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By 1920, the name Eugene Debs represented different things to different groups. For some, he was a visionary union leader and politician who rose to the national stage to unite American workers under the banner of socialism. To others, he was a dangerous traitor who sought to discredit the nations war effort and undo the tremendous progress the countrys economy had made in the beginning of the 20th century. And to the employees at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he was inmate number 9653.

The first two viewpoints depend solely on a person's political leanings, but the third was an indisputable fact. Debs was indeed an imprisoned manwho also happened to be running for President of the United States from his cell.

Eugene Victor Debs was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Marguerite Bettrich and Jean Daniel Debs, two immigrants from Alsace, France.They came to the U.S. in1849and worked in the grocery business. At age 14, Eugenetook a jobas a paint scraper at Vandalia Railroad, where he earned just $.50 a day. He soon moved up to become a railroad fireman, shoveling piles of coal into the locomotives firebox for more than $1 each night [PDF]. This was at a time when workers toiled for16 hoursa day, six days a week.

In 1875, Debs was elected secretary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and was an editor for the organizations monthly magazine. Seeing the dangers firemen faced firsthand, Debs said his brotherhood would fight to provide for the widows and orphans who are daily left penniless and at the mercy of public charity by the death of a brother.His growing interest in social and economic issues also led to a two-term stint as Terre Haute City Clerk from 1879 to 1883, and a term serving as a Democrat in the Indiana General Assembly in 1884.

On June 20, 1893, Debs's ambitions grew when he founded the American Railway Union (ARU) to protect all workers throughout the railroad industry, not just firemen. The union was soon one of the countrys largest, with 125 local chapters nationwide; at one point, enrollments hit 2000 a day.

In May 1894, after suffering a series of salary cuts,workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company walked off the job. In response,Debs and the ARU organized a massive sympathy boycott of any trains and railroads using Pullman cars, and by June,125,000 ARU workershadjoined the cause.A nation that thrived on cross-country train commerce was now being stopped in its tracks.

The workers'defiance soon turned to anger. After Debs made a speech to workers on June 29 in Blue Island, Illinois, some in the crowd broke off and began a riot. By day's end, buildings had been burned to the ground and a locomotive with a mail train attached to it lay topped over.

With the U.S. mail system affected by the strike, andvital rail service crippled,President Grover Clevelandnow considered the unruliness to be a federal matter. In early July, Attorney General Richard Olney issued an injunction against Debs and other ARU leaders that forbid them from communicating with their union members. The press at the time turned on Debs, too, claiming the strike he organized around the Pullman situation was a power grab. One political cartoon in the Chicago Tribune portrayed Dictator Debsas a cigar-chomping would-be king who liked to rest his feet on the U.S. Constitution [PDF].

President Cleveland deployed troops to Chicago to quell the ongoing demonstrations, but on July 7, the conflicts turned violent. Members of the National Guard killed anywhere from four to 30 strikers in the clash.Debs, who was no longer legallyallowed to communicate with his members, could do nothing to calm tensions.

That same month, Debs was arrested and charged with contempt of court and conspiracy to interfere with U.S. mail,and spent six months behind bars. The ARU crumbled soon after, and while many Pullman workers were eventually rehired, they had to agree in writing to never form a union.

Behind bars, Debs read Karl Marxs Das Kapitaland convertedto socialism.In 1897, two years after leaving prison, he established the Social Democratic Party of America.

Under this banner, Debs made his first run for president in 1900 on a platform revolving around workers equality and better wages. William McKinleywon the race with a total of 7,207,923 votes, while Debs garnered just86,935.Still, it was a start.

Debs ran again in 1904, this time as a member of the next political party he helped establish: the Socialist Party of America. His totals jumped to around 402,000 votes; in 1908, he returned with 420,000 votes, losing to Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, respectively.

Debs's peak came in the election of 1912one of the great wild cards in U.S. history. It featured the incumbent, Taft, running against Democrat Woodrow Wilson; former president Roosevelt, who was running as a member of the Progressive Party; and Debs, running again as a Socialist on a platform that put an emphasis on workers, women's suffrage, and ending child labor.

Debs fell short once again, but his total ballooned to more than900,000 votes6 percent of the popular vote. It's still the highest percentage of the vote a Socialist candidate has ever received in a presidential election, and its more than double the amount he earned in 1908. It would be another eight years before his fifth and final presidential campaignarguably one of the strangest the country has seen.

By 1914, Debs was expressing his ardent opposition to Americas seemingly inevitable involvement in World War I in a series of anti-war editorials in the National Rip-Saw, where he stuck to one main message: Capitalist nations not only exploit their workers, but ruthlessly invade, plunder, and ravage one another. The profit system is responsible for it all.

Written words gave way to public rallies. Debs traveled across the Northeast to speak to his base of frustrated workers looking for a unifying voice against war. During one memorable stop in Boston, he asked a packed crowd of workers: Must we send the workers of one country against those of another because a citizen has been torpedoed on the high seas, while we do nothing about the 600,000 workingmen that are crushed each year needlessly under our industrial machinery?

Socialist opposition to the military action had little real effect. On April 6, 1917, the United States officially declared war against Germany. Just a few months later, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which targeted disloyal citizens who attempted to interfere with military progress during the war. This was followed by thecomplementary Sedition Act of 1918, giving federal authorities the power to punish anyone using disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language toward the Constitution, the military, or the country.

Debs knew the risks he was taking with his anti-war crusade, but hecontinued throughout the Midwest, culminating in a speech at a Socialist Party gathering in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918. For two hours, the impassioned orator made his case, criticizing everything from the war to the Sedition Act to the military draft.

The master class has always declared the wars, the 62-year-old told the crowd. The subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to loseespecially their lives.

Days later, Debs was arrested while heading to another party event in Cleveland. The jury found him guilty onthree counts of violating the Espionage and Sedition acts. On September 18, 1918, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Even prison couldnt quiet Debs. In fact, by 1920, he was again nominated to be the Socialist Party's candidate for president, his fifth run overall. While he was accustomed to campaigning by train and speaking in front of thousands, in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Debs was allowed [PDF] to give one political statement every week, which was then handed over to news wires. Supporters did the campaigning for him on the ground, making posters featuring the slogan From Atlanta Prison to the White House, 1920 and campaign buttons that showed Debs in a prison jumpsuit with the words For President: Convict No. 9653 splashed across them. It wasn't so much a campaign as it was a protest against what many thought was Debs's unconstitutional imprisonment.

Amazingly, Debs still captured 3.4 percent of the popular vote, meaning more than 910,000 people chose a socialist in prisonover Warren G. Harding or his opponent, James M. Cox.

By December 1921, with the war over, President Harding pardoned Debsand invited him to the White House. I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally, Harding said upon meeting him. Indeed, Debs had left prison almost as a mythic figure to his followers50,000 of whom lined up to watch his train pull in upon his return to Terra Haute.

Though the meeting with Harding was as close as he ever got to the White House, Debs proved he didn't need to win an election to make his voice heard.

Link:
Eugene V. Debs, the Five-Time Socialist Candidate for President Who Once Campaigned From Prison - Mental Floss

The NDA crossed 100 Rajya Sabha seats on Friday, further consolidating the BJP as Indias dominant political force in its 40th year.

The Bharatiya Janata Party was formed in April, 1980, after its members were expelled from the Janata Party, the joint opposition force that was launched three years before that to counter Indira Gandhi. One of the components of the Janata Party was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, launched in 1951.

According to its own record, the Jana Sangh was the result of three events. First the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in December 1950, second the resignation of Syama Prasad Mookerjee from the Nehru government the same year, and the election also in 1950 and subsequent forcing out of PD Tandon as Congress president.

Tandon was seen as a Hindu conservative opposed to Nehrus secularism and after Patels death, Nehru forced Tandon to resign.Another event, also acknowledged by the Jana Sangh as being important to its formation, was the banning of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh after the murder of Gandhi in 1948 and the arrest of its leader MS Golwalkar. The RSS was not registered as a political organisation and the ban was lifted in 1949, on the condition that the RSS adopt a constitution, which it agreed to do.

Read more here:
Both secularism and socialism figure in BJPs constitution! - National Herald

By Fred Mazelis 26 June 2020

This week marks 25 years since the death of Ed Winn, a longtime member of the Workers League, forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party in the US, and twice the Workers Leagues presidential candidate. This obituary, commemorating Ed Winns life and work, appeared in the International Workers Bulletin , a forerunner of the World Socialist Web Site . It has been slightly edited for republication.

Ed Winn, a leader of the Workers League and the partys candidate for US President in 1984 and 1988, died in Wilmington, North Carolina on June 20, 1995. He was 58 years old.

Comrade Winn had suffered for some years from kidney disease and had been on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. However, his death from an apparent heart attack was sudden and unexpected. It is a great loss for the working class and the revolutionary movement.

For nearly two decades, Ed Winn was a member of the Workers League and a political supporter of the Fourth International. His history of struggle, as a transit worker in New York City and, above all, as a leader of the Trotskyist movement, is bound up with the great political issues of our time.

Ed was born on February 12, 1937 in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father, Richard, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Anna, a homemaker. His family, like millions of others, struggled to sustain itself during a period of mass unemployment and poverty.

The Jim Crow system of racial apartheid was firmly entrenched in North Carolina during his childhood. Eds political awareness as he matured in the 1950s was shaped by the growing civil rights struggle. He recalled the threats from the police and white racists and the whole system of segregation: the separate drinking fountains set up for white people, the separate public facilities that were set up by the racist laws of Southern states from Maryland, where I had relatives, all the way to Mississippi, where I visited and stayed for a while.

Ed was 18 years old when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, was beaten and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in Sumner, Mississippi in the fall of 1955. Till, a Chicago youth who was visiting relatives, was slain for the crime of allegedly whistling at a white woman. His murderers were acquitted.

When Ed Winn arrived in New York City in 1958 he already knew a great deal about the struggle for equal rights. He soon found out about the struggles of workers on the job. He obtained work at a clothing store and became for a period a member of the clothing workers union. ln late 1965 he was hired by the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked for the next 22 years.

Only a few months after becoming a transit worker, Ed joined thousands of others in a militant strike which shut down the System. The 1966 transit strike was among the bitter struggles, including those in auto, the mines and other sections of basic industry, which erupted as the post-World War II boom was coming to an end. Transport Workers Union President Mike Quill, the unions founder, was forced to call the walkout and defy the capitalist politicians and the courts. Quill, who suffered from a serious heart ailment, had a fatal heart attack after being jailed.

The strike ended in a victory for the transit workers, although the gains made in wages and benefits have since been largely destroyed by years of concessionary contracts. Ed was elected as a shop steward at a car maintenance yard during his first year on the job.

Several years later, Ed joined an opposition caucus in Local 100, the Rank and File Committee, which was dominated by a black nationalist outlook. The Opposition challenged the right-wing union leadership on racial grounds, claiming that attacks on workers were the result of discrimination and arguing that the increasing number of black workers in the transit system made possible a change to black leadership of Local 100.

As Ed Winn later explained, We did not understand the class issues that were involved, that the problems that were developing in work locations were problems affecting both black and white workers, that these were problems affecting the working class itself. Our narrow nationalist outlook prevented us from bringing black and white workers together in order to take up a common struggle against those, namely, the bankers and businessmen, who wanted to place the burden of the crisis in transit onto the backs of the workers.

The Rank and File Committee disintegrated in 1972. Ed, along with most of its other active supporters, turned away for a time from political and union activity.

In the mid-1970s, world capitalism was shaken by a series of economic and political convulsions. In the US, the Watergate crisis precipitated the resignation of Richard Nixon, which was followed by the defeat of the American war against Vietnam. In 1975 New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, and a state Emergency Financial Control Board was established to tear up union contracts and force city workers to pay for the crisis.

Ed was by now working as a bus maintainer at the East New York surface maintenance shop in Brooklyn. It was here that he came into contact with the Workers League. He heard about the partys campaign on behalf of Gary Tyler, a youth who had been framed up and imprisoned in Louisiana for a crime he did not commit.

Tom Henehan, a young leader of the Workers League and its youth movement, the Young Socialists, played the key role in recruiting Ed Winn into the Workers League.

Tom discussed the Workers League pamphlet Black Nationalism and Marxist Theory with Ed, arguing that the fundamental issue facing every section of workers was the class struggle and not struggles based on race. Tom also stressed the importance of taking up a fight inside the transit union against its pro-capitalist leadership and of fighting to build a labor party to establish a workers government.[1]

As a result of these discussions and his reading of the Bulletin, as the newspaper of the Workers League was then called, Ed joined the Workers League in early 1976.

He later said that the very first work by Leon Trotsky that I read was Marxism and the Trade Unions, in which he dealt with the economic decay of capitalism and the necessity for transforming the trade unions into revolutionary organizations. This, in turn, meant replacing the reformist union leadership with a revolutionary leadership. At the same time Trotsky warned that the trade unions could not replace the revolutionary party: that the revolutionary leadership could only come through the building of a party trained in the Marxist world outlook and a scientific perspective.

One of the crucial political experiences through which Ed and other members of the Workers League passed came less than two years later, when Tom Henehan, then 26 years old, was shot and killed at a Young Socialists dance in support of Gary Tyler in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Along with other members and supporters of the Workers League, Ed Winn responded strongly to this political murder, gathering the support of thousands of transit workers and others on petitions demanding an investigation of the killing and action to bring the assassins to trial. After more than three years, the two gunmen were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to maximum prison terms.

In December 1977, Ed Winn was elected to the executive board of TWU Local 100, representing more than 1,000 workers in the Surface Maintenance division of the union. He ran on a program calling for the building of a labor party and socialist policies. He was reelected in 1979.

During these years Ed developed as a Marxist fighter in the working class. When the transit workers struck once again in 1980, he was on the executive board and fought against the moves of the bureaucracy, then headed by John Lawe, to isolate and betray the strike.

Ed fought for transit workers to turn to the entire working class against the union-busting Democratic Mayor Ed Koch. Lawes other opponents on the Local 100 executive board, however, based themselves simply on trade union militancy and ignored the political issues in the struggle against the union bureaucracy. They themselves refused to break from the capitalist Democratic Party and challenge the so-called right of a few billionaire bankers to dictate wage concessions, layoffs and cuts in social services, Ed stated. Therefore, they could offer no viable alternative to the capitulatory policy of the Lawe leadership.

The defeat of the transit workers in 1980 foreshadowed the betrayal of the PATCO air traffic controllers struggle one year later and the ensuing decade of betrayed and broken strikes. The next stage of Ed Winns activity as a transit worker and a leader of the Workers League was bound up with the struggle against these betrayals. In 1984 Ed applied for and was granted a leave of absence from his transit job in order to run as the presidential candidate of the Workers League in its first-ever national campaign.

This was a period of wholesale wage-cutting, concessions, plant closures and union-busting. The assault on the working class was carried out by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Jesse Jackson pursued his own campaign as a Democrat in order to keep workers tied to that big business party. Ed and his running mate Helen Halyard were placed on the ballot in six industrial states, and they received 14,363 votes. He spoke to thousands of workers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota.

In 1988, Ed was again the Workers League candidate for President, joined this time by Barry Porster as the vice-presidential candidate. The Workers League campaign exposed the deterioration in the social conditions of millions following eight years of the Reagan presidency and the huge transfer of wealth to the rich, as well as the crisis facing the labor movement.

The union-busting onslaught, aided and abetted by the AFL-CIO leadership itself, had deepened during the 1980s. The defeat of the Hormel meatpacking strike was followed by the frame-up of the four coal miners involved in the 1984-85 strike against A.T. Massey in Kentucky. During this period trade union membership continued to decline rapidly.

One of the high points of the 1988 campaign was Ed Winns appearance before one thousand paperworkers and their supporters at a rally in Lock Haven, Pa., marking the first anniversary of the struggle against International Paper. In that speech, listened to intently by locked-out workers and strikers from several States, Winn analyzed the defeats suffered in the 1980s and explained their source.

No one can claim, he concluded, that American workers did not want to fight the corporate union-busters or that they were too weak to defeat them. The weakness is not in the ranks of labor, but in the cowardice and treachery of the bureaucrats. With a revolutionary leadership, a leadership which fights for socialist policies, and a revolutionary strategy, the working class can defeat its enemies and open up a new road for society, throughout the United States and internationally. This is what I call upon you to do.

In the 1988 campaign the Workers League placed its candidates on the ballot in eight states and the District of Columbia. Ed Winn received 18,662 votes.

The period between the 1984 and 1988 campaigns also witnessed a historic struggle against opportunism inside the Fourth International. The Workers League and its co-thinkers internationally defeated the opportunist leadership of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, which reacted to the protracted degeneration of Stalinism, Social Democracy and the trade union bureaucracy by abandoning the fight for revolutionary leadership. The struggle between the majority of the International Committee and the WRP leadership, which began in the early 1980s, culminated in a split in 1985-86.

In 1984, Ed had a chance to witness the degeneration of the WRP first-hand, when he visited Britain as the presidential candidate of the American Trotskyists. At a public meeting his hosts introduced him simply as a transit worker, omitting all mention of the Workers League election campaign. In fact, at this point the WRP was providing Jesse Jackson with favorable coverage in its press.

Ed retired from his transit job in order to devote himself fully to the 1988 election campaign and other political work. Soon after the campaign, however, he was diagnosed as suffering from polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary disorder leading to progressive loss of kidney function. He began receiving kidney dialysis treatments and prepared for an eventual transplant, which would enable him once again to lead a normal and active life.

During this period Ed continued to participate in political work to the best of his ability. He met with his fellow transit workers, spoke at public meetings of the Workers League, and wrote articles and columns for the Bulletin on the struggle in transit, as well as on other subjects.

In 1990 and 1991 New York City was the scene of several bitter struggles, including the Daily News and the Greyhound strikes. In November 1990, police, with the collaboration of Newspaper Guild union officials, arrested Ed on the Daily News picket line on a phony charge of disorderly conduct. A campaign by the Workers League forced the Guild to come to Eds defense, and the charges were dropped.

The fear which Ed Winn continued to evoke within the TWU bureaucracy, three years after his retirement, was demonstrated in March 1991, when Local 100 President Sonny Hall wrote Winn a hysterical and threatening letter in response to a column in the Bulletin which exposed Halls fraudulent claim to support the Daily News strikers. Hall wrote, what you ... wanted was a Mass Strike, not to win wages, but to bring down the government. In Winns reply, he wrote: Whats so terrible about that? If thats what it takes to defend the jobs and living standards of transit workers, then so be it!

Ed was always proudest of his collaboration with his international comrades in the Trotskyist movement in Europe, Asia and Australia. In November 1991 he was able to travel as part of the US delegation to the World Conference Against Imperialist War and Colonialism, held in Berlin, where he met with workers from many parts of the world and participated in its proceedings.

Comrade Winn moved back to Wilmington in 1993 after his fathers death and remained on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. He continued to participate in the political life of the Workers League, meeting with other party members and discussing political developments.

Ed is survived by his three children, Ed Jr., Adrienne and Debbie, and by ten grandchildren. A funeral took place in Wilmington on June 25. The Workers League will soon announce the date for a memorial meeting to be held in New York City.

Anyone who knew Ed Winn would be willing to testify to his integrity and honesty. He was universally respected by his fellow workers, even those who disagreed with his political views, and by his neighbors in Brooklyn. A calm and dignified man, he would seethe with scarcely concealed emotion when fundamental questions of principle were at stake. He had an intellectual and moral impact on those who encountered him.

Eds political legacy has to be set against the degeneration and collapse of the old leaderships of the working class all over the world.

He never wavered in his dedication to the struggles of workers, his confidence that a new period of revolutionary struggle was approaching, and his scientific conviction of the necessity for the socialist transformation of society. That is why so many workers will learn from and honor the example that he set.

[1] During this period, the Workers League fought for the building of a Labor Party, based on a socialist program, as the political form through which the American working class could establish its independence from capitalist politics. The bankruptcy of the nationalist program of the unions, and their degeneration into direct instruments of the corporate financial elite to police the working class, led the Workers League to conclude in 1995 that the Labor Party demand was no longer viable. For more information, see The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality PartyPart 11 .

The author also recommends:

Tom Henehan: A revolutionary life [16 October 2017]

Why are trade unions hostile to socialism? [28 September 2019]

The rest is here:
Twenty-five years since the death of Ed Winn - World Socialist Web Site

By Sam Wayne 27 June 2020

Members of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) recently published a joint statement with the youth section of SYRIZA, the pseudo-left party that has implemented austerity and police repression in Greece.

In their statement, YDSA and SYRIZA Youth members write jointly on the global problems of police brutality and capitalism. The authors include Spyros Kasapis (member of both SYRIZA Youth and the YDSA chapter at the University of Michigan) and Vicky Tsefala (head of the SYRIZA Youth International Committee). Elias Khoury, also of the YDSA at the University of Michigan, is listed as the editor of the piece.

The joint statement, which is published in YDSAs publication theActivist, focuses on the police murder of George Floyd and the mass protests that have broken out across the United States. The authors also cite a parallel development in Greece when large protests broke out in response to the killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos, who was shot dead in December of 2008 by Greek police on his 15th birthday. The shooting sparked one of the largest protests in Greece since the fall of the Papadopoulos dictatorship in 1974.

The authors note the similarities between the response of the Trump government and the Greek government: The government responded to our direct action as they usually dowith more violence. It was clear that the state was far more concerned with preserving its own power than meeting the needs of the Greek people.

The authors fail to mention, however, that SYRIZA, when it came to power in Greece in 2015, carried out violent attacks on protesters, including a violent assault on protesting pensioners.

In October of 2015, a small group of retirees marched through Athens city center to request a meeting with the SYRIZA Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Police blocked the street to the parliament building with police cars and forcibly dispersed the demonstration.

When angry pensioners tried to break through the blockade and overturn a police car, units of riot police tossed tear gas into the crowd at close range. Elderly men and women, some with crutches, had to retreat, gasping for breath. The protests were in opposition to drastic cuts introduced by the SYRIZA government that had been agreed as part of the most recent austerity package. Tens of thousands of retired Greek workers were affected by the cuts.

The crackdown on the elderly protesters came just months after another violent crackdown on protesters at the Technical University of Athens who were also opposing the massive austerity. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pledged publicly that the SYRIZA government would do what was required to maintain law and order.

These actions were an expression of the role of SYRIZA in enforcing the demands of the Greek and European ruling class. After campaigning against austerity and neoliberalism, only weeks after coming to power, SYRIZA betrayed its electoral promises and pushed through austerity policies despite overwhelming opposition. The hostility of workers and youth to this betrayal was ultimately expressed in the July 2019 election, when SYRIZA was defeated by the right-wing New Democracy Party.

Like the Democratic Socialists of America, SYRIZA is not opposed to capitalism and has no intention of leading or participating in any struggle of the working class against capitalist rule. For all the talk of rejecting shallow solutions and addressing the root causes of the issues, including police brutality, the statement provides no political program. While the authors of the statement repeatedly allude to a corrupt political system and systems of oppression, the word capitalism does not make a single appearance in the entire statement. This is no oversight.

The rise, reign and demise of SYRIZA has provided a critical strategic experience that must be studied by workers and youth. The World Socialist Web Site has carefully followed SYRIZA and provided prescient warnings and analysis of the organization. Going all the way back to 2012, the WSWS warned workers of SYRIZAs political function:

In the coming class struggles, SYRIZA will confront the workers as an enemy. Its aim, whether in or out of power, is to contain popular opposition to austerity policies and maintain the political domination of finance capital over the working class. Should SYRIZA be allowed to take power by the Greek ruling class, in an attempt to head off the radicalization of the population, this will produce only further disappointments and defeats for the working class.

The YDSA statement is a transparent attempt to cover over SYRIZAs political betrayals, with its authors hoping that workers and youth in the US are not familiar with the repression and austerity that was carried out by the party.

The statement ends with the following: We hope that SYRIZA Youth and the YDSA can use our shared goals to cultivate a stronger bond between the two of us going forward.

The fact that a YDSA chapter is seeking to collaborate and develop close ties with such an organization, without reservation or a breath of criticism, merely reflects the fact that the DSA serves a similar function within the United States.

In the 2020 elections, the role of the DSA and the YDSA has been to campaign for the Democrat Bernie Sanders, who, after dropping out of the race, has thrown his full support behind the right-wing campaign of Joe Biden. The DSA has no more to do with socialism than SYRIZA.

The outcome of the SYRIZA government is not an aberration within the international trend of pseudo-left and left-populist movements. Whether it is Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos in Spain, the Left Party in Germany or the Workers Party in Brazil, these are parties and individuals that utilize left slogans in the attempt to keep workers and young people trapped within the framework of bourgeois politics.

The way forward is a turn to the perspective of Marxism and Trotskyism: the revolutionary mobilization of the industrial and economic power of the international working class on the basis of a fight for genuine socialism. A new revolutionary leadership is needed within the working class. That leadership is the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality, the student movement of the Socialist Equality Party and the ICFI, fights for the revival of a socialist movement among young people, as part of an international socialist movement of the entire working class.

We urge students and young workers to join the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and the Socialist Equality Party, study the history of the ICFI and its fight to defend genuine Marxism and join the fight for real socialism.

More:
YDSA develops ties with SYRIZA youth, Greek party of austerity and police repression - World Socialist Web Site

For decades, progressives have attempted to use climate change to justify liberal policy changes. But their latest attempt a new proposal called the Great Reset is the most ambitious and radical plan the world has seen in more than a generation.

At a virtual meeting earlier in June hosted by the World Economic Forum, some of the planets most powerful business leaders, government officials and activists announced a proposal to reset the global economy. Instead of traditional capitalism, the high-profile group said the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive Green New Deal-like government programs.

Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed, wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in an article published on WEFs website. In short, we need a Great Reset of capitalism.

Schwab also said that all aspects of our societies and economies must be revamped, from education to social contracts and working conditions.

Joining Schwab at the WEF event was Prince Charles, one of the primary proponents of the Great Reset; Gina Gopinath, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund; Antnio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations; and CEOs and presidents of major international corporations, such as Microsoft and BP.

Activists from groups such as Greenpeace International and a variety of academics also attended the event or have expressed their support for the Great Reset.

Although many details about the Great Reset wont be rolled out until the World Economic Forum meets in Davos in January 2021, the general principles of the plan are clear: The world needs massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those offered by American socialists such as Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersOvernight Defense: Appeals court rules using Pentagon funding for border wall illegal | Esper visits NATO after Trump announces Germany drawdown | Russian intel unit reportedly offered bounties for killing coalition troops in Afghanistan Former Sanders aide slams new rollback of banking rules Nina Turner says progressive Democrats who won primaries need to 'keep up the pressure' MORE (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAlexandria Ocasio-CortezNetanyahu still has time to change his mind on annexation Nina Turner says progressive Democrats who won primaries need to 'keep up the pressure' Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy MORE (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan.

Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism a word the World Economic Forum has deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive plans.

We need to design policies to align with investment in people and the environment, said the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow.But above all, the longer-term perspective is about rebalancing economies.

One of the main themes of the June meeting was that the coronavirus pandemic has created an important opportunity for many of the World Economic Forums members to enact their radical transformation of capitalism, which they acknowledged would likely not have been made possible without the pandemic.

We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change, said Prince Charles at the meeting, adding later, It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again.

You might be wondering how these leaders plan to convince the world to completely alter its economy over the long run, since the COVID-19 pandemic most assuredly wont remain a crisis forever. The answer is that theyve already identified another crisis that will require expansive government intervention: Climate change.

The threat of climate change has been more gradual [than COVID-19]but its devastating reality for many people and their livelihoods around the world, and its ever greater potential to disrupt, surpasses even that of Covid-19, Prince Charles said.

Of course, these government officials, activists and influencers cant impose a systemic change of this size on their own. Which is why they have already started to activate vast networks of left-wing activists from around the world, who will throughout 2021 demand changes in line with the Great Reset.

According to the World Economic Forum, its 2021 Davos summit will include thousands of members of the Global Shapers Community, youth activists located in 400 cities across the planet.

The Global Shapers program was involved in the widespread climate strikes of 2019, and more than 1,300 have already been trained by the Climate Reality Project, the highly influential, well-funded climate activist organization run by former Vice President Al GoreAlbert (Al) Arnold GoreIntroducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy The 'blue wall' is reforming in the Rust Belt CNN coronavirus townhall to featurescience author David Quammen,'Empire' actress Taraji Henson MORE, who serves on the World Economic Forums Board of Trustees.

For those of us who support free markets, the Great Reset is nothing short of terrifying. Our current crony capitalist system has many flaws, to be sure, but granting more power to the government agents who created that crony system and eroding property rights is not the best way forward. America is the worlds most powerful, prosperous nation precisely because of the very market principles the Great Reset supporters loathe, not in spite of them.

Making matters worse, the left has already proven throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that it can radically transform political realities in the midst of a crisis, so its not hard to see how the Great Reset could eventually come to fruition.

Can you imagine George W. Bush or Bill ClintonWilliam (Bill) Jefferson ClintonWhy Joe Biden should pledge to serve just one term Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy A new age of lies? MORE printing trillions of dollars and mailing it to millions of people who didnt lose their jobs? This would have been unthinkable just a couple of decades ago. Today,this policygarners bipartisan support.

Prince Charles was right: The present pandemic is a golden opportunity for radical change. And if Al Gore, Prince Charles and the rest of the World Economic Forum can convince enough people that attempting to stop climate change is also worth dramatically pushing humanity toward greater government control, then radical and catastrophic change is exactly what were going to get.

Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org)is the editorial director of the Heartland Institute. Follow him on Twitter@JustinTHaskins.

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