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Chinese officials have signaled how generative AI may be regulated in the country, writing in recently published draft guidelines that the software should reflect the core values of socialism, CNBC reports. The proposed rules were published by the countrys Cyberspace Administration of China as it seeks public feedback and provide key indications of how the countrys heavy-handed speech rules may be applied to locally developed competitors to ChatGPT.

As well as reflecting socialist values, the draft rules (translated via Google Translate) say generative AI should not attempt to subvert state power, overthrow the socialist system, or undermine national unity. Promoting terrorism, extremism, or ethnic hatred is also prohibited, along with distributing false information or content that might disrupt economic and social order.

There are guidelines about how algorithms should be designed in a way that prevents discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other characteristics. And Bloomberg notes that the country plans to conduct security reviews of generative AI services before allowing them to widely launch in the country.

The publication of the draft guidelines comes as Chinese firms have signaled their intention to develop homegrown alternatives to OpenAIs ChatGPT. Alibaba has Tongyi Qianwen, which it plans to integrate into its productivity software, while Baidu recently announced its own software called Ernie bot.

Government restrictions mean China already has a distinct online ecosystem of apps and services. Western search and social media giants are largely barred from the country, allowing domestic firms to dominate the space. Now, its looking like this will continue into a new generation of generative AI services. Nikkei Asia previously reported that Chinese users have had to turn to VPNs in order to access the US-developed ChatGPT and that Tencent has banned third-party attempts to integrate the generative AI tool into WeChat. China Daily, the countrys biggest English-language newspaper, has warned of the potential for ChatGPT to amplify US disinformation.

China is keen to promote the development of domestic generative AI alternatives amid mounting tensions with the US over its access to powerful technologies like high-end semiconductors needed to train AI systems. But theres tension here with the countrys restrictive approach to censorship. I see the Chinese regulators being quite cautious with its regulatory approach in order to give more room for the development of generative AI in the country, University of Hong Kong law professor Angela Zhang tells Bloomberg.

At least one Chinese generative AI tool has had limitations imposed on its ability to create content relating to political topics. Last year, MIT Technology Review reported that Baidus text-to-image generatorERNIE-ViLG refused to create images of Tiananmen Square or other political leaders and would instead label them as sensitive.

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China wants homegrown AI to reflect the core values of socialism - The Verge

We are the party of the future, and the future belongs to the youth. We are a party of innovators, and it is always the youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is waging a self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle. Lenin

Across the world, a whole generation of youth are entering the road of class struggle. In response to a lifetime of capitalist crises, young people are increasingly turning to the only progressive solution to humanitys problems: revolutionary communism.

According to one recent poll, for example, 29% of 18-34 year-olds in Britain believe that communism is the ideal economic system. In America and Australia, the equivalent figure from the same survey is 20%.

And the youth have been at the forefront of countless international struggles and mass movements in recent years: from Black Lives Matter; to Fridays for Future; to the explosive events in Iran.

In the Basque Country (Euskal Herria), however, this process of radicalisation has gone even further, with thousands of youth organising themselves into the openly-communist Mugimendu Sozialista (MS, Socialist Movement).

This movement has been responsible for some of the largest youthful revolutionary mobilisations in recent decades. On just one day in January this year, the MS marched 7000 through the streets of Bilbao and Pamplona to confront the bourgeois offensive against the working class.

The Socialist Movement represents a radical current that has developed from the Abertzale Basque nationalist left. It groups together several organisations led by the Gazte Koordinadora Sozialista (GKS, Young Socialist Organisation).

GKS defines itself as communist, proletarian, against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and avowedly internationalist.

It emerged from a split in the main Abertzale youth and student organisations, with the majority levying criticism against the left-nationalist EH Bildu party.

This revolutionary tendency demanded that the failures of the old leadership of the Basque national liberation movement be recognised rejecting EH Bildus reformism and its support for the PSOE (Socialist Party) government in Madrid (see below).

In opposition to this dead-end of reformism, GKS calls for the independent organisation of the working class, and the struggle for the establishment of a socialist state in the Basque Country.

The movement has organised mass demonstrations under slogans that condemn the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the clearest terms, and which call on the working class to fight back. Connecting the crisis in workers living standards with the decay of the capitalist system, the struggle for socialism is put front-and-centre by the Mugimendu Sozialista.

For abandoning some of the traditional nationalist symbolism and slogans, MS has been spurned as unpatriotic by the official Abertzale leadership.

But the movements supporters defend the class basis of their organisation, proudly flying the red flag of international socialism on demonstrations, above all others.

This unashamedly revolutionary stance has drawn sympathetic interest from across Spain. Notably, similar tendencies are developing amongst the Catalan youth, and in nationalist movements in other regions.

And MS has reached out to these groups, actively promoting its bold revolutionary agitation and model of socialist councils (kontseilu sozialistak), recognising the need for a united movement across the Spanish state.

Basing itself also on an international perspective, MS has also sought links with revolutionary organisations in the near-abroad of the Basque Country.

This internationalist call has been answered by the Marxist Student Federation in Britain. MSF comrades attended one of the movements massive youth camps last summer, and MS activists participated in the 2022 Revolution Festival in London last October.

The spectacular rise of the Mugimendu Sozialista is a sure sign of growing radicalisation among the working class youth of the Basque country. But the same process is taking place in all countries.

The details may differ, but the overall trend is clear. A wave of young people, seeing the impasse of capitalism, reformism, identity politics, and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism are turning towards the ideas of Marxism, internationalism, and communism en masse.

A whole generation has grown up in the post-2008 landscape, knowing only social, political, and economic turmoil on one side, and witnessing the bankruptcy of the traditional reformist parties as well as new popular formations like Syriza and Podemos on the other.

In Britain, young people were pivotal in the rise of the Corbyn movement. But unfortunately, the weakness of the left leaders was equally pivotal in its fall.

Similarly, north of the border, the youth have been the driving force behind the Scottish independence movement. But now, under the leadership of the SNP, it has run out of steam. And it is clear that these bourgeois nationalist leaders, unwilling and unable to mobilise workers and youth, have no strategy for breaking the deadlock with Westminster.

In place of these old leaders and parties, young people are seeking the most advanced ideas and reaching for the most radical methods from the history of the class struggle.

In turn, many are discovering the red thread of communism: the highest expression of the emancipation of the working class.

There is the potential for something like Mugimendu Sozialista in every country. The MS shows the way forward for young people everywhere who have grown disillusioned with reformism and left nationalism: turn to the path of communism and class struggle!

Millions are now looking towards these ideas, and to the struggle of the working class, as the only force capable of changing society; of addressing the multitude of economic, social and ecological crises that are inflicting misery upon workers and youth.

Unburdened by the defeats of the past, working-class youth will lead the way in this fight for the revolutionary transformation of society. It is we who are bearing the brunt of capitalisms crisis and we who have the most to gain from the overthrow of this rotten system.

The class struggle is unfolding before our eyes: on every strike and demonstration; in the trade unions and in our workplaces.

As Marx and Engels outlined in the Communist Manifesto, it is the task of communists to be the most determined and militant section of these struggles guided by the most advanced ideas and by a clear revolutionary programme.

That means steeling ourselves in the genuine ideas of scientific socialism, i.e. Marxism, as represented by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in their lifetimes, and by the International Marxist Tendency today.

Young communists must learn, study, and get organised. Join the struggle for the future of humanity! Join the fight for communism! Join the IMT!

Khaled Malachi and Laida Lpez

Since the emergence of the Gazte Koordinadora Sozialista (GKS), the official leadership of the nationalist left (EH Bildu) in the Basque Country has treated them as a nuisance; maintaining an official appearance of ignoring them.

Last year, Arkaitz Rodrguez, the general secretary of Sortu (the largest party in the EH Bildu coalition) described the group as reactionary. But in the next breath, he claimed that GKS is a mere fly in the ointment, and that the leadership had not dedicated even half a minute to their developments.

While this boastful claim seems rather unlikely, it is now clear that the nationalist left are paying full attention. In February, Sortu sent a circular to their members in which they aimed to politically clarify their position regarding GKS. This amounted to peddling the lies that the Basque media have propagated (depicting GKS militants as thuggish and violent); and most strikingly, using identity politics to tar the communist youth.

Sortus clarification was a thinly veiled attack; a conscious acknowledgement that their approach so far has failed. Though claiming that GKS weaken transformative projects, the timing of Sortu publicly breaking its silence is rather telling.

Indeed, the circular followed another magnificent mobilisation of 7,000 people organised by GKS in Bilbao and Irua on 28 January. The demonstration rang with militancy with slogans including lets face the bourgeois offensive and the workers revenge: socialist revolution.

Though the size was the same as last year, it was clear that the bold, communist messaging is garnering support from swathes of the Basque youth.

The circular states that behind GKSs revolutionary and radical rhetoric we find an inability to influence society and change things. But far from a flash in the pan, GKS and the wider Socialist Movement is a force the nationalist left must reckon with.

They counterpose the reformism and paltry offerings of the nationalist left with revolutionary agitation and propaganda. It is no surprise that they have become a reference point in the Basque country and beyond.

GKS emerged from a debate within the nationalist left, with the explicit aim of exposing the historic failure of the strategy used to bring about Basque independence, as well as criticising their subordinate role to the government in Madrid. This is something Sortu cannot tolerate, especially with their pitiful record in parliament.

EH Bildu is part of the government majority whose vote is necessary for the PSOE-UP coalition to stay in power in Madrid. There have been many written agreements between Bildu and PSOE. And so the track record of this government one which has defended the interests of the ruling class on all decisive questions reflects back onto themselves.

There have been a handful of instances, for example, of backtracking on election promises since the shaky coalition came to power.

There was a written agreement between PSOE and Bildu about the repeal of the right-wing Popular Partys labour counter-reform. When it came to putting this agreement in practice, the PSOE refused to implement it, passing only a partial reform of the PP legislation, whilst leaving intact the most reactionary elements. Bildu protested, presenting its own alternative proposal but in the end, stayed as a loyal partner to the PSOE-UP government.

The same was the case with the reactionary Ley Mordaza (Gag Law), also introduced by the PP government in order to limit democratic rights. The PSOE-UP government had promised to repeal it. Then they settled for amending it slightly. Bildu protested, refused to vote for it but continued its support for the government.

Moreover, it would be wrong to think that EH Bildu simply protests against the government, and then falls silent. They have voted in favour of the reform of the penal code (Codigo Penal), which increases the repression on those who struggle against injustice.

Just to give another example of the kind of government the nationalist left is supporting in Madrid: recently, an officer involved in the torture and extra-judicial killing of Mikel Zabalza in 1985, a Basque bus driver, has been promoted in the Spanish state to the leadership of the Civil Guard. This is the reality of playing second fiddle to the regime in Madrid.

With elections approaching, they are falling over themselves to promise the world in order to secure their seats. But just like the rest of their resistance, this amounts to nothing more than words, words, words.

Though EH Bildu feigns a mixture of shock and disappointment at the government, it continues to give crucial support to that very same government.

Moreover, their constitutional path to independence is a mirage. National liberation in the Basque country is not one centimetre closer since EH Bildu ingratiated themselves with PSOE in Madrid and in the Navarre parliament.

The facts speak clearly: the PSOE-UP government in Madrid, despite its pretence of being the most progressive government in history, is firmly committed to managing the crisis of capitalism in the interest of the bosses. They are loyally servile to US imperialism when it comes to foreign policy, including support for NATO in its war with Russia in Ukraine.

EH Bildus support shows the Basque youth where their allegiances lie. They are a completely pacified and politically bankrupt force. In truth, these petty-bourgeois nationalists were only ever concerned with having a seat at the table.

Their record at home is no better. In the Basque country, they engage in the Stalinist tactics of smear campaigns, chiming in with the attacks mounting daily in the bourgeois press against the Socialist Movement. They have attempted financial strangulation of GKS; expelling the communists from the txosnas, which is an instrumental way of raising money for their projects.

We might ask: with comrades like these, who needs enemies?

In their circular, Sortu lambasts the reactionary GKS for the most harmful practices that have been seen on the left. Irony is perhaps lost on them. The leadership of the nationalist left should hold up a mirror to themselves.

With nothing to offer the workers and youth but more of the status quo, Sortu has dressed itself up in the language of identity politics. As they write:

On the road to a unified, independent, socialist, feminist and Basque-speaking Basque Country, GKS does not contribute anything. On the contrary. In addition, there is no possibility of collaboration, because we have different projects and strategies, because they reject that possibility and, above all, because they act in an exclusive and aggressive way.

One part of that paragraph is actually true: there can be no collaboration between the opposing projects and strategies. But that is precisely because the Socialist Movement stands against capitalism and for socialism, while the leaders of Sortu stand firmly for a reformist strategy of managing the crisis of the system within the narrow limits of capitalism.

The circular continues by arguing that GKS feels uncomfortable with struggles of the LGBT community, feminism, etc. For example, they slander Itaia, the womens coordinating group of GKS. In a customarily patronising manner, they claim this group corrupts the minds of young women militants.

With these broad strokes, Sortu aims to paint GKS as a single-minded group that is against social justice completely aloof from anything other than communism.

This is a red herring. The struggle of genuine communists aims to connect all the various struggles. Revolutionaries must seek to unite the oppressed and exploited strata in society, and channel these collective energies into building a revolutionary party capable of overthrowing capitalism.

Paying close attention to all the injustices of capitalism and agitating against them is a prerequisite to building. And only on this basis, can we uproot all discrimination and prejudice that plagues society.

After all, it is the system that Sortu defends through their reformism that relies on these divisions to rule. And so it is little surprise that they fall back on the arguments of identity politics.

Identity politics claims that the main division in society is one of subjective identity. It separates the struggle for womens liberation from the struggle against the capitalist system, pandering to trendy ideas that serve to confuse and disorientate the youth.

It is no surprise that this emaciated reformist party speaks in such language. Being the torchbearer of social justice in mere words is the cheapest of all reforms.

These attacks are cynical and self-serving. Once again, we see the genuine oppression faced by women being weaponised by a party that has no serious interest in fighting against it in the first place. GKS have rebuffed this nonsense.

Sortu stands in a long line of reformist parties that fall back on radical-sounding language to keep up appearances. We see this in Scotland also, where the SNP has profited from being more progressive than the rabid Tory Party, while still standing firmly within the limits of the capitalist system.

In all cases, if you scratch the surface, you will find reformist politics that offer no route forward for the masses.

In truth, the focus on identity, nationality, etc. and the relegation of the importance of class independence and methods has disastrous consequences.

Lenin once commented that the national question is at root a question of bread. That is absolutely correct. In a period characterised by cuts and counter-reforms, the problems of housing, security, jobs will continue to fester. There is no way of solving the national question on the basis of capitalism.

We note that it is from a position of weakness, not strength, that Sortu has attacked GKS militants. This will serve a dual purpose. With elections later this year, Sortu is aiming to deflect attention away from its failures. They will also be aiming to firm up their youth group, Ernai, who have been left behind in the wake of this explosion of militancy.

For all of the bombast of GKS being against Basque national liberation in their circular, it has not dawned on the leadership that the youth are pushing beyond the limits of nationalism with resounding success.

This is occurring not just in the Basque country. There are other such promising developments in Catalonia with the formation of Socialist Horizon (Horitz Socialista).

Across the world we see a layer of working-class youth radicalised by the experience of capitalist crisis, the threat to the climate, war and destruction turning towards the ideas of radical change, rejecting this rotten system, and turning towards the ideas of communism.

GKS is undoubtedly the most advanced example of this to date. But the potential for developments like this exist all across the globe. Internationalism must be the lifeblood of the communist movement in order for us to succeed in the tasks we set ourselves.

GKS have shown the way forward for the youth disillusioned with reformism and nationalism. The path forward is class struggle and communism.

We commend the efforts of GKS in the example they have set. And we stand in full solidarity with them against the attacks and slanders which they continue to face.

The sterile politics and strategies of the reformist parties have been put to the test. They have been found wanting.

The role of communists is to expose the weaknesses of these woolly, institutional politics, and to educate ourselves in the ideas of scientific socialism. Marxism is our sharpest weapon the key to understanding the world in order to transform it. With further crises impending, we havent a minute to waste.

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Basque Socialist Movement shows the way: Join the fight for communism! - Socialist Appeal

Photo: Supporters of the Socialist Party of Zambia. Credit Dr. Fred Mmembe

The Party for Socialism and Liberation strongly condemns the brutal attack on April 8 against a public meeting organized by the Socialist Party of Zambia, and the subsequent arrest of party president Dr. Fred Mmembe on false charges. The assault, carried out by members of the ruling United Party for National Development, came amid an election campaign. This is a cowardly attempt to suppress the rising popularity of the Socialist Party of Zambia, which fights for the rights of workers and the poor.

The U.S. government views Zambia as an arena to conduct its strategy of great power competition against China. This includes using Zambia as its base for the recent Summit for Democracy a soft-power tool designed to sharpen the new Cold War atmosphere around the globe. The World Liberty Congress, a regime-change operation with ties to Western intelligence circles, is also attempting to use Zambia as a base to train activists to overthrow anti-imperialist governments in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. As long as the UPND government is on its side in this perilous new Cold War, the United States is happy to turn a blind eye to the violent political repression it carries out despite its empty rhetoric about human rights.

The Socialist Party has been a resolute voice against Zambia becoming a pawn in the game of U.S. imperialism to control the world for a tiny elite. Their clear voice is undoubtedly dangerous to the ruling party, who hopes to confuse the working class and peasantry.

Absurdly, the police arrested the victims of the attack, not the attackers. The day after the assault, police announced that Mmembe along with Saili Chita and Daniel Mumba would be charged with assault, with an additional bogus firearm charge leveled against Mmembe. He explained:

The UPND cadres who attacked us are not being arrested, they are not in any way being questionedI was myself assaulted in front of police officers, I was threatened in front of police officers at the police station. This is the type of policing we are seeing today

The UPND government of president Hakainde Hichilema has ignored the well being of the people of Zambia in the interests of big corporations and western governments. Violence and repression is its only option to prevent alternative political forces from challenging its power.

Clearly, the Socialist Party of Zambias program of pro-people development is considered a danger to the entrenched power of the elite. We demand an end to the physical and legal attacks on the Socialist Party, its members and leaders.

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Solidarity with the Socialist Party of Zambia: Drop the charges against Dr. Fred M'membe! Liberation News - Liberation

Photo by: Brenden Cowan

Haytham Nawaz

Karl Marxs central observation about capitalism was correct and the acknowledgement of that is desperately needed in a 21st century fraught with inequality and undemocratic institutions.

This whole writing year at The Brock Press Ive been something of a broken record on the need to take socialism seriously as a political alternative to the dominant neoliberal consensus in the Western world. Im not the only one, though. The Fraser Institute put out a poll that found socialism saw a favourability amongst Canadians aged 18-24 in the 50 per cent range. Needless to say, socialism is becoming favourable to younger generationsGen Z and Millenials.

While the fear rightfully associated with names like Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot still plague and blossom into irrational reactionism in the generations that were most acutely subject to McCarthyism, younger people are realizing that socialism is just as diverse a tradition as any other ideology. Socialists of today are fairly sober minded when it comes to the failings of big 20th century projects. Many on the left today rightfully acknowledge that what the Stalinist USSR and Maoist China did was a kind of state capitalism that industrialized too fast and imploded from within. Demand always outpaced supply. Thats why the resurgent push for both top-down and bottom-up reform to capitalism from socialists like founding editor of Jacobin magazine, Bhaskar Sunkara, as seen in his book The Socialist Manifesto are so important.

Likewise, the Marxist economist Richard Wolff in his seminal work Democracy at Work argues that the worker cooperative is the way forward for the socialist movement in the 21st century and beyond. What a cooperative entails is the democratization of the workplace, where every worker has a share in the company and can vote on how the organization is run. The workers of an enterprise, then, are effectively their own directors instead of the division of owners and workers seen in traditional work organizations where the board of directors and CEOs, CFOs, etc. are the sole owners and pocket the profit created by the workers.

This would be the bottom-up aspect. The top-down aspect would no longer be the Central Committee as seen in the Soviet Union but institutional reforms in the state that would incentivize the democratization of the private workplace through preferential loans to worker co-ops or even through nationalizing banks, as well as rebuilding a progressive welfare state not unlike what one sees in the highly successful socialized models in the Scandinavian bloc. Theres also merit to the need for state control of the energy sector as it will be easier to facilitate a switch to renewable energy for the basic reason that the market mechanisms in place currently simply dont address the climate crisis (which is criminally called an externality according to neoclassical economics).

The common thread running through all of these arguments and proposals emerge from what was essential to Karl Marxs study of capitalism as outlined in his masterwork Capital, released in Germany in 1867.

In the first volume of Capital Marx spends the first few chapters laying out his labour-theory-of-value (LTV). The LTV has been rejected by many economists and commentators since. However, the main idea articulated in it is still correct: workers produce commodities and capitalists sell them and pay back only part of the value created by the workers in the form of wages and hold onto the rest of the value called surplus-value by Marx in the form of profit. This is what Marx calls the exploitation of labour-power. And while Marx spends a great deal of time in Capital arithmetically tying the LTV into prices and other aspects of economic theory that appear to be a dubious gymnastics of universalization by todays standards, the central idea of exploitation still stands regardless of if prices can or cant be pinned down to a science that results from the socially necessary congealed labour-time of society.

What Marx made clear is that there is an antagonism at the heart of capitalism. The neoclassical approach has been to disavow this antagonism at every step of theorization. Key objections from the neoclassical side of the aisle include (I) that the capitalist takes a risk in starting an enterprise and that (II) the capitalist assembles the means of production (factories, tools, the workers, machines) in order to begin the production process in the first place. The first statement, however, is true of workers too. Workers have to sell their labour otherwise they risk homelessness and starvation; they too take a risk accepting to work for a company they have little to no control in because they have to to survive. To the second point, Marx already outlines how those means of production assembled by the capitalist are already congealed forms of labour from the past, a kind of frozen labour that Marx calls dead labour.

What labour-power in an economy does is it uses living labour from the living workers to create value with, on and through dead labour in the form of tools, buildings, machines, and even intellectual dead labour such as concepts. The capitalist is simply a mediator between the interaction between these two forms of labour that manages it but under capitalism he also takes the value created, claims it as his own, and apportions a bit of it through wages to workers so they can meet their subsistence requirements and continue to work for him. Capitalists ensure that they are not just mediators but owners and exploiters through the employee-employer contract which states in law that the employee agrees to sell their labour-power and, therefore, their muscles and brain to the employer for a wage.

The contractual aspect is why criticism of the state from the left shouldnt focus on abolition first, as per anarchist thought, but on using state power to reconfigure this contract to a more just arrangement, again through preferential loans or by making wage and salary work illegal in the same way that paying under the minimum wage and sexually harassing employees is illegal. That would involve having a scaled form of penalization, starting at fines and ending with imprisonment. So no, the implementation of state sanctioned abolition of wage/salary labour doesnt mean throwing capitalists in jail per se, just that there will be a sliding scale of punishments like when theres other laws violated in the workplace.

Its time to acknowledge that Marx was right and then work towards sublating the antagonism at the heart of the global capitalist system.

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The 21st century has to acknowledge Karl Marx was correct about ... - Brock Press

On Easter Sunday, 1911, San Franciscos Central Theater was packed with more than a thousand people gathered to listen to Berkeley mayor-elect J. Stitt Wilson give his weekly socialist sermon, this one on the theme of resurrection. They heard Wilson contrast the values of love and sacrifice espoused by Jesus with the mercilessness of capitalism, and applauded as he concluded with a call for people to give themselves new life by working together in the socialist movement to bring about a social resurrection, a civilization based on their common humanity.

For Wilson, socialism was applied Christianity, practical Christianity, or as he told a conference of Methodist ministers, Christianity in overalls. An economy organized as a cooperative commonwealth would support, rather than undermine, Jesuss message to love thy neighbor as thyself. He criticized the churches for treating people as children of God on Sunday but keeping silence when they were treated as commodities during the working week. He called for social as well as individual salvation.

Many Socialist Party activists were ministers or, like Wilson, former ministers. A few months after Wilsons election as mayor of Berkeley, Louis Duncan, a Unitarian minister, was elected mayor of Butte, Montana, and George Lunn, a Presbyterian minister, won office as mayor of Schenectady, New York. But Wilson was one of the first to move beyond a vaguely progressive social gospel and make The Bible Argument for Socialism, as he entitled one of his pamphlets.

Wilson was born in 1868 in a small town in midwestern Canada, where his father labored as the local shoemaker. Moving to the United States, he worked his way through seminary and Northwestern University, just outside of Chicago, as pastor to various Methodist churches. He was serving at a working-class church in Chicago when the depression of 18941897 hit his congregation. He quickly saw that the usual remedies promoted by the church thrift, sobriety, willingness to work hard, charity for the deserving poor were completely inadequate. He searched for broader remedies and for a theology that would buttress them.

At a time when most Protestant churches were hostile to strikes, and some ministers even called for strikers to be shot down in the streets, Wilson spoke out on behalf of striking workers. At a rally supporting garment workers, he asked: What if the clothing in this room could tell its history? What a story of tears, misery, starvation, low wages, long hours, and abject slavery we would hear.

Wilson admired the leadership that Eugene Debs provided railroad workers in the 1894 Pullman strike and, once Debs was released from prison, invited the labor organizer to speak at his church. The church hierarchy repeatedly admonished Wilson and finally threatened him with dismissal, which would have forced him to leave school just short of getting his degree. He quieted down long enough to graduate, then publicly resigned not only from his ministry but from the church. Half of his congregation left when he did.

With the full support of his wife, and despite now having three children to support, Wilson took a new and precarious path. He would put his life behind Christs message of sacrifice for love of humanity and evangelize for the cooperative commonwealth, hoping to build a movement through mass conversions. His Social Crusade held meetings on street corners, in rented halls, and in a few sympathetic churches. From 1897 to 1901, his talks were attended by tens of thousands of people throughout the Midwest, and he recruited several other ministers to join him. The problem was that once someone was converted to socialism and subscribed to the Social Crusader magazine, it was not clear what they should do next.

That particular problem was solved in 1901. While Wilson was touring the Western states, drawing large crowds in Colorado and California, his fellow social crusaders met in Indianapolis along with many other socialists and formed the Socialist Party of America.

Wilson and his family settled in Berkeley, California, and for the next several years he toured the Western states recruiting new members. He was, labor historian Grace Stimson writes, the outstanding organizer for the Socialist Party of California. His speech on the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, Capitalism: The Nations Perpetual Disaster, gives us a sample of his clear and forceful style:

We were appalled by the sudden death by earthquake of 500 to 1,000 people in our sister city. Are we appalled when . . . ten times as many men were unnecessarily killed in the steel and coal industries of the Pittsburg district last year? . . . We call a natural calamity a terrible disaster, but the poverty and want of 10 million people, caused by social injustice, we call even such names as prosperity and national well-being.

By 1906 there were enough socialist ministers in the United States to form the Christian Socialist Fellowship, whose magazine, the Christian Socialist, emblazoned on its masthead: The Golden Rule Against the Rule of Gold. The 1907 conference issue featured Wilsons article Individual and Social Salvation, but by the time it came out he had moved to Great Britain.

The Socialist Party was split between revolutionary socialists and evolutionary or constructive socialists. The revolutionaries criticized Wilson for being unscientific and failing to sufficiently focus on the proletariat as the main agent of social revolution. Once they gained control in California, Wilson was no longer welcomed as a party representative.

Wilson had, over the previous several years, made friends in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a socialist organization that allied with major unions to form the British Labour Party. Christian socialism was a major current within Labour, and his friends were eager to launch a British version of the social crusade. In 1907, he and his family moved near Bradford, a small industrial city in Englands North, where ILP city councilors had won public ownership of utilities and free social and medical services what became known as municipal socialism.

In Bradford and surrounding towns, Wilson led an organizing campaign for the ILP, canvassing working-class neighborhoods, holding evening meetings in local halls and schools, and holding large Sunday meetings with himself and other well-known socialist clergy as the speakers. He also toured in Scotland and Wales, speaking to audiences that often numbered in the thousands on The Kingdom of God and Socialism, Moses: The Greatest of Labour Leaders, and The Impending Social Revolution.

A reporter for the Halifax Labour News explained Wilsons appeal to British workers:

He claimed for them the Bible as their property, with its great store of hope and record of the worlds struggle for humanity towards a higher life. He linked up their present effort with those of Moses, of Isaiah, of Amos, of Christ. . . . He had borne to them the Message from the heart of God to his people.

In 1909 control of the California Socialist Party changed hands, and Wilson and his family moved back to Berkeley. The new party leadership was heavily involved in a campaign to unionize Los Angeles, fighting a Merchants and Manufacturers Association that was equally determined to keep Los Angeles nonunion and use lower wages as a competitive advantage over heavily unionized San Francisco.

Job Harriman, leader of the Socialist Party in Los Angeles; Fred Wheeler, head of the Los Angeles Central Labor Council; and other like-minded Socialists hoped Wilson could help make the Socialist Party in California the party of labor and replicate the success of the British Labour Party. This meant building stronger ties with the state labor federations, which were dominated by unions in San Francisco and winning enough political power in Los Angeles to prevent the use of police to break up strikes and union organizing efforts. (Unfortunately, it also meant going along with the labor unions racist opposition to Asian immigration.)

In 1910, Wilson received 12 percent of the vote for governor, the best showing the Socialist Party would ever enjoy in a statewide race. The next year he successfully ran for mayor of Berkeley, gaining the support of enough progressive Republicans to win a majority against an incumbent Democrat. With his support, two other Socialists were elected to the School Board and one to the City Council.

Over the following two years Wilson worked himself to exhaustion. He promoted local tax measures that allowed the city to improve its sewer system, pave its streets, build parks, and begin to take public ownership of utilities. He helped fend off a recall aimed at the Socialists on the School Board and City Council. He campaigned throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for a state constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, which passed, and in support of Socialist candidates in other cities, most of whom came up short.

He visited Los Angeles to support Harrimans campaign for mayor in 1911, which was narrowly defeated. He helped organize a statewide initiative campaign to allow local governments to implement land value taxation (also unsuccessful). And he ran for Congress, receiving 40 percent of the vote.

Wilson felt he had demonstrated that the Socialist Party was capable of becoming a major party. He believed that newly enfranchised women would support Socialist candidates because, as potential mothers, they embodied the ethic of care essential to the cooperative commonwealth. A coalition of labor and women would, he hoped, transform California politics. Instead of running for reelection as mayor in 1913, he returned to statewide speaking on the Socialist Partys behalf. Membership in the Socialist Party tripled from 1909 to March 1914.

But the wave of enthusiasm did not last.

Women voters didnt flock to the Socialist banner, and the labor leadership abandoned their flirtation with the Socialists when Governor Hiram Johnson helped pass a number of modest prolabor reforms, including workers compensation and an eight-hour day for women. With the failure of the Los Angeles union drive, labor had only regional political power and could not hope to sustain a statewide workers party. In 1914 the California Socialists went into rapid decline, and by the end of 1915, they reported fewer members than in 1909.

A burned-out Wilson left the Socialist Party, convinced that party-building had failed and the abolition of capitalism cannot be achieved without a great and overwhelming Spiritual Awakening. A new approach was needed. But he had no idea what that might be.

In 1917, Wilson again ran for mayor of Berkeley, this time as an independent, and forced the conservative incumbent, a wealthy businessman, into a runoff. The day before the first round of the election, the United States entered World War I. Over the next three weeks until the runoff, Wilson was redbaited by the leader of a Berkeley-based citizen secret service organization sponsored by US Army intelligence. He lost the election by just 124 votes.

Moving on from this disappointment, Wilson thought that wartime patriotism might provide the basis for the national moral renewal he sought. Seizing on President Woodrow Wilsons claims that the United States was fighting to make the world safe for democracy, Stitt Wilson retooled his equation of Christianity and socialism into an argument that Christianity meant democracy, including democracy in industry, denouncing Kaiserism abroad and workplace tyranny at home.

His hopes for wartime and postwar democracy proved naive, however, as Debs and other former Socialist Party comrades were imprisoned for their opposition to the war and a deeper reactionary turn post-armistice reversed the gains that labor unions had briefly made. World War I exacted a deep personal toll, too: Wilsons son died in pilot training shortly before the end of the war.

Hoping to inspire a new generation of social-justice activists, Wilson went to work for the collegiate division of the YMCA, a stronghold of the social gospel in the conservative 1920s. He spoke on Christian Democracy at colleges around the United States, arguing for industrial democracy and adding material such as a lecture contending that evolution showed cooperation rather than competition allowed species to thrive.

Wilson twice returned to Great Britain and, in 1929, had the pleasure of participating in the campaign that produced a Labour government (although one dependent on support from the Liberal Party). Returning to a United States stricken by the Great Depression, Wilson proposed that the nation should bring the values of Jesus to the economy through national economic planning and spoke in many churches where the ministers and congregations were now more receptive to alternatives to capitalism. Urged on by the Young Socialists at the University of California, Berkeley, he rejoined the Socialist Party and was elected to chair the state central committee.

Part of his work was helping organize a Socialist-sponsored union among farmworkers, and there he met the American version of fascism. Rural county sheriffs worked hand in hand with agribusiness and deputized vigilantes to break up union meetings and picket lines. Wilson began speaking out about the threat of fascism in the United States, believing that the Socialist Party did not take the threat seriously enough. The national party made grandiloquent threats that they would crush the reckless forces of reaction, something far beyond the resources of a group that had attracted only twenty thousand members nationwide after several years of the Great Depression.

In 1934, Wilson again resigned from the Socialist Party and registered as a Democrat to support Upton Sinclairs leftist EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign. He campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, holding that Americans faced a choice between Roosevelt and fascism. Health issues limited his activities in subsequent years, but his last talk before his death in 1942 was to a local humanist group, calling for victory against fascism, and a social reconstruction based on the ethics of Jesus.

J. Stitt Wilson never claimed to know the best path forward to the cooperative society, saying that socialists were groping in the dark and needed to be open to receive whatever light is available. Throughout his life he adopted different strategies and tactics to advance the socialist movement, alternating between evangelism (making the Christian case for socialism) and practical politics (building organizations and competing in elections), while doing his best to follow the teachings of Jesus.

Wilson was part of a widespread working-class tradition of social Christianity that revered Jesus the Carpenter and rejected official church versions of Christianity that excused treating working people as commodities. The Socialist Party of America was inclusive in its ideological approach, and Debs was a master at bringing together the many strands of insurgent workers culture. He often invoked in the same speech the ideal of democratic citizenship, the Declaration of Independence, Karl Marx, and Christ on the Cross. Debss successor as party leader, Norman Thomas, was a Presbyterian minister.

The Christian socialist tradition stretched into the latter half of the twentieth century, most notably through the figure of Martin Luther King Jr. While studying for the ministry as a young man, King brought together the black religious tradition of Christianity as the promise of liberation and the Christian socialist theology of the younger Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch, who admired Wilsons work. Although he kept the term out of his public writings and speeches, King came to espouse a Christian democratic socialism that insisted on social and economic transformation.

Wilson had the same commitments. Faced with the suffering caused by capitalisms extremes of wealth and poverty, he devoted his life to ministering on behalf of a society that would embody Jesuss message of love and sacrifice for one another a socialist society of caring, cooperation, and democracy.

The rest is here:
The California Christian Socialist Who Thought Socialism Was Christianity in Overalls - Jacobin magazine