other corporate Democratic share with the conservatives who reject Trump is the concern that Trump is weakening the U.S. empire further by disputes with U.S. allies over trade and climate change, as well as his moves to negotiate with longtime foes such as the DPRK (north Korea) and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is no coincidence that this third impeachment effort in 45 years (President Clinton was impeached but acquitted by the Senate, while President Nixon resigned before the impeachment vote), comes at a time when the U.S. empire has been in decline, since its major defeat in the war in Vietnam to today’s rise of China. In contrast, the first 180 years of the U.S. republic only had one impeachment – President Andrew Johnson in 1868.

In contrast to method of impeaching Trump, the successful refounding of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) represents the fight from below, from the grassroots, against Trump and the right wing. Originally founded in 1973 on the heels the international effort to free Angela Davis, NAARPR held its refounding conference in November in Chicago. 1200 people came to a Friday night rally on November 22 to hear Angela Davis and other movement activists. The next day 700 attended the conference and elected Chicago community activist Frank Chapman as their executive director. Chapman was a wrongfully convicted prisoner freed with the help of the Alliance, who has become a leader in the fight for community control of police to combat the epidemic of police crimes.

Present at the conference were families of those wrongfully convicted or murdered by the police, representatives of militant labor unions like the Chicago Teachers Union, and Palestinian American Rasmea Odeh, who was fought jail and deportation on trumped-up charges, spoke via a video connection. All showed the breadth and depth of the people’s movement in the United States. While organizers of the conference did work long and hard for months, its foundations were laid by hundreds of activists across the country who have been building grassroots, militant struggles in the community, on campuses and in the workplace. The rebirth of NAARPR also was based on the millions of African Americans and others who poured into the streets to protest police crimes in the movement for Black lives, including urban uprisings in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, the like of which hasn’t been seen since the 1960s.

While nobody would be happier than us if the senate convicts Donald Trump and tosses him from office, the reality is that the chances of this are slim to none. There are better odds that Trump can be defeated at the polls in 2020, and there is even the possibility of a relatively progressive Democrat being elected president. But even in this best-case scenario, the corporate Democrats, along with the Republicans, will support the billionaires’ agenda. Only a strong grassroots people’s movement, such as the newly invigorated NAARPR, can continue to push for real change that will benefit the working class and oppressed people of this country and the world.

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #Trump #impeachment

Minneapolis, MN – Organized by the Resist from Day One Coalition, a Trump Out Now protest has been set for 4:30 p.m., June1, at the federal courthouse in downtown Minneapolis (4th Street and 4th Avenue).

According to a statement from protest organizers, “We can’t wait until 2020 or wait patiently for processes like impeachment to run their excruciatingly slow bureaucratic course to push Trump out. Every day he stays in office he is a threat to humanity and his policies continue to severely harm millions of people at home and abroad.”

The statement continues, “Mass protests have stopped some of Trump’s worst proposals from moving forward – like the Muslim ban and the health care disaster. We need to build on that and get millions of people in the streets across the country standing up and saying the time is now for Trump to pack up and go.”

#MinneapolisMN #ResistFromDayOneCoalition #impeachment