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By Kevin Reed 5 September 2020

Earlier this year, the World Socialist Web Site was officially blacklisted from r/politics, the largest political subreddit on the link-sharing social media site Reddit, with no explanation given.

On August 28, an article entitled, Trump runs for Fhrer inexplicably made it past the blacklist, having been shared by a Reddit user in the r/politics subreddit. It quickly won thousands of upvotes, received over 600 comments, and was elevated onto Reddits front page.

The r/politics moderators immediately sprang into action. They labeled the WSWS article as coming from an Unacceptable Source and shut down the political discussion among Reddit members.

As we reported on Saturday, the censored WSWS articlewhich analyzed President Trumps nomination acceptance speech at the 2020 Republican National Conventionbecame instantly popular because it said what the establishment media refused to. It exposed Trumps law and order response to the mass protests, his appeals to the police, military and federal paramilitary forces, and his tirades against socialism and Marxism as part of an attempt to establish a personalist presidential dictatorship and create a fascist movement in the US.

The articles thousands of upvotes were accompanied by overwhelmingly supportive comments, including the following:

These events make clear the nature of Reddits censorship of the WSWS. It is aimed at silencing left-wing criticism of the US political establishment, under conditions in which broad sections of its own readers are hungry for news and analysis from just such a perspective.

Moreover, the WSWS analysis pointed out that the only reason Trump has been able to take his dictatorial plans as far as he has is because of the spinelessness of his Democratic Party opponents. As the article explained, the Democrats have consistently blocked any appeal to the broad majority of the population and, in particular, the working class, and this is because, as one of the two parties of Wall Street and big business, the Democrats are just as terrified of, and hostile to, the growth of mass popular opposition to capitalism as Trump is.

However, for the r/politics moderators, this analysis by the WSWS is considered unacceptable. And, approximately nine hours after the WSWS article was sharedand after it had received 9,200 upvotes (93 percent of those who voted) and more than 600 commentsthe r/politics moderators labeled the article from an Unacceptable Source and shut down the political discussion.

The subreddit moderators political censorship of the WSWS article Trump runs for Fhrer comes as no surprise given their previous removal of wsws.org from the r/politics domain whitelist.

On May 26, Reddit users attempting to post links from the World Socialist Web Site to r/politics were informed that the wsws.org domain had been removed as a recognized source of news and analysis on the subreddit.

Subsequent attempts by users to publish links to articles from wsws.org were returning an automated system message that says, Your submission was automatically removed because wsws.org is not on our approved source whitelist. r/politics has a number of conditions that domains must adhere to in order to be approved as an acceptable source.

As we explained in an earlier article on April 3, regarding the banning of the World Socialist Web Site from the r/coronavirus subreddit, the removal of the wsws.org domain by moderators is unmistakably an act of political censorship designed to block our analysis of the unfolding crisis from reaching the public.

In the case of the r/coronavirus ban in April, moderators claimed that WSWS articles were off-topic political discussion. In the more recent case of r/politicsa subreddit specifically devoted to political topics and political discussionthe moderators have resorted to a cruder form of censorship: the false claim that the World Socialist Web Site is unacceptable.

We have also pointed out that the World Socialist Web Site is recognized internationally as a major source of authoritative Marxist journalism and analysis. Articles on the site are frequently quoted by leading authors and journalists around the world and in dozens of academic papers. Articles and statements on wsws.org are translated into 24 languages and the site is followed daily by a growing international audience of hundreds of thousands of readers.

Both recent instances of political censorship by Reddit moderators were recently noted by Matt Taibbithe freelance journalist and contributing editor for Rolling Stonein his May 29 blog post Planet of the Censoring Humans, which surveyed a series of recent online censorship actions by the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit.

Taibbi wrote, In late April, the World Socialist Web Sitewhich has been one of the few consistent critics of Internet censorship and algorithmic manipulationwas removed by Reddit from the r/coronavirus subreddit on the grounds that it was not reliable. The site was also removed from the whitelist for r/politics, the primary driver of traffic from Reddit to the site.

The subreddit r/politics was created in August 2007 and is one of the most widely used forums on Reddit. Out of 1.2 million subreddits on the news aggregation platform, r/politics ranks at number 56. It has 6.5 million members with tens of thousands actively participating users at any one moment. At the time of this writing, for example, there are approximately 150,000 users participating in live online political discussions on r/politics on a range of topics.

There are more than 1,020 news source domains included on the r/politics whitelist. These include newspaper publishers (359), policy think tanks (188), web publishers (183), magazine publishers (118), television networks (48), international news agencies (39), polling and research organizations (37), radio broadcasters (19), US government agencies (10), news wire services (10) and political parties (9).

The r/politics whitelist includes numerous right-wing publisherssuch as The Federalist, Breitbart.com and theWashington Timeswho engage in promoting racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories and completely false and dangerous information about the coronavirus pandemic.

The World Socialist Web Site had been previously whitelisted nearly three years ago by the subreddit and, since August 2017, hundreds of article links have been shared. These articles have resulted in some of the most popular discussions on r/politics and produced a combined total of hundreds of thousands of upvotes and tens of thousands of comments.

We demand answers from the moderators of r/politics to the following questions:

Finally, we call upon all Reddit users and others who defend free speech rights to demand an end to political censorship by r/politics moderators and that the World Socialist Web Site be restored to the subreddit whitelist with an accompanying official statement to this effect.

The author also recommends:

Reddit moderators censor WSWS article on Trumps speech at Republican convention [29 August 2020]

Reddit bans 2,000 communities in major censorship action [2 July 2020]

Why is the World Socialist Web Site banned from the subreddit r/coronavirus? [3 April 2020]

Google is blocking the World Socialist Web Site from search results.

To fight this blacklisting:

Go here to read the rest:
End the blacklist of the World Socialist Web Site on Reddit! - WSWS

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! Im Amy Goodman. The Quarantine Report.

Our next guest writes today in the Los Angeles Times, Fifty years ago today, on the night of Sept. 4, 1970, I was dancing, along with a multitude of others, in the streets of Santiago de Chile. We were celebrating the election of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist leader in the world.

President Allendes victory had historical significance beyond Chile. Before then, political revolutions had been violent, imposed by force of arms. Allende and his left-wing coalition used peaceful means, proclaiming it unnecessary to repress ones adversaries to achieve social justice. Radical change could happen within the confines and promises of a democracy, he writes.

Ariel Dorfman went on to become the cultural and press adviser to President Allendes chief of staff during the last months of his presidency in 1973. He continues, I have often fantasized about how different the world would be if Allende had not been overthrown, three years later, in a bloody coup. I wonder where humanity would be if his peaceful revolution had been allowed to run its course and become a template for other countries.

Those words from todays op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by our Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean American best-selling author, human rights defender, playwright, poet and distinguished professor emeritus of literature at Duke University, joining us now from Durham, North Carolina.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now! Talk about what happened 50 years ago, the way the word socialist is thrown around in the United States today by the leaders of this country, and what you see are the lessons from Chile.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Well, its great to be back with you, Amy.

Allendes revolution, which was a peaceful revolution, was the attempt to put the resources of the country and the future of the country into the hands of the majority. Chile had been a country that had had incredible poverty, where most of our resources were controlled from abroad, many by American companies, where the land was not tilled by the people was tilled by the people, but those people didnt get the riches or prosperity that they had. And Allende basically was a movement for social justice and for putting in the center of history the real protagonist of that history, which are the everyday men and women who built the country,I mean, the essential workers right? that are now so praised but who are generally left behind and neglected and forgotten.

So it was a moment in history which is very, very important, because Allende was saying to the world, We do not need to repress, eliminate, censor our adversaries. We dont need to kill other people, in order to have social justice. We can do this through peaceful means. And so, Allende joins Gandhi and Martin Luther King and so many other wonderful people of history saying there is a way of changing the reality, of changing everything, everything that we dont have to leave the world in the same way in which we found it. We can create a different world ahead of us. And it was a wonderful experiment. It was an experiment that lasted 1,000 days. But in those 1,000 days, wonderful things happened.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go to today, to the Republican National Convention, to the former governor of South Carolina, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

NIKKI HALEY: A Biden-Harris administration would be much, much worse. Last time, Joes boss was Obama. This time, it would be Pelosi, Sanders and the Squad. Their vision for America is socialism. And we know that socialism has failed everywhere. They want to tell Americans how to live and what to think. They want a government takeover of healthcare. They want to ban fracking and kill millions of jobs. They want massive tax hikes on working families. Joe Biden and the socialist left would be a disaster for our economy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, thats Nikki Haley. And, of course, President Trump repeatedly talks about socialism. This was the State of the Union.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Tonight we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.

AMY GOODMAN: Ariel Dorfman, please respond.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Well, listen, I would be glad if America were a socialist country, because then people would not be starving. There wouldnt be racism in the way weve got it. Everyone would have healthcare, and the economy would be much, much better off.

But socialism isnt on the ballot, you know? Social justice is on the ballot. Healthcare for all is going to be on the ballot. Infrastructure is going to be on the ballot. Racial justice is going to be on the ballot. I mean, theres lots of things that are going to be on the ballot, but not necessarily socialist. And Trump is simply deranged, as we know. He lies about everything.

And, you know, when your previous guest, Professor Stanley, spoke about fascism, I remember two very different things. First of all, the whole campaign against Allende during the Allende government was exactly what Professor Stanley is speaking about, but exactly, you know? That we are diseased, the law and order, were going to come were going to rape your women. The socialists are going to rape your women. Well, of course, the people who ended up raping women and children were the fascists who took the reins of government after they overthrew Allende. So, they spoke about foreigners infiltrating the country. They spoke about the nationalism. They spoke about sexual unease. Every one of those little fascist things that you mentioned there was part of the campaign against Allende, which was in great measure paid for by the CIA and Nixon and Kissinger. Besides that, after, when Pinochet took power on September 11th, 1973, the whole policy of the Pinochet government was exactly what Professor Stanley is saying, taking the exact same points.

So, socialism isnt a problem thats ahead, you know? But people will have to decide whether sweeping change is going to come. And I think that the country is ready for those sweeping reforms, just like the sort of sweeping reforms that we had to do in Chile, because there are moments when you need to change things drastically in order to make things better. And, in fact, Joe Biden and Harris are the party to security. In fact, theyre the party of stability, not the party of chaos. If anybody is creating chaos, it is people like Donald Trump and all his enablers. And they will go down in history as accomplices to murder.

AMY GOODMAN: I daresay that you

ARIEL DORFMAN: Mass murder, by the way. Mass murder, not just general murder.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about the U.S. topping 6 million cases of coronavirus, 187,000 deaths, could be 400,000 by January 1st. You say the pandemic is teaching Americans what its like to live in exile. Explain.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Yes, I think that we are you know, Ive lived in exile a great part of my life, and Ive been an immigrant a great part of my life. And we are used to distancing. We are used to discovering in distance the capacity that we have to connect with one another, the capacity we have if you think about the immigrants, immigrants have come into a country, and when we come into this country, we see everything with new eyes. And Im suggesting that that experience is one which Americans are going to have to have.

In fact, Im suggesting that even confinement may lead to enormous advances in literature and art, some of the greatest art. I have a novel that just came out called Cautivos, which is about Cervantes in the jail of Seville. And he created the greatest novel of all time, Don Quixote de la Mancha, right? And he created it in circumstances of confinement, of extreme confinement. And some of the greatest literature has been done either in exile in other words, when youre distanced from others, when youve lost everything, when youve lost your country and you have to refound everything, you have to rethink everything or in confinement, when youre isolated and you have time to look into yourself and say, What is the real meaning of life? What is real happiness? How will we connect with one another? How will we seek and imagine a different sort of future?

So, those are things that, strangely enough you know, Im an optimist. I think its terrible, whats happening. I would not wish it on the worst of my enemies, this pandemic were living through. But it is a chance for us to think again about what it means to be isolated, what it means to lose a country, what it means to lose everyday life, what it means not to go to the funeral of the people we love, not to be able to hug the people we love like immigrants all over the world. We cant do that, right? Were separated from ourselves. And yet, from that pain, I think that new things can be born. Were like phoenixes in that sense. We rise from the ashes. And we rise from the ashes with our imagination, with our compassion, with our ability to think and to rethink the world in a different way.

I think thats whats really, really going to happen in the next few months. We have to decide whether were going towards a different sort of future, imagine the possibility of that future, or whether were going to get in a stranglehold of a past and die in that. And many people will die because of it. I mean, death is on the ballot. Death is on the ballot this November. It is a matter of life and death, whats going to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Ariel Dorfman, I want to thank you for being with us, Chilean American best-selling author, human rights defender, playwright and poet. We will link to your op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today headlined I danced in the streets after Allendes victory in Chile 50 years ago. Now I see its lessons for today. He was the cultural and press adviser to President Allende during the last months of his presidency in 1973. Salvador Allende died in the palace in Santiago September 11th, 1973, as the authoritarian dictator Augusto Pinochet, supported by the Nixon government in the United States, rose to power. Pinochet would kill thousands of people in the years to come.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we remember David Graeber in his own words. Stay with us.

More here:
Death Is on the Ballot: Lessons for the US, 50 Years After Allende's Socialist Revolution in Chile - Democracy Now!

From each according to ability; To each according to need, is a phrase derived from where?

A) The works of Karl Marx

B) The Bible

C) The Constitution of the United States

If you answered A, you are kinda right. But if you answered B, youre not exactly wrong either.

C, on the other hand, would get you zero points. But you would not be alone in getting it wrong. In a 1987 survey, nearly half of Americans surveyed believed the phrase From each according to ability; To each according to need came from the U.S. Constitution.

The phrase was, in fact, popularized by Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. But its origins are in France.

It occurs in the 1848 speeches of the socialist politician Louis Blanc and can be traced further back to the cover of the 1845 edition of philosopher tienne Cabets utopian novel Voyage en Icarie: First right: To Live To each according to his needs First duty: To Work From each according to his ability.

But a decade and a half before Cabet, the followers of the French political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon coined a similar phrase, To each according to ability; To each according to works as an epigraph of their journal LOrganisateur in 1829.

There is a constitution that contains a mix of both phrases, but it isnt the U.S.s. Rather it is the Constitution of the USSR. Joseph Stalin paired From each according to ability with To each according to work in the 1936 Soviet Constitution.

So where does the Bible come in? Well, Saint-Simon, Cabet and Blanc all committed Christians whose social programs were inspired by their faith borrowed each of these phrases from French Bible translations of the time, and defended them on scriptural grounds. History of economics scholar Adrien Lutz and I traced these phrases back to these French biblical passages.

To each according to needs comes from the Book of Acts documenting the practices of early Christian communities in Jerusalem. In the Book of Acts, believers were together and had all things in common and sold their possessions and distributed the proceeds within the community as any had needs.

In Voyage en Icarie, Cabet tells of a fictional community who practice similar communal living arrangements. He later went to the U.S. and founded a number of Icarian communities in the second half of the 19th century, that practiced communal ownership of goods and were governed by egalitarian ideals.

From each according to ability, is likewise found in the Book of Acts: So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. Cabet and Blanc both construed this phrase as a call for Christian servitude. They believed society to be a cooperative venture in which people of means should contribute more.

To each according to ability is in the Gospel of Matthew. In the Parable of the Talents, a master gives his servants different amounts of money or talents and goes away on a journey: To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Upon his return, he praises the servants who have invested and increased their allotment but condemns the one who buried the money and simply returned it.

For Saint-Simon, the phrase meant putting jobs and resources in the hands of the most qualified and entrepreneurial people and taking them away from nobility. This would lead to greater productivity, benefiting everyone, and in particular, the most disadvantaged socioeconomic groups in society.

To each according to works occurs at many junctions in the Bible. For example, St. Pauls Second Letter to the Romans states: [God] will render to each according to his works: To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.

The phrase is also found it in First Corinthians: He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. Whereas St. Pauls letter makes rewards contingent on ones achievements as a single individual, in Corinthians it measures the effort that one brings to a collective endeavor.

The same article in the Soviet Constitution that employs this phrase also contains a quote from a Bible passage found in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.

The message is the same, but the background of this quote is interesting. St. Paul, the Christian apostle, believed that he and his co-workers did have a right to be maintained by the Church presumably because their ministry was a sufficient contribution to the common good.

But they were facing an incentive problem: There were idle and disruptive elements in the Christian community who were trying to free-ride on the communal living arrangements. For this reason, even though they were doing ministry, St. Paul urges his followers to do manual labor to set a model and distance themselves from the free riders.

The sentiments behind these slogans are not confined to the ash heaps of history. Rather, many of the policies from the political left today fit under these simple slogans.

To each according to need can be applied to the debate over health care. The aim is to take the provision of health care away from market forces and to make it freely accessible to all who need it. From each according to ability is what underlies a concern for the common good and a conception of society as a cooperative venture, with mandatory public service as a matching policy proposal.

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To each according to ability is at the core of equal opportunity an ideal that underlies affirmative action legislation and various policies to increase the accessibility of college. To each according to work maps onto the ideal of equal pay for equal work and the push for minimal wage policies, mainly benefiting manual labor jobs.

Two millennia in the making, these phrases illustrate what is said in the book of Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun.

Read more:
'From each according to ability; to each according to need' tracing the biblical roots of socialism's enduring slogan - The Conversation US

Do the Democrats and media believe there isn't enough chaos in America, so we need a president with probable dementia, and a very abrasive and phony vice president? Does their strong endorsement by communist China define that Democrat platform?

In a family, not being permitted to ask questions is one of the key indicators of a dysfunctional and abusive family. With that same standard, the media, Democrat Party and educational system are all dysfunctional and abusive. But is that surprising when the cultural marxism (socialism), that the media, Democrat Party and National Education Association push is itself dysfunctional and abusive?

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See the article here:
Socialist agenda sows division and chaos in everything it touches - Wyoming Tribune

The history of socialism in this country is, generally speaking, a history of failure. This isnt the fault of all socialists past, its a function of specific historical conjunctures and the formation of the Labour Party, in its specificity, has played a key role. There are a number of reasons for this, rooted in the history and formation of the party, but they can be summarised by the fact that the Labour Party has never been a Marxist party and has always been collaborationist. If we accept the centrality of Labour to the historical failure of socialism in the UK in the absence of a convincing theoryandpraxis aimed towards crushing the party its necessary to think about how exactly to engage with it.

The anti-socialist function of Labour in the UK has been twofold. The first is to inhibit socialist organising in the first place by offering the mirage of an easier path. The second is by working as a pressure valve, as a means to redirect socialist energies into establishing a better class settlement within the existing capitalist-imperialist framework. Recognising this function is not accelerationism, nor is it saying the left needs suffering to succeed: it is to say that the Labour Party forecloses radical possibility by finding a local optimum and staying there. Both functions are anti-socialist, but mistaking them for one another is a consistent and debilitating flaw on the left.

The implication of the first is that socialist organising must be focussed entirely beyond the Labour Party, and any belief that organising for the emancipation of the working class should be done within the party will be the downfall of a socialist movement. The implication of the second is that the socialist left in the UK is only relatively autonomous from the Labour Party.

The influential Marxist theorist Louis Althusser who was a lifelong member of the French Communist Party and is known for his work on ideology claimed that the economic base is determinant of the superstructure only in the last instance and he called this relative autonomy.In the same way, the Labour Party is determinant of socialist possibility only in the last instance. In other words, there is a complex two way interaction between socialists and the Labour Party and, whilst we have a degree of autonomy, how far we can go is bound by the Labour Party.

The first function of the Labour Party lends itself to total disengagement from it socialists ought not get involved, lest it redirect their energies from a productive cause to an unproductive one. The second function implies the opposite socialists must organise within the Labour Party but importantly it must be alongside their extra-party organising.

There are two rationale behind this latter implication: firstly, that the Labour Party as a national platform and field of struggle is more accessible to socialists than almost any other; secondly, that in the last instance, when the autonomy of the socialist left is revealed as relative, we will be better placed to ensure the Labour Party is not there to offer a class settlement. Socialist control of the party is vital to avoid the horizon-limiting effects caused by its agitation it is vital so that the party cannot serve as the final barrier to the socialist cause.

There is no driving reason as to why those currently organising outside of the Labour Party should join it and there is no driving reason why those currently organising within the Labour Party should leave it. The Labour Party is an unwelcoming place, it has a toxic culture that is hostile to minority groups and no one (especially you) should feel pressured into joining such an institution but for those of us who are willing to stay, organising within it can be worthwhile.

A successful socialist movement will require either the Labour Party to have been crushed or transformed. Whilst the end goal is absolutely the abolition of the existing structures and the institutions that reproduce them, the party currently isnt even a platform from which the left can launch itself. That needs to change.

This has implications for what organising in the Labour Party should be driving towards. There is an argument that Labour is and always has been a social-democratic party and so advocating for a social-democratic position is the best to hope for (socialists should leave or bend). This argument mistakes the difficulty of pushing a more radical agenda for a refutation of its necessity. It operates on the assumption that socialist possibilities can be disentangled from the Labour Party.

In a developed capitalist economy like ours the two are intertwined they have been since the party was formed and affiliated to large swathes of organised labour. Whilst it exists it is necessary to fight to pin the party left, advocating for a real break from capitalism, for the dual purpose of making use of its amplified platform and to work to prevent class-compromise. Ultimately, therefore, the Labour Party being elected into government is secondary to ensuring the Labour Party does not hold reactionary or compromising positions.

Left-Labourists aim to use the party as the primary instrument for bringing about socialism. But the existing Labour Party is a component of the ideological state apparatus. It serves as a barrier to socialist goals and, explicitly aiming for a conciliatory approach, it serves to set the boundaries of discourse and obfuscate real, radical political possibilities.

Aiming to use the party in its current form to legislate for socialism is a Sisyphean task this is the lesson of the Corbyn project. Initially an attempt to transform the Labour Party, Corbynism was derailed by the taste of near electoral success in 2017, in favour of one last push. In opposition to this, our aim must primarily and principally be the transformation of the party, not its election to power. This transformation must come with the complete and total consent of the membership and this requires changing the broader balance of class forces in which the membership operates. It is for this reason that organising outside the Labour Party is vitally important even for those who wish to stay in the party. Organising within the party lays the groundwork for its transformation: organising without the party creates the conditions for it.

Being a member of the Labour Party is not necessarily to claim it is the sole means by which society can change; it is not even to claim that it is a force for good it is simply to claim that without recognising and counteracting the role it plays in maintaining the capitalist state, there can be no socialist break.The Labour Party is not necessarily the means by which socialism will come about but if it isnt dealt with, it will be the means by which it does not.

Luke Evans is a founding member and steering committee member of Labour Tenants United

See original here:
What's wrong with the Labour Party? - Red Pepper