The Christmas Gift That Keeps on Giving

 http://libcom.org/news/gift-keeps-giving-hatred-ruling-classes-21122020

The meaning of Christmas.

In 'Emblematic Parting Blow,' Trump Moves to Take $700 Million Per Year Out of Tipped Workers' Pockets ~~ Kenny Stancil

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/12/23/emblematic-parting-blow-trump-moves-take-700-million-year-out-tipped-workers-pockets

A waitress serves guests as people dine outdoors in Pasadena, California on December 2, 2020. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

IWW Organizing Manual

https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/industrial-workers-of-the-world-iww-organizing-manual

A few snips from the detailed IWW manual about how to organize..

Collective Statement of Total Objection to Military service

https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/xupoluto-tagma-collective-statement-of-total-objection-to-military-service

This declaration is a collective public statement of total objection to military service. What does this mean? It means that we refuse to enlist to the army. We want to make our objection publicly, under our own names, not only because we do not want to hide, but because we also want to encourage others to declare their objection. It means that we are not looking for individual solutions for each one of us separately, but we are seeking ways of collectively responding to the problems that the capitalist system produces. It also means that we are not merely trying to avoid military service, but we want to oppose the institution of the military as a whole – what it represents, protects and reproduces.

Social Democracy- An Unworthy Goal ~~ Kacey SW

https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/kacey-sw-social-democracy-an-unworthy-goal

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IS NOT DESIRABLE

It's Been a Long Nightmare Before Christmas for UPS and Postal Workers ~~Alexandra Bradbury

 https://labornotes.org/2020/12/its-been-long-nightmare-christmas-ups-and-postal-workers

For postal and UPS workers, the peak season started in March with the pandemic... and it never let up. Photos: IMF Photo Cory Hancock (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), Michael Shea

NIKE: UNDERSTANDING HOW WEALTH AND POVERTY ARE CREATED IN THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST SYSTEM ~~ Jeremy Cloward

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/zvq4786agn3el4jw9lpyyyr3o6bzct

Remembering Protest Singer Phil Ochs on his 80th Birthday

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/remembering-protest-singer-phil-ochs-on-his-80th-birthday/

Phil Ochs

CBO: Medicare for All Reduces Health Spending ~~Matt Bruenig

https://portside.org/2020-12-15/cbo-medicare-all-reduces-health-spending

Overall, the study confirms what serious Medicare for All analysts have known for some time now. It is possible to provide high-quality public health insurance to every person in the country while also saving money overall on health spending.

Immigration - Marxist/Socialist Position Documents

This is a ready reference for leftist writing on immigration from the SP archives.  The articles are numbered for reference purposes.

Capitalist Covid Catastrophe ~~ Martha Grevatt

https://www.workers.org/2020/12/53129/

It’s December 2020. The working class in the United States is facing a crisis of survival. It is the worst such crisis since the Great Depression, especially for the most oppressed.

The statistics are damning: One in six households face hunger; one in five workers are out of work; some 30 million renters and homeowners face homelessness in the coming winter months. The COVID death toll will hit 300,000 any day now. The virus is now the leading cause of death in the U.S., passing heart disease and cancer. Hospitals are unable to cope with the surge in COVID cases.

There could likely be half a million deaths before vaccines are widely available — more than double the 200,000 projected as a worst case scenario at the start of the pandemic.

The Unraveling of America ~~ Wade Davis

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.

MARX'S IMMISERATION THESIS, THE TRUMP/BIDEN EFFECT, AND THE FASCIST TIDE. ~~ Colin Jenkins

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/marxs-immiseration-thesis-the-trump-biden-effect-and-the-fascist-tide

Patriotism, a Menace to Liberty ~~ Emma Goldman

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1911/patriotism.htm

WHAT is patriotism? Is it love of one’s birthplace, the place of childhood’s recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations ? Is it the place where, in childlike naivete, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one “an eye should be,” piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds, and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or the place where we would sit at mother’s knee, enraptured by wonderful tales of great deeds and conquests ? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous, and playful childhood?

If that were patriotism, few American men of today could be called upon to be patriotic, since the place of play has been turned into factory, mill, and mine, while deafening sounds of machinery have replaced the music of the birds. Nor can we longer hear the tales of great deeds, for the stories our mothers tell today are but those of sorrow, tears, and grief.

Marx on Immigration ~~David L. Wilson

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/02/01/marx-on-immigration/

Renters Are Organizing To Fight Evictions, Just Like They Did in the 1930s ~~ Zacharias Szumer

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/australian-renters-evictions-organizing-1930s-covid

In the wake of the pandemic, Australian renters are once again facing the threat of mass evictions. The militant renters’ struggles of the Great Depression are an excellent model for the movement that’s taking shape today.

Intellectual Property Rights ~~ DEAN BAKER, ACHAL PRABHALA AND ARJUN JAYADEV

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/09/want-vaccines-fast-suspend-intellectual-property-rights

Tens of millions of Americans struggle to pay rent as unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium near expiration ~~ Alex Findijs

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/pers-d04.html

~~ snip ~~

The September 11 terror attacks, which killed 2,977 people, were used to launch wars costing some $6 trillion and to implement sweeping attacks on democratic rights, all on the basis of a supposed national emergency. Now that the equivalent of a 9/11 is happening every day, death on such a massive scale is effectively treated by the US political establishment as inevitable. And amidst the greatest social crisis since the Great Depression, there is supposedly nothing that can be done to alleviate mass impoverishment.

Amazon workers unite and fight: “Bezos’ obscene fortune only possible because of the work we do”

https://www.liberationnews.org/amazon-workers-unite-and-fight-bezos-obscene-fortune-only-possible-because-of-the-work-we-do/

Workers in more than a dozen countries organized coordinated actions against corporate giant Amazon to coincide with the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Those participating are from a diverse array of countries and lines of work up and down the supply chain, from warehouses of the United States to call centers in the Philippines. The demands are varied and serve as an indictment of the monopoly’s anti-worker operating practices.

The Creation of Scarcity ~~. Michael Perelman

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLPicUXGrfdQIQliNIHeThSUTNIcbXkEVJt0nnpNEhsbpIN8HSphR-vRCh9DgV0hvEUKlIVUTkHFFal-YxY8c7AJavS2Pfh2vlQoDHaSbqY7HFQqRRCNlSIuyECxDtawldvZ7lj5dBFTsl/

This was posted by SageThinker quite some time ago.  It is a PDF so had to be re-typed by hand to post.

The key to avoiding the curse of a comfortable life was to create artificial scarcity for the rural poor.  As Arthur Young observed in 1771, "everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious" (cited in EP Thompson 1963, 317).  Access to common land touched a particularly sensitive nerve among more affluent property owners.  Marx (1977, 881 and EP Thompson, 1963, 217 ) cited by a Dr. Hunter who fretted that "a few acres to the cottage would make the laborers too independent."

Reviving the Gallows, Electric Chair, Gas Chamber, and Firing Squad Recalls a Hideous History ~~Austin Sarat

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/05/trumps-plan-revive-gallows-electric-chair-gas-chamber-and-firing-squad-recalls

The way the federal government can kill death row prisoners will soon be expanded to ghoulish methods that include hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber and the firing squad.

Set to take effect on Christmas Eve, the new regulations authorizing an alternative to lethal injections – the method currently used in federal executions – were announced by the Justice Department on Nov. 27.

What is clear is that these new regulations send a message about the lengths the administration will go to kill as many death row inmates as possible before Joe Biden takes office and, as expected, halts the federal death penalty.

If the president and Department of Justice succeed in their plan, the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump's federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliest in the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century.

Isn't socialism about conformity? ~~ Paul D'Amato

https://socialistworker.org/2006-1/590/590_09_MakeSame.php

From the Meaning of Marxism Series

SOCIALISM WILL make us all like the same. This claim is, to quote the British journalist Paul Foot, "delicately stoked by the press and television of a capitalist society which is increasingly stamping sameness and conformity on its working people."

LEE CAMP: We Can’t Vote ‘Em Out

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/30/lee-camp-we-cant-vote-em-out/

The criminal absurdity of American politics - 

It doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. I know that because here in America we can’t vote out the assholes. We can trouble them, scare them, annoy them, and sometimes even pressure them into doing some small thing that’s mildly progressive. 

But we can’t vote out the assholes.

The Philosophy of Antifa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgwS_FMZ3nQ&feature=youtu.be

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

COVID Tipped the Scale: How King County Employees Made Childcare a Union Benefit ~~Michael Laslett

https://labornotes.org/2020/11/covid-tipped-scale-how-king-county-employees-made-childcare-union-benefit

Ten thousand union members who work for King County, where Seattle is located, have won a $9 million fund to cover emergency childcare expenses this school year. Now the union coalition is pushing to make the benefit permanent.

“We did not sign up to be raped”: Women veterans fight back against military sexual trauma ~~ Johnnie Lewis

https://www.workers.org/2020/11/52749/

~~posted for Collectivist ~~ 

This month two veterans, represented by the Yale Law School Veterans Legal Service Clinic, won a lawsuit against the U.S. Army for giving “bad paper” discharges to veterans with mental health diagnoses. The discharges include women victims of sexual assault, abuse and harassment, known collectively as Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Additionally, the lawsuit supported all veterans with diagnoses of traumatic brain injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who were given bad paper discharges. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/11/18/army-agrees-review-thousands-of-bad-paper-discharges-part-of-lawsuit-settlement.html

200 years since the birth of Friedrich Engels ~~ Peter Schwartz

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/28/pers-n28.html

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago today on Nov. 28, 1820. Together with his friend Karl Marx, who was two-and-a-half years his senior, Engels co-founded scientific socialism. Two hundred years later, their life’s work is of burning contemporary relevance. They were much more farsighted than the countless academics who have filled entire libraries with their attempted refutations of Marxism.

Whiskey Snakes and Voltaire ~~ Joe Bageant

https://bageant.typepad.com/joe/2013/06/whiskey-snakes-and-voltaire.html

See the introduction to this series of posts: Writing on Things Southern and Past

Are Workers “Smart Enough” to Govern Under Socialism? ~~ Gordon Haskell

Gordon Haskell - 20 September 1948
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/haskell/1948/09/socdem.html
 
"In our present set-up the man who gets to the top is usually the man blessed by rich parents, good connections, or a willingness to grind his fellow humans under his heel."

“A few months ago,” says my friend Jack to me the other day, “you were telling me about how the workers and farmers and other people that do something useful will run things once they wake up and take over from the monopolists and politicians and the rest of the riff-raff that has the world by the tail these days.”

Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth ~~ Bertolt Brecht

http://www.idcommunism.com/2017/08/bertolt-brecht-five-difficulties-in.html

Summary

The great truth of our time is that our continent is giving way to barbarism because private ownership of the means of production is being maintained by violence. Merely to recognize this truth is not sufficient, but should it not be recognized, no other truth of importance can be discovered. Of what use is it to write something courageous which shows that the condition into which we are falling is barbarous (which is true) if it is not clear why we are falling into this condition? We must say that torture is used in order to preserve property relations. To be sure, when we say this we lose a great many friends who are against torture only because they think property relations can be upheld without torture, which is untrue.

Lenin on Social Class

https://mltoday.com/from-the-classics-lenin-on-social-classes/

From  A Great Beginning

June 28, 1919

And what does the “abolition of classes” mean? All those who call themselves socialists recognise this as the ultimate goal of socialism, but by no means all give thought to its significance.

Creeping fascism after the U.S. election: Trump’s march to Gilead

https://mronline.org/2020/11/24/creeping-fascism-after-the-u-s-election-trumps-march-to-gilead/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Would you believe it? Just when these ‘creeping fascism’ people were expecting Donald Trump to unleash hordes of Brownshirts onto the streets of America, he goes and gets defeated in an election! Yes, the normal functioning of capitalist democracy! Which shows you just how far fetched the idea of creeping fascism was.

Ben Fletcher’s One Big Union ~~ Robin D.G. Kelly

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ben-fletchers-one-big-union

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Ben Fletcher, once one of the most important black labor figures in the United States, has faded into obscurity. But he couldn’t be more relevant to the most urgent political projects of the present.

The Nation’s New Crime Boss ~~ JOHN DAVIS

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/20/the-nations-new-crime-boss/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

A great deal of energy was expended recently to influence who would be the next president of the criminal enterprise that is the United States of America. The nation’s criminality was established historically by its extermination of indigenous populations inconvenient to its imperial goals and its enslavement of Africans expressly imported into the country under hideous conditions for the further ease and enrichment of the already wealthy. Although these were crimes initiated long before the formal constitution of the U.S., when the slave trade was belatedly outlawed in 1808, slaves were bred in the Upper South and driven in chains across the country or shipped down the Mississippi to be sold in the Deep South. There, they joined their brothers and sisters in an industrialized system of enforced labor cruelly driven by the whip. The expansion of cotton across the south required the removal of Indian tribes who lived on the land the plantation owners wished to cultivate. Their forced removal included documented acts of genocide.

The First Thanksgiving: Separating Myth From Fact ~~ RUTH HOPKINS

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/thanksgiving-myths-facts-mayflower-landing

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Here in the United States, we’ve all heard the legendary tale of the first Thanksgiving, when Pilgrims dined with Natives in celebration of a bountiful harvest.

What Could be Better Than a Drug That Can Stop Covid? A Society That Doesn’t Let Some Make Billions off a Drug Millions Can’t Access ~~ SAM PIZZIGATI

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/23/what-could-be-better-than-a-drug-that-can-stop-covid-a-society-that-doesnt-let-some-make-billions-off-a-drug-millions-cant-access/

The capitalist economy doesn’t work for workers

https://mronline.org/2020/11/19/the-capitalist-economy-doesnt-work-for-workers/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Capitalism, an economic system of private ownership and control of production based off the exploitation of workers, is ultimately not reformable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change economic system. We believe that socialism provides the solution to the world’s ills and that marxist theory gives us the tools to enact social change we so desperately need.

Bolivia: A hero’s welcome — Inside Evo Morales’ triumphant return tour ~~ Oliver Vargas

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/bolivia-heros-welcome-inside-evo-morales-triumphant-return-tour

~~ posted for Collectivist~~

The return of Evo Morales to Bolivia on November 9, one day after President Luis Arce’s inauguration, marked the formal end of last year’s United States-backed coup.

US history proves it: change comes from struggle, not elections ~~ Eleanor Morley

https://redflag.org.au/node/7429

Pinning hopes on the outcome of elections has weakened social movements. When the oppressed take matters into their own hands, things change.

Nearly 1,000 Homeless People Died in LA in 2020 as 93,000 Homes Sit Vacant ~~ Alex Ferrer, Terra Graziani and Jacob Woocher

https://portside.org/2020-11-02/nearly-1000-homeless-people-died-la-2020-93000-homes-sit-vacant

We must see real estate market for what it truly is: an institution rooted in settler colonialism that allows land (and the housing that sits atop it) to be distributed and controlled by those who have enough money for their preferences to matter.

Rosa Luxemburg's Revolutionary Socialism ~~ Paul Leblanc

https://socialistworker.org/2019/01/15/rosa-luxemburgs-revolutionary-socialism

TEN YEARS after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919, playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht wrote in his typically stark, homely verse:

Red Rosa now has vanished too.
Where she lies is hid from view.
She told the poor what life’s about.
And so now the rich have rubbed her out.

Luxemburg was born in 1871, in a Poland divided under German and Russian domination, and she played a role in the working-class socialist movement of each country.

Yet her influence has been global. She was part of a mass working-class movement seeking a transition from capitalism to socialism. The decades following her death saw increasing crises and finally a half-century decline and collapse of that movement.

Why the military establishment backed Biden

https://mronline.org/2020/11/17/why-the-military-establishment-backed-biden/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The U.S. military establishment will breathe a sigh of relief at Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Nearly 800 former high-ranking military and security officials penned an open letter in support of the Democratic candidate during the campaign. A who’s who of former generals, ambassadors, admirals and senior national security advisers—from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to four-star admiral and Bush-era Deputy Homeland Security Advisor Steve Abbot—backed Biden as the best bet to revive U.S. power. A month earlier, 70 national security officials who served in Republican administrations threw their weight behind Biden (the list soon grew to 130), arguing that, on foreign policy, Trump “has failed our country”.

Labor podcasts

https://portside.org/2020-11-16/labor-podcasts

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The right-wing has effectively taken over much of the media, from TV stations to radio and podcasts. Fortunately, labor organizers and analysts are creating high quality informative podcasts and news shows.

Reasserting the Importance of Committed, Truthful, On-the-Ground Reporting on the Centenary of John Reed’s Passing ~~Juan Antonio Sanz

https://portside.org/2020-11-14/reasserting-importance-committed-truthful-ground-reporting-centenary-john-reeds-passing

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

On 17 October 1920, just days before his 33rd birthday, American journalist John Reed, author of Insurgent Mexico, a book covering the Mexican Revolution, and Ten Days that Shook the World, the most famous chronicle of the October Revolution of 1917, died of typhus in a Russian hospital in Moscow. Both of these works and Reed’s career now constitute an invaluable example of engaged journalism committed to social justice while ensuring truthful reporting, respect for sources and the indispensable need for the journalist to be where the news is happening.

Class Oppression and the Virus ~~ Deidre Griswold

https://www.workers.org/2020/11/52464/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The United States continues to lead the world — in the number of COVID-19 cases as well as in deaths.

Americans Work Too Damn Much AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE MCCALLUM. ~~ Micah Uetricht

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/work-time-leisure-hours-overwork-labor

Workers in the United States have lost control of perhaps the most important aspect of their lives: their time. Getting that time back is crucial — for workers’ well-being, for democracy, and for weakening the tyrannical power of the boss.

Meatpacking Workers Say Attendance Policies Force Them to Work With Covid-19 Symptoms. ~~ HEATHER SCHLITZ

https://inthesetimes.com/article/meatpacking-workers-attendance-policy-covid-19

As the pandemic rages, punitive attendance policies at corporate meat plants coerce sick workers into showing up, according to activists, experts and the workers themselves.

The Envy of the World Still has no Functioning Democracy ~~ Paul Street

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/11/the-envy-of-the-world-still-no-functioning-democracy-here/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Nobody Said Biden’s Name

I walked up to Chicago’s Trump Tower down the middle of Michigan Avenue last Saturday night. Within four blocks of the hated structure, both sides of the street were jammed with cars full of young LatinX, Black, and white folks honking their horns, hanging out car windows, waving, roaring their engines, playing YG’s chart-topping hit “(FTD) Fuck Donald Trump,” and aiming bird flips at the Trump building. Young people of all races and ethnicities danced on all four corners of Michigan and Wacker.

It was one Hell of a celebration. As well it should have been. Donald Trump is a vicious, pandemic-spreading white-supremacist, eco-exterminist, uber-narcissist, and instinctual fascist who richly deserves Noam Chomsky’s description of him as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” A second Trump term would be a tragedy from which the nation and world might never recover.

Anyone on the “the left” who wouldn’t like to see Trump removed from the world’s most dangerous job is morally and intellectually comatose.

Afterword to Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program ~~ PETER LINEBAUGH

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/11/afterword-to-karl-marx-critique-of-the-gotha-program/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Don’t Let Up: Fascism isn’t Dead Yet ~~ PETE DOLACK

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/08/dont-let-up-fascism-isnt-dead-yet/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Even if Joe Biden had won the U.S. presidency by the expected landslide, the threat of fascism would remain. And not simply because Trumpites are not going away anytime soon.

Donald Trump doesn’t have the intelligence, competence or sufficient ruling-class backing to actually become a fascist dictator. His desire to be one, however, has been more than sufficient to necessitate the widest possible movement against him and the social forces he will continue to represent, and there is no doubt his authoritarian impulses would have become still worse had he won a second term. What little democracy is left in the United States’ capitalist formal democracy would have been further reduced.

What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could

- https://www.dissentmagazine.org

“Capitalism is dying,” wrote Michael Harrington forty years ago. “It will not, however, disappear on a given day, or in a given month or even year. Its demise will take place as a his­toric process that could lead to democratic so­cialism—or to a new kind of collectivist and authoritarian society.”

Michael Harrington ▪ Fall 1978

Capitalism is Double-Billing Us: We Pay From Our Wallets Only to be Robbed of Our Future ~~ Jonathan Cook

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/28/capitalism-is-double-billing-us-we-pay-from-our-wallets-only-to-be-robbed-of-our-future/

Here is a word that risks deterring you from reading on much further, even though it may hold the key to understanding why we are in such a terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is “externalities”.

It sounds like a piece of economic jargon. It is a piece of economic jargon. But it is also the foundation stone on which the west’s current economic and ideological system has been built. Focusing on how externalities work and how they have come to dominate every sphere of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet – and offer at the same time the signpost to a better future.

Engels and Marriage

https://mronline.org/2020/11/06/engels-and-marriage/

~~Posted for Collectivist ~~

One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India

https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-32-communist-movement-in-india/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

On 17 October 2020, the Indian communist movement looks back on a century of courageous resistance against tyranny, oppression, and exploitation. This was a century of sacrifices by hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries of the Indian communist movement who pledged their lives to the dream of an egalitarian and a truly democratic society. Thousands of cadre were martyred on this path and many more continue to carry forward the dream and the fight in the face of state repression, violence, and infinite efforts at subversion.

Why Capitalism Was Destined to Come Out on Top in the 2020 Election ~~ RICHARD D. WOLFF

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/06/why-capitalism-was-destined-to-come-out-on-top-in-the-2020-election/

No matter who “won” the U.S. election, what will not change is the capitalist organization of the country’s economy.

The great majority of enterprises will continue to be owned and operated by a small minority of Americans. They will continue to use their positions atop the capitalist system to expand their wealth, “economize their labor costs,” and thereby deepen the United States’ inequalities of wealth and income.

Race and Class ~~ Fred Hampton (Black Panther)

Excerpts from Power Anywhere Where There's People = A Speech By Fred Hampton

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html

We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist.

Communists Fight Racism and Evictions ~~ Stephen Millies

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2019/10/25/communists-fight-racism-and-evictions/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The long shadow of the Chicago race riot, Part 4

Despite the race riot and segregated housing, Chicago’s Black population more than doubled in the 1920s and reached 233,903 by 1930. Even in 1940, during the Great Depression, the figure climbed to 277,731.

A small Mexican community also grew, despite the massive deportations of the early 1930s. About 5 percent of workers at the Armour and Swift packinghouses were Mexican.

The Chicago Defender became one of the best known African American newspapers and was distributed countrywide. In 1928, the African American Oscar DePriest was elected from Chicago to the House of Representatives. He became the first Black member of Congress since George Henry White of North Carolina was driven out in 1901.

The United States is not a Democracy. ~~. Ben Hiller

https://mronline.org/2020/11/04/119166/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The United States boasts one of the most farcical democratic systems to have been invented. The country’s constitution is an eighteenth-century relic penned by merchants and slave owners, amendments to which can be blocked by as few as 13 states representing less than 4 percent of the population. Its Supreme Court, conservative by nature and stacked with tenured-for-life justices, provides an institutional anti-majoritarian check on the popular will.

Debs Attacks “the Monstrous System” of Capitalism ~~ E. Debs

In recognition of election day

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5725/

The world’s workers have always been and still are the world’s slaves. They have borne all the burdens of the race and built all the monuments along the track of civilization; they have produced all the world’s wealth and supported all the world’s governments. They have conquered all things but their own freedom. They are still the subject class in every nation on earth and the chief function of every government is to keep them at the mercy of their masters.

Trump-Biden 2: Dueling Billionaire-Backed Liars ~~ Jeff Mackler

https://socialistaction.org/2020/11/01/trump-biden-2-dueling-billionaire-backed-liars/

If I were a high school debate referee I’d score Joe Biden the winner big time in the October 22 final debate with the nation’s moron accidental president Donald Trump. But it wasn’t a high school debate wherein each side is assigned in advance to take opposing sides of a question. In Trump-Biden 2 both debaters took the stage to defend the same side, that is, the corporate capitalist elite who really run the country regardless of which candidate gets to live in the White House.

A Right-Wing Think Tank Is Behind the Controversial Great Barrington Declaration Calling for COVID-19 Herd Immunity. ~~ Dana Drugmand,

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-10-29/a-right-wing-think-tank-is-behind-the-controversial-great-barrington-declaration-calling-for-covid-19-herd-immunity/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

‘Ecological Leninism’: On waging war against the common cause of Corona and the climate crisis. ~~Eds

https://mronline.org/2020/10/30/ecological-leninism-on-waging-war-against-the-common-cause-of-corona-and-the-climate-crisis/

What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis?Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.

COVID-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to buy and sell, hacking down tropical forests, blowing up limestone caverns, and draining wetlands, we drive out the diseases and their carriers: bats, rats, mice, anthropods, mosquitoes and locusts. For Malm it’s ‘rather as if the human economy had resolved to lift up the container of coronaviruses and other pathogens and pour the load over itself.’

The Neoliberal Road to Serfdom ~~ Branko Marcetic

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/03/neoliberalism-totalitarianism-surveillance-hayek-socialism?fbclid=IwAR3574vPPFWTXyt4Z9xkXeSJQfd-IfJ6v4ZQSkdhlvu_MKff8zwoRNVs38w

~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~

The fear of socialism is mostly based on one idea: that the end of the road of bigger government is the totalitarian horror of the early twentieth century.

Sure, there are other objections, usually involving muttered words like “market” and “efficiency.” But for the fathers of neoliberalism like Friedrich Hayek, what it really came down to was the fear that every increase in the role of the state was just one more step toward the chimneys of Dachau: power concentrated among a know-it-all elite deaf to the problems facing its people; ever-present surveillance of the population, whether “suspect” or not; a vast, armed bureaucracy ready to stamp out dissent; countless bodies locked and tortured in prisons; and a state that asserts the power to treat its citizens as mere subjects while demanding secrecy and impunity for itself.

Elections: What’s the economy got to do with it? And what we can do about it ~~ Gary Wilson

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2020/10/29/elections-whats-the-economy-got-to-do-with-it-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~

Oct. 28 — In the final days of campaigning before the 2020 elections, every form of media is saturated with advertising for the Democratic and Republican candidates in local, state and national elections.

The focus is mainly on the presidential campaigns. The far-right Trump campaign is openly racist and white supremacist, with Trump’s call-out to the neofascist Proud Boys to “stand by.” The campaign’s slogan is, in the words of the New York Post endorsement of Trump, “Make America Great Again, Again.”

The Taylor System—Man’s Enslavement by the Machine - V. Lenin

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/13.htm

Capitalism cannot be at a standstill for a single moment. It must forever be moving forward. Competition, which is keenest in a period of crisis like the present, calls for the invention of an increasing number of new devices to reduce the cost of production. But the domination of capital converts all these devices into instruments for the further exploitation of the workers.

The Taylor system is one of these devices.

The General Strike ~~ Bill Haywood

https://archive.iww.org/history/library/Haywood/GeneralStrike/

Among the best parts are in the questions and answers at the end.

Only Class War Can Stop Climate Change ~~ PARIS MARX

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/class-war-climate-change-overpopulation-carbon

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

A new report shows that the world’s top 1 percent is responsible for double the emissions of the entire bottom half of the planet. The message is clear: to fight climate change, we have to fight the ruling class.

Competing with Nature: COVID-19 as a capitalist virus ~~ Ashley Smith

https://mronline.org/2020/10/20/competing-with-nature-covid-19-as-a-capitalist-virus/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The COVID-19 pandemic shows no signs of abating as the death toll climbs ever higher around the world. Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews epidemiologist Rob Wallace about the global capitalist roots of the current pandemic, the likelihood of future pandemics, and the types of organized resistance necessary to prevent them.

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist with the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps. He is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and the just-released Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19. He has consulted with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Communist Manifesto ~~K. Marx, F. Engels

Considered as a foundational document, presented are links to various formats of the Manifesto of the Communist Party

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

PDF version:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Audio:

https://www.marxists.org/audiobooks/archive/marx-engels/communist-manifesto/index.htm

Ebook:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61

We Can’t Be Free Until We Fully Abolish Slavery ~~ Michele Bratcher Goodwin

Keeping an eye on present day American slavery...

https://blackagendareport.com/we-cant-be-free-until-we-fully-abolish-slavery

Through a loophole in the 13th Amendment, governments and corporations profit from cheap, incarcerated labor.

Paid Sick Leave and COVID 19

 

As Coronovirus Spreads, Which US Workers have Paid Sick Leave and Which Don't ~~ Drew Desilver

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/12/as-coronavirus-spreads-which-u-s-workers-have-paid-sick-leave-and-which-dont/

AS THE GLOBAL HEGEMON COLLAPSES, CAN PRIVATE PROPERTY BE FAR BEHIND? ~~ Stephen Miller

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/as-the-global-hegemon-collapses-can-private-property-be-far-behind

This article lays out clearly the rights given to private property - including the fiction of depreciation of capital, and how these are exploited by the capitalist class at the expense of the working class. 

Thomas Jefferson Father of White Supremacy ~~ Kermit O

http://kermito.com/blog/thomas-jefferson-father-of-white-supremacy/

Part:

When you hear the name Thomas Jefferson, it is likely followed by “founding father”, “hero”, “patriot”, and other such reverent terms. Amongst the mildly critical—or anyone not in complete denial—you’ll hear it acknowledged that he was also a slaver, and that there were some inherent contradictions between this and the idea that “All men are created equal”. The more critical still may point out that he was also a rapist, in that his relationship with Sally Hemmings was a matter of obligation for her, as she was his “property”.

Workers in eastern Europe and former Soviet states prefer socialism

https://thecommunists.org/2019/07/26/news/workers-eastern-europe-former-ussr-prefer-socialism/

As the dystopian reality of bourgeois exploitation and ‘democracy’ hits home, Stalin and communism are viewed with respect and longing.

Normal is gone—where do we go from here? ~~ Grace

https://mronline.org/2020/10/16/normal-is-gone-where-do-we-go-from-here/

The Coup Already Underway ~~Paul Street

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/the-coup-already-underway/

This might be a good time for Americans to stop masochistically worshipping at the feet of their nation’s authoritarian Constitution. A proto-fascistic genocidal racist maniac and anti-science eco-exterminist determined to kill two million more Americans with COVID-19 sits in the White House thanks in no small part due to the absurdly venerated 1788 United States Constitution.

What we mean by the working class - Paul D'Amato

 https://socialistworker.org/2004-1/487/487_09_Class.php

CLASS IS commonly viewed as something based upon income level: upper, middle, lower. The other popular idea is that we are all basically "middle class"--with perhaps a minority "underclass" of poor people.

The Malthusians ~~ P. J. Proudhon

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/the-malthusians

Dr. Malthus, an economist, an Englishman, once wrote the following words:

“A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders…”[1]

A Fair Day's Wages for a Fair Day's Work ~~F. Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/05/07.htm

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work? But what is a fair day's wages, and what is a fair day's work? 

The Young Karl Marx - Movie

~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~

 - Excerpt - Writing the Communist Manifesto -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toeib1Xd4Pk&feature=youtu.be

and

- Movie Trailer -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVTDoZLssg8&feature=youtu.be

And a Movie review:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/young-karl-marx-raoul-peck-engels

Corporate money militarizes the police

https://www.workers.org/2020/10/51840/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

After police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., demonstrators across the U.S. called for defunding police departments. The Center for Popular Democracy Action, in a June 10 report, estimates $100 billion is spent each year in the U.S. on policing — between 20% to 45% of municipal budgets. (https://populardemocracy.org/news-and-publications/congress-must-divest-billion-dollar-police-budget-and-invest-public-education)

As activists target state and municipal funding sources, it is important to shine the spotlight on often hidden corporate police funding. A popular street chant against the police has been “Who do they protect? Who do they serve?” 

Another question must also be asked: Who protects the police?

‘Horseshoe theory’ is nonsense – the far right and far left have little in common. ~~ Simon Choat

https://theconversation.com/horseshoe-theory-is-nonsense-the-far-right-and-far-left-have-little-in-common-77588

After the first round of the French presidential elections, several liberal commentators condemned the defeated leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon for refusing to endorse the centrist Emmanuel Macron. His decision was portrayed as a failure to oppose the far-right Front National, and it was argued that many of his supporters were likely to vote for Marine Le Pen in the second round. Comparisons were drawn with the US presidential elections and the alleged failure of Bernie Sanders supporters to back Hilary Clinton over Donald Trump.