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The brutal murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25 has sparked a wave of protests across the United States.Thousands of people took the streets of Minneapolis and other major U.S. cities, demonstrating against police repression and demanding justice for Floyd and the other victims of police brutality.Since the tragic incident became known, several communist and left political forces in the U.S. have strongly condemned the murder of George Floyd, expressing their solidarity and support to the protesters across the country. Below you can read some of the statements:

PARTY OF COMMUNISTS, USA (PCUSA)

The murder of George Floyd is an act of police terror and cowardice that demonstrates the total disregard for the human rights and dignity of the poor and working-class peoples. An unarmed and innocent African-American was slowly executed by peace officers who are entrusted and sworn to protect their fellow citizens. The Party of Communists USA strongly condemns the recent murder of George Floyd by white supremacist officers of the Minneapolis Police Department on Monday, May 25, 2020. What the Minneapolis Police Department and the City of Minneapolis have proven once again is that they protect the privileges, property, and the power structure of the monopoly capitalist class. NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE STRANGE FRUIT! A communist, Abel Meeropol wrote the poem in 1937 that became a song performed by Billie Holiday in 1939.

Things have gotten worse since William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson presented the WE CHARGE GENOCIDE!* petition to the United Nations in 1951. Nothing will change until we as a nation of people truthfully and openly question the mentality of profits over people in the United States. Monopoly capitalism never died in the Americas! It continually persists, exemplified by the events in Minneapolis, with its victims being the poor and working-class members of society!

Just as our brother George Floyd was asphyxiated, so too are the poor and working peoples of the United States. The Party of Communists USA demands:

STOP GENOCIDE!

AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL!

THE LIVES OF THE POOR AND WORKING-CLASS MATTER!

SOLIDARITY WITH ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLES!

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COMMUNIST PARTY, USA (CPUSA)

The Communist Party USA joins with the people of Minneapolis in demanding the immediate arrest and prosecution of the cops responsible for the murder of George Floyd.

The horrifying eight-minute evidence, streamed around the world, is clear and undisguisable. It reveals that the murder of George Floyd was a public execution by the police. The refusal to immediately make arrests has understandably sparked rage in Minneapolis and around the country. Once again, I cant breathe has become the battle cry of millions. Make no mistake, the protests will continue until justice is done.

Minneapoliss rebellion is the fault not of the protestors but of the system of institutionalized racism and violence that allows such atrocities to occur in the first place. These racist murders are occurring over and over, alive and in living color, and most often without prosecutionits a wonder more rebellions havent occurred.

Donald Trumps irresponsible threat to shoot the looters is as contemptuous as it is predictable. We recall with disgust his threat to order troops to shoot immigrants on the U.S./Mexico border. Indeed, threats of violence are a regular part of his tool kit. In fact, he openly encourages police forces to manhandle those arrested. It is Trump who is the thug-in-chief.

Trumps use of racism as a central organizing tool will only end with his defeat in November. But the country cannot wait to address the epidemic of racist violence. Congress, state legislatures, city councils, labor leaders, clergy, and representatives of community organizations of every stripe across the country must address the crisis. The time is way past due for community control of the police. In the first place, neo-Nazi, KKK, and other neo-fascist elements must be driven out of police departments around the country. Investigate that! In addition, our country needs a radical reform of policing.

Compounding the routine violence against African Americans is the impact of COVID-19 on working-class communities of color in all aspects. They are the ones dying in inordinate proportions. They are the first to serve on the front lines and, like in any war, the first to die.

We call on our members and friends to join the protests for justice in every way possible and to make justice for George Floyd part of every demonstration going forward.

Our hearts, prayers, and solidarity go out to George Floyds family and to Floyd himself, who cried out for his deceased mother while a thug sat on his neck. We say, rise up and protest. We join with millions demanding justice now!

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FREEDOM ROAD SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION (FRSO)

The people of Minneapolis have taken to the streets the past 72 hours, demanding the arrest of the killer cops who murdered 46-year-old African American George Floyd on Monday night, May 25. Eyewitness video was released Tuesday morning showing now former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin pinning Floyd the ground, with Chauvins knee directly on the back of his neck the video shows Floyds last gasps for air. You can hear him telling the killer cop that he cant breathe and calling for his mother before you see his body going limp. Three other cops on the scene stand by, with two other cops actively helping to restrain Floyd on the ground, all ignoring the pleas of bystanders to let him breathe. Since then, tens of thousands in Minneapolis and have taken to the streets, demanding justice and retribution, which prompted the Minneapolis police to immediately terminate the four officers involved with Floyds murder and finally to charge and jail Chauvin May 29.

We cant forget that Twin Cities area police have been the target of recent high-profile struggles involving police murders, including the murder in 2015 of African American man Jamar Clark by two killer Minneapolis killer cops, which prompted a wave of protests; the murder of Philando Castile in the suburbs of Minneapolis on video, as well Justine Damond in 2017, which also prompted mass protests.

The question of killer cops targeting African Americans isnt just a story of Black people being more oppressed workers, its also the result of the system of national oppression, a system that chains down African Americans and subjects them to the most intense methods of brutality at the hands of the ruling class and its police force. From Minneapolis to Louisville, we see a disregard for Black life at the hands of the police, with the Minneapolis rebellion becoming a breaking point for the Black liberation movement, sparking nationwide protests.

As Martin Luther King Jr, once said, A riot is the language of the unheard.

We must continue the call to demand community control of the police as well as the indictment and convictions of all killer cops, especially those who murdered George Floyd. We must also, as what weve seen in Chicago with the LaQuan McDonald cover-up, fight to kick out government attorneys and prosecutors who refuse to prosecute killer cops and racist vigilantes, as they did initially in the case of Ahmaud Arberys lynching in Brunswick, Georgia.

On May 30, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is calling for a day of nationwide protests against the murderous policies of police departments nationwide as well as demand the mass release of inmates in prisons due to COVID-19. We unite with this call and know that the more people that hit the streets, the shakier the foundations of national oppression in this country becomes. Protests have already started taking place in cities like Memphis and Los Angeles, with many cities planning protests through the week leading into the weekend.

Our job is to organize, agitate and connect the struggle for Justice for George Floyd, Justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Justice for Breonna Taylor to our own local struggles for justice and community control of the police. We need to build organization on both a local and national levels to consolidate the power of the people into a fighting force against national oppression and the criminal injustice system.

The streets are on fire for action and our job is to continue to fan the flames.

Justice for George Floyd! Indict and convict the killer cops! Community control of the police now!

All power to the people!

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WORKERS' WORLD

The corporate media call the May 27 protest in Minneapolis a riot. In a speech on March 14, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defined that term, saying, A riot is the language of the unheard. Following his assassination less than a month later, Black people rose up in hundreds of cities in righteous protest. They were heard.

So was the Black population of Minneapolis. During the May 27 action, community members broke the windows and slashed the tires of a long line of police cars while arrogant cops drove them. The community, united in action, raised one powerful voice to say: We are all George Floyd meaning that any one of them could wind up a victim of a police lynching at any place or time.

The protests responded to the May 25 videotaped lynching of a Black man, George Floyd. Everyone who watched the video saw a white racist cop, Derek Chauvin, choke Floyd to death with his knee as he was begging for his mother and his life while three other cops, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng, did nothing to stop this atrocity.

The long unheard Black community in Minneapolis only needed a spark Floyds execution to arouse its collective anger built up during years of humiliating police occupation, harassment, beatings and arrests and rise up. Even the statistics justify their anger: Of those police shot in Minneapolis from late 2009 to May 2019, some 60 percent were from the Black community though they make up only 20 percent of the total population. (New York Times, May 28)

Righteous protesters broke the windows of the Third Precinct Headquarters where the four fired cops were once based. They picked up tear gas canisters the cops targeted at them and threw them back at the police. They burned or expropriated goods from AutoZone, Target and other businesses.

A class view of violence

Once the protests moved from peaceful on May 26 to direct action on May 27, the corporate media rushed to defend the capitalists sacred private property and labeled some protesters violent. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other officials called for calm.

This posturing repeats the standard attempt by capitalist politicians who seek to drive a wedge between the masses on the issue of nonviolence.

They focused on the same argument in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965; in Newark, N.J., and Detroit in 1967; in the hundreds of uprisings following Kings assassination in 1968; the Miami rebellion of 1980; the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992; and Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

In his 1992 pamphlet, A Marxist Defense of the LA Rebellion, Workers World Party chairperson Sam Marcy wrote: In times when the bourgeoisie is up against the wall, when the masses have risen suddenly and unexpectedly, the bourgeoisie gets most lyrical in abjuring violence. It conjures up all sorts of lies and deceits about the unruliness of a few among the masses as against the orderly law-abiding many.

Marxism here again cuts through it all. The Marxist view of violence flows from an altogether different concept. It first of all distinguishes between the violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of the masses. Just to be able to formulate it that way is a giant step forward, away from disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence. It never occurs to any of them to show that the masses have never made any real leap forward with the theory of nonviolence. Timidity never made it in history.

Indeed, Marxists do prefer nonviolent methods if the objectives the masses seek freedom from oppression and exploitation can be obtained that way. But Marxism explains the historical evolution of the class struggle as well as the struggle of oppressed nations as against oppressors.

There are two factors that these multigenerational events have in common: First, they were ignited by police terror, especially killings of Black people; and second, they were major rebellions, carried out by the oppressed and their allies against their oppression due to decades-long inhumane conditions caused by capitalism.

Rebellions scare the hell out of the billionaire ruling class that wants to keep hidden its super-exploitation of the workers and oppressed. But when rebellions do break out, the ruling class will unleash its state apparatus the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the National Guard and even the Army in an attempt to terrorize neo-colonized peoples in the Black, Brown and Indigenous communities.

When the masses rebel, they are not only rebelling against the state, but they are rebelling against an oppressive system that denies them the basic necessities of life jobs, housing, health care, education and the right to live free from all forms of oppression, etc. in order to fulfill the inherent profit drive of capitalism.

As Marcy emphasizes, any spontaneous or unorganized violence from the oppressed is self-defense against the organized armed force of the state. There is no equal sign between the two; they represent two distinct, antagonistic social classes.

From diverse ideological perspectives, what both King and Marcy stated connect to todays events in south Minneapolis

However any oppressed community sees fit to fight back against legal and extralegal terrorism be it the police or neofascists alongside mainly antiracist white youth, is justified. It should be supported and defended against the slanderous attacks and lies propagated by right-wing and even so-called liberal media and politicians, whose primary objective is to apologize for a rotten system living on borrowed time.

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PARTY FOR SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION (PSL)

We salute the thousands of Minneapolis, Minnesota residents who came out in justified indignation to demand justice for George Floyd. Demonstrators of all backgrounds and ages took to the streets the day after Floyds killing and were met with violent police repression. Police in riot gear used mace, tear gas and bean bag guns to repress the righteous anger of the people of Minneapolis.

It was only four years ago that Minneapolis mourned Philando Castile, a Black man also shot to death by police. His killer, Jeronimo Yanez, was let off and found not guilty at trial. The police killing of Castile sparked protests around the country.

This latest incident of state-sanctioned racist terror comes on the heels of a string of police and vigilante killings that have taken place since the COVID-19 crisis began in the United States. Though in some parts of the country lockdowns and quarantine measures are in effect, the oppression of Black people still remains and has in fact surged in the wake of one of the largest public health crises in recent history.

A video capturing the killing of George Floyd was posted on Facebook and sparked widespread outrage and protest. In the video, Floyd is seen pinned to the ground by his neck, face pressed against the ground so hard that his nose bled, and is heard repeatedly gasping I cant breathe. While Floyd was on the ground, officer Derek Chauvin pushed his knee into the back of Floyds neck, choking him for several minutes. As multiple bystanders pleaded with the officers to get off of Floyds neck, he became unresponsive and was taken by ambulance to the Hennepin County Medical Center. He was later pronounced dead. George Floyds last words, I cant breathe are the exact same last words of Eric Garner, who was strangled to death by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014.

The officers claimed they were responding to a forgery in progress, a possible non-violent crime. The officers alleged that the unarmed Floyd was resisting arrest, however they later changed their story, asserting that he was suffering from medical distress. It is outrageous that police would use such brutal deadly tactics on a person in medical distress, let alone anyone.

We cannot depend on the Federal Bureau of Investigations, which has begun to look into the killing, for justice. The FBI is a violent state institution that has been wielded as a weapon against the liberation movement of Black people in the United States. The FBI has never been fair and partial to the Black community. Real justice will be brought about when the people organize and fight for their own demands in the face of racist oppression by the U.S. capitalist state. The police will always fulfill their role of being shock troops for white supremacy and capitalism as long as it exists in this racist state.

In this absolutely critical period, we sharpen our resolve to build organizations capable of waging militant class struggle against the racist state and their ruling class. The ruling class and its government has only shown complete disregard for the lives of millions of working-class people during the COVID-19 crisis, especially Black people who are disproportionately victims of the virus. Amidst the deep crisis, the racist killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. and Sean Reed in Indianapolis, Ind., make it clear that the protests and fight back must continue and intensify. We affirm and support the right of Black people and all oppressed people to protest and defend themselves against racist terror.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation demands that the four officers involved in Floyds murder be prosecuted and convicted. We also demand the end of the repression of the demonstrators in Minneapolis demanding justice and accountability during a health and economic crisis.

Justice for George Floyd and all victims of racist police terror!

Excerpt from:
George Floyd's Murder: U.S. Communist and Left Parties in solidarity with the protesters - In Defense of Communism

by Peter Baehr

When I arrived in Hong Kong from Canada in August 2000, to take up a professorship in sociology, I was struck at once by the openness of the citys academic culture. Put crudely, yet accurately, there was no political correctness in Hong Kong, no ideological policing of minds. The streets might be polluted by smog, but on campus the air was bracing.

Today Hong Kong is menaced by a different force, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As the Party tightens its grip on the city, with new national security laws, what can Hong Kong universities do to impede the curbs on academic freedom for which Communist states are notorious?

Answering this question requires us to recall what academic freedom is; to clarify the nature of the organisation that will attack it; and to be realistic about the support Hong Kong academics can expect from their Western counterparts.

Academic freedom is not the liberty for professors to do or say anything they please. Academic freedom is a norm which states that university professors should be free to teach, research and write on academic matters unconstrained by political and other kinds of interference.

Political activism in the classroom is not an exercise of academic freedom; it is the mirror image of state propaganda. And state propaganda is a speciality of Communism.

All Communist parties govern in essentially the same way. They replicate the Party structure at the granular level across all sectors of state and society: legislative assemblies, the law courts, the civil service, trade unions, the media, schools and universities.

The Party controls its subjects through a combination of ideology, fear and material incentives. Loyalty is valued more highly by the regime than competence. Ideology is valued more highly than creativity. And, everywhere, the expression of thought, especially in writing, is closely monitored for dissent.

Because academic freedom is, in its modern form, a Western concept, it would be reassuring for Hong Kong professors to count on their Western counterparts for support against Communist censorship.

But is that likely? Only from some quarters. Across much of the Western world and in Australasia too the public use of reason, and the existence of open debate, are in full retreat, threatened by an alliance of non-academic administrators, student activists, and academics who demand unanimity on all important matters.

Speakers with unpopular views are disinvited from campus or no-platformed. Political tests are administered as in the University of California system to appraise a job applicants attitude to diversity. Complex questions in class are reduced to ideological formulae.

And Marxism remains robust among the professoriat, either as a default critique of capitalism or reconfigured, with contortions that would have astonished Marx himself, as identity politics. In short, the CCP has nothing to fear from an influential section of Western academics.

Outside this unworldly stratum, however, a more critical attitude to China is emerging. As the CCPs soft power evaporates in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, its brutality is becoming plainer to Western governments, or at least harder to ignore.

The US, Canada, Australia and Britain have variously protested at Chinas Covid obfuscations: its silencing of domestic whistleblowers, its manipulation of a credulous WHO directorate, its threats to cut off medicines, and its public lies, notably the claim that the West was the source of the coronavirus.

Western governments were powerless to stop the internment of a million Uighurs. These same governments are not helpless to call the CCP to account post-Covid and transform their political and economic relationships with it.

Where does all this leave the Hong Kong academy? Co-authors and co-researchers abroad are likely to support us in any way they can. So will external examiners and reviewers of research grant applications.

The Hong Kong Research Grants Council an advisory body has several foreign experts on its panels. Western governments are also paying attention to what is happening in the city.

But it is obvious that we in Hong Kong must rely chiefly on our own actions and on the tradition of independence and plurality of which we are the fortunate beneficiaries. To uphold this tradition, I am calling on:

People subject to terror cannot be blamed for keeping quiet and inwardly emigrating. That is not yet our condition. Hong Kong universities are still free to discuss unseasonable ideas and professors are still able to write opinion pieces such as this one.

But the window is closing. Acquiescence and opportunism are the great temptations now, the stilling of voices voluntarily in anticipation of their silencing.

Academics especially their professional associations administrators, and students in Hong Kong are advised, as a matter of urgency, to work together in the coming months to craft a Hong Kong Charter of Academic Freedom.

If nothing else, the breach of academic freedom by the CCP, together with a host of other liberties, will then be fully visible not just to Hong Kong people but to all of those among the international community who still care about the life of the mind.

Peter Baehr is a Research Professor in Social Theory at Lingnan University.

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Hong Kong must now rely on its own efforts to protect academic freedom - Hong Kong Free Press

By Elisaios Vagenas*.

The recent successful tele-conference held by the Communist and Workers Parties that cooperate within the framework of the European Communist Initiative, in which 24 parties from many European countries participate, constituted a new form of exchanging opinions and coordination of their efforts.

It demonstrated that the CPs can successfully utilize various forms when under pandemic conditions, direct contact between members, invitations to congresses and conferences were impossible. The class struggle does not cease, which makes it vitally necessary for the CPs to exchange views, to clarify their positions, to coordinate their action and to pursue a revolutionary strategy. In none of this can we back down under pandemic conditions when a new global economic crisis of capitalism is building momentum. Of course, the CPs must adapt their style of work as International, regional , and bilateral meetings are not feasible with a physical presence.

The form of Joint Statements by the CPs

One tried and true form of cooperation and coordination among the CPs are the Joint Statements. The formulation of the texts of Joint Statements clarifies the assessments which each CP has decided upon, as well as the goals of struggle each party has set for the development of joint action.

This process remains important, despite the fact that many Communist and Workers Parties today are weak, either functioning under semi-illegal conditions or severe persecution or not having all of the means available that the KKE has today along with some other parties, to struggle for the common goals that are formulated.

In order for the international communist movement to emerge from the ideological-political and organizational crisis it has been in over recent decades, it is necessary to comprehensively strengthen it in every country and region, as well as to coordinate the joint struggle and to formulate a revolutionary strategy at the international level. The process of exchanging viewpoints and the related struggle around serious issues within the context of the preparation and publication of Joint Statements can contribute to the above direction.

The KKE and the recent Joint Statements

During the recent period of the Pandemic, the Party signed 5 Joint Statements of the Communist and Workers Parties, some of which were approved after an initiative of the KKE, while others on the initiative of other parties which were supported by our Party, which sought whenever necessary to contribute to improving their content. All of the statements were published in Rizospastis. These were:

Whatever glitters isnt gold

We could say that Lenins quote that before we can unite and in order that we may unite, we must first of all, draw firm and definite lines of demarcation (*) suits todays situation and the issues of the joint statements of the parties. The period of the pandemic turned out to be very dense in terms of initiatives taken for the publication of Joint Statements. In addition to the 5 listed above, other parties took related initiatives. This doesnt mean that all could be accepted and supported by our Party, in the name of a superficial unity of the international communist movement. Such a unity is not only unnecessary, but actually is detrimental to the communist movement as it doesnt clarify important issues.

The discussion of different viewpoints, agreement or disagreement, comradely disagreement over serious ideological-political issues of strategic importance is necessary and will continue over the next period. Through this process and the utilization of the experience derived from the class struggle, incentives will be provided for a more substantial mastering of the principles of our worldview and Marxist-Leninist methodology, the elaborations of the CPs will be enriched and this requires great perseverance.

Some parties who took initiatives for joint statements, outright rejected the contribution of other parties in formulating the texts they presented. Conversely, the KKE, as well as other parties that undertook the above initiatives and which were supported by our Party, asked for comments on the initial texts that were submitted. They gave great attention to the many proposals from other parties. They accepted substantial comments that improved the original content. Some parties did not allow such a process to take place for their own texts, while very problematic positions persisted within the texts, such as positions that vindicate the social democratic management of the capitalist system, attributing all of the problems to neo-liberal management.

Nor, could the KKE of course, agree to gratuitous and detrimental requests from parties who call upon the USA to comply with international law as the CP of Spain did, as if we arent dealing with the most powerful imperialist power on our planet, but with a young girl who strayed from the path and is awaiting the CPs to put her on the correct path of adherence to international law. That law that today legitimizes imperialist interventions and charges the imperialist body NATO to enforce it in different situations. Of course, it would be difficult to expect anything different from a party that has been immersed in the opportunist current of euro-communism for decades, a party that has abandoned revolutionary principles, who views the state and the law as being classless, that has slipped into the management of capitalism in its country.

There were also attempts for Joint Statements to be signed not only by Communist and Workers Parties, but also by other self-proclaimed left forces that appear, e.g. in solidarity with the people of Venezuela and against the designs of the USA, but who at the same time support similar plans, especially those of the imperialist EU.

There have also been efforts for CPs to co-sign texts not only with bourgeois left forces, but even with right-wing political forces. In the name of saving humanity, or the observance of international law. One such effort on the issue of the pandemic was made by the CP China. According to Andrei Klimov, senator and member of the Presidium of the center-right party United Russia, it was a joint initiative between the two governing parties of China and Russia, which was said to have been signed by more than 200 parties from all over the world. While the entire list has never been officially released, reports say that among those parties were many bourgeois parties from Asia, Africa, the Americas, policy makers that serve the interests of capital and that are responsible for the commodification of Healthcare, under-funding of the Public systems and so on. In any case, the specific joint statement makes no reference to capitalist barbarism, which is the cause of the situation that bears grave consequences for the peoples, nor of course does it refer to struggle aims for the development of joint action. How could it? Capitalist relations of production have prevailed in China for years, and Russia today is a product of counter-revolution and capitalist restoration

Among the parties that signed such a text were also some communist parties which of course, take responsibility for their choices. However, its very important that many CPs have taken a position on todays China and Russia which now play an important role in the global imperialist pyramid, as the intra-imperialist contradictions with the USA are intensifying.

All of the above show that not all of the efforts to issue Joint Statements had the necessary prerequisites to be considered a contribution to the strengthening of the international communist movement. As we often say in analogous situations, Not all that glitters is gold.

The importance of recording joint struggle goals.

Communists of different countries and regions may wage a struggle in every single country. There may be different approaches to issues of strategic importance. However, the collective effort has its own importance and the fact that in joint statements the same goal is put forward: the overthrow of capitalist barbarism, the construction of a new socialist-communist society. Therefore, every possible form of cooperation and coordination must be attempted under pandemic conditions, much more the tried and true form of Joint Statements that reflect common assessments and goals of struggle, that contribute to coordinated action at the international level towards the benefit of the working class, of the peoples.

(*) V.I. Lenin Collected Works, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, Synchroni Epochi, Volumne 6, pg. 22.

Eliseos Vagenas is a member of the CC of the KKE andHead of the International Section of the CC of the KKE.

Excerpt from:
KKE: The joint action and coordination of the Communist Parties under pandemic conditions - In Defense of Communism

Photo: Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis via Getty Images

When [Donald] Trump assumed the presidency after a 2016 election that Democrats should have won by a landslide writes John Nichols in his new book, the crisis came into focus. It was not the Republican Party that was ruining our politics. Rather, the lack of a coherent and appealing opposition to the Republicans was the problem.

You have probably seen versions of this argument hundreds of times. It is the standard left-wing critique of the Democratic Party. The feckless Democrats keep losing because they stand for nothing. Having abandoned their progressive principles and sold out to the corporate Establishment, they have forfeited the trust voters had given them during the glorious New Deal era. Most of these critiques point to the 1970s as the moment when the party turned neoliberal and set itself along the path of political and moral ruin.

But Nichols advances a different argument. In his new book, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, Nichols, the Nations national correspondent, locates the pivotal moment some three decades earlier. The Democrats lost their way in 1944, when they removed vice-president Henry Wallace from the ticket, denying him his place as Franklin Roosevelts successor. Wallace, argues Nichols, would have kept alive the New Deal flame that was instead extinguished by the moderate Harry Truman. Instead, Trumans great betrayal (in Wallaces words, which Nichols endorses) of Roosevelts legacy veered the Democrats onto the neoliberal path. The lost soul of the Democratic Party was a man, he argues, and his name was Henry Wallace.

Nichols has ambitions beyond mere historical reinterpretation. He presents his history as a blueprint for the revival of the Democratic Partys left wing, concluding with a rousing chapter casting Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as heirs to the Wallace tradition. His blurbs from progressives like Sanders, Ro Khannna, Ilhan Omar, and Democratic Socialists of America director Maria Svart, rather than from historians underscore Nicholss vision of his protagonist as a redemptive model.

Nichols is correct to see parallels between Wallace and the left-wing movement built around Sanders. What he fails to understand is that many of the same errors that destroyed Wallace as a political force also drove Sanders to his demise.

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Nicholss emphasis on Wallace as a model has one clear advantage over the traditional left-wing focus: He is able to account for the tension between liberals and leftists that long predated the 1970s. After all, if the neoliberal turn took place only after Nixon appeared on the scene, what would explain the lefts contempt for what it called the corporate liberals of the Kennedy-Johnson era? Or the bitter attacks on Truman that Nichols documents? Both the international economy changed and the Republican Partys economic program changed in the 1970s, but the Democratic Partys ideological orientation was relatively stable. It did not stop being a social democratic or labor-dominated party in the neoliberal era because it was not one before then, either.

But Nicholss attempt to make Wallace the rightful heir to FDR runs into problems of its own. The most obvious one is that, if Wallace was a faithful adherent of Roosevelts legacy, and Truman a Judas, why did Roosevelt throw Wallace off the ticket and replace him with Truman?

Nichols tries to explain this away as a devious scheme foisted upon an unwitting Roosevelt by the partys conservative elements. The bosses took advantage of an ailing and distracted Franklin Roosevelt to force [Wallace] off the ticket, he writes. This explanation gives too little credit to Roosevelt (who was ailing, but who was not too distracted to spend time in Georgia with his mistress). When recounting the narrative, Nichols notes in passing that Wallace himself was gone on a strenuous trip across Siberia and China before the convention where he was replaced. He does not mention that Roosevelt sent Wallace on this trip in order to keep him from campaigning to save his job.

Second, Nicholss attempt to bracket Roosevelt with Wallace as visionary progressives, and Truman as the first of a long line of corporate sellouts, requires him to judge Roosevelt and Truman by very different standards. Truman, to be sure, accomplished relatively little in the domestic sphere. But this was because he inherited a Congress dominated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. Roosevelts New Deal reforms had already ground to a halt before Truman took office.

Nichols gets around this problem by judging Roosevelt by his rhetoric, and Truman by his practical results. He lavishes praise on Roosevelt for his soaring Four Freedoms speech, without acknowledging Roosevelt did not (and could not) turn those principles into policy. He doesnt credit Truman for his own soaring populist rhetoric (like his proposal for a Fair Deal, which would have created national health insurance, public housing, aid for education, and a rollback of Taft-Hartley anti-union legislation.)

At one point, Nichols does acknowledge that Roosevelt, too, was hardly a consistent liberal: He would lurch left and then edge back; he would welcome the hatred of the bankers and plutocrats and then meet the investors and business owners whose buy-in he needed to retool the economy. And yet he generally falls into the progressive trap of treating Roosevelt as if his lurches to the left constituted the entirety of his political identity.

Roosevelts self-definition was generally that of a liberal, counterpoised between radicals (who supported him sporadically) and conservatives. Roosevelt once observed that a radical was a man with both feet firmly planted in the air, and a conservative a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward, while, a liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest at the command of his head. Trumans habit of tacking between left and center, market and state, and conciliating business and labor was a more faithful continuation of Roosevelts political style than Wallaces.

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After Roosevelt replaced him on the ticket in 1944, Wallace rejoined the cabinet. But he left in 1946 when he broke with Truman, whose administration was reorienting its foreign policy around resistance to the Soviet Union. After a stint as editor of the (then) left-wing New Republic, where he built his following, he ran against Truman as a left-wing splinter candidate in 1948.

The movement that grew around Wallace in the middle and late 40s many ways resembles the one built by Sanders over the last five years. Both Wallace and Sanders presented themselves as the true heir to Roosevelt, proposing to steer the party back to its New Deal roots after it had lost its way. Wallace, like Sanders, mobilized a passionate base whose intensity at times obscured how few people the movement actually represented. Both came to rely on the energy supplied by their most passionate and ideologically extreme supporters, some of whom were hostile to the Democratic Party and had no use for it except as a vehicle for a left-wing takeover. And both Sanders and Wallace tended to delude themselves into thinking they represented the true sentiment of the partys voters, and by mobilizing a populist rebellion, they could seize it back from the corrupt nexus of financial interests that had gained nefarious control.

Nichols rightly credits Wallace for his moral clarity in denouncing segregation. Barnstorming the South and holding integrated rallies, Wallace was well ahead of his time in an era when the Democratic Party had a devils bargain with Jim Crow.

But Nicholss emphasis on civil rights is difficult to square with his valorization of Roosevelt. While the New Deal drew northern black voters into the Democratic Party with economic relief, Roosevelt did almost nothing to challenge white supremacy. He allowed Southern Democrats to bottle up even meager steps toward civil rights like anti-lynching laws, and (as Ira Katznelson documented) was forced to craft many of his social-welfare measures to deny helping disenfranchised black voters in the South.

Meanwhile, it was Truman who took the first real steps toward making Democrats the party of civil rights. Trumans outrage at lynchings of returning black soldiers drove him to integrate the military. Truman fought for a strong civil rights platform at the 1948 Democratic convention, where Hubert Humphrey declared, The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. Wallace dismissed integration of the armed forces as an empty gesture. But the partys lurch toward civil rights was significant enough that Strom Thurmond left to run a splinter campaign as the Dixiecrat, foreshadowing the demise of the Solid South.

The disparate way Nichols describes the behavior of Roosevelt and Truman is telling. He gently chides Roosevelts civil rights record (FDR had fallen far short) while crediting him for attracting black voters. Later he attacks Truman as cautious and calculating. Its difficult to reconcile his gentle treatment of Roosevelt and harsh treatment of Truman, when Trumans civil rights record undeniably surpassed Roosevelts.

Its even harder to understand how Nichols can castigate Truman and his Democratic successors for forfeiting Roosevelts massive New Deal coalition. The overwhelming reason white voters left the party was that the party moved left on race. Nichols blames Democrats for losing white voters while blaming them for failing to move farther and faster on the very issues that caused white voters to defect.

Wallace had an answer to this contradiction. He believed moving left would attract, not repel, white Southern voters. He believed white racism was nothing but a plot by economic elites from the North. When his Southern rallies faced violence, he blamed northern industrialists who dominated these communities for inciting it, and claimed whenever one found racial injustice in the South there look for the long string of dividends that lead to Wall Street. (Here, and in some other places where I provide context Nichols omits, I am citing Thomas Devines 2013 history, Henry Wallaces 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism.)

Wallaces insistence of dismissing racism as a metaphenomenon driven by economic concerns, and his inability to take it seriously as an authentic belief system, anticipated the errors Sanders has made in 2016 and 2020. Both men believed that if white racists were told they were being duped by Wall Street, they would awaken from their false consciousness and vote their class interest. Both likewise failed to understand the calculations of African-American voters, who preferred to leverage their vote with political allies who could promise and deliver concrete steps in the right direction. More than three-quarters of black voters supported Truman in 1948, and rather than question his flawed assumptions of his candidacy, Wallace bitterly concluded the black vote had let him down.

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It was foreign policy that drove Wallace out of Trumans cabinet in 1946 and formed the most irreparable breach with his former party. From Wallaces point of view, Truman was betraying Roosevelts alliance with the Soviets. It is of course correct that Trumans policy toward Moscow was more hostile than Roosevelts. The error made by Wallace and his supporters is to attribute that difference to Truman abandoning Roosevelts vision, rather than the two presidents facing very different circumstances. Had Roosevelt survived his fourth term, his posture with Stalin would have surely changed after the Nazi threat had disappeared and the Soviets began gobbling up Europe.

Nichols defends Wallaces warning about the rise of fascism in the United States, pointing to Donald Trumps right-wing authoritarianism as an indication that Wallace was prophetic. But Wallaces definition of fascism was far broader than anything that might be traced forward to Trumpism. He insisted that American support for a democratic government in Germany was a plot to revive Nazi-style fascism. Wallace insistently described American foreign policy actions as offensive and Soviet actions as defensive.

Nichols justifiably credits Wallace for his unvarnished denunciations of British imperialism, but fails to note that Wallace turned a blind eye to Soviet imperialism. When the Soviets sponsored a coup in Czechoslovakia, Wallace blamed Truman for provoking them, and compared Russias actions to the American position in France. When the Soviets imposed a blockade on Berlin, Wallace assailed Truman for airlifting in supplies.

Nichols, incredibly, credits Wallace with forcing Truman to temper the bombastic Truman Doctrine in favor of the more cooperative Marshall Plan to give billions of dollars in aid to rebuild Europe. He does not inform his readers that Wallace opposed the Marshall Plan. It was a blueprint for war concocted by militarists and Wall Street monopolists to suppress the democratic movements in Europe that would convert western Europe into a vast military camp, with freedom extinguished, he testified.

Nichols has no affection for Soviet expansionism. Rather, he echoes the same view of communism that was articulated by Wallace and many of his enthusiasts. They viewed communists as allies, and viewed almost any attack on them as unfair red-baiting. Wallaces anti-anti-communism consisted more of an intense suspicion of any anti-communist policy than a positive defense of Stalins regime. Their method was very similar to the anti-anti-Trumpism that defines many conservatives today.

The debate over communism dominated American politics at the time. There were essentially three positions. The center-left, epitomized by Truman, proposed instead to contain communism, through a combination of aid for non-communist states and military deterrence against further Soviet expansion. The right wanted to roll back communism, going to war if necessary (which it would have been). Conservatives denounced containment as a form of appeasement. Richard Nixon mocked Trumans foreign policy as the cowardly college of communist containment. Wallaces left, which was far smaller than either of the other two camps, opposed containment as a provocation that would, and was designed to, lead to war.

The domestic analogue to this debate centered on the increasingly paranoid form of anti-communism that Joe McCarthy stoked. McCarthys tactic was to equate New Deal liberals with communism, asserting that Roosevelt and Truman had been manipulated by Soviet spies. Wallace, for his part, equated all anti-communism with McCarthyism.

From the right, anybody who opposed rollback and McCarthyism was a communist sympathizer. From the left, anybody who opposed communism was a warmonger and a red-baiter. In both their foreign and domestic aspects, both the right and the far left sought to flatten three-sided debates into a more convenient binary.

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Wallaces political crusade was not merely about left-wing domestic or foreign policy. It was an attempt to revive a political strategy called the Popular Front, a strategic alliance that joined liberals with the far left, including avowed communists.

During the 1930s and 40s, the Communist Party line was set in Moscow and followed by communists across the world. At some points in time, communists refused to cooperate with any other left-of-center party, believing that it was better to allow fascists to destroy them to hasten the revolution. (The pursuit of this course helped Hitler crush the German Social Democrats.) At other times, they urged communists to support other anti-fascist parties by forming a Popular Front. Many American communists and fellow travelers joined Roosevelts government, an arrangement that was tenable while the United States was fighting a world war on the Soviet side, but became untenable as the end of the war drew within sight.

The logic of the Popular Front was often summarized in an expression no enemies to the left, and its ethos of refusing to draw lines of contrast against the left was foundational. The two Bernie Sanders campaigns have both followed a version of this strategy. Sanders brought into his campaign organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, and some radical activists, who otherwise view the Democratic Party with indifference or outright hostility. Nichols admires Wallaces method of absorbing smaller left-wing parties into a broad left-wing movement to capture the party.

What Nichols does not seem to recognize is that this very practice helped lead to Wallaces demise, and had the same effect on Sanders.

Wallace stirred wild passions among his enthusiasts, who packed stadiums for his speeches and could mobilize impressive armies of volunteers. One demonstration of strength came in February 1948, when a Wallace-backed candidate won a special election for a House seat in the Bronx against the Democrat. The jubilant left interpreted the result as a wholesale repudiation of the Truman administration, recounts Devine much like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs shocking primary upset, which many progressives saw as a harbinger of a nationwide uprising against the party leadership.

But most Democrats recognized that Wallace had merely activated a fervent but tiny faction. Removed from the hothouse atmosphere of the liberal civil war, they were less likely to overestimate the former vice-presidents potential strength or the electoral clout of the Democratic Partys left wing, writes Devine, in a passage written several years before Sanderss first presidential campaign, but which nonetheless captures it perfectly, even though Wallace claimed to have the backing of the common man, his primary base of support had always been limited to a relatively small group of left-leaning intellectuals, middle-class professionals, and CIO labor leaders.

The Wallace campaign was a debacle. He won just 2.37 percent of the national vote, and 37 percent of his votes came from New York City. Whatever passions he had stirred among the intelligentsia, Wallace gained almost no inroads among regular Democrats, despite having served four years as vice-president andeight more years as a high-profile cabinet official.

Nichols criticizes Wallaces decision to run as a third-party candidate, arguing instead for a Sanders-style popular-front strategy within the Democratic Party. But he fails to understand that Wallaces refusal to distance himself from the far left made him toxic to the party base. For instance, 90 percent of the public opposed his plan to let the Soviets take Berlin. Nichols instead attributes his problems mainly to the machinations of segregationists and party bosses, not to any genuine distrust his message might have created with the voters.

He does allow that Wallaces communist-dominated campaign may have committed some mistakes. Yes, an argument can be made that taking less advice from the Communist Party tacticians who hung around the progressive party headquarters in New York might have made for more strategically sound choices, he concedes. But he reels back even that remarkably tepid criticism in the next sentence: But a parallel argument can be made that many of the ablest grassroots campaigners for Wallace in the campaigns closing days were Communists, fellow travelers, or independent leftists who refused to abide any form of anti-communism. (There were very fine people on both sides of the Stalin issue.) This seems more like a description of the problem that comes with handing your campaign over to its most extreme adherents than a persuasive defense of doing so.

Social movements can change the world. But they can also become powerful vehicles for self-delusion. Wallace tapped into a movement that came to believe it represented The People, and lost all ability to see what the actual people outside the movement thought about them. Inevitably they came to see their defeats as the product of a scheme. Nichols detects many parallels between Wallaces movement and the Bernie movement. But the lessons he draws seem to be mostly the wrong ones.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

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Decoration Day - Memorial Day

Originally called Decoration Day, from the early tradition of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths and flags, Memorial Day is a day for remembrance of those who have died in service to our country. It was first widely observed on May 30, 1868 to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers, by proclamation of Gen. John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of former Union sailors and soldiers.

We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.

James A. Garfield May 30, 1868 Arlington National Cemetery

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