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First of all, I just want to say that I am honored to be speaking today alongside so many leading comrades with decades of experience in our movement, many of whom were involved in the initial launch of the World Socialist Web Site and from whom Ive learned so much.

For myself and for a whole new generation of comrades, our entire political lives have been guided and shaped by the World Socialist Web Site .

My generation, the millennial generation, has come into political life under conditions of unprecedented economic, social and political crisis. We were graduating from high school just as the 2008 financial crash was taking place. And now, just over a decade later, we are living through a second worldwide catastrophe, the coronavirus pandemic.

The youngest generation, Gen Z, is entering political life under even sharper conditions. Consider for a moment that those just coming into political life in the past year have been confronted with miles-long food lines in the US, a president who is talking about refusing to leave office, and protesters denouncing police violence being beaten in the streets outside the White House, among many other critical experiences.

Even before the current crisis, young workers were living under the conditions created by 40 years of social counterrevolution, which produced staggering levels of inequality, mass unemployment and the lack of basic needs such as health care and retirement.

It was upon these conditions that the pandemic acted, exacerbating all the social ills created by the capitalist system. And now the brutality of the ruling class is on full display before the world, as governments everywhere embrace the policy of herd immunity, that is, sacrificing workers lives to protect private profit.

These are mass experiences on a scale never seen before. Nearly every person on the planet is aware of the coronavirus and has been impacted in some way.

Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that a defining feature of this period is the immense radicalization of the working class, and, in particular, young people.

One statistic that begins to demonstrate this comes from this years annual survey conducted by youGov, which found an increase in support for socialism over the last year among youth who are part of Gen Z (ages 16-23) of nearly 10 percentage points. Over the course of a single year, support for socialism among these young people rose from 40 percent in 2019 to 49 percent in 2020. This statistic reflects massive shifts in consciousness.

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The International Committee of the Fourth International is the leadership of the world party of socialist revolution, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

What the last yearand really the years before the pandemic as wellhas shown is that young people do not lack anger, they do not lack a willingness to fight, and they have a deep desire to change the world. We have seen this in the mass demonstrations against police violence and many other eruptions of social protest.

However, what is so critically needed is a political perspective and program rooted in historical knowledge and an understanding of the experiences of the past.

Young people looking for answers to all of the pressing questions of today are coming to find that there is no greater resource than the WSWS.

I know I speak for a whole layer of young people when I say that the WSWS is responsible for not only my political education, but, in many ways, my formal education. It is where I learned about art and culture, about science, history, economics and philosophy. It is where I first found a counter to the postmodernist and racialist poison promoted and pushed in the universities.

Like countless youth in the party, when I was first introduced to the website I spent months going through the archives, reading what the movement wrote about every major political event in my lifetime: the stolen election, the events of 9/11, the Iraq War and the protests against it, the emergence of WikiLeaks, the persecution of Julian Assange, the 2008 financial crash and countless other developments.

The real strength of the new site is how comprehensively it is able to bring forward this powerful archive. One can go back and read what the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) wrote the day after the September 11 attacks. The level of political clarity with which the movement responded is unparalleled.

One can find comments like Anti - Americanism : The anti - imperialism of fools , which takes a principled stand against all those demoralized middle-class elements who responded to the September 11 attacks with vulgar anti-Americanism in the place of principled anti-imperialism. The WSWS explained that it was the American ruling class, and not the American population, that was carrying out imperialist policies throughout the world.

Young people who have been profoundly impacted by the wave of school shootings can find in the archives of the WSWS comments like The Columbine High School massacre American Pastoral , American Berserk , which rooted the horrific events of April 1999 in an analysis of the nature of American society and the consequences of social inequality and endless war.

If there are young people watching who have not read these pieces and related pieces, I strongly encourage you to do so.

These are only two examples of issues I know have impacted young people so deeply in the past two decades. However, this exercise can be repeated for every significant political and social event and phenomenon in recent history.

Perhaps most importantly, in the archives of the WSWS young people will find the history of the working classthat is, their own history. It is a history that is kept from workers, distorted and obscured to serve the interest of the ruling elite.

They can learn about the Enlightenment, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, and the advent and development of Marxism. They can learn about the Russian Revolution, the development of the Left Opposition, the immense class battles of the 1930s and 40s, including the extraordinary history of the American working class.

They can, and really must, learn about the history of the fight for socialism, which is contained within the history of our movement.

For the ruling class, the WSWS poses the most imminent threat. It is desperate to cut young people off from knowledge of the history of working-class struggle, of revolution, expressed most consciously in the history of the Marxist movement.

It is because of its powerful perspective that the World Socialist Web Site is unlike any other website in the world. It is an organ of education and struggle that will serve to arm workers and youth with the tools they need not just to understand the world, but to change it.

I encourage young people and workers who are listening to this call and who are not already a part of the ICFI to join today, to explore the new website, to help fund the new website, to understand it as your own, to contribute to it and promote it. Dedicate yourselves to a study of history and get involved in the fight for socialism today.

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The role of the World Socialist Web Site in educating a new generation of revolutionaries - WSWS

As others have noted in this meeting, the defense of historical truth is central to the work of the World Socialist Web Site. Our political practice is always based on an assimilation of the lessons of the past. The most powerful weapon the working class has is the knowledge of the historical experiences through which it has passed, in order to know what it has won, what it must defend today and how it must fight to achieve socialism in the future.

From the defense of the Russian Revolution and Leon Trotsky against the Stalinist and Post-Stalinist Schools of Historical Falsifications to the fight against the trivialization of Nazi crimes in Germany, the Trotskyist movement has been, from its founding, at the forefront of the fight for historical truth.

The great historian of the Left Opposition, Vadim Rogovin, explained that Like ideological ones, historical myths are a product of immediate class interestsRefuting these myths is only possible by rehabilitating historical truththe honest portrayal of actual facts and tendencies of the past.

Over the past year, the fight to defend historical truth took a new formthe defense of the revolutionary traditions of the great democratic revolutions in the United States, the American Revolution and the Civil War. It came as a surprise to many when the WSWS emerged at the forefront in opposing the New York Times 1619 Project, a rewriting, indeed falsification of American history, presenting the history of the US as a history of racial conflict.

In fact, we are the only publication that has raised any criticism of the project from the left. This confusion was based on the fact that the genuine principles of Marxism and socialism have been so distorted and misrepresented by the middle class pseudo-left, which is in fact an anti-left.

Our first in-depth exposure of the project was published on September 3, 2019, just two weeks after the project was published with much fanfare in a special edition of the New York Times Magazine. From the start we recognized that the most profound theoretical and political issues were at stake.

The rewriting of history is always related to the political interests of the present. As we noted in our original exposure, the aim of the New York Times is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal identitiesi.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race. Above all it erases the struggles of the working class from American history.

We defend all that is progressive in history. We understand history not as a morality tale, but as the evolution of mankind through the development of the class struggle. We understand that the working class cannot conquer new heights if it does not defend what has been won in the past. And we are irreconcilably opposed to all efforts to divide workers along racial, national or gender lines.

Marxism long ago settled its account of the limitations of bourgeois democracy, but it never gave up the fight for equality. The progressive concept inscribed on the banners of the bourgeois revolutionaries of the 18th and 19th century, that All men are created equal, finds its most advanced expression today in the Marxist movement.

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The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

The United States is the center of world imperialism. Its working class has been forged from innumerable nationalities and ethnicities from every corner of the globe. The challenge of uniting the working class in the United States is essential to the victory of socialism worldwide.

We are proud to have provided a mass audience for the best scholars of American history, including Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Clayborne Carson, Richard Carwardine, Adolph Reed, Jr. and Dolores Janiewski, to voice their criticisms of the 1619 Project. They have all devoted their lifes work to the defense of historical truth and the principles of democratically motivated scholarship.

Due to the work done by the WSWS, the 1619 Project has been thoroughly exposed. The material that we have published, all of which can be easily accessed thanks to the relaunch of the site, has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times by readers worldwide. Above all, this powerful response makes clear that workers in this country and around the world are deeply attached to the revolutionary history of the United Statesembodied in the Declaration of Independence and the struggle to smash slavery led by Abraham Lincoln in the Civil Waras well as the monumental struggles out of which the working class emerged.

The relaunch of the WSWS is rooted in an understanding of the relationship of the past to the present. Indeed, in its very form it is aimed at drawing these connections. The WSWS is itself an immense repository of historical truth. What the WSWS has achieved over the last two decades must be brought forward and expanded to arm the international working class for the monumental struggles to come.

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The World Socialist Web Site's exposure of the 1619 Project and the defense of historical truth - WSWS

Pam Griffin|The Destin Log

People living between the Blackwater River in Northwest Florida to the Sabine River on the Texas-Louisiana border have to feel like they joined the Hurricane of the Month club. Living on the Florida coast, it's always a relief when a storm makes landfall away from us, but the multiple strikes west of us do bring a twinge of guilt. Jimmy Buffett wrote "Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season" almost 50 years ago, but that was about one storm, not a series.

By the time this goes to press, all the 2020 election votes will have been cast. Since hurricane season doesn't end until Nov. 30, maybe all the clamor about socialism will end. If a coastal community gets hit by a hurricane, socialism bails them out. Don't you believe me? When Hurricane Sally hit Pensacola, the winds had not died down before politicians had FEMA on speed-dial.

I grew up in rural Georgia, right on the Georgia-Florida line (not the Florida-Georgia line). Folks there would still be picking up debris from Hurricane Michael's 2018 devastation if it weren't for FEMA.Natural disasters overwhelm local and state governments, and a national response is the only suitable option. America tried the other way, and it didn't work.

A hundred years ago, a series of devastating floods wracked the Mississippi Delta. Arkansas suffered so severely the state declared bankruptcy. For decades the state didn't issue bonds and infrastructure withered. The flood's damage was catastrophic, and the region became ground zero for parts of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Critics called it socialism then, too.

South Walton real estate would suffer without the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), subsidized mightily by the federal government. According to a Congressional Budget Office study, the NFIP has a $1.4 billion annual deficit. Premiums collected by the NFIP leave a 25% shortfall annually. It's a government hand-out; deal with it. Even though I don't own an NFIP policy, we benefit since flood insurance props up property values. I'm not fool-hardy; we live on top of a hill.

I listen to Mike's Weather Page more than Jimmy Buffet or local prognosticators during hurricaneseason. Mike blogs about the weather, primarily hurricanes, but all of his data comes from the National Weather Service, along with information gleaned from other countries'weather forecasts. Civilized societies benefit from publicly-funded weather sources.

Americans have ingrained mythology about rugged individualism. We reflexively distrust government;after all, we overthrew one to get things going. But the first decade after the British sailed away was chaotic, and we formed a more perfect union; it's in the Preamble to the Constitution. Private industry can create the proverbial better mousetrap and improve society. Government programs have a place,too. The key is to find the mesh between them. Too often, especially in the heat of elections, we heara lot of misplaced rhetoric. Lots of people complain about socialism but cash the checks.

You can't always get what you want, but Buz Livingston, CFP, can help you figure out what you need. For specific advice, visit livingstonfinancial.net or drop by, masked, 2050 West County Highway 30A, M1 Suite 230.

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JUST PLAIN TALK: Socialism doesn't have to be a dirty word - Destin Log

A supermajority two-thirds of respondents, including a solid majority of Republicans supports a 2 percent tax on households whose total net worth, including stocks and real estate, exceeds $50 million. Support for such a proposal, which was a plank in Senator Elizabeth Warrens bid for the Democratic nomination, has increased from where it was a year ago.

Oct. 14, 2020, 11:31 p.m. ET

Taxes on the rich is an objectively popular policy, said Sean McElwee, executive director of Data for Progress, a progressive think tank that has polled extensively on support for liberal policy plans. Over the long term, the wind is in the sails of progressives, in terms of demand from the public.

Mr. Trump and his party have tried to sow concern about socialism for several years. In the fall of 2018, as midterm elections approached, Mr. Trumps White House Council of Economic Advisers produced a 72-page report warning of the dangers of socialist policies to the American economy. The White House promoted it in a news release with the headline, Congressional Democrats Want to Take Money From Hardworking Americans to Fund Failed Socialist Policies.

In the abstract, the messaging would appear to fit with Americans views about economic policy. Polls show a significant majority of Americans approve of capitalism and disapprove of socialism. But there are movements toward socialism in subgroups of the country. Majorities of young voters, and Democrats overall, have a favorable view of the concept.

Some of the split comes from disagreements over how to define the term. Americans who favor socialism tend to associate it with Scandinavian countries like Finland or Denmark, whose economic and social welfare systems are more commonly referred to as the Nordic model, the Pew Research Center has found. Its opponents tend to associate it with Venezuela.

That range of definitions has allowed Republicans to lump a growing number of policies favored by liberal groups under the socialism banner. In a recent attack, Mr. Trumps first example of Ms. Harriss so-called communist views was her position on immigration policy, accusing her of wanting to open up the borders of the United States.

In my district, I hear a lot of fear about the dramatic turn the Democratic Party has taken toward socialism, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said in an interview. My constituents are fearful when they see proposals to defund the police, abolish our immigration and customs enforcement, when there is burning and looting in cities, concerns over the Green New Deal.

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Why Trumps Efforts to Paint Biden as a Socialist Are Not Working - The New York Times

While Joe Biden has been making it unmistakably clear that hes nobodys socialist tool, the American socialist movementmost of whose adherents will be voting for Bidenhas continued to expand. The Democratic Socialists of America (to which Ive belonged since the Neolithic Age) now has more than 70,000 members and has launched a campaign to raise that number to 100,000. At its current rate of growth, its membership rolls may well surpass that of the Debs-era Socialist Party, which claimed 118,000 dues-payers at its early-20th-century zenith.

The rebirth of American socialism has come complete with any number of explanatory and exhortatory books, the best of which was published late last month: The Socialist Awakening: Whats Different Now About the Left, a brief, incisive volume by veteran political journalist, longtime democratic socialist, and sometime American Prospect contributor John B. Judis. The book is Judiss third in a series published by Columbia Global Reports. In it, as in its two predecessors The Populist Explosion and The Nationalist Revival, Judis tracks the consequences of the failures of globalized capitalism to sustain working- and middle-class prosperity and stability since the 2008 collapse, and the concomitant rise of both left and right in the wake of those failures. As is not the case in the other two volumes, however, Judis writes not merely as an analyst of an ideologys return but as an advocate for its necessity, with particularly shrewd assessments of how the new American socialism can advance, and, alternatively, how it may marginalize itself into irrelevance.

More from Harold Meyerson

Judis focuses on two periods in American socialisms long history: the Debs Era of 1900 through 1920, and the Bernie Sanders Surge, which began to incubate with the Occupy movement of 2011 but didnt really take off until Sanders began running for president in 2015. Both were periods in which capital concentrated wealth and power, in which little of either trickled down to most Americans, in which the New Deals semisocial democratic reforms had either not yet been enacted or had been discarded in the post-1970 turn toward laissez-faire.

Sanders has always made it plain that socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was his hero, but in Judiss telling, the key to Sanderss zeitgeist-changing success was his move away from the socialist insularity that Debs espoused. While nominally remaining a political independent, Sanders won election to Congress on a social democratic platform of greater regulation of capital, greater power for workers, an expansion of social welfare and economic rights, and a pledge that hed caucus with the Democrats. When he began running for president in 2015, Sanders made clear his model of socialism was the Scandinavian mixed economy. But as Judis recounts, after Columbia University historian Eric Foner sent him an open letter that emphasized a more American pedigree for socialist initiatives, Sanders took the hint. As I recounted in the Prospect, in Sanderss two speeches that he billed as his definition of socialismone given at Georgetown University in 2015, the second at George Washington University in 2019he cited Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King as his forebears in the struggle for socialist reforms.

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In keeping with that expansive definition, Judis emphasizes the broad socialist network thats emerged today, which extends well beyond DSA card-carriers. It includes a range of progressive think tanks (like the Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt Institute) and magazines; most importantly, it includes not just the avowed socialists in elected office but a host of progressives whose politics are indistinguishable from the socialists politics, as Elizabeth Warrens were from Sanderss.

Expanding that network, as socialists like union leaders Sidney Hillman, A. Philip Randolph, and Walter Reuther did during the New Deal and the postwar period, will be as important, if not more important, to the social democratization of todays United States than the growth of DSA per se, Judis contends. What could retard that growth, he continues, would be continuing the hold that a relatively small group of orthodox Trotskyists now have over DSAs leadership. The majority of DSA members, he argues, are Berniecrats, happy to work for socialist and other progressive candidates seeking office as Democrats. (I believe hes right about this.) They understand, as Sanders does and as DSA founder Michael Harrington did, that third-party politics are a dead end in the current configuration of the American electoral system, and that socialists have won power in democracies only when allied with other progressives on behalf of social democratic programs. Such an approach is anathema to the neo-Trotskyist cadres in DSA, for whom a kind of socialist identity politics eclipses both class politics and that of a 21st-century popular front.

Judis also makes the case for a socialist version of nationalism, at which many in todays socialist movement will look askance. So long as democratic nations offer the one kind of government where majority rule holds sway, though, I think Judis has a point. While capitalism has had no trouble going global (in part to escape the regulations enacted by democratic nations), socialism cannot yet call on any planetary democratic body to reform the global economy. Moreover, peoples support for welfare states funded with their taxes, Judis points out, seldom extends beyond their nations borders. To advance a slightly different viewpoint, its worth noting that the nation that has given the highest share of its GDP in foreign aidsometimes to insurgent movements, like the African National Congresswas Sweden under the Social Democrats. Of course, that was when Sweden also had the worlds most expansive welfare state for its own citizens.

Judis writes not merely as an analyst of an ideologys return but as an advocate for its necessity.

As events would have it, the publication of Judiss book coincides with the premiere of a film that seeks to introduce and normalize socialism to American viewers. Indeed, The Big Scary S Word, a film by documentarian Yael Bridge, will have its first festival screening later today.

In Judiss terminology, The Big Scary S Word is a film about the broad socialist network, and broad left history, rather than a look at, say, the American Socialist and Communist Parties, or at DSA today. The focus is on progressives in motion, then and now, and their connection, explicit or implicit, to socialists and socialism, as distinct from the substance of their involvement in the socialist movement as such. Rather than disentangle the socialist and nonsocialist threads that came together to make the civil rights movement, for instance, the picture simply documents the socialism of Martin Luther King. Some of the environmental protests it shows may not have been populated by socialists, but theyre juxtaposed with interviews with Naomi Klein in which she connects a socialist perspective to any serious effort to save the planet. Theres a marvelous segment, replete with old films and photos, on the socialists 40-year control of Milwaukees city government, but no discussion of the social democratic meliorism of Victor Berger, the Milwaukee socialist leader and a contemporary of Debs who did not share Debss antipathy to reformist socialism. For that, you need to consult Judiss book, which is pitched at a narrower audience than Bridges film.

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Just as Eric Foner plays a key role in Judiss account of the Americanization of Bernie Sanderss socialism, so Foner plays a key role in explaining the contributions of socialists to American struggles for justice in Bridges picture. In this task, he is joined by Klein, Cornel West, The Nations John Nichols, and a host of others. In documenting the rise of socialism today, the picture focuses on Lee Carter, a DSA member and the one socialist in the Virginia legislature, as well as on a teacher who assumed a leadership role during the Oklahoma teachers strike and became a socialist in the process.

As its title suggests, The Big Scary S Word makes a broad and pointedly reassuring case for socialism as the remedy to our towering inequities. Judiss book makes a compelling case for what it will take to roll the revived socialist movement on, and offers a pointed critique of how sectarianism could derail it. The former is essential viewing for a broad audience; the latter essential reading for progressives and socialists.

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The Socialist Moment, and How to Extend It - The American Prospect