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The Irish syndicalist trade-union leader James Larkin was one of the towering figures of the radical workers movement in the early twentieth century. He achieved fame in the words of Lenin as a remarkable speaker and a man of seething energy who performed miracles amongst the unskilled workers.

Larkin led celebrated struggles in Belfast and Dublin during the run-up to World War I. He formed the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) as well as an armed workers militia, the Irish Citizen Army, and spent time in prison for his militancy.

However, after he helped found the Communist Party in the United States and was jailed once more for doing so, Larkin became the subject of fierce criticism from communists during the late 1920s for failing to build a revolutionary workers party in Ireland. The first and most pressing duty of communists, one British party member wrote in 1929, is to expose Larkin and drive him out of the working-class movement.

Negativity toward Larkin still dominates the narrative. Historian Emmet OConnor subtitled his 2015 biography of Larkin Hero or Wrecker?, and came down firmly on the latter side of the argument.

This article will ask whether Larkin deserves all the blame that has been heaped upon him. I will use evidence from the Moscow archives of the Communist International, the Comintern, to argue that much of the onus for the failures normally ascribed to Larkin must at least be shared with the Comintern itself, and with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whose Colonial Department oversaw Comintern Irish policy.

The 1920s were difficult years in Ireland. The country had just experienced two and a half years of armed insurrection against British rule, followed by a bloody civil war. The most right-wing elements in the national movement triumphed over their opponents and ruthlessly went on the attack against workers wages and conditions. There was virtually no resistance to this offensive from the reformist labor leaders who backed the newly established Free State. Irelands workers were roundly defeated and demoralized.

Internationally, matters were no better. In the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks were in retreat. Their 1917 revolution hadnt spread to the industrialized West, and with the defeat of the German communist uprising in late 1923, the notion that Russia could go it alone, building socialism in one country, gained traction among the growing Soviet bureaucracy, with Joseph Stalin at its head. This perspective became more national and self-serving than international, marking a sharp break from the Bolshevik tradition pursued by Lenin.

This was the world to which Larkin returned from his American prison cell. Almost immediately, he was at war with the renegades at the head of his old union, the ITGWU, grouped around the leadership of William OBrien. In 1924, when Larkin was attending a Comintern congress in Moscow, where he was elected to its executive, his militant supporters formed a breakaway union, the Workers Union of Ireland (WUI), after ITGWU bosses had deployed armed soldiers against them.

At the time, Comintern policy was against breakaway unions. However, Larkin took charge of the WUI on his return to Ireland, and the Comintern accepted it into its trade-union wing, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU). The split in the Irish labor movement persisted for decades, but in the immediate aftermath, it poisoned relations between Larkin and his political mentors, the CPGB.

From the outset, as Comintern documents reveal, the CPGB took an entirely hostile attitude toward the WUI. Citing Comintern policy, it refused support to the WUI during its sometimes life-and-death industrial battles, and even demanded that the Comintern compel Larkin to disband the new union and seek readmission to the treacherous ITGWU. This was something that neither he nor his followers could ever agree to.

While the British communists blamed the split on Larkins ego, he believed that they had betrayed him. Larkin felt that they lacked a proper understanding of the Irish situation and were acting toward him in an overbearing, imperialistic manner.

This hostility between Larkin and the British communists was never overcome, but Larkin was not alone in his criticism of their attitude. The Indian communist leader, M. N. Roy, also denounced the CPGBs imperial hauteur, while other communists from colonial countries, including Vietnams Ho Chi Minh, found a similar inclination prevalent in the upper echelons of the Comintern itself by the mid-1920s.

The Comintern had tasked Larkin with building a mass-based workers party in Ireland, and the CPGB sent one of its leading figures, Bob Stewart, to guide his work. In May 1925, Stewart came close to getting a party off the ground, but abandoned the plan at the last minute when Larkin withheld his imprimatur.

This is an event that has gone down in communist history as Larkins moment of treachery. In his memoirs, Stewart made no reference to any of Larkins serious concerns about how the CPGB and Comintern had acted toward him in the past, offering the following conclusion instead:

Big Jim would never accept the democracy of a disciplined Marxist party. He always had to be at the centre of the stage. . . . and to join a party where the emphasis is put on collective work was not for him.

This may have been partially correct, but it was very far from the whole story. Larkin himself never spoke publicly about the matter, but he made his views clear in a letter to Comintern president, Grigory Zinoviev:

A Party cannot be brought about simply by drafting a decree in a room. . . . but people come along and dare to venture that at a certain hour or on a certain day a certain event will take place. Like some of the old astrologers or alchemists they want to write a formula and then make a hocus-pocus and, lo and behold, we have pure metal. . . . We believe that a natural birth resulting from the necessities of the time is the appropriate way [and] our immediate needs require what may be called local tactics beyond world tactics.

Stewarts mission had been to launch an Irish party at the very time when Stalins power was growing. Under Stalins authority, communist parties throughout Europe and the wider world were being beaten into shape to ensure unquestioning support for socialism in one country. Larkins resistance to being sucked into this process, evident in his assertion of the rights of a national section against central diktat, remained instinctive, however, and was never intellectualized.

In the meantime, relations with the CPGB took another nosedive. The Comintern had ordered the CPGB to mount a campaign in the UK for the withdrawal of British-based trade unions from Ireland. These unions were generally pro-empire, and their members frequently scabbed during WUI strikes.

However, the CPGB point-blank refused to implement Comintern policy in sharp contrast to its adherence to the line on breakaway unions. Now it argued that implementing the new policy would jeopardize its own influence within the unions.

For Larkin, the CPGBs open defiance became a major grievance, and the Cominterns failure to force the British party to obey orders deepened his alienation from the Moscow center. This all made the task of the next Comintern agent to arrive in Ireland, the Norwegian communist Christian Hilt, infinitely more difficult.

Hilt arrived in the summer of 1927, with Irish parliamentary elections due to be held in September. On Comintern instructions, Hilt supported in person by the CPGBs Jack Murphy insisted that Larkin stand. Larkin himself argued that this was a waste of resources because, as an undischarged bankrupt, he wouldnt be able to enter parliament even if he was elected. I was against fighting, but I was overlooked, he later complained. Moscow had determined that we should proceed, and as orders were orders, we obeyed.

In the election, Larkins primary objective was to see the right-wing Labour Party defeated. To this end and in keeping with the Cominterns then-policy of forming blocs with bourgeois nationalist movements he allied with amon de Valera, leader of the nationalist Fianna Fil party. Several prominent British communists came to help in the campaign, but they followed their own agenda, urging workers to vote Labour. Larkin complained bitterly about the CPGBs disruptive interference and the Norwegian, Hilt, agreed with him.

Despite the confusion caused by British meddling, Larkin was elected but, as he had predicted, was unable to take his seat. As he saw it, he had been forced, against his will, into a very costly, exhausting, and ultimately futile campaign by people who thought they knew better than he did about how to conduct the struggle in Ireland. Yet the Comintern perceived this as an opportunity to capitalize on Larkins reemergence into the limelight, and it dispatched another agent, Jack Leckie, with instructions to immediately form an Irish workers party.

Leckies Moscow handlers had promised that 150,000 (in todays money) would be waiting for him in Dublin to finance the party and produce a new workers paper. Failure to send the cash, he warned them, would make me appear ridiculous, neutralize my influence, and prevent me carrying out successfully the tasks entrusted to me. And, he added, it would deepen the rift with Larkin. His warning proved entirely prophetic. There was no money awaiting him, and no explanation for its non-arrival.

A furious row with Larkin ensued. Jack Carney, Larkins closest associate, told Leckie that everyone was becoming embittered because the centre continued to make promises which were left unfulfilled. According to Carney, the problem was exacerbated by interference from English party representatives [and] the comrades locally were sick and bitterly disappointed with the whole affair. Leckie packed his bags and left Ireland, furious at the Comintern for letting him down.

In the midst of all these problems, the CPGB and the Comintern had gone behind Larkins back to send senior Irish Republican Army (IRA) officers to Moscow in an attempt to win new friends who could help them bypass Larkin. When Larkin found out, he was incensed, as he considered the IRA to be petty-bourgeois terrorists. And worse was to come.

Early in 1928, the Comintern adopted a dramatic change of line. This ushered in an era of ultraleftism in communist politics that owed more to developments within Russia where Stalin was forcibly collectivizing the land than it did to the needs of workers internationally.

Under the new line, Larkin was ordered not just to form a united front with the IRA, but to wage all-out war against de Valera, his ally of a few months previously, even though de Valeras politics remained unchanged. But what really irked Larkin was the fact that no Irish representative had participated in shaping the new line in Moscow. Stalins Comintern now worked through orders from the top. The end of Larkins troubled relationship with Moscow was fast approaching.

The immediate issue that led him to finally sever ties was the arrival in Ireland of the Soviet company, Russian Oil Products (ROP). Larkin saw this as an opportunity to showcase the superiority of socialist enterprise over the capitalist variety. Instead, ROP acted like the worst capitalists, offering wages below union rates, and employing workers who had scabbed during WUI strikes.

Larkin complained bitterly about this to Moscow, but he got no satisfaction. This was simply the final straw. In the summer of 1928, Larkin resigned his seat on the Comintern executive, while the WUI disaffiliated from RILU. His four-year association with Soviet Russia was over.

Larkin wasnt the only former syndicalist-turned-Bolshevik who broke away at the time. Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte in France, James P. Cannon in the United States, the Russian Victor Serge, and the Catalan Andreu Nin all split from the Comintern. While they expressed opposition to Stalin and support for Leon Trotsky, Larkin remained silent on the struggle within the Soviet communist movement.

Yet it was no coincidence that his growing disillusionment coincided with Stalins rise, and it was hardly surprising that claims of Trotskyist sympathies were leveled in his direction. Jack Carneys response to these allegations is illuminating:

I would rather be a Trotskyite and be wrong than be right among those at the centre who play fast and loose. We have paid a bitter price for our affiliation with the centre and the centre in return has acted worse than any group of social democrats. Someday they will receive a kick in the unreasoning end of their anatomy.

While Larkin wasnt a Trotskyist, he was always more syndicalist than Bolshevik, with little inclination to submit to strict party discipline. But the purpose of the discipline to which he was expected to submit cant be separated from the process. In the era of socialism in one country, as the Comintern was reshaped to do Stalins bidding, Larkins instinctive resistance turned to disillusionment, and finally to divorce.

The domestic context in which Larkin was operating also shaped his despondency. As the great American novelist James T. Farrell noted:

After defeat, the Irish labor movement needed someone to lead it who could remould a defeated class. Larkin was a great and courageous agitator, but not a leader of a defeated army.

Yet if Larkin wouldnt do Moscows bidding, others would. Several young Irish workers, among them Larkins son and namesake, James Larkin Jr, were selected to attend the Lenin International School in Moscow, where the next generation of leaders of the worlds communist parties were trained. Their daily lessons began with instruction on the errors of Trotsky and the infallibility of Stalin.

At the end of their studies, the Irish students returned home to organize the party that Larkin had failed to deliver. This was to be an organization that would faithfully follow the line from Moscow, even when such loyalty was damaging to the partys own prospects and to the cause of socialism in general.

In the meantime, Larkin himself retreated both personally and politically. Disenchanted and world-weary, he moved further and further away from the cause that had once inspired and impelled him. He ended his political career as a member of parliament for the same Irish Labour Party whose betrayal of the working class he had once railed against with such passion and zeal. It was a sad finale for the greatest labor leader Ireland has ever known.

Read the original post:
Jim Larkin Was One of the Great Leaders of the Radical Workers ... - Jacobin magazine

25 April marks the liberation of Italian territory from Nazi occupation in 1945 and the end of two decades of fascist barbarism. This historical reality is today challenged by the revisionism of the right-wing forces in government, in particular by la Lega and Fratelli dItalia.

The motion tabled in parliament by the majority parties, aimed at converting Liberation Day, the national holiday commemorating the liberation from Nazi-fascism, into a day of reconciliation against all totalitarianisms', represents a profound threat to the historical memory of the Italian anti-fascist resistance. It is an insidious attempt to erase the values and revolutionary aspirations of thousands of working men, women, and young people who gave their lives in the struggle against fascism, and for a future free from oppression and misery. This incredible insult to the struggle is a reminder that the real mistake of the partisans was to have abandoned their weapons after 25 April instead of continuing the fight for the overthrow of capitalism.

The majority of the partisans were in fact socialists and communists, intent on continuing the fight against the Italian bourgeoisie, accomplices and benefactors of all the barbarity of the fascist regime. However, the Stalinist PCI, under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti, was of a different opinion. Using the excuse of the Allied occupation, it chose to pursue an opportunist policy that saw as its first step the disarmament of the partisans in order to prevent the development of an armed insurrection. This was in accordance with the orders of Stalin who, in compliance with agreements made with British and US imperialism, wanted to prevent the anti-fascist resistance resulting in a socialist revolution and threaten the position of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union itself.

In fact, by the end of the war the conditions for a mass insurrection were ripe, with increasing numbers of workers intent on taking control of the factories and peasants fighting to demand an end to landlordism and the redistribution of land. The betrayal of the PCI, in collaboration with the forces of the bourgeoisie, meant that the factories were back in the hands of the industrialists, the land in the hands of the large landowners and mafiosi, and the weapons in the hands of the bourgeois state. Socialist and communist partisans who did not bow to the policy of national unity, i.e. collaboration with the democratic bourgeois forces supported by the allied military occupation, were accused by the PCI of being fascists and in some cases murdered by the agents of Stalinism.

The reality is that with the fall of Hitler and Mussolini fascism was not completely defeated. It was a historic victory for the working class, but a partial one. In many countries, fascism lasted well after the Second World War, as in Spain, or Portugal. Even in Italy, however, the Republic born of the Resistance was never really anti-fascist, because it served to allow the continuation of the economic and social system responsible for fascisms rise to power. After the war, fascist criminals suffered no persecution and, after Togliattis amnesty in 1946, were reintegrated into the apparatuses of the Italian state, primarily the police, security services and judiciary. The bourgeois state, even though it put on a democratic mask, remained an expression of the dictatorship of the capitalists and had to rely on the remnants of the state apparatus and the fascist movement to consolidate and defend its system.

In fact, after the Togliattian amnesty, prisons were emptied of fascist criminals and filled with partisans and anti-fascists who wanted to continue the revolutionary struggle. The republican state continued to brutally repress the working-class and peasant masses, often at the hands of the same officers and bureaucrats who had carried it out during the fascist dictatorship. In the Years of Lead (late sixties to late eighties), the state apparatuses, shaken by a decade of popular uprisings, went so far as to use neo-fascist terrorists to carry out massacres aimed at terrorising the population into submission, from Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan to the Bologna station bombing.

The anti-fascism of the bourgeois institutions is a facade, and the democratic and social principles of the anti-fascist Constitution of 1947 were never applied. It is therefore useless to extol the values of a constitution that have only remained on paper and in which the most progressive elements have been gradually emptied of content by governments of both the right and centre-left.

For decades, the conflictual, revolutionary, and class character of the Resistance has been obscured by the rhetoric of institutions and the official history of Italian democracy. The revolutionary and anti-capitalist nature of the partisan struggle is omitted, to make way for an empty rhetoric of national unity. This is why even the value of anti-fascism is today threatened by the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni, whose party is a direct descendant of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (the reconstituted remnants of the fascist movement founded by Mussolini). Moreover, this ideological offensive finds support in the institutions of the Italian and European bourgeoisie. Indeed, right-wing MPs have been able to refer directly to the motion passed by the European Parliament in 2019 that equates Nazism, fascism and communism as forms of totalitarianism. This sets a dangerous precedent that, by obfuscating the class nature of dictatorial regimes, opens the door to historical revisionism and the demonisation of the history of the international labour movement. This, despite having seen its revolutionary aspirations betrayed by its Stalinist and reformist leadership, was in fact the central driving force behind the defeat of Nazi-fascism and continues to be the only real curb to the authoritarian drift of capitalism.

Fascism was a weapon of big capital in Italy and elsewhere to destroy the workers and socialist movements. Thanks to the fascist dictatorship the bourgeoisie averted the danger of a socialist revolution and made huge profits through exploitation, oppression and the most brutal colonial expansion. Fascism is a product of the crisis of capitalism, and cannot be definitively defeated without destroying the social and economic system that creates it. The rise to power of the extreme right in Italy and around the world shows how the fight for our democratic rights and against bourgeois reaction is more relevant today than ever before.

The new partisans are those who fight for the rights of workers, women, LGBTQIA+ people and migrants, against an economic and political system designed to defend the profits of a ruling class that is responsible for environmental devastation, wars and the growing misery of the working class. Only the struggle for a democratic and ecological socialism can truly fulfil those liberating aspirations that were at the heart of the Resistance.

Long live anti-fascist 25 April! Long live socialism and workers democracy! Resistance, now and always!

Link:
Revolutionary History || The Liberation of Italy from Fascism - International Socialist

One of the comforts of growing older is knowing that some things will never change.

Sports fans will always argue over the designated hitter rule and over who was the best heavyweight boxer of all-time (Muhammad Ali). Movie fans will never agree which Godfather movie was better, the first or the second (the first.) And the trumpets will sound at the Second Coming before capitalists and socialists agree on whether the Nazis were really socialists.

The last item has always puzzled me, I confess, and not just because the word is right there in the name: National Socialism. If you read the speeches and private conversations of the Nazi hierarchy, its clear they loved socialism and despised individualism and capitalism.

In his new book Hitlers National Socialism, the historian Rainer Zitelmann gives a penetrating look into the ideas that shaped men like Hitler and Goebbels. While its clear they saw their own brand of socialism as distinct from Marxism (more on that later), there is no question they saw socialism as the future and despised bourgeoisie capitalism.

Consider, for example, these quotes from Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party:

These quotes represent just a smattering of Goebbels views on and conception of socialism. One can see that in many ways the Nazi spoke much like Karl Marx.

Phrases like we are a workers party, the worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces, moneyis the reverse with socialism, and we are against the political bourgeoisie could easily be plucked from Marxs own speeches and writingsyet its clear Goebbels despised Marx and saw his brand of national socialism as distinct from Marxism.

So what sets National Socialism apart from Marxism? There are two primary differences.

The first is that Hitler and Goebbels fused their socialism with race and German nationalism, rejecting the international ethos of Marxismworkers of the world unite!for a more practical one that emphasized Germanys Vlkischen movement.

This was a clever tactic by the Nazis. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek pointed out, it made socialism more palatable to many Germans who were unable to see Nazism for what it truly was.

The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will who, by their socialist policies, prepared the way for the forces which stand for everything they detest, Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom (1944). Few recognize that the rise of fascismwas not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.

The second difference is that National Socialists were less concerned with directly controlling the means of production.

In his 1940 book German Economy, 1870-1940, Gustav Stolper, an Austrian-German economist and journalist, explained that though National Socialism was anti-capitalist from the beginning, it was also in direct competition with Marxism following World War I. Because of this, National Socialists determined to woo the masses from three distinct angles.

The first angle was the moral principle, the second the financial system, the third the issue of ownership. The moral principle was the commonwealth before self-interest. The financial promise was breaking the bondage of interest slavery. The industrial program was nationalization of all big incorporated business [trusts]. By accepting the principle the commonwealth before self-interest, National Socialism simply emphasizes its antagonism to the spirit of a competitive society as represented supposedly by democratic capitalism . . . But to the Nazis this principle means also the complete subordination of the individual to the exigencies of the state. And in this sense National Socialism is unquestionably a Socialist system . . .

Stolper, who fled from Germany to the United States after Hitlers rise to power, noted that the Nazis never initiated a widespread nationalization of industry, but he explained that in some ways this was a distinction without a difference.

The socialization of the entire German productive machinery, both agricultural and industrial, was achieved by methods other than expropriation, to a much larger extent and on an immeasurably more comprehensive scale than the authors of the party program in 1920 probably ever imagined. In fact, not only the big trusts were gradually but rapidly subjected to government control in Germany, but so was every sort of economic activity, leaving not much more than the title of private ownership.

In his 1939 book The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, Guenter Reimann reached a similar conclusion, the economic historian Richard Ebeling notes.

...while most of the means of production had not been nationalized, they had nonetheless been politicized and collectivized under an intricate web of Nazi planning targets, price and wage regulations, production rules and quotas, and strict limits and restraints on the action and decisions of those who remained; nominally, the owners of private enterprises throughout the country. Every German businessman knew that his conduct was prescribed and positioned within the wider planning goals of the National Socialist regime.

The historical record is clear: European fascism was simply a different shade of socialism, which helps explain, as Hayek noted, why so many fascists were former socialistsfrom Mussolini down (and including Laval and Quisling).

Like Marx, the Nazis loathed capitalism and saw the individual will and individual rights as subordinate to the interests of the state. It should come as little surprise that these different shades of socialism achieved such similar results: poverty and misery.

Socialists will continue to argue that Nazism was not real socialism, but the words of the infamous Nazi propaganda minister suggest otherwise.

Excerpt from:
Joseph Goebbels' Own Words Show He Loved Socialism and Saw It ... - Foundation for Economic Education

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

AMY GOODMAN: Harry Belafonte last appeared on Democracy Now! in 2016 at a special event at the historic Riverside Church in New York to celebrate Democracy Now!s 20th anniversary. He co-headlined the event with Noam Chomsky. It was the first time they had done a public event together. Harry Belafonte spoke about Donald Trump, who had just been elected president.

HARRY BELAFONTE: I believe that Trump, in bringing a new energy to the realization of the vastness of the reach of the Ku Klux Klan, is not something that has been out of our basic purview of thought. The Ku Klux Klan, for some of us, is a constant has a constant existence. It isnt until it touches certain aspects of white America that white America all of the sudden wakes up to the fact that there is something called the Klan and that it does its mischief.

What causes me to have great thought is something thats most unique to my experience. And as I said earlier tonight, at the doorstep of being 90 years of age, I had thought I had seen it all and done it all, only to find out that, at 89, I knew nothing. But the most peculiar thing to me has been the absence of a Black presence in the middle of this resistance, not just the skirmishes that weve seen in Ferguson and Black Lives Matter and I think those protests and those voices being raised are extremely important. But we blew this thing a long time ago. When they started the purge against communism in this country and against the voice of those who saw hope in a design for socialist theory and for the sharing of wealth and for the equality of humankind, when we abandoned our vigil our vision and vigils on that topic, I think we sold out ourselves.

A group of young Black students in Harlem, just a few days ago, asked me what, at this point in my life, was I looking for. And I said, What Ive always been looking for: Where resides the rebel heart? Without the rebellious heart, without people who understand that theres no sacrifice we can make that is too great to retrieve that which weve lost, we will forever be distracted with possessions and trinkets and title. And I think one of the big things that happened was that when Black people began to be anointed by the trinkets of this capitalist society and began to become big-time players and began to become heads of corporations, they became players in the game of our own demise.

I think people have to be more adventurous. The heart has to find greater space for rebellion. So, we pay a penalty for such thought, because I was just recently reminded of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. They sit particularly close to my own feelings and thoughts, because I was one of the voices that was raised in recruiting those young students to participate in our rebellion.

AMY GOODMAN: David Goodman, Andrews brother, is here today.

HARRY BELAFONTE: Im sure of it. Hes always at the right places.

But I think that there are those kinds of extremes that will be experienced in the struggle, but the real nobility of our existence is: Are we prepared to pay that price? And I think once the opposition understands that we are quite prepared to die for what we believe in, that death for a cause does not just sit with ISIS, but sits with people, workers, people who are genuinely prepared to push against the theft of our nation and the distortion of our Constitution, and that, for many of us, no price is too great for that charge.

Ive been through much in this country. I came back from the Second World War. And while the world rejoiced in the fact that Hitler had been met and defeated, there were some of us who were touched by the fact that instead of sitting at the table of feast at that great victory, we were worried about our lives, because the response from many in America was the murder of many Black servicemen that came back. And we were considered to be dangerous, because we had learned the capacity to handle weaponry, we had faced death on the battlefield. And when we came back, we had an expectation, as the victors. We came back knowing that, yes, we might have fought to end Hitler, but we also fought for our right to vote in America, that in the pursuit of such rights came the civil rights movement. Well, that can happen again. We just have to get out our old coats, dust them off, stop screwing around and just chasing the good times, and get down to business. Theres some ass-kicking out here to be done. And we should do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Harry Belafonte, speaking in 2016 at the historic Riverside Church in New York to celebrate Democracy Now!s 20th anniversary. He co-headlined the event with Noam Chomsky. Harry died on Tuesday at the age of 96 of congestive heart failure at his home here in New York City. You can visit democracynow.org to see the full event, as well as all of our interviews with Harry Belafonte, Harry giving his speech in 2003 against the War in Iraq, Harry in Venezuela, Harry at the Sundance Film Festival, when the documentary about him premiered, talking fully about his life and so much more.

That does it for our show. On Saturday, Juan Gonzlez will deliver the opening plenary address at a daylong policy forum at American University titled In Search of a New U.S. Policy for a New Latin America: Burying 200 Years of the Monroe Doctrine. Visit democracynow.org for more information.

Oh, and special thanks to our archivist Brendan Allen and Charina Nadura for todays show. Democracy Now! produced with Rene Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, Mara Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Sonyi Lopez. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. Im Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

Read more from the original source:
Get Down to Business: Harry Belafonte in 2016 on Trump, Socialism & Fighting for Justice - Democracy Now!

In the lead-up to the Democratic Socialists of Americas (DSA) 2023 convention, many competing political platforms and resolutions will be discussed and voted on. One such resolution, The Clean Break which is backed by Boise DSA and the Red Labor Caucus is putting forward the call for DSA to immediately pursue a clean, irrefutable, and permanent break from the capitalist Democratic Party A minimum of 300 signatures are required by April 28 for the resolution to make it to the DSA convention floor.

Below we reproduce an internationalist statement from the youth of the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS) in Argentina in solidarity with the resolution. If you are a DSA member, you can sign on in support of the resolution here.

On behalf of the youth of the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (Party of Socialist Workers) from Argentina in particular, and our sister organizations in Latin America and around the world, we want to express our support for The Clean Break resolution presented by Boise DSA and the Red Labor Caucus in this upcoming DSA convention. The progress of a working class left independent of imperialist and capitalist parties in the U.S. is of utmost interest to us.

Its difficult to drive home how progressive the emergence of an independent working class left in the U.S. would be for socialists all over the world. We have been following closely how a generation of young people have been turning toward the ideas of socialism in the U.S. Even further, how many new working class organizers have been leading a wave of rank-and-file unionizations all across the U.S. It is important, however, for this turn to the left to not be co-opted by the apparatus of the Democratic Party, which serves ruling class interests.

In its 2021 convention, the DSAs leadership consolidated a right-wing turn for the organization. The leadership further pushed to establish the party as the left-wing of the Democratic Partys electoral machine. It is no secret that in the upcoming convention they will seek to deepen this right-wing policy. It is in the hands of the organizations rank-and-file to put forward an alternative and instead turn the organization toward independent working class and socialist politics.

The leadership of the DSA (and other so-called progressive figures) will justify its association with the Democratic Party with a myriad of possibilist arguments: they will talk about how it is impossible for a third party to emerge in the U.S., and how, therefore, it is necessary to work within the Democrat Party (the lesser evil of the U.S. political establishment), at least for now. They will shy away from focusing on labor organizing and even other social movements like the struggle against racism and reproductive rights, as they can only conceive change to only come from the apparatus of the capitalist state. In short, the leadership of the DSA seems to always be skeptical of the American working class strength, and optimistic about the American political regime.

They will always, in one way or another, point out the weaknesses of the working class, and do nothing to radicalize its struggles. We saw this during BLM, an international movement and the largest movement in U.S. history, where many DSA members were on the streets, but the organizations leadership refused to put the largest socialist organization in the U.S. at the service of this historic struggle. Instead the DSA politically echoed the calls of the Democratic Party to vote for Democrats instead of mobilizing.

One of the biggest strategic limitations of the American working class is its lack of independent organization and conscience, in workplaces and political organizations. Isnt this what a so-called socialist party like the DSA should be promoting, in every action it takes, in every decision they make? It is the mentality of a bureaucrat to blame the masses for the woes of its leadership. As the American working class shows more and more of its power and its need for an independent organization in the face of economic and social crisis, the DSAs leadership has only paved the way for the dissolution of all this potential, smiling as the Democrats drain every social movement of its strength. Will the DSA become a beacon of independent, working class organization? Or will it be just another tool in the arsenal of the American elite?

To us Latin American socialists, the answer is clear. To us, there is no lesser-evil argument for supporting the Democrats. In our country, Argentina, it has made little difference whether Gerard Ford, Jimmy Carter, or Ronald Reagan were president while our most bloody dictatorship kidnapped, tortured, and murdered over 30,000 people, most of them political militants, labor organizers, and LGBTQ+ activists. Even less so did it matter to Pinochet, as he made Chile a guinea pig for brutal neoliberal reforms. The leadership of the DSA will be okay with coexisting with these atrocities and many others, as they concede to the lesser-evilist notion that the Democrats are better than the Republicans and that therefore it is okay to vote for them and even run candidates under their platform.

Here in Argentina, weve also heard similar lesser evil arguments that we need to vote for more progressive ruling class candidates and abandon our principles and goals to fight against the Right. Does this not hurt us further? Do these notions not prevent most working class people from ever conceiving an alternative to capitalism? Workers, POC, and LGBTQ+ folks are expected to give up more and more, as the Right continues its attacks, and the Democrats constantly concede to them. It is no wonder that the far-right is growing if there is no alternative to capitalism in sight. If the Left in the U.S. is to become a real political force, and for you to truly fight against the Right, you must break away from the Democratic Party once and for all and form an independent political alternative, based on socialist, working class organization and action.

This is why the political independence of socialists in the U.S. is not only possible, but also necessary. If we concede to the pressures of the Democrats, we will lose sight of our goals, and surrender to the dystopian, neoliberal present in which we are submerged in right now. There is a reason why the Democratic Party is nicknamed the graveyard of social movements. Elections should not be seen as an end in and of themselves, where we surrender our principles and objectives to win them, but instead as a tool for us socialists to get our message and politics to working people. If we win elected positions, we must use them as working peoples tribunes, and expose the halls of congress as nothing but a staged play by capitalists.

This is anything but impossible these perspectives are part of the tradition of the revolutionary left. In Argentina, our party is a founding member of the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores (Workers Left Front), a coalition of most of the revolutionary left which has been able to get over a million votes in several elections and become the third-largest electoral force. Our representatives rotate their seats between the parties in the coalition, and donate their salaries to labor struggles, effectively only earning as much as a public teacher. They are present in every picket line and in demonstrations, fighting to bring visibility, expand, and unify all working class struggles. To us, elections are a means to get our ideas to as many people as possible. Our main focus is on the organization of the working class itself, to organize independently from all capitalist and bureaucratic influences in our workplaces and movements. We believe that if significant change is to be achieved, it can only be achieved and defended by working people, with their own methods of struggle and self-organization. It will not be the parties of the ruling class, and it will not be their state.

There are those who may think that something like this would be impossible in the U.S. Well, once again, we are no strangers to these notions ourselves. It took us years and years to achieve what we have achieved. We started our project during the height of neoliberal supremacy and fatalism, and put forward a political struggle after the emergence of progressive bourgeois governments which never really challenged the neoliberal status-quo of the years prior.

Now neoliberalism and the parties that represent its political project are in crisis particularly in the U.S. As we saw during the Great Recession, in times of crisis, ruling parties like the Democrats bailout capitalists and make workers pay through brutal measures like austerity. If there is a time for socialists in the U.S. to step up and fight back, it is now. If not, the DSA will only help in aiding the Democratic establishment and the bureaucracies aligned with it in diverting the struggles that will emerge in response to this crisis of capitalism. An independent, united, revolutionary left in the U.S. would be a beacon of hope for working people around the world. That is the best way in which American socialists can show solidarity with the struggles of workers in other countries. Solidarity doesnt come from supporting Democrats or having guest talks with former Latin American presidents, like Dilma Rousseff, as the DSA leadership did during its last convention. Politicians like Dilma may pander to the Left like the Democrats do in the U.S., but in reality, they havent questioned the rule of American imperialism, and have ultimately in spite of some friction served its interests. Instead, solidarity comes from fighting our common enemies, from within the belly of the imperialist beast. Solidarity comes from turning the American working class into an enemy of the imperialist capitalist class, and an ally of the working people of the world. This is why we urge you to sign onto Red Labor Caucus and Boise DSAs resolution.

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An Internationalist Call to Support DSAs Clean Break from the Democratic Party - Left Voice